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Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions Digital Creativity, 2013 Vol. 24, No. 2, 157– 164, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2013.808963 Downloaded by [Universitetbiblioteket I Trondheim NTNU] at 13:29 06 November 2013 Performance meets games: considering interaction strategies in game design Elena Péreza and Lara Sánchez Coterónb a Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; bIndependent Researcher, Madrid elena.perez@ntnu.no; lara@yoctobit.com Abstract 1 Introduction This contribution 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 digitalmediated games. 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 work 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, Keywords: improvisation, performance, game design, human-to-human interaction, experimental performance # 2013 Taylor & Francis Digital Creativity, Vol. 24, No. 2 Downloaded by [Universitetbiblioteket I Trondheim NTNU] at 13:29 06 November 2013 Pérez and Coterón 2 Reclaiming player experience from the game system: performative strategies as a formal property of art objects, is downplayed in order to foreground social context and interpersonal relations’ (Wilson 2012, 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 artefacts, 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: 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 (Ono 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, 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’ (2012, 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 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 this contribution 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. 158 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 coauthorship 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, emphasis added), we advocate game designers ceding control over their systems to players by foregrounding collaboration, dialogue and improvised performance. 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, 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’ (ibid., 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’ (2003, 9). In this contribution, 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 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 (2007, 4) 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. 159 Digital Creativity, Vol. 24, No. 2 Downloaded by [Universitetbiblioteket I Trondheim NTNU] at 13:29 06 November 2013 Considering interaction strategies in game design Digital Creativity, Vol. 24, No. 2 Downloaded by [Universitetbiblioteket I Trondheim NTNU] at 13:29 06 November 2013 Pérez and Coterón 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. 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 and Yarrow 2007, 60). In some examples, as in the LARP described by Montola, Stenros, and Waern (2009) called Momentum (Jonsson et al. 2006), the game designers modify the course of the game in real time: 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. In 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, 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 (2008, 40). The new audience gets to exert control over the 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. (Montola, Stenros, and Waern 2009, 114) Something similar happened in the Spanish game-based dramaturgy project called Mata la Reina (Kill the Queen) (Yoctobit 2012). The game space, a 300 m2 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 160 Digital Creativity, Vol. 24, No. 2 Downloaded by [Universitetbiblioteket I Trondheim NTNU] at 13:29 06 November 2013 Considering interaction strategies in game design Figure 1 Mata la Reina testing rehearsal at Intermediae Matadero Madrid, 2012. A droid (dressed in black) admonishes a player offscreen in the picture with the interphone open awaiting orders from the control room. Source: J. L. Durante. 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’s 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. 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 161 Digital Creativity, Vol. 24, No. 2 Downloaded by [Universitetbiblioteket I Trondheim NTNU] at 13:29 06 November 2013 Pérez and Coterón Figure 2 Homeward Journeys play at Intermediae Matadero Madrid, 2011. A woman sitting on the left side of the image holding a microphone suggests that the actress look for her cellphone in the bin while the countdown is running (6.03 min left). Source: Yoctobit.com. 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 162 Digital Creativity, Vol. 24, No. 2 Downloaded by [Universitetbiblioteket I Trondheim NTNU] at 13:29 06 November 2013 Considering interaction strategies in game design Figure 3 Players try to find each other by listening to the sound cues. Hide and Seek Festival, London 2010. Source: Screenshot from video filmed by Eva Kanstrup. 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 contribution, 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 contribution 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 game affords theatricality and increased awareness of the other players’ actions. 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 contribution, 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 163 Digital Creativity, Vol. 24, No. 2 Downloaded by [Universitetbiblioteket I Trondheim NTNU] at 13:29 06 November 2013 Pérez and Coterón 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. Lowood, H. 2010. “Players are Artists, too.” Accessed March 10, 2013. http://youtube/PVnUDWhCEpE. Montola, M., J. Stenros, and A. Waern. 2009. Pervasive Games: Theory and Design. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann. Sicart, M. 2011. “Against Procedurality.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 11 (3). References Abramović, M. 1977. Imponderabilia. Stevens, T., and P. Law. 2010. Sangre y Patatas. Accessed March 14, 2013. http://www.papasangre. com/tag/sangre-y-patatas/. Bogost, I. 2007. Persuasive Games. The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilson, D. 2012. “Designing for the Pleasures of Disputation – or – How to Make Friends by Trying to Kick Them!” PhD diss., IT University of Copenhagen. Consalvo, M. 2009. “There is No Magic Circle.” Games and Culture 4 (4): 408 –417. Denzin, N. K. 2003. Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yoctobit. 2010. Homeward Journeys. Accessed March 15, 2013. http://www.yoctobit.com. Dewey, J. 2005 [1934]. Art as Experience. New York: Berkeley. Yoctobit. 2012. Mata La Reina. Accessed March 15, 2013. http://www.yoctobit.com. Dixon, S. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Yoko, O. 1964. Cut Piece. Elena Pérez is a researcher, theatre practitioner and experimental game designer. She is doing her PhD (2009 – 2013) in the department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where she is looking at how digital media is challenging classical notions of participation, space and community in contemporary theatre and performance. She has created performance experiments such as Chain Reaction (2009 and 2011) and Random Friends (2011) for academic inquiry in Berkeley and Trondheim. She is currently based in Madrid where she is writing her PhD dissertation. Eskelinen, M. 2004. “Towards Computer Game Studies.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by N. Wardrip-Fruin and P. Harrigan, 35–37. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fischer-Lichte, E. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. London: Routledge. Fletcher, J. 2012. “How ‘Spin the Bottle’ Explores Wii U’s Social Potential.” Interview with Lau Korsgaard. Accessed March 15, 2013. http://www.joystiq.com/ 2012/12/26/how-spin-the-bottle-explores-wii-ussocial-potential/. Frost, A., and R. Yarrow. 2007. Improvisation in Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Gómez Peña, G., and R. Sifuentes. 1994. The EthnoCyberpunk Trading Post & Curio Shop on the Electronic Frontier. Lara Sánchez Coterón is an independent researcher and cultural producer at the convergence of contemporary artistic practices with games. She holds a PhD in new media and games studies from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2012). She earned a BA in fine arts by Basque Country University. She is founding member and game designer at game-based experiments group Yoctobit. She currently lectures in Spanish public universities and curates activities and exhibitions related with game design and new media. Johnston, C. 2005. House of Games: Making Theatre from Everyday Life. London: Nick Hern. Johnstone, K. 2007. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. London: Methuen Drama. Jonsson, S., E. Boss, M. Ericsson, and D. Sundstrom. 2006. Prosopopeia Bardo 2: Momentum. Accessed March 15, 2013. http://momentum.sics.se/. Kester, G. H. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 164