Interactive Theatre
Highlights
Participatory Agency
Agency is concerned with the range of actions that are available to the guest. When guests have the capacity to act on their will in some way, choose or make a decision, they have agency. Any restriction on what the guest can do limits their agency. Taken to the extreme, a world with full agency would be a world akin to Westworld (HBO, 2016), where anyone can do anything without limitation by the law, morals or conscience. It is up to the designer of the experience to limit the guest agency such that the experience would still be practical for the showrunner and enjoyable for the guest.
Reactive, Interactive and Proactive Agency (Astrid Breel)
In the article “Audience agency in participatory performance”, agency is described as follows: “Agency is concerned with intention and choice, so for a participant to have agency they should intentionally perform an action (however small) that causes something to happen or change within the performance as a result.
Visualizing Agency
- The different types of agencies differ in the areas they are concerned with, from the type and amount of freedoms and interactions they give guests to the type of consequences that come from guest decisions. This cannot be meaningfully simplified with a one-dimensional axis.
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