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Performance meets games: considering interaction strategies in game
design
Digital Creativity: Taylor & Francis Group
Lara Sánchez Coterón, PhD
Independent Researcher on New Media and Game Studies, Madrid, Spain
lara@yoctobit.com
Elena Pérez
PhD candidate, Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of
Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
elena.perez@ntnu.no
Performance meets games: considering interaction strategies in game
design
This article offers an evocative conceptual framework to inspire thinking about
game design in an alternative way. If Proceduralism focuses on crafting game
systems, we advocate recovering the relevance of players’ interactions by
pulling digitally mediated games out from the screen into the physical world
where gameplay and players can intersect and interact. We draw on certain
performance strategies to illuminate some currently under-explored game
design resources.
We use several case studies that help us describe what we call human-to-
human interaction (H2HI) in game design in three different levels. First,
having designers improvise according to players’ actions real time; second,
substituting computer game characters for human actors who perform
according to players’ suggestions and third, looking outside the traditional
computer game environment for a computer-mediated human playground.
These cases help us raise some conjectures about the possibilities of recovering
the physical and social essence of performance for digital-mediated games.
Keywords: improvisation, performance, game design, human-to-human
interaction, experimental performance
1 Introduction
The main current in contemporary Game Studies, derived from earlier Ludological
theories (Eskelinen 2004) is called Proceduralism, and focuses on the formal essential
properties of games as designed systems with rules, mechanics and challenges. This
theoretical frame, embraced both by designers and theorists and led by academics
such as Ian Bogost (2007) understands games as texts, and analyses them as objects
(Sicart 2011).
Although rules are truly the specific core of this medium, proceduralists often
forget that the player’s input is inseparable from games, that is to say, there is no
game without players (Consalvo 2009). While most current games (computer games
but also non-digital games) create the gaming experience by focusing intently on the
ways in which the game system enacts procedures, there is a transitional body of
works within the independent scene in which designers conciliate the player with the
physical experience of sharing the performative space with peers. Established
examples are some of the Die Gute Fabrik game designs, such as Johann Sebastian
Joust and B.U.T.T.O.N. inspired in part by the deliberately awkward and difficult
situations Marina Abramović conceived for her audience in some of her early
performances, and in which the ―notion of content, as a formal property of art objects,
is downplayed in order to foreground social context and interpersonal relations‖
(Wilson 2012, p.58).
We will not advocate any radical stance against proceduralism in games, but
rather, we would like to put forward some alternative design approaches as other
possible interactive design opportunities. Players and their creative involvement are
necessary ingredients in games. However, their engagement and experiences have
been taken for granted as game creators focus rather too exclusively on the rules of
the game. In the performance field, on the contrary, practitioners have struggled to
include the audience in the shows, seducing audiences into artworks through a variety
of strategies designed to engage them, breaking down the traditional barrier between
performer and artist and trying to establish a shared event of (only) participants in
some cases. In this article, we shall look at performative strategies developed by what
we generically call ―experimental performance‖ practices in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries that may inspire new modes of game design and can help
us break from the fixed traditions of mainstream computer-game field. By exploring
games as activities rather than only thinking of them as designed artifacts, we shall
focus on players’ actions, and thus aim at recovering the physicality of the game
experience. In this intersection, we hope to contribute to understanding how
experimental performance practices can help us to rethink game design. The question
to be addressed is: How can we improve the design of contemporary games in a way
that enriches player experience and goes beyond the game system itself to include the
players’ capacity to generate new layers of meaning? We will argue throughout the
article that by substituting certain digital game elements with human improvisation,
game designers can exploit the performative dimension of playing while
simultaneously building social experiences around games, as the game becomes a
social event.
