No half-assed performance: how playing with a live crowd turns video games into performance art

Crowd control Asses.Masses played by a live audience. Crowd control Asses.Masses played by a live audience. T his weekend, I spent more than eight hours in a theatre playing a video game about donkeys, reincarnation and organised labour with about 70 other people. Political, unpredictable and replete with ass puns, Asses.Masses is, on the one hand, a fairly rudimentary-looking video game made by Canadian artists Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim with a small team of collaborators. But the setting - in a theatre, surrounded by others, everybody shouting advice and opinions and working together on puzzles - transforms it into a piece of collective performance art.