Research goals
The two initial iterations of TMD (July and September 2010, Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham) were commissioned to act as the research vehicle through which to discover whether transmedia dramas that take place away from the comfort of the cinema, theatre, or living room could be as emotionally engaging as dramas using traditional forms and media.[1] The outcome of that first phase of performances was the observation that pervasive drama can be highly emotionally engaging (Evans 2015). Watching a drama in a darkened room is specifically designed to permit and heighten emotional engagement. A tear can be shed and wiped away without anyone else needing to know. Breaking out of that space into the real world, we discovered with iterations one and two, need not hinder emotional engagement. Indeed, by taking the audience member away from that place of safety, other benefits may be unlocked. The boundaries of the dramatic world are no longer proscribed by the space of the stage. The passive audience member may become an active participant in the drama and even have agency over aspects of it. Having proved that we could create an engaging pervasive drama, I developed a new set of research questions for the third and fourth iterations that delved deeper into the strengths and weaknesses of this dramatic form:
1. Is it possible to create characters and plots in a pervasive dram that are as complex as might exist in a play or movie?
2. Could I get audience members to feel like they "know" a character?
3. Which of the methods I use are the mose "immersive" and which cause the player to step out of their immersion?
4. How can we make players active and not bring out in them their fear of being made to perform?
[1] The first staging at Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham in July 2010 was for an invited audience only, mainly academics and students from the University of Nottingham. The second, in September 2010 was free of charge and advertised in the Broadway listings. The third iteration was at Watershed Media Centre, Bristol in February 2013 with an invited audience, mainly attendees of a BBC Academy Fusion Initiative workshop. The fourth and biggest iteration was at Watershed in May 2013 and was advertised as part of MAYFEST and seen by 172 people. Tickets were £15 and £12 concessions.
Introduction
In 2010 I was struck by the real-life drama of Julian Assange and the leaking of secret documents by WikiLeaks. This was a story that broke across multiple sources – newspapers, radio, TV, government briefings, and WikiLeaks counter briefings. Then there was the whole thing about his sexual relationships, which may or may not have been connected to his status as hero of free speech or villain, traitor, and rapist. A later twist was his taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy. At the time I was drawn several times into wide-ranging debates with friends about Assange as person and political figure. On one side of the table he was a political hero with bad social skills, on the other he was a politically naïve narcissistic sexist. Now, having read Andrew O’Hagen’s account of working with the man (O’Hagen 2014), I feel I know who he is, but when the story broke, my view of him was constructed from fact, assumption, political perspective, and gut instinct. In TMD, as writer and director, I am attempting to tell a story that “breaks” from multiple sources. Each player’s view of the protagonist, Eve Rust, is constructed from some combination of contentious facts and personal feelings.
TMD was created as an experimental platform for audience research, which meant that, whilst it had to be a satisfactory experience for the paying audience, the techniques we used to tell the story had to be free to fail. How would audiences respond to the use of an app, use of actor encounters, use of installations, use of music, etc.? If some of the audience members were left confused or unimmersed, then our observation of their experience would allow us to really understand how people respond to the practice and methodologies of pervasive drama.
Drawing on our experiences and audience feedback from the four stagings of TMD, I will examine the strengths and weaknesses of the multiple methods used to communicate plot and character in this drama. I will also consider what “immersion” in a pervasive drama encompasses and whether awareness of the mechanisms of the production affects it.
Immersion and Empathy
My purpose in making pervasive drama is to create an experience where the players feel they have really become part of another world and another set of lives. For me, it is not enough for them simply to witness this world and these fictional lives; they should be, affectively, part of them. Is it enough simply to describe this as immersion? How exactly does immersion work? And what is the process by which we relate to characters?
There are many definitions of immersion in the fields of gaming, virtual reality, theatre, architecture, and so on. Most of these are unsatisfactory as a definition for use in pervasive drama as they are built around the specifics of their field, such as use of joysticks, VR headsets, etc. Here I offer a few of those definitions and focus in on the problem of ascribing to a monolithic concept of immersion. Using a different term, but capturing the psychological process of complete involvement in an activity is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow [2] which he describes as the “holistic experience that people feel when they act with total involvement” (Csikszentmihalyi 1975: 36). This is a very useful theory that elegantly describes the conditions required to be “in the zone.” It works really well for a musician lost in the music or a computer gamer who plays for hours with no awareness of time. But the experience of being a player in TMD is not limited to one zone, it’s a sequence of zones with many distractions. Ulrik Schmidt says that “distraction and immersion can in fact be seen as two closely related ways of experiencing ambient events.” Distraction is a “diversion of attention away from its focal center and into the periphery. Immersion, in contrast, refers to the subject’s deep – physical or cognitive – absorption in a phenomenon” (Schmidt 2013:181). Michael Mateas offers a definition in terms of interactive drama:
Immersion is the feeling of being present in another place and engaged in the action therein. Immersion is related to Coleridge's ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ – when a participant is immersed in an experience, they are willing to accept the internal logic of the experience, even though this logic deviates from the logic of the real world. (Mateas 2000: 1)
So both distraction and disbelief (or the suspension of the suspension of disbelief) are the enemies of immersion. But there is a further factor at play. In reading the transcripts of the audience feedback it is clear that however “immersed” players were, they were simultaneously very aware that they were part of a theatrical process. This is similar to being aware that one is reading a book whilst being engrossed in the story. In a paper from 1996, the early days of interactive media, Bolter and Grusin discuss what they call the contradictory imperatives of immediacy and hypermediacy that are at play in all media (Bolter and Grusin 1996). They are talking about imperatives that are present in the creation of media rather than in experiencing them, but the two terms are nevertheless useful here. Immediacy is somewhat analogous to immersion – it is a state of unawareness of the medium. Hypermediacy is the state of awareness by the audience of the medium. In my view, they are both at play simultaneously as a player either consciously or unconsciously transitions between immediacy (engrossed, unaware of the construct) and hypermediacy (aware of the construct).
