What Games have started Theatre will complete
From Faster than Night to Theatre's Post-AI Future
Part 2 of the Theatre Arts Series
Haven't read [Part 1: Why Video Games Are Total Art]? I recommend starting there, but here's what you need to know:
The Setup: Games as Total Art
In Part 1, I argued that video games achieve Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk - "total artwork" - more completely than any previous medium, including Wagner's own opera.
Using Heavy Rain's "Shark" trial as example, I broke down how games synthesize:
Architecture as psychological space (suburban house → child's bedroom creating unbearable moral pressure)
Music that responds dynamically to player behavior (Normand Corbeil's adaptive orchestral score)
Acting performed in Brook's "empty space" through motion capture (my performance of Ethan Mars captured in physical truth)
Writing as moral architecture (David Cage's "I'm a father too" - four words, opposite meanings based on your choice)
Visual art of games spanning photorealism to stylized animation
Interactive choice making the audience co-author
Wagner imagined opera synthesizing all arts. Games went further - they made YOU part of the synthesis through interaction. You don't witness Ethan choose between killing Brad or sparing him. You ARE Ethan making that choice.
Games achieved what Wagner couldn't imagine: the audience as co-author.
But they didn't achieve total art completely.
Going back to my beginning
I was trained as a dancer from the age of four. By the age of 17 the expectations and the scholarships seemed to point in one direction: Musical theatre. However, my favourite moments in any musical theatre piece I performed were acting scenes. I loved the singing and the dance, but these were choreographed steps. Scenes could unfold unpredictably. It was only when I saw Dame Judi Dench in a rather average play, giving what I now see as a rather manipulative melodramatic speech that understood why I was so drawn to acting.
Judi stood downstage center, simply recounting the story of the final moments of her husband’s life before he ended his own life. The words, I forget. But I remember the feeling - the rolling of surprise after surprise as the story was revealed - leaning over the balcony in the cheap seats - trying to stop myself from shouting “No! Stop!” and looking across to see I was not the only one. We were all feeling the same horror and grief, we were allowed to feel it, we the audience and Judi shared in a moment where we were all in the world of the play. Humans feeling the same electricity… It is indeed hard to describe with words. It was powerful enough to fuel 30 years (and counting) of learning how to do it. The birth of a vocation. I was changed.
The Missing Pieces
Wagner's vision was synthesis - all arts serving a unified whole. Games added interactivity - the audience completing the synthesis through a live choice leading to a range of pre-recorded repercussions.
But total art requires one more element. The element games cannot provide, no matter how sophisticated they become. The element theatre has always had.
Now. And Now…and now. Liveness.
Not "also valuable." Not "still relevant despite digital dominance."
Essential. The final piece. Without which the synthesis of all the arts remains incomplete.
Games achieve synthesis and interactivity… near-total art. Live interactive animated theatre achieves total art completed in the “now”.
Let me show you what games are missing - and what happens when you add it.
1. Immediate Reciprocal Energy
When I performed as Ethan Mars, I'm in a motion capture studio in 2008. The performance was captured, rendered, shipped on disc. When you play in 2010, 2015, 2025—you're experiencing a recording.
No matter how sophisticated, games are extremely limited to respond to YOUR energy, let alone a group energy in the now.
Theatre requires both performer and audience to complete the circuit. The performance I give depends on your attention, your breathing, your presence. My presence. I remember the first time I got to watch a video and a mocap replay of a scene I had done. I found it easier to believe the video - but the mocap - which was just a cloud of 90 or so white dots outline my skeleton - made any artifice blatant. The fact is that physical presence delivers physical, paralinguistic and visual communication.
We're affecting each other, psychophysically, in real-time, in shared space.
Roy Mitchell wrote in 1929:
"Consummation of theatre is with the audience... theatre possesses the power to produce for the audience the revelation... of the ancient mysteries."
Mitchell’s "ancient mysteries" refers to real experiences: those that cannot be transmitted through description, only through direct encounter:
The dissolution of self-boundary in collective presence. That moment when you stop being an individual observer and become part of something larger.
