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Below the Radar Transcript

Episode 239: Ass Power — with Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim

Speakers: Samantha Walters, Milton Lim, Patrick Blenkarn

[theme music] 

Samantha Walters  0:04 
Hello listeners! I’m Samantha Walters with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, I’m joined by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, interdisciplinary artists and co-creators of asses.masses, a participatory videogame performance that follows the epic journey of a group of unemployed donkeys. The show recently wrapped up a run at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Enjoy the episode!

[theme music fades]

Samantha Walters  0:40 
Hello, and welcome back to Below the Radar. Today we're joined by two special guests, Milton Lim and Patrick Blenkarn. Welcome to the show. 

Milton Lim  0:48 
Hello.

Patrick Blenkarn  0:48 
Hello. Very happy to be here. 

Samantha Walters  0:51 
Before we get into it, could you both introduce yourselves a bit?

Patrick Blenkarn  0:55 
Yeah. Milton, who are you?

Milton Lim  0:57 
My name is , my pronouns are he/him. I'm an artist based in Vancouver, BC.

Patrick Blenkarn  1:03 
And my name is and I also use he/him pronouns. And I am... It's complicated, but I'm based in Vancouver, BC, but I'm spending a lot of time in Los Angeles. Thanks to my girlfriend who lives there.

Samantha Walters  1:17 
Cool. Yeah. So we're recording this in the middle of the 2024 — A bit of a mouthful— Where your show is showing. And I just watched it this past weekend— 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:29 
And did you love it? 

Samantha Walters  1:30 
I loved it. It was really... Imagine if I was like, I hated it. 

[Patrick and Milton high five]

Patrick Blenkarn  1:34 
Sorry that was a high five. 

Milton Lim  1:35 
Yes.

Samantha Walters  1:37 
Yeah, so for people who might not know what asses.masses is, like, what is the show? And how did it all come to being?

Patrick Blenkarn  1:44 
First of all, what it is. In a nutshell, asses.masses is a custom made video game that Milton and I and a team of artists from around the world have spent many years building. It is a game that is played and designed to be played inside of a theatre by live public from beginning to end. It takes about seven and a half hours, give or take the skill and or interests of the audience when it is performed. And really at the heart of it, is this collaborative journey that the audience has to go on across these 10 episodes following the epic adventures of an unemployed herd of donkeys and...

Milton Lim  2:20 
And those donkeys are trying to get their jobs back amidst a massive industrialization in their region. There are machines that they are revolting against, they are asking the humans that they can maybe have their jobs back. And in doing so we have an ensemble based story with a herd of donkeys, as much as we also have, as Patrick mentioned, it's a video game played by the audience, but one person at a time. And so there's one controller and people self-elect, or they are told to go up one person at a time by other people in the audience to try and navigate, I guess, the tropes of leadership as they go through the story. And they see their journey reflected both in the room and in the game.

Patrick Blenkarn  2:53 
And so the reason, you know, how did we— How did we come up with the idea of putting a video game on stage and saying, hey, behold, this is actually performance. And you know, we want people to engage with the experience as a form of performance. And also understand how performance can be transformed by the incorporation, or rather, the invitation of other art forms onto the stage. We have a past of making other games, but also like yourself, Sam, we were artists who had some formative training in some capacity at ¶¡ÏãÔ°AV, where collective creation and devised methods were held as a, you know, a high value for theatre creators. And I think for a lot of us who work in that tradition, the idea of play, the centralization of play within an artistic practice and process is incredibly, incredibly important. It creates a sense of liveness, it creates a sense of, you know, contingency that, you know, we all have to be here, we were there the night that something special happened. In the way that, you know, when you see big sporting events, I've often described parts of asses.masses like, we don't know how long it's going to take just in the same way that when you are watching like a boxing match, you know, is the person gonna go down in the first round, or they're gonna go down in the tenth round? And trying to cultivate through play, through game structures, a sense of, really the precarity, I guess of, and I'm gonna say, like, radical contingency of being together as a group doing something. 

A lot of the theatre that we've seen in Canada, and I'd say internationally too, that has tried to start engaging with gamification and game logic, the world and culture of games. Because of the way that they're importing it into theatre culture, they tend to be clipping its wings to a certain extent. You know, we see game aesthetics being recreated, but we don't actually see the principles that really define and shape games being allowed to play out fully on stage and so that has, you know, ramifications on some of the traditions that we associate with theatre. Are the lights on? Or are they off? Or, you know, how long is it? You know, two hours? What are the sort of standard tropes that we tend to experience? And we found that if you let games come into the theatre, and be a game fully, well, maybe the show is going to be a little bit longer than your average three act play. Or maybe, you know, that we have to sort of have other ways of negotiating rhythm and pace, you know, can we take breaks? How long are they? Well, who decides? Should you be told how long to take a break in the middle of a game of monopoly or Settlers of Catan? Like or do you— is it, you know, something that you negotiate with your peers? So as you saw in asses.masses, all of the intermissions are self organized by the audience. Again, coming back to this idea of, you know, this is, we're not here to tell you how to do this, we're here to create the context for you to Carpe Diem, and seize the moment. 

Milton Lim  5:55 
So that's the nutshell of what the show is. Right? 

Patrick Blenkarn  5:58 
Yeah, that's the nutshell, yeah.

Milton Lim  6:00 
Just like all those things, but also like of our practice, and of . And so talking about culturecapital a little bit, which is the trading card game that Patrick and I made, like a lot of the ideas that we have around performance follow through from that into asses.masses, into what the show is. And so this idea of like, what does it mean to participate in something? What is the context in which we play things? Patrick and I will often talk about how putting any game on stage is one approach to making games as performance, but also situating very particularly in a specific context, will allow the game to speak in a different way, will allow it to land in a different way. And so when we talk about asses.masses, and this idea of like taking responsibility for one another, to be in a room in which I have to self elect to become a leader, in a room where we often talk about theatre as a as a site of political gathering, we think that a video game in particular, and the politics, as what we say often, the politics of the basement, where we should all share the controller, we take turns, someone has to go get snacks. When we take a break and we want to start again, like someone else has to go out and say, hey, we're starting. All those things are politically ripe for us in how we imagine the game space, but also the space of theatre, mostly because we reflect upon in culturecapital, the amount of times we've gone and travelled to other locations. And in doing so we learned that a lot of people are saying that their work is doing one thing, and yet at the same time, it's very much held within a certain perspective of what theatre should be. And Patrick and I are very much like, what could theatre be? Right? 

Patrick Blenkarn  7:31  
And I think we saw that a lot during the pandemic. There was many moments when we saw artists mourning theatre as the ultimate site for gathering. And it's just objectively not true. There's so many other ways that humans get together to share stories, and be, you know, in a shared moment of experience, and that we had started asses.masses before the pandemic, and it just happened to become very, very relevant and pertinent to the experiences that the global, you know, the world was having. And I think that is something that we've continued through as the show now has sort of reached its conclusion and it's sort of final form. That, everywhere we go, we are trying to remind ourselves and our public, that the theatre can be a site of gathering, but it is not the only one. And if we want the theatre to be returned, I guess you could say, to a certain political or social political, cultural significance, particularly in English speaking Canada, then we need to start thinking about how it becomes a site for all these other populations and these conversations that it has hitherto been excluding. 

Samantha Walters  8:57  
Yeah, because I mean, often that traditional theatrical gathering feels kind of artificial, in a way as well, like you're sitting and you're not supposed to move or speak or do anything. Like, often with shows recently I've been... I've got the sense that I wanted to yell during a show. And it was really gratifying to get to yell 

Patrick Blenkarn  9:18  
You wanted to yell at the actor and be like, do better or?

