This Tuesday, we popped over to the opening night of Block Stop‘s “By The End Of Us” (running at Southwark Playhouse until 11 June – two more nights, as of now).
We’ve shown Block Stop’s work at a couple of events in the past – at the Wellcome Play Spectacular and at Now Play This 2016. They make “staged interactive events in which participants simultaneously experience both video gaming and theatre”.
What this tends to mean, in practice, is that there’s a playable actor – a performer with a camera strapped to their head – whose point-of-view is livestreamed, in videogame first-person view, to a player. The playable actor asks for advice as they explore tunnels, talk to other performers and hunt for their objectives; the player gives instructions and suggestions, attempting to navigate the actor successfully through the story (solving puzzles, defusing bombs, tracking down enemies, suggesting things to say to other characters, etc etc).
