Immersive playable theatre performances are becoming more and more widespread. These performances have a double promise: the promise to transport their audience into another fully-discoverable-world and the promise of a certain level of agency for their audience for them to discover the set design and the plot in a playful way. The form that these immersive performances are taking can vary from small-scale interactive theatre with almost no technological devices and game theatre performances (which are replicating the settings of a video game by offering a level of agency similar to video games) to big scale
performances where the set design offers a narrative by itself and the actors are interacting with the audience on various improvisational levels. The parallel between video games and immersive theatre performances has also been around for a while as pointed out by some authors (e.g. Rosemary Klich, 2017; Biggin, 2017; Bakk, 2019) who draw attention to the variety of game mechanics that can be observed in immersive performances and how these mechanics nurture the development of such performances. The corpus for analysis is, however, limited (the UK-based Punchdrunk or the US-based
Third Rail Project’s company being some of the few examples), and performances outside the Anglo-Saxon world are almost entirely missed. In this paper I aim to discuss how certain forms of immersive
theatre amplify the participant’s sense of playability. In the first section of the paper, I will outline what societal and cultural context gave birth to this neoliberal audience attitude and why it is important to create artistic and critical immersive environments. In the following section I will present the performance Das Heuvolk (The Strawpeople) by the Denmark- based theatre company Signa I will also outline the audience survey that I conducted in the summer of 2017 with the aim of mapping the level of the participant’s agency and immersion in the performance. After this I will explain why the concept of immersion in experience-related discussions is becoming more common and how it pushes the creators to create environments
that urge the participant to discover as much as possible. I will also outline how these immersive performances are in particular using the thrilling effect of the new horror genre (Ndalianis, 2012), and the feeling of uncertainty (Bar-Anan et al., 2009) which intensify the thrill of choosing between multiple
possibilities. By relying on these aspects of the performance, I will point out how certain forms of immersive theatre, with the help of horror, create a element of playability , and I will also briefly discuss the history behind the current societal context and design frameworks that created the conditions that led to the
rising demand for, and therefore the development of, this kind of playable immersive phenomena.
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