The recognition of mortality as lived reality, not intellectual concept. Watching someone actually struggle with a choice where death—theirs or another's—is the consequence.
Empathy as bodily knowledge, not sympathetic understanding. Your nervous system mirroring another's physical state, your breath synchronizing with theirs, before conscious thought.
These aren't feelings you can explain to someone who hasn't experienced them. They're transformations that happen through you, not to you. Theatre—when it works—doesn't describe these experiences. It generates them in the moment, in the shared space between living performers and living witnesses.
This is what games can only approximate. Games are pre-recorded mysteries.
They feel interactive because you make choices, many of which will be based on how you feel. But the performance was completed years ago. The mystery is solved before you arrive. Ultimately there’s a limit to the response to how you feel.
Theatre, in contrast, is a live analog mystery, unsolved until this specific audience witnesses the specific performance when it happens.
2. Embodied Presence Without Mediation
Gaming experiences happen through technological mediation: screens, controllers, headsets, data gloves. Even the most immersive VR requires apparatus between you and the experience.
Theatre happens body to body, breath to breath, in shared space.
As AI is on it’s march towards making digital perfection trivial—infinite variations, personalized content, photorealistic everything—physical human presence becomes precious.
3. Communal Transformation as Shared Space
You mostly experience games alone, or with anonymous online others. Even local co-op means sitting beside someone staring at the same screen - like film a parallel attention, not shared space.
Theatre creates community. The person next to you is breathing the same air, experiencing the same moment, part of the same transformation. You're aware of their reactions affecting yours. Collective gasp. Held breath. Laughter rippling like contagion. A moment known in it’s uniqueness of now.
Mitchell understood this:
"The experience must be a communal one, since the individual cannot enter by himself into the higher realm of the mind."
Games give individual transformation. Theatre gives communal transformation—and those are different in kind, not degree.
4. Spontaneous Unpredictability
In Heavy Rain, I performed seven variations of the warehouse scene. Comprehensive branching—but still finite, predetermined possibilities.
In theatre, anything could happen. The best performances embody unpredictability into every moment - whether implicitly or explicitly.
This isn't a failure—it's liveness. The essential quality that cannot be captured, replicated, or digitized.
What Games Actually Prove About Theatre's Future
Games proved the concept of interactive synthesis. They demonstrated massive appetite for agency, often a taste for moral complexity, and spatial storytelling.
They showed us the path. Now theatre completes the journey
Interactive narrative: Theatre has ALWAYS offered this. We just forgot. Mitchell's productions let audiences move through space, choose where to focus attention, experience multiple simultaneous actions. Modern "immersive theatre" is an inheritor of what Mitchell did in 1911 with movable boxes and wash basins.
Spatial storytelling: Games use architecture and environment to communicate meaning. Theatre invented this. Every set design, every use of levels, every blocking choice is spatial storytelling.
“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.” Peter Brook - The Empty Space
Extended character development: Games offer 40-100 hour character arcs. Theatre can't match duration, but can match intensity. The transformation that happens in a one or two-hour live performance can equal the psychological depth that games take 60 hours to achieve. Both have their distinct value, a different temporal logic, a different hierarchy between ludic and narrative values, but equal power.
Moral complexity: Many narrative games let you choose between difficult options with no clear right answer. Theatre has done this since Sophocles. The difference: In games, YOU make the choice. In most theatre, you witness someone ELSE make the choice - and you carry their decision as your own dilemma. The interactive mechanism in games provides perhaps a deeper impact that theatre can learn from.
Active participation: Games position the audience as co-creator. Theatre can do this too - think August Boal and “Poor Theatre”, and moments in British Pantomime and Musical Hall, and Commedia Dell’arte. In the age of film it became unfashionable to break the “forth wall” on the theatrical stage. We built picture frame stages. We dimmed house lights. We made audiences passive voyeurs. I believe this was a temporary diversion. Games prove appetite for active engagement. Theatre can reclaim this.
