I think it's also worth comparing how various interactive theatre pieces handle scaling to the size of an audience, because physical things scale in very different ways from computer games.
Tamara was a big-budget endeavor by a seasoned theatre troupe, with tight timing across the scenes (implying a lot of rehearsal time) and a realist style to the opulent set and detailed costumes. The audience doesn't get to touch anything, because that would throw off the well-oiled machine. I think all of these things, along with the partially historical subject matter, helped the impression of the audience as witness to a story that has already happened. A large part of the interaction model of Tamara is moving through space (that's how decisions are made), and the scales of the rooms were carefully planned with the scale of the scene. A scene with just one or two characters (and thus one or two characters' worth of audience members) can be in one of the tiny bedrooms, but climactic scenes had to be in the auditorium or atrium. Altogether, an entire mansion really was necessary, but the audience works as a kind of swarm, or fluid.
Conversely, Her Things was run on a much smaller budget. The venue didn't allow for much moving around, so the story was told at the object scale. The team putting it together had very little structure in terms of author vs actor vs crew, so they'd all built the story together and put faith in their ability to improvise as necessary. It had some of what I think of as the problem of conversational impedance matching: actors, in character, having to interact with audience members, very much not in character. (I really try to get into the spirit of these things, but I am super bad at acting!) There's only the one timed event, and everyone experiences it at the same time. Scaling is accomplished by just having a lot of things that need to be looked at; interestingly, the size of the audience is actually an asset for the auction scene.
A third approach was what Strata did: one-on-one interactions, with some elaborate machinery in place behind the scenes to keep everything flowing. Its dreamlike narrative helped smooth over weird actor/audience interactions and made it easier for the timing to work out. It's worth noting that Strata was heavily grant-supported.
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Date: 2014-08-23 04:28 pm (UTC)From:Tamara was a big-budget endeavor by a seasoned theatre troupe, with tight timing across the scenes (implying a lot of rehearsal time) and a realist style to the opulent set and detailed costumes. The audience doesn't get to touch anything, because that would throw off the well-oiled machine. I think all of these things, along with the partially historical subject matter, helped the impression of the audience as witness to a story that has already happened. A large part of the interaction model of Tamara is moving through space (that's how decisions are made), and the scales of the rooms were carefully planned with the scale of the scene. A scene with just one or two characters (and thus one or two characters' worth of audience members) can be in one of the tiny bedrooms, but climactic scenes had to be in the auditorium or atrium. Altogether, an entire mansion really was necessary, but the audience works as a kind of swarm, or fluid.
Conversely, Her Things was run on a much smaller budget. The venue didn't allow for much moving around, so the story was told at the object scale. The team putting it together had very little structure in terms of author vs actor vs crew, so they'd all built the story together and put faith in their ability to improvise as necessary. It had some of what I think of as the problem of conversational impedance matching: actors, in character, having to interact with audience members, very much not in character. (I really try to get into the spirit of these things, but I am super bad at acting!) There's only the one timed event, and everyone experiences it at the same time. Scaling is accomplished by just having a lot of things that need to be looked at; interestingly, the size of the audience is actually an asset for the auction scene.
A third approach was what Strata did: one-on-one interactions, with some elaborate machinery in place behind the scenes to keep everything flowing. Its dreamlike narrative helped smooth over weird actor/audience interactions and made it easier for the timing to work out. It's worth noting that Strata was heavily grant-supported.
(I also recently wrote up some thoughts in a thread on the IF forum.)