Finding Interaction in Cyberspace Game Playing

Best Before

Live Performance

Rimini Protokoll

ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts)

London

30 June - 3 July 2010

“Best Before pulls the multi-player video game out of the virtual realm and plugs it into an intimate theatre setting. Each audience member navigates an anonymous avatar via a gaming pad, to interact with a panel of on-stage experts - an electronic artist, a game tester, a politician and a traffic flagger. As audience and panel clash, collude, remonstrate, a simulated city, BestLand, gradually develops. Taking its inspiration from Vancouver's gaming industry, BestLand lives and dies through a decision making process that encompasses the personal, social and political. ” (ICA, 2010)

When I held the joystick and asked to take control of the avatar-projected role onto a huge screen, I felt glad with getting involved in, as a part of collective. Since every avatar-projected role has been connected to the every member in auditoria, with sex, name, appearance, job and props representing it’s identity, and grew up from time to time, this role-playing game became a completed imagined world created by audience and practitioner together.

Game playing, to be exact in cyberspace, has been distinguished as a kind of immersive performance in my critical paper, but Best Before is defined as “reality theatre” by Protokoll itself. Sometimes, I feel confused to classify a performance into a concept. I said that the features of immersive theatre differ from political are reduction of reality, aesthetics, emotional and resonance. Out of question, Best Before is a product of reductive experience from fictional world or an imitation of the physical experience. However, Best Before not immersed audience through audio or video effect as a role-playing game. Instead, audience was asked to show him or herself from seats when he or she win or lose the game. Start from this aspect, spectators noticed by third person frequently, which blocked them reach to the "total immersion" stage and reminded awareness of fiction games, then this piece could be belong to the political theatre, with social meaning.

That is my understanding of Frankfurter Rundschau’s comment “lies above all in the fact...that life could gain the upper hand, and theatre could lose control over itself." (Frankfurter Rundschau, 2010)

I would like to call Best Before as a product of image theatre. Due to each spectator gets the right to modify the “real image” (i.e. the image of reality, the world as it is), in order to show in “a visual form how it may be possible to move away from actual reality and create the reality we desire” as “ideal image” or BestLand as ICA said before (Boal, 1992: 3). In this way, this piece arrived to an image that represents a consensus among all the participators by thinking with their own images and speaking with their hands.

When the man next to me pated me on the back and said “hey, the winner with medal is me”, I can say this piece is succeeded in interaction.


Reference:

Institute of Contemporary Arts:
http://www.ica.org.uk/24619/Live-Art/Rimini-Protokoll-Best-Before.html [last accessed 14 July 2010]

Boal, A. (1992) Games for actors and non-actors: Second edition. Trans. A. Jackson. London: Routledge.