Theater is not a likely reference point for most gamers today, but it should be, according to Bloom. She writes:

Rich connections between gaming and theater stretch back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when England’s first commercial theaters appeared right next door to gaming houses and blood sport arenas. In the first monograph to delve deeply into the early modern period of gaming, [I] show[] that a key reason theaters competed successfully in London’s new entertainment marketplace was because the experiences of watching a play and playing a game feel so alike. Audiences did not just see a play; they were encouraged to play the play, and their knowledge of gaming helped them become better theatergoers. Examining the dramas written for these theaters alongside textual and visual evidence of analog games as popular today as they were then, [I] argue[] for games as theatrical media and theater as an interactive gaming technology.

Gaming the Stage breaks new ground in theater studies and game studies by using dramatic literature to historicize and theorize games. The book reflects critically on the ways “interactivity” and “immersion” have been conceptualized in both theater and game studies, arguing that spectatorship is a form of vicarious play. I bring[] to literary and theater history a method more commonly used in videogame studies: play as research. Indeed, [I] argue[] that historians are gamers who engage their bodies and embodied minds in the act of vicariously playing with the past.

If you could pair your book with one other text, what would you recommend? Why?

Read it alongside colleagues Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux's book Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. Like Boluk and LeMiuex's book, Gaming the Stage takes game spectators seriously and thinks about the ways that spectators become players.

Gaming the Stage was published in Fall of 2018 by the University of Michigan Press as part of their Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series and is available open access. You can find it here.