asses.masses is a unique, 7-hour, live performance that uses video game logic to expand the narrative possibilities and social dramaturgy of experimental theater. With a single video game controller at the front of a movie theater with lights up so everyone can see each other, the audience must negotiate amongst themselves who will step up to play the next section of a narrative game that spans a wide range of different genres from 8-bit pixel art RPG representing the hyperreal to high-res, 3D open world walking simulators representing a fantasy idealized realm. The audience also has to negotiate how to make hundreds of collective decisions that come up in the game from dialogue tree options to which direction to to go to deciding which set of metaphoric political platform issues that should be prioritized for the ensemble cast of socialist Marxist donkeys. They lean upon the binge-watching culture to split the 7 to 8-hour run time into 10 total episodes split into 2-episode chunks that are broken up by 4 different intermissions where snacks and dinner are provided.
Here’s a description of the story that’s told in this long-form format:
The unemployed donkeys have one demand: the humans must surrender their machines and give all donkeys their jobs back. But revolution is never easy!
asses.masses is a custom-made video game about labour, technophobia, and sharing the load of revolution, designed to be played from beginning to end in a live theatre. This is gaming as performance, an immersive, cheeky, and highly original work. Brave spectators take turns at the controller to lead the herd through a post-Industrial society, where asses are valued more for their hides than their potential.
Confronting automation-driven job loss, nostalgia as a barrier to progress, and the role of technology in adaptation, we are encouraged to find space between the work that defines us and the play that frees us.
asses.masses is Animal Farm meets Pokémon meets Final Fantasy, as exciting in form as it is in content. No previous gaming (or donkey) experience required.
asses.masses is one of the more unique immersive experiences that I’ve had a chance to have, especially when it comes to mashing up social behaviors that stem from video game culture, but set within a live theatrical context. I saw asses.masses at PAM CUT (Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow) here in Portland, OR on March 29th, and I had a chance to remotely catch up with the co-creators Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim to unpack their journey of blending video games into how stories are told in a live theatrical performance. We also explore how they’re exploring new modes of social dramaturgy that leverage insights from couch co-op, live Twitch streams, and video game logic where part of the performance is automated through the video game itself, but it’s augmented by the emergent social dynamics of the audience that end up reflecting main narrative themes of managing flows of power, community-building, collective decision-making, and in the case of our screening some actual revolt against an theater nerd/gamer audience member turned heel.
Overall, the experience allowed the audience to exercise some muscles of social imagination beyond the Capitalist Realism baseline as elaborated by Mark Fisher’s work, and there was a turn-taking between the more cathartic mode of Aristotelian drama and breaking the fourth wall of Brecht’s distancing effect / alienation effect. The narrative was initially developed to serve a wide range of game-play mechanics in a live theater context, but the spaciousness of the extended run-time allowed them to explore many deeper philosophical, political, and economic topics that most stories do not have the time to get into. The ensemble cast of archetypal characters each have their own arc, and I found that the ending and epilogue really landed and stuck with me. If you have an opportunity to catch an upcoming screening of asses.masses, then I think it’s definitely worth setting aside a day to go check it out in order to see how it expands the vocabulary of game-play verbs through it’s social dramaturgy.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So, on the Voices of VR, I've been going to a lot of these different film festivals and covering the immersive storytelling experiences that are being shown here. And one of the trends that I've seen is that more and more of these experiences are playing with unique social dynamics in some ways. So you have a group of people who are co-located and the experience is mediating some sort of unique interaction. And so I had an opportunity to do a very unique experience called Asses Masses, which is kind of like a seven and a half hour marathon video game binge watching type of experience. You're playing the video game, but you're also having it as a live theatrical performance. And so the audience is able to engage by choosing which of the options in the dialogue tree to choose, but also to make different decisions as you go along. And it ends up being this kind of meta game that has all sorts of social dramaturgy that these two theater makers, Patrick Blencarn and Milton Lamb, are kind of orchestrating all these other social dynamics that are in some ways reflecting the themes that are being covered within the context of the story that they're telling. So I'm going to read both the experience description and the on-screen description just to give you a bit more context for this experience. So join PAMCUT. PAMCUT is the Portland Art Museum Center for an Untold Tomorrow. It's based here in Portland, and they end up showing like 25 unique events a month and like 250 unique events a year. So join PAMCUT for a one-night-only marathon video game, food, and live theater extravaganza like no other. During this epic 8-bit video game, audience members must work together to determine the fate of the revolution. Four intermissions with snacks will be provided during the experience with additional food and beverage will be available for sale from the concession stand. And so this was a 10 episode series and you would play two episodes at a time and then there would be a break where you would go and get some food and take a rest. And then there was no determined time when you came back and then you continue to play the game. So there's a lot of things that the audience is expected to help negotiate all these different dynamics as well. So, on screen, Asses Masses is a runtime of seven and a half hours, and this is the description that was provided. So, the unemployed donkeys have one demand. The humans must surrender their machines and give all the donkeys their jobs back. But revolution is never easy. Asses Masses is a custom-made video game about labor, technophobia, and sharing the load of revolution, designed to be played from beginning to end in a live theater. This is a gaming as performance, an immersive, cheeky, and highly original work. Brave spectators take turns at the controller to lead the herd through a post-industrial society, where assets are valued more for their hides than their potential. Confronting automation-driven job loss, nostalgia as a barrier to progress, and the role of technology in adaptation, we are encouraged to find space between the work that defines us and the play that frees us. Asus Masses is Animal Farm meets Pokemon meets Final Fantasy, as exciting in form as it is in content. No previous gaming or donkey experience required. So as one of the most unique experiences that I've had a chance to have while covering all these different types of immersive experiences, Especially because you're really committing to a seven-hour experience, but also there's all these kind of emergent social dynamics that were a part of the experience. And so I wanted to sit down with Patrick and Milton just to get a sense of how this came about, but also trying to take the form of experimental theater and then add video games and all the conceits of video games that... are starting to change the forms of these kind of live theatrical immersive performances, but have all sorts of new social dramaturgy that they're trying to use the affordances of the video game to inform what kind of new immersive and emergent social dynamics might be possible in these types of experiences. So we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Patrick and Milton happened on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025. So with that, let's go ahead and... dive right in.
[00:04:04.964] Patrick Blenkarn: My name is Patrick Blencarn and I am an artist from Ottawa, Canada.
[00:04:10.988] Milton Lim: Hi, my name is Milton, Milton Lim. I am an artist from Vancouver, Canada.
[00:04:15.950] Kent Bye: Great. And maybe you could each give a bit more context as your background and your journey into the space.
[00:04:21.354] Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, so we both come from the world of theatre and particularly experimental and increasingly interactive forms of participatory theatre. But both of us have training in sort of a more foundational world of creation-based theatre. So less script-based, more about a bunch of people coming together in a room and... making something highly visual, usually very conscious of the relationship between what is being performed on stage and the people who are actually gathered in the room to experience that thing.
[00:04:51.261] Milton Lim: Yeah. I think we also have different disciplines under our belts coming from like interdisciplinary practice, but also Patrick studied philosophy. I studied psychology. And so the way that we approach theatrical formats is also very much more concept-based and and tends to be the kind of work where if we wanted to do something in a room, we would usually do it ourselves and we'd learn how to do it. And that's very much true of Assets Masses and true of many of our other projects. And so every time that we've started a project, it's bolstered by any of the techniques and things that we've picked up in the past, whether or not that's movement practice or working with interactive media, using like different applications or different platforms.
[00:05:32.569] Patrick Blenkarn: It might be kind of controversial to say on a podcast about interactive and immersive media, but I feel like one of the things that is unfortunate when one often speaks with theater artists and or maybe when you're being trained in theater and what that looked like, at least when we were being trained in it over 10 years ago, that I think you can genuinely say that all theatrical performance, live performance experiences are immersive in some capacity, but a lot of people don't take issue with the event of it happening that night. So, you know, like we run shows in rep traditionally in theatrical practice. And, you know, the idea that you're going to do King Lear tonight isn't thematized or it's not. There's not a kind of attention that is drawn to why you're doing it tonight with these people in this place right now. And I think once you start to make theater. With an attention to that level of detail of the singularity of the night that you're doing it and the people who are involved, you all of a sudden start to ask the questions that a lot of the people who left that tradition start making more immersive, quote unquote, immersive stuff. We're asking that's why they start or maybe they started asking those questions, which is why they started to get more interested in. being specific about all of the components that are around the participating audience member. So when we look at the works that we're making, we're interested in the idea that you are there that night doing this thing. And that idea that like a bunch of people come together and they do a thing. It's surprising how much that isn't the philosophy of what is being put forward in a kind of traditional theatrical training environment. So yeah, I think in some ways, like I often say that there was a very easy jump from the kinds of work that we were being trained in and the kinds of ideas that we were thinking about within that domain to what we're doing now. Ideas around play for sure, but also ideas around, hey, let's do something in the room that matters. And it's clear why we're doing it and what it's cultivating amongst all the people in the room, including the participants, including the spectators, including the performers and so on and so on.
[00:07:42.045] Kent Bye: Yeah, this whole concept of experimental theater sort of implies that there is a bound of which that there's the normal theater that's happening. And then experimental implies that there's some sort of fringe where you want to experiment or play with some of the forms. And so maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on that. the genesis of this idea of starting to blend the traditional forms of video games with this kind of more experimental theater and start to see how video games could start to expand what we typically think of as theater.
[00:08:13.223] Milton Lim: I think for us, it didn't really start as an inquiry into video games in particular. I think we wrestled with a lot of the things that Patrick was bringing up around linearity, around variability, around set time limits, and the fact that so many of the things that we were so accustomed to in the live performance room was going to be Like, let's rehearse it so that it's the exact same emotional quality every single night. Let's all sit in the dark and face the same way so that no one sees each other, but instead that they're going to have the same experience, even though everyone's kind of sitting from a different position. Like, there were so many of these things that were not being addressed. And when we came back to working on our first project together, Culture Capital, We were recognizing that games sort of created a container for us that was going to be very helpful in order to encounter a lot of those questions that we were having trouble with inside the theater space. We realized that games were able to be much more variable. They didn't have a set time scale that we had to work within. There was emergent narrative and dramaturgy coming out of that, so that as we were playing, conflict was happening. Conflict was often built into it in a conceptual way that we were interested in exploring. And drama unfolded from that. So if one person played a card, then how does that affect the rest of the playing field? And how does that build off of the card that was played before and the emotionality that was contained in that before it? And so as we continued making Culture Capital, I think games and game logic became foregrounded for us as a different way of approaching a theatrical narrative and a theatrical format. And then Patrick had this idea with the donkey coming out of a master's project. And then we started talking about it. Patrick had the idea of like a video game on stage. What would that look like? And so then we started toying with that together on an empty stage through a residency and at the Shadbolt Center in Burnaby, Canada. And that's where we started scaling ourselves up in how to make video games from YouTube tutorials. And we started questioning what kind of game formats work best in a social environment, in the eventness of theater, and how can we make it into an evening of... At the time, we didn't know it was going to be a whole seven, eight-hour show. We just knew that we had an idea for an episode, which we didn't even know was an episode at the time. We had the idea for an event that would be played with one controller and an audience. And then after that, we knew that we just wanted to keep exploring.
