Editorial: How to Play

Canadian Theatre Review: Gaming

A journal issue for multiple players of all ages

Playing time: Entirely up to the player

Canada, 2018. The urban landscape is changing. Not far from your home, in downtown Guelph, there are two somewhat traditional performance spaces: the River Run Centre, which hosts concerts and touring productions, and the Making Box, an improv comedy venue. In the same downtown area, there are at least two board game café/bars, a video gaming lounge, four escape room venues, and an axe-throwing and archery tag space. The growth in gaming culture is hardly unique to Guelph. All over Canada, new gaming venues are popping up—supplementing the already widespread gaming practices that occur in homes or online. Now, a group of authors come together to make sense of this changing landscape and its relationship to theatre and performance in Canada.

Game contents

• 1- Cover image

• 1- Editorial

• 3- Conversations between creators

• 3- Artist reflections on process

• 1- Interview

• 2- Articles on role-playing

• 1- Image-based script

• 1- Online feature

Preparing to Play

According to the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, over half of the Canadian population can now be classified as gamers, which means they play a video game at least once a month. This gameplay takes place in a range of locations, from personal mobile devices to computer screens to movie theatres that host large-scale eGaming tournaments. But gaming goes beyond Canada’s $3.7 billion video game industry. Other modes of gaming are gaining popularity, from live action role-playing (LARPing) to tabletop gaming to the gamified classroom. According to The New York Times, the act of watching others play is also now widespread, with online users spending 128 million hours a month watching people play the game Fortnite over the streaming service Twitch.

While there is no single reason behind this recent expansion of gaming practices and spaces—nor any single motivating factor that unites all gamers—game critics frequently theorize on why gaming has become so pervasive. Focusing on the structure of games, Ian Bogost argues, “Games aren’t appealing because they are fun, but because they are limited. Because they erect boundaries. Because we must accept their structures in order to play them” (x). Bogost points to one way that theatre and performance intersect with gaming—they both provide a structure and set of rules for spectators/players. But this crossover is not limited to similarities in form. Structured play has long been a central element of theatre and performance, particularly in actor training and theatre for social change. We can think here of Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors and Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theater, two core resources in performer training with game structures at their core. As Spolin notes, gaming allows for both personal and collective creativity—key skills for any performance maker: “The game is a natural group form providing the involvement and personal freedom necessary for experiencing. Games develop personal techniques and skills necessary for the game itself, through playing” (4).

Set-Up

Though gaming has always been an integral part of performance, now-emergent gaming practices—particularly in digital spaces—are taking the field of theatre and performance in new directions. This issue of Canadian Theatre Review explores how theatre and gaming practices have become entangled, and how performance practices feed into increasingly ubiquitous modes of play. This is the first issue of Canadian Theatre Review on gaming; however, many previous issues and articles have dug into topics relating to this area. Canadian Theatre Review has published three issues on the relationship between digital tools and theatre: Computing Theatre (issue 81, Winter 1994), Liveness and Mediatized Performance (issue 127, Summer 2006), and Digital Performance (issue 159, Summer 2014).

In issues 81 and 159, Alan Filewod proposes taking seriously the connections between theatre, performance, and digital gaming—particularly in terms of embodiment and immersion. In the more recent issue, Filewod argues that while “[d]igital gaming may not be theatre . . . it is a theatricalized activity, and it has a place in the wider sphere of activities that theatre embraces, where we trace a spectrum...