A similar process of mental stepping between states of experiencing and understanding is described by Adriano D’Aloia (D’Aloia 2009). Empathy, he argues, is the process by which we relate to characters in films. It would appear to me that we can draw a comparable link to pervasive drama and assume that the same process is at work.
Empathy is a composite process, one that has at least three grades or modalities of accomplishment: [A] the first is the emergence of experience: suddenly, I see sadness on the character’s face; [B] the second – the very empathetic moment – is the fulfilling explication: I am involved in his/her inner state, I experience the sadness s/he lives by moving ‘at’ him/her, ‘with’ him/her in front of the same object; [C] the third is the comprehensive objectification of the explained experience: at the end, I understand the character’s sadness. In brief, at the starting stage, we are in front of the object and we perceive it with our senses. In the middle stage, a fulfilling explication drives us to the Subject and drives us back. At the final stage, we are again in front of the object, and we cognitively receive it into our experience, we internalise it. A perceptual act lived as an emotional act and objectified as a cognitive act. However, the three stages are not to be conceived as spread over time: rather they are three psychological stages of an ‘experienceable whole.’ (D'Aloia 2009: 495-6)
He describes this process as a stepping forward and back:
Before empathy, I am too far [from emotional understanding of the situation, RL], and the initial distance must be filled. After the empathetic fulfilling, I am too close and I need again to set myself at a distance to better understand. (D’Aloia 2009: 496)
This stepping in and out of immersion and structural awareness is familiar to us all. When watching Sandra Bullock in the film Gravity (Cuaron 2013) one can simultaneously be worried that a CO2 overdose will prevent her from making it to the hatch of the spaceship, while at the same time marveling that this really is one of her best roles and wondering if she will win the Academy Award for Best Actress for it. This mental switching does not spoil the enjoyment of the story, in fact it enhances it. We can say that even with this stepping back and forth the spectator is immersed. There is, however, a tipping point at which the viewer of a film (or a pervasive drama) ceases to suspend disbelief and is pulled out of immersion. Watching Gravity, I came close to becoming unimmersed when a threat of schmaltz over the dead daughter emerged. Fortunately the filmmakers held off from laying it on too thick, and I continued to suspend my disbelief.
Immersion then, in the context of pervasive drama, is a process of stepping between states of being part of a story and awareness of being part of a story. In a game, awareness of rules and structure are part of the immersive experience. In a drama, such awareness can be a form of distraction. Let’s imagine a hotel room that is seeded with character information; a woman’s clothes, a man’s razor, some political flyers. A couple arrive at the room as part of a game. They look around and discuss what they find with each other. They are trying to discover the rules of the game or, if they already know the rules, are trying to fit what they find into those rules. They are essentially trying to solve a problem, probably to find out where to go next. They know they are playing a game, and they probably want to win it. Now let’s imagine another couple who have entered the room as part of a theatrical experience. They have been given a plot-based reason to enter, perhaps to wait for their friend whose room it is. They look at the props and they discuss what they are discovering about the character. They don’t have to solve a problem, but they may set themselves the problem of understanding the character and the plot. They want to know what is expected of them and where they should go next. The game couple, fully immersed in the game, can talk about the game, about the rules and how they should use what they find to compete in the game. Immersion in the game is immersion in the structure of the game, and discussing it is part of that immersion. The theatre couple should ideally talk about the character and the plot, but they shouldn’t refer to the play or what is expected of them by the makers of the play. They are supposed to be part of the reality, for example waiting for someone they vaguely know in her room; they are not supposed to be aware of the mechanism that makes the play what it is. It is better that they say, “there has been a man staying here with her,” rather than, “the writer wants us to think that a man has been staying here with her.” Naturally this form of immersion is much harder, if not impossible, to achieve. The question is: if our theatre couple starts to discuss the structure of the drama, does that mean they have ceased to suspend their disbelief? Referring to Figure 1, I suggest that my goal as a pervasive drama writer and director is to keep players in the immediacy circle, but at the same time, I have to accept that they may also be in the hypermediacy circle.
[2] The Wikipedia definition of flow is “the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.”
Various means of communicating plot and character in detail
The rest of this article is dedicated to looking at the means, listed below, by which we communicated with TMD players and exploring my assumptions about their efficacy at keeping players in the “immediacy circle.” I will explain how we used each of these approaches and then address the research questions in relation to them.
1. The use of a smart phone app to deliver audio and maps
2. The creation of the cultural universe: props, flyers, and diegetic media
3. Performer encounters
4. The use of sets and real locations
5. The use of audio/video installations
6. The use of conventional media
7. The role of player agency
1. The use of a smart phone app to deliver audio and maps
The powerful and direct method we employed to deliver the main narrative to the players was a combination of spoken word and music via headphones. Using an app meant that, rather than every player getting the same audio in the same order, we could customize the experience for each player. Players would occasionally meet a “watcher,” a character in the drama who would take their phone, type in a code, and thus trigger the next audio file. Symbols on the screen would tell the watcher where the player was in the narrative (Fig 2. Image on the right).