Samantha Walters  9:20  
Sometimes that, sometimes that, but sometimes just kind of like... There are moments where it's like, this feels like you want us to do something, but actually, at the same time, we're contained as an audience because you've set up clear parameters of like, stay over there.

Patrick Blenkarn  9:34  
Yeah. And we had to really grapple with that at the beginning, you know, to flashback to some of the earlier tests of asses.masses, we used to have the lights off, you know, we were in a theatre and, you know, we were thinking, oh, and there's a cinematic element to it, you know. For those who are listening, I guess to describe asses.masses in other ways that we do, is to say that it is something like a movie marathon, or you know, an epic binge watch with 150 people. And so when we started the project, and we were starting to think about the design that the theatre would need to have, well we were also, you know, borrowing with the aesthetics that we had from our other experiences, and we realised that no, actually those aren't helping us. We actually need the lights to be half lit, or you know, just dim. Because you need to be able to see the people next to you, you need to be able to see the other people in the theatre so that you can look at each other and have a visual negotiation of, are you gonna be the next player? Or am I? Or can I point at you? Or if you turn around when you have the controller and you try to appeal to the masses behind you, can you see everyone? Well, it's not going to help the work if you can't, you have like bright lights in your eyes. So there were these small changes that were just, you know, very simple changes that we could make to the theatrical space towards further encouraging the kind of social and communal interrelations that we, you know, we hope that the show was creating. And I think it is. It is doing that. Yeah.

Samantha Walters  11:02  
I would say it's doing that— 

Patrick Blenkarn  11:04  
Awesome. Done. Wicked.

Samantha Walters  11:04
From my experience. Yeah, well, I really like this phrase you used about basement politics, because I think, like, yeah, this show is operating on a few different levels of the actual story and how it's set up. But also, yeah, just this experience of being in a space with a group of people playing a game together. I mean, I know I've spent a lot of time playing video games with friends for a whole day where you're just yelling at them to do something. And it's like, oh, it's over there, you have to look over there. And so it's very interesting to take that and put it in a theatre space. And from my experience on Saturday, it seems like the audience very easily got into that mode of feeling comfortable yelling and feeling comfortable pointing things and some people were jumping up to like, go to the person on controller, and—

Patrick Blenkarn  11:53  
Multiple were jumping up, and then they were getting beat to the controller, right. And they would have to then negotiate like, oh, I'm sorry, I got here first. But actually, I don't care.

Milton Lim  12:02  
Maybe for anyone listening, it's important to note that many people have come up to us in the past and said, I don't play video games very well, maybe this is not a show for me. And the honest truth is that participating is also sitting there, is also just being attentive to also seeing maybe you're the one person in the room that saw where that object is, or you know, you've memorised what the particular event is. So you can contribute that. And those are just as important, if not sometimes more important than the person sitting at the front. And for us, that's the gesture towards like political leadership is not something where we should all sit in the back and say, that's your job now. But instead, like we should all be actively contributing to this person's success and leading us forward. And then at any time, like saying, maybe it's my turn to lead us. And so like, as one of the larger gestures of the show, that's one thing that we hope comes out of manifesting this kind of political gathering inside of the theatre, where instead of just sitting there, as we mentioned, like a kind of very reserved audience member in the dark who doesn't say anything, who just receives receives receives. Instead, we can find like a supportive and communal inward looking group that can also move forward as one cohesive herd.

Samantha Walters  13:06  
Yeah, that makes me think of like the history of larger non-Western theatre as well and how it has been a communal kind of thing in the past or even like the famous example of like Shakespeare used to, like people would yell what to do to the characters. 

Patrick Blenkarn  13:21  
Absolutely. And, you know, we've had, we have had audiences that have responded to asses.masses even like a Panto. Like an English panto where, you know, when the villain arrives, everyone in the audience boos and there's these sort of tropes of responses. And I think it's totally available for that to become the language of the night. You know, we've said in other contexts, Milton, that our goal is not to direct the audience how to behave and self organise. But we want to create a very fertile context where, you know, democracy might take form or different types of strategies for collaboration. You know, there's one controller but sometimes two people decide to go and stand at the plinth with the controller and pass it back and forward. Not really sure why, that tends to be young people who are maybe nervous— 

Samantha Walters  14:12  
It's moral support. 

Patrick Blenkarn  14:12  
Being there up there alone, and they need some moral support. So they bring a friend, they bring like a deputy.

Samantha Walters  14:18  
Then it ends up taking longer.

Patrick Blenkarn  14:19  
It ends up taking longer, it's very inconvenient, and then you know, those two people on Saturday, for example— 

Samantha Walters  14:24  
Oh my gosh.

Patrick Blenkarn  14:24  
They just— Oh my gosh, tell me what you felt. 

Samantha Walters  14:27 
Okay, so— 

Patrick Blenkarn  14:28
And why, sorry, but why did you not? 

Samantha Walters  14:31  
Why didn't I not go? Ah.

Patrick Blenkarn  14:32  
Try to depose them? 

Milton Lim  14:34  
Oh, ok. Spicy.

Samantha Walters  14:35  
Oh, yeah, I did not cause a coup. So there's a moment in the game where there's sort of a series of puzzles like stealth puzzles kind of thing. Trying not to get caught, sneaking around, kicking security guards as a donkey. And also some quite graphic factory meat grinder stuff. 

Patrick Blenkarn  14:54  
Yes. 

Milton Lim  14:54  
Mhm.

Samantha Walters  14:55  
And I think it was at that point where you're trying to save the donkey from a meat grinder. And these two people were up there and I think it was that situation where someone came up for moral support. But they were, they were taking turns passing the control back and forth. But they were both doing a really bad job and taking a really long time to do it. And it was getting so frustrating. And I, yeah, I will say I did not feel like I wanted to get up there. Mostly because I was like, I don't know if I can do a better job. 

Patrick Blenkarn  15:22  
Right. Fair.

Samantha Walters  15:24  
That's a metaphor, probably. But... 

Patrick Blenkarn  15:28  
Can we take a pause for metaphor and let the metaphor sink in.

Samantha Walters  15:30  
Pause for the meaning of that. But that was a moment where, sitting in the audience, I could feel the frustration of everyone around me. And... it was a great victory when we finally got through that. But the audience for a few minutes was like really sick of those people up there. They were doing their best, I'm sure.

Patrick Blenkarn  15:47  
But there might have been someone up there— they started to get tired, actually. Visibly tired. 

Samantha Walters  15:50  
They started giving up. 

Patrick Blenkarn  15:51  
And they didn't take the cue that maybe it was time to...

Milton Lim  15:55  
But also no one else offered to help. 

Samantha Walters  15:57  
No, yeah. 

Milton Lim  15:59  
Which is maybe a good segue to say, like, we've done the show internationally, we've done the show in multiple places around Canada. And every time we go somewhere, we kind of get the temperature and the culture of the city manifesting a little bit in the performance. And so you know, to paint in very general kinds of broad strokes. In Toronto, when we did the show, there was a lot more kind of, I'm very present, sometimes a little bit aggressive, but they were very loud and very, like, clear about where they stand on things, about how they might want to vote together. They started creating voting systems in some of the shows,

Patrick Blenkarn  16:29  
When they wanted— Intermissions which again, are self determined, they would stand up and say, OK, what, 15 minutes? 15? 10 minutes? 10 minutes. Okay. See you in 10 minutes. And then...

Samantha Walters  16:39  
That's so different. 

Patrick Blenkarn  16:40  
Someone in the audience actually set, like a timer on their phone. 

Milton Lim  16:43  
Yep. 

Patrick Blenkarn  16:44 
Vancouver absolutely did not do that.

Milton Lim  16:47  
No.

