The Theatre in Game Design

One of my favourite indie games is a simulation game called Game Dev Tycoon, in which you start your own game development company in the 1980s. Your main goal is to create and sell games but to get the best results you have to make sure you are constantly researching new technology and keeping up to date with market trends.

"Your success depends on your creativity and willingness to experiment. What topics and genres go well together? should your Action game focus more on engine optimisation or on quest design? the decisions you make during the development of your game will have a major impact on the ratings you receive." - (Pocket Gamer, n.d)

But what a good game also needs is 'theatre'. The best games are the ones that can offer their players a spectacle, whether that's through an emotional narrative, extravagant set pieces or even just impressive software. It's easy to suggest that theatre and video games are complete opposites, "one is rooted in hundreds of years of tradition and convention; the other is technologically advanced and obsessively forward-looking" (McMullen, 2014). But if you look closer, you realise there are many things that tie them together, and they both allow us to play and interact, in ways film and TV do not.

“How can you take theatre and put it into games? What’s the Titus Andronicus of computer games? That’s the questions we want to be actively posing over the next 10 years.” - Felix Barret, Artistic Director of Punchdrunk (McMullen, 2014)

As theatre is influenced by videogames, adopting narrative structures and plot devices, as are videogames being influenced by theatre and cinema for their storytelling methods and presentation. They are starting to gain respect for the stories they tell, even from non-gamers. with new technological advances in the industry, such as VR. Gaming offers increased opportunity for getting lost in enticing characters, stories and worlds.

Games such as Naughty Dog's 'The Last of Us' and Dontnod Entertainment's 'Life Is Strange' focus on character and storytelling as their main motivators. On top of this, they cleverly pace their more intense chapters that require quick thinking with quiet, truthful moments that round out their characters; tricky puzzles that slow the game down and require you to think outside the box; and scripted dialogue that's placed over the more monotonous sections of gameplay that develop the relationships between the characters.

However, when there is a specific and sometimes narrow focus on story, the gameplay is often limited and repetitive. There is a long list of games with extremely engaging gameplay systems and mechanics that offer hours and hours of entertainment with very little focus on narrative but high levels of replayability, for example, Mario Odyssey, Celeste and Minecraft, to name a few. The Mario games offer a very limited story, Princess Peach has been Kidnapped, you must rescue her by navigating your way through a number of dangerous worlds, defeating bad guys as you go along. There is very little script with no character development or psychological insight. However, I don't care about that because I have a great time just running and jumping around, collecting coins, finding patterns and weaknesses that aid my mission. This is because at every level you are introduced to new mechanics that make each stage of the game feel fresh and different. Furthermore, I have an unlimited number of ways to complete the level due to the wide range of platforming abilities. There is also something to be said about the satisfaction I get from completing a level after hours of trial and error. Whereas some story-based games, like 'The Last of us', risk having a limited level of replayability due to the linear way I can complete their fixed story and its comparatively mundane gameplay. Therefore, if game developers wish to change that and make players want to play their games over and over, they should also be investing in increased interactivity and branching storylines.

However, there does have to be a real commitment, from the developers, to the separate choices a player can make in a game. Fans often complain about the illusion of free will and find that there is little actual consequence to their actions in games like Quantic Dream's Indigo Prophesy. Indigo Prophesy gives you the power to choose whether or not to save a character, however, no matter what your decision ends up being, the rest of the game is not affected by it. The character is still never to be seen again, they either walk away from the story to pursue something else, or they die. This is mostly because studio's don't want to have to do major re-writing of the same section of a game, as it's expensive and time-consuming.

Another thing that the developers will have to consider is if they want a game where the player has to work through trial and error to achieve the best ending, like in 'Detroit: Become Human' where you can make a wrong choice, potentially killing your playable character, and have to go back and try again. The other option is to let their players freely change the ending and experience a unique journey that they have directed themselves. Unfortunately, the latter is much more expensive and therefore much harder to achieve. Chunsoft's 'Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward' successfully offers it's players completely different story chapters, character interactions and endings, however, it is only able to do so because the rest of the game is relatively cheap to produce, it being predominantly text-based with reusable animations.

I am aware that it is unlikely for a videogame, with today's technology, to be able to pull off a multiple choice game with real consequential branching paths as well as high levels of performance and presentation - therefore, I am interested in how I, as a theatre-maker, can combine technology and live theatre, to give audience members the chance to dramatically shape their own journey using the real-life actors in front of them.

McMullan, T. (2014) The immersed audience: how theatre is taking its cue from video games. [online] The Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/20/how-theatre-is-taking-its-cue-from-video-games > [Acccessed 06 January 2021]

Pocket Gamer (n.d.). Game Dev Tycoon. [online] Pocketgamer.com. Avialable at: <https://www.pocketgamer.com/games/029050/game-dev-tycoon/#:~:text=Game%20Dev%20Tycoon%20is%20a> [Accessed 06 January 2021].

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