Audio delivered to headphones in the form of music, sound effects, and narration has been exploited by artists and dramatists since at least the 1970’s in the form of “sound walks” or “subtlemobs.”[3] The writing technique exploited in TMD was to use the words and soundtrack to evoke a world and create fictional characters, but also, crucially, to create space for the players themselves to “fill in the blanks.” This kind of writing aims to get the players in a suggestible state where, prompted by the narration and the mood of the music, they will personalize the narrative with their own thoughts and memories. The underlying hope is that players will create their own connections between story events and real-world events. The following quotes from players suggest that they sought to make sense of all sorts of events around them through the prism of the story.
Somebody rushed past us with a green phone, who probably wasn’t anything to do with that, or maybe she was. I don’t know, but I just started being suspicious of those. (FRC5)
So even the woman who was cleaning the corridor, I thought, oh, is she a plant? Is she just cleaning the room? That kind of stuff. (FRF5)
And there was quite a nice coincidence, which was when you were asked to remember your first memories, and a small child ran in to me, and there was actually something quite nice about that. (SAB2)
In general, the TMD writing aimed to create many opportunities where invention of characters and meaning by the players was possible. The players were invited to see the world as elements of a story unfolding around them. Perhaps the event of the small child running into SAB2 was not just a random thing that happened, but resonated as part of their version of the story of Eve, their own mixture of their own memories and random events taking on the form of memories. The mixing of the musical score and sound effects also aid massively in the creation of these possibilities, as the music shapes the atmosphere and sets the emotional tone. The use of leit-motifs and repeated themes has the effect of turning the real world into a movie (Kolassa 2015). The following quote underlines how, in this instance, music helped to trigger the player’s imagination to weave a fictional event into the real world.
I was very aware of when you had a voicemail from her. There was underscore, and I thought, oh that is odd because that wouldn’t be there, it is not diegetic, so I was you know […] I thought it was effective. It felt more like being in a movie that was actually happening to you because of the underscore. (SAA1)
We have seen that the use of voice-over combined with music is successful at making players open to the suggestion that they should personalize the narrative either consciously or subconsciously. It is however worth recognizing the negative aspects of this form of communication. One challenge is that levels of comprehension exhibited by players can vary from acute to almost non-existent.
There were a lot of instructions, weren’t there? We were walking, looking, and there are instructions. And as soon as you’ve had the instructions, you’re thinking, aah, what was the instruction, what was the instruction?! (SAG1)
Some people simply don’t absorb information from the soundtrack easily; others absorb every subtle detail and effortlessly fly with it. Even for the attentive player there are constant distractions in the city around them such as loud sounds that mask the audio track or meeting people who talk to you. Messages can be easily missed; indeed, from observation it is clear that when instructions are given twice they are more successfully responded to.
2. The creation of the cultural universe: props, flyers, and diegetic media
In the run-up to the performance, the Internet allowed us to “begin the play” and prepare the player before they arrive on the day through the creation of a set of optional in-story web pages. This form of storytelling is familiar from “alternate reality games,” or ARGs, where the boundaries between the real world and the fictional world are blurred. We might term this form of pervasive media “diegetic media,” meaning media that originates within the fictional/real world of the story. The XM, Mevokia, and the Digital Investigations Command have websites that players can explore before they arrive (Lander 2013).
In addition, the area where players experience the drama has been flooded with flyers for memory phones, memitation classes, anti-legalization protests, mem-core club nights, and so on. On discovering these details, the boundaries of the fictional and real worlds become less clear, and this once more helps to make players suggestible. A frequent comment emerging from the audience feedback referred to them not knowing where the real/unreal boundaries of the experience were.
I think my favorite bit was where I was in the dentist’s reception, and they were talking about how this was not real, and how real the magazines feel, so I was actually looking through it, and I was like, it’s not real. (FRB1)
Interviewer: (laughs) So you liked that they were kind of playing with that sort of suggestion?
Yeah, that was actually my favorite bit. I think that’s the bit where I felt most immersed in the story. (FRB1)
Figure 3: Memitation Classes. One of the flyers that could be found around the city. TMD Iteration 4, Bristol, May 2013.
Much of this material is easy to absorb. The existence of memitation classes or a memcore club night can be taken in at a glance, but serves to widen the fictional world where the use of mems is a social phenomenon. Other scattered media offer a chance to delve deeper into the fictional world. In the hotel lobby, a photocopy of a Daily Mail article about the battle between Eve Rust and DI Stone with the headline “Bust Rust” offers a deeper look at the social and political impacts of memming and why Eve is fighting to prevent the privatization of memory. Some players may have just glanced at it, while others may have read it. It is there for those who want it. In an ideal world, one person per group of six would have read it and would be able to offer a deeper perspective during the discussion in the final scene. The information is not essential, but for more experienced and calmer players who are able to take the time to read it, the content adds depth and flavor to the constructed reality.
