초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper separates immersive theatre from immersive experience, and explores the relation between audience interactivity and immersion in The Under Presents: Tempest (2020) by Tender Claws. Tender Claws’s VR immersive theatre that fuses Shakespeare’s drama and gameplay encourages the players to interact with the live actor, fellow participants, and the set to help realize the virtual version of Shakespeare’s tale of magic and forgiveness. Tempest is a multiplayer online game, and the relation between audience participation and immersion requires a game studies approach that distinguishes puzzle immersion from narrative immersion for such approach denies one specific kind of interactivity that guarantees the sense of intense involvement in all contexts, acknowledges the importance of the meaning of interactivity over its physical manifestation, and argues for an immersive experience that exists as a series of graded states. This paper applies the multivalent model of interactivity and examines cognitive interactivity, functional interactivity, explicit interactivity, and beyond-the-object interactivity in Tempest based on the author’s experience of the theatre along with the performance reviews shared through social media including Reddit and Oculus website (Facebook). The paper concludes that immersion in Tempest derives from various modes of interactivity and is experienced not as a felt/not felt binary but as a graded state consisting of states of engagement, engrossment, and total immersion. Tempest thus demonstrates how immersive theatre is not limited to tragedy and its sub-genres as well as how immersive experience can be constructed by gameplay (interactivity) as well as mise-en-scéne or design.
