Donkey throng

Asses.masses is a seven-hour game played by an audience of hundreds

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The 2024 documentary Grand Theft Hamlet shone a spotlight on the potential of videogame worlds as stages for live theatre - an idea that may have already been familiar to any veterans of Second life. Asses.masses, however, reverses the direction of flow. "We're at this other end of the spectrum where we say it's not about doing [a performance] in the game," says co-creator Patrick Blenkarn. "It's about bringing the game in as a centrepiece and seeing how it transforms everybody in the room."

Asses.masses is a custom game made to be played collectively by an audience of dozens or hundreds, at live shows that can stretch to seven or eight hours. It casts players as a group of unemployed donkeys whose jobs have been taken by machines. The game is split into ten episodes, each focusing on a theme such as isolation, motherhood or ambition, and each involving a different game genre and social mechanics.

"We deliberately do that, so that the room itself morphs and changes as we play the game," says Milton Lim, the other half of this creative partnership. "The narrative shifts according to what needs to happen, both on screen but also in the room." And what happens in the room is by far the more important of the two.