‘A whistle-blower contacts you, says they have information which the public should see. But they need your help getting it out there’ (Fast Familiar, 2020). This snappy call to action is the first line of the publicity material for Smoking Gun (2020), a recent interactive work by the UK-based company Fast Familiar.
Two of the creators of this piece, Dan Barnard and Rachel Briscoe, are former theatre directors who have abandoned work requiring conventional spectatorship in favour of more participatory projects (Briscoe, 2020). As such, Smoking Gun may offer a useful snapshot of the current state of ‘playable theatre’
in the United Kingdom. The publicity text continues, stating that ‘over 6 days, you receive information on your phone – you solve puzzles and put clues together to figure out what is going on’ (Fast Familiar, 2020). I suggest that the use of the word ‘puzzles’ is salient in describing many interactive works that might be
described as ‘playable’. As I have argued elsewhere, interactive performances can often be understood as puzzles, in the sense that they provide a latent text which is to be decoded, and this article develops my critique of a ‘textual paradigm’ in participatory performance (Harper, 2019) by proposing that works which centre upon excavation of pre-existing content are fundamentally unplayful. Drawing on the work of Brian Sutton- Smith, I suggest that play is, essentially, an act of experimentally reconfiguring prior experience to develop new agential capacities (Sutton-Smith, 1997). Consequently, since puzzle solving is an unravelling of latent text rather than a reconfiguration of textual material, this type of activity is less likely to confer the developmental benefits of play.
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