MJ Gamelin
Drama Major
Emerging a few years past quarantine, MJ Gamelin, a senior drama major, reflected on their experience in theater, isolation, and the community around roleplaying games (RPGs) for their research at UNC Asheville. Gamelin has always loved games like Dungeons and Dragons, which center around players acting as their characters. They noticed during the height of COVID, RPGs were a booming sector of entertainment, as they didn’t necessitate in-person play. With the growing popularity of RPGs, Gamelin knew there was a potential for combining theater with the typical structures of RPGs.
“I knew that there was really an untapped potential to use this in the theater world,” Gamelin said. “There's been a really big interest in interactive theater and immersive theater—anything where the audience is brought into the story. While what I'm doing doesn't necessarily have an audience, I think it merges a lot of those same principles.”
This project, which started as his senior competency project, has grown into undergraduate research, and has morphed and changed over the past year. Typically, senior theater projects look like a final production, with seniors acting, directing and producing the show in its entirety. Yet, in the wake of COVID, many felt it wouldn’t be possible to do a big production like years past. Gamblin considered creating workshops or performing a series of monologues, all of which they weren’t fully passionate about. Eventually, Gamelin realized that they wanted to work with actors and performers without the structure of a script or text, and the inklings of their project began.
In the early stages, Gamelin tried to fit this event into a typical research paper. The analysis and theory that comes with most research topics wasn’t a driving factor for Gamblin, but they aimed for a more scholarly project at first.
“It's not really about the data,” he explained. “It's about the people and the connections and the experiences. So it went through a little bit of process of, ‘How do I make this project fit that world of academia and research, but still focus on the adventure of the event?’ Luckily I’m doing a poster presentation, so I can talk with people about the experiences that players are going to have, and the experiences I've had with it, so it's much more human centered now.”
As for the event itself, Gamelin kept most of the details under wraps, but said it was a 1920s murder mystery with a sci-fi twist, with eight players and Gamelin serving as both another actor and an immersive director. They explained that the experience is like “improv in an escape room”, where the actors will have character sheets similar to most RPGs, and they’ll have secrets related to the plot. The acting comes in to fill in the gaps of the nonexistent script. The actors get to build out their own personalities in relation to the provided information, and they make choices during the performance how they believe their characters would behave.
“I hope my players get to play and have fun,” said Gamelin. “I think so often, we are so focused on results and producing things that we don't often give ourselves a chance to enjoy it. A big part of why I'm doing this is because of that interpersonal connection. I really wanted this one last chance at UNC Asheville to really dig into a form of theater that would be focused around building connections between people.”
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