[00:10:39.622] Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, we have some early documentation from that residency where it says on the big screen, like you'd play a game and then it said pass the control to the left. And, you know, the political, it's very, very clear. And sort of like what we were saying is like, yeah, the controller would have to be passed to the left. And both of us had a lot of, experience doing types of participatory stuff before we should say, like creating experiences where people were sharing the control of the event, you know, there was no kind of strings on anything. And I'll say, I mean, one of the other things that, You mentioned about bringing video game practice into this interfacing traditions, let's just say interfacing traditions. And my undergrad thesis was actually about the idea that theater eats everything. Like you could play a movie inside of a theater and it would be fine and it would still be theater, even though you spent most of the time watching a movie. A lot of these experimental traditions from especially since the 60s and 70s were very much about how much shit can we push into the theater of other disciplines and it still be theater. For some reason, it has this capacity more so than a lot of other art forms as this composite thing. Video games in so many ways get to have that same flexibility. like you could be playing a video game and then all of a sudden it just cuts to a movie and you could watch a movie for two hours inside of a video game, but someone would still walk away and be like, yeah, I was playing a video game. And there was a movie in it in some way. So there's some kind of Russian darling conceptual thing that we seem comfortable with these disciplines as well, given their composite kind of nature. I'm not sure how that interfaces at other kinds of levels of experimental traditions inside of video games, experimental traditions inside of theater. But we can say that a lot of the traditions that we pay homage to inside of Asses Masses are not necessarily the most experimental or... the most hardcore experimental elements of video game history. And likewise, the scenario that is created, the performative scenario that's created for the theatrical audience also isn't particularly, I mean, aggressive is maybe not a fair word to say, but you think about when people, if you're listening to this, Like, oh yeah, I have this image of experimental theater. It probably looks like 70s New York, people yelling, maybe naked, maybe too long or too short, or some mishmash of Yoko Ono meets Richard Schechner meets Wooster Group kind of stuff. And Asses Masses really doesn't feel like that. It's actually very... accommodating it's very welcoming to people despite being this thing that people say is like at the forefront of you know someone just published an article in london being like is this the future of theater could this be a mainstay of what theatrical experience looks like in years to come which is great to hear because it's one of the things that we're advancing it is one version of what that could look like for sure and it's really not offensive in a sense of what it feels like to be in that space with people. And it's like very warm. I mean, you were there, like you can attest to, you could tell everyone may be listening if you felt like that's true, but like there's a lot of care put into building a community there.
[00:13:55.305] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think it was probably one of the more intimidating experiences that I've gone to in a while, just because, you know, the runtime is seven hours.
[00:14:02.148] Patrick Blenkarn: I take everything back. I take everything back.
[00:14:05.009] Kent Bye: I just mean, in terms of like, I go to a lot of different film festivals and the film festival format is that you want to have something that's like 20 or 30 minutes, or sometimes you have longer show runtimes, but having a seven hour runtime at a festival means that you would be eating up someone's entire day. at that festival. And so, you know, it's kind of a unique opportunity to commit to something that feels like a little bit more of a long distance run. And so even like movies, you know, pushing the runtimes of like three or four hours, but as a video game, you typically have that as runtime, but it's not usually as a theatrical performance. And so I'm wondering when you first started down this path, did you know that it was going to be this runtime where you really wanted people to commit And to really get into this kind of ensemble story with 12 to 15 characters that are being told over 10 different chapters. And there's like five different breaks that people are taking. You know, that's quite ambitious at the end of what you have created, which has a lot of open world content. I'm pretty sure we didn't even see everything as we go through that run where there's choices that are being made, where there's even more content above and beyond that. And so as you were starting down this path, I'm wondering if the runtime was a key part of having people together for that long and seeing what kind of emergent social dynamics would be born out of this commitment.
[00:15:23.936] Milton Lim: I think we knew pretty early on that we wanted to have, once we knew that we wanted a story instead of like a documentarian aesthetic practice, then we wanted to explore a story. And once story came along, we started talking about RPGs, especially having grown up on a lot of Japanese role-playing games, Final Fantasy, for example. We knew that having that kind of experience and that level of emotionality with characters was not something that we could replicate in the same 20 minute to one hour format of shorter form theatrical experience. Also, as people who consume other media that goes on for much longer, I think we both were watching a lot of like every frame of painting, for example, Tony, who makes those videos. I remember going to talk and he was saying that once he found out that the YouTube algorithm could only have allowed him to do a certain like 30, 40 seconds worth of material before it got cut off because it was all copyrighted material. And it was all looking for audio wavelength in order to scan it fast enough. he realized that he only had certain amounts of time, less than a minute usually to talk about something before having to switch over to talk about what's exactly in the next frame and the next frame and the next frame. And so he found that liberating on one hand, but the other thing that was constraining was that he couldn't talk about religion or philosophy because could you talk about those things in that length of time? Not really. And I think that holds true for the lengths of time that we often see in live performance as well, which is, can you actually have a conversation about deep emotional bonds with characters that you have versus like the characters intuiting that they've known each other for their whole lifetimes? No, not really, because we haven't had that time with them. And that's something that video games have done with having played 60 hour video games and spent hundreds of hours falling in love with characters and having to say goodbye after a long period of time. Like Nier Automata takes that into consideration. Spoilers, no spoilers at the end. And... That's something that with story, we couldn't shy away from. And we didn't know for the longest time that it was going to be the seven, eight hour experience. We thought that it was going to be maybe four hours, I think for the longest time.
[00:17:30.198] Patrick Blenkarn: Seven episodes and four hours on a number of our applications, mostly because we thought we would be scaring off the funders.
[00:17:39.257] Milton Lim: but when we finally got into like, what's the full scope of the story we want to tell, that's where we were like, okay, this is starting to seem more like five hours, six hours. And then we started pushing it. And it wasn't that we wanted to have the longest show possible and to like scare people off or to make them like feel challenged. It truly was like, what kind of story do we want to tell and how long is it going to take for us to get there? And it happened to be a full work day, which felt really nice to us.
[00:18:04.443] Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, it was very serendipitous to arrive at the eight-hour workday. That's only if you make certain decisions, obviously, because it can be a little bit less, it can be a little bit longer, just like anybody's day on the job. And playing in the sphere of this question, this line between work and play was interesting to us. If you have to go and see an eight-hour film, feed or play the associations that people have with how much work that's going to be on their body on their system on their attention typically is enough to make a lot of people not want to do it this has different codes like there's different languages involved of understanding oh it's a video game okay so it doesn't feel like seven and a half eight hours that is what we hear all the time i mean it doesn't feel like that for us it doesn't feel like that for many many people who come to see it and they're very explicitly like it didn't feel like seven and a half hours you're like we know We told you it wouldn't. We told you you would like fall in love with these characters. And as we were building it, you know, we made sure that we were putting that level of attention in to the structure of how it's written so that it flies in a sense, right? Like we were very inspired by the kind of structures that we're seeing or we're seeing on HBO in terms of how our long episodes would end was particularly important. And yeah, what a cliffhanger was, what's the thing that needs to happen before an intermission so that people feel like they could go into the intermission and be like, oh my God, did you know, or did you see that coming? Or like, what do you think is going to happen next? All of those were techniques that when you grow up in the soup of TV and films, you kind of by osmosis start to adopt. We're not trained screenwriters. We're not trained TV writers, but we are very attentive and very specific artists. And so when it came to adopting principles from other things, including from video games, including from theater, we applied that rigor wherever we really could. And so when you get to the end of the 10 episodes, And the sort of, you know, the epilogue and the sort of final moments, there's a real big, like emotional release that everybody has, you know, they clap for each other as much as they clap for the game because they did it. And that feeling of like, we did it all together. Yeah. It's a beautiful, very palpable thing.
[00:20:21.485] Milton Lim: I do want to highlight that we explicitly called each of the chapters in our show episodes to reference the binge-watching culture that many of us have these days. Because we kept hearing in the early formats, oh, I could never do a theater show that long. But at the same time, many of those people would go home and have a full seven, sometimes eight-hour experience staying up all night just to watch the latest season of who knows what. And for us, we're like, well, we do have relationships with these lengths of narratives. So why don't we just borrow from that? So it feels at least conceptually a little bit more like it's in tune with things that people are used to. And we learned a lot as we went along when we were testing episode one over and over and over again for multiple years, then episode one to two, and then we trashed that version of number two, and then we went episodes one to four, and then we finished out the rest of the show. And one of the things we learned along the way was that Well, maybe this isn't a single hero's journey, but instead it's a herd. It's a whole herd of donkeys. And in doing so, we can invite the fact that there's many different perspectives in the room and each of our episodes of Asses Masses can focus on each of those perspectives and a different character along the way.
[00:21:30.162] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things that I found really interesting was the audience participation part where it's not explicit like voting or anything where there's any formalized way where you're taking the sentiment of different dialogue trees. You know, there's no like voting on your phone or anything. It's basically like... whoever yells the loudest. And then at the end of the day, it's whoever is at the front of the room at the controller driving the experience. It's up to their decision and they could decide to not even listen to any of the audience input or not, or they could listen to it and what were the loudest voices. There was an interview that I did with Casey Baltes, who is the curator of Tribeca Games. And I was asking her around branching narratives because, you know, when she plays any games for Tribeca Games, she will actually play through the entirety of the experience multiple times just to kind of understand the type of narrative structure. Because sometimes you don't know the narrative structure until you play it multiple times. So I always have the question of like, oh, when you're making these choices, what kind of branching is happening when you're making these choices? Are these choices having narrative consequence? And one of the things she told me was that sometimes when you're playing a game, it's not really about the branching narrative. It's more around what she calls branching character, where she says, quote, because there are some games where your choices are really meant to allow you to be closer to the moments and the characters or the character that you're playing or the character that you're affecting within the experience. And I think in asses masses, I really felt that the choices were like more of a reflection of the values of people or what they think might've been more interesting to declare a part of their identity for whatever I want to be associated with this choice rather than that choice. And so I'd love to hear some of your reflections on how you were creating a video game that had a performative element where you're making choices that would get this type of reaction from an audience, getting them all riled up and wanting to jump up and really speak out and shout one choice over the other. When really for the most part, a lot of those choices weren't really necessarily from as far as I could tell, sending you down any significant different narrative branches.
