Hi John, A memory stirs 🙂 Is it possibile that you were one of those eho organised the 198? Albert Hall freeform event? Cheers, Peter Quinton (peterwquinton at gmail.com)

Albert Hall Convention
extract from the unpublished novel “Freyja, Fragments”, Peter Quinton, 2020

In the early days of the computer revolution I bought a franchise to design
and sell games, to my disappointment, the franchise excluded computer applications.
Undeterred, I developed computer aided programs to assist in the
manual tasks, but then found that experience unlocked a wondrous world,
barely matched by the primitive graphic capabilities of the day, of fractals,
and geometric progressions. Studying the excited literature of the day, a
team of designers gathered around me, and together in a spirit of frantic enthusiasm,
we gave our all to meeting the design problems of the day; how to
encapsulate time-based movement, how to create primitive real time games.

The team was good; within a short period of time, we had exhausted the
technological capabilities of the equipment within grasp, and we started to
explore basic game dynamics.

One enquiry examined how to build games that many players could engage
in simultaneously; both from a distance and close. Another examined interactions
across complex game scenarios; a little like players taking on a role
within a play; and continuing to play those roles, over an extended period.

Preparations for an extended three day play period one hot January, involving
about 200 people, attracted some attention from within the local drama
community. Assistance was offered in relation to building sets, creating
props and creating costumes. In one meeting of game designers, script writers,
builders, and organizers, a consultant director suggested that I approach
the national drama association for financial support; assured that the association
would be both interested and willing to meet some of the mounting
costs of the production.

An application was prepared and dispatched, and, just as quickly forgotten,
as the hectic preparations continued.

Within the confusion of that period, the boisterous meetings, the boundless
enthusiasm of the day, the capacity to draw emerging technologies into mix
(a video camera, still a luxury, was hired at great cost to record the event,
a university supercomputer to print currency and create world maps) the
meeting with the association still seems surreal.

I was summoned to the national drama association mid-afternoon, into the
foundry, a small theatre used to develop new plays and rehearse those in the
early days of production. Low, built in the style of an old roman villa, with
baked clay tiles, it looked ancient.

I dressed in all my finery, my revolutionary jacket, flying boots and, an afterthought,
a cloak. I entered the dusty hall, to meet the committee. In the
half-light, I saw them, sitting on the stage: three actors: Solon, Thepsis and
Aurelius (or so they seemed). They asked me to stand before them, in the seating area reserved
for the audience.

“We have your application; we do not understand what you propose. Explain
the type of entertainment you propose”, Solon demanded.

I propose a different type of entertainment. All around me is a passive audience.
I believe that the audience can be empowered; that within the bounds
of a scripted drama everyone within the theatre can be engaged.

“Nonsense; the essence of drama is the focus. Where is the focus?” asked
Thepsis.

Imagine an event of great stress within a bounded community. A drama
might be scripted that takes each of the audience out of themselves into a
world of our making, confronting them with choices, allowing the plot to
develop as the community develops.

“Let me get this right; you are not scripting this drama?”, asked Aurelius
with a smile.

Not quite, significant events might be partially scripted, perhaps even delivered
by a professional actor or filmed and thrown onto a screen in the
playing area.

“So the audience would not be sitting in their seats?”

No. I propose to build a series of props through the theatre. The audience
would populate the props and play out the lives of the characters.

“How would this happen?”

Each player, member of the audience, would be given a sketch of their character.
Their physical characteristics would be set mathematically, to allow
interaction in the event of a tussle of wills, the use of an artifact or exercise
of skill.

“We don’t understand you.”

Assume we set the drama in a tight community, perhaps an island, like Prospero’s
Island. At the start, each member of the audience would be given a
role to play within the community of the island. Into the lives of these characters,
we would introduce discordant themes, perhaps a series of threats to
the safety of the community which every member must contribute a part in
the meeting. We might expect to see the predefined leadership roles change
as people work together to solve problems and build solutions.

One of the ‘audience’ might play a guard. The guard might determine the
nature of a threat and report it to her superior officer. The conversation might
be overheard and reported to town folk, while the official report is taken to
the town council.

If the guard confronts the threat, we would determine outcomes on the basis
of chance and the mathematical profile of the guard, and the threat.

“Sounds pretty boring. How would you keep people’s attention?”

I have described a single threat. Within the initial set up there may be many
pre-existing stresses between numbers of the ‘audience.’ And the threats
brought to bear internally and externally would be designed to amplify some
of these and create new dynamics.

“Remind me, why are you doing this, who is watching?”

Well, the ‘audience’ is participating in the action, every person sees a different
part of the action. Each person will come away from the drama with a
personal appreciation of what has happened.

“Is there a Director?” snarled Solon.

A committee has been working on preparing each of the character sketches,
but there is no director.

“Enough. This is the most stupid idea ever presented to this committee. It
cannot work; the audience will get bored and walk away. It is not entertainment.
There can be no cohesion without a script. There is no focus without
the essential elements of a stage and an audience. The stage focuses an audiences’
attention; it allows a director to refine the drama. The separation
of stage and audience permits every member of the audience to appreciate
the same action. Without a stage, there can be no drama. Since plays were
first performed, in the Greek amphitheaters, there has been a stage, and the
audience there has been the focus, and script. There can be no development
of excellence. How could it be repeated? Who would come back to see it?
It makes no sense.”

“Come back to us with drama, and we will reconsider your application.”

I walked away from the national drama association, confused.

The convention went ahead as planned at the end of that hot January in
a massive old hall, the Albert Hall, located on the shores of Lake Burley
Griffin, and at the end of three days of solid drama, the 200 members of the
‘audience’ collapsed in exhaustion and argument about what they had experienced.
There was excitement, everyone knew they had done something never attempted
before, but no one could describe any more than they had experienced.

The audience came up with a name to describe the experience; they
called it freeform role-play, a unique form of ‘drama.’

The original story line developed by the committee had had to be thrown
away at the end of the first day, the ‘audience’ generated a powerful dynamic
driving the story in directions unanticipated, unplanned and highly emotionally
charged. We had not anticipated the strength of emotion: ‘audience’
players laughed, cried, argued, fell in love, hated and lived.

The threats we had devised proved too easy for a coherent community to
overcome. On the second day, the Committee had to sabotage the town
council and send in a team of actors as wave after wave of coherent
threat. As island members were killed, and new leaders arose to meet new
challenges the community started to twist before us in ways the committee
could not contain or control. It became powerful and hungry. It demanded
new stories, new ideas, and when the committee failed to deliver, the community
improvised.

The committee retired exhausted, fragments of the day captured by a cameraman
engaged to record the event, with promises to try to make sense of
the event.

The form was reported through the youth network. Variants were tried with
different degrees of success in other world cities within the year. Merged
with ideas of computer assisted games, the vision of a ‘virtual’ community
started to appear in literature, and became the focus of computer application
development.

Decades later, with the emergence of the internet and powerful graphical
applications, virtual communities became a reality, with all the strengths
and weaknesses we observed that hot January in Canberra.

They called these entertainments massive multi-player online role playing
games. No attempt to describe these as dramas; there was no stage apart
from the individual portal provided by each player’s computer screen. There
was no audience apart from the watching eyes of every participant.

Into these games fell a generation and like the initial audience, they laughed,
cried, argued, fell in love, hated and lived within the bounds of the electronic
community. No longer bounded by a three-day long weekend in Canberra
on a hot January, people started to live their lives in the artificial worlds and
communities.