Samantha Walters  16:47  
It was free form. 

Patrick Blenkarn  16:48  
And then when someone wanted to start the button, again, it's impossible to do this just audio, but— 

Milton Lim  16:52  
Woah, look at that dance that you're doing.

Patrick Blenkarn  16:53  
The physicality of the person who would be, like, looking over their shoulder— 

Samantha Walters  16:58
Very sheepish.

Patrick Blenkarn  16:59  
Waiting, very sheepish and being like, well, I think I'm just gonna hit start. And you're like, there's 100 people outside. Like, what are you...? OK. I mean, that's, that's how you're gonna, that's what your form of leadership is? Just, maybe I'm gonna push this button and hope that they hear some sounds and come back in. 

Milton Lim  17:16  
And it just takes one person in the audience to say, do it! And then they do it. 

Patrick Blenkarn  17:19  
And then they do it, you're like, wow, that is how we ended up in such a shitty political situation.

Milton Lim  17:26  
But, as we do the show in Vancouver, it was interesting that so any times, there would be a little bit more reticent kind of behaviour towards leadership and oftentimes when someone was struggling, you would see the people in the audience going like 'you got it.' Like, very supportive. 

Samantha Walters  17:41  
From over here yeah.

Milton Lim  17:42  
Like, you know, not me but you got it! And then, there were a couple times in the first show where someone would say 'who else wants to play?' And the audience would go, eh, no no you're good! And just like, keep going!

Patrick Blenkarn  17:54  
And there's like, 80 people behind them. The moment, on the first show that we had at PuSh. There was a moment where everyone was cheering, because both of these shows had a moment where people got stuck, like, quite stuck. The moment you're describing in the factory, there was another moment in the sort of southwest part of the mines where you have to do a basic jumping sort of sequence—

Samantha Walters  18:14  
Oh, basic.

Patrick Blenkarn  18:14  
Using a platformer,

Milton Lim  18:15  
Basic for some people.

Patrick Blenkarn  18:16  
Basic for some people, and... Jump, jump, dash, come on. But this person, you know, the whole audience was like, you can do it. Cheering, cheering, cheering. And then they got very quiet, because they clearly stopped believing that the person could do it. And they couldn't do it. They had to trade off. 

Milton Lim  18:31  
Yeah, they did. 

Patrick Blenkarn  18:32  
Eventually, but it took much longer for them to recognize that they were no longer necessarily serving the moment as they had once.

Samantha Walters  18:44  
Yeah.

Milton Lim  18:45  
But I just cut some of the footage from our B-roll from Toronto. And there's an excellent moment in the audience, when they're in the same moment with the factory and the button mashing, it was very clear that the person playing couldn't do it. And so he turned around, 'who else is a great button masher, is there someone here?' And someone says 'me!' And they run down. And then they trade off and just like a huge pat on the back saying, like, 'mash!' And then he did it first. The first try. Yeah, it was amazing. 

Patrick Blenkarn  19:10  
So again, every time is... Every time is different, but we're seeing similar ways that the game has also, you know, like kind of social acupuncture. Showing us, you know, it's pushing these certain types of buttons in different communities and, again, broad strokes about how Vancouverites either do or do not wish to speak to their fellow Vancouverites. And this is a game that, you know, really thrives on— or you become very aware of the fact that you should start talking to people around you. But I also think that kind of meritocracy is not something to take as carte blanche good, right? That you know, this idea of oh, there's someone special in the audience who has the special capacity, you know, the hero to sort of swoop in and button mash us out of this problem. You know, it's not a Brad Bird movie. And I think that that is something that I hope that you don't leave, thinking that it is— that that's the solution, right? Sometimes those moments of sitting and struggling with that person jumping their way out of a mine creates a whole special kind of narrative of struggle, of capacity, of you know, who do we— Are we here for efficiency? Or are we here for whatever this other thing is that's emerging? We keep referring to, throughout the show, as you may have noted, you're often presented with the options of do you want to take the long way or the short way? Well, here you are a group of 100 and something plus people and spending a full afternoon and evening in the theatre. Very uncommon and continually you're being asked if you want to spend more time, do you want to make this longer? And of course, in English, we often use the phrase to spend time, like it's a currency. But you know, other languages, we pass time, or, you know, we experience it differently. And so those, often I think we had a... I think Toronto often went for, they also went for short. No, they went for long, long. Yeah, most people and that's what's great to see is that, you know, you might have these presuppositions about how, you know, the value of a community, or the community values time. But also, if the show creates a context where people want to stay, they want to pass more time together, spend more time, they realise that it's— that that time of being together is valuable. And I think it's also doing a good thing.

Milton Lim  21:33  
It did change as we got better at doing the hospitality bit. Because you know, the show is, it feels long if you're hungry. It feels long if you like really need a break, and you haven't really gotten all the sustenance that you need. And so that's something that we've learned over time to get better at. And so now we have like full table of snacks, and warm food and dessert now as part of this run. And those are things that we actively tried to do so people don't have a reason that they need to leave. And in fact that like, bonus points, and in fact, this run, we can bring it inside the theatre and eat while we play. And going back to the basement politics, that kind of makes the whole game, the fact that you can just chill, eat, and then experience this thing, stand up when it's your turn, the kind of divide between the lobby and the theatre becomes a lot more blurred. 

Patrick Blenkarn  22:17  
Yeah.

Milton Lim  22:18  
Yeah. 

Patrick Blenkarn  22:18  
Yeah. What'd you think of the food?

Samantha Walters  22:20  
I was very surprised to get as much food as we did. And I was like, samosas, ice cream. Great.

Patrick Blenkarn  22:27  
Great. Samosas, ice cream, soup, great. 

Samantha Walters  22:29  
That's all I need. Yeah.

Patrick Blenkarn  22:31  
But it's true, you know, the politic of inviting someone to something and then to starve themselves for 8 hours. That doesn't make sense. And when we think about the types of political structures that we have in, well, let's just use Canada as an example. You know, our, we want to, we want people to enter into contexts where they can engage with political thought, and political action. And, you know, just as a good example, like our own government is incredibly poorly set up to accommodate, you know, human relationships. People on the west coast of Canada have to fly back to Vancouver from Ottawa every single weekend, they like, you know, their families fall apart, they can't participate in anything, like just thinking about what are the aesthetics that we associate with political gathering, and where decisions get made and what we need. And it's not, this isn't just an advocation for like, you know, get snacks into your— 

Milton Lim  23:25  
It solves everything.

Patrick Blenkarn  23:26  
But, you know, if we're going to spend the time together, let's make sure that we meet people with where they're gonna want to go. Which, to be honest, is is a philosophy that we also use in the game. Of if you're going to go over the hill, right? You want to see what's over there? Well, we as the game designers better have thought that you might want to do that and be there to meet you, you know, is there going to be something there when you get onto that other side of the hill? Because we want the world to feel full and we want all of your curiosities to be validated. And say like, yes, this is a legitimate use of— Your curiosity is valid.

Samantha Walters  24:03  
Yeah. And that, like feeds into the duration aspect so much as well. I think like, I was thinking while watching the show, that if this was a game that I had on my own console, and I was playing, like, I'm the kind of person that I'd like to see everything everywhere, explore the whole map, talk to everyone possible. But then I was like, well, if I was up there, I would feel guilty doing that, because I'm taking up people's time. And that's also this question of like, economy of time. And also, even though I wasn't up there, I could imagine the feeling like a performer suddenly, when you're up there at the controller because you are performing, even if it's just... 

Patrick Blenkarn  24:40  
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Even if you're just button mashing to plough a field. You know, like that there is a real stress that— People have told us it's stressful. But if you're listening to this, and you're like, I really want to do it. Don't worry. Like it's...