[00:23:33.976] Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, totally. Cool. We never, I don't think we actually have ever used the phrase branching character, but we would just say, you know, like Kentucky route zero. That was sort of the main reference that we used for getting to choose how you respond to another character and being able to say, well, I'm going to say hi instead of hello. Like really it's, do you feel informal today or do you feel more formal? And we used that to, We didn't use that in our first prototypes when we did a 20 minute version of this in Portland all those years ago. But it became a very consistent thing across the game. And it also then became an important thing for the dramaturgy of entering a character's perspective. So you might've noticed, but when a character changes in the middle of an episode, we have been very deliberate in always beginning that next character's track with a dialogue option of them responding to something because that both gives, I mean, it does also give the audience an opportunity to have their say about how this character is going to behave in their version of the story. Yeah. But it also helps them then adopt that perspective. It's both about creating something in the room, but also curating something on screen. And this constant dialogue between the two, as we say, it's as much about what's on screen as what's in the theater.
[00:24:53.597] Milton Lim: Maybe just to say it, we adopt that person's perspective by understanding their subtext. So looking at the dialogue options that seeing like someone, and I just played a little bit of Dragon Age. So like sometimes those decision points are super heavy handed. It's like, do you want to be a jerk or do you want to be super nice about it? But the thing we learned from Kentucky Route Zero that Patrick is talking about is maybe you can call something in like a nice way versus like, maybe more nuanced. And I think we were trying to find some of that nuance in like, well, do you call it the winds revolution or do you call it something else? And naming those things allows us to understand like, what are the options that the character is thinking of? And so not just their perspective, but also like what are the different versions that we are seeing through them?
[00:25:37.274] Patrick Blenkarn: Maybe it's less actually subtext and more, we could paint a much more complicated view of each character just by giving them all the things that might have been in their head at that moment. That's awesome. From a dramaturgical standpoint, because as an actor on stage, if you're a realist actor, you would need to make sure that each of those were sequentially clear to your audience. Oh, like, I think you're an asshole. Okay. Actually, I shouldn't say you're an asshole though. I should actually say good morning. Right? Like I, as a director of an actor, I'd be like, okay, first I need to understand that you're thinking this and then understand this other thing. But because of dialogue options, it's all there for us to see. We're like, oh, this character has all these types of opinions about something. They're all true until you pick the one that we're going to go with, but it doesn't devalue. The previous other now like foreclosed options. Yeah. So that was a really great discovery for us to just deepen character relationships and things like that in terms of branching. Yeah. There's a lot of these dialogue. I don't even think they merit the name of Lemon, but there's a dialogue option that invites a kind of added story into the room, right? They were like on a kind of agency if we want to use that term, but there's some kind of like extra thing that gets added into the room by having these types of choices. And then there are choices that happen that are kind of world historical, go left, go right kind of options. And then there's other ones where you don't know that you just made a world historical kind of choice. And we've masked it behind these very nuanced kind of, oh, well, like, what would you like? What do you think I should do? Like, oh, here's my opinions about these things. And they seem relatively benign, but that's the thing that actually leads a character down like a totally different path. And you have no idea because it doesn't happen until two hours later. And that is also a tactic that we used to try to. soften this idea of, I mean, Milton, you've often used the example of walking dead, right? Where it's like, I'm going to remember that. And they tell you that you've made this decision. We were like, actually, no, no, no. We want people to live in the present and always that's the goal, right? I mean, it's a live performance, live in the present, accept the choices that you make and just go like no regrets, right? Just keep going. live your best present life. Yeah. So we've tried many times to mask where there's a big shift that's going to happen based on a choice because we didn't want people to deliberate in that way. Now, does that mean that everyone thinks that every choice is as like world historical and they're kind of like, there's a great anxiety about, oh God, we can't say that because maybe this terrible thing will happen. Or did we cause this to happen because we failed to do something? Yeah. Some of that seems healthy and some of it feels like, you know, there's always maybe like another pass that someone could take on a story and be like, ah, I see. They always choose that option. And we thought that was nuanced. Like we genuinely thought that those two dialogue options, maybe they don't do anything, but they always choose the same one. Like, why do they do that? Maybe they seemed nuanced to us when we first wrote it, but actually there's another way of putting options on the table. I don't know. Milton, do you have thoughts about choice?
[00:28:44.670] Milton Lim: Yeah, I would just think that over and over again in Asses Masses, we are seeing that audience members enfold their whole experience to how they want to be. And to your point, Kent, like sometimes in the show, we don't see people yelling as much as we see people raising hands. Sometimes people make their own voting systems, especially in the episode later on that you see that there are these mini games and people need to decide how they're going to do these group exercises together. That's where we really see different kind of things emerge that we haven't really presupposed. In one show, the audience ran onto stage to show like, this is where this is. And we've never seen audiences storm the stage before. And so, yes, many of the shows do include audiences that yell and say like, who's the loudest voice? But that's one way in which decisions are made. Other ones are made by like, okay, who hasn't spoken enough yet? And then the audience listens to that person or who has the right answer in the room. And so just in case for anyone listening, it's not just the loudest voice in the room, but it's also like, how does an audience want to negotiate who is listened to at what point and who makes what decisions? And do we make it collectively or is it delegated to someone else?
[00:29:52.045] Kent Bye: Yeah, from my experience, at least in the showing and screening in Portland at the Portland Art Museum's Center for an Untold Tomorrow, was that there was a certain amount of delegation where we were kind of like leaving it up to the person to make the final choice. But sometimes if they would not be listening to the will of the audience, then there would be some revolts or people screaming for people to sit down. They kind of lost their tolerance if they weren't being listened to. I listened to a previous interview that you did, and it's very interesting to hear how you were talking around. There's these flows of power that are happening in the audience and how you see it as this kind of social acupuncture of, you know, from each city that you're showing this, you get a little bit of a reflection of the culture through how the audience is reacting to your piece. And so I'm curious to hear some of your reflections on that, especially in Portland or anywhere else, you know, but just in particular, what you noticed around the Portland audience that I happened to watch it.
[00:30:48.131] Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, that's a good question. We can have like sort of a general comment maybe to start about the United States because Portland is the second place that it's been in the United States. And we were at Ann Arbor, Michigan. I mean, like both of which are pretty like bastions of liberal democracy and things within the greater landscape of the United States. But at the same time, we've seen like certain little choices around like... I think no one has ever entertained, including small businesses in the final manifesto, except in the United States, which is like totally irrelevant. But both of us were in the booth and we were like, wow, like that's wild. Normally people just write that off as like, whoa, whoa, whoa. If we have like a manifesto that is about to like, you know, make our lives better like we're really going to march through the streets with we need to support donkeys having small businesses i mean it didn't make it to the final version but it was on the draft it was on the drafting table um no but portland had like some interesting negotiations for sure there was like a lot of organization in a way that happened there was a self-organizing that happened about making sure that people who wanted to play could play That happens. If you're listening to this and you're like, hey, that's a great idea. I'm going to go and see Asus Master and do that. Cool. I mean, that's where you got. Now we just, you know, that's where you got the idea. Sometimes that doesn't happen, right? Sometimes it is very organic and people will go like, you know, I really wanted to play, but I didn't put myself out there or I didn't raise my voice in some way. And it doesn't have to be, I didn't yell, but I didn't. you know, find a way other people in some cultures and communities and spaces are sort of far more weirdly sneaky about it. Like during intermission, someone will lurk by the controller as though they've kind of like staked their territory of like, I'm going to be the next player. Again, if you want to do that and you're listening to this podcast, like, cool. I mean, that's how you're going to do it. I guess in what I'm saying right now, you can kind of hear that. Like we tend not to like to share all the ways that people have, um, inhabited the space because it's always different depending on who's in the room. We do genuinely hope that people support each other, that the loudest voice in the room is because they're laughing the loudest or it's not that they're dominating over the dialogue or the person who has the controller. I hear you loudest person, but I understand there's 100 other people in this room. Yeah. General observations about other places like we could go into, but largely sameness, not to be like kind of a womp womp that we're all the same, but as as masses is really, as no one was saying, like a lot of choices are made similarly and it's teaching us something about like kind of a global culture moment, but also who goes to these types of things, who's aware of theater festivals and or like art experiences. And generally those people aren't assholes.
[00:33:31.854] Kent Bye: Well, I will say, I will say in, uh, in Portland, there was someone who is, I think he had a background in theater and type of gamer type of mindset. It'd be like, let's experiment to see what happens because the intermission title screen is pretty vague. It's basically like push X to continue, or, you know, the way that you phrase it, it was ambiguous because it's left to the audience to negotiate how long you want to have your intermissions. Yeah. And so someone just started playing before everybody was back and he was refusing to listen to people. He just was like speed running through stuff. And I was like, what are you doing? Like, this is a seven hour, eight hour narrative. And you're just rushing through when people aren't even back. And so I asked him as he was walking, I was like, why, what are you doing? And he's like, Oh, this is a theatrical performance performance. this is theater. I was a part of the performance. And basically what happened was that the whole audience like revolted and basically voted him out. And so it was certainly a moment where in hindsight, it was like, okay, I did get very triggered and emotional in that. I guess I was- Absolutely, absolutely. Embedded into the theater of that moment. But it was also like, come on, we're watching a shared narrative experience with a couple hundred people here. You're just going to start to do that? What's the thinking there? So anyway, that was a moment that really got me embedded into the story, which is also about revolution and revolt and protest. And so it felt like an opportunity for the audience to embody some of those principles. Yeah.