"Faster than Night": Bridging Games and Live Theatre
In 2014, I co-created Faster than Night with Alison Humphrey. It was an attempt to answer a specific question: What if we took games' achievement of synthesis and interactivity, and added liveness? (Video Interviews etc. HERE)
What we created was among the most complete Gesamtkunstwerk yet achieved - synthesis of all arts with the audience as co-author, a living presence creating an unrepeatable moment in shared space. What would be lost and what would be gained?
Let me show you what we proved.
Here's what we built:
I performed live on stage, downstage left, in a seat with my face lit by a head-mounted camera. Behind me, a scrim/curtain projected my avatar—animated in real-time, driven by my facial performance captured through the mocap rig. Behind the curtain: engineers and Actor Melee Hutton voicing the AI assistant I interacted with as another character.
The audience communicated with The AI and voted on narrative choices via Twitter (Now X)
The story: Three astronauts. Two working cryopods. I'm awake and hold the key to general artificial intelligence - poised to solve world hunger, cure cancer. But I'm also fleeing something: ALS. My body is failing. My hope is to return to a cure by cheating time and death with faster than light travel.
The other two astronauts? The audience only knows them through me—an unreliable narrator desperate to survive.
Who lives? Who dies?
The audience decided through Twitter votes. The team assessed votes in real-time and communicated choices to Melee, who interacted with me as the AI.
The consequences were immediate.
If the audience voted to kill one of the other astronauts, they heard them scream. Not later. Not in a cutscene. Now. While we were all in the same room.
What Worked That Games Can't Do
You saw me. Not just the avatar—me. Downstage left, visible, breathing, sweating, performing in real-time. You could see my face through the head-mounted camera rig. You knew this was happening now.
You saw each other vote. Twitter was public. You knew how your friends, your partners, the stranger next to you voted. Social pressure. Moral witness. The vote wasn't abstract—it was communal decision-making with social consequences.
Neither of us knew how it would end. I didn't know what you'd choose. You didn't know what I'd perform in response. The narrative in many places was emergent - predetermined plot points but improvisational responses to your live choices.
You were responsible. When that astronaut screamed as they died, you heard it. Everyone heard it. And everyone knew it was because of the vote. Not because a game designer scripted it. Because you—collectively—chose it.
This is what games cannot give you: live moral consequence witnessed by a community.
I am not sure we fully realised what we had achieved and how predictive the production was. Now it seems evident: This wasn't 'bridging' games and theatre. This was completing what games began.
Games achieve: Synthesis plus Interactivity. We made a first step to Synthesis plus Interactivity plus Liveness
That's total art more fully realized.
What We Learned
In 2014 the limitations were real:
Cost: Motion capture equipment, specialized suits, technical crew—prohibitively expensive unless funded for education or research. We could do it once, maybe twice.
No Technical precedent: This had never been done before. Although I was using cutting edge technology of the time (I was a business developer for Dynamixyz) we had to use a cellphone strapped to my head to capture head motion. I got my dad to design a simple light switch system so the team behind the curtain could notify me when the facial capture froze. The show could only run for two one hour performances and could only use one headcam - restricting the narrative to a near solo performance, and a shorter time to prepare for the ending emotional moral choice.
No Theatrical Precedent: It was difficult to persuade traditional theatregoers of where the drama would be - how it would make them feel - if they were distracted by phones and tweeting. Also there was a risk that non-tweeters would feel left out. It was likewise hard to sell as a proof of concept after the show - even though it was clear that much of the audience had been thoroughly moved to a degree that had not felt in theatre before.
Agency vs. cumulative voting: When choices are crowd-sourced, individual agency feels diluted. You vote, but so do 200 others. Does your choice matter? (I would now make voting blind rather than public to avoid social consensus pressure.)
Scalability: Every performance required technical setup, specialised engineering team, five people behind the curtain. It therefore couldn't tour easily without significant funding. It just wasn’t scaleable. It needed further performances, monetised platforms, it needed more experimentation, it needed the technology we have now!
