91. Wolves and lambs
It must have been about six months ago when I first started getting adverts for Malthouse Theatre's The Hour of the Wolf in my social media feeds. It felt unusual for a production from a medium sized theatre company to be going out to market so far ahead of schedule - but perhaps that speaks to the scale, budget and target audience for the production. I wrote about the last Malthouse Theatre immersive production, Because The Night, back in episode #67 ['Immersion rewind'] and I’ve been eager to see what their next foray into the genre would bring.
As it turned out, it is an improved, tighter, more immersive production.
Hour of the Wolf’s storyline is a pretty straight genre mystery. It doesn’t upend or play with the conventions of the genre. In many ways that allows the audiences to engage more with the immersive form itself - perhaps this is a necessary trade off in this sort of theatre. It reminded me a lot of some videogames, the so-called walking simulators - Gone Home, Everyone’s Gone To The Rapture - conflict-free games where you wander through environments uncovering and unraveling a wider narrative through in-world props - and also teen mystery Life Is Strange. Given the younger target audience that this production will likely attract, these game-like feelings are something that many audiences will find a familiar connection with.
There are a couple of new aspects that move this production forward. First, all the audience wears headphones which relay ambient sound as well as the performances from the mic’ed up actors. Immediately this creates a coherent sound-world that envelops you even as you move from room to room. Because they seem to be using an IR-based system, it works very effectively and even the moments moving between rooms where the reception breaks down into waves of static, this too feels believably ‘in-world’, almost like hazy VHS memories. The headphones also allow for the presence of a narrator who suggests your options at the end of each ‘moment’ in the plot (“do you follow X to the pottery studio, or Y to the gym?” etc).
Second, the set is much more compact. The last production, Because The Night, used a lot of the Malthouse’s space but this set feels much smaller and denser. This makes for much less wandering between rooms ‘looking for the cast’ (and the action). Initially I had concerns that this might curtail the ability for the set to carry enough of the narrative, but that leads to the third important feature.
Third, the production uses a time rewind mechanic. This allows the audience to discover much more of the forking and intersecting narratives, addressing one of the biggest challenges in these sorts of productions - the sense that an audience often has of ‘missing a crucial moment’. Thinking about this mechanic, it is very much like playing a rogue-like game, repeating the same sequence over-and-over. This means that the performance is split up into a small number of set scenes that repeat allowing the audience to discover different scenes and perspectives by making different choices.
Combined, all of these features lead to a more satisfying shared experience than Because The Night. It is more ‘on rails’ as people in game design might say, but that also makes it a lot easier to ‘follow’. It also means that audiences aren’t left with ‘dead time’ wandering the set looking for something to happen. This is a common complaint in other productions and one that is hard to address as sets get bigger and more intricate in detail.
In adding these features - especially the room-sensing (with IR) headphone narration - I did think that more could have been made of this ‘extra expository audio track’. When Sandpit did their Adelaide production (and then VR) Ghosts, Toast and the Things Unsaid (2015) headphones were used to provide access to an actors inner monologue and thoughts. And in many videogames, audio is also used to reveal clues or back story (lore) in the environment. Being given the option at the end of a scene to “stay and explore the room”, made me wish that the narrator might return and guide me through more expository back stories as I opened drawers or looked at props.
Third Rail’s Then She Fell worked with a similar ‘remix/reorder the narrative’ with audience members moving through scenes in a different order to each other but they were not repeated exactly; whilst Teatro de Sentidas’ Echo of the Shadow have single audience members highly personalised 1:1 scenes but in a tightly linear sequence; and of course Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More was much more free-roaming and less narrative-centered. But I wrote a lot about those in Episode 67.
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve not mentioned the actors and their performances. Whilst the performances of the cast were solid - the close proximity and variety of positioning of the audience requires a combination of scripted and improvisational skills - I find that immersive theatre, in centering the audience, tends to turn actors into non-player characters (NPCs). The script was a little unremarkable - perhaps that’s the point, though. Again, there’s probably a PhD thesis in examining “the commercial popularity of immersive theatre against the rise of main character syndrome on social media platforms” (I expect a reader to tell me that one of their students is already writing this!).
