Drama Theory

There are two standard works that look at virtual worlds from the perspective of drama theory: Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre ¹ and Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck ².

Laurel’s big idea is that computers are a medium, rather than a tool. She sees drama as a conceptualizing theory that should be applied for designing engaging human/ computer activities, its advantages over narrative being its emphasis on enactment—people perform. She argues that by arranging the action (in any software engineering project) about the interface, the rest of the design falls into place. When the interface is the human imagination, the possibilities are limitless.

This interest in interface leads Laurel naturally to virtual reality, which she regards with great enthusiasm. It is primarily for this reason that her work is often quoted with reference to virtual worlds, although it’s something of a distraction in today’s post-hype VR climate. More relevant is her general belief that the relationship between human and computer should be about creating imaginary worlds that have a special relationship to the real one ³.

Laurel’s approach focuses on the players, as both performers and (when the computer acts) audience. Murray, on the other hand, focuses on the work; for her, this is the performance that results from interaction between the players. She does mean players (rather than characters), too: Characters are like the masks of classical Greek drama, a device that by delimiting actor and role liberates the actor to become their role. Although it’s tempting to think of the virtual world itself as the theatre in which the roles are played out, this is not Murray’s approach ⁴; rather, she sees it as a narrator, telling the story that unfolds as the players perform. Her vision is essentially constructivist: Players gain by building the context through their actions—they define the world.

Thus, she conceives of virtual worlds as being the collaborations of virtuosi, rather than the works of single geniuses: commedia dell’arte as opposed to Shakespeare. They follow a folk-story model, where the story form is passed down through succeeding generations and repurposed by each for their own needs; the high culture model, by comparison, fixes the work and passes it down verbatim. This means that although the resulting stories may look derivative to the outsider, they can be intensely meaningful to the performers. Hopefully, as narrative formulae are developed, understanding the stories and creating more advanced ones will become easier.

Murray’s approach is far more story-oriented than Laurel’s, but she still basically regards computers as a medium. She identifies three important properties of this medium, which by now should be familiar to virtual world designers:

• Immersion. How it helps people construct, rather than merely suspend, belief.

• Agency. How it allows users to do things that affect what is being represented.

• Transformation. How the medium can change to enhance immersion and agency.

Although much of what Murray says is relevant to the design of virtual worlds, its applicability is limited by the fact that (from our point of view) she’s looking in the wrong place. In virtual worlds, players don’t perform the work, they are the work. The closure that effectively ends a performance occurs when its structure is understood; for players, that’s the key part of their hero’s journey.

Also, purely from a designer’s perspective, much of what goes on in virtual worlds occurs because of the way the world is structured. The virtual world itself may be created by a presiding genius who provides a context that allows the players to excel beyond what they would have done otherwise. Virtual world designers can certainly count such geniuses among their number; Raph Koster is the most obvious example.

Virtual worlds are not narrative components, they’re places. As places, they can be venues for genuine performance without reference to the art of their creation—“art within art,” in other words. There are genuine virtual theatre companies who act out pieces of interactive drama within virtual worlds to audiences. The most famous of these, the Plaintext Players ⁵, have been performing regularly since 1994. They don’t work to a formal script: They are provided by the director with a basic scenario ⁶, and improvise to fulfill it.

Although the Plaintext Players often record (that is, log) their performances, it takes an experienced reader of transcripts to get any sense of the power and inventiveness of the piece. It is unlikely that someone who is not accustomed to reading log files would find them inspiring, even if they were replayed in real time. Basically, you have to be there, live, witnessing the performance taking place in the context of your own ability to influence it, in order to appreciate it ⁷. This is despite the fact that there is some heavyweight drama theory behind them ⁸.

Part of the reason for this is that the Plaintext Players work exclusively in textual worlds. Graphical worlds are more accessible in this regard, and unsurprisingly many players do record activities in these worlds for later consumption ⁹. Most of these recordings are of a “home video” nature, with subject matter concerning things like weddings, fights, and bloopers. Others, though, are parodies; some are actual scripted dramas.

At the moment, these graphical pieces are limited by the fact that the audience cannot enter the drama either actively (by moving the camera wherever they want) or passively (having a director choose the camera angles). They are recordings of events from a single perspective; they only show what is on the recording player’s screen at the time. In theory, since the data exists anyway, it should be possible for members of the audience to change the camera angle themselves, switching points of view between participants, and getting in among the action. It should also be possible for a director to edit a cohesive and compelling narrative from the unlimited camera recordings that could be made available to them. All it would take would be for the graphical client to be able to record the incoming data stream and play it back. As a bonus, the amount of data needed to store a performance would be low compared with what is needed to store it frame-by-frame; feature-length events would be possible, instead of the five-minute shorts we have today. In practice, though, this is much harder than it sounds due to synchronization and cross-patch compatibility issues.

Some other papers concerning drama theory and virtual worlds are:

• Howard Rheingold, 1991 ¹⁰. Chapter 13 of this well-known book describes drama in virtual worlds as envisaged in the VR-optimistic days of the early 1990s. Although many of the predictions related may in time come true, if they do it will be because of the worlds, not the interface.

• Jen Clodius, 1996 ¹¹. Here, Clodius describes the use of dramatic performance to give in-world context to a meta-world event (the return of a former player to an administrative position). She characterizes performance in virtual worlds as a form of spontaneous communication, people playing off each other to express and convey ideas. The actual event she describes used a framework script (which is presented), enhanced by improvisation during its execution to account for the reactions of the audience.

• Susan Warshauer, 1994 ¹². Warshauer has the refreshing idea of examining (through interviews) the aesthetic approaches of two different virtual designers, to ascertain what they believed was important to virtual world design (simulation of reality, quality of room descriptions, and so on). Focusing on their attitudes to role-playing, she constructs a “dialectic of interacting” ¹³ that describes the motion that players experience between IC and OOC states. This is strongly related to the stances of RPG theory and the concept of immersion.

• Shannon Appelcline, 2001 ¹⁴. In this experiment, Appelcline wrote his regular Skotos column in screenplay format to demonstrate the problems that arise when material created for one medium is presented using another. Things work in different ways in different media, and not all transfer; some aesthetics intersect, but some don’t. You always need to adapt a work of art for a different medium, and therefore you always have to adapt your understanding of works of art for different media. In particular, models of narrative and performance appropriate for the silver screen are not necessarily appropriate for virtual worlds.

This depiction of virtual worlds as a medium links suspiciously neatly to the next topic.