One of our most successful experiments with the use of diegetic media was during the second iteration at Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham, in 2010. When players entered the bar looking for the dealer, a radio phone-in show was playing over the PA system. This was noted by several players as a successful moment:
The bit with the radio was a bit, kind of trippy, because you’re sort of, you’re trying to hear (indicated headphones in ears) and then you hear ‘Eve, Eve’ and it sort of punctures the kind of your interior space in quite an interesting way. (M1)
That was really interesting when you started with the audio in there (indicates bar) and you’re listening to this in your head and you’re sort of ‘this is outside my headphones.’ (M2)
Yeah, that was good. (M3)
I believe this effect is so popular because it expands the interior headphone experience into real locations, thereby expanding the potential reach of the story world from “just inside my head” to “all around.” Similarly, in TMD iteration 4, several interviewees appreciated how the presence of music in the hotel room transforms the experience from just a personal soundtrack to a story that transforms parts of the world into story world.
I noticed in the hotel that when I took my headphones out that music was in the hotel room, which I loved. That made me feel really like, ‘oooh’ [agreement and laughter]. (SUF1)
For me, in the hotel room, it, with the, the kind of ambient soundtrack that was on the headphones, was duplicated almost exactly on the speakers, and I thought that was very effective. (FRD1)
[3] A flashmob is a sudden gathering of people in a public place, usually drawn there by text message, to perform an unusual spectacle. A subtlemob, as devised by sonic artist Duncan Speakman, uses mobile technology to bring groups of people together in public spaces, but the aim is for them to remain invisible. Subtlemobs often use simple audio technology, such as mp3 players or live phone calls, to bring the listener into an enhanced appreciation of the place. My experience of Speakman’s subtlemob, As If It Were The Last Time, was highly influential in the creation of TMD, which is essentially a subtlemob. On the website of Circumstance, a collective of which Speakman is a member, they define it as follows: “A subtlemob is an invisible flashmob, it integrates with the beauty of the everyday world, so only its participants are aware of it. It's like walking through a film. It is experienced on headphones, and it is performed by you and hundreds of strangers.”
3. Performer encounters
Throughout TMD, players encountered five members of the XM (“watchers”) who guided them to the car, hotel room, and other locations, plus a memory dealer, a receptionist, and a dentist. Such encounters were in general very popular with players. In more general terms for pervasive media, such encounters, if handled right, can be very immersive and offer excellent player identification with the fictional world. One of the things we learned from the first two iterations of TMD was that players found it difficult to absorb plot exposition when it was delivered via headphones. In TMD4, watchers were instructed to find out what players had understood of the story and fill in gaps.
Great care must be taken as to what “energy” is given to players. By this I mean that in their suggestible state, it is very easy to get the player excited, manic, or paranoid. Players enjoy being made to feel strong emotions by these encounters, but there is a real danger that if they are made too jumpy they will cease to be able to absorb subtlety from the soundtrack or from the locations. For example, if a watcher asks them to “find out what happened in the hotel room,” the player may go into a destructive frenzy, opening every drawer, pulling the bedding off. Instead, I preferred for watchers to keep the players in a state of wonder, encouraging them to adopt a position of open exploration rather than paranoid clue hunting. “Why don’t you wait here for Eve. There’s something strange about this room. Some of the objects seem to contain memories.” On a simple level we are talking about energy here. A performer telling you that you are in danger and may be arrested and everything depends on you is going to trigger the release of adrenaline that will give you a feeling of excitement and a need for action. Fight or flight. To avoid the over-energizing of players, I wanted performers to keep players in a suggestive and trusting “mindset.”
During the May 2013 iteration (TMD4), as I went through it as a player, I found that some of the actors were asking questions of players. Player feedback showed that this was increasing anxiety and confusion. By way of explanation, compare these two approaches:
If an actor asks a player, “When did you meet Eve?” the player is put on the spot. This is a question they don’t have the answer to. They don’t know what to say. They wonder if they are supposed to know and have missed something. Now they are doubting whether they are any good at having this kind of experience. Overall they feel as though they have somehow failed by not knowing the answer.
If an actor says to a player, “You’ve known her ages, haven’t you,” the player can simply agree and has no sense of being put on the spot. The actor can then get into a rhythm with these leading statements. “You lost contact with her for a while didn’t you. It’s sad losing touch with a friend.” This allows the performer to find gaps in the players' understanding and customize the delivery of exposition based on how the player responds.
As this is sold as experiential theatre, we might assume that people who were awkward about active participation would choose not to take part in the first place. However, from the feedback (see the examples below) it is clear that people do attend despite their fear of being put on the spot. Perhaps their partner bought the tickets, or perhaps they were simply curious.
I wouldn’t have signed up for it if it had been, ‘you will be a player.’ I didn’t know anything about it. (FRH3)
I think probably as a person I feel a bit vulnerable doing things like this. I was a bit worried I was going to make a dick of myself (laughs). (FRH4)
In order to help players sustain immersion and engagement, actors must very delicately (and swiftly) assess each person for their self-consciousness and fear of being made to perform.
4. The use of sets and real locations
The beauty of perambulatory drama is that the set isn’t limited to what you can build. For players in a suggestible state, the whole of the Bristol docks was the set, and the cast was filled out with thousands of (potential) minor characters and extras. Entering someone’s hotel room is already a thrilling and interesting experience, but adding to this a sense of narrative mystery, of discovery and suspense, it can become a real treat for players.
However, it is also very interesting to add sets into the real world; these are spaces that are very obviously unreal settings found in a real setting.
