Tortoises, Dragons, Chameleons: Some Thoughts On Interactive Theatre Acting
While I was finding draft blogs I hadn't put online, I found this. While I'm not sure I 100% agree with it all now, I think the basic investigation is still thought-provoking, so I'm putting it online.
There is a concept in tabletop roleplaying game studies: GNS theory.
In short, one common reason for unhappy player experience during a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) is that they have different expectations of how they’ll have fun. Broadly, expectations are:
Gamist: These players enjoy the game part of it. They want to work out how best to use the rules available to achieve the goals.
In Dungeons & Dragons, for example, these players will be there for the mechanics. They will enjoy the puzzle of combat tactics, lots of dice-rolling, and working out an ‘optimal’ build for their character, realising that if you mix this skillset with that class of magic-users then suddenly victory over those monsters becomes much more probable.
It’s a form of fun.
Narrativist: These players enjoy the story part of it. They want to use the game to tell a story.
In Dungeons & Dragons, again, these players will be there for creating a tale with their friends. They will enjoy forming relationships, in-character conversation, and possibly even ‘playing to lose’ if it creates a dramatic moment for their character, or gets another player’s character closer to an important in-narrative moment. It’s hard to overcome your thirst for revenge unless you choose not to avenge someone, after all.
It’s a form of fun.
Simulationist: These players enjoy the simulation part of it. They want to use the game to simulate a world.
In Dungeons & Dragons, these players are often Game Masters, making sure that the world the player characters inhabit is consistent. They will enjoy creating and exploring lore, making the world follows a set of logical rules, and being confident that if the players choose to go through the right hand door, on the other side is exactly what has been written down, even though what’s behind the left hand door is much more interesting, because that’s what the world is!
It’s a form of fun. Though as a rule of thumb, nobody likes lore as much as the person who wrote it.
It’s worth noting that GNS theorists generally think that most people fall into one or two camps, and are nowadays considered a little old fashioned.
But I think these broad concepts can usefully be applied to Interactive Immersive Theatre (IIT), a form that sits close to game theatre and zero-prep LARP, both for audiences and actors.
GNS Theory for Audiences
In brief: different shows offer different forms of fun, and it’s useful to try and tease that out.
Many shows in the IIT genre are fun for gamist audiences: there’s a clear goal, and people are given tools to overcome it.
Meanwhile, another audience member might be drawn towards uncovering the lore, and be very upset if it looks like the show team are fudging things to make a better story. They’re a simulationist.
A third audience member might be a narrativist. They’re not really interested in the tools or the lore, as long as it’s a good story. They might want a good story just for them to see, or a good story for the overall show, but they’re there for moving or engaging theatre.
Different audiences, obviously, have different needs, and it’s worth thinking about how we convey that.
GNS Theory for Actors
This blog came out of me wanting to write something about the ‘pet tortoise school of acting’, before I realised that I was reinventing GNS theory.
Because no one part of the GNS triptych is wrong. They just all lead to different, to some extent incompatible, outcomes.
However, I do think IIT performers could think more about which is most useful for the show they’re doing.
Gamist performers might prioritise good facilitation of in-show mechanics, making sure that the audience’s experience of the tools for interaction is as good as possible.
The advantage of this is that it emphasises the performer’s vital role as guide in IIT. It means creating a character that, no matter what, can adapt to the audience’s individual needs. They are a member of the Playful Chameleon School.
However, it can also de-emphasise the actual character being played. It is difficult to toe the line between ‘how my character behaves with this audience member’ and ‘a substantively different character with this audience member’. This alters the way that a character might form relationships with other roles in the show.
Narrativist performers might prioritise creating great drama and stories, whether for their character, other roles, members of the audience, or the overall show.
The advantage of this is that it brings out the theatre part of IIT. It creates emotional or dramatic moments that captivate, and give it the at-the-heartstrings effectiveness of great traditional theatre. This is the Draconic School: it is better to be beautiful and magnificent than realistic or entirely fair.
However, it can lead to performers who push against the audience’s choices, or veer towards weak melodrama rather than genuinely effective plots. In IIT that emphasises audience agency, it can shift the focus away from the audience’s agency and back onto the characters, with the audience as backdrop.
Simulationist performers might prioritise creating characters with intricate, detailed backstories, memorising lore, and making sure that at all costs they abide by the established canon of the in-game world.