2 Reclaiming player experience from the game system: performative strategies
Game theorist and designer Douglas Wilson has looked into the field of performing
arts to propose what he calls dialogic game design, a new approach to game design in
which the designer and the player relate to each other through the game as if they
were ―in dialogue‖—in a figurative or sometimes literal way. This dialogical design
frame was inspired in part by the work of performance artists and the way they relate
to the audience, drawing attention to performance practices carried out in the 1960s
and 70s by artists like Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović. Examples are Cut Piece
(1964), in which Ono sat on the stage and the audience was invited to go up on the
stage and cut away her clothing, and Abramović’s early work Imponderabilia (1977),
where she and her collaborator Ulay stood nude in a doorway, forcing members of the
public to squeeze through and choose whom to face. In these performance art pieces,
the artists created a context where the focus was on the artist’s relationship with the
audience, which became the artwork itself. As performance theorist Erika Fisher-
Lichte explains, ―performance provides the opportunity to explore the specific
function, condition and course of a particular interaction‖ (2008, p.40). In this sense,
these performances can be understood as exploring interactions per se.
From an independent game development stance, as Wilson points out talking
about his dialogic designs, many designers ―aspire to interact with their players in
person‖ (p.75) in the performance art tradition mentioned above. Making the designer
physically present seems in some cases to be a successful strategy for changing the
relationship between designer and player, making it more dialogical rather than
having the designer vanish behind the game system without direct access to the
players.
Another keystone of the performance art genre that we would like to bring to
game design is the democratic treatment of the audience, in which they are invited to
become co-creators. This strategy is indeed a shared premise in the tradition of the
avant-garde, which advocates the democratisation of the arts by empowering people
through encouraging full participation in aesthetic acts and processes (Dewey, 2005
[1934]). To include audiences in artistic production mechanisms, experimental
performance practices foster co-authorship by understanding artworks as resulting
from the meeting between authors/performers and spectators on equal terms rather
than spectators consuming a work created by authors alone. In the same way that
Grant Kester understands artists as ―context rather than content providers‖ (2004,
p.1), we advocate game designers ceding control over their systems to players, by
foregrounding collaboration, dialogue and improvised performance.
3 Improvisation and performance
Improvisation is a strategy from the early twentieth century that proliferated across
the arts to foster co-creative practices within the discipline of traditional and
alternative theatre. The practice of improvisation advocated a turn towards art forms
that were more spontaneous, embodied, playful and collaborative, rather than those
that were purely intellectual (Johnstone 2007). Artists experimenting with
improvisation produced new disciplines and art forms ranging from improvisational
theatre, jazz music, free dance and later, movements such as FLUXUS, Conceptual
Art and Happenings.
Frost and Yarrow define improvisation as
the skill of using bodies, space, all human resources to generate a
coherent physical expression of an idea, a situation, a character
(even, perhaps, a text); to do this spontaneously, in response to the
immediate stimuli of one’s environment, and to do it à l’improviste: as
though taken by surprise, without preconceptions (2007, p.4).
In this tradition, improvisation is a skill acquired through training that professional
actors use to develop onstage performance—improvisation in and as performance—
such as Keith Johnstone’s theatre sports developed during the 1970s in Calgary, Viola
Spolin and Paul Sills’ audience-led improvisations in Chicago in the 1960s-80s, and
Augusto Boal’s Legislative Theatre in the 1980s-2000s.
Since the 1960s’ performance turn, performance art and experimental theatre
events have developed parallel to this tradition, but still stand on the shoulders of
these improvised genres, sharing improvisation’s aim to create transformative events
―co-constructed by the bodily presence of both actors and spectators, generated and
determined by a self-referential and ever-changing feedback loop‖ (Fischer-Lichte
2008, p.38). What makes performance different from improvisation, among other
things, is the following: In performance, the improvisational aspect is left to the
encounter between performer and audience, while in improvisation it happens among
performers as it develops stage performance. In this sense, performance embraces
contingency rather than the attempt to stir the audience into controlled and guided
responses. In performance, a ―shift in focus occur[s] from potentially controlling the
system to inducing the specific modes of autopoesis‖ (p.39). That is, the artist’s job
lies in creating the conditions for the possibility of interactions to emerge, suggesting
rather than explicitly directing participants. This way, the participant is empowered
through her performance as she becomes a cultural agent in an aesthetic work. As
Denzin argues ―performance can be seen as a form of agency, a way of bringing
culture and the person in play‖ (Denzin 2003, p.9).
