I’m working on a playable clown show.
If it all comes together
this will be my fourth interactive stage show. Looking at my creative
output over the past few years, it's pretty obvious: the interactive stage
show has become a bit of an obsession!
In 2016 I debuted
The Incredible Playable Show, made up of alternative-controller games designed for the stage. In 2018 I
created
The Scrambled Eggman Show, a gameshow with challenges made by hacking Sonic the Hedgehog games. In 2022 I reworked my
livestream performances into
The Crowd Creativity Show, a suite of performance art bits where the audience directs me in creative
acts.
I’ve been developing games for well over 20 years now, and
it’s been my line of work since 2010. I joined my first clown class in 2018,
to help me become a better showman, and honestly it’s transformed my approach.
While I’m still very much a game developer, in practice and at heart, the stage has become a creative home. Nowhere have I felt quite as at-home as in the world of clown.
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| Me as my clown character, Mademoiselle Cafetière Photo by Filiz Moore, taken at Scritch Cabaret |
The clown is the antithesis
to the video game. Where the game is defined by rules, the clown is lawless,
driven by impulse, emotion and imagination. Where the game designer values
immersion in a world, the clown acknowledges the artifice of the stage. Where
the gamer seeks mastery, the clown revels in failure.
In a game
every element is strictly defined. For the clown, a stick can be a sword one
minute and a walking cane the next.
Nevertheless, for some reason I keep coming back to the computer. There’s something that the rules and
the strictness of the machine offer which pairs well with the freeform nature of clown. So much so that it makes a
juicy double-act.
That’s why I’m making a playable clown show.
What is clown?
My introduction to clown was with Holly Stoppit.
Holly is a Bristol-based clown who is not just a performer but also a
qualified drama therapist. As well as running drama workshops for theatre
practitioners, she also uses clown as a therapeutic approach for adults with
mental health issues. It’s a connection that makes sense, as Holly’s approach
to clown is very much grounded in mindfulness. Classes typically begin with a
meditation. Reaching the headspace of the clown comes from being present and
deeply aware of your sensations and emotions.
Every clown will have a different answer to the question of “what is a clown,” but for me it’s always been defined by the headspace Holly helped us find: the clown sees the world as if for the very first time.
The clown is curious, the clown is playful, the clown is open, and the clown is unaware of existing social rules. The clown acts on impulse. Your clown is who you would be if there is no expectation of who you are supposed to be.
In talks I demonstrate this with a paintbrush. As an adult, I know how to use a paintbrush: you dip it in paint and use it to spread that paint on a canvas. To the clown, it’s a totally unknown object. What do its bristles feel like? What is the texture of the handle? What does it taste like? Does it make a nice sound when I stick it in my ear? Could it be my friend?
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| Igne Barkauskaite with the neutral mask, a tool used in Lecoq theatre training |
The clown works from intuition: the imaginative muscle we warm up in that first hour. The clown does not live in the space of thinking, but in the space of impulse. Focusing on the body gets us out of our heads. We find ourselves much funnier and more moving when we don’t second-guess ourselves. A clown has an idea and does it, just to see what happens when they do it. The clown is endlessly curious.
To anyone who’s watched me paint on-stream, this will explain a lot. Viewers have seen me staple cabbage to the canvas, claw holes in the canvas, paint with my face, and pour a jug of water on my head. I do it to see what happens when I do it. I don’t stop to think if it will make a mess.
Clowns find games. A game could be anything. It could be smiling back and forth with an audience member. It could be finding out what kind of sounds a paintbrush makes when banged upon different objects. It could be as simple as picking up a tissue and dropping it. Try maintaining eye contact with someone as you pick up and drop the same tissue over and over again. You never know what could grow out of it.
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| Clowning on the street on a Holly Stoppit course, Aug 2019 |
Above all, the clown comes from a space of connection. In one Holly course we ventured out, in full clown costume, to the streets of Bristol. We found games in our environment, and we found games with the general public. A lot of the public will not want anything to do with these red-nosed weirdos roaming the street, but some people will be curious. You can tell by how they look at you. And those people you can smile at. Maybe you can approach them. Maybe you can find a game with them.