[00:35:02.605] Milton Lim: Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit because this audience member was talking to me before and after the experience. It's all your fault. I think to be honest, he was checking to see like, do people ever take control of the controller and not listen? And he was asking, and I thought we were just chatting about the show, but I think in retrospect, like he was wondering because just as a theater maker as well, wanted to know what are the boundaries and what are the walls that I can touch here? And so very clearly went up. The exact quote was, we're turning heel. and was chanting like we're turning heel everyone we're turning heel and most of the audience you're right like 90 of the audience was still outside of the room eating and enjoying their intermission and then as the trickle in started happening as people were like what someone started the game without us that's where someone from the audience had equally raised their voice and said you've lost your controller privileges which was amusing to us super parent style like super
[00:36:00.251] Patrick Blenkarn: Like real throwback to like being a kid being like, you're playing Grand Theft Auto 3 way too long. Like you've lost your privilege. Just go to bed.
[00:36:06.400] Milton Lim: So it was really funny to us, but we were watching because we haven't really had that kind of altercation to that level before. So Portland was the first and not that we're ever looking for those things, but the way that it erupted and like we saw some fists being balled up and we're like, okay, well, we're watching this very closely. Obviously nothing happened. And like everyone was quite smooth about asking the audience to say like, should I sit down or should I continue playing? And then the person afterwards, after being voted off, came back up to me and said, is that what you wanted? And my response was, no, not really. But very clearly, the person stayed at the back of the audience afterwards for most of the show, I believe. And that was a moment where the whole audience came together under a unified enemy. towards like, oh, we're not going to be jerks and the display of camaraderie at the end, which like who hasn't played yet and who would like to play. And if you do want to just come sit in this row and then we'll make sure that everyone who wants to play will get a chance. I think arose out of a response to a kind of like there has been a jerk in the room. Now, how can we be kind? And that was something really interesting to witness in Portland.
[00:37:14.815] Patrick Blenkarn: I think, I mean, we should say a lot of times, many times, grammar, the game has started before everyone's back in the room. And the decision to have the intermissions be of no fixed length, press X whenever, is really to do a very simple thing, which is, okay, this is all about taking care of the group. You've just played two episodes about taking care of the group. And now can you actually do it? at the level of, will you share, like, will you be the person who finishes all of the M&Ms or would you leave some for someone else? It's like very basic social shit, but time and again, time and again, that doesn't always, you know, dawn on people, whether it's because there's a transaction that takes place, they paid money. This is my experience. I get to have it the way I want, or I don't know. There's other ways of, you know, this particular character was very, you know, embraced a kind of performative relationship to the piece itself. But many times it's much less dramatic. People will actually just start it and not say anything and no one would like challenge them. And then people come back in and you see, they look sad. Cause you're like, and that person with the controller, sometimes they also look sad. Like they, they know they did a bad thing. They started it without people and people are sad and they're sad. And they're like, oh, and then they pause because there's this like kind of emotional ping pong that just happened. And they realized like, yeah, maybe that wasn't, Maybe that's not a good way to raise the morale, which again, was what you just did in the game a mere 30 minutes earlier. So yeah, we had some interesting moments in London just the other weekend where someone got up and said, like, it was like towards the end of the game and they started to speak, kind of doing the same thing. They're like, people have got, I think some people have kids they need to get home to. And I was like, you definitely don't have kids that you got to get home to. Like, you are totally making this up. And you're just trying to, and then people were also like, yo, stop. And then they stopped. So, you know, it happens. Like people try to like engineer their own. experience inside of something much bigger than them. And if that's, you know, in so many ways, as is masses is interesting as an artwork because it creates a platform, but it doesn't create the outcome necessarily, but it really gives you as much foundation. And so to say, I mean, there's a value judgment here, I guess that I could say, but like, it really gives you the opportunity to explore another way of taking care of each other and being on a journey as a group in a kind of a social collective experience. Yeah. You have everything that you need to do it one way, but some people will decide that they don't want to do it that way. And then it's about how the collective navigates that, which as we imagine alternative forms to the political scenario that we find ourselves in is pretty much what we're all going to be doing for the rest of our lives.
[00:40:03.453] Kent Bye: Yeah. And there seemed to be reaction to people that were during the intermission guarding the controller and trying to have more communication around the process. There's a transgression that catalyzed more organization of people. But as we're talking about all this, I did want to bring up a quote from Sister Sylvester in an interview that I did with her in her piece called Drinking Brecht that was at IFA Doc Lab. And she was talking around how Bertel Brecht was trying to get people to be politically engaged above and beyond what was happening in the theater. Rather than the Aristotelian mode of going in and contorting your emotions with some symbolic representation of the characters, where you would go in and process all your emotions and then leave and then basically not change anything. Brecht was trying to embody more of that political action to get people to be more involved. And my experience of the asses masses, I felt like it was a little bit of this blend between like some parts Aristotelian, like I'm seeing a drama and a catharsis that's happening that's in these symbolic characters, but then we're also like shouting out in these symbolic ways, but we're not actually like starting a revolution, although we did actually have to kind of revolt and organize in some ways. And so I felt like in this experience, it would kind of go back and forth on the spectrum between this embodied action in trying to form a manifesto as an example and have some sort of delivered process for what are the values that we have collectively. But there's also quite a lot of narrative story elements that over the course of the seven or eight hours, you know, it's nice to just kind of take more of that passive role and kind of receive the story as it's being transmitted, as people are also playing through this open world game. So it felt like a Twitch stream where you're watching somebody, but it's all live and have a democratic participation. So let me hear some of your reflections on this spectrum between the more Aristotelian modes of catharsis and the more Brechtian modes of embodied engagement and political action.
[00:42:03.745] Patrick Blenkarn: Absolutely. Yeah, it's great. I mean, I don't think we've ever got to talk about Brecht on a podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What was the name of the person who brought this up in your other? Sister Sylvester. Sister Sylvester. Well, cool. Thanks to you if you hear this. Where do you want to start, Milne? I guess one of the things that I would say first is that Brecht failed. The general consensus is that Brechtian alienation is pretty suspect. We can use it as a kind of... Not necessarily a straw man, but a... As an extreme, as a reference guide, you know, what if this is possible? And Aristotle on the other end of like, what if you could have full catharsis? What if you could have full alienation? And just because, you know, maybe people are going to listen to this and be like, hey, Mai Lan Fong and like Brecht's sort of whole genesis of the alienation effect largely came from watching something that he had no fucking clue what was going on. So like he watched Chinese performance and was like, ah, I feel alienated. And you're like, well, yeah, because you don't know anything about the tradition and you don't speak the language. I'm like, come on, man. But all to say the literarization of theater is a big component of Brecht's practice. You know, literally putting text on stage, often hung on these like big screens and or drapes and things. And as his masses with its tech box on stage, you know, there's no vocal acting in the piece whatsoever. I think there's a lot that has been in the project from the very beginning that we were aware of in terms of relationship with Brecht's politics and aesthetics. Even one of the donkeys we used to have in the pitched second act was an homage to mother courage so you know the fact i mean no spoilers so there is like an element of mother courage that lives on with the way that the narrative unfolds and so you know if we say that brecht is a that extreme is a failure well great then we're living very much in that like yes there's this oscillation and milton maybe you want to talk about this like shifting modes of perception or spectatorship now, because when we think about what Brecht wanted from his audience, and we think about a 21st century, you know, mildly addicted and distracted audience, an attention exploited audience, we're working with various forms of alienation that are just now de facto in our experiences in attending anything, it seems, right? So I don't know where you want to go with Brecht.
[00:44:28.891] Milton Lim: Yeah, with Brecht, but also just talking about theatrical representation and thinking about what's the landscape of video games. And when I thought about this, I was like, well, a lot of video games are also representational. Like I am not actually wielding a sword and bashing it around and hurting goblins and taking gold from an urn or like whatever else. But the strength that we wanted to borrow from theater is in its double nature of it's both representational, but there is still a kiss actually happening on stage. For example, like, oh, you're seeing two characters fall in love, but there's still a kiss happening. And that kiss is both literal and it's also in the story. And I think it's beautifully said, the idea that it's oscillating between both and this idea that on the screen, there is the narrative happening and it is sucking us in. And it is what a lot of video games do, which is allows us to go fully into it without critiquing its outer formats. as much as it's also like but what's actually happening on the screen is happening in the room and so all those characters have voices and they're saying certain things and while they're saying it on the screen some people are also saying those things and embodying those perspectives in the room and that was important to us to be able to hopefully oscillate and recognize like there is an emotional narrative and an arc that we want to take people on and that's also going to be enfolded into our experience socially of what's happening in the room or intermissions as we talk to each other, as strangers become friends. And as we continue doing the show, we're actually seeing that more and more, which is that people have had parts of themselves seen that haven't been seen before. Quiet people in the room actually get heard. Or people go away and think like, why didn't we listen to the quiet people? Why did I enforce that the person in the controller had to be the person making all the decisions? How is that my relationship to kind of like larger political systems? Am I done my citizenship once I, my political acts are done once I voted? Like, is that enough? Or do I have to continue being an active politicized agent in the world? And so I think that's tribute to the fact that we have a pretty strong epic that happens on the screen, as much as we also have a pretty strong dramaturgy of what happens socially in the room. And so that is in some ways returning a little bit back to that oscillation between Aristotle and then Brecht, that like we suck people in into the narrative, but also the narrative, you can read what's happening outside of that, whether or not it's immediately or it's weeks later, we've talked to friends and other people have seen the show and and they can start to see the outer workings of also what's happening outside of just what's on the screen.
[00:47:00.694] Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, it seems like because of what we said, what I was saying at the beginning around the facticity of what's going on, the eventness of the theatrical experience, right? Like we are here, we're doing this thing in so many ways because of the nature of the video game and needing to kind of push our way forward by pressing X and like moving and finding things. We never lose that. We worked really hard to create characters in an epic that, as Milton was saying, we could really go into. Because I think it's kind of impossible to lose a certain amount of that alienation to the event because the event depends on someone, possibly you, maybe the person next to you. going up there and like moving us forward and all this kind of you know i guess new studies in agency and avatar kind of like am i you know we've talked about this too in other contexts of like when i play am i the character or do i see a distance between the character and myself so there's these kind of inherent questions of i identify 100 like i am that character Until something happens and then all of a sudden there's a break and then I can go back into it and being a little bit less 20th century extremist on like you're either on the Brecht side or you're either on the cathartic Aristotelian side and say, look, we're always moving through like different modalities of power. and relationships and to be a bit more post-structural about it of like, there's these kind of like coming together of these moments where, yeah, we have like an explosion of emotion and then At the same time, the lights are always on. You can't get lost in the room or in the screen, let's say, because the lights are always on. And that's a very conscious choice that we've made to make sure that you never forget about the people that you're doing this with. So the way it's been calculated right now is towards a certain goal of... I wouldn't even necessarily say it's a balance, but it is this kind of oscillation or this flip-flopping or this turn-taking even between emotion and... critique.
