Photo of a megagame in progress, with three people standing in a room discussing something.
Once you overcome the initial challenge of feeling like you’re inside a life-sized board game with rules to follow, you realise that you can completely improvise and shape your own journey and play style. These games essentially function as an improvised “legacy board game” experience, with both players and game facilitators adapting and modifying the rules as the game unfolds, allowing everything to change and evolve over the course of the game – great for improvisors!
While ultimately a game, each player finishes with their own unique story of their journey through the experience, intertwined with other players’ stories but without knowing the full details of anyone else’s story. It’s a live, open-ended storytelling medium that relies on improvisation and the social interactions driven by the roles of each player. You’ll often form friendships and bonds with people you’d maybe never meet in the real world, but have a need to in the game world.
One of the most exciting aspects of megagames is that the experience doesn’t end when the game ends. More fun then comes from the post-game debrief or social meet-up, where you learn the tactics and stories of the people you played with and against, and how that changes your own story once you know the truth of what happened and the reasons other players made the decisions they did. It’s like having two games in one!
We use improv as a tool for personal development. By learning to improvise and play, we enhance our life skills and overall balance as human beings. However, once a class is over, how do we continue to play and use what we’ve learned? Many improv alumni end up on stage performing comedic improv as a hobby – yes our stages are full of students who swore they’d never get on stage “never ever”. With improv performance having a very low bar to entry, and only 20-30 hours of improv training needed to become stage-worthy, this is often an improvisor’s main outlet – at least traditionally anyway.
In modern times, however, there are many ways to practice and enjoy improv without performing on stage. Want to play in your living room? Great! Gather some friends and improvise at home. You can play theatre games, tell stories, re-enact popular films, or even dub over movies with the sound turned down. Additionally, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the popular role-playing game from the 1980s, has made a major comeback, as its original fans are now adults. Indeed, many Dungeon Masters (the people who run a D&D games) take our classes to enhance their storytelling and improvisation skills.
LARPs (Live Action Role-Playing) also offer a great avenue for improvisors who are interested in cosplay and enjoy a more theatrical style of role-playing. In fact, our Principal, Richard Bennett, once performed at the Enmore Theatre with LARPers the Anachronists as part of a medieval battle re-enactment in the opening of a themed Theatresports show. Though he wasn’t a LARPer, he stepped in when one of the Anachronists became ill! (Improv pops up everywhere!)
Megagames present another fantastic way to improvise and play outside of class and without stepping onto a stage. If you’re interested in learning more or participating in upcoming events, you can visit the Sydney Megagamers website for more details, or watch the video of a recent game titled The Generalissimo is Dead, which was shot, edited and produced by Genji, one of our advanced class improv students. We may even see you at an upcoming megagame!
And there’s always corporate training, public speaking, acting, and other ways to improvise and play in life and to continue your improvisation journey. It may not seem like it at the beginning, but like a megagame, the future is unwritten and ready for your input and imagination. What will be your improv journey?