Milton Lim  24:53  
It's also fun. 

Patrick Blenkarn  24:54  
It's also fun. Yeah.

Samantha Walters  24:57  
I will say what felt nice about the Vancouver politics is that people were quite supportive. Just like, we're all behind this kid that's button mashing right now.

Milton Lim  25:06  
We did have a show in Toronto where a few people decided to read out all the lines of dialogue, which has never happened in a show.

Samantha Walters  25:13  
Like perform them?

Milton Lim  25:13  
And perform them! And they put on voices. And there was something interesting that we had never thought of before, which is like it gave a kind of singular reading of the line. Because all the dialogue in the game is represented through like visual text, text boxes. And so when we're all reading that, we all have our own reading voices in our head, we associate like Old Ass has a particular voice for me versus you. But now it's only this one person's voice. And you know, there was some— 

Patrick Blenkarn  25:35  
They were musical theatre people.

Samantha Walters  25:36  
Oh no.

Milton Lim  25:37  
Some musical theatre people. And then those— 

Patrick Blenkarn  25:39  
Long pause. 

Milton Lim  25:41  
There was— Yeah, not everyone was happy about that in the room. But also at the same time, not everyone is willing to like stand up and say, please stop, very loudly and very clearly to them. But somehow, like it kept going through the entire show. And it was one of the most unique shows we've had.

Patrick Blenkarn  25:52  
We had, I mean, we also didn't have the same kind of ferocity. But you know, there's a moment in the factory that's complicated, it's sort of the penultimate section to get out of that factory. And in Buenos Aires, when they failed, like some people were like, jumping up and down, yelling, and screaming, because the person wasn't listening necessarily to them. The people who were yelling actually had the right answer. But, you know, they kept not listening. And I think that idea of I'm not being heard. So what are my options? You know, we're literally in a moment right now, where it feels like, you know, millions of people around the world feel absolutely ignored by governments, who continue to fund and send weapons to Israel. And, like, there's so much outcry of, why can't you hear us? Like, why? What is it like, how many messages do we call, I leave voicemails, I send emails, I go to protests, I go, like, why, what do I do? And so these micro kind of moments in asses.masses, where you see people similarly feel like, they're not being heard by this person at the front. Well, who put that person there? Or like, I didn't, I didn't elect that person, actually, you know, and that's the case in Canada, too. I didn't elect that person, but they happen to be the person who's making these decisions. So what— how do I respond? When it feels like from the get go, I haven't been sort of seen. And that's really a, you know, that's, that's a choice made by the person in the position with the power. And so that's been, it's been very interesting.

Milton Lim  27:21  
And I also think that we talked about this about our democracy talks that we had for the PuSh festival industry series, you know, we're kind of at a tension with the 21st century thought that like, we all have platforms, that on social media, we all have a voice. And the reality being that we all have voices that are quite siloed. And so when we talk about how we can change things, most times people associate, like, I just need to put it out there. And that'll be enough. And yet that going out there is often just going to our close friends. And we think that like, well, the strength of theatre, the thing that we can do inside of theatres is actually gather and maybe see people that we don't necessarily fully agree with, and have that conversation in real time in places where it doesn't become so inflammatory right away. And so yeah, that's—

Patrick Blenkarn  28:04  
Well, and I think , in one of her talks at the push festival, last week, had a great moment where she's like, yeah, we've got diversity, but we actually just don't have diversity of opinion. We're largely in agreement with each other. Like, we have a moral agreement on many fronts when we all get together at the theatre. And because that's like a certain class who goes there, it's a certain culture, certain values of that, as— I mean, just to put it on the record that Canada is not— English Canada is not a place where theatre is sought, as a context for working through ideas and or forming cultural bonds. Like it is absolutely not a primary context. It is secondary, or tertiary, or like, whatever it is, it's a very specialised, special interest. So again, to come back to, you know, okay, well, what did, how can we return that space to be that? You know, means that we also have to be open to this idea of a diverse range of opinions and perspectives on how things should unfold next. And you know, the show that you were at, Sam, that was interesting, we saw that one little group of analysts appear. Again, we keep coming back to this factory, the factory is hard. But the group of analysts jumped up and tried to analyse all of the puzzle options of how to get out of this situation.

Samantha Walters  29:21
Oh yeah, there were like four people.

Patrick Blenkarn  29:22  
There were four people at the front and they're all doing it. Okay. But if I go left here, and I go up there, no, and then I hit the button. And then what if you jump on the thing? And it's like, that was a very funny moment of collective decision-making that, but also cut the audience off. Right? Like they became this sort of micro council. 

Milton Lim  29:38  
A small committee.

Patrick Blenkarn  29:39  
A committee was formed. And again, you're like, yeah, representational politics, like a committee gets made, like cool, which also is just another way that I, you know, I stop being heard, unless that committee is going to, you know, run through each line and be like, what do you think, what do you think, what do you think? 

Milton Lim  29:53 
Because for clarity, they were whispering to each other. 

Patrick Blenkarn  29:55  
They were not sort of publicly fielding responses. Yeah.

Samantha Walters  29:59  
Yes. That's interesting. Yeah, that was a funny moment. 

Milton Lim  30:02
It would have been different if they said I'll take the first four rows, I'll poll them and then you take the next four rows and go on, go on. 

Patrick Blenkarn  30:07  
And again, you know, to be just, to be honest about, you know, is that an efficient way to solve my sensibly a logic problem? You know, does— is that... A lot of what asses.masses gets into is the question around the value of delegated labour. And, you know, here we are with you, have been delegated the podcast from Am. Next generation taking over. And that is, but that is a very central question that we have in the conceit of the show, that we're going to delegate the labour of the performer to the audience, to engage with this problematic that we live in where increasingly different types of labour are being delegated to machines. So we're trying to find a map— we're trying to map out a territory where this translation of labour is happening in all the types of different ways. And not necessarily put a value judgement on, OK, well, this is good delegation, this is bad delegation. Look how, look at how it sometimes serves us, sometimes it doesn't. And then how one person, once they get the power, well, then they hold on to it. And they don't delegate it further, like this sort of flow, trying to think about how asses.masses might visibilise a kind of flow of power and or control over... And even then, like inspiration to the people behind you. 

Samantha Walters  31:35  
Yeah and I think something I noticed that—I'm assuming people's ages here—but most of the folks that went up to use the controller were younger. And there were some older audience members that I don't think any of them went up. And I wonder, with these questions of technology—

Patrick Blenkarn  31:49  
There was a blonde gentleman, with a donkey shirt. 

Milton Lim  31:54  
Yep. 

Patrick Blenkarn  31:54  
From Australia.

Milton Lim  31:55  
He whipped it off, right as soon as he went up to the front. It was amazing.

Patrick Blenkarn  31:58  
He took off his coat so that everyone could see that he had a shirt with a donkey on the front of it. 

Milton Lim  32:01
That's what I meant by whipped it off. 

Patrick Blenkarn  32:03  
So he kept his shirt on. It was not... It's not that type of show, even though to be honest. There are moments that are that type of show. 

Milton Lim  32:13  
Sure.

Patrick Blenkarn  32:13  
And he played one of the sections, so... Which is great to see. In Buenos Aires actually, we had an older woman go up to the controller and was like, I've never played a video game before. 

Milton Lim  32:23  
That was also the first person that ever played.

Patrick Blenkarn  32:25  
The very first person who ever played wasn't an older person. But they were in their 20s, I'd say. 

Milton Lim  32:31  
So old, so old. 

Patrick Blenkarn  32:32  
And they got the controller. And then they turned around and they said, how does it work? 

Milton Lim  32:36  
Yep. 

