Dia  🕸️quite a person 🕸️ Lacina

This is weird, because it's not performed as much -- it's difficult, because it involves the dead being back to life, specifically, a magnificent statue of being made human. I've seen a lot of unsuccessful productions. A lot. It's really hard to sell a statue becoming flesh.

But one time, and really just the once, I got to witness a production so skillfully handled, so organically performed, with a modest but effective stage design that one could not help but believe that they had reanimated the dead. Turned cold marble to warm skin.

The thing is, that scene is a big moment. A "set piece" if you will, but it only works if the rest of the play allows for it. An entire world has to be conjured and maintained on stage even as sets are changed and time passes (and The Winter's Tale passes some fucking time).

If you've ever seen a Shakespeare production, particularly a small city one with a tiny budget and competent but not truly great actors, you know that there is no "losing yourself" ... The chairs are always hard and uncomfortable, the temperature is wrong, plays are long.

I used "conjure" because it is not an immersion. You will always be acquainted with your existence as an observer-participant of something else. That it is not part of your world, and you not of it. But the theatrical world has to convince you of its reality, and you accept it.

Or you don't. When things go wrong or it's just not a skillful production, or incongruous decisions are made -- you might reject it. Hold yourself at a greater distance. Or refuse to participate at all as observer.

Big Games pride themselves on their set pieces. They get hidden behind embargos during review, they get turned into video clips and shared casually, they're talked about. They exist to astonish. To win the audience. To secure entry into the 9+/10 echelon.

But it always seems to me, as with contemporary blockbuster movies that these games draw upon, those moments exist outside of these worlds. That the beats between are simply there to breadcrumb to those moments, not build the world for them to happen inside of.

Fortunes are spent on these games, to flesh them out as photorealistically as possible, to fine tune and focus test gameplay into a smooth delivery method. To enhance astonishment. Which isn't to say the people laboring to make them aren't skillful -- they are.

But the directive under which nearly all these games exist isn't to convince you this is a world where statues can be people, and that it is both miraculous and possible. It's to fill them with a steady drip of statues becoming people. And making the middle bits easy.

It's job is to manufacture astonishment, and constantly elevate the stakes, to make astonishment easy. When I saw that production of The Winter's Tale, it was a well-done production, but honestly nothing special. I knew the play. It was done well, but my ass hurt the whole time.

But every part was as important as the rest. The players and director had an understanding of how the play had to work. That in order to convince the audience of the final miraculous transformation, it could not simply be just about delivering that moment.

Astonishment can be good. It can be transformative. I'd seen so many plays by that point in my life, I'd studied early modern drama. But when Paulina shouted "Music, awake her; strike!" and Hermione began to stir? That was when I really felt I truly experienced magic.

Astonishment can be grand, it's exhilarating sometimes. But it has to be earned. It shouldn't be given over cheaply. And yes, a play is a manufactured thing as all other media is, it can't purely be about willing that experience into an audience.

Blockbusters and AAA games are cheapened by their demanding of astonishment, their thirstiness for it, the constant drive to deliver surges of neurotransmitters. By their focus on it above all else.

The Winter's Tale worked because it asked me to be a participant, and provided me the means to participate. It didn't see me as a willing captive to a dopamine rollercoaster. It respected my participation, and knew it might not retain it.

I knew full well that Hermione was never a statue, that they had not performed an ad hoc resurrection in this dreary Virginia theater. But nonetheless the effect was astonishing. So much that I'm still thinking about it well over a decade later.

I'm not opposed to games drawing from film, it feels like a dead end to me, but that's neither here nor there. It's how they imitate -- the what, and why, and to what end. To convince an audience of a resurrection on stage is tremendous. In a game or film it is rote.