You’ll be amazed at how much fun you can create with a random mother waiting at the bus stop with her kids. Just mirroring her movements back at her could be the start of a very silly game - you may end up pulling faces, or dancing, or treating her like royalty. You’ll be surprised how little you’ll have to do - in fact, the passers-by tend to lead the games themselves, and all you need to do is follow. Be curious, and say yes. What do they want to do, and how can I add to that?
To the clown, there is no fourth wall. Connection is the point.
I don’t stop to think if it will make a mess
I’m working on a playable clown show.
It’s a messy process.
I’m probably going to embarrass myself a few times. I might end up in front of
an audience with no idea what I’m doing.
My inner clown revels in
the mess. In my painting livestreams I may find myself stapling a cabbage to
the canvas, or pouring a jug of water on my head, just to see what happens if
I do it. But I won’t do it if it’s dangerous. I’m not in a hypnotic trance,
and I’m not beholden to my audience. They want to see me comfortable more than
they want to see what they can get away with asking me to do. If I’m
uncomfortable, they’re uncomfortable.
I pour a jug of water on my
head because it’s fun. I’m curious how it’ll look on-camera and, most
importantly, I feel safe. I’m in my own flat and I don’t mind cleaning up
afterwards. I’m excited to explore the creative rapport I have with my
audience when they know no suggestion is too wacky for me.
Clip from an interactive painting Twitch stream, December 2022
To create a welcoming space for being messy on a livestream, I need to form a welcoming connection with the audience.
My audience on Twitch communicates via Twitch chat, and I can see what they type as I host the stream. In that same chat window they can type in keywords that place markers on my video feed. So, if you type paint giraffe at 25, 80 a marker will appear at the bottom-left of my camera feed, and I will try to paint a giraffe in that spot. That’s the rules. That’s the strictness. That’s what's programmed into the computer.
The computer can’t make a mess. It can only do exactly what you tell it to. It has no opinion on whether that was a good idea.
This is the beginning of a game. The audience, knowing that I will respond in an interesting way to that prompt, will tend to explore what else I might do with similar prompts. Maybe they’ll get me to make more giraffes, having enjoyed my valiant attempt. Maybe they’ll ask me to print out other pictures, and turn this painting into a collage. Maybe they’ll ask me to cut more holes in different places. In doing so I may expose even more interesting features of the canvas that they’ll be even more curious to explore. We've just invented the game of giraffe.
It’s just like clown. A game forms out of treating things at face value. I’m not trying to win Giraffe Portrait Artist of the Year - I’m just responding to “I want a giraffe at this spot.” If I respond to how the canvas is wet and sticky that’s me engaging with it as texture, as sensation, in the present moment. If I cut a hole in it, well why not? There’s no law saying a canvas must remain whole. If there was such a law my inner clown certainly wouldn’t know it.
So I’m not bothered about making a mess. If I make a mess, that introduces a kind of failure. Failure creates fun wrinkles in my task, and I can explore these wrinkles with curiosity.
I’ve seen audiences replace the word said with screamed, whispered, sang and burped to see what noises they could get me to make. I’ve seen audiences try to turn every word into the. I’ve seen audiences replace English words with Dutch words to see how I try to pronounce them. They've replaced words with emoticons to see what pretty pictures they could make render on-screen. Each of these is, in a clown sense, a game.
They failed to be witty, and in doing so created patterns of words and noises that were beautiful to explore. Failure became a source of joy.
Failure became a joy because the computer is just awful.
The computer is a terrible scene partner. Absolutely awful. It just does exactly what you tell it to. Sometimes based on a logic only it understands, but always the exact same way every time. It has no originality, no imagination, and that’s why I love it.
If you typed something in wrong, the computer won’t adjust to what you meant. If it didn’t put your punchline in the place you wanted it, it will have no idea it made a mistake. This is how I’ve come to love the computer as a creative partner: it’s constantly adding wrinkles, constantly adding failures, and every failure is a new toy to play with. And yet, you can’t blame it.
If I’ve designed the system well, with enough clarity that the audience knows what they’re doing, we can accept the computer as an innocent. It’s simply doing what it’s told.
The computer is a clown.
Rules, of course, are the lifeblood of the video game
I’m working on a playable clown show.
