Avatars, joysticks, and gaming chairs on the stage: the theater adapts narrative forms from computer games and turns viewers into players. An exploration. Bureaucracies are like bad games. Complex, obscure, the rules are constantly changing. “So you want to go over too?” Asks the officer behind the desk. The flag of the “Loerian Republic” blows in the wind of the fan. “Yes,” I say. She issues me a passport. I come from Pykholm now, I was born in 1963 and have no denomination. The game begins.
The visitors to the Forum Free Theater Düsseldorf (FFT) are refugees on this evening who want to enter the “Loerian Republic”. We are not spectators, but rather players in this mixture of theater and computer games by the group Machina eX. The piece is called “Right of Passage” and we have to earn this right to cross the border.
Shacktown
Scenic elements alternate with playful elements, and we interact with the performers in the setting, the Gohptal reception camp on the Lörisch border. A makeshift shack town with soldiers, a doctor, a factory, a bar, and a kiosk. Everything is real, nothing is virtual here. We play completely analog – just like a computer game. Those who are familiar with these games have no advantage. On the contrary. Many tasks can only be solved with the help of old media, such as typewriters, tracing paper, or a rotary telephone, which many experienced gamers have already fingered at a loss. In Gohptal, every refugee has to collect a package of documents and constantly make a decision: Do I follow the stories presented as a viewer, do I take part in the group puzzles, or do I take care of my documents? As a result, everyone experiences a different evening. By orienting itself towards the mechanisms of computer games, “Right of Passage” masters the challenge of interaction theater: to find the balance between scope for action and narration, that point at which a given story is open to individual input and at the same time remains. Game theorist Michael Mateas once called it the “sweet spot”. “Right of Passage” is, so to speak, the end product of this development laboratory.
Soak up technology
The theater, this reflection on society, this “media-eating machine”, as the critic Jan Fischer once called it, will also soak up this technology. Also because it enables a new aesthetic experience, that of immersion. A quasi-sucking in, much stronger identification with the virtual events. A tempting promise for the stage arts. It is less a question of whether, and more a question of how computer games will affect theater. After all, stage and computer games have a lot in common. Games also tell stories, which is why they are made into films (Tomb Raider) or appear as novels (World of Warcraft). Sometimes books appear to accompany the game in order to be able to tell the background stories of the game heroes in more detail (Battlefield 4). And the mode of this narration is purely dramatic. The story on the screen is created at that very moment.
