Storytelling is a core part of the human experience, and as new technologies are introduced, they quickly become adapted to the telling of stories. The internet gave people the storytelling tools to create online games like Fallout 76, and those games in turn give players tools to become storytellers.
Sometimes this takes the form of roleplaying—the act of telling an improvised narrative within the space created by a game—but for the Wasteland Theatre Company and those like them in other online games, the medium creates a digital venue for classical performance. Much like live plays can be broadcast on television, so can online games become the stage for plays. For instance, The Wasteland Theatre Company recently staged a performance of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.
As performers got ready for the November 19 debut of Coriolanus, Wasteland Theatre Company's Artistic Director Northern_Harvest spoke to The Best War Games about staging classical plays in a digital medium like Fallout 76. To Harvest’s understanding, their performance marked the first time Coriolanus was performed in a digital space like this, though there’s a growing movement for similar online productions across the spectrum of massively multiplayer online games.
Shakespeare performance continues to evolve, thrive, and adapt to new audiences in new ways, whether on stage, in movies, podcasts, or non-traditional spaces: that’s what makes Shakespeare so timeless. Being the first to perform Coriolanus in this digital performance space opens so many doors for the relationship between gaming and theatre, and what better way than this great Shakespearean tragedy?
But performance on the massively multiplayer stage is a growing interest for gamers and performers. In Final Fantasy 14, for instance, there are multiple groups that put on performances from the lauded A Stage Reborn to the folks of Curtain Call Theatre writing their own original scripts based on the world their theater inhabits.
Coriolanus, while hewing close to the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon’s work, does adapt itself to its setting as well, making comparison to the work done by Curtain Call evident. What both companies do is bring elements of the games they performed in into the bones of the plays they perform. It is a fascinating evolution of stage performance that blends the medium itself with the production.
Despite being Coriolanus, the version performed by the Wasteland Theatre Company is Fallout’s version of Coriolanus. Not only would the same play be different in Fallout 76 and Final Fantasy 14 due to mechanical differences, but due to the differences in the setting of each, as these digital theatre companies take the step to evolve the performance in a unique way with the medium they’ve chosen to perform in.
And that it would be even possible in multiple MMOs is a testament both to the creativity of players and the way developers have broadly supported these kinds of creative endeavors through letting players have the freedom to build spaces in these games. On top of that, both games’ communities have been very accepting and encouraging of the growth of performing arts within their digital communities.
Fallout 76 allows us to build theatres, stages, and set designs specific to each of our productions. Our stage designer PapaGator aka Hera Jura aka ThorOdinsdottir is renown in the Fallout 76 community for her ability to use the build mechanisms in-game to produce amazing stages and sets … The Fallout 76 community is famously among the most welcoming and supportive communities in gaming, and that lends to an environment where people can do fun things like theatre together. The tragic post-nuclear apocalyptic environment of Fallout lends really, really well to the themes in Shakespeare.
From the recent Wasteland Theatre Company performance of Coriolanus to the upcoming Curtain Call debut of House of Ice, the emergence of the MMO theatrical performer seems to be an area of creativity, expression, and community art that will continue to evolve in the years to come.
Fallout 76
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 54 /100 Critics Rec: 9%
WHERE TO PLAY
Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of Skyrim and Fallout 4, welcome you to Fallout 76. Twenty-five years after the bombs fell, you and your fellow Vault Dwellers—chosen from the nation’s best and brightest – emerge into post-nuclear America on Reclamation Day, 2102. Play solo or join together as you explore, quest, build, and triumph against the wasteland’s greatest threats. Explore a vast wasteland, devastated by nuclear war, in this open-world multiplayer addition to the Fallout story. Experience the largest, most dynamic world ever created in the legendary Fallout universe. Expand southward to Skyline Valley – a brand-new region of Appalachia. Investigate the cause of the electric storm circling overhead and unveil the mystery around Vault 63 and its dwellers, including a shocking new Ghoul type – The Lost.
