The Interactive Theater of Video Games: The Gamer as Playwright, Director, and Actor

Unless you're Roger Ebert and believe that video games cannot and will never be art, video game designers, writers, and directors are starting to blur the lines between interactive theater and games.1 In the recently released video game Gone Home, for example, the player is a young college student who returns home from Europe to find her parents missing and a note from her younger sister taped to the front door. [...]is the video game now a legitimate rival of, some would even go so far as to say the successor to, the legitimate theater which has been described, even dismissed as "the fabulous invalid"?3 When filtering the play through his or her own life experiences, needs, agenda, interests, preoccupations, the spectator in the theater has always been a "player" in the loose sense of that word. [...]performances were half scripted, half improv, the latter coming into play when audience members joined the actors onstage, their role ranging from nonverbal members of a crowd to "new" characters in the ongoing story.