Immersive Theater : One of the origin of the Nonlinear Narrative in Video Game

Immersive Theater : One of the origin of the Nonlinear Narrative in Video Game

  Immersive theater, a kind of theater can break the boundary between actors and audiences, creating a special space for audiences to join to the theater. With different perspective of watching the theater, audience would have different understanding of the theater.

  

  <Sleep No More> is a very famous immersive theater. It presents a tragedy happening in McKittrick Hotel. The performance stage is the whole McKittrick Hotel and every room of the hotel is a small performance stage. Audiences can shuttle among these room and watch these theaters by their ways.

  Immersive theater seems like a game happening in our real life. In <Sleep No More>, audiences could choose what they want to watch, which story they want to follow, which room they want to explore(they are many items in these rooms, all of these items would provide some relevant information of the story). If you want, even you can stay in candy house for 3 hours. 

  Nobody can get all information in one time. Every audience only can get some part information of the whole story, which like fragments of a picture.

With watching more times, audience would know about many branch story in those rooms, making the whole story presents more clearly in front of the audiences.

  

  In the <Sekiro: Shadow Die Twice>, we can see many characters of Immersive theater. Branch story in Sekiro like the rooms in McKittrick Hotel. If players can experience these branch stories, they would have a deeper understanding about the NPC's background, motivation and destination.

  I believe that there are many same thing in narrative field between theater and video game. What we need to do is learn from each other, because we have the same goal: bring a good experience to audiences.  

Gadio Early Access Vol.28(Chinese): 

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1J4411v76N?from=search&seid=472172082650988794