Yes, And…
Earlier this week, we got Matt Crowley’s take on a performance called Grand Theft Ovid, a show that combined footage from live video game play with the poems of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This collision of game and theater got some commenters thinking about the performance aspects of role-playing games. ItsTheShadsy recalled a trend from The Matrix Online:
Back when The Matrix Online was in its prime, there was a huge focus on role playing. Oftentimes when an official or player-run event went down, characters would get in a heated conversation or speech, and the crowd would part to let them verbally spar. Inevitably, someone from the masses would join in too, leading to a sort of loosely scripted dramatic improv session. (Of course, this was always immediately followed by a karate fight.) It was extremely effective, and it felt like a new form of storytelling that smartly used the spatial and technological constraints of a online role-playing game. It slowly dawned on me: It was essentially digital black box theater. The characters performed scenes in front of an audience that, based on the intimate staging and narrative context, were part of the setting.
I find it very exciting that someone is finding new ways to use and to legitimize this type of dramatic presentation. Restaging plays inside a game—especially in one that allows direct audience spectating—is a really interesting way to reinvigorate an older text and build audience investment. (I’ve recently seen a lot of neat ways that educators are using Minecraft in schools, but I never even thought of theater as a possible application.) The most exciting step will be when someone creates and stages an original work that uses the semi-participatory aspects of a game to the fullest possible advantage.
And Duwease fondly remembered the spontaneity of MUDs, the more free-form, text-based ancestor of online role-playing games like World Of Warcraft:
I used to play text-based MUDs back in the day, and role-playing was the core of the experience along with world-building. “World building” is literal in this case, because most of the time high-level characters could build new areas, script scenes, and generally bend the world to their will. Often you’d be sitting around the tavern, shooting the breeze, when a character would spontaneously run in asking for help, and who knows where you’d end up. Maybe you’d be riding a griffon in a civil war or taking a submarine to the ocean floor for a wedding.
While a particular MUD’s entertainment value was largely a function of the improv ability of its curators and inhabitants, overall I quite enjoyed them. But then, when they became graphical, the flexibility was lost, the stories became standardized to fit, and the focus turned more to the game aspects—quests, loot, abilities, and so on.