Surely I can’t just
take to the stage and “be a clown” for half an hour. Surely my clown needs
something to do?
Every task in Artholomew Video’s Stream Challenge
is about making a mess. We might be making a messy painting, or we might be
making a messy poem, or we might be making a messy dance routine, or even
singing an entire messy musical. I’m making a mess of something, but it works
best if as host I’m genuinely engaged with doing a good job of it.
When
painting, I genuinely try to make an expressive piece of abstract art. When I
read stories and poetry, I read them with passion and aplomb, as if they are
still important works of literature. My improvised dance routines reveal that
I’m a terrible dancer, but I give it a damn good go and I don’t worry for a
moment about getting tired out.
The clown may fail frequently, but
the clown is genuinely trying to succeed.
C. Thi Nguyen explores
this very same paradox in games in his excellent book
Games: Agency as Art. To have a good a game of tennis you must take it seriously,
fighting to win, while simultaneously valuing it lightly, as just a game. If it’s not just a
game it becomes combat. Yet if you don’t give it your all you won’t play out the exciting rallies you’ll remember on the way home.
For the clown to
fail the clown must have some goal they genuinely want to achieve, which is why a lot of
clown exercises give you a rule or two to play within.
In one
exercise, the clown begins asleep in the middle of the stage. Awakening, they
find the stage is filled with a thick dense fog. They can’t see a thing! The
clown’s task is to find their way off the stage.
Now, both the
clown and the viewers know there is no fog, and can see their way to the exit.
But the clown plays along with the rules of the exercise. Clown is still all
about connection, though. So there’s nothing to stop them turning to the
audience, looking them dead in the eye in pure terror as if to say
“I can’t see a thing!” Indeed, there’s nothing to stop them whimpering
“help me!” to the poor viewers who they, technically, should not even know are there.
The rules aren’t there to provide an actual
challenge, and you don’t even need to fully adhere to the rules. The rules are
simply a context to play off of. Rules, of course, are the lifeblood of
the video game. The computer operates strictly on rules, and it’s the video
game player who creates meaning from the result. Rules provide wrinkles and
wrinkles provide inspiration. Rules create jeopardy and jeopardy creates
drama. Drama creates excitement.
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| Three clowns in training with Igne Barkauskaite, March 2024 |
Another great exercise Igne uses
comes after exploring the four elements: earth, water, fire and wind. We warm
up, moving in the space as if we are the elements personified, exploring how
we’d move if we were made of earth, water, fire or wind. Then we go onto the
stage in pairs.
As an element, you explore the space in your own
little world, until Igne claps her hands. When she does, you and your scene
partner see each other for the first time, and instantly fall in love.
Whatever happens from then on is your scene.
I’ve seen elemental
passion, I’ve seen elemental heartbreak. I’ve seen elements in unrequited
longing, and I’ve seen elements dance the tango. I’ve been a horribly
obsessive fire boyfriend and I’ve been deathly-slow and made of rock,
spellbound by a drifting wind-maiden I just can’t reach. Scenes have ranged
from hilarious to melancholic and everything in-between.
The magic
is that you set up the rules, and everything else follows intuitively. None of
what happens in these scenes is planned, and often by following the rules and
being engaged with your audience and with your scene partners, the scene
writes itself. When you’re in the flow of it the whole thing feels magical.
As
game designers it’s our job to create rules that will prompt players to create
magic moments for themselves. So when I decided to make a playable clown
routine I knew that’s what I had to create. What set of rules can I
conjure up so that I and the audience - prompted by my weird scene partner
called the computer - will conjure up magic moments for ourselves?
The Digital Clown
I’m working on a playable clown show.
And the maid’s uniform
was a wild swing for the fences.
At one of Igne’s clown workshops
we were exploring costume. I typically find that I struggle with costumes that
are specific. I can be very creative dressed in something abstract like
plastic bin bags or robes made of book paper. But if you put me in a suit or
in an astronaut’s costume I struggle to know what to do. I don’t know how to
be astronaut.
I wanted to crack this nut, so I asked what would be both specific ambitious. The maid costume was the answer.
