![]() ![]() The work of companies including Punchdrunk, dreamthinkspeak, Wilderness, RIFT_, Blast Theory, Third Rail, Speakeasy Dollhouse, and We Players promises to disintegrate the fourth wall by placing participants within physical and narrative architectures. ![]() Yet both positions assume immersive theatre voids itself of the spectator and their associated modes of perception, and therefore creates a new kind of subjectivity that audience members negotiate in medias res. In other words, one position sees immersive performance through the capitalist framing of the experience economy, and the other regards the genre as avant-garde. In the former view, participatory theatre markets itself as not-theatre to a wider demographic of people who don’t typically think of themselves as theatre-goers in the latter, participatory techniques revive mid-twentieth century experimental theatre inspired by Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double (1958), most notably The Living Theatre and The Wooster Group. Contemporary interest in participatory theatre forms has been generally explained in practical and theoretical terms, and both perspectives share a fundamental shift in the audience’s expectations for the performance. The proliferation of immersive, promenade, mixed-reality, interactive, environmental, and site-specific theatres over the past decade has struck critics as strange, considering how few things in performance are dreaded so much as audience participation. ![]() We should therefore remain skeptical of immersive theatre’s claims of audience empowerment because its remediations are susceptible to the exploitative dynamics associated with gamification and commodified experience. I conclude that while game design can productively inform dramatic performances (and vice versa), Sleep No More demonstrates the dangers of uncritically applying game design into embodied contexts while Then She Fell shows how thoughtful adaptation of player experiences can enhance interpersonal exchanges and introspection. Walking sims often resist temporal, procedural, and meaning-making conventions in contemporary game design, but this upending of dominant design trends is lost when adapted for a stage which creates its own rules, expectations, and contexts. While both media forms share core mechanics, these procedures can yield different experiences. The final section compares environmental storytelling in walking simulators like Gone Home, Firewatch, and The Stanley Parable with immersive theatre. The trade-off for Then She Fell’s choice constraints is clearly-defined terms for interactivity that draw from game design to accentuate the dramaturgy rather than attempt to remediate a game-like experience. By contrast, Third Rail’s Then She Fell restricts player choice, but in doing so utilizes the inherent strengths of live-performances: embodied proximity and interactivity. Worse still is that Punchdrunk’s productions have enabled predatory behaviors by virtue of creating spaces that anonymize and privilege consumers in an experience economy model. But as I demonstrate, Sleep No More’s borrowed mechanics limit the audience by binding them to the precise timing of the performance, limiting content behind scarcity models, and erasing meaningful role-play. Co-director Felix Barrett claims that Sleep No More’s design allows participants to make decisions about their own pacing and experience, and that this is an agentic expression yielding co-authorship of the work. Dramaturgs working within this genre explicitly cite digital games-including RPGs, narrative games, and walking simulators-as inspiration for their free-roaming narrative architecture. Both perspectives assume immersive theatre voids itself of the spectator and their associated modes of perception, and therefore creates a new kind of subjectivity that audience members negotiate in medias res. Critics have generally explained the popularity of immersive theatre in two ways: as a remediation of video games into live performances, or as avant-garde theatre in the same vein as mid-twentieth century participatory theatre experiments by The Living Theatre and The Wooster Group. Using an interdisciplinary framework drawn from game studies, theatre studies, and literary criticism, I focus on Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More and Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell, as well as draw comparisons between immersive theatre and walking simulator games. It pays attention to marketing materials, the staging of environments, design of participant/actor interactions, and the limitations and affordances for audience choice and agency. This essay argues that video game design informs the genre of immersive theatre both in its conception and in the ways participants interact with their narrative environments. Of Actors and Non-Player Characters: How Immersive Theatre Performances Decontextualize Game Mechanics ![]()
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