Under the arches of London Bridge two policemen pursue a murder suspect. The man gasps for breath, desperately searching for an escape route as the cops close in. Meanwhile, some place not far away, a crowbar-wielding physicist lunges desperately at a reanimated corpse. An experiment has gone wrong, opening a portal to a savage alien world. Chaos ensues.



Both of the above are performances of sorts; in the first, the suspect is an audience member in an immersive theatre production; in the latter, the physicist is a gamer. At first glance, theatre and games seem like opposing artforms – one steeped in hundreds of years of convention; the other technologically advanced and obessively forward-looking. But beneath the surface there are many similarities; they can play with us in ways that film and TV cannot. And increasingly they are moving closer together.



Being the story



Over the past three decades, the experience of playing video games has had a profound effect on the way artists and audiences engage with stories. Adventures like Myst, Half-Life and Grand Theft Auto have introduced fresh narrative structures and plot devices, and theatre practitioners have picked up on the cues.



Loosely embracing categories like "promenade performance" and "site-specific play", immersive theatre refers to any production in which audience members are put into the scene, and maybe even given bodily involvement in the action. Sometimes the audience is ushered from one place to another, sometimes they’re allowed to explore the space of the play all on their own.



Immersive theatre has grown in popularity since the beginning of the 21st century, its rise aligning with gaming's entry into the wider public consciousness. British companies such as Punchdrunk, Belt-up and dreamthinkspeak have pushed the form, filling warehouses with large sets and channelling the audience through their scenes much like a game will channel the player through a level. It’s clear the two art-forms tell stories in very similar ways.

Stories are divisions



Walls are a good place to start. In the expanse of an empty computer-generated environment, a game designer needs to erect walls; walls that inevitably form into corridors. Half-Life, that seminal science-fiction shooter, is a master-class in directing the player down these tight spaces. As you run from one part of the sprawling Black Mesa facility to another you choose how to fight, you decide when to hide, but you are inexorably funnelled down a path to a specified end.

Half-Life – a world of corridors and constrained spaces. Oh and transmogrified scientist monsters. Photograph: PR

It’s a technique familiar to anyone who’s been to see a piece of immersive performance. Liberated from the plush balcony chair, you are thrust into a world where you can go where you please, but you need to go different ways to see what happens next, down an alley, into a room. Making a good immersive show is difficult and, like games, much of the trick teeters on the balance between scripted-events and audience-freedom, between getting people to go down the corridors and making them want to go down the corridors all of their own accord.



In Rift’s 2013 adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, the audience members were cast as protagonists and squeezed around a transformed Shoreditch Town Hall. Given some agency over where to go, the audience were presented with an impression of freedom but were ultimately, like Josef K in Kafka’s tale, led inexorably to an execution site. It was a structure directly inspired by games. “Train, the level in Goldeneye 64 where you walk down one long corridor is utter genius,” says Felix Mortimer, Rift's co-director. “It’s great at guiding the player along a linear track. In The Trial we had a track which led our audience – but they would often challenge it.”

A scene from RIFT's interactive production of The Trial by Franz Kafka Photograph: RIFT Photograph: PR

This sense of defiance is also at the heart of The Stanley Parable, a surreal adventure game which sees the player constantly trying to evade the narrator’s direction. If you disrupt one line of story, the narrator needs to adapt to make a new one and in this way the game raises interesting questions about what can be done to empower the player while maintaining a satisfying narrative structure. If the player continually attempts to derail from the linear tracks, how else can a story be told?

“We try not to spoon-feed the audience,” says Felix Barrett, artistic director of Punchdrunk, whose show The Drowned Man, a fable about sixties Hollywood, is currently occupying four floors of the Temple Studios building in central London. “There are two ways of watching The Drowned Man. Either you can follow one character and treat it as a completely linear show, or you can follow your instincts, treat it as free-form exploration and let the beats of architectural detail lead you.

"It’s similar to how in Skyrim you can follow a character and go on a mission, or you can explore the landscape, find moments of other stories and achieve a sense of an over-arching environment.”

