Meaningful play: applying game and play design practices to promote agency in participatory performance

ABSTRACT

As interactive and immersive forms of performance have proliferated, performance scholars have devoted increasing attention to gaming practices in order to describe the types of agency that these forms offer to their participants. This article seeks to problematise links that have been drawn between interactive performance and games, however, arguing that discussions of gaming in relation to performance are often limited to a textual paradigm which conceives game play as the exploratory uncovering of performance texts rather than the generative creation of emergent play narratives. This argument will be advanced by making three propositions: firstly, that performance practitioners and scholars who wish to draw upon games in their work should move beyond a textual paradigm to develop an understanding of how games can be understood as systems. Secondly, the article will propose that if the enhancement of participatory agency is desired, participatory performance designs might usefully respond to the cultural particularity of those involved. Thirdly, the article will argue that although system-based design can imply connotations of top-down control, participatory performance design can be reconceived as a ‘curatorial’ practice that creates contexts for play that is co-created by participants, affirming their agency in shaping the emergent content of the work.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance
• participation
• play
• games
• systems
• the curatorial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jamie Harper is a theatre director, play designer and performance researcher. He trained on the Directors’ Course at LAMDA and went on to win the JMK Directors’ Award and National Theatre Cohen Bursary which led to a year as Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio. In 2013, he received a Churchill Trust Travelling Fellowship to research the intersection of game design and drama at University of Miami and, following this project, he has made several participatory performance works that incorporate play including: Archipelago, The Lowland Clearances and The City Limits for Camden People's Theatre, People Vs Democracy at the Free Word Centre, Nudge, which was the runner up for Headlong Theatre’s 2016 Digital Artist Award, Washing Machine for the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Migrations of Cool at the Arebyte Gallery in Hackney Wick. He is an active member of the Nordic Larp (live action role-play) community and has presented larp works at international festivals including Grenselandet in Oslo, Blackbox CPH in Copenhagen and Minsk Larp Festival in Belarus. He is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD in participatory performance at Newcastle University.