Samantha Walters  32:36  
Oh amazing, yeah.

Patrick Blenkarn  32:37  
Which to me is a, both an expression of incredible naivete and incredible bravery. To see a spotlight on a controller on an empty stage and think I'm going to go and touch that thing. And so then someone in the audience yells, press X, because they understand what that object is. And then away we go. And there are still moments where someone ends up with a controller, and they are not particularly skilled with it, but something in them called them to service. And, again, to make a connection to our political realities and other places where, you know, anyone can be a member of parliament, technically speaking, and they don't necessarily have to have the credentials to do that very well.

Milton Lim  33:21  
But something that we're proud of is that the game does elicit for some audience members the generosity to just give over your experience. To share with someone your skills of what I can do and what I can do well, and some people are very good at memorising details. And they can use that well. Some people can speak certain languages. That is used at the beginning of the show, especially. Where like, OK, well, you know that but I don't. And so the— Yeah, the show itself has, I guess, a culture to kind of... generosity for the group. But also in the design of the game, we have in every episode, different game genres, and different game mechanics that we use. And that's a very deliberate thing that we do, because not everyone is good at all games. And so at any given moment, someone might have to switch off. And then we also have episode structures, which means that, you know, you come to the end of a narrative arc, and that's another opening to hand over the control to someone else,

Patrick Blenkarn  34:09  
You change character. It's another opportunity. I was playing as this donkey for 20 minutes, but all of a sudden, the story is now, you know, repositioned to be from the perspective of this other donkey. Again, if you're feeling like you're in tune with the narrative, you might feel like, oh, I shouldn't continue because I was that donkey, and it's now time for someone else to be this donkey. 

Milton Lim  34:30  
Doesn't always happen. Sometimes people don't listen to the group, they kind of feel like it's their turn to play. We don't see as often as we think would like, someone saying from the audience, it's my turn. It's often like giving control over maybe that's the politics.

Patrick Blenkarn  34:44  
Or can it be, can it be my turn? Yeah.

Milton Lim  34:48  
But yeah, everyone, Canadians were nice. We have the stereotype of being nice. Giving someone their time. There's the understanding that as the performer you don't interrupt their performance. And so all of those things are at tension with the game and doing it in different places, in different contexts, both culturally, and also like architecturally. Like we're inside of a theatre. That comes with different rules. But if we were to do it inside of a cinema, that would be different. If we did it in some sort of like empty art gallery, also different. If we did it in someone's basement, very, very different, right? 

Samantha Walters  35:15  
Yeah. So, to turn to the donkeys, what is it about donkeys as like the chosen vehicle for the show?

Patrick Blenkarn  35:23  
They happened to be the subject that I was working on, at the end of my graduate studies, when at ¶¡ÏãÔ°AV. I had done my MFA degree there and was interested in representations of knowledge. And was looking at books as an object, as an artefact, and as a kind of a problem. And in one of the works that I was building, came along a donkey character, largely inspired by an image that I found in an Alberto Manguel book, just called . And it was a book from, there was an image, it was a woodcut from the 15th century, or 1500s, where a donkey is teaching a group of students, and it was a, you know, it was a satirical image to represent the state of education in that era. So I started thinking about, oh, the donkey was an interesting antithesis to the image of knowledge, right? Because it's put in the place of the teacher. But you know, it just takes scratching the surface a little bit to realise that actually, that's just a gross misrepresentation of the animal's behaviour. And that for largely its entire history, it has been subjected to, you know, being abused as an image or as a symbol, as a way to, you know, be a convenient vehicle for criticising manual labourers, people who we think are stupid. You know, it's sort of infiltrated many Indo-European languages, as well as Semitic languages and other languages around the world as a form of insult to, you know, someone else. In English, ass. You, ass. In Portuguese burra. Like, you know, it's part of so many of our vocabularies. And so, you know, there was these tests at the beginning of how it might be a character that could help us understand the contemporary situation where it was, where the manual labour was increasingly disappearing from narratives and urban contexts, it was being replaced, they were being replaced by machines. And at one point, I sort of stumbled on the idea of donkeys who work all day coming home and playing video games. And that was like an initial seed idea, and there was a little test that I had done, and then a residency was granted to me at the Shadbolt, and I invited Milton, because we had already started working on culturecapital. So like, he was privy to my weird donkey interests for at least a year. 

Milton Lim  37:56  
I was.

Patrick Blenkarn  37:56 
Like, oh, I'm like reading about donkeys. Oh, have you heard of this like, you know, massacre going on in Asia, where donkeys are being slaughtered to produce this particular Chinese medicinal product called ejiao. And so I was very interested in, you know, this idea that this manual labour was literally now being liquidated to feed the desires of the nouveau riche, as a status, and it seemed like a, you know, a kind of, a very strong metaphor. Despite also not— It's also just a very real situation that a life is being sacrificed because it is more valuable dead than alive, which is the case for all animals that are consumed. And so anyways, we started working in that context. And we came to this idea of, you know, making games about donkeys. Exploring the ways that we could use the ideas that we had in culturecapital around dramaturgically translating labour or economic relationships into games. So we took the donkeys, the situation these donkeys were living in or trying to live in or trying to survive in, and turned them into games. And at some point in time, it turned into a sort of fantasy epic of Marxist donkeys trying to revolt against the humans. There's a bunch of other steps in there but do you want to fill anything in?

Milton Lim  39:08  
Well, I'll just say that the documentarian aspects of the donkeys have been moved into a different project now called , which we'll one day make when we have time. But yeah, that's like a series of different smaller games. But we realised in going back to the theatrical practice, I think that's one of the things that made us realise that the story is the main driver. Might help us be able to explore larger questions, rather than just like isolated moments of just like learning real facts. We're like oh, maybe we can start to seed in like larger questions about philosophies, about ways of being, and experiential questions as well, that we wouldn't otherwise have if we had something much more, I don't know, broken apart.

Patrick Blenkarn  39:49  
Yeah, and especially when trying to say hey, we're going to engage with the theatre, the tradition of theatre. And this presumption again, theatre has the space for these, opera— You know theatre, opera, these big stories, these big epics and that they have some kind of privileged status in the history of storytelling. We're storytellers, tell us the theatre artists, all the time. And you're like, cool, but also video games can tell stories. And so if we're going to go into theatre, we're going to need to make sure that we bring the biggest, like, a story that is too big for most theatres with us. You know, it's going to have a cast of 15. Well, you can't, you can't hire 15 actors very easily in Canada, and it's gonna have multiple locations, it's gonna have robots, it's gonna have AI, it's gonna have all these things that theatre can't necessarily do in the way that it was doing it before. But it can do it this way, it can do it if it lets video games be theatre. I think we should also say that the donkeys... We were interested in this idea that for a lot of us, we were labouring all day on computers, and we'd go home. And in our off time, we would then continue playing on exactly the same machine. And that has become a, you know, a globally shared experience for so many people throughout the pandemic. But for us in, you know, 2018, 2019, when we started, we were really thinking about the, what is the significance of that which is produced through, for example, virtual farming. It's a carrot, it's a virtual carrot, you can't eat it. So, what is it? Like, why did you make it? What is it putting into your world? Or what is it feeding? What is the other thing that it's feeding? And again, that sort of was a shared context, imagining these donkeys who had to work all day, and might go, you know, if they got time off, would they play with a plough? And starting to blur this idea of work and play, and all the ways that we are, you know, being encouraged to both make work a place of play, and, I don't know, consider play, to be something that should be outside of work. The kind of capitalism structure that has consumed the very idea of time off as a place for self betterment. You know, like, oh, in your spare time, you should like, learn something. So that you can be more productive and more valuable in this particular economy.