In the third iteration, the dentist’s waiting room was a set made of wooden flats decorated with wallpaper and so on. It looked like a set rather than a real room. At this point in the narrative, where the players are simultaneously being themselves and acting out Eve’s memory of yesterday, I hoped that the presentation of the waiting room as a set would be appropriate to their experience; reality as such is discarded, and fiction is layered upon fiction. Considering the Venn diagram (Figure 1) we are, at this point in the story, placing players firmly in the central intersecting area of “suspended disbelief but aware of medium.” Players often refer to “feeling like they are in a film,” so it is surely appropriate that we offer them occasional glimpses of the edges of the set.
In contrast, the players’ earlier solo encounter with the rather scary dealer takes (in iteration 4) place in No. 1. Harbourside, which is a real bar. The dealer character in her hoodie appears very real and, at least for some of the audience, the frisson of finding and approaching a dealer in a real public space made this one of the best moments of the experience. Here players describe the difficulty of identifying the dealer and how this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in terms of enjoyment.
I stood outside the Harbourside for quite a while and then went in and checked everyone out and came out and went back in. I thought, ‘there’s a lot of suspicious looking people in here,’ and I actually said out loud to a friend who happened to be in there for another reason, um, I’m looking for friends of Eve, and nobody batted an eyelid. The guy I thought was probably a dealer was actually probably a cop. So eventually I got there, yeah. (FRD2)
I freaked a middle-aged gentleman out outside by asking him if he was selling memories [laughter]; he was a bit weirded out! (SAJ2)
I quite liked those bits where you weren’t quite sure and again going to the café and trying to figure out who the dealer was. I quite […] in a sense it brought you out of the drama, but I quite liked that. (SAA3)
All of these players seemed to be enjoying the anxiety of trying to find and approach a dealer in a public place. I believe a set would not have worked in this context because it would have reduced the reality of the situation, thus diminishing the frisson of anxiety.
5. The use of audio/video installations
I began my professional life in the 1980’s as a video artist, and one of my earliest solo works was Trial By Media (1989) commissioned by the World Wide Video Festival, The Hague (The Netherlands).
VideoObject 1: Rik Lander - Trial By Media Installation.
The aim of this 14 screen, 5-source video installation (as with TMD) was to make viewers the subjects of the narrative and to give them an active role in the story. I did this by showing multiple video scenes in a linear order that the viewers had to walk through. The use of installations has been a part of my practice ever since. TMD had media installations in the car, hotel room, jewelers, tent, and police surveillance area. Their role was not to provide exposition, but to offer story fragments, i.e. supply memories that had become trapped in everyday objects.
On entering Eve’s hotel room the watcher would tell the players who were being brought there that Eve’s memories had become trapped in the fabric of the room. Another instruction was that they must be still and silent. If they followed this guidance they might have heard very faint voices coming from the pillows and discovered that installation.
Figure 5: Eve’s hotel room, scattered with props. The two pillows play “his and hers” soundtracks. TMD Iteration 4, Bristol, May 2013. Paul Blakemore.
I liked the sound under the pillows. It really did feel like there were little memories floating around in the air. (FRA2)
If players lay on the bed, one pillow offered a male voice (Doug – Eve’s boyfriend) and the other Eve’s voice. The volume was such that it was only possible to hear one side of the conversation when putting your head to the pillow. There were a number of aims here: I wanted players to lie on the bed, and I wanted them to hear the conversation that took place there and to gather knowledge, mood, or tone from that. In other words, as well as advancing the narrative, I wanted players to enact an element of Eve’s action.
This idea of encouraging players to make physical actions was established during the first act. As the players walked around the dockside, the narrator made suggestions via headphones:
Male voice
You stop walking. What made you wander here? It's the exact place you first met her. She was standing and looking up. You were hurrying past, not really aware of the world as usual, but you glimpsed her and found yourself looking up to where she was looking. All you saw was the top of the building. You look again now, still unsure what it was she was looking at so intently. Someone in a window? A bird on a roof?
There are multiple prompts and instructions from the narrator for the players to follow. If they find themselves stopping and looking up, they have already submitted to the production: this was a step towards immersion. The next step is for them later to associate that spot, the one they had chosen, with "where they met Eve for the first time." The whispering voices of the pillows were a similar invitation for the players to modify their behavior according to instructions provided by the narrative. When lying on the be, they were acting out Eve's memories, feeling and smelling the same sheets as she, and her thoughts were in their head. Given that we know that players are reluctant to be "put on the spot," each time an individual submits to one of these suggestions, they trust the production more and are acting the story our perhaps without even realizing that this is what they are doing. The process is both subtle and manipulative, and necessarily so, in order for the players to experience full immersion.
Within the hotel room, every minute or so, a musical chord, very much in the style and tone of the headphone soundtrack, would emanate from the wardrobe. The chord was suspenseful and dark. If the players stood very still in front of the wardrobe, they would see a visual memory trapped in the glass of the mirror. This was a stylized dramatic scene between Eve and Doug – a kind of power struggle. (Around this time, from the pillows or the headphone soundtrack, the players would realize that Doug is a spy for the police.) Again, the installation has a behavior modification role: it has a sensor in it, so the players must stand still in order to see the scene. Interestingly, many players didn’t see this scene for a number of reasons. They missed the subtle messaging from the watcher as they entered the room, they were too busy moving around for the soundtrack to ever play, they were too twitchy to notice the image in the mirror, or even if they understood the mechanism, some were too impatient to stand still. Missing the pillows or the wardrobe didn’t rob players of comprehension, but they missed out on thought provoking and evocative experiences. In some respects I am content that only some people saw the installation. They are the elite players, the ideal players who are focused and immersed. I’m happy that they were rewarded. But I also take away some very useful learning experiences from the mixed success of this installation.