[00:49:06.560] Milton Lim: And we're excited because we also do that in the narrative as well. There are moments where like we start off, our first character is like an unspeaking avatar where you kind of place yourself onto this donkey and everyone's like, oh yeah, that is us. And it's very nice to have that as kind of like a first connection with a character. And that's in the video game landscape, very usual. It's like, oh yeah, I'm just going to graft all of my desires, all of my values onto this character. We're going to be virtuous. We're going to be amazing people. We're going to do all the good things, especially in a social environment. But then on the same coin, especially later in the show, there are moments where the character has different dialogue options and they are not the ones that hold the same values in the same room. And they are really heartbreaking. And that's I think you really see it in the audience when everyone's like, that's not what we want to say. That's not what we want to choose. That's not how we would act. And we talked a lot about The Last of Us as a great example, which I know has the TV series right now. But looking especially at the video game and when someone is playing and you have this narrative turn of like, that's not how I imagined. That's not my version of Joel. Like, that's a very heartbreaking thing to come across dramaturgically in the narrative. But also, I think that's moments where everyone turns away from the screen for a second and looks at their comrades side by side. And they're like, oh, that sucks. Like, why would they do this to us? And so that distancing is a great kind of narrative reflection as well to strengthen what's happening inside the room. Yeah, I know why they did this to us, but I still don't like it.
[00:50:35.317] Patrick Blenkarn: And if that's not like, if that's the kind of like the Brechtian ideal in some ways of like, I know why this is happening. Like I see the dynamic, I see the politic, I see the aesthetic, like I see all of it being clear, but I'm still emotionally fucked up by it. And I think so many of Brecht's plays are great like that. Like that is like, you do feel like you do see this dichotomies and these dialectics on stage between people. especially critiques of capitalism on one side of the stage and then sort of like, you know, the impacts of war on the other and something like mother courage. And yet you still feel for the people. And in some ways, you know, I think, yeah, I'm highly pro as we are very conceptual artists who use our brains and we love ideas and, but also, you know, we have feelings too. Yeah. And we love characters that like, I would say this is like in terms of the cathartic capacities of asses masses, it's a real shift even for us in our respective practices. You know, we didn't write these kinds of stories before, but in looking at what we wanted to do to theater history and theater as like an institution and live performance, we realized that we had to use a certain kind of story in that place. As Milton was saying, we moved from a kind of documentarian approach to, um, an epic RPG approach. Again, we're really trying to listen to the material of what can video games do in this place? A lot of people thought we would be like playing Tetris for five hours or something. And we're like, no, that's not what we're doing. Like these games have equal kind of right to a history of drama, right? Whether or not you recognize it or not, like we've got characters, we've got drama, we've got conflict, we've got all of these things and they should, you know, seed the stage. We can see the stage every once in a while to something like this.
[00:52:23.496] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, I did want to talk a bit about the narrative at like a high level, not like specific beat by beat. No spoilers. I will say that the story did stay with me walking away from the theater. Yes. It's worth just kind of describing the scene because we essentially have a bunch of Marxist socialist donkeys that I think there's a really nice metaphor for how right now we have the threats of artificial intelligence potentially displacing all sorts of labor. And so And in a previous podcast, I heard you go into a little bit of how donkeys and asses have both represented the working class in some ways, but also used as an insult for people to denigrate someone's intelligence or just the kind of classist way of putting people on a scale of like, they're only worth as much of a donkey or an ass or someone who's on more of a working class scale. So by putting these donkeys as the protagonist, it's in some ways putting the workers at the forefront of all of labor. But in particular, it's in this contrived fantasy world where these donkeys are not only socialist Marxists, but are wanting to actually catalyze some revolution and have a protest and bring about some change and try to actually go back to a time when donkeys were really valued. ahead of when everything was automated. So I think at a high level, that's kind of like the thrust of the story and it's a real vast kind of ensemble cast. You go into like etheric realms of reincarnation and other kind of metaphoric realms of like afterlife from what is the real world and the afterlife and this dialectic between those two worlds is something that you use to great effect to kind of explore what it means to have these two different realities, more idealized reality versus the more harsh reality of what's happening in the world today. So I'd love to hear you just kind of elaborate on the process of generating the story.
[00:54:18.596] Patrick Blenkarn: That's a great summary, by the way. And we should say just for anyone who's a fan of wordplay, asses masses is full of wordplay. And so that ethereal afterlife that Kent is referring to is called the astral plane, which asses cross to be reassigned and to have their ass souls reassigned into the bodies of other asses. Yeah. So just to, you know, point of clarification on, you know, getting the terminology correct. And to say that the show is fun.
[00:54:47.913] Milton Lim: We're having a good time.
[00:54:50.433] Kent Bye: It goes, what I really enjoyed was that it would constantly kind of pervert my expectations because it would start to go in completely other directions because it feels so like grounded and what's happening in our world today and reflecting that. But it also goes in this kind of more. idealistic fantasy kind of exploration realms that, that has this tension between like, what does it mean to be alive as we're working? Why are we working? And it also kind of introduces some really interesting like narrative structure, but I think allows you to really explore these different characters through their lives and through this whole journey that you're going on for like seven to eight or maybe even nine hours, depending on how long people play it.
[00:55:27.513] Patrick Blenkarn: But yeah,
[00:55:28.582] Kent Bye: Love to hear a little bit more of the genesis of, you know, why are they Marxist socialists and, and just kind of a larger story that you really want to dig into.
[00:55:36.568] Patrick Blenkarn: So in the very first 20 minutes, there was a book of like the communist manifesto, like on the farm, but we took that out. And we should say a lot of those ideas are inherited by one donkey whose name is Old Ass. And Old Ass has convinced everybody of what they got to do in order to get their jobs back. And the very first version, the 20-minute version, and its very, very first prototype at Risk Reward many, many years ago now, they were actually protesting for their better job conditions in a more classical sense of, what do donkeys need? They need better working conditions. They hadn't actually lost their jobs in the same way. But there's a kind of political ambiguity that you have already kind of touched on, which is when you have these ostensibly socialist, you know, Marxist socialist donkeys calling each other comrade, old ass comrade, trusty ass, and so on. wanting to go back to the way things were. There's like, you know, leftist sympathies go so far until it's all of a sudden, it feels like we kind of reach around to the other side of the political spectrum. And all of a sudden it feels very, very conservative. of, wait, wait, wait, so we don't want any machines? We don't want any progress, quote unquote, in that way? What actually is the ideal that they have? They use all of these high rhetoric around equality and justice and so on and so on. But the goal, if you really think about what their goal is, maybe not everyone in the room is so interested in that. And that becomes, as you say, that's the fallout of that initial thrust of, well, hold on a second. And that we'll hold on a second is obviously something that is paralyzing a certain leftist politics in the world right now, because we keep holding on a second and another second and another second to try to figure out how to accommodate all of the views that the left has. And, and again, people got to make decisions in the room in real time in this show. So we, maybe I'll just say, and then pass it to you, Milton, that the way we went about writing it was that we were really, especially in the beginning, we were writing from a, like a form first. We knew we wanted to use Pokemon-esque aesthetics, but They were accessible. There's a thematic connection there, which is fun, and labor connections around making Pokemon work for you, fighting each other and such. There was some interesting starting points around games with animals like that. And so pixel art and then 3D as well, there was an interest in us just trying to figure out how to use as much of what the video game language allows us to do. And we started to explore, well, okay, you know, how do we subvert this idea that the hyper real is actually the like mythological and the pixel art, which is the less real is actually reality or the material world. Like we started to play with these different polarities and gradually as we worked on it, like the story started to emerge from if we made a game that was like a racing game, where would it happen? And why is it important to happen now? No, let's move it to episode four. If we were going to have... a game like this, where would it happen? We started to use essentially the way that we devised performance in yesteryear on stage with physical bodies and stuff where people bring in different materials and you've got different ideas and you look at, well, what story can we tell with all of these materials? There was definitely a lot of that at the beginning, which, you know, it's like prototyping. You're like, oh, okay, cool. We can do 3D. Well, why would we go? Why would it be 3D now? What story does that tell? And gradually the story kind of evolves through just what's in the room.
[00:59:18.769] Milton Lim: I think one great thing that comes out is having a cast of characters at the beginning was that we started off with what felt like archetypes or just like playing a joke. Like there's nice ass who has really nice toned legs who can run and plow really fast. And then you have thirsty ass who wants to run a bar and like loves water. And then you also have big ass who likes to eat all the time. But because we have such a length of time, it just meant that actually we could sit with those characters for a lot longer. And something in the writing process, and we should also give a shout out to Laurel Green, who's our dramaturg, co-writer, and touring manager now of Asses Masses, who was in the writer's room with us, especially towards the end, just helping us and really asking us like, what is your ending? Because for the longest time, we didn't have one. Our writing process was also at a certain point, like who's available? based on the conditions of, we had, as Patrick was saying, different forms that we wanted to borrow from in different video games. And we're like, okay, who's the best fit for this? And also, where are they in the narrative? And also, do they need to be there? And how did they get there? And there was a lot of kind of like, okay, well, this person is with this group over here. This person's over here. And there were a couple of really big decision points of like, okay, well, who's going to become this important character? Is it really going to be this donkey that we have? Are we really going to do that? Well, actually, maybe that makes a lot of sense because they have been well loved by all these people. They're being missed by all these other donkeys. And maybe they are the right kind of person to in the room full of people who like the unexpected player steps up. And we kind of love that idea of like, how do we foreground again, the things that are happening in the room so that we can be narratively interesting to suggest that it's not always going to be the people you expect.
[01:01:08.387] Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah. And those changes of game forms that we're talking about, we were very conscious from early on that the more times we change the type of game, the more likely the player is going to change. So we were very, very conscious of creating these moments of like a breath of like, oh, something's changed. maybe me as player should change now too, actually. It seems like a natural shift. And in some episodes, there's multiple of those and some of them there's fewer. But by and large, the way we approached these scene changes and aesthetic shifts was with the idea that these might be natural breaks for people to see themselves in you know, abdicating and, and we're taking a, making a shift. And yeah, that was also something that was planned to some degree in terms of even just like, yeah, generally like shifting character perspectives as well. When the donkeys shift, you're like, oh yeah, cool. I'm no longer playing the donkey. I was just playing. I shouldn't be playing this other donkey. That's clearly someone else because you've like imprinted yourself. You're like, I am nice ass. So now nice ass isn't doing it. Oh, great. I got to go. Like that's my time.
