‘Tell no one’: Cinema auditorium as game-space – Audience participation, performance and play

Sarah Atkinson, Helen W. Kennedy

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Taking Secret Cinema as its site for analysis, this article engages with the question what is ludic at the cinema. Secret Cinema delivers live, immersive, participatory cinema-going experiences and is a complex interaction between film, game, theatre and social media. Through the expansion and reimagining of a film’s milieu in both virtual and real spaces, Secret Cinema experiences encourage spectatorial performativity and ludic participation. Through the use of multiple methods, this article presents the formation of a dramatic and playful community in which the impact of game cultures and a ludic aesthetic upon cinematic audience spectatorship is illuminated. Cross-disciplinary in its approach, this article connects the registers of both game and film studies in order to account for this emerging playful engagement with cinematic texts. Through its use of empirical methods, we move towards a fuller understanding of audience experience and affective engagement.
Original languageEnglish
JournalGAME
Volume1
Issue number4
Publication statusPublished - 21 Sept 2015

Keywords

  • Immersive cinema
  • Ludology
  • Secret Cinema
  • Dramatic Community
  • Play

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