Life and Trust

We went to Life and Trust in New York. It's a wild Martha Graham-esque dance performance taking place simultaneously on five floors of a fabulous Financial District skyscraper. Like Sleep No More, which Emursive also produced, the actors/dancers do a scene and then scurry off to another floor to do another. You chase after them in a herd, or if you're quick, you chase after them and the herd chases after you. Or you wait around to see what else will happen in the space you're in.

There are zillions of characters and theoretically there are interlocking plots involving deals with devils and a suspiciously addicting syrup, all happening on the night of Wednesday, October 23, 1929. (Guess what happens on Thursday!) I had almost no idea what was happening in the plots, but the dancing is spectacular, and the site-specific set is, too. Go see it if you can get to New York. It may spoil you for proscenium theater, though. It's hard to get excited about theater you watch from a single chair for the whole performance, in a space that has nothing to do with the story. 

 (The set is ADA-compliant, but you can't chase after people on stairs if you're not very abled indeed. But you can guess where stuff is going to happen and they'll give you a guide, if you like, to make sure you're there when it happens.)

Oh, you! New York Times

A civilian friend sent me an opinion piece about video games from the New York Times. It covers the move to live, free-to-play games over single-player games you play once and move on from. Which, predictably, it bewails.

Fair enough. Live games do make it harder to release a new game. The "next Fortnite" is probably also Fortnite. 

On the other hand, I'm working on a live game that releases March 6, and I'm happy that I won't be unemployed on March 7 (inshallah). And if people didn't want live games, they wouldn't buy them.

The article is off base on two points. One, yes, some games do have a lot of sidequests that can come off as grindy chores, but then also, that's an issue that game devs have identified and rejected. We often have conversations like, "We're not going to ask the player to collect one thousand feathers."

The other is that it's ridiculous to say games used to be better. Of course the MOMA is collecting old games. Museums collect old things, after their worth has been proven. There are amazing new games all the time, just as there was filler and trash twenty years ago. Games like Disco Elysium, Balatro and Hades are future classics. The present always looks worse than the past, in any medium, because we only remember the good stuff from the past. Not all ancient Greek epics were Homer. It's just, most ancient Greek epics have gone the way of the ancient Greeks. 

MEGO

As I discussed in my first book (and maybe my second?) I think that the best way to develop a story, any story, is to tell it over and over, to different people, without notes. This gets you a bunch of things:

a. You can tell how it holds together. If you can't remember what comes next, then the story logic needs mending

b. You can immediately tell if your listener is bored. People who read your writing have time to prepare a lie, but if their eyes glaze over, they're bored

c. You may come up with something better as you tell your story on the fly. Writing a story down freezes it, but until then, it's a fluid, living, growing thing.

So here's Yannick Trapman-O'Brian, immersive experience-maker, on Reality Escape Pod S8E7:

"I wish upon everyone an intoxicated audience. The clarity it requires of you, someone just looking you full in the face as you do your beautiful dance piece and they go, 'Okay, this is boring, I'd rather go pee.' That is such good feedback."

See? 

Odysseus is a comic hero:

 

Odysseus is a comic hero:

• It's Odysseus's fault he doesn't go straight home, because he just HAS to tell Polyphemus his name
• After he ends the war by hiding in a fake horse
• After he tries to duck the draft by pretending to be insane
• Circe turns his men into pigs
• He's captured by a nymph, Calypso, who keeps him as her boy toy. For, like, 7 years.
• When he gets to Ithaca, he lies his head off to the first person he meets, a shepherd boy, telling him a cockamamie story about having been kidnapped by pirates...
• ...the boy turns out to be Athena in drag.
• When he gets home, he doesn't tell anyone who he is, not even his wife, Penelope, who he tells that he "saw" Odysseus, in Egypt or something
• Even after he kills all the suitors, Penelope still tries to trick him by asking him to move their bed, to his great irritation, because it's impossible
• His final task is to appease Poseidon by carrying an oar inland so far that people have no idea what an oar is. 

No Proscenium

 Another interesting thing about immersive, experiental theatre:  it is local. So much of the world is now global. There is no proper city in the West without a sushi restaurant. You look at a new museum (probably by Frank Gehry) and you have no idea where it is without looking at the caption. 

But immersive theatre? If you want to experience Phantom Peak, you have to go to London. 

Ladders? Los Angeles. 

Meow Wolf's Radio Tave? Houston. 

Factory Obscura's Time Slip? Oklahoma City. 

Moment Factory's Foresta Lumina? Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook, about two hours East of Montreal.

(I was commissioned to pitch a Moment Factory show for Jean Drapeau Park on Ile Ste-Hélène in the St. Lawrence River. That was super fun even just thinking about it.)

Wasteland Weekend? Neotropolis? Burning Man? The freakin' Mojave Desert. 

(I'm not counting the projection shows where you pay $30 to look at Van Gogh screen savers projected on walls.) 

Like, I'm seriously thinking, wouldn't it be nice to fly to London and go to Phantom Peak? I'm sure there's other things I could find to do over there. 