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| A gang of clowns at Igne's workshop, May 2024 |
I don’t know exactly what made it click, but in that costume I just started being differently. I wasn’t trying to act like a maid. I wasn't cleaning, or ironing, or folding clothes. Just exploring the space in the way I normally would. Somehow it all seemed to conjure more fascination and more curiosity. I could be doing the most mundane of activities, and simply fixing someone's gaze would be enough to induce fits of laughter.
Igne said I became like the ghost of Cinderella.
If you’ve watched my livestreams or
seen my 7 minutes on stage as pretty maid Cafetière, you’ll see that she’s
neither ghostly nor demure. In fact, she’s taken on the personality of a human
wrecking ball. I think her evolution has come about as a result of
interactivity, and I'll get to why later.
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| Clown maid pictured with Igne, May 2024 |
You see, I’ve described
a lot about my Artholomew Video livestreams as if they were already
clown. In my eyes they’re not clown, but they take on a lot of the lessons
and attitudes of clown. I can’t fully immerse myself in the clown state
because, as host, I also need to play facilitator to the audience. I need to
relay to viewers how to join in. I need to engage people and hype them up so
that they want to give typing messages a go. Before I can get playful with audience
suggestions I need to reassure audiences that I will take their suggestions
seriously and that I value them. Clowning around only emerges once we get
that ball rolling.
My motivation to do the clown equivalent of
Artholomew Video was
to try and get past this barrier. Could I create an environment where I no
longer needed to play compere, and could just be clown?
This maid
character seemed to be the answer. On returning from clown school I set up my flat in a multi-camera setup,
going between living room and kitchen. I played that I'd opened up my flat as a
café and the viewers were my customers. Viewers type in what they’d like
to order, it pops up on the screen, and I try to realise that request for
them. And, just like the elements falling in love, what happens is what
happens.
Running the clown café on my Twitch stream, June 2024
As a design for a livestream, this took away the
complication of figuring out what, as a viewer, to do.
“Place your order” as a prompt is as delightfully open as
“ask me anything.” Meanwhile it’s not so open-ended that you feel
pressured to type something clever. Asking for a cup of coffee - knowing I can't physically get it through your screen - is clever enough.
The maid character, and the café space,
provide the same amount of opportunity for things to go wrong as wet paint
on a canvas, without me needing to explain them - I just live in
them.
In these livestreams I discovered totally new technical
challenges. I struggled to stay in camera-shot and I wasn’t able to hear the
audience’s reactions. I had no idea if anything I was doing was funny, so I stopped caring about being funny and just did things I thought were interesting. The
character in her own little world, immersed in her fascinating little tasks, took on a haunted vibe. The ghost of Cinderella was alive and well.
Nevertheless, as I started to get a feel for it, the audience and I started to find our games. Our games often
involved gaffer tape (which I own a lot of), making weird potions in the
kitchen, or carving food into odd shapes. I made a cup out of a cucumber and
drank tea from it. My ghostly clown seemed to constantly fall in love with
things. She fell in love with a lamp, and she fell in love with a pear, and
she fell in love with her own future-self.
When the opportunity to do a
7-minute slot at a new material night came up, I knew I had to go for it. If I
can make this work on a livestream, can I make this work on the stage?
But how do I compress 2 hours of freeform play in my
kitchen into a 7-minute stage bit?
Here’s where we come back to rules: the meat of the video game.
I
need something that pops in short order. I need something that needs no
explanation. I need something where people instantly get how to interact with
it. I need a goal I can try - probably fail, but genuinely try - to achieve in
7 minutes. The rules of the game should be set, pre-programmed, in advance. Get the program running and go go go.
My clown’s propensity for romance provided the answer: I’m on a date. I have 7 minutes to win my date’s
affections. And my date is a dummy voiced by the audience.
Welcome to My Date with Pierce Brosnan
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| Photo by Filiz Moore, taken at Scritch Cabaret |
Seven Minutes with Cafetière
I’m working on a playable clown show.
In my show I’m on a
date. A date with Pierce Brosnan, no less! I have 7 minutes to win my date’s affections, and my date is a dummy voiced by
the audience.
My name is Mademoiselle Cafetière.
It’s simple set of rules, and it’s easy to see how it propels me into activity that turns into clown games with the audience. I’m inspired by what my audience gets my date to say to me. They’re inspired by my reactions and, thus, give him new things for him to say.