The advantage of this is that it creates a world the audience can explore to their heart’s content, for the performers can answer any and all questions. It gives the audience faith that their choices ‘matter’ in an external world that has many specific ties to the external world.
However, it can lead to performers who, having created their backstory, want some excuse to share it - after all, if they are interested in it, surely someone else will be? For nerds in the audience, it is The Silmarillion rather than The Hobbit. One has lore, one has story.
The Pet Tortoise School
Simulationist performance is the school I feel least warmth for. For me, there is a joy in the grandeur of a role that is bigger than everyday life.
Your tragic politician doesn’t need a specific memory of their time at university in 1937; five bulletpoints about their in-show function, narrative function, and core relationships allows the actor room to invent if needed, but above all focus on the things that make IIT theatre.
This is an attitude from directing Shakespeare and opera. We got Macbeth down to three epic bulletpoints, which I will not share. For, say, Prospero, it might be “Decline, Knowledge, Doubt.” Each implies their opposite, while also encouraging the actor to intelligently think about how their choices impact the shape of the show overall, for other characters, and for the audience, as well as their part of it.
That is say, I am more interested in roles than characters. It’s one of several reasons why I wince when people tell me an anecdote about someone “you ought to put in one of your shows.”
I enjoy grand performances; by being more than human, they are often enthralling. In contrast, the giddy sharing of intricate backstory by some performers after a show often seems to be more for their self-gratification as simulationists than anything else. It is from hearing one performer tell me excitedly about a bit of backstory they’d conjured that I name this school the Pet Tortoise School.
Yes, it made sense for the character, and was even funny in a show that was not. But it undercut the show, the performer, and diminished scale of the performance, all for a rather cheap, small fact that did not, in fact, usefully add to anything in the show itself.
The Benefits and Downsides of Pet Tortoises
Members of the school will point to its robustness in the face of simulationist audiences, who love the lore. However, while that is a form of fun, in my experience it is rare - and where I have seen it in action it is a) a response to the provocation of having such lore in the first place and b) only considered satisfying if it supports the story, rather than the internal logic of a character’s biography (e.g. a clever character logically might have a first from a top university, but that’s not satisfying in the way that knowing where and how they formed their thoughts about the core theme of the show is).
More importantly, the Pet Tortoise School creates a frankly overwhelming quantity of information, which the performer can try to keep in their head (and indeed may want to share, having created it) but an audience must therefore engage with - either by trying to climb the mountain, or avoiding it entirely.
They might also point to similar approaches being useful in, say, Chekov. It is certainly partly derived from Stanislavskian approaches.
First, let us be honest and admit that most IIT characters are not as interesting as roles in Chekov. We might want to make sure we know what life would have been like for Nina; we might want to even spend some time ensuring Nina’s actor has a shared understanding of her early life with other actors who would have known her role. But Generic Bureaucrat #3… does not offer the same richness.
Second, Stanislavskian approaches are done with a narrativist goal in mind. The end result is not the creation of the lore, but the performance and the overall play. Most practitioners in such schools would at least agree that small points of private lore about a character may only colour a performance in a near-invisible way; many would accept that they should focus on preparation and invention that serves the show, but other work may actually draw away from it.
It’s why, for example, some modern-dress productions of classic plays don’t work. The headcanon required to make Hamlet an intense fan of Metallica might force the actor to make choices that do not serve the performance.
Many members of the Pet Tortoise School lose track of the core of the show and their role. Inventing backstory can feel like usefully passing the time, while in fact creating a sea of facts to wade through towards the core performance. In particular, poor judgement or direction can mean creating a fun or dramatic fact that muddies the waters of a character in the overall show.
For finally, IIT performers are not performing as classic Stanislavskian performers. While those actors’ duty is fundamentally to the show, an IIT performer has other duties to the game mechanics and the audience. The other two schools offer more flexibility for both.
I Am A Draconic Chameleon
As is likely obvious, I would view the heart of IIT as narrativist (it’s theatre, after all) and then gamist (it’s interactive too). I think that interactive theatre’s immersion comes from thematic elements far more than Tolkeinesque amounts of lore.
In an ideal world, I want to be as moved or as thoughtful as I am in theatre, and I am often not.
I want my engagement with the game to be a part of that. If it is the priority, then I’ll look forward to enjoying it like a board game or similar.
But unless your world really is filled with endless layers of interesting information for each part of the world, from characters to politics to trade routes, I’d prefer you to leave your pet tortoise at home.