What I learned is as much about game-play as it is about dramaturgy. Practitioners of pervasive drama come from many backgrounds, such as the world of games, sound art practice, theatre, and linear narrative media. I’m slowly learning how game-like approaches can help in the construction of dramas. In a games model, on level 1, players are taught the rules of the world, i.e. “do this to achieve that.” Once the rules are established, the difficulty may increase, but the rules remain the same. In game terms, the TMD rule set was all over the place. On entering a situation, players didn’t know if they would have to act in a particular way to deal with a live human watcher or in a different way to deal with multiple kinds of installations, some of which were triggered and others simply looping. This meant that rather than becoming immersed in the narrative, players might be worried about what they had to do to make a situation work for them and anxious that they were missing things and doing something “wrong.” In short, they were unclear of the rules.
The mirror required the player to remain still before it played, but the car video or the pillows did not. In the future, I would give all installations the same trigger, i.e. either require players always to stand still before they play or simply make all installations loop. In fact, my current thinking is that mixing installations with live encounters and app audio results in too many competing forms. Instead, I’d like to take the installations out of the perambulatory experience and put them into a separate, parallel gallery experience. These are two different forms that require different rules to deliver the best experience.
6. The use of conventional media
The final scene in TMD contained exposition that was necessary in order to give the players the chance to make a meaningful decision at the very end about whether to save Eve. For the first time, players came together with all the other “friends of Eve” (a maximum of six people) to watch a fairly conventional TV drama scene on a TV in a set that looked like a police surveillance point. There was an interactive twist as their own image, secretly taken earlier in the play, was included in the video as photos of police suspects. They were told that if they remained where they were, they would be arrested by the police arriving in seven minutes. If they stayed, Eve would go free, but if they left she would remain in custody and her plan to prevent the privatization of memory would fail. The group was encouraged to use the time to decide their own fate and that of Eve.
There is little doubt that headphone audio and installations were not ideal for the exposition of plot; for many players, information tended to go in one ear and out the other. As TV viewers, we are very used to absorbing plot exposition from conventional video. Because of this, to get across the plot information relevant for the group discussion, my approach with the final scene was to use an edited video shown on a TV screen. One player was planning to exit the location until he saw the video scene between Eve and the Detective start:
I was like, okay I’m out of here. But actually, when the exchange happened, the blue, the blue lit exchange, the interior thing, that was when I was probably more immersed than at any other point in the whole thing. (FRG3)
Others, however, felt that suddenly going from being an active participant to becoming a sitting audience member was too much of a jolt, that the scene was too long, and that they were impatient to be moving on. There was an economic imperative here too. Making a scene that uses video to impart dramatic information may reduce costs, as once it is made, it can be used over and over. Reflecting on the responses, my own view is that conventional televisual storytelling does not mix very successfully with pervasive drama: this 15-minute scene might work well on a TV in a living room, but demands too much focused attention in the context of a perambulatory drama.
7. The role of player agency
Not all interactive dramas offer player agency, but it really is the holy grail of interactive drama, because other mediums don’t offer it. Traditional media don’t need to give their audience any control over the order or outcome of the storytelling, but the need emerges very strongly for post-internet media forms. There are, however, two significant challenges for the interactive auteur. First, how to give autonomy to the audience without undermining the quality, consistency, and coherence of the drama? And, second, once agency is given, how to make sure that players feel it is worthwhile?
Game and interactive media makers often resort to trickery to avoid giving genuine authority to their audiences. Agency can be “faked,” for example when a choice is given to the players which makes no real difference to the outcome or flow of the story. This works unless a player doubles back to test the validity of a choice. If they discover a fake, they will usually reject the piece at that point, so it is a risky approach. Choices can also be second-guessed, e.g. an A/B choice is given, but everyone knows that audiences will always choose A over B. Choices can also be trivial or non-essential, and such choices can frustrate and alienate audiences. Conversely, offering real control can be difficult and dangerous. Would Romeo and Juliet be better if the audience could choose the ending?
The solutions used in TMD concerning audience agency can be characterized as follows:
A. Personalization. The narration is written in such a way as to encourage individuals to customize the narrative in accordance with their own personhood. As we saw above, players are actively encouraged to remember the spot where they first met Eve. In the following example from the first act, they are invited to imagine that the people around them may be part of the story.
Male voice
You look at the other people going about their lives. Maybe some of them are memming. Being themselves and someone else at the same time. Their mobile phones replaying memories right into their brains. Anyone with headphones on could be memming.
You look down at your feet. You can feel the contact between the soles of your feet and the solid city around you. You can feel the weight of your body firmly rooting you to the ground. Thank God for gravity keeping you from floating away. Eve plugged herself into a dangerous jumble of other people’s memories and lost herself and you did nothing to help her.
In the first paragraph, the player is invited to picture members of the public (anyone with headphones) as part of the story world by imagining them as being “themselves and someone else at the same time.” In the second paragraph, the narration offers a clear instruction to stop and look at your feet, inviting the player to become aware of their own physicality. It then suggests a possible element of guilt in the player’s relationship with Eve in which the player “did nothing to help her.” This set of instructions aims to allow the players to connect with other people, with their physical presence in the environment, and finally to start imagining a deep and complex relationship with Eve. This idea of personalization is subtle, but it is the creative key to the piece. It is a tool for inviting the players to immerse themselves fully in the story, mentally and physically.
