Spending eight hours in a theatre with 70 people playing through political donkey epic asses.masses was gruelling – and a tribute to gaming’s shared joyThis weekend, I spent more than eight hours in a theatre playing a video game about donkeys, reincarnation and organised labour with about 70 other people. Political, unpredictable and replete with ass puns, Asses.Masses is, on the one hand, a fairly rudimentary-looking video game made by Canadian artists Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim with a small team of collaborators. But the setting – in a theatre, surrounded by others, everybody shouting advice and opinions and working together on puzzles – transforms it into a piece of collective performance art.Here’s how it works: on a plinth in front of a giant projected screen is a controller. In the seats: the audience. Whoever wants to get up and take control can do so, and they become the avatar of the crowd. The game opens with a series of questions, mostly about donkeys, some in different languages, and quickly it becomes obvious that you have to work together to get them right. Someone in our crowd spoke S another knew the answer to an engineering qu I knew, somehow, that a female donkey is called a jennet. Continue reading...
Thursday 30 October 2025
theguardian - 22 hours ago
No half-assed performance: how playing with a live crowd turns video games into performance art
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