The Big Smoke

On Tuesday afternoon I was fortunate enough to snag a ticket for the much-discussed Tunnel 228 (it’s free, but sold out), the latest piece of experimental theatre from Punchdrunk (in collaboration with the Old and Young Vics). Read our review here.

It takes place in the darkness of a vast underground space near Waterloo; machines clank and whir in the half-light while you wander round in a mask, ogling strange artworks, exploring dark corners, watching mysterious performers and trying not to walk into pillars. It is a very unusual experience, one that most reviewers have likened to Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis'.

This says a lot about most reviewers range of cultural influences, because if Tunnel 228 resembles anything, it's not silent German expressionist cinema from the 1920s but something much more popular and contemporary: computer games.

All the tropes are here: a sinister, self-enclosed world; atmospheric sound and light; the freedom to explore a vast Tardis-like world within tightly-defined borders; the concept that you have a central ‘mission’ to fulfill, but also the liberty to ignore it the mood strikes you; the secret doors and curtains concealing hidden treasures, imaginatively created (discussing it later with friends I learnt that I ‘found’ the lapdance, but not the mini-Lidl: there was probably much else I missed).

It is, in other words, the world of "Doom", or "Tomb Raider" or "Deus Ex" or countless other classics of the gaming genre.

There has been much written in recent months about the future of computer games by a generation that has been weaned on PlayStation and Nintendo and is now mature and self-confident enough to describe the medium they love as ‘art’. (Read any or all of these fine articles by John Lanchester, Steven Poole, Tom Chatfield and Sam Leith on the subject.) This has mainly focussed on the potential of games themselves, but it's also worth considering what impact the distinctive features of gaming will have on the cultural world outside the console.

Film has always been seen as the leading candidate to take the idioms of the computer game and relate it to one of the more respected artistic forms, but clearly, as a succession of terrible games-turned-films tells us, this was wrong, badly wrong. And the failings were those of film, not computer games.

Cinema, you see, is inherently passive; the filmgoer is at the mercy of the ego of the director. Computer games, by contrast and despite common perception, are active; players choose their own adventures, going as deep into these strange, parallel universes as they want to, limited only by their own inquisitiveness (in the best games, the ferocious imaginations of the developers should be taken as read). The two-dimensional world of cinema cannot hope to capture this sort of immersion into another world. 

So, if you are lucky enough to get a ticket, get down to Waterloo. Underneath these arches you’ll not only find the place where interactive theatre meets performance art, but also the point at which computer games finally take their influence into the wider world of the cultural arts.