Page 114 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

114always inside a historically documented world. Video games thus make it possible to travel to places in time and learn more about each of them through virtual visits.Immersive theatreInteraction with the media is becoming so common that it is also spreading to areas such as the theatre. Although this sounds like something new, the so-called fourth wall that supposedly separates the audience from the actors has not always been there; for example, the choruses in Greek tragedies appealed directly to the people sitting in the auditorium. Nor do we need to travel back in time to nd other examples of theatre in which the audience takes part in the action: in children’s theatre, both puppet and stage shows, a dialogue is commonly established with the young audience, who often tell the characters what to do or warn them of danger. Once again, we nd that activities for children have set the standard for adult entertainment.There are various degrees of participation in immersive theatre ranging froman audience exploring the space to others where the audience decideson the actions or shows in which the participants play a role.There are various degrees of participation in immersive theatre ranging from examples in which the audience can explore the space where the action takes place to others where the audience decides on the actions, and nally to shows in which the participants play a role. The rst type of immersive theatre is characterised by stage spaces where the audience explores and follows various simultaneous actions. This is not something new, as María Irene Forn s wrote a play of this kind, Fefu and Her Friends, back in 1977. And the British company Punch Drunk has pioneered a type of immersive theatre with plays such as Sleep No More, which combines dance with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hitchcock’ssuspense. In these productions the audience are silent witnesses of the action, which takes place simultaneously in di erent parts of a building with several oors.We also have theatre that is directly inspired by video games, where the audience has to solvea series of puzzles for the action to continue, in other words cybertexts that involve playacting. Escape rooms – activities where the participants start o being locked inside a room and have to solve puzzles to escape – are becoming popular in cities all over the world. Activities of this type are inspired by escape the room video games, which were fairly popular in the mid-2000s and could be played from the browser; one of the earliest examples is Mystery of Time and Space (MOTAS) (2001). Whereas the popularity of the digital version of these games is waning, escape rooms have become a fairly popular group activity.Another example of plays that bring game mechanics to the theatre is the Berlin company machina eX, which stages productions inspired by the so-called graphic adventures that wereso popular in computer games of the 1990s. In Spain we have the group YOCTOBIT, which has staged interactive plays such as Mata la Reina (2012). These plays take place in small spaces and when the characters come up against a problem, the audience has to handle the props to solve the puzzle so that the action can continue.Finally, we have live-action role-playing (LARP), where there is no longer an audience as such; instead everyone takes part in a story thatis developed over a longer period of time, sometimes several days. This type of role-playing is a very sophisticated tradition in Scandinavia, where players not only dress up for the partbut actually live as their characters during the event. A few examples are Inside Hamlet (2015), a role-playing game that takes place in the real castle of Elsinore in Denmark, and College of Wizardry (2015), inspired by the Harry Potter stories, which is held in a Polish castle in theGAME DESIGN AS A CULTURAL DISSEMINATOR · CLARA FERNÁNDEZ VARASmart culture. Analysis of digital trends