[01:02:19.133] Milton Lim: Yeah. Also for anyone who's seen the show multiple times, my partner just saw it twice in London and it was just picking up like things were there from the beginning, which is very nice to hear because certainly in the writer's room, it was not there from the beginning. When we look back, because in truth, like there were things that we said, like who's available, who can become that character or who has the necessary backstory that's going to allow what we want to happen in the narrative to unfold. Then we started to go backwards. And that was the great thing, because if we were in like a TV writer room, the TV episodes already been released, we can't go back anymore and like retract anything that we had said, it would be a very different story. But because we are constantly going back to the show and seeing like, how do we tune up a line to make it more sense, make it allow it to make more sense, or to have the kind of impact that we wanted to have. then we can actually do that. And there have been many refinements that we've made over the years of making the game. And a lot of that writer's room, once we made some big decisions, we went back and made sure that all those things for that character made sense so that those decisions that they make later on are founded somewhere.
[01:03:28.453] Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah. Yeah. And which is a real game changer of like, this character needs to say this word every single time they speak. Because in episode nine, Like, it's going to be the pivotal thing that, you know, almost, we talked a lot about Arrested Development and the success of it being able to hide that kind of stuff from the get-go. And we knew we were operating within a dramatic context, not as much, I mean, it's comedic as well, but some of these decisions, they were largely more about dramatic kind of character building things that you would associate. Yes, this character loves the gods. Okay, great. The gods, the gods, the gods. It's always about the gods. And then plot ensues. maybe some gods appear. And, you know, there's something that we were able to seed in from the very beginning, but that wasn't there until, you know, 2024. And it had already premiered. And we realized, ah, we're missing, this character is missing these vocal, I mean, I'm not going to say vocal tics, but like, We really tried to make sure, because it's all written and you only get to read it once, everybody's text needs to be very clear, not inverted sentences, and also have something that feels like you hear their voice every single time you see their line. No surprise, but if anybody listening to this gets to see Big Ass' text again, there is something related to size in literally every line that he has almost. But his whole thing is that he doesn't feel like he fits in. And so his pursuit is he wants to make an impact. Eventually, he wants to find a place where he belongs and where he can make an impact. Yeah, so we sort of scaffold that all the way through in his text as an example.
[01:05:07.469] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I have my wife that points to a quote from David Simon talking about The Wire, where The Wire is kind of like Greek tragedy, where it's telling the story of a system and a structure in a lot of ways, where it's using an ensemble cast, but a lot of times the fates of the situations are essentially beyond the control of any individual character. And So in some sense, asses masses, the main antagonist in some ways is this structure of capitalism itself. That is something that is way beyond their agency to really have much impact on that as an issue. And Patrick, you had mentioned Mark Fisher as a partial reference or inspiration. And I looked up and watched a video on his book about capital realism.
[01:05:53.753] Milton Lim: Is there a note?
[01:05:54.873] Kent Bye: One of the things I got from what he was saying was that in 1989, when there was like the fall of the Soviet Union, it was almost like capitalism no longer had a dialectical opponent. Everything becomes like this total business ontology, economic monism, where there's no real alternative to capitalism that's on the world scale. Maybe China to some extent, but China also has kind of adopted capitalism and they kind of have this weird hybrid where capitalism maybe they do capitalism better than the United States now. And maybe there's this shift into, we're moving from like the capitalism run by law and now capitalism run by more mafia style, fascist organizations. So that's maybe a new phase that we're entering into. But when I think around this opposition between like capitalism and some alternative where there really isn't a viable alternative where it has kind of subsumed all of reality. In some ways, in Asses and Masses, you've managed to create this tension because you're dealing with the afterlife, the astral realm, the way that is more in this kind of idealized realm that goes above and beyond the limits and constraints of physicality and materiality. So you do have that opposition, but it's not necessarily like a viable opposition that we are going to have any sort of that... idealism that we have.
[01:07:15.108] Patrick Blenkarn: That's one of the main problems is that the astral plane, it's just nice to stay. It's supposed to be like a path as a place of transformation or your transition, but people are like, actually, it's a lot nicer here than it is where we just came from. Yeah. I mean, I think I didn't read Mark Fisher before we made this show. He wasn't someone, I mean, he was writing a lot of this stuff kind of around the same time that we were like, you know, in his own practice. But when I read that book not that long ago, I was like, ah, man, this is exactly what one of the things that we probably would have been like really excited about when we had started it because, or at least given us certain language around the decisions we make in the end and the the way that one of the things that he talks about is like the problem of representing alternatives to capitalism, that we have all these movies that America pumps out of like where capitalism gets taken down, but there's no replacement. And so even at the end of the day, the capitalist realist imagination is still trapped within the idea that sure, it's not a good system, but I can't literally imagine another way of being with people. Um, and the relationship I have with other people. And to go back to this thing of like what happens on screen and what happens in the room is, Again, there are other ways of being with people that are not through a kind of like capitalist exploitation. There are many, like it's, you know, generosity, all kinds of versions have been tried, mutual aid, yada, yada, yada, yada. It's just about being able to put them into practice. And again, asses masses is not like, it does not engineer these other realities, but it really gives a platform for us to discover them. And I think Milton, if we had, you know, we could talk, we don't actually, we haven't talked that much about this, but there's a way that we have faith. in people to find that other reality. If we give them the right platform to find another way of valuing the other person and time and, you know, joy through other means, it's just about, you know, giving people a context to explore that in, in a way, because it has to be a collective, it's a collectively found new imagination, right. Of, of a present. And yeah so that that is one of the things that i feel like i i still am very excited about of being and i also see it now everywhere like if you're listening to this and you don't know mark fisher's kind of stuff every time you see a movie now that it ends with like the capitalist system being torn down and no replacement is put in place and it's if there is a replacement it's a dystopic replacement and everybody's just kind of sad still or dirty you're like yes it's a trope and it does not need to be any thoughts on that milton
[01:10:01.044] Milton Lim: Yeah, I think one thing that we say, maybe just to support Patrick's statements as well, is that we like to imagine that Asses Masses can be a rehearsal of, sure, the protests, sure, the revolution, but also just exercising some of those muscles of imagination, of social imagination, of how else could we be inside this space? And for the longest time, it was like, how do we want to occupy space in the theatrical format, but also how do we want to occupy space as social citizens? And something that we talked about a long time ago, Patrick, was like Jesse Schell's ideas of who's a game developer talking about different verbs that we use inside of different formats and different media. And so he would talk about in a lot of video games, it's a lot of the neck down verbs and it's like kicking, you run, you do all these things. But then all those head verbs, all those things like do you negotiate, do you care for and like do it like all those things that are less action based. don't exist very well in video games. They exist well inside the theater format, and that's something that Jesse Schell comes back to and saying like, well, how do we make sure that games can be seen as an art form? Because it's not doing all these verbs yet and not doing them particularly well. And I like to think that Asses Masses, we did think about that a lot in the kind of social dramaturgy. And it was important to us that this space that we've cultivated could be one where we exercise some of those muscles and So that we can actually train, as Patrick is saying, in the intermissions where we can look at how we imagine sharing food might look differently. Now we can take that ahead. And it's not just this is only the show, but also next time we see food in society and we look to another person that we don't delegate that just to the leader or whoever has the controller or to the state or to X, Y, Z. But it's also, oh, it could be me that steps into the role now. And I think that just to come back to some of the general ideas behind the show of how can we transform the landscape of our understanding of leadership and revolution, it's also in the small and big ways.
[01:12:02.620] Patrick Blenkarn: And that's actually very tied to what you said earlier at the beginning of this conversation around like the doubling that is theater, right? It both is the thing and representation of the thing. And so, yes, it's a rehearsal in the sense of like, it's not the real thing yet but it's also entirely the real thing like you are both rehearsing what you will do later as well as doing a very very real act of relating and social collective building at the same time as preparing for maybe you know whatever is going to happen next
[01:12:35.083] Kent Bye: I have a brief little anecdote around tracing the VR industry for the last 11 years. One of the very first VR experiences that started to integrate the IBM Watson natural language input where people could start to speak, then you have the capability to have speaking as a part of the gameplay mechanic. And so the Starship Commander video game was you're in a spaceship and there's an opportunity for you to go head to head against another spaceship. spaceship. And my immediate reaction when I was playing was like, fire, fire. And that's the immediate reaction. But then the whole idea was to start to explore diplomacy as a new gameplay mechanic. And then tragically, as time went on, in order to actually reformat this experience for location-based entertainment, it turned out that people just wanted to shoot things. And so... It was like they had to revert back to those normal verbs that people expected because of the genres that we have. You can't get too experimental because how do you start to really actually use diplomacy as a gameplay mechanic? So even in NASA's masses, I would say that there are these dialogues that you're making, but there isn't a part of that diplomatic dialogue. aspect that is a part of the actual gameplay it's more of the meta gameplay that's happening as a social experience that is kind of like orthogonal to the gameplay so i think as we move forward it'll be interesting to see how we start to integrate more of those different things into the actual experiences whether it's through immersive theater whether it's through ai agents or I think we're going to be entering into a phase where with natural language processing, we're going to have new possibilities to not just be from the neck down, but start to go from the neck up and start to explore what that means. And I can definitely see how AssesMasses is starting to do that, but I feel like there's a lot more potentiality for where this is going to go in the future.
[01:14:20.873] Patrick Blenkarn: Especially inside of a game context itself, right? Norton, did you want to say something?
[01:14:25.492] Milton Lim: Yeah, I just want to say that the video that I was talking about with Jesse Schell is from 2013. It's from his game developers talk about the future of storytelling. I highly recommend if anyone wants to watch it. And it talks about all these things. But just to quickly say, so many video games automate things that would otherwise have been in a tabletop role playing game. so much more taxing on the players. I'd have to roll the die, I'd have to take down all the numbers, I'd have to run the calculations, compare it against my stats, and then I'd decide, how does the story want to unfold? A video game will do all those things for you. And in the narrative of what we have conceptually happening inside of Asus Masses, where the performer has been replaced by automated technology, and this came a Unity video game that we made, We do actively, and this is something that theater is really good at, we slow down time to be able to analyze what that is. And in doing so, we also put the work back into the hands of the audience. And we do that as game designers. There's no save system. There's no mini map system. We actually have to rely on each other again and again and turn to each other for aid and support. And that is part of what I think to come back to Jesse Schell's idea in that video is that through natural language processing, through AI, we're going to have characters that can help automate the storytelling process for us. And that's the future of like where storytelling going. That's why he went to VR as his company has. And for us to actually say, well, in the analog version, it's that we still talk to one another and that we perform like what otherwise could be relegated to AI. Like, oh, AI will just make the story for us. But to say it another way, AssesMasses is doing that socially with many people doing the work of what one computer would do.
