The Spontaneous Playfulness of Creativity: Lessons from Interactive Theatre for Digital Games

This paper argues that the practices and theories of improvisational and activist theatre can enrich digital game design by introducing spontaneous, playful creativity into how developers conceive characters, relationships, social issues, and gameplay. Its author, Lori M. Shyba of the University of Calgary's Digital Media Laboratory, positions games as a temporal art form akin to a symphony, and presents the work as a call to action for designers and development teams to adopt kinaesthetic, hands-on approaches rather than relying solely on conventional technical topics like facial rendering or AI agents.

The paper draws on a set of practitioners, including Stephen Nachmanovich, Ruth Zaporah, Keith Johnstone, Augusto Boal, David Diamond, and Michael Rohd, whose methods are mapped onto game design problems. Central proposals include adapting Uta Hagen's character analysis questions and Stanislavski-inspired "inside out" development to digital characters, applying Chris Crawford's arithmetic formulation of relationship motivation, and using Johnstone's status-tower and "Lists" exercises to build relationship dynamics and generate first-instinct ideas. Boal's Forum Theatre is presented as a model for multiplayer social-issue environments in which participants can reshape a narrative.

The work is conceptual and argumentative rather than empirical. It offers no survey, sample, or experimental data of its own; its supporting figures come from external sources, such as ABI Research projections that video game revenues would grow from $32.6 billion in 2006 to $65.9 billion by 2011. The paper's main conclusion is that embodied, spontaneous play can help game designers discover new ideas, though it acknowledges that these techniques are not a guaranteed route to better design.