RobotGeek

Summer vacation season is upon us, and I for one always welcome the opportunity to go experience something new and relaxing while thinking constantly about work. This year was no exception, as I visited the long-running Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, OR with family, and left with a bunch of scattered thoughts about the similarities between theatre and videogames.

While games are often compared to film (with frequently problematic results), theatre in many ways makes for a less superficial analogy. Like games, plays are composed of a single text that can be executed in a large variety of ways to produce a single playthrough or performance. Theatre is also one of the only traditional artforms that is able to do anything substantial with audience interaction. These similarities have recently been discussed by Michael Abbot in his review of the Happening-like Sleep No More, currently being performed in New York. This performance suggests a bright future in works that blend game and theatre in interesting ways.

For my part, I was struck by some of the more practical considerations that games and plays share. Namely, issues of set design. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is somewhat unusual in that the company often performs multiple plays per day in the same theatre during peak season. This means that their sets need to be designed for quick breakdown and reassembly, as each performance space gets re-skinned between shows. The sets also need to change the space as much as possible, which is easier in some spaces than others. One of their theatres is a an open-air stage in the Elizabethan style, complete with an elaborate Tudor backdrop; entirely transforming the look of the stage is fairly difficult under these circumstances, although the Ashland company did a fine job of it.

In theory, your theatre could just be an empty lot with a huge number of modular pieces that you can assemble into different stage layouts, backdrops, audience configurations, walls, roofs, etc. You could get every type of performance space you wanted, but it would be insanely expensive and slow to change. You would also have to rethink practical considerations like acoustics and line-of-sight every time. That said, this is how environments in games are generally built. The fact that the pieces are digital rather than physical certainly makes things easier, but the same issues with expense and speed still exist at a smaller scale.

Many games on a budget solve this problem with procedurally generated levels. This can significantly reduce costs and design time, but losing control over environment layout isn’t always ideal. To go back to the theatre analogy, maybe you’ll always have a stage that satisfies some basic constraints, but some nights it randomly ends up with lousy acoustics. I’ve spent enough time in Persona 3 idly hopping up levels where the exit spawns right next to the entrance to suspect that this is a major issue in games as well.

An alternative solution might be to copy from theatrical set design, and have a single fixed space that you know has certain desirable properties, with set dressing that changes the surface appearance for various purposes. But while theatre audiences are used to seeing a single stage dressed in various ways, game audiences are decidedly not. When Bioware tried to do something like this in Dragon Age 2, they met with pretty much universal derision. It may have saved time and money, but gamers have a strong prejudice against repeated environments.

To be fair, Dragon Age 2 reuses its spaces quite crudely. Not much attempt was made to change even the superficial appearance of the sets, not to mention more basic functional changes like removing unused doors. One can imagine a more elegant approach to recycling environments that hides the seams more creatively. This still might not be enough, however. Gamers view spaces more functionally than aesthetically, and surface changes might not hide the fact that the level layout has remained the same.

Still, there is a useful space between reusing sets and creating them from scratch, and traditional procedural design isn’t the only approach in this space. More modern theatres, like the Angus Bowmer in Ashland, are designed for flexibility within limits. Parts of the stage can be raised or lowered; walls can be moved; audience seating can be rearranged. Spaces above and below the stage are available for various kinds of construction and mid-scene changes. The space stays pretty much the same, but an individual set designer has a lot of options to change that space.

An equivalent approach in games would be a set of default environments with a lot of switches and levers that the level designer can play with. Unlike procedural methods, which take a fixed set of pieces and assemble them according to rules, this would involve the creation of a single configurable space. This would allow for more control than procedural design, without the overhead of building each level from the ground up. Maybe it still wouldn’t satisfy the player’s lust for novel environments, but it seems like a reasonable method. (Of course, if there are already any games that use this method, please let me know in comments!)

I think the broader message to take from theatre, though, is that a limited set of objects – be they environments, props, or actors – can be used in a huge variety of ways if you do so intelligently. Part of this is just engaging the audience: if people are into the performance, they’ll be more willing to go along with the shortcuts you employ. Another part is just knowing what people do and do not pay attention to. People tend to focus on people, so costume design is often a better investment than set design. People also fill in a lot of details that aren’t there, in memory as well as perception. If you put up a spare set and have the actors convincingly describe their surroundings, chances are people will remember a much more complex environment than you actually built. Some of this might apply to game design, and some of it might not. Either way, trying to get more out of less is a much better strategy for advancing the craft than throwing too much effort into lush, static environments.