Designing pervasive theatre: the Chain Reaction case

2014

This paper describes the development and use of a design method based in physical theatre practice in the creation of Charge, a multiplayer physical game that relies on digital technology. Methods from Physical Theatre improvisation were explored in a series of workshops as the basis for developing an understanding of how to design technology supported games that encourage physical and social engagement through body movement. A central concern here is the use of technology to support positive user experience and the sense of fun that are connected with body movement and physicality within game play. The initial results suggest that physical theatre practice may usefully contribute to our design understanding of human movement and support novel methods for exploring new interaction styles.

Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare Association, 2016

This essay discusses the theoretical implications of a recent experiment with game-based social media to increase Shakespeare literacy in eleven to fifteen-year-olds. In collaboration with the Stratford Festival, we aimed to make the gameplay of our pilot, Staging Shakespeare, and the social space it generated, experientially theatrical in some way. While the pilot itself was not, in our view, successful, the design process helped us articulate a theory of theatricality grounded in the ontological complexity of theatrical things and the ontogenetic conditions of theatrical environments. Our conclusion is that literal simulations of Shakespeare's plays or of Shakespearean theater production may not be the richest way to teach Shakespeare through social games. Instead, we may need a design theory grounded in the adaptation of theatrical principles to electronic media, and perhaps a new aesthetic and even a rhetoric of gameplay only associatively related to Shakespeare.

2017

This article is a brief, individual review which illustrates some advances that digital technology can foster for theatre. Whether this can be seen as an encroachment or augmentation in this field, there are clear examples of significant opportunities for practitioners who follow the digital route as a means to increase theatrical participation. Concurrent to this, this article will demonstrate the validity of using the principles of game design to consider the potentials offered by digital theatre and indicate possible avenues for future research.

In the practice of building large scale interactive situations, we have followed various paths in order to achieve maximal effectiveness. This paper investigates some of those paths and the way that they relate to the practice of games and gameplay. Considering these practices, we find that there are strong connections of both these areas to the theories and practices of contemporary theatre. One of the main connections is the idea of a game or installation as a form of structured public improvisation. This paper investigates these three aspects, game(play), large scale interactive installations and contemporary the-atre, and brings out some of the ways that they can be seen in our work and work of colleagues working in related areas. We find several ways that theatrical theory can be used to improve the details of large scale interactive environments as well as gaming spaces.

Australasian Crc For Interaction Design School of Design Creative Industries Faculty Institute For Creative Industries and Innovation, 2012

This paper is a reflection on a design teaching project that endeavours to establish a culture of critical design thinking in a tertiary game design course. In the first instance, the 'performing design' project arose as a response to contemporary issues and tensions in the Australian games industry and game design education; in essence, the problem of how to scaffold undergraduate students from their entry point as 'players' (the impressed) into becoming designers. The performing design project therefore started as a small-scale intervention to inspire reflection in a wider debate that includes: the potential evolution of the contemporary games industry; the purpose of game design education; and the positioning of game design as a design discipline. This journal and associated articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 New Zealand License.

(Published at Videojogos 2010) As claimed by Chris Crawford in 1984, games must evolve to a potential form of art. Over 30 years later, the discussion demands a more mature state of the art, since games are still seen mostly as entertainment products. Considering them as a direct heir of cinema, in terms of language and dispositive parameters, games may be seen as a new form of media, and thus a vehicle both to entertainment activity than to artistic expression. To explore such possibilities, it is necessary to re-think the means of production and to purpose a new model of collaborative work that involves technicians, scholars, and artists.

This paper explores the way Shakespeare is being adapted in analog and digital games, focusing on a subgenre of games that aim to build players’ theatrical competencies by having them pretend to be producers of Shakespearean theater (actors, dramatists, theater managers, or designers). The paper considers the failure of these games to translate the experience of theater-making, however, arguing that the presumably distinct physical experiences of theater-making and game play can productively be brought to bear on each other if game designers take advantage of new technologies in immersive gaming. As a case in point, I discuss a Shakespeare motion-capture videogame that I am currently helping to design. The game engages players’ bodies in a simulation of theatrical production and, in the process, turns players into adapters, who participate in the creation of Shakespearean works.