Another thing that Hour of the Wolf gets right is ‘onboarding’. At Hour of the Wolf there is a need to quickly scene set, set up the rules of engagement, check everyone’s headphones are working, and then, through the set design, ensure the audience is split up into relatively equal groups to begin them in different scenes and narrative sequences. Those who remember the early days of Punchdrunk may still be scarred by being pushed out of the elevator on different floors and forcibly separated from your friends (it was a very effective tactic!).
My interest in onboarding really took off in the early 2010s with the Cooper Hewitt project and has been something that has only grown as service design methodologies became popularised and its practices adopted to varying degrees across many fields. A focus on ‘onboarding’ is increasingly being adopted by museums and exhibition designers - especially as it allows for greater openness from visitors and reduces the need for heavy didactic information inside an exhibit if it is done successfully up front.
Anyway, if you’re in Melbourne anytime before Dec 3 and have a spare evening and work in or around this field, then you’d probably get something out of it.
And speaking of videogames.
Recently Melbourne hosted the government-supported Melbourne International Games Week, a citywide takeover of games, this time with two epicenters - PAX down at the conference centre and the programming hub at ACMI. It’s sometimes hard to grasp just how large the game-interested public actually is but MIGW makes this very visible. I had just returned from my vacation and missed the first part of the week but that was more than made up for with Freeplay’s annual Parallels showcase - short Powerpoint presentations introducing new weird and often very funny local games that are in development. Some to look out for are Knuckle Sandwich, The Dungeon Experience (a crab as a dungeon master!?) **and, perhaps to readers of this newsletter in particular, Jessie Scott’s Videoshop Algorithm. Scott’s game first emerged in 2020 and is available in a free (and physical boxed deluxe version!) and is a good non-digital party game where you collaborate to conceptually connect a set of movies to other movies, like a 1990s videostore clerk. There’s some backstory too.
That was followed by a live puppet, projections and music performance celebrating the big local hit from a little while ago, Cult of the Lamb, a combination of Animal Crossing and a roguelike dungeon crawler - the kind of strange hybrid game that thrives down here. Commissioned by ACMI and part of Melbourne Fringe, the ‘Cult of the Lamb Ritual’ was a surreal and wild event. It was a rainy night - the rain paused for the ‘ritual’ and six thousand people crowded in trying to figure out what was going on. It was nuts - here’s a little video snapshot, take a look.
I’ve foolishly begun playing Baldur’s Gate 3, an astoundingly vast game that has surprised me in its versatility. I grew up at the peak of Dungeons and Dragons ‘satanic panic’ and played all those early derivative computer role playing games - Ultima IV, the Bards Tale series, and the ‘official’ D&D titles - Curse of the Azure Bonds and Pool of Radiance - on the family Commodore 64. In the late 1990s I had Baldurs Gate and then the sequel in the 2000s - I think I might have had to review the first one for a games magazine I wrote for back then. All these games were constrained not so much by computing power or graphics but by how they made a rigid implementation of the rule systems of D&D. As a player there were very obvious limited ‘choices’ to make and ‘ways to interact’ - which ran counter to actual D&D in which the dungeon master has wide latitude to unfurl the story with the rules as guide. As D&D has swung back into a mass market mainstream activity and players feel a great deal of freedom in how they play, the rigidness of computer ‘adaptations’ has become more visible.
Pippin Barr in their recent short book The Stuff Games Are Made Of about their own experimental art games writes, “a video game is not merely the sum of its parts but a far more complex interaction in which every element - platforms and programming languages, rules and raycasting, memory use and music - influences how play unfolds.”
Even decades after those early computer role playing games it is rare to find games that make a player feel like they can do what they are ‘supposed to’ but could also do all manner of other things if they wished. Yes, they could attack an aggressor with their ‘weapons’ as expected, but they could also set fire to something nearby that in turn makes something fall on the aggressor. Or just avoid the confrontation altogether by distracting the aggressor with a song. Sometimes the big open world games give the illusion of choice purely by their scale or, as is the case with sandbox game systems like Minecraft and Roblox, they forgo narrative altogether and cede that to the player/s.
Usually these ‘alternative ways of play’ in narrative games are discovered by speed runners or others looking for ‘bugs’, so its exciting to find a game that allows and actively encourages much more diverse ways of exploring its world. Added to this in Baldur’s Gate 3 is just the sheer variety of NPCs you encounter, each with their own voice and seemingly customized reactions to your behaviour.
