Is There a Pipeline from Theatre to Games?

Something that's been rattling around in my brain for a while is how similar I've found the process of running a theatre organization and being on a game development team.

Theatre

Let's back up for a second. During my undergrad, I was very involved in my university's student-run theatre organization. I'm not that much of an actor, and I mostly was around doing stage management and other "technical" theatre things, but I eventually became president of the organization, and that year taught me an incredible amount about how the gears of an interdisciplinary project fit together and run together. It made me appreciate really the beauty of people who are incredibly talented in their own disparate fields working in tandem, despite their differences, or rather because of their differences, in order to make a show.

A musical that we put on would be the resulting effort of a little over 100 people in a production, working on designing sets, designing publicity, rehearsing music, directing actors, rehearsing scenes, building sets, painting sets, programming lights, designing sounds, making props, and managing all of it so that it actually happens. Really its a miracle it happens at all, and it sucks you in.

During my senior year, I stepped away a bit to get a breather and focus on my classes to graduate, and I took an RPG writing class, which was the beginning of my new interest in games.

Games?

I was always more of a writer, and I got into games through an interest in narrative design (hence the RPG writing class). However, I got ushered into game design as a whole because I loved the feeling of creating something together with a team that brought together people who were experts in things that I was not. When my team finished writing our 100+ page adventure for, I realized that I felt the same way I did after finishing a theatre production: That bone-deep tiredness, relief, pride, and satisfaction.

I took more game design classes, and I collaborated with more artists and programmers and writers. I ended up getting roped into an interactive/game/theatre/improv experience where we put on a show called Free To Play that was a choose your own adventure game, but the avatars and characters were actors, and the audience members were the players. Looking back, I feel like it was a kind of on-the-nose experience to tie together my thoughts on the intersection of theatre and games. At the end of the day, you're working with different people to create an experience for the audience. At the risk of sounding like a broken records, theatre and games bring people together both in their creation and in their dissemination.

As I've made my way into games, I've had the wonderful experience of realizing that I haven't really been alone in these thoughts. I've talked to a couple alumni of my theatre organization now, and I was either approaching them as an alumni of theatre or as a current member of the games world, but to my surprise they ended up being a part of both. Through my conversations with them, I realized that they had come through the same pipeline I did, and had many of the same thoughts. Maybe my sample size is biased because the alumni of my school's theatre organization are more often than not also alumni of a very technical university. Theatre + Engineering -> Games or something along those lines. But regardless I think there's something to be said about the addicting nature of pouring your soul out with other people into a creative project and seeing it come to life.

I think its just an interesting and somewhat unexpected connection between two worlds that at first glance seem pretty disparate: What does Pac-man have in common with Wicked? What does Baldur's Gate 3 have in common with experimental theatre? (One of the alumni I talked to actually works at Larian because they met someone through the interactive theatre scene, but that's besides the point). To me, games are a sibling to theatre--Both birthed from the arguments, compromises, and inspirations of incredible people of different disciplines and backgrounds.