But here's what we proved:
Live animation can carry dramatic narrative. You weren't watching a tech demo. You were invested in whether I lived or died—and whether you were complicit in murder.
Interactivity has layers. Proximity matters. People in the front row feel different from the balcony. So Twitter voters felt different participation than people just watching. Multiple tiers of interactivity can coexist - and this can be a strength.
Improvisation unlocks liveness. The most powerful moments weren't the branching plot points - they were my improvised responses to live tweets at the beginning, establishing the "game mechanic" through play before the high-stakes choices arrived - and my genuine state of apprehension not knowing how the audience had voted.
Social voting creates moral weight. You weren't anonymous. You saw how your community voted. This added ethical pressure games don't have—you couldn't hide from your choice.
Where This Points
Ten years later, the technology has changed dramatically:
AI-powered mocap can run on webcams
Streaming allows simultaneous live and remote audiences
VR can place remote viewers inside the narrative space
Actors can switch roles instantly through game engine systems
Every performance can be recorded until a standalone "offline" experience emerges
So the technology is there. We are now at the threshold of the next generation of theatrical live experiences leveraging this technology for human connection.
Imagine this:
A small audience filters in to seat themselves around an empty space, the floor a soft surface of black and grey tiles each 1 meter square. It's a dedicated capture volume. Around them cameras are arranged ready to capture the physical movement of live actors. The set is made up of wooden crates, see-through wire walls - designed so the cameras get an unobstructed view. The actors are animating characters in real time that are in a virtual world that is projected on a big screen above them - the audience can flip between live action and live animation.
With a VR headset somewhere in a midwest state, joined by students from a film school in Norway, and many others from diverse parts of the globe, a teen joins the production inside the same world as the animated characters. All the viewers can walk right into the scene - choose where they look - who they look at. They are ghosts witnessing the scene from within.
On YouTube or Netflix - the 2D image of the play is being streamed live. The live event TV viewership is back. The view and camera position being directed from within the volume using virtual cameras.
Music and effects are cued by different triggers - either in the scene, or even cued by the tone and the performance of the actors.
Each Audience is experiencing something communal according to the rules of the platform they are joining with; Live means imperfect, live means always unpredictable, live means human. The actors can switch what role they are playing with every performance by random selection. The character rigs can be anything and can switch with the click of a button - digital quick changes. The actors can improvise and change the perception of a character - or even how things unfold.
All three audiences participate simultaneously in the same live performance. Different proximity, different levels of agency, the voting systems made appropriate to each platform, but all affecting the same outcome in real-time.
The performer responds to all three audiences. The narrative branches based on collective participation across physical and digital space.
Now imagine serialising the story and revealing it in episodes that are wrought from the choices of the various audiences. Charles Dickens meets Heavy Rain.
Here's the crucial part: Every performance is recorded from multiple angles/perspectives. After enough performances, you have all the major branches captured. You can then assemble a standalone "offline" game—the way Heavy Rain exists now—but it was generated through live performances, not a collection of prerecorded scenes with no audience.
Theatre becomes the generative engine for validated interactive media.
Theatre doesn't compete with games. Theatre becomes the generative engine for total art - creating the content through live performance that can then exist as standalone games.
Not defending relevance. Not preserving tradition. Completing Wagner's 180-year-old vision.
The Unsolved Challenge
The most compelling element of Faster than Night was the feeling of agency and responsibility. You made a choice. Someone died because of it. You heard them. Everyone saw how you voted.
That ethical weight and the competition between deep human values is what made it matter.
Understanding how to deliver the feeling at each level commensurate to proximity - and how these layers interact - remains the biggest challenge. What does agency mean in crowd voting? How do you find the right balance between predetermined structure and genuine improvisation? How do you ensure that technical systems don't overwhelm human drama?
But these are solvable problems, just as film learnt its own rules and language, and games too. Solving these problems creates something greater - Total Art.
Communal moral consequence in real-time across physical and digital space.
