Since the early 2000s, video games have become the economically dominant medium and their cultural importance has been growing ever since. It is, therefore, logical that an increasing number of creators of live performances are interested in video games. The influence of the latter can be viewed both thematically and formally (or scenographically), with various intermedia configurations (Muehlhausen 2014). The opposite phenomenon can also be observed: video games generally draw on pre-existing media and are sometimes inspired by live performance.
To better understand new performances that are marked by video games, it would appear beneficial for theatrical research to draw upon game studies. Conversely, video games are increasingly observed from the perspective of their performative dimension (Jayemanne 2019). Narrative strategies, immersion, interaction, identification, multimodality, characters and the relationship between physical and virtual worlds: the fields of investigation concerning the complex relationship between live performance and video games are numerous and compound (Nicholson and Harpin 2017). This symposium will bring together specialists in the field and will provide an overview of research into this relationship. These events will also constitute an opportunity to extend certain previously proposed analyses.
While intermedia theatre, in general, is the subject of a considerable amount of research and the various forms of participatory theatre, such as immersive theatre have also been the subject of several publications, the relationship between live performance and video games is still rarely studied and relatively few research papers dedicated to these issues exist (Biggin 2017, Dreifuss 2017, Männel 2018, Büscher 2018). Indeed, even if the portal nachtkritik.de has established the category, « Game Theater », in its lexicon, where journalist Christian Rakow writes on the topic since 2012, and although several doctoral theses have been completed or are in progress in relation to this theme (Foster 2017, Dreifuss, Männel), there is a limited number of articles that relate to this topic. It should be noted that two international colloquia were held at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK), in 2016, « Gamification: Digitale Ausrahmungen des Theaters » and in 2018 « Ludification im Theater. Neue Utopien des Theatralen », both organized by Dieter Mersch and Réjane Dreifuss. Lire la suite de Live performance and video games/ symposium