Rimini Protokoll Takes on the Game of Life...Choices

All I knew about Rimini Protokoll's Best Before show at On the Boards (through May 9, tickets $24) was that it somehow involved video-game controllers and would last two hours. This was anxiety-producing for me, a Zaxxon low-scorer, but I needn't have worried; I spent most of the evening with a goofy grin on my face, and giggles and yelps of laughter were widespread.

The zany video-game environment of BestLand (a Sim City of life choices) is balanced by a panel of "experts in daily life"--people that Rimini Protokoll found to help more movingly portray the consequences of life choices. They're not actors, though that's never a hindrance (except in the case of avuncular former Vancouver City Councillor Bob Williams, who shares my uh habit uh of "uh"ing too uh often--you people are so lucky this is a blog and not a podcast). 

Rimini Protokoll doesn't necessarily represent themselves as a fun evening. They sound properly Germanic, serious, and theoretical. The group's name is the "label for projects by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel." With their plays, they're "trying to invent rules in a certain way that makes something performative happen." This kind of language makes me cut myself. Thanks for that.

If the evening drags a bit, oddly, it's because of the game play, not the non-actors. Duff Amour (the biting, cynical former Electronic Arts game-tester), Brady Marks (a South African émigré and the game's chic designer), Ellen Schultz (a journalist-turned-traffic-flagger, in the evening's most compelling social commentary), and Bob Williams (also director of a credit union) tell their stories engagingly and with a minimum of monologue fussiness. Williams also sings "Don't Fence Me In."

It's just that after an hour or so of the game (you've been born, set a series of biological and social parameters, and worked your way through knotty questions like whether to legalize drugs and keep an army), the decisions-have-consequences (foreseen and unforeseen) point has been made (both cleverly and heavy-handedly), and the fun of having a little blobby avatar who jumps and falls from the sky and can bump into the person ('s avatar) next to you is starting to pale. It's a hard-knock matrix, yes. 

Still, the Best Before environment is completely memorable for what it talks you into. On the one hand, it's just a game, but on the other, you're publicly (and not always anonymously) displaying preferences on intensely personal choices. When people vote not to legalize marijuana--at an OtB show!--you have to look around in wonder. If no one wants to bond with your avatar, it's a little sad watching all the other blobs hooking up. The acme of too-close-to-home may have been watching everyone discover, after bonding, who wanted children and who didn't.

Because of a technical glitch, I was unable to tell how many of us were about to voluntarily commit suicide at mid-life, besides Brady Marks and IT support. My avatar was flat as a pancake from unemployment (money makes you bigger in BestLand) and I had failed to get elected to public office. Even a sex change had provided only momentary relief from ennui. Goodbye cruel modeled environment! 

I don't think they will promise a crash every performance, but it made for a rebuttal of how "revealing" video games are of the real world, power, and control--at least ontologically. "With the push of a button or a tilt of a joystick" (quoting UW doctoral candidate Edmond Chang)...nothing happened. I couldn't help but think of the quote: "Rimini Protokoll brings real life to the stage...."

It was, indeed. Instead of watching BestLand grow old and die, as planned, we were simply bumped out of the game. It was frustrating, a let-down, and had no deep lesson as such. A minute ago, we were having fun. As a process fork in the game of life, it was perhaps all too real.