In this article, we shall use the concept of performance to refer to both
professional actors and participants’ actions in an aesthetic work in an attempt to see
both parties’ contributions on equal terms. This stance also captures the essence of
improvisation (spontaneity, reaction to stimuli without preconceptions) while adding
a level of cultural and political empowerment to the cultural agent.
3.1 Human-to-human interaction in games: designers and players
The first case in this analysis is described as when the designer is present within the
gameplay and changes the game as it is taking place—in real time, reacting to
players’ actions. The live action role-playing game (LARP) is the most extreme form
of audience-centred improvisation and is considered both theatre and game. In this
format, the audience completely replaces the actors, who are used as mere adjuncts
and facilitators (Frost & Yarrow 2007, p.60). In some examples, as in the LARP
described by Montola et al. (2009) called Momentum (Jonsson et al. 2006), the game
designers modify the course of the game in real time:
The game masters had to work in shifts in order to know player plans
and improvise appropriate and timely responses. They used video and
audio surveillance, spies infiltrating the player group, network
monitoring, and GPS tracking. Almost a hundred people worked behind
the scenes on the game mastering (p.114).
Something similar happened in the Spanish game-based dramaturgy project called
Mata la Reina (Kill the Queen) (Yoctobit 2012). The game space, a 300m2 area, was
filled with microphones and surveillance cameras for game designers and technicians
to follow gameplay from an adjoining room. In addition, game characters (actors)
wearing audio inter-communicators (as we can see in Figure 1), reported issues and
problems to game designers. This method is significantly similar to a process called
The Wizard of OZ, used in testing phases in the field of Human Computer Interaction
(HCI). The Wizard of Oz refers to experiments where a human interacts with a
supposedly autonomous computational system that it is actually being operated by a
hidden human being. For designers, the improvisational flow this strategy affords—
the sense that the activity is moving along steadily and continuously—can be used to
adapt gameplay to the needs of the players, becoming a very powerful tool to balance
the game, react to player performances, and also offer new game options as the game
proceeds.
Figure 1
3.2 Human-to-human interaction in games: performers, game characters and
players
The second case of human-to-human interaction (H2HI) we will examine occurs
when the game characters are humans and perform in an improvisational mode
according to players’ instructions, a strategy that echoes Viola Spolin and Paul Sills’s
first experiments in the strategy of the audience request—in which actors perform
what the audience suggests—and Johnstone’s theatre sports. The Ethno-Cyberpunk
Trading Post & Curio Shop on the Electronic Frontier (1994) by Guillermo Gómez
Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, a performance that explored cultural clichés and racial
prejudices, spectators were encouraged to confess their intercultural fears and desires
into microphones within the space (around a third of visitors participated, with the
rest remaining as observers) and also via a variety of media offering varying levels of
individual security and anonymity. The performers would then improvise—in a
highly exaggerated manner—spectators’ thoughts and suggestions (Dixon 2007).
This type of real-time improvisation ―puts the actors at the service of the
audience, placing the control of the story in the hands of the audience, rather than
having it controlled by the authors‖ (Johnston 2005, p.229). Roles are reconfigured
and the performer changes from the doer into receiver, giving away power and
control to spectators, who, through ingenious suggestions and requests, instruct the
actors on how to proceed with the performance. This way, new power and status
relations are played out, empowering audience over the performers.
Erika Fisher-Lichte warns against the dangers of role reversal and argues that
it is positive as long as it establishes a community of co-subjects, but falls short when
it merely recreates the old binary relationship in a new guise (p.40). The new
audience gets to exert control over the performers, which makes them aware of not
only the power than comes with this kind of authorship (performers will do anything
that is requested), but also the responsibility that comes with it (their requests shape
the performance and the performers are in the hands of the audience). While this kind
of audience request system recreates the performer-audience binary in reverse, it also
draws attention to the play of power and the co-creative dynamics of the performance.
A game design that uses the audience request strategy is Homeward
Journeys—a mix of graphic adventure game and interactive theatre piece developed
by the Spanish art collective Yoctobit (2010). The players are asked to help a stressed
businesswoman (an actress) get out of the office before time runs out by giving her
instructions through a microphone (as shown in Figure 2). Together with her
performance, digital scenography—simulating a video game head-up display (HUD)
which simultaneously presents several pieces of information, including the main
character's health, items, and an indication of game progression—helps the players
(audience members) to figure out what the appropriate game inputs are in order to
proceed with the game and, along with the actress’ reactions, complete it. In this
sense, this exchange can be understood as a form of participatory theatre/performance
in which players and game characters (performers) achieve game goals in a joint
performative effort.