Milton Lim  42:21  
Well, prior to recording, we talked about Animal Crossing, which is a very funny parallel to a couple of things, but also like Tom Nook as a character who is like... For context it's this raccoon, right?

Samantha Walters  42:33  
Tanuki, yeah.

Milton Lim  42:34  
Thank you, Tanuki. Who... For the precision, thank you.

Patrick Blenkarn  42:38  
Very different. 

Milton Lim  42:39  
Yes.

Patrick Blenkarn  42:40  
Actually we, just to say, Pom Poko was very important to the studying in the, sort of in the research phase for asses.masses. 

Milton Lim  42:46  
Watch it. 

Patrick Blenkarn  42:47
Isao Takahata's Pom Poko. Back to Animal Crossing. 

Milton Lim  42:50  
So Tom Nook, you know, it tells you like, hey, welcome to my island. Also here, please build your own house. Okay, perfect. Now—

Samantha Walters  42:56  
Pay me.

Milton Lim  42:56  
Now that you've built your own.—And now pay me for building your own house. Now also build other people's houses and pay me for the materials and everything else that you need. Quite a jerk.

Samantha Walters  43:04  
The Tom Nook discourse is intense online.

Milton Lim  43:07  
It is. And then we haven't even touched on the radishes. 

Samantha Walters  43:10
Oh, my— the stock market? 

Milton Lim  43:12
The stock market. 

Samantha Walters  43:12
They built a stock market into the game.

Patrick Blenkarn  43:14  
And so for anyone like me, who actually has never played Animal Crossing, and has no— Has not been abused by this Senor Nook... I, you know, but you see, like, it doesn't... It's that, that relationship and that sort of transformation of economic relationships have, you know, we see it in all kinds of different contexts. And so that was, you know, as we started asses.masses trying to think, like, what was the story? Just to have it on the record, something that was very fun in the development of asses.masses, was that at the beginning, they weren't actually protesting to get their jobs back. They were trying to get better work conditions. We decided somewhat early on in the process, that it might be more interesting for them to be a little bit more politically compromised. In terms of this difficult position that I guess, I think we're finding ourselves in, where conservativisms and, you know, like, our spectrum is totally blurred in terms of who wants what and why and who should get... Who should have— Who's return to more conservative values is politically supported and who's returned to conservative and more domestic values is being deemed, you know, unvaluable or like problematic? So we sort of created this whole religion that these donkeys have around work, that they had been domesticated for 7000 years and so how could they remember a time before work? And you see this play out in, you know, one of the characters, Sturdy Ass who champions that one day we'll get to go back to the way it used to be. And she, you know, her greatest wish is for her child, the foal, to have the opportunity to toil in the fields like she did. And the foal who has been born, who was the first to be born into their world without work, doesn't know what it is and doesn't understand why she should love it. Like, why should I? Why should I do that? And all the stories that my mom tells me are, you know, that it's supposed to be this great, great thing, but I don't have any examples actually. 

Milton Lim  45:21  
And I don't want it.

Patrick Blenkarn  45:22  
And I don't want it. 

Samantha Walters  45:23  
I just want to play rocks. 

Patrick Blenkarn  45:24  
I just want to play rocks or I want to, you know, jump around and play. 

Samantha Walters  45:27  
Yeah, I mean, maybe we'll tack this on to the end in case people want to avoid spoilers of the show, but we can talk about the story. 

Patrick Blenkarn  45:34  
Yeah, yeah, totally. Let's get into it. Because you know, I don't think, we can... I think we can do our best to avoid the big spoiler. Whatever, those are.

Milton Lim  45:42  
Which we all understand what they are, right? OK.

Patrick Blenkarn  45:46  
We'll play a buzzer if you say something where it's like, or maybe we could actually just redact it at the end. 

Samantha Walters  45:52  
Yeah, we'll like do a beep. 

Patrick Blenkarn  45:53  
Just do beeps. 

Milton Lim  45:54  
Unintelligible conversation.

Patrick Blenkarn  45:57  
This is the end of the part where it's understandable. So yeah, the story. How did you feel at the end?

Samantha Walters  46:02  
Yeah, I was not expecting to be so emotionally invested in the donkeys.

Patrick Blenkarn  46:07  
Let's not cut that line out. That's important.

Samantha Walters  46:09  
We'll keep that. Yeah. Keep that for marketing purposes. 

Patrick Blenkarn  46:12  
And, you know, you're not the only one. The number of people who came to me during the intermissions because, you know, we hang out and we were there to just meet people and talk to them. And said, you know, I was, I actually only thought it was gonna stay for two hours. Even though it said, you should stay the whole time, they had the gall to tell me that I was only gonna stay for two hours. But I'm so invested right now. And I've actually cancelled my other things.

Milton Lim  46:32  
And that's something to be said about, like, the emotional attachment that one has to a character that you've known for, like maybe an hour in a show is one thing. But then for anyone who like loves reading books, or like they love serialised narratives, or anyone like myself, who's played a video game for like, 60 hours, and the amount of time I've spent with certain characters—Cloud Tifa—you know, like, I can name the list. And my relationship to them is fundamentally different from one that I've known for, they're basically a stranger. And so there's something to be said about a narrative over seven hours, like you keep going deeper and deeper with those relationships. And that's something that we knew as we were writing the game, that like, we had to make something that didn't just have like a side character that just never comes back. But instead, this is an ensemble story, it's going to be something that we're going to have B characters become main characters. And that really gave us a lot of fodder to go back and forward on like, trying to find other forms of storytelling that usually theatre doesn't have space for. 

Samantha Walters  47:27  
Yeah, I mean, I fully cried over Trusty Ass.

Patrick Blenkarn  47:31  
At the end of episode one. 

Samantha Walters  47:32  
Yeah.

Patrick Blenkarn  47:33  
Or in eight?

Milton Lim  47:33  
Oh! 

Samantha Walters  47:33  
End of episode one. I was—

Milton Lim  47:35  
That's early. That would be in the first hour.

Samantha Walters  47:37  
I was in— Well, because like the entire first episode, you're basically playing as Trusty Ass. And then suddenly, you [beeping sound].

Milton Lim  47:47  
Beep.

Patrick Blenkarn  47:47 
Beep.

Samantha Walters  47:49  
Suddenly, something happens to you. And there's also like the spiritual element of it coming in, it's suddenly very visually and aesthetically different. Like the whole spirituality system, I was so into, as well, just like... It reminded me a lot of The Good Place, the TV show.

Patrick Blenkarn  48:07  
The dramaturg with whom we have worked on this show, .

Milton Lim  48:11  
And co-writer. 

Patrick Blenkarn  48:12  
And co-writer. She loves The Good Place. 

Samantha Walters  48:13 
Yeah. 

Patrick Blenkarn  48:14  
And that is one of her examples, you know, I use Plato's Republic.

Milton Lim  48:20  
On the same level.

Samantha Walters  48:21  
On the same level as The Good Place!

Patrick Blenkarn  48:21  
And then she uses The Good Place, which they all definitely read Plato's Republic. And just thinking about, you know, we're thinking about cycles of regeneration and reincarnation, and which in the story of asses.masses, for those listening, is called re-ass-ignment. Because we've tried to work the word ass into pretty much absolutely every core concept of the show. 

Milton Lim  48:44  
Yeah. And ass related things like butts, bums, you know, whatever you wish. 

Patrick Blenkarn  48:50  
Which, this is a sidebar moment to say, high-art low-brow. Or low-brow humour, high art?

Milton Lim  48:55   
Yeah, we go low-brow, high-art. And just like, it's for the people. Yeah.

Patrick Blenkarn  49:00
And the reason for that is that there are judgments historically that have been made against donkeys, namely their ass as a homonym for butt. But also, video games have also been subject to a kind of, what would you say, like a smear campaign for decades?

