Writer Bekah Brunstetter is definitely not a video game fan. Her personality type — “obsessed with mental productivity,” as she puts it — has covered all gaming rabbit holes for the past 25 years.
And yet Brunstetter, perhaps best known for her television work “This Is Us” and the book for the current Broadway adaptation “notebook” Not one or two plays have now been written about the ways video games hinder or facilitate human connection.
“Game,” it currently has World premiereAbout a fictional version Fortnite Battle Royale, a third-person shooter where each round ends with only one survivor. It comes seven years after Brunstetter “The Oregon Trail” inspiration the game It condemned countless middle schoolers in the 1990s to a series of gruesome deaths (cholera, dysentery, snakebites, etc.) as they attempted to replicate the 19th century’s grim path from independence to the West.
In “The Oregon Trial,” Brunstetter parallels the modern-day struggles of a young woman with the greater dangers of her video game counterpart. With “The Game,” she’s taking an outsider’s perspective, focusing on a support group of wives who decide to withhold sex to keep their partners away from Fortnite, or The Game — or The Game, as it’s called here. (The play is a very loose adaptation of “Lysistrata,” an ancient Greek comedy in which a sexual strike is designed to end the Peloponnesian War.)
Brunstetter, 41, spoke on a video call about “The Game” the day after the final dress rehearsal at the Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, NC, discussing the two plays, her learning curve and the TV show. may be Lure her back into the gaming world.
Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Your characters show a familiarity with The Oregon Trail that they comically lack with The Game. Is this a fair estimate of your own expertise? Have you researched Fortnite for “The Game”?
I know what I know about video games from my husband, mostly by listening to a one-sided version of the conversations he has on his headset while he plays. After finishing my first draft I took a deep dive into gaming rules. He read them and was like: “That will never happen. This is completely wrong. ” Sometimes, when I write, I like to poke fun at my own ignorance.
Sounds like you learned the hard way in middle school about the dangers of the Oregon Trail.
I always die because I have no skill or patience for games. I went to this private Lutheran school where we went from the chapel to the computer lab and killed several people. It’s crazy that this thing we call play has so much at stake and taken so lightly. How much should humans fear and risk for our own comfort?
For the women in “The Game,” The Game’s open-world update has been a source of disappointment. Did the predetermined nature of Oregon Trail dictate a different approach to your storytelling than Fortnite’s sandbox?
Technology in 1995 and the way we related to it were very different. The “Oregon Trail” is more about limited options. The main character in my play is in his mid-20s, which is where I think a lot of people start to feel: “Oh, no. I made a bad mistake. My life is over.”
As for “The Game”, it’s open world, I think, speaks for itself. How does the real world keep these men here when this other world is getting so rich and giving them so much control?
Not just men though. A woman in a support group is there because of her female partner.
This is something my husband pointed out to me years ago: Somewhere around 45 percent of players are women. I knew I had to include it. Especially in the case of shoot-em-up games, it’s easy to assume that this is a male space. But of course women have anger and frustration, and they need an outlet for that too.
But war in “Lysistrata” is definitely a male space.
“Lysistrata” ended up being more of a springboard. It had a lot of what I call boner humor — big, bad, crowd-pleasing humor — and I wanted to find similarities there. So I created the same women and started with the same story, but then played it in a contemporary setting. Also, unlike in “Lysistrata”, the sexual strike does not work.
In the end, you also make a point of showing some of the game’s more positive, world-building aspects.
The first idea I had for the play came from this gap in our lives when my husband and I were trying to have children and it didn’t work out. And he showed me What they were building in Fallout. And it really hit me that they weren’t just filming. He was doing something. Then, during the pandemic, he set me up with this really relaxing farm game where you grow crops. But I wasn’t very good at it.
So you’ve done some gaming in the last 25 years!
Well, and me Came to Words with friends some time My thing is looking at shoes I don’t need or like: “My baby needs a raincoat! I’m going to be looking at children’s raincoats for the next half hour! But the content of the game – it makes no sense to me. And as I say, I recognize that the thing I need to do most of all is to do things that don’t make any sense.
Do you have any specific titles in mind?
Actually, yes. My husband and I Watched “The Last of Us”. And I loved that father-daughter — well, father-surrogate daughter — relationship. I’m really curious to see if I ever find the time to make the cut Play it.