[01:16:04.367] Patrick Blenkarn: And that's where, you know, I think the choices, it's always about the choices that you make in our work, right? And that seems to be the theme, like par excellence for people who are early adopters of AI into more thematized roles within their projects, right? Like, okay, but why did you choose that? component to be that way and and i think one just listen to you i didn't know that story about people wanting to they wanted people to deliberate but everybody just wanted to shoot classic uh but you know that is what i've learned through the process of making this is trying to understand well why did they give them those two options why did they think that that was meaningful as a choice and trying to understand, especially in the work that we've done, we're very, for lack of better terms, like conceptual purists. The video game has one controller. It is on stage or the controller is on stage, the game is on screen. There's no fancy shift of the greater mode of interaction. Yes, there's a lot of different ways that we can interact with the game, but a lot of those are kind of inherited from a particular experience of couch co-op, of understanding how to relate to video game narrative and story. But there's no moment where all of a sudden three controllers appear or you have to yell into a microphone and do something else with another muscle. Right. I actually think that's really important about creating a contract with your audience about how something's going to go, especially when it's something as big as asses masses. And you're asking them to go on that contract. It's to not break that contract with them. Or, you know, if the contract is going to evolve, that they get a chance to kind of renegotiate it. And especially in immersive work. There is not a lot of success with those new renegotiations. They feel very like, whoa, hold on. I came to sit on a couch and have a song sung at me, and now I'm dancing? I didn't sign up to be a dancer here. What are you doing to me? That is something I think both of us were hyper aware of, given certain traditions of immersive performance coming out of, let's just say, Britain, and how that had made a big influence on Canadian immersive performance. And American performance as well. There was a lot of like, okay, what can we get people to do? But the objective was never to just get people to do a whole bunch of different things. It was, let's do this one thing. and look at all the different ways we can do it, but the objective is still clear and we're kind of focused on this particular dynamic and scenario because of a real passion and belief in what could be brought about by committing to that. So I'm not sure that in those moments where people are exploring all the potentialities of the technology, for sure, we're gonna see a lot of stuff where people do that. And that's great, cool, let's see what it can do. But when we start to make artistic choices about the environments and why we need to do things at certain times, Then I feel like, yeah, I have questions of just taking care of people in the transition from one contract to another and really thinking about, yeah, is this fair in a way? We talked a lot about punishing players versus supporting players and all kinds of ways that, you know, largely we don't use in a certain theatrical tradition where it's like cool to be abstract and obtuse and... opaque and vague and whatever else synonyms i can get like that that's like the cool thing to do right especially when you're like when you're 21 you're interested in a kind of like european director driven theater aesthetic but that is increasingly what games have definitely like taught me as we've been working through and like learning the skills of like designing them ourselves of like okay when is it cool to shift something all of a sudden and demand another kind of labor and or break a contract
[01:19:56.223] Kent Bye: Great. And as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think is kind of the ultimate potential of immersive media, this intersection of experimental theater and video games, these kind of interactive immersive art forms and what it might be able to enable.
[01:20:12.833] Milton Lim: I can speak first in saying, I don't think it's the optimistic version of things, but something I'm curious to watch personally is, and Patrick, you've heard me speak about this a lot, is the ways in which interactive technologies are going to be deployed by larger companies. Disney, Netflix, streaming platforms to be able to allow for those things to happen outside of like physical spaces and more inside of people's homes. And I say this looking at Disney and like Story Living by Disney being an initiative that they started several years ago, where it's imagining like Disney hotel resorts kind of thing, but you live inside of it. and just thinking about the ways that we already have technology in our pockets in our phones that are going to enable for the kind of story worlding like ongoing things that people have been deploying in theme parks for years around rfid around like continuous engagement and identification I expect that we're going to see more and more of that unfolding, especially with VR becoming as more consumer ready as it is so that we live more and more inside it, whether or not it's augmented reality or something that contractually we're already kind of inside of that world and like legally we are bound to it. Like all those things are going to coalesce in ways that we are not. Already, many of us through Disney Plus have signed up with Disney to be on some sort of ride. And I think we're going to be taken on some sort of ride, not just through Disney, but through other things. That's not optimistic. That's not necessarily where as an artist, I'm like, that's the critical intersection of where we can be. active and responsive and like in agents of our own space. But I think that is something that we need to watch for. And to be completely blunt, I think that there is a kind of financial cap that many of us artists like Assesmasters was very lucky to receive the funding that it did to be made because in truth, we could not have asked for more from public arts funding in Canada. And had we wanted to make anything larger than that, if we wanted it to be 10 hours, that would have had to be built off of the backs of our labor and not something that could have been funded the ways that it was. and so if we wanted to imagine in larger landscapes it would have to be from the for-profit industry and i think artists who are working in the not-for-profit industry right now are kind of locked out of having those levels of discussion and immersive and interactive worlds are expensive to make at the moment and however they get made especially digital ones i won't speak for like things that can be made inside your room and your house and those kinds of things But yeah, that's one way moving forward that I think I optimistically hope that artists will find our ways into having a say at what those kinds of storytelling will look like and how they'll unfold, how they'll be deployed and what that means for larger social landscapes.
[01:23:06.349] Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, totally. Yeah, the class thing is very real. I think about people who don't have credit cards and like if at a certain point, certain things and amenities are only like, hey, you can have a meeting with the bank, but it's only in VR. I'd be like, what are the costs that come with the normalization of some of these technologies? But I won't weigh so much into that, because to be honest, my excitement around the stuff that we've done together and just generally Unity, and the thing that brought me to Unity at the beginning when I was a master's student was that I wanted to put things on walls in galleries, but I wanted them to change over time and not be video, because I detest video in galleries often. That like you could go up and you could change something that's on the screen. You could like move the image, something like very simple, just having like a WASD controller at the bottom of a painting. And then followed by that being like, oh, well, what if you could do something else? And then what if you could like, oh, video games are like puppetry. Oh, let's do that in like a, you know, let's do a kind of lecture performance in that way. And so I recognize that the traditions that don't recognize the material conditions of painting, any of this type of play and or work or experience of the technology. is missing out on this whole like the reality of where it takes place and the negotiations by which someone not to have or do or go through in order to arrive there and sit in like you know what chair is the best chair to do vr in and like it's these kinds of questions of like i think my brain is still like you have to answer for those questions and the total like the pure virtual for the Deleuzians out there, you know, the actual and the virtual go hand in hand. And like that continues to be, I mean, we see that, you know, that's a value that's shared by Milton and I in Asses Masses for sure. And as like thinking about projects that happen after it that have video games components in them, you know, I'm still interested in, okay, well, like, is that the limit? Is Asses Masses the limit of a kind of relationship between video games and theatrical context as like, there's no actors, the game is pure game on stage, and it's about how we respond to it. And I would be excited to see someone say, hey, I've made my own version of this kind of thing, and they've discovered things that Milton and I didn't do. And now I'm kind of curious of like, well, what else could we do with a video game in space? Because again, somehow you put it in that room and it's still theater. even though there was none of the other bells and whistles that normally are associated with theatre. And again, that's sort of continuing to say, oh, well, there's probably still more questions to ask about theatre the companion to the technology, which is if you're going to be a technocentric perspective to say like, oh yeah, are we becoming the companions to the technologies, which is what Heidegger would have been all afraid about. But that's the argument I would say is trying to be still interested. And I guess I'm interested in that position. I'm the person who has rendered standing reserve to the phone. It doesn't mean you have to throw the phone out the window as much as maybe some of us want to, but there's a dialogue and maybe there's even a dialectic that these kinds of works can do. Just for a final sprinkling of Brecht.
[01:26:31.068] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that either one of you would like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:26:36.309] Patrick Blenkarn: I would be curious if you are part of the broader immersive community. and you're listening to this podcast, you know, what do you see theater for? And, and I'm not saying that maybe you've never been to the theater. Maybe you don't go to theater. Maybe you had some bad experiences at the theater and you're not really particularly interested in it, or maybe you love theater and you know, there's anyone on the spectrum could be listening right now, but I'll say that the theater is a place that needs you, or it could use you it's available to you. And it might have some, like, if you're a maker of immersive stuff, especially like digital immersive kind of things, I would be curious to invite you to come back to the theater and say, hey, could this also be a place for me? Because by de facto, that place is supposed to be a place of social transformation, whether that's emotional transformation, whether that's political transformation. That is what trying to get to the sense of, hey, could this be a place for me? And as places get more and more difficult to access, We have to fight for those places where that in-name or in-spirit are supposed to be where new ideas and communities are brought together. So maybe launch your VR thing at a theater one day.
[01:27:48.894] Milton Lim: I think something that Patrick and I talk about often is like, who is playing the game is just as important as the game. Because you could just play Monopoly, it's true. But if you played Monopoly with a bunch of capitalists who own a bunch of real estate in a city, it becomes a very different context. And so as we think about like, it's immersive, but for who? And maybe coming back to that class comment about like who can afford the tickets to some of the immersive works, especially around the UK that we've seen, what kind of aesthetics are being employed? I think are pretty important questions as different tourism boards are being kind of courted towards supporting some of these initiatives for very good proof of concept reasons for the expansion of the form and the medium. And also like that's the live performance immersive version. Then there's the VR version with like who are the kind of video game publishers that are supporting these things. Yeah, I think the more and more we can think about who's being invited into the room, which comes from a theatrical premise also of like, well, who can be there? If theater is for the people, like are the people actually in the room? Can they afford the seats? I think that's the thing that I would want to come back to as fellow artists being like, well, can we also open up the conversation for how we can make this not just accessible, but also be really critical about who's sitting at the table and why it has to be that person. And that's something that we're proud of for us as masters to have come to, which is it does matter that someone's there. And it matters that if they were the right person at the right time to play or if they were the right person at the right time to be in the back of the audience and just like to whisper the right answer so that everyone understood the room in that moment, that we meet people where they are.