Again like immersive theatre, the rules can’t be entirely open and opaque, otherwise it wouldn’t function as a coherent narrative or a game experience. It’s the productive tension around ‘just enough’ structure that allows players to explore but also not feel lost. I was surprised to find it runs really well on a recent-ish Mac laptop, although I had to dive into Reddit to figure out how to stop the game from quitting every time I kept pressing CMD (to look for things to pick up) and Q (to rotate the camera) together.
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I’ve also been getting out to a lot of gigs. Kiwi indie act, Fazerdaze zipped through town playing a great little show. This week coming up its Melbourne International Jazz Festival so I’m off to see Marquis Hill and later in the week, Makaya McCraven.
The Bandcamp situation has worsened and Miranda Reinert has a good overview.
“Bandcamp has been the reputational beneficiary of an unforced binary born of the era of convenience internet. It is the very rare decent middle man that is providing enough value to the thing people care about – supporting music and the artists who make it – that it’s become the only logical music purchasing option for many people. Fans have built libraries and have been able to feel good doing it. People want to support people who make the art and media that they enjoy. It’s obvious in the rise of OnlyFans and of newsletters helmed by individual writers. What Bandcamp did was make it so easy to feel good about the company beyond being that middle man service.”
While I was on vacation a lot of great new music came out, and the September to November period has historically been a peak for new releases - originally it was to get product into market before the end of year Christmas chart season. Even though that motivation has long passed with the shift to streaming, it remains a legacy industry tradition. Here’s a few things that have been tickling my eardrums, some of which are immediately available, and others on the verge of release.
Rival Self’s self-titled LP is sample-heavy psychedelic hip hop beats collaged together from snippets of lots of 60s and 70s records, spoken word cut ups in dialogue with hip hop catchphrases, all that sort of stuff. These types of beats have come back into vogue again, and, when done well, are still catnip to me - exactly the kind of tunes we used to play back at Frigid in the 1996-97 era. In a similar vein, with less cutting and scratching, and apparently from the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, is Monastry’s Collages. Again, this could have been released any time in the mid to late 1990s.
Local label Efficient Space has a splendid new collection of genre and decade spanning sounds, the next in their series of guest curator collections. Searchlight Moonbeam follows the fantastic Sky Girl (2016) and Ghost Riders (2022) in constructing a ‘mood’, a vibe, from seemingly disparate oddities unconstrained by geography or time period. I love these types of collection, put together with an old school mixtape aesthetic, and Searchlight Moonbeam veers from Taiwanese soundtrack music to offkilter indie, discordant electronics, and a French adaptation/cover of Moments In Love. Its not out for a couple of weeks but pop it in your wishlist or just pre-order. Its wonderful!
In an electro-pop style, Jenny Hval’s Lost Girls project has just released Selvutsletter. And in a very Melbourne-way, Vince Giarusso of Underground Lovers has put out a very synth-pop - almost early Pet Shop Boys-esque - solo album, I’m With You, as Vincey. It's cute and opens with a song set on a nearby street. And if it's just synths you’re after then Colleen’s latest album Le jour et la nuit du réel makes a lot out of a very minimal setup. And lastly, another record made by a friend - Sydney’s Gentleforce has a splendid short 'ambient and field recordings' album Life Anthems out on Oxtail Recordings that is like a warm blanket on an Autumn evening.
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There’s a lovely quoted quote in Justin Hopper’s 2017 book Old Weird Albion,
“As cartographer Tim Robinson has argued, 'A place name is a few words piled up to mark a spot; a few stones that fall down after some generations, perhaps for someone else to pile them up again into a different shape.’
I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
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And if you’re the podcast listening type, I was on two recent episodes talking about various things from earlier in the year. First was Substrakt’s Digital Works who spoke to me way back in February (but went live in September), and also Art Sense which recaps the Museums of Tomorrow event in San Francisco in April. A bunch of things I’ve written about are covered and as usual, some other stuff. Always listen at 1.25 or 1.5x speed!
Ok that’s it for now - all that should provide some distraction from the horrors and disappointments of world around us right now.
In solidarity, Seb