The Playfulness of Narrative

Narrative Correlationism, we’ve said, defines participatory art as “ritualized behavior permeated by play,” borrowing nomenclature from Richard Schechner. (1) Traditional narrative forms are discursive, and participatory art forms are efficacious; Traditional forms, in other words, focus more on the telling of the story, and participatory forms focus on the effect it will have on the audience, the narrative experience that the artwork invokes. Participatory art is ritualized in that it is transformative, and in its ability to facilitate in the audience a deeper suspension of disbelief than purely discursive narrative art can ever hope to achieve. Not all forms of participatory art are games, but what they all do have in common is some degree of game-like agency that they afford their audience. In exercising this agency, audiences of participatory art are engaging in play. And this game-like agency, notably, is what distinguishes participatory art from traditional spiritual rituals.

Traditional, spiritual rituals are participatory (in that they afford participants roles to play within the experience), and art (in as much as any narrative performance is art), but they are not participatory art, as we’re defining it, because they lack that playfulness - that game-like agency - that we’ve said is one of the cornerstones of the form. In traditional rituals, there are very strict observances, and typically a very codified script defining when you - as a participant in the ritual - are supposed to talk, and what you’re supposed to do and say. Games and play, on the other hand, tend to emphasize improvisation, individuality and self-expression. In a game, you aren’t just a participant in the experience, you also have the agency to influence your experience of the narrative, by exercising your own creativity.

Games, throughout most of recorded history, have been considered primarily a leisure activity. And Turner points out that "Leisure is etymologically derived from the Old French leisir, which itself derives from the Latin licere 'to be permitted.'" (2) What this means is that games, writ large, have tended to be subordinated to “more important” pastimes, and in many cases relegated exclusively to the remit of children. For many people, engaging in play, then, is something that one has to receive permission to do. And this idea of “play permission” can take a number of forms. For people who grew up in a generation that primarily associates gaming with children, and who relegate gaming exclusively to a leisure activity, play permission is about reminding people that gaming is for everyone. Gaming is not trivial, gaming is not something that only children are allowed to enjoy, and gaming can have many positive effects on a person’s psyche that elevates the importance of play to something that is more than just entertainment. That, I think in part, is why “This is not a game” emerged for a time as the primary mantra of alternate reality games; Characterizing ARGs as something other than a game was a way of giving adults permission to play.

Another way to look at the idea of play permission is that participatory artists afford their audiences the permission to play in spaces that, historically, they would not have been allowed to. For example, even though a traditional theatrical performance is called a “play,” what the audience is actually signing up for is the privilege to watch others play. The performers get to play make believe, don costumes and pretend to be people other than themselves, and the audience is afforded the opportunity only to watch. In fact, most people familiar with the observances of orthodox theater-going are so indoctrinated to ideas like the complete separation between the audience and the performers, and a complete lack of agency by the audience, that immersive theater shows - participatory artistic experiences that afford their audiences a great deal of narrative agency - tend to require some manner of tutorial for the benefit of first-timers. Any immersive theater performance could be someone’s first, and the narrative designers behind the scenes have to find ways, within the experience itself, to explicitly grant the audience permission to participate. Because, absent that explicit invitation to interact, many traditional theater-goers will never attempt to do so, simply because everything they’ve ever been told about theater is that that kind of behavior is completely verboten.

I attended the Storyworld Conference in 2012, and while I was there I was fortunate enough to see a presentation on an Alternate Reality Game that Disney’s Imagineers had playtested at Disney World called “The Legend of Fortuna.” And one particular story from that event is one I always think of when discussing the idea of play permission. As Scott Trowbridge recounts it, for at least one family, “The Legend of Fortuna” facilitated something that - for them - was unprecedented. (3) The mother began the experience with her arms crossed, willing to participate, but refusing to don a pirate hat. The hat, for her, was a bridge too far, and one imagines her reluctance stemmed from a fear that engaging in this kind of play as an adult would make her look silly. But by the end of their playthrough of the ARG, the mother had become the participant who was perhaps the most engaged, dramatically holding her fake pirate sword to the throat of the main villain at the climax of the experience. And no one was more astonished at this turn of events than her two teenage boys. Not once, in their entire lives, had this woman’s boys ever seen their mother play. “The Legend of Fortuna” had created a context in which she felt comfortable to play for possibly the first time in her adult life, which was no doubt a transformative experience for her, but also an unforgettable experience for her family to share together.

The agency that participatory art affords its audience, as we’ve already discussed, also renders the experience more life-like, and by extension more meaningful. Every meaningful choice that you make within the confines of participatory artistic experience is a node of a story, part of a continuum of meaningful connections that you as a member of the audience are building across time. There’s a lot more to be said about the ways in which participatory art incorporates game-like agency, and about the reasons that games and game-like experiences play an important role in the lives of human beings. But we’ll circle back to that later, after we’ve explored more of the mainstays of the participatory art forms.

We’ve established so far that participatory art is transformative, like rituals, and playful, like games. In our next article, we’ll take a step back and examine the process by which these kinds of experiences are crafted, and the people who create them: narrative designers.

Move on to Entry #14

Go back to Entry #1

SOURCES

(1) Schechner, R. (2004). Performance Theory. Routledge. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000OI1836

(2) Turner, V. (1982). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (p. 40). PAJ Publications.

(3) [Future of StoryTelling]. (2015, September 25). Scott Trowbridge - Unexpected Magic: Inviting the Audience to Drive the Story [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhIOMjh0D3s