Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater by Gina Bloom (review)

Theatre historians generally agree that the play's the thing, but what exactly do we mean by "play"—and what do we assume is played? The usual answer is the dramatic script, certainly, or more broadly, the text, whether it be printed, devised, or intertextual. We might think of the playful process of theatre creation, whether the provisional "games for theatre" that enable performers to attune mind and body to the task at hand or the more constitutive forms of play we associate with devised theatre. Those versed in the broader spectrum of performance practices will recall Richard Schechner's abiding interest in the varieties of human play and their integral relationship to performance more generally. But despite our love of play, theatre historians have mostly ignored the kinds of play associated with recreational games: cards, boardgames, tabletop role-playing games, and the like. And they have ignored the skills that players of games bring to the arts. There are signs of change if you know where to look, but unfortunately those are mostly in the present tense and are often framed in digital terms—immersive theatre, augmented reality, new media performance, videogames.

In Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater, Gina Bloom not only corrects these shortcomings, she also describes an innovative and authentically playful transmedia theatre-historical method. It is a tour de force, the kind of book that could be written only by someone with comprehensive knowledge of their period, an acute sensitivity to the embodied experience of theatre and gaming, a firm critical-theoretical hand, and practical grounding in the design of playful theatrical experiences.

Bloom begins in the present tense, noting the unprecedented growth of games as popular pastime and the evidently unstoppable devolution of theatre into an elite entertainment. In response, she asks a pair of questions that implicates both present and past: "What do theatrical plays and games have in common, for their producers and their spectators? And what can we learn about gaming and about theater by uncovering the links between these media forms?" (1–2). The answers Bloom finds shed light on old stages and new media alike and provide useful lessons to both historians and creators of theatrical entertainments.

As she notes, "the earliest commercial theaters of Shakespeare's era, known as 'playhouses,' were built right next to gaming establishments; some of these … even doubled as blood sport venues" (1). This geographical coincidence reflected a broader coincidence of ludic cultures and the need for makers of one of them (the theatre) to appeal to consumers of the other (games and sports). "The commercial theater," Bloom writes, "was fashioned as a gaming apparatus for its consumers, whose spectator-ship was participatory, albeit in ways that might be missed at first glance" (3). Thus it follows that one can learn about both by examining the formal and cultural coincidence of playful practice.

To this end, Bloom surveys in the first chapter the material record of "sitting pastimes" in Western Europe (cards, boardgames, and the like) and attitudes toward them expressed by cultural authorities. Reflecting her interest in closing the distance between present and past, she emphasizes a characteristic of gameplay of special importance to twenty-first-century game scholars: that games are first and foremost information systems, and that game play is fundamentally an engagement with such systems. It turns out we share that concern with the early moderns. In the next three chapters, she focuses on three popular pastimes—cards, backgammon, and chess—and the plays in which they feature, demonstrating how they engage "a whole set of epistemological concerns about the flow and control of information—a concern of political and religious authorities at the time" (29). Considered together, they show us how early modern audiences perceived and practiced gameplay, as well as how they perceived and practiced a new kind of play: going to the theatre. This is...