Author Bekah Brunstetter is clearly not a video game fanatic. Her personality type is, in her words, “mentally obsessed with productivity,” and for the past 25 years she has shut down the entire gaming world.
Still, Branstetter, perhaps best known for his television work on “This Is Us'' and his book “The Notebook,'' currently playing on Broadway, believes that video games can hinder or facilitate humanity. I wrote not one, but two plays about how to do it. Connection.
The Game, currently having its world premiere, is a fictionalized version of Fortnite Battle Royale, a third-person shooter where each round ends with only one survivor. The film was inspired by the game Blanche played, which forced countless middle school students in the 1990s into a series of gruesome deaths (cholera, red intestines, snakebites, etc.) in an attempt to recreate the grim times of the 19th century. It comes seven years after Teter's “Oregon Trail.” West of Independence, Missouri.
In “The Oregon Trail,” Branstetter parallels the modern-day struggles of young women facing high-stakes dangers like those found in video games. In “The Game,” she takes an outsider's perspective and talks about a support group for wives who decided to abstain from sex to get their partners out of Fortnite, here referred to as The Game. focusing on things. (The play is a very loose adaptation of the ancient Greek comedy “Lysistrata,'' in which a sex strike is planned to end the Peloponnesian War.)
Branstetter, 41, spoke about “The Game” via video call the day after final rehearsals at Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and talked about the two plays, his learning curve and… maybe Bring her back into the game.
Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Your character displays an affinity for The Oregon Trail, which is comically lacking in The Game. Is that a fair assessment of your own expertise? Have you looked into Fortnite for “the game”?
I know what I know about video games from my husband. Mainly by listening to the one-sided conversations that take place in his headset as he plays. After I finished the first draft, I did a deep dive into game terminology. He read them and said: This is completely inaccurate. ” As I write, sometimes I feel like laughing at my own ignorance.
It sounds like you learned the hard way about the dangers of the Oregon Trail all the way back in middle school.
I have zero gaming skill or patience, so I always died. I went to this private Lutheran school and I went straight from the chapel to the computer room and killed a bunch of people. I think it's crazy that there were so many dangers in this thing we call games that we downplayed so much. How much fear and danger do humans need to feel in order to feel comfortable?
For women in The Game, The Game's open-world updates are a source of disappointment. Did the preordained nature of The Oregon Trail require a different storytelling approach than Fortnite's sandbox?
In 1995, technology and the way we interacted with it was very different. “Oregon Trail” was more about finite choices. The main character in my play is in his early to mid-20s, and I think a lot of people start to feel like, “Oh, I'm done with this.'' I made a wrong mistake. My life is over. “
When it comes to “The Game,” it's an open world, and I think that really speaks for itself. How is the real world going to keep them here when this other world has become so rich and gives them so much control?
It's not just men though. One of the women in the support group attends for her female partner.
This is something my husband pointed out to me years ago. Approximately 45 percent of gamers are women. She knew she had to include it. Especially when it comes to shooting girls games, people tend to think that this is a space for men. However, of course women also have anger and frustration and need an outlet for it.
On the other hand, war in Lysistrata is a distinctly masculine space.
In the end, “Lysistrata” became a stepping stone. It had a lot of what I would call silly comedies, big, vulgar, crowd-pleasing comedies, so I wanted to find similarities there. So I created the same woman and started with the same story, just playing it in a modern setting. Also, unlike in Lysistrata, the sex strike doesn't work.
Near the end, it also focuses on showing some of the more positive, world-building aspects of The Game.
The first idea I had for this play came from this in-between space in our lives, where my husband and I were trying to have a child and it wasn't working out. And he showed me what he was building in Fallout. And I was really shocked to see that he wasn't just filming. he was making something. And during the pandemic, he prepared me a really calming farming game where you grow crops. But I wasn't very good at it.
So you've been gaming a little bit over the past 25 years.
Well, I've been obsessed with Words With Friends for a while now. What I want to do is find shoes that I don't need. “My child needs a raincoat! For the next half hour we'll be looking at raincoats for children!” But when it comes to games, it feels pointless to me. Even as I say this, I realize that what I need to do more than anything else is to waste time.
Is there a particular title in mind?
Actually, it is. Her husband and I had been watching The Last of Us and we loved that father-daughter, father-surrogate-daughter relationship. I'd really like to know if I can find the time to play, thrash, and make it.
