Collaborative gaming and the revolutionary epic of a jobless donkey: asses.masses comes to Broadway Cinema

asses.masses is a seven-plus hour video game performed live, with the audience taking turns at the controller and no instructions given. Where did this format come from, and what were you hoping to unlock by handing total control to the crowd?

Patrick: Excellent question! We started asses.masses together in 2019, where we had our first residency together. It's funny, it was called asses.masses from very early on, and during the period that followed, we had started making a card game a year earlier. The objective was to play that card game on stage. We then discovered and started thinking about real games and playing them on stage - and how does that change the culture of theatre-going?

Milton: We were seeing a lot of games in the performing arts that were illustrated or dramatised in ways that didn't change the way the events happened themselves. Putting it on stage with the audience playing allowed it to be quite distinct - we started rethinking interactivity and participation through a different lens.

Patrick: When we started, it became very clear as we did two weeks in a big venue and learnt how to make our first real games on that stage. We were there alone, as we had no money to invite others. We did YouTube tutorials and made the first demos. Six months later, we got accepted to do a showing in Portland, Oregon - and we were in Vancouver, so it was a straight shot down.

We did a 20-25 minute showing and realised it works really well! There was something special about how the audience responded. It was a simple thing from the beginning, with the controller on stage.

We did think it might be more guided, but most of us remembered playing games with friends in a living room or basement. There was a social understanding about who was playing too long and how to ask for the controls.

In the beginning, we were interested in how people felt when leading the herd and sharing power. Those thoughts were confirmed when we did the demo, and from there on we expanded those principles without compromise.

Milton: From those principles, we taught ourselves to make video games!

Patrick: We wanted to create a genuine new expression and perspective on life. asses.masses is reframing a particular experience and amplifying it.

The story follows a herd of unemployed donkeys trying to get their jobs back in a post-industrial world... Why donkeys? And what do they allow you to say about labour, dignity, and redundancy, that human characters might not?

Patrick: Donkeys are historically and bizarrely maligned creatures in cultures all over the world.

Even though, in all of these cultures and across ancient Europe, the donkey was irreplaceable for the development of civilisation, they form a fairly integral and ancient insult. Still to this day, donkeys form an important and key part of global economies.

When you’re thinking about the relationship between the worker and the capitalist system, the donkey becomes integral, allowing people to enter through an external character.

Considering there was a crisis of skin trade in China where donkeys were slaughtered for traditional medicine, the donkey became one of the things that are rather interesting.

Connecting this, with other global activities with donkeys, we found there was an opportunity for a potent metaphor where the human manual labourer was transformed into something else. Somehow they’re more valuable dead than alive. And here we are in the world of the AI boom…From as early as 2018, it all of a sudden seems more relevant. But it came from a more general critique of where the labourer sits in this history of capitalism.

Milton: Humans tend to anthropomorphise everything. We chose the donkey because of the conversations around labourers and technology, and AI happened to overlap at the same time. It’s a story as old as technology itself, in the space between progress and technology.

Patrick: There are a number of moments in the show where there’s a fable, but are we making sure donkeys behave like donkeys? What would a donkey want? What could a donkey want? Are we making sure that their donkeyness is representative?

We’re so eager to make it about us!  Some others have ideological critiques, but overall, the donkeys need to behave like donkeys. 

You describe the show as somewhere between a game night, a movie marathon, and a political uprising. How carefully structured is the experience behind the scenes? And how much genuinely depends on the decisions of whoever steps up to “seize the means of production” each night?

Milton: Everything is very deliberately thought out; we know what food is going out and when to respond to the audience, meeting them where they're at. We want to optimise for the flow, and we don't want people coming from one difficult to another difficult.

The reality for us, as designers, was making something for everyone to play together. Where everyone is labouring, trying to make the event work both in the room and on the screen. That’s something we come back to often…

We don't predetermine how long they'll be in the room -  we allow it to be the responsibility of the audience members. The representations of the narrative of the donkeys are reflected by these people in the room.

The show is not simply one hero's journey, so we wanted very different perspectives to be played. It was intentional and important to us, as a revolution is usually more than one person.

Patrick: We are creating a platform for people to take an opportunity to practice something and to strengthen the muscles of being together. Looking beyond the machine and looking at the relationships is what it's all about. Having this kind of flexibility, it's a linear adventure, but there are lots of ways to get to the end of the game.

Where someone might go wrong is by only looking at the screen, thinking, “Did my choice in this particular moment affect this part of the story?”. But if you are going to go wrong, it's because a choice on screen will change an attitude or relationship with another character.

Think qualitatively, and think about your relationships with human characters as transformable and shapable things.

Milton:  People know how long the show is, so they regulate themselves accordingly because they know the interactions will continue, especially when people know future play will happen with the same person. It’s easy to lose it with someone online as all contact is lost immediately.

Patrick: You cannot force-quit your way out of the present. There are still transitions - how do people come back, start and leave? There's a disentangling of an individual from the herd that is so complicated and nuanced that force quitting out of the server is not an option.

There are no instructions. Spectators have to work it out together. What have you learned about collective decision-making from watching different audiences navigate the game?

Patrick: Some things we thought might need debate are apparently globally not worth debating. Those are minor decisions, and we are not psychologists or sociologists or anthropologists, but some of those folks would love to sit in the booth with us.

We do take note of these behavioural tendencies, and we see if this is what we’re hoping to achieve or if this is creating the moment we’re hoping to create. Generally, people are nice.

Milton: One thing we’re always on the lookout for is the first player. There's not as much variation between cultures as people think there is. There’s more variation between shows in the same city than cultures around the world. We’re proud to have made a show that changes if you're in the room. The first player changes the room and sets the vibe. In both cases, they create different shows.

Nottingham has a strong history of rebellion, particularly the Luddites, who destroyed machinery like the stocking frame in protest at losing their livelihoods. Do you see parallels between that moment and the unemployed herd in asses.masses trying to reclaim their work in the face of technological and economic change?

Milton: Absolutely there are overlaps.

Patrick: Rock on! Growing up in a city where you might hear that history repeated to you is awesome.

Milton: People can recast the story in those terms. The show meets people where they’re at.

Today, conversations about automation and AI are once again raising fears about redundancy and job loss. How does asses.masses speak to contemporary anxieties about digital labour and being replaced by the systems we build?

Milton: Again, it's a tale as old as technology itself, and these themes are alluded to within the stories of asses.masses. It’s a rough idea - workers are a very important and fundamental part of human life. To remove that in the work towards progress and technology is a huge transition. It's a big part of our show, especially when we think about donkeys being replaced by machines, and we think - what is the next thing being outmoded? 

We've tried to do this formally, as there are no performers, and the audience steps in with the aid of a machine. We've also tried to do this narratively, although not specifically about AI as asses.masses predates it.

And there's a whole conversation about whether we could retrain the entire industry into renewable tech and how that would work. We have people saying they don't wanna do that - assuming they had the right to work a certain job - and that was a very big part of the mid-2010s discourse.

Do you really have the right to the job you have?

Now, that’s a very different conversation surrounding creativity and AI. There are donkeys that think they have a right to work, and we see that representation of history in our story. This type of job is like a religion to them. We were trying to unpack that as a social principle and as a cultural identity.

Milton: We were also making this at the time where video games replicated labour work, like playing farming simulator and truck simulator. When we think about gamification and automation, it blurred that space between work and play.

Fancy joining the herd? asses.masses will be coming to Broadway Cinema on Saturday 21 March.

broadway.org