Playable theatre, simply put, is live performance that integrates meaningful audience agency, where participants have some kind of perceivable and transformative impact on the experience.
Playable theatre can take a variety of forms, from immersive and participatory theatre, to live action roleplaying (larping), to pervasive alternate reality games, to escape rooms with live actors, to interactive theme park experiences, to some of the mediated live performances that have become commonplace in the age of COVID-19. Playable theatre merges aspects of theatre, games and larping, which is perhaps the most developed subset of the genre. The term is adopted from “playable media,” which broadly describes mediated playful and interactive experiences, both inclusive of and beyond games.
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