The Brick Theater in New York has run the Game Play festival each year for the last four years. Seth Schiesel of The New York Times described it as “the most ambitious effort I know of to fuse the techniques and live presentation of theater with the themes, structures and technology of interactive electronic entertainment.”
In this episode of Dialogue Tree, Eric Brasure interviews four artists who were involved in this year’s Game Play: Gyda Arber, Amy Overman, Charles Battersby, and Kathryn Funkhouser.
(Originally broadcast Sep 4, 2012.)
Contents
01:30 “Well, our first year it was, sort of, not superplanned…”
05:20 “There’s not that many artists working in this space…”
09:40 “We threw out a press release [to] see if we could get some nibbles. There were so many nibbles.”
10:30 “…players are controlling the characters on stage and leading them through the process.”
11:35 “…don’t really understand how important it is to really integrate gaming into the work that we’re looking for.”
25:00 “…as soon as we read it we basically fell in love with it…”
26:00 “Being an actor, playing a role-playing game is a lot of fun.”
29:50 “Why are we doing this? What do we get out of it? We’re probably not making money.”
38:40 “We’re looking at it through a D&D game.”
40:30 “I think it’s been a lot easier for people who don’t understand D&D to figure it out.”
45:10 “…being clawed and bitten and pummelled down to the ground…”
50:50 “Well, I’m a huge fan of the apocalypse, of the Fallout games and any kind of post-apocalyptic storytelling.”
51:40 “…he and his wife find themselves surviving a nuclear war in a bomb shelter that’s built for one.”
54:20 “When we have the mod finished it will feature voices of the actors that are actually on stage…”
57:00 “A videogame is like an interactive theatre piece.”
67:10 “–but when you’re watching a play, they really are in the room with you.”
70:20 “Comics and videogames were both really underestimated as art forms when they started out…”
Download the podcast MP3 or play it right here in your browser:
References
- Featured music: Dikes of Holland – “We Gotta Go” and Bird Names – “New Life” (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
- The Brick
- Game Play page at the Brick
- New York Times article on Game Play (2010)
- Gyda Arber
- Modal Kombat
- Dysfunctional Theatre (Amy Overman)
- Of Dice and Men
- Charles Battersby
- That Cute Radioactive Couple (companion Fallout NV mod still under development)
- U.S. Department of Electronic Entertainment
- Kathryn Funkhouser’s tumblr
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