B. Performing. The narration is written in such as way so as to encourage particular kinds of behavior from the players. Players are, in effect, acting out elements of the drama, and they choose how far they go in this participation. For example, in the dentist’s waiting room when players are experiencing Eve’s memory of yesterday, the soundtrack says:
Male voice
You find that Eve is standing up and your body does the same. You are saying out loud: “I have to see her. I have to see her.”
Eve
I have to see her, I have to see her.
Male voice
You’re saying out loud: “I have to see her! I have to see her now!”
By this point as a player, you are either happy to go along, stand up and speak, or you are too shy to do so. About half of the players stood and spoke at this point. Once again, the process of encouraging performance from players is key to the idea of gaining their trust and for them to allow themselves to be immersed in the experience. Hopefully, those people who choose not to stand are happy with their decision and don’t feel that they have done something “wrong,” which might have the effect of unimmersing them (Giraud 2015).
C. A/B Choice. In the final scene, all the players must choose whether to stay and be arrested in order to allow Eve to go free or to leave, thereby letting Eve be charged. The choice is framed as an all or nothing rather than a majority choice: all the players must agree. With DI Stone referring on screen to an edited sequence of photographs of all the players present, the dialogue in the video proceeds as follows:
Stone
So these are the leading members of the XM ...
Eve
That’s right. I’m just the public face.
Stone
... and we’ll find evidence linking them with a known dealer. They can all be identified by the dentist?
PC Clarke
Yes Ma’am. We’re also gathering forensics from various sites now.
Stone
And they’re all gathered in one place? How long to get there?
Male voice
Seven minutes. The team’s en route.
Stone
If they’re all there when my officers arrive, you will be free to go. I want them all. If just one leaves I will charge you. OK? Interview terminated.
VideoObject 2: The Memory Dealer - Police Interview scene extract.
There is a dual reason for this insistence on unanimity. Firstly, democracy is disappointing if you vote one way but the majority swings it the other way. Secondly, the insistence on everyone agreeing the collective course of action means that debate is likely to be encouraged. If one person disagrees with another, they can argue it out. This approach worked well, and often the discussion lasted the full seven minutes. In some instances we put an “agent provocateur” into the group to make sure that debate ensued, but such a presence was not essential. Opinions on Eve were often quite strong at this point. I was also keen for debate to be part of the structure of the drama as it would allow the players to resolve any questions about Eve and the plot amongst themselves, thereby in effect bringing the post-play discussion in the bar forward into the drama. The purpose of this is not about enhancing immersion but more about allowing players to pool their perspectives on Eve. As it is possible for each player to notice, experience, and register different elements of the drama, my intention was for this discussion to allow them to pool their understanding. In the following quote a player reflects on the benefits of having the discussion as part of the experience.
In fact, that was quite good: that is, the final bit where you get the chance just to sit and kind of think about it all in a way that you perhaps do less of really. I was quite confused at quite a few points earlier on, but it was quite good having that space at the end. (SAA3)
Several interviewees commented positively or negatively on whether there was enough agency:
I think there’s a large level on which you don’t necessarily feel you want to make a choice, in terms of like at no point did I feel like, oh I wish I could have chosen a different order, or something like that, because it never felt, it was never like, it wasn’t orders, it was instructions. (SUA4)
This next group quoted here appears to be thoroughly aware of the limits of agency on offer, but then debate the possibilities within those limits:
Well there’s no choices, was there, I mean you’re there to observe it all. And you can interact a little, but there’s one path in the story. (SUB1)
There were choices about how to behave, I thought. (SUB2)
Yes. (SUB1)
You could have fallen off the whole thing if you’d have ... (SUB3)
But if you’d rejected it at any point, then you’d just go home. (SUB1)
But even in the compliance, there were choices about the way you acted out, the way I acted out the compliance. I felt it was full of choice. (SUB2)
Figure 6: Players discuss whether to stay to be arrested and thus let Eve be released or leave and let Eve stay in custody. TMD Iteration 4, Bristol, May 2013.
Conclusion
The true conclusion of this process will become manifest in the next iteration of TMD (or perhaps a new piece entirely) when everything I have learned will be put into practice. True to its semi-digital nature, there is no finished version of the play, only the next update. From the overall positive feedback received, we know that we have created a play that people enjoy. The next iteration(s) will transform TMD from a work in development, an experimental research platform, into a thoroughly well-prepared work of art.
The first two research questions were:
1. Is it possible to create characters and plots in a pervasive drama that are as complex as might exist in a play or a movie?
2. Could I get audience members to feel like they "know" a character?
In short, based on the focus group comments: yes and yes. For the next iteration I’d like to soften Eve a little, make her a little less Assange. I managed to create a character that players “knew,” but they often didn’t feel she was particularly sympathetic. My aim was for players to base their decision on a balance of personal and political feelings. The group quoted below appears to have stayed because they agreed with her politics despite not trusting her:
Us two […] I said I wanted to leave, Ruth was going to leave, but then the others talked us into staying. (SAH2)
Interviewer: OK. So why, how did they do that? What did you say, that made you stay?
