ARTICLES

The Essential Ludology of Theater
Although theater is often restricted by a singular possible narrative, some scripts are designed to differentiate with every performed iteration. Loaded Cowboy is a short, experimental theater piece by Robert Quillen Camp. It is designed for twenty-five performers playing and switching between four primary characters. The role each performer takes is dependent on two variables: wearing a cowboy hat, or not wearing a cowboy hat, and pointing a gun, or not pointing a gun. These conditions are determined with an unpredictable, randomized “chance of operation,” such as a coin flip (144). This introduces a rather unique condition into the reading and any subsequent performance of this script, that being a randomized variable. The chance of operation determines how many performers will take on each role, or what roles are being included at all. This stage direction considers a facet of theater that is often neglected by designers and forgotten by audiences — that theater is live, and consequently, the activity within the medium is unforeseeable. This is often understood with audience-interactive performances, but the phenomenon exists within any form of live performance. Although it often remains an unscripted and unacknowledged element of theater, nonlinearity is fundamentally innate to theatricality; it defines the actor’s relation to the script and creates the audience-performer dynamic that is distinct to theater. The state of nonlinearity for the audience participant is not the focus of this argument, as comparisons between interactive theater and nonlinear mediums such as games are common and apparent. Instead, analyzing the traditional actor’s role as a game player will display the presence of nonlinearity in theatricality.
Within theatrical narratives, the various experiences of an actor rarely follows the exact undisrupted path the script itself takes. The actor’s relationship to nonlinearity in theatrical performance can be coherently visualized with LCD game animation. The Game and Watch series began in 1980, utilizing rudimentary LCD screens for short form entertainment. Through the lighting of dark silhouette “keyframes” across the screen, the player and other onscreen objects can move and be interacted with. For instance, in the Game and Watch game Fire, the player moves a trampoline, attempting to bounce victims escaping from a burning building into an ambulance. This directive media can be thought of as a “script” for the player; they must move the trampoline to bounce the victims. With a frozen view of all the LCD silhouettes, the game displays a coherent and linear narrative script, saving the victims from left to right. The reality of the gameplay is that the player will have to move the trampoline left and right on various occasions, following the path that the victims take as they fall. Although this is covert within the script, it is fundamental to the enactment. Coordination of the actor’s space, timing, and behavior are necessary to convey the overarching narrative. Unwritten directives in the script are often conveyed through subtext; the player knows it is necessary to bounce the victims when their active keyframe is just above the trampoline. However, the most important deviation Fire displays from a linear form of animation is an alternate result in the narrative, and in this case, failure of the task. Even within the limitations of the Game and Watch consoles, the developers highlight the fail conditions of the game, three spots where the victims can hit the ground. Within theater, the possibility of failure exists with going off the script, technical difficulties, or any other interruption to the planned narrative. Rather than utilizing imagery to communicate the conditions of failure, the disruption of the scripted narrative is universally understood as a blunder in the goal of immersion, which is a standard for narrative theater. The possibility of failure or any alternative to the script provides a sense of nonlinearity in every form of theater, regardless of how linear it may appear. Within Loaded Cowboy, there is no acknowledgement of potential error just like most theatrical scripts, but it includes the concept of alternative dialogue, that which may or may not be included in the actual performances. Like a frozen game of Fire, the viewer sees a multiplicity of outcomes.

Fig. 1. Fire. Developed by Nintendo, a Game and Watch System, 1980.

Understanding the actor’s identity as a player through the usage of the script gives a strong indication of nonlinearity in theatricality. Game designer and academic researcher Gonzalo Frasca identifies this role through his explanation of representation versus simulation in his text, “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” Representational media can be thought of as a one-way stream of information, like a picture or a video. With the framework of any representational medium, it is not manipulatable. Simulation includes representation, but also a “model of its behavior” through means of interaction (3). Traditional scripts are representational, but a time and space for performance creates the simulational element. In Loaded Cowboy, the model of behavior is very gamelike in the form of input and output it demands from the performer. Between every scene each performer adjusts the positions of their hats and guns depending on the hat and gun positions of the performers horizontal and vertical to them. This requires a “model of behavior” based on the live observation of performers by performers. Like the player of a game, no performer only functions as an output. They are sensors of their environment, acting when they observe the appropriate moment to do so. How Loaded Cowboy differs from a traditional script is the acknowledgement of the actor’s process; it outlines the sensory capability of an actor as not only a tool, but a necessity for performance. From the perspective of the audience, this effect could be a rehearsed process, but Frasca highlights that “to an external observer, the sequence of signs produced by both the [representation] and the simulation could look exactly the same [...], but simulation cannot be understood just through its output” (3).
The audience’s blindness to the simulational creates a divide in understanding the nonlinear perspective of theater, but Loaded Cowboy exposes this nonlinearity within the script itself. A script for a play cannot be considered simulational. It is purely symbolic, as the text does not literally resemble any component of what it signifies. However, the presence of alternative dialogue brings into question as to whether or not there is a linear means of reading the Loaded Cowboy script. Because the dialogue of characters may or may not be included from scene to scene, the ways of reading the script as it may be performed are practically countless and completely indeterminate. It brings into question the utility of a script in capturing the true essence of the performance’s theatricality. The permanency that is inherent to writing fails to capture the natural spontaneity of the live performance. This is the reality of every script, regardless of how controlled and extensive the production may be. The actors are not automatons and the performance does not exist within a vacuum. Perhaps this is what distinguishes the feeling of observing a live performance from something prerecorded. It’s the idea that anything at all could happen, maybe just this one time.
Experimental theatermakers like Robert Quillen Camp don’t attempt to create isolated anomalies within the performing arts, but rather create bridges of understanding between different mediums and means of thinking about them. Loaded Cowboy displays that the elements at play during a live presentation of theater are not built on the basis of constants, but rather an undefinable array of variables. This creates a matrix of unique experiences that can’t simply be recreated with dialogue and direction, but may only be experienced once in lifetime by those lucky enough to experience it.