Figure 2
3.3 Human-to-human interaction in games: recovering real world
playgrounds for players
The third case of human-to-human interaction (H2HI) emerges when the physical
playground environment is taken back. Although this is a feature of traditional games,
it is also part of a new and emerging genre of local multiplayer party games, which is
being developed by digital game designers working outside the conventions of the
mainstream computer games industry. Inspired by the hybridisation of digital games
and games as a performance platform, these new digitally mediated games explore the
durational, embodied, social and extended spatiality of performance forms in which
the players interact face to face, such as Spin the Bottle by KnapNokGames and Hit
Me by Kaho Abe. Even though party games can be understood as having evolved
from traditional folk games, the social essence present in the original games has been
lost in console party games, where the devices have taken attention away from the
players. As game designer Lau Korsgaard ponders, on current console party games,
everyone directs their attention to the TV. In his view, taking attention away from the
people at the party and putting it on a screen always seems to be a ―party killer‖
(Fletcher 2012). In reaction to this issue, designers have begun to discard the screen in
games, instead designing games where physical interaction between players is
prioritised over traditional, screen-mediated interactions.
In this sense, theatre games can be a rich inspirational field for game
designers, and these types of games connect to a wider tradition of education in
theatre where games are used in the studio as ways of establishing strong connections
between players. These games create relationships that generate trust, comfort or even
fair competition. An example is the adaptation made by Tassos Stevens and Pete Law
of an old theatre exercise, the game called Sangre y Patatas (Blood and Potato Chips)
(2010), where players gather in a playground, blindfolded as shown in Figure 3. In the
playground, there are areas covered with potato chips and others with hanging bells as
sound hazards. Players must move around the playground, one of them as the killer
―Sangre‖ and the rest are prey ―Patatas.‖ As the killer bumps into someone to greet
her with her name, the prey must die in a theatrical manner and leave the playground.
The winner is the last of the ―Patatas‖ standing. In this way, the game affords
theatricality and increased awareness of the other players’ actions.
Figure 3
As Henry Lowood pointed out in his lecture Players are Artists, Too (2010),
as designers we are able to ―design games [in which] players respond by figuring out
how to perform in surprising and delightful ways (...). Players are the experts on using
games as performance spaces, creating and showing off their own moves and plays.‖
That is to say, as designers, we should take advantage of the ability of players to use
games as performance platforms, not focusing on perfect play over closed systems but
rather on players’ creativity and improvisation. In this way, we can think of games as
situations and rely more on player’s performance.
4 Conclusions
Throughout this article, we have shown three ways of including performance in
games. First, having designers improvising to players actions in real time to improve
gameplay; second, capitalising on the interactions between players and human game
characters—actors who improvise according to players instructions—and third,
reclaiming face to face interaction and traditional playgrounds for games.
Including performance in any of the three ways we have described adds a
sense of unpredictability and serendipity to the game. In most digital games, even in
those with the best computer-mediated systems for supporting emotional behaviour,
difficulty level and interactive character behaviour, the game flow is less
unpredictable and generative than in the cases presented in this paper, where the
unpredictability is human-driven.
Although it is hard to say exactly to what extent, it can safely be said that it is
possible to merge performance with the game design field to develop alternative
forms of gaming. Through this specific design approach, we aim to set some
inspirational strategies for designers to enhance the performative and social essence of
games, supplementing current procedural and overly rational positions in game
studies and game design.
It can also be argued that the experiences set forth by game designers as the
ones described in this paper are attempts to stretch the boundaries of current game and
play activities.
For these reasons, we suggest thinking of game design as an activity in which
we are going to create human-led experiences. In spite of a sometimes too
technocentric culture led by the realm of digital games, we propose a more sceptical
stance towards technology in which we can foreground social context and reflect on
game design as a whole.
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