The evil that lurks in the hearts of men is exposed via the looking glass of Art Gaming

Theatre.

Before the turn of the century, it stood alone as the only artistically credible medium — its playwrights the Jason Rohrers of that dark, pre-digital age — its players the carriers of a great weight of prestige, rather than merely a great weight.

Yet decades later, the creation of the automobile, the invention of AIDs, and a bevy of man’s other great achievements and modern conveniences have strangled theatre. Times change, and so shifteth the topography of the artscape. What could once only be appreciated by the critic has come to be appreciated only by the pimple faced high school drama student — a pitiful creature whose social nakedness is covered only by a beaten, gray Les Misérables sweater; whose first and only kiss came at the end of Act 2 of Batboy, a play in which he played the titular role.

Where Shakespearean wit and subtle sexual puns once filled modern high school auditoriums with awkward silence, the mechanics of Increpare‘s Theatrics achieve the same for the auditorium of the mind.

In this electronic hypertheatre of the future, a future of ironies, you are at once the player, yet the playwright. You wield a great and terrible power, as playwright you are lord of all artistic creation. As player, you shoulder the monstrous burden involved in expressing human emotion to a bespectacled and autistic audience. Love. Betrayal. Joy. Rage. It’s all here, broken down into its smallest constituent parts and delivered straight into your faux-8-bit nasogastric tube. You know that you are being creatively nourished, and yet inherent to its delivery is a great emptiness. For the great feast is bypassed, and Theatrics is a game of pure utility.

At this time of great mirth and excess, the dawning of a new decade, it’s important to take a step back. Theatrics puts life in perspective. A means to an end. The dull minutiae of our lives stripped away, reduced to nothing more than a list of instructions. All the world’s a stage 1-1, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, so too does Theatrics. Theatrics is a food for special medical purposes, created on an industrial scale in a cold steel laboratory, shipped via a leviathan logistics network to your primary care giver, administered through your tube whereupon it percolates in the small bowel of your mind. Here it festers, it leaves its mark, and at last leaves the body as fundamentally unfulfilled and retrospective as Krapp himself, age-weary and sun-shrunken, huddled by his tape recorder, awaiting the end.

Theatrics, by Increpare, Browser

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 11:18 am and is filed under Freeware, Gamepiece, Indie As Hell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.