Milton Lim  49:16  
I'd say it exactly that way.

Patrick Blenkarn  49:17  
That, you know, that they were always vulgar, of the people, you know, stupid, they would like melt your brain. Like these types of stereotypes really were just another way of undermining the, let's say intellectual capacities of both— Of a form. Of a form to tell stories, to be complicated. I mean, it's maths, like how could you tell people like, it's just straight up maths. So I feel like there is a really beautiful parallel. They're very different, but there's a beautiful parallel between the way that video games have been treated in their lifetime, and even just maybe games in general, since the days of them being, you know, necessary components of military training. Like Go. And donkeys. That they also have, you know, these sort of similar generational smear campaigns.

Milton Lim  50:11  
We did have two— 

Patrick Blenkarn  50:12  
Sorry, the smear campaign pun, I've now just clocked it. 

Milton Lim  50:15  
Yes, yes. We should put it in somewhere. But we did have two people come to the show, fairly older, if I can say it nicely. So they were standing outside the show, and one of them says, hey, are you going back in? And then he went, no they're just playing a video game in there. Which was hilarious to me. And, you know—

Patrick Blenkarn  50:40
Meanwhile Sam's crying. Totally devaluing your experience.

Samantha Walters  50:45  
My emotions are valid.

Milton Lim  50:46  
Different experiences for sure. And we're not going to win everyone over, but we hope that they'll give it a chance.

Patrick Blenkarn  50:51  
So back to the tears. 

Samantha Walters  50:52  
Oh, yeah. That happened.

Patrick Blenkarn  50:53 
So that happened. And what happened next to you?

Samantha Walters  50:54  
Um, I mean, the... So there's also like these interludes throughout the game of like, the red screen, pixelation happening, that I mean, it's part of the spirituality system I'm assuming.

Patrick Blenkarn  51:08  
For sure.

Samantha Walters  51:08  
That sometimes doesn't get fully explained, which I'm for. But yeah, with The Good Place, it was interesting that, so you find, after these donkeys have died, they're in this place where there's like, all these hedonistic things that they could desire that they wouldn't get in their sort of toiling labour lives of like— There's like a pit for orgies, if I can include that in the podcast. 

Patrick Blenkarn  51:30  
For sure. There is an orgy den.

Samantha Walters  51:32  
There's drugs, there's like, we didn't get a chance to see the racing thing, I think on Saturday, but there is something there. And then they have the choice to re-ass-ign themselves back to life and back to potential labour. And that just brought up all of these questions of like, what is the meaning of our existence and how we produce value in society. And also that, like... Why I think of The Good Place is because there's that final season where they find themselves in... Spoilers for The Good Place. They find themselves in the actual good place. And it's, they get bored of it eventually, because it's just good things. And...

Patrick Blenkarn  52:11  
And so that is a... We were very aware of that story and that value. Sort of that idea of, what is the purpose of going on? And like what are we going on to do? And in asses.masses, the ass-tral plane is the name of the afterlife. Yes, it's funny. And then, so yeah, you find these donkeys occupying what is ostensibly supposed to just be a highway towards, you know, going back to the material world, and getting back to work. In what work means. And you know, there's a whole other layer there, 

Milton Lim  52:50  
Not the perverted work.

Patrick Blenkarn  52:51  
Not the perverted work, but the good work, which, you know, you'll find out what it is when you come to see it in a future show, whoever's listening. And that, but that moment of understanding what that world had to be, that took time for us, because at the beginning, we did think it was, you know, freedom. They were free from the trappings of and the sort of the blood, sweat and toils of... which is not the way that those words normally go. Blood, sweat, and tears, but blood, sweat, and toils, let's say, of their material condition. And then we've slowly, you know, we've slowly as artists also sort of tried to understand oh, yeah, well, what is that? What is that dream of extricating yourself from the shit? That, you know, we keep falling back into in this world.

Milton Lim  53:37  
Especially while others are still in it. Right? And so that's one of the larger kinds of conversations about like, are we going to leave everyone else behind? Or are we going to do this together?

Patrick Blenkarn  53:47  
And I think that question of, again, to come back to the way that we've understood video games as escapism, as a world that you escape to, that you go to, and you sort of shut off everything else in the world. That was part of our earlier conversations as to what that, you know, what is that space? What is digital space? That afterlife moment that we're talking about is in 3D, as opposed to the vast majority of the show, which is in 2D, borrowing aesthetics from Pokemon and that generation. You know, so we wanted to make a world that was beautiful, lush, like— Well, it's the desert, so it's not lush. But it's, you know, it's rich in its detail. And it feels like it's teeming with possibilities. Because we, you know, we're trying to invite this dialogue on well, we could just stay here. And if we did, what could we, you know, we could run all these races, we got all these things that you could just do for minutes and minutes and minutes and minutes. And yeah, hopefully, I mean, it sounds like that that landed for you. 

Samantha Walters  54:45  
Yeah. And that's making me think that it's interesting that when, at least my experience on Saturday with our group was that when we were in that space, we were like, no, we have to get back to the other space as quickly as possible because they need— The donkeys need our help. Over there.

Patrick Blenkarn  55:01  
Which is a great... Which is great. And you know, so if you don't feel swayed, maybe, you know, maybe we go back to the writing room and we try to sway people more or we— 

Samantha Walters  55:09  
To stay in the... 

Patrick Blenkarn  55:10  
Yeah, but at the same time, we have seen people like arrive and say, let's go! Like, I think the first time we ever played the ass-tral plane in a public context, they just ran right around the middle and right at the other end. They didn't even touch anything. 

Milton Lim  55:28  
Here we are in the back of the theatre going, that's like an hour of content!

Samantha Walters  55:33 
We programmed all these things!

Milton Lim  55:34  
We did.

Patrick Blenkarn  55:35 
We like stayed up for days trying to make something work. And then— 

Milton Lim  55:38  
It was at least three weeks of work. 

Patrick Blenkarn  55:40  
Yeah, it was just like, we don't care. Like, we want to know, we want to save the herd, we want to get back, we want to get back to work. 

Milton Lim  55:46  
And to be clear for everyone listening, like when you see the show, you will not see everything. It's not possible. 

Patrick Blenkarn  55:50  
Yeah. And I think, you know, we... Certain people will always ask, you know, could it have been different? Could it unfolded— you know, did my choices matter? And that is something that has been a really interesting conversation for Milton and I, throughout this process, because we're looking at different ways of choices, and what you're choosing between. And for us, those matter, because a lot of it is about, not necessarily creating branches and narrative, but creating the version of the narrative that's here tonight in this theatre. So how does this character respond to this other character? Do they use these words? Or do they use these words? Are they sharp? Or are they gentle? Are they... So there's a certain amount of flexibility of who the characters even are, through that kind of input. And it's not just about saying, I want to go left to this world, or right to this other world, and we're gonna build, you know, totally different stories. But it's about, here is the story of asses.masses. And every time we play asses.masses, it's different. But like any great epic poem, you know, it's told differently, but it also arrives at the same, like conclusion, right? My example, because it's just my background, is that Odysseus always comes home at the end of the Odyssey. How long he stays on the island or how many of his comrades get eaten by the Cyclops, you know, that might depend on who's telling it that night. And that was a real way in for me to understand the sort of ways that video games can breathe that Milton, when you play some of the games that you play, and you want to make sure you get a cool haircut, or you want to— 

Milton Lim  57:44  
Always. 

Samantha Walters  57:45  
It's important, 

Patrick Blenkarn  57:45  
You know, these like very specific things. When you're creating that story, you're able to spend, you know, when you sat down to tell the audience about your journey through— What game is that in again, that you did the haircut in? 