And notice that it's not all cultural hotspots. There's a lot of theater you can only see in London or New York. But Oklahoma City? 

(Check out Everything Immersive and No Proscenium if you want proof.)

I keep thinking: this is the exact opposite of video games. Each copy of a video game is identical. You can have different experiences, but you can't have an experience that isn't programmed into the game. You can have emergent gameplay -- the interaction of different mechanics producing unforeseen effects -- but true emergent storytelling is ... well, I've never seen it, and I've played a bunch of games that are supposed to have it. 

You can buy any videogame almost anywhere. You can download anything on Steam in Hokkaido or Honolulu and (if you're clever) Hanoi. 

Videogames scale. If one person can play it, a million people can play it (if you throw on enough servers and work out lag issues). Every immersive theatre show is artisanal. 

As with theatre, each performance is unique. There's a script, usually, but you'll never see the same performance again exactly.

It's interesting to contemplate the other end of the spectrum from the art business I'm in.

Elan Lee

 
I'm listening to Reality Escape Pod, a podcast about escape rooms. They interview Elan Lee, who co-invented Exploding Kittens, the card game and the animated Netflix series. 

His rule for making games is, "Don't make games that are entertaining. Make games that make the people you're playing with entertaining."

Maybe doesn't apply entirely to video games (which had better be entertaining!), but it is an interesting filter to put on the user experience.

He also puts the game instructions through 100+ drafts, literally, and then starts them with, "Don't read these instructions. Watch our video about how to play."

Aaaaand he has a really interesting approach to testing his games. He asks his testers only one question:  "Do you want to play again?" He doesn't trust anything they might say about what's fun or not fun. People tend to want to be helpful, so they come up with things to say that may be true or not. 

What he does, instead, is records the player playing. It takes longer, but you can see what they're doing when they're frowning, or when they take out their phone to check messages. 

This relates indirectly to my idea that the best way to refine your story is to tell it over and over again, without notes. When you tell your story to a live human being, you can tell when they're bored. Their eyes glaze over. You can tell when they're confused. If you hand someone a story on paper, they may tell you they're confused about Y, but the recording reveals that they were actually confused a minute beforehand. 

For example, they find a scene confusing. But that's not the scene's fault. It's because they didn't understand who the character was when you introduced them. And maybe the introduction itself was okay, but you said something right before that introduction that bounced them out of the story, so they were still processing it when you did that introduction, so they didn't absorb the introduction.

I was a computer science major at university. When I wrote a program, I'd get a flock of bugs. I could eliminate 50% of them right away by checking the very beginning of the program and fixing the mistakes I made setting up variables. 

And that is why you must take all feedback with a grain of salt. If someone says something is confusing, it is confusing, you can't tell them it's not. But they may not realize why they find it confusing. Figuring out where the glitch is, is part of the skill of writing.

Boldly to Go

 I am coming around to the notion that immersive experiences are the Wild West frontier of narrative. Video games have been telling stories since, what, the 1980s? While it seems like immersive theatre dates to the early 2000s, with Punchdrunk's Sleep No More.

I say "seems," because of course there have long been immersive theater experiences. Also in the 1980s I saw a production of The Remembrance of Things Past -- mostly the naughty bits -- in a house on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven that was due to be torn down. It was promenade theater, meaning you could wander around following one or another actor in one or another plotline. Arguably promenade theatre goes back to the Middle Ages, with Stations of the Cross installations. Arguably Colonial Williamsburg, Old Sturbridge Village and other living history centers are a form of promenade theater. 

(I live in Old Montreal, where there are regular ghost tours where actors play ghosts in various alleys; it is also not at all uncommon to see British redcoats marching down the street with musket and bayonet.)

But definitely the current wave came into its own with Sleep No More. And now, escape rooms. 

I've been listening to the No Proscenium podcast a lot lately. There are over 450 episodes -- I hadn't known there were that many immersive events to podcast about! There's a fascinating episode about Neotropolis, which is a descendant of Burning Man, but cyberpunk, and with a plot.

Various folk have been trying to sell us LLM's (large language models, a form of AI) by saying, "What if you could talk to NPC's, you know, really talk, about anything." Never mind that no one has made an LLM worth listening to; everything is just a prototype and the real deal is right around the corner.

But in many immersive situations, you really can talk to the NPCs, or the other player characters. They're human beings and they have a character and a backstory, and they can react to you accordingly. 

That, I think, is a great development. Open-ended dialogue is not something video games are good at. AIs are a very long way from being about to tell a coherent story, let alone a good one. But check out No Proscenium -- there may be immersive events in your neck of the woods.

Clams

 Here is a fine list of clams, that is, turns of phrase that were once clever and now, not so much. (Not sure if "not so much" counts as a clam. Apparently Paul Reiser popularized it on Mad About You. I'm not ready to give it up, though.) 

Of course, there is also Know Your Meme and TV Tropes. I am not responsible for your lost hours of work if you open up TV Tropes, though.