Block Stop: The theatre company taking live-action video games to the stage

There’s nothing more British than the theatre (except, maybe, for scones, scampi, and football). Go anywhere in a major city and you’ll invariably see an advert for a new production or a new play. Whether it’s as old as Shakespeare or as radical as a computer-generated musical, there’s always something waiting in the wings. As such, it makes sense to find a company like Block Stop in London, who specialise in what they call “live-action video games.”

“When Block Stop started out, we were just a bunch of bushy-eyed theatre graduates interested in video games and experimenting with interactive forms of theatre,” says codirector David Thompson over email.

Their first endeavour—Who Killed FionaFarenheit?—was a final-year university project with an unusual hook: hop into a Second Life avatar and take on the role of a murder suspect. Players were encouraged to make use of their online anonymity, and to be “tactical, mischievous, and just a little brazen.” Unfortunately, Who Killed FionaFarenheit? didn’t prove particularly sustainable, requiring the use of at least 11 decent laptops.

“Begging and borrowing no longer felt like an option and we simply did not have the finances to pull it off,” writes Thompson.

So, the team parked the show. But Who Killed FionaFarenheit? was just the beginning. Dead Wait came next, heralding a new fascination with live-streaming. Their projects quickly grew in scope, scaling upwards, evolving from tense one-player experiences to multi-tiered extravaganzas such as in their latest show, By The End of Us.

Here, audience members find themselves watching a cat-and-mouse game through a variety of live feeds as an assassin named Mia Culper stalks her target. For a little extra, one lucky participant can take on the role of the Contact and liaison directly with Mia, broadcasting instructions. Meanwhile, the remaining spectators deliberate among themselves. Unlike the Contact, their interactions with the show are limited. Every decision is crowdsourced, a product of consensus.

Critics had mixed responses to the production, praising the idea but not the implementation. Many noted that the pacing was slightly too reliant on the enthusiasm of the Contact. But Thompson did not seem deterred by the reviews. If anything, he seemed eager to implement what they’d learned from the experience.

“We knew this would be a big step up for us and weren’t entirely sure what kind of effects these changes would have on our work. It has been a huge learning curve for us, and certainly not seamless, but reactions have been encouraging,” he says.

The ideas on which By The End of Us is built aren’t necessarily new, but are nonetheless new enough that they can’t be easily categorised. “At the moment there are a load of terms floating around,” says Thompson. “Street games, physical games, pervasive games, role-playing games, interactive theatre, immersive theatre, even our own coined term of ‘live action games/videogames.’ The distinctions between these terms seem to be getting more and more blurred and, in some cases, are basically the same thing with a slightly different skin.”

Which makes sense, really. There’s a maker-like vibe to these productions, whether it is games like Johann Sebastian Joust, simulations like the LHS Bikeshed, or even Punchdrunk’s collection of immersive productions. Only one commonality unites them: a sense of physicality, so unusual in this era of growing digitisation.

This is the reason, perhaps, why things like escape-room games are fast gaining popularity. People crave touch, crave the tactility of physical interaction, of actually inhabiting a space instead of passively consuming someone else’s story. But while participants might be willing to stretch outside of their comfort zones, Thompson insists that the team had learned to not ask too much of their audience in the beginning, and instead allow them to adapt and ease gently into the experience.

“We find that, by about halfway through a game, most players have relaxed themselves in and are immersed in the experience—even to the point where some forget that it’s a game at all,” he says.

Getting there, however, requires careful thought. A key element, Thompson explains, is framing: “Very subtle differences on things like user interface or how you phrase rules or objectives seem to have a massive effect on player psychology. Even something as small as changing an objective from ‘stop the assassin’ to ‘stop the assassination’ can have huge consequences.”

The approach echoes Punchdrunk’s philosophy to an extent. In an interview with The Guardian, artistic director Felix Barrett talked about minimizing spoon-feeding, permitting audience members to experience The Drowned Man—a large-scale production pivoting around a tragic love story—on their own terms.

“There are two ways of watching The Drowned Man. Either you can follow one character and treat it as a completely linear show, or you can follow your instincts, treat it as free-form exploration and let the beats of architectural detail lead you,” he said.

It’s all a little bit of magic, regardless of whether you’re discussing theatre or video games. The viewer’s role is ultimately limited, possibly even inconsequential. But like with stage illusions, the trick is convincing the audience to believe otherwise. Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead became the topic of much debate for that reason after the Internet learned that player choice in the series, at least from a mechanical standpoint, wasn’t terribly important at all.

Proponents of the game, however, argued that the illusion of choice can be important and that even if the narrative itself is predetermined, these small decisions work to enhance player immersion.