I said I sort of didn’t trust her, she stitched us up, but she just needs a couple more days to stop the deal going through. (SAH6)
So we sacrificed ourselves for her to achieve that. (SAH2)
Many of the responses to how players felt about Eve and their decision to save her or not, reveal just how much they had come to know the character, almost speaking as if they really knew her:
I also felt a bit sorry for her, because, um, she was obviously surrounded by people who were playing with her head. (FRB1)
Well, you have to remember we were friends years ago. And then we, we, we went our different ways and through the first part of the experience it came back to me very much why we went our different ways. (FRG5)
She obviously had her own needy reasons at the beginning for entering this memming world. And she obviously got into it too much, and one doesn’t know what effect this has already had on her psyche. And so you have to be susp …, you have to feel that her decisions are suspect, and she wasn’t a trustworthy character, or a very grounded character to start with. (SAF1)
I believe that by placing some more positive, warmer “memories” in the narration I can warm up the player-Eve relationship. I was initially reluctant to do this because I didn’t want everyone to love her: I wanted there to be genuine tension in the choice at the end between the personal and the political. I think the real challenge for a future pervasive drama is to create a character that players feel genuine friendship for, that players love. Is this possible?
The third research question was:
3. Which of the methods I use are the most "immersive" and which cause the player to step out of their immersion?
1. The use of a smart phone app to deliver audio and maps
This was hugely successful throughout the experience and was a very significant tool for creating deep immersion. The mixture of narration and music was effective in setting tone and atmosphere. The suggestive writing style worked particularly well. Act 1, which is a purely headphone experience, was most often cited as the best part. It is easy to see why this is so. The writing and production are of sufficient quality to bring players into the story world, and the location brings it to life. But this part of the experience is really all about what the players bring to it. They may be flattered that this is all about them and Eve. In later sections, where they encounter actors or visit locations, they are more obviously being pushed around. It is a less pure and cerebral experience.
2. The creation of the cultural universe - props, flyers, and diegetic media
The creation of a simple prop like a flyer can have a significant impact on enlarging the universe of the story. Placing diegetic audio such as a radio show in public places has a very powerful effect of legitimizing the fiction into the real setting.
3. Performer encounters
These intimate, sometimes one to one encounters were popular and useful for deepening the experience and allowing for exposition. However, there are several important factors to bear in mind: 1) Some people feel awkward in these moments, and actors must try to detect this and not exacerbate any fear; 2) It is important to set the right “mood” in terms of not making the players too excited or paranoid – this is about keeping players in an appropriate “mindset;” 3) Questions should not be asked by actors - leading statements should be used instead.
4. The use of sets and real locations
The use of sets had mixed results. In the context of experiencing Eve’s memory of yesterday, a set could be argued to be a legitimate choice as it might underline the constructed nature of experiencing someone else’s mem. Otherwise, a real location would offer more frisson. For the next iteration I’d like to use a real dentist’s room and get the players to sit in the chair! This would surely be way more exciting.
5. The use of audio/video installations
Yes, a good idea, albeit requiring a lot of effort (and funding) to keep them running. I think the use of installations in pervasive drama is really exciting and audiences like them. I think I’m faced with a bifurcation here: to make pervasive dramas with installations or not. I’d love to create a drama that uses only a series of installations.
6. The use of conventional media
The use of a conventional TV drama scene was probably the weakest part of the experience: having employed media unconventionally for 70 minutes and then adding 15 minutes of linear video to the end was basically inappropriate for the form.
7. The role of player agency
The final research question was:
4. How can we make players active and not bring out in them their feat of being made to perform?
As we have seen, TMD offers player agency in subtle ways through personalization and participation as well as through a more explicit discussion and group choice. These were enough to satisfy the need for players to feel that there was agency. A future pervasive drama might offer more agency through a slightly different dramatic structure.
A final thought here is one about two opposing forces that became apparent through the feedback. Players reported becoming unimmersed when there were logistic failures such as them getting lost or having to wait to meet one of the characters. Perhaps as much as any failings in the writing or performances, these logistical gaps are a major source of disengagement from the drama. If the schedule runs perfectly, then players should not have to queue, and one to one encounters can occur seamlessly. If players miss an instruction, stop for a chat or get lost, they wander out of the tight schedule. This may be due to a lack of comprehension of instructions or it may be due to a desire to be autonomous and not feel “on rails.”[4] The effect of this can be that they find themselves in a broken structure with the workings and the scheduling exposed. They are glimpsing the scrawny man behind the curtain, not the magnificent wizard in front of it, and of course this undermines the magic.
TMD is an “on rails” production rather than a “sandbox”[5] or any other structure. In section 7 above I talked about the tensions inherent in the enterprise for a writer of pervasive drama to offer agency, how genuinely to give players agency without allowing them to unravel your wonderful construction for themselves or others. What is clear to me is that great logistics that can allow players to feel free even when they are on rails is as important as a great script, props, locations, and performances.
In short, the briefest set of conclusions that I will carry forward are as follows:
1. Make your instructions clear and repeat them several times
2. Keep the "mindset" of the players as open as possible to suggestion
3. Try to keep players on the rails
4. Keep the rails invisible
[4] "On Rails" is a computer gaming term. The definition from gaming website Giant Bomb reads as follows: "an on-rails game behaves much ike a train: while sometimes the player can choose which path he goes down, he cannot deviate from it. Seomtimes on-rails games even go so far as to decide when the player moves."
[5] "Sandbox" is a computer gaming term. Here is the definition from gaming website Giant Bomb: "Games that have an open gameplay structure that allows you to 'play' in the world and choose to participate in the story at your own pace."
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