That's not a game. That's not traditional theatre. That's the next evolution.
The Post-AI Necessity
Here's why this matters urgently:
In 5-10 years, AI will generate:
Perfect photorealistic video on demand
Convincing voice performances
Infinite variations personalized to you
Game worlds that adapt in real-time to your preferences
Digital content becomes essentially free and limitless.
What becomes VALUABLE?
Authentic human presence (can't be faked by AI)
Spontaneous response (genuinely unpredictable)
Shared spatial experience (bodies in same room)
Community formation (real relationships, not parasocial)
Skilled craft (years of training visible in living movement)
Theatre offers all five.
As AI dominates entertainment, live performance becomes:
Countercultural act (asserting human value)
Spiritual practice (Mitchell's "higher realm")
Community building (connection in isolated age)
Cultural preservation (techniques passed body to body, not through data)
This isn't nostalgia. It’s a movement.
Mitchell wrote in 1929 that theatre would become essential as mechanical reproduction advanced. He was describing radio and film. He would recognize our AI moment instantly.
Conclusion: Why I'm Arguing This at the Arts & Letters Club
Video games prove that:
Massive audience exists for sophisticated narrative art
People want to be active participants, not passive consumers
Spatial storytelling communicates powerfully
Performance-based entertainment matters deeply
Moral complexity without easy answers resonates
Total artistic synthesis creates profound experiences
But they also prove the limits of digital mediation - and point toward theatre's next evolution.
The Arts & Letters Club pioneered experimental theatre 115 years ago. Roy Mitchell created sophisticated productions from wash basins and boxes. He understood that authentic human transformation happens in shared space, live.
We can pioneer the next stage of live performance.
Not by rejecting technology. Not by retreating into nostalgia. But by understanding what technology reveals and how it can serve what humans actually need:
Live. Spontaneous. Communal. Breathing the same air. An embodied shared experience at differing proximities. Creating unpredictable moments that exist only once, witnessed only by us.
Building the Community
For live animated storytelling actors need to be trained to easily embody different characters - similar characteristics but actor-specific interpretation. The actors need to bring back a focus on immediacy of acting in the moment, live, with no immediate second take, able to improvise when narrative branches are selected or when things don’t go as planned.
Physical transformation and nonverbal storytelling in an empty space is what I teach when I teach for the Mocap Vaults. The technique I developed and taught over 20 years - GAP technique is designed to give actors the live abilities - re-visiting old values with a modern understanding of behavior and psychophysical motivation. Time and time again I have had the hair stand up on my neck, my arms, when an actor “gets” it. There is electricity in the air, everyone feels it - the same feeling I had on the balcony watching Judi Dench.
This is the pedagogy I will teach at the Arts and Letters club, with the intent of building a community of actors ready for the next iteration of Total Art - free of onerous financial constraint, in a building dedicated to creative exploration, continuing the line that Roy Mitchell and his peers began.
Theatre can achieve something games have paved the way for: total art through PRESENCE.
Mitchell saw this coming in 1929, watching film and radio arrive. He wrote that live performance would become culturally essential as mechanical reproduction advanced.
We need to remember it in 2025, watching AI arrive, knowing that theatre is positioned to adapt once again as it has adapted to every other social and industrial change.
When the world is saturated with AI-generated images, music, narratives—infinite digital synthesis at near zero cost—what becomes irreplaceable?
Complete synthesis. Total art.
Not synthesis alone (Wagner's vision). Not synthesis plus interactivity (games' achievement). But synthesis plus interactivity plus liveness.
Human, live, communal experiences - as old as fireside storytelling and cave paintings - aren't nostalgia or a retreat.
They're the completion of total art that games made possible but cannot finish.
That's what we build next. That's what Roy Mitchell would recognize instantly. That's what the Arts & Letters Club can pioneer again.
Not preserving the past. Building the future.
About this series: These blogs are preparation for members' talks at the Arts & Letters Club, building toward a proposal to revitalize our theatrical tradition.
