Avatar Adventure was born from a class project, enabling me to collect both qualitative and quantitative data about the experience.  From my perspective, this performance relied on my improvisational and storytelling skills to actively engage the audience and meet their suggestions with an earnest attempt to carry out their directions.  Establishing this "in-good-faith" understanding, the audience-participants, or players, may contribute to building empathy.  In a post-performance survey, 80% of players reported feeling a sense of responsibility and concern throughout the game while 60% reported empathizing with the avatar. These numbers prompt me to wonder how this performance form might be further explored and shaped to steer into an experience of communal empathy or open up possibilities for sharing in someone’s lived experience through the privacy and convenience of the viewer’s own home.

What excites me most about the results Avatar Adventure is the potential for continued audience or community engagement outside of the bounds of a live-theatrical performance. Especially in relation to a theatre for social change piece, I believe that a play by itself cannot provoke an audience into enacting societal change. However, a theatre company, community, or organization might utilize a play or a theatrical experience to highlight, expose, present, or communicate about a social issue, experience, or perspective. Working along these lines, an immersive, virtual performance form could allow the audience to explore the possibilities that proposed social change might present, or experience the world through another’s perspective, or test out a line of action and safely experience the consequences that might occur.

One key element to this format is designing in a level of player control and autonomy that generates a sense that the play experience is fully responsive while keeping the performer safe. Overall Avatar Adventure participants reported a sense of extreme or strong responsivity, but two participants noticed potential threat levels that they had to navigate around, as the quotes above attest.

I find the investment of care and concern for me as a real person carrying out these actions to be crucial to the resulting care and compassion that participants felt during play. This might also create opportunities for building communal empathy by allowing audience members who are outside of a particular group experience to sympathetically embody the perspective and lived experience as someone from within that community.