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| Photo by Filiz Moore, taken at Scritch Cabaret |
So how
does it function? Audience members scan a QR code, which takes them to a page
on my website. There they type in short messages they want my date, the dummy,
to say. Every 10-20 seconds, the computer picks one at random and reads it aloud
via a text-to-speech plugin. After 6 minutes bells chime and, like Cinderella
at the ball, our date is over. I must then resolve whatever story the audience
and I have concocted.
When I said that the character had become less like a ghost and more like a wrecking ball, it was the limitations of the stage that necessitated that change.
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| Photo by Filiz Moore, taken at Scritch Cabaret |
Each act in the cabaret had 7 minutes, so I was
under a tight time limit. In 7 minutes I couldn’t wait for the audience to get
the hang of interacting. I needed to them to interact now.
So I needed to be enthusiastic and proactive, and vocally ask them to start typing into their phones. Handing out QR codes in-character during the interval, I needed to make sure I got the audience’s attention. Most of them, after all, were queuing at the bar. Without intending to, I let the ghostly demeanour disappear, and the hyperactive energy I bring to The Incredible Playable Show came out. Channelled through the clown maid this became a character who was fearless, loud and impulsive: a human wrecking ball.
I performed my 7-minute bit at the Scritch Cabaret in Bristol in August 2024, and it was a roaring success. Massive laughs, many a spellbound spectator, and the spontaneous discovery of games with the crowd.
The audience voiced a passionate Pierce Brosnan, who delivered a shocking revelation which drove a dramatic rift between us. A revelation so shocking it had me throw him off the stage! But we made up and, in the final moments, both agreed to a three-way marriage with a member of the audience.
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| Photo by Filiz Moore, taken at Scritch Cabaret, with an unknown volunteer from the audience |
Encompassing the small clown games that punctuated the act, we discovered a broader game of the show that I'd not seen coming: a melodramatic narrative. A game of weaving a tale of forbidden love triumphantly accepted.
Rules are, after all, simply limitations that offer a multi-faceted set of outcomes. Rules can inspire new creative directions. In the creative space of the stage they can inspire massive personality transformations: from demure ghost to romantic wrecking-ball.
Accepting these limitations as gifts, and playing naturally off of what the
audience give you, results in some very funny and very affecting clown.
My Date With Pierce Brosnan
I'm making a playable clown show.
It's 30-minutes long and charts the story of Mademoiselle Cafetière, waiting tables in a lonely little French café until she receives a special guest: her fairy godmother who offers her a once-in-a-lifetime date with Hollywood legend Pierce Brosnan.
I've been back to Scritch Cabaret to test out new material for the show, as well as taking the 7-minute Brosnan act to other events to develop the showstopping climax. I did my first test-run at the Bristol Improv Theatre in October, and am taking it to PLAY Hamburg this week.
We'll be trying it in a faux-café setting and I'm excited to see this plays out compared to the stage. Going walkabout with the audience has been a great way to build rapport before a show, and doing the whole show in a walkabout space feels like an extension of that.
The 30-minute My Date With Pierce Brosnan is split into four acts that together form a story. I begin waiting tables, the audience typing in what they want to eat, and where they are in the room. I bring them their orders and alas, I do not have most of what they order and must use my creativity to find them the next best thing.
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| Cafetière and the Fairy Godmother at a testing afternoon at the Bristol Improv Theatre |
Act two has them write my dating profile. The computer randomly cobbles together their messages into a script, which I read aloud and improvise based off of what piques my curiosity. The opening act is quite explosive - very physical, lots of running from seat to seat - the reading should slow down the pace and act as a palette cleanser before the showstopper that is act three.
Act three is the titular date with Pierce Brosnan, the talking dummy. Finally, we finish with a musical honeymoon. The audience types in locations and my computer - calling the Google Image Search API - turns these into holiday snaps from our round-the-world tour. Over a cliché Broadway-style backing track I sing about where we went. I am not a good singer.
What becomes very obvious in the 30-minute routine is that the audience starts to explore how they can break the format. What are the limitations of the technology, and how can they use that to make something funny happen? When ordering food to tables, having noticed that Cafetière was getting frustrated with Table 1 for making impossible requests, the Bristol audience started sending all of their requests to Table 1. Why send us on our honeymoon to a real-world destination when you could send us to the moon or Narnia? Why not send us to Windows XP or to Rick Astley?
