This 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 Spanish; another knew the answer to an engineering question; I knew, somehow, that a female donkey is called a jennet.
This is what makes the game a collective experience. Usually, no more than one person has their hands on the controller but, nonetheless, everyone is participating as you guide a group of donkeys on a long, surprising and increasingly surreal quest to get their jobs back from the farm machines that have made them redundant.
It made me want to invite friends round my house and pass the controller around all day like we used to in our early 20s. My friend was reminded of a video game book club she used to run, where six people would play through a game such as What Remains of Edith Finch together (and laugh at it, in that specific instance). Asses.Masses is specifically designed around collective play, but I can think of plenty more shortish, thought-provoking games that could be staged like this, and that would inspire an interesting reaction from audiences. And if the number of people who engage with Twitch is any indication, I think a lot of people would come.
Stumbling out of the theatre and into the rainy Glasgow night, I felt a real sense of camaraderie with the small crowd I’d been playing with. Often when I finish a game, I’m on my own in the living room in the middle of the night, while my family sleeps, and I have nobody to turn to to discuss it with. This time, I had a whole group of people to debrief with, and it reminded me that it is always the addition of human players that animates games with soul.
Assess.Masses is on a