[01:29:30.245] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Patrick and Milton, thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast. I really enjoyed this conversation and also really enjoyed the experience of asses masses. It's unlike anything else I've ever experienced. It's kind of like a mix between a movie marathon and binge watching a whole TV series along with like all these emergent social dynamics. And I feel like there's the story that's being told and the video game components of like watching a Twitch stream, but it's in that live environment. theatrical performative context where there's all these unique emergent social dynamics that are both being reflected in the story, but also embodied within the audience. And just really appreciated all that experimentation and the care that you had for the audience to not only feed us over this seven to eight hours, but also just invite us into this journey to be a probably not very many people have done before, which was to go for seven to eight hours into a movie theater and watch people play this video game around these socialist Marxist donkeys who are going on this journey. So yeah, I really enjoyed the piece and there was a lot of deeper things that I've seen in the trends in the film festival circuit where people playing with how could you have these different types of emergent social dynamics and these different immersive experiences. And so This was definitely one of the more successful implementations of that and to catalyze this type of really rowdy, dynamic, interactive experience with a group. It's definitely a live visceral experience that I'm not going to forget anytime soon. So thanks again for putting it all together and for coming on the podcast to help break it all down.
[01:31:07.244] Patrick Blenkarn: Thanks so much, Kent.
[01:31:08.345] Kent Bye: Thank you. Thank you. So that was Patrick Blencarn and Milton Lim. They're the directors of Asses Masses, which I had a chance to see here at the Portland Art Museum's Center for an Untold Tomorrow, PAMCUT, on March 29th, 2025. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, well, I just loved hearing both Patrick and Milton's experiences coming from the theatrical world and thinking about how can video games as a form start to change what we even conceive of what kind of live, immersive theatrical performances can we have. So first of all, I think the fact that we have the TV series and these different episodic approaches is then also being put into like the video game format where you have a 10 episode series and you would play these different chapters. you have the ability to have one person go up and play through these different interactions. And throughout the entirety of this experience, you have these characters and this ensemble cast who are representing these different archetypes. And they said that they really started from the forms of the video game, where they really wanted to explore a variety of different types of genres and looks and feels. I've found it really fascinating just to hear Patrick say that they're taking this idea from Baudrillard, the hyper-real, where you take the hyper-real and actually the most realistic aspect of the experience was represented by this really low-fidelity 8-bit art. And then you have, in contrast, this astral plane that is like this fully high-resolution, 3D, more kind of immersive graphics that are representing something that is completely in this idealized and fantasy state. And so... It's kind of an interesting contrast of how they were using the different types of video game genres to then have the audience come up and negotiate amongst themselves, how they're going to navigate this experience. And so there's a lot that is left up to the audience to decide on their own. And so it's kind of like a social experiment in that way, just to see how, how can we best navigate this situation where in Portland, Oregon, we didn't come up with any like formalized structures. It was very kind of emergent and loose where we, If people wanted to really voice their perspective on which dialogue option to choose, they would like have this kind of yelling in the audience. And there'd be other moments where there was more like explicit decision making where it was less around like what the decision of the person was making, but it was more of like, what is the group values that we want to put together through this collective deliberative process where you're essentially putting together this manifesto for people? the donkeys, but it's also in some ways a proxy for people projecting themselves onto these characters. And so I found that really interesting just to see how they were talking about it in terms of the social dramaturgy. So the way that they're orchestrating and constructing these different moments of interaction that could happen, a lot of it is just like deciding who's going to be up on the front and then who's ever at the front playing the video game, then they have to decide how they're going to take input from a very rowdy audience behind them. Or it may not be rowdy. It may be other dynamics, depending on wherever you happen to see it and whatever group of people that are watching it. But when I watched it, it was a lot of people that were kind of yelling. And it was very engaging because it did have this what Patrick said is this turn taking between the more like I'd say Aristotelian ways that you're just receiving the story and the narrative that's being told. And then other moments where there's more explicit engagement and embodiment, and you're in some ways reflecting the different spirit of what's being told in the story, but you have these opportunities to kind of act it out. In the case in Portland, there was someone who was transgressing and going against all of the different rules that were expected for what you would want for this type of experience. And I wasn't in the room when the person who did this was announcing that he was turning heel and It was kind of like someone who had that gamer mindset trying to push the edge and the boundaries of what would happen if they would just do something that was really transgressive and not really listening to the group energy. So it actually catalyzed the audience to become more cooperative and more deliberate, more intentional for who was going to be taking different turns. And it kind of had... A side effect of actually bringing the audience together. So I guess that's in some ways the function of a heel is to have someone who is providing a focus of opposition that people can actually come together. And rather than just having this revolution and protests being played out on the screen, then actually kind of got embodied within the context of that performance. Not that they were trying to deliberately orchestrate that, but that's sort of what happened when I happened to see it. So it did sound like they did have some world-changing decisions that were happening, but that it wouldn't happen like two hours later in other chapters. And so you're making different choices and their perception of it is that there really wasn't that much. I mean, sometimes there's explicit directions, go left or go right, and it would take you into a different part of the world. There's other worlds where it's clearly more of an open world where there's all these different possibilities that you could go and do this or that. There's quite a lot of open world content that you're also exploring. Other times, it's more of a linear narrative where you're just going through the different steps. As you go through the steps, then the story's unfolding. It's switching back and forth between those. But what I found really interesting is just all the ways that they're talking around the existing forms of the video game and how that can start to expand out what we even think about as a theatrical performance. Because when you say, oh, I'm going to watch a seven-hour theater performance, Patrick was saying, well, people think about that as work. And so what's the line between... work and play where when you watch a movie, it's like, you know, 90 minutes to, you know, two or three hours now these days, but you still think about that in your mind as this entertainment recreational experience. But then all of a sudden, when you start to say, I'm going to go watch a seven to eight hour theater performance, and you say, well, that's like the equivalent of like going to work, I'm going to have to prepare and like, what's the food situation? Am I going to have to take snacks? Or they're providing food, and so you don't have to worry about that. But there's still a way that you're in it for an extended period of time that starts to blend the line between what's work and what's play, which is a theme that they're covering not only in the story that they're telling, but also within the experience itself as you're going through this. And so all the ways that they're bringing this kind of social dramaturgy for the different types of social dynamics that are being explored in the themes of the story, but also being embodied by the audience that's watching it. And also this idea that Milton was talking about from Jesse Schell talking about the verbs and video games in this GDC talk on the future of storytelling is that most of the verbs are from the neck down and that as we start to go from the neck up, then what different types of ways are you going to start to include like diplomacy or negotiation or persuasion or maybe there's other aspects of like the social care that's happening within the context of a social situation. And so This is an interesting mix because they're taking the video game and some of those different components aren't being directly put into the video game as a gameplay element. Like, say, if you had an AI agent and like the example I gave with the Starship Commander, where you're expected to do maybe more diplomatic steps to try to diffuse the situation rather than just resorting to information. attacking which is something that you could use the abstraction of a button to push to be able to fire so now that we're getting into more complicated inputs for these different types of immersive and interactive experiences then how can you start to take those elements of those neck up types of verbs and start to include them into the experiences and rather than trying to integrate it within the video game itself they were using it as a part of the social dramaturgy where there's a kind of a deliberative process that's happening within the group as the audience is watching it and I found it really quite interesting because there's been a lot of different types of like experiments that I've seen over the years where, you know, there's like a voting mechanism where like, let's say everybody could have their say, but that ends up being like you're expressing your agency, but that agency is still abstracted to the point where you really don't have much sway. There's no way to kind of change or evolve that. You make your vote and then that's it. It gets tallied and then you take this collective agency. But anytime you have that translation from your individual vote into the collective vote, it's, it still essentially feels like somewhat random because you're not able to, let's say, build a coalition or have more persuasive elements. It feels more abstracted in a way that doesn't feel that satisfying, that gap between your individual and collective agency. But somehow by just not having any structures or rules or, you know, like Milton said, that's really up to the audience to decide how they're going to make these group decision-making processes as a community, then it just felt a lot more satisfying to hear what people really had a strong opinion about, This or that there's tons of different choices that have to be made throughout the course of this experience. And so at some point, you know, I was just like, either one is fine for me, I didn't have a strong opinion. But it was interesting to see this negotiation of this collective agency, but also these other social dynamics that were coming from this idea of using the theatrical context to be able to explore these elements that are normally just very difficult to include within the context of the video game itself. And one of the things that Patrick was saying there at the end was that there's a certain amount of contract that people have with a video game where there's experimental video games and experimental theater. And if you go into something, you don't quite know if your inputs are pushing the bounds of what you expect for how you're expressing your agency in these traditional ways that we have an expectation of what it means to use a controller and so there's a certain contract the audience has for those expectations because there's all these existing genres and so it's enough to just stick to those video game conceits and have that more experimentation that's happening within the social dramaturgy and more of the theatrical side so it leans a little bit more into the experimental theater than i'd say like in the experimental video game but just by combining them together it becomes more of an experimental experience overall And so, yeah, I just really appreciated just hearing all the reflections on the affordances of theater as this place for social transformation and to allow communities to come together and to form and to share new ideas. And also just overall being able to have this length of a story and the different topics that they're covering. There's lots of philosophical and political reflections. And it's able to go at a depth that you don't typically see in, like, say, a normal theater. movie or film or even in video games that aren't necessarily always focusing on this tension between the real reality of what's happening in their world today but in this idealized fantasy world that they're using so i really quite enjoyed it and it was a lot of fun to watch it here in portland and at the portland art museum center for an untold tomorrow pam cut they've been holding all sorts of different unique events each month like 25 unique events that only run for one night and then basically 250 unique So I'll be syncing up with Amy Dotson, the founder of PAMCUT here later this month, and also been going to a lot of other PAMCUT events here in Portland just to kind of see the different type of programming that they're doing in this theater that is curated by the art museum here in Portland, but also just running a whole variety of different unique events that are pushing the bounds of what different types of experiences that you can have with PAMCUT. the community coming together within the context of a movie theater. So it's really quite exciting to see what's happening there. And I'm just really grateful for the opportunity to be able to go see this experience. That's something that I would normally see at something like a film festival, but it's a lot more difficult to bring something like this to a film festival just because it would end up eating up the entire day. And from the audience perspective, you have to really commit to going to something like that. But I do think that it is an experience that is worth having, and there's all sorts of really interesting experimental things that are happening that you don't get to see when you're on the normal festival circuit for something that's a lot more constrained for how much time you have together. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue bringing this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