Skyrim – the sprawling RPG adventure can be as much about exploration as narrative Photograph: PR

For Barrett, exploration is crucial. Walls can make rooms as well as corridors, rooms with secrets to uncover. And uncovering here doesn’t necessarily mean unravelling or derailing the story, it can mean discovering separate, smaller tales. Skyrim lets you do this on a grand, loose scale, but for a more focused experience Barrett points to Gone Home; a game which puts you inside a large family home and lets you discover journals and tapes which illuminate the story.



“Gone Home has an implicit narrative,” says Barrett. “You’ve either just missed the action or it’s just about to happen and you’re suspended in-between.” Like Gone Home, The Drowned Man gives the audience space to discover messages and trinkets hidden behind cupboards and here again it’s these personal findings, more-so than any prescribed set-pieces, which stick in the memory. “Rather than an audience crafting their own narrative they are peeling back layers of story, almost archeologically,” says Barrett.

Fullbright Company's intriguing adventure game Gone Home feels like an immersive theatre production in its use of environmental story telling Photograph: PR

Both Gone Home and Drowned Man cast the participant as a hunter, an active assembler. You are not passively waiting for the next event to happen, you have to dig into the scenery and heave out the plot. This is a method that's very different from books and film, but shared by immersive theatre and games. In effect, understanding The Drowned Man is like solving puzzles in Grim Fandango or piecing together the history of Lordran in Dark Souls. It is interactive, not passive.



From linear corridors to rooms full of secrets, the question surfaces of whether audiences or players can completely construct their own stories in these environments. The interactive theatre company Coney certainly believes so. Its 2009 show, A Small Town Anywhere, casts the audience as citizens in a small town on the brink of social collapse. Given roles and nudged towards events, the audience had objectives to complete but the way these were achieved (or not) were down to the individuals.



“We developed a ‘game engine’, a live game engine, which was based on the play adapting to the gossip around the town,” says Tassos Stevens, co-director of Coney. “But if it’s a game it’s a badly designed one, because it’s deliberately open-ended about where the audience can take the action.”



There are echoes of game design in Coney’s method but, compared to the pre-programmed approaches of a game, the audience’s imagination and actor’s improvisation mean there are a multitude of ways to create a scene, as Tassos illustrates: “There was one performance where a teenage boy playing La Librarian decided that ‘her’ secret was that she was not a middle-aged woman but rather a man called Barry in hiding; he played this by sustaining a bad broken falsetto through the entire two hours of the show.”

Freedom and drama



It’s hard to imagine the same level of adaptability in a game story, but the possibilities of live performance can lead to limitations of another kind. While theatre has to make do with what’s physically at hand, in most cases a warehouse and dim lighting, games can expand beyond these boundaries into massive cityscapes, temples and mountains.



With procedural generation, these landscapes can pop-up differently each time. In games like Minecraft or Don’t Starve there are no real objectives other than survival; the balance between scripted events and player freedom skews toward the latter. While Coney’s show had a level of open-endedness, there were still actors and directors shaping the audience’s decisions towards a definite conclusion. While the prospect of a Minecraft play, in which audience members chop down trees and build cabins in an east London warehouse, sounds like a hoot, translating these open-ended experiences into a live performance would result in a pretty unsatisfying theatrical experience.

“How can you take theatre and put it into games?” asks Barrett. “What’s the Titus Andronicus of computer games? That’s the questions we want to be actively posing over the next 10 years.” The gaps in the brickwork mean that theatre and games can peer at each other, but the lines between the two are still there. Theatre shouldn’t necessarily try to be a video game, and games shouldn’t try to be theatre, but, as Barrett suggests, there are things to learn, techniques to borrow.



Games are growing, breaching into other spaces to define their own territory. Theatre is doing the same, snatching at its neighbours, testing its barriers. They make spaces of their own but the overlap is quietly growing. Standing in a room, whether in a game or a performance, you still search for story. You have the same desire to explore.



• Inside The Drowned Man with Punchdrunk's Felix Barrett – audio slideshow

• Interactive theatre: five rules of play from an audience perspective

• Wisdom of the crowd: interactive theatre is where it's at