Even though the pre-recorded Fairy Godmother is scripted to send us on our honeymoon, who knows if Brosnan and I will even like each other by the end of our date? I may even have murdered him! But the clown, of course, says yes to all these offers. She continues on the musical journey lifeless Brosnan in hand.
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| Cafetière admonishes Table 1 for their irresponsible purchasing decisions |
The opportunities to break things are the great source of audience creativity. As a clown it's catnip because clowns thrive on failure. Failure inspires curiosity. Failure inspires a new radical perspective. Why can't a honeymoon on your own be joyous? Romantic, even?
Where the clown can adapt on the fly the computer cannot, and that's what causes it to throw out weird outcomes that audience can exploit. That, plus the anonymity of the phone screen, which allows even the most shy player to be wild and mischievous, gives the audience the opportunity to become clowns themselves.
A good game mechanic for the clown is one which invites the audience to break it.
After all, clowning is following your curiosity. Clowning is connection. Clowning is finding the game. By being given the reins of the show, and the capacity to break it to bits, the audience can give as good as they get.
A Clown Theory of Games
I’m making a playable clown show.
I’m making something that
is at once both video game and living breathing human clown.
I’ve
been reflective lately. I still find myself living in a game developer world
while my creative output has long drifted to stranger pastures.
Why do I keep reading academic games books and going to developer gatherings when my work is stage shows and
modified paper shredders?
The answer is that video games are still the object of my curiosity. I'm fascinated by what the rules, the systems and the devices can do for us as people. Can they help us engage with our humanity? Can they inspire us, allow us to express ourselves, and empower us to be creative? The stage and the alternative-controller are spaces where we directly engage with ourselves as messy, moving, analogue beings.
Rules, automation and anonymity are gifts from the video game medium. When I move my work outside the traditional video games space I can pick and choose which of these gifts are most useful for me.
While the rules-laden world of the computer can be hugely inspiring, video game makers stand to learn a lot from the world of clown. Were I to put it in one word, I'd say that lesson is looseness. In a clown game, rules provide a compelling direction, but those same rules can be dropped when they cease to arouse curiosity. The clown tells when a game has lost its curiosity by maintaining a connection with the audience.
By contrast, I often feel as game designers we take a "father knows best" attitude to our players. We try to guide the player to have the revelation we wanted them to. Then we hide our tracks so they feel like they had that revelation for themselves. Could we instead regard our players as equal creative partners? Could we instead listen to what our players are curious about, and then build in ways to support and satisfy that curiosity?
In many ways, I'm talking about the difference between a scripted text and an improvisation. While the clowning I've been drawn to is largely improvisational, many clowns work towards a scripted performance they can rely on to get laughs every night. They'll typically improvise to generate ideas and then, in a process known as devising, refine the best bits of the improvisation by repeating them and tweaking them into something repeatable.
Personally, I find this a less enticing process than improvising on the spot. I like building a relationship with an audience and allowing them to interact in response, rather than having them sit back and consume the show. I want to live the creative process and I want to share it with other people. I want to surprise people with the spectacle they can create when the stage is their canvas and I am their brush.
So here's my call to action. From a clown, to the game designer: embrace the looseness of play.
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For the clown, a stick can
be a sword one minute and a walking cane the next. What mechanics in our games can take
on a new function as and when the player desires it?
For the clown,
curiosity is the driving force. Can we make games that respond to players’
curiosity rather than guiding them to have the experience we’ve planned out for
them?
For the clown, failure is simply a prompt for curiosity. In
video games,
can we embrace the glitch as an object of curiosity? Can we empower our players to do the same?
The clown does not
recognise a fourth wall. Instead, the clown looks the audience in the eye and
invites them in. As game designer can you too respect the player’s humanity,
their unique motivations and their desire for self-expression?
And
if your gut reaction to these provocations is “no,” perhaps instead regard these questions
with curiosity.
I’m just a clown, you see. I’m seeing this whole
medium as if for the very first time.
And I’m not even that
smart.
After all, I’m making a playable clown show.