Milton Lim  57:58  
Fallout. 

Patrick Blenkarn  57:58  
Fallout. Like that you would say, look, I'm going to— Before we go on, everybody, you know. If it was a stage show, you would say, and now I'm going to describe for you the haircut that this character had. 

Milton Lim  58:09  
Important. 

Patrick Blenkarn  58:10  
And you go into all these details, because it would represent who they are and how they were feeling at that, who they were, how they were feeling at the time, like, how many days it's been since they shaved? Or whatever it was. You have that licence, but the end of Fallout, you still reached that moment, but it was— The flavour is very, very specifically shaped by your decisions. 

Milton Lim  58:29  
Yeah. We took from quite a few other games in terms of like inspiration of what they've done. I will note down as a very important game that we had played in the development process by . And something in the episode one or act one that they do, which is super smart, is dialogue options. But they don't always make a difference. Sometimes they do. And that's also in our game, sometimes your dialogue changes are for branches inside the game. Other times it is for explicitly something for us to understand more about the character. So as we were writing, sometimes it became clear to us that we didn't always have to have two different, I guess, story chains. But sometimes we could represent all the things that the character is thinking and represent their perspective, who we're playing as, through the different options that they have in front of them. And there's that conversation of what they say. But then there's also the conversation in that room, like how do we decide what they're going to say? So in Kentucky Route Zero, you can name your dog right at the beginning of the game, it doesn't really make that big of a difference. But for you, you become so much more attached to this character because you named them. And we also do that inside of asses.masses.

Patrick Blenkarn  59:32  
Yeah, that's a great example of how do you visualise thought?And so for anyone just, you know, looking for tactics in whatever they're making, those dialogue options, you can't pick all of the options, but you're given the information that this character has 10 responses, maybe, to this situation. All of them tell us about how their character is, right? They're all valid thoughts and like us, you know, we're complicated people, like we get multiple impressions of, oh my god, there's six things I could do. And those paint a version of my way of responding. And just additional information that, you know, in— Because even though asses.masses is seven and a half ish hours, we can't tell everything that we want to tell. Like there could be so much more, it could be so much longer. So we're also looking for areas to sort of add in additional information to round out characters, for sure.

Samantha Walters  1:00:27  
Yeah, it was funny, leaving the show. And then I had the moment where I— When I play games, I like to go on like the wikis or whatever. And like, see the different options and like— 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:00:37  
Where did you go? 

Samantha Walters  1:00:38  
Well, I didn't know where— I went to the accessibility guide. 

Milton Lim  1:00:42  
Oh! Ok.

Samantha Walters  1:00:43  
Because I was like, I was curious, like, oh, there's the zoo versus the circus thing. Like, what happens in the zoo? Because you've written out the plot, basically. And I was also curious, like, are there any other endings? Like what else could have happened? Or... Yeah, and it was funny, I had a desire to like, oh, I wish there was a Reddit forum for this, that we—

Patrick Blenkarn  1:01:02  
Do you want to start it?

Samantha Walters  1:01:04  
Yeah, it was. So it'll be—

Patrick Blenkarn  1:01:05  
Actually it'd be very funny too. It would not be the first time that asses.masses was mentioned on Reddit. 

Samantha Walters  1:01:12  
Really?

Patrick Blenkarn  1:01:12  
Because we did a version of episode one and two, that were totally rewritten after, but we did it in a 300 something seat theatre in Kelowna, in February, on the weekend before Canada shut down. 

Milton Lim  1:01:28  
Yep. 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:01:29  
And in 2020. We remember seeing someone had posted the listing for the show with the description of the show. And there was a Reddit comment on it that said, is this, I'm pretty sure this is just art speak for playing video games with your friends.

Milton Lim  1:01:47  
In your basement. I think is what they said.

Patrick Blenkarn  1:01:49  
I don't think they said the basement. 

Milton Lim  1:01:50  
I thought they did.

Patrick Blenkarn  1:01:51  
Well, maybe that's where that whole phrase came from. But it's fancy artspeak for playing video games, because we had a very artspeaky way of trying to justify what we were doing at the time. And so yes, if you go to Reddit, and you search, I think that might still show up. 

Milton Lim  1:02:07  
And they got it. They understand. 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:02:08  
They understood, they called us on it. And we're like, yeah, that's absolutely what it is. Yeah, totally. Reddit user so and so: Isn't this just artspeak for playing video games with your friends? May or may not be in a basement. 

Samantha Walters  1:02:21
Like those ironic marketing techniques.

Patrick Blenkarn  1:02:22  
Yeah. Which like you see on Oatly.

Samantha Walters  1:02:28
Yeah, I like that the references in this interview span from like Plato to Oatly.

Milton Lim  1:02:34  
Sure.

Patrick Blenkarn  1:02:35  
Hey, I think whoever's writing the Oatly box, they could have worked with us on asses.masses. I think they get it. 

Milton Lim  1:02:44  
They're real.

Samantha Walters  1:02:46  
Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about? 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:02:49  
Well, we should say that asses.masses is touring, it is being translated into French starting tomorrow, actually. 

Milton Lim  1:02:57  
Yep. 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:02:57  
And it has already been translated into Spanish, where it premiered using that Spanish translation in Buenos Aires. And has toured to Mexico City and Halifax and Toronto, and Kingston, as we've mentioned. We have one more show here in Vancouver, this recording will come out much later. 

Milton Lim  1:03:13  
So you missed it. 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:03:14
Possibly before upcoming shows that we're going to have in Bristol, United Kingdom, and Montreal, Quebec. And then we'll also have shows in the near future in Ireland and hopefully other parts of Europe.

Milton Lim  1:03:27  
Just to place it in time. If you're listening to this, our shows in Bristol and Montreal will happen in May. 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:03:32  
May, 2024. 

Milton Lim  1:03:33  
That's, that's right. In case you listen to it in 2028.

Patrick Blenkarn  1:03:38  
And that's the beauty of archives. 

Milton Lim  1:03:39  
Yeah. 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:03:40  
So you know, if... The show is constantly evolving. We're always, you know, interested in like, we keep it open, we draw a little bit more, we fix a little bit more here. So if you've already seen it once, and you find yourselves in those places too, come and find the pixel art that we've updated, and or see like new... I think episode four might actually be different than what Sam saw. By the time we get to May. It'll be just different. So.

Milton Lim  1:04:08  
Yeah, also, we're pretty friendly people. If you just want to reach out to us, Instagram, find us on the socials. Just let us know if you have any questions, like we love chatting about these things. So if this whole conversation really sparks something in you, reach out.

Patrick Blenkarn  1:04:22
Yeah, you can find us at . And I think in the show notes, maybe there'll be links to our respective websites as well and . 

Samantha Walters  1:04:32  
Those will for sure be in the show notes. 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:04:34  
Wicked, love the show notes. It's been so great to talk to you.

Samantha Walters  1:04:39  
Thanks. Thank you guys for coming in.

Patrick Blenkarn  1:04:40
And yeah, hopefully we see some of these listeners. Obviously we don't know what your faces look like at this time but... 

Milton Lim  1:04:46  
And you don't know what we look like either. But... Google. 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:04:51  
Meetings are still possible. 

Milton Lim  1:04:53  
Yes. Until then. Never forget. 

Patrick Blenkarn  1:04:56
Ass power.

Milton Lim  1:04:56
Ass power.

Samantha Walters  1:05:00  
Excellent. 

[theme music]

Samantha Walters  1:05:06
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by ¶¡ÏãÔ°AV’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim. Check out our show notes to find out more about asses.masses, including upcoming performances. If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with ¶¡ÏãÔ°AV's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.