2015

Since 2008, when Michael best surveyed the field of Shakespeare video games and reported just a handful of fairly unsuccessful experiments at the border between Shakespeare education and gaming entertainment, the field of Shakespeare gaming has exploded. (1) There are currently dozens of video as well as board and card games about Shakespeare's life, drama, and theatrical culture. Although very few scholars have paid much attention to them, they are worth closer analysis not only for scholars of adaptation studies and popular culture, but also for scholars of drama, theater history, and performance. (2) To be sure, most games simply trade on the bard's cultural iconicity, using theater to sell games (or products advertised on free gaming Web sites), but increasingly theater proponents have reversed this strategy, using games to sell theater. In addition to the many commercial games available for personal computers, smartphones, and iPads, games have emerged on the Web sites ...

Revue d’Historiographie du Théâtre 4. Special Issue: Études théâtrales et humanités numériques, 2017

After a critical presentation of the state of the art in scholarly activities at the intersection of theatre and digital humanities, in Canada and elsewhere, this paper suggests how the two disciplines might work together to articulate and facilitate new modalities of knowledge production emerging in each individually. Its aim is to make explicit the values of the inventive knowledge production characteristic of design and performance, and to propose that theatre and digital humanities might best acknowledge and enable inventive knowledge by shifting their emphasis away from production-oriented prototyping and towards experimental prototyping, provotyping, and experience design. Du développement des outils au design expérimental Jusqu'à présent, les chercheurs travaillant à l'intersection des études théâtrales et des humanités numériques ont eu tendance à se lancer dans le développement d'outils électroniques, conçus pour faciliter deux grands modes de création de savoirs: à travers des recherches sur l'histoire du théâtre (y compris la numérisation et l'archivage de textes ou de traces de représentations), ou à travers l'aide à la création théâtrale (à savoir la facilitation et la documentation des processus de création). Dans les deux branches d'activité, l'accent a été mis sur le développement d'outils prêts à l'emploi, ou de prototypes prêts pour la mise en production, susceptibles d'être disséminés largement et appliqués à des contextes variés par toute sorte d'utilisateurs, avec leurs objectifs spécifiques. Dans d'autres mots, la recherche à l'intersection du théâtre et des humanités numériques a été orientée par la création de produits et de plateformes ; nous avons imité les entreprises commerciales de production de software avec notre ambition de créer des objets numériques qui puissent aider d'autres chercheurs à générer ou à transmettre des savoirs. Quoique les outils qui en ont résulté, ainsi que notre engagement critique avec leurs épistémologiques, ont été une réussite (au Canada, ils se comptent parmi les plus notables dans le champ des humanités numériques), les objectifs et les méthodes qui ont porté ce travail ont eu relativement peu d'impact sur les buts et les méthodes, établis ou émergents, soit des humanités numériques, soit des études théâtrales comme disciplines indépendantes. En me fondant sur les projets que je connais le mieux – principalement des projets canadiens dans les humanités numériques et mon propre Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)-, je souhaite soutenir ici que les humanités numériques ont à offrir plus aux études théâtrales, et réciproquement. L'idée principale de cet article est que les réussites du projet SET, qui a su répondre aux tendances dominantes dans son domaine, sont moins intéressantes que les possibilités suggérées par ses échecs et ses à côtés, surtout dans le champ de la construction du savoir et des objets d'étude. Le théâtre et les humanités numériques pourraient aller plus loin et tirer plus de profit en mettant moins l'accent sur le prototypage orienté vers la production, et en se consacrant plus à un prototypage expérimental ou au « provotypage », pour faire plus de place, dans un champ dominé par des méthodes de recherche issues des sciences sociales ou des sciences exactes, à des méthodes plus propres aux sciences humaines et susceptibles créer, sans exclusive, des savoirs

Performance studies deals with human action in context, as well as the process of making meaning between the performers and the audience. This paper presents a framework to study videogames as a performative medium, applying terms from performance studies to videogames both as software and as games. This performance framework for videogames allows us to understand how videogames relate to other performance activities, as well as understand how they are a structured experience that can be designed. Theatrical performance is the basis of the framework, because it is the activity that has the most in common with games. Rather than explaining games in terms of ‘interactive drama,’ the parallels with theatre help usunderstand the role of players both as performers and as audience, as well as how the game design shapes the experience. The theatrical model also accounts for how videogames can have a spectatorship, and how the audience may have an effect on gameplay.