Save this article to read it later.

Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.

Hes sure hes underappreciated, though his aesthetic revolution sounds a lot like unoriginal dreck.

Article image

it’s possible for you to see him, cant you?

Glasses, a little beard, a T-shirt with a skull on it?

It was often deeply absorbing, if in its second half occasionally exhausting.

At every moment, though, it felt like a brand-new genre, confident and fully formed at birth.

(It is stillavailable to watchon Songs Twitch page.

More than 9,500 people have watched Songs stream not live, of course, but since its been archived.

That is the equivalent of selling out New York Theatre Workshop 48 times exactly a six-week run.

Instead of adapting Chekhovs 1895 play for actors, Song remade it for the video games AI-driven avatars.

Will your Sims argue?

Fall in love and make, in Sim-parlance, WooHoo?

As long as free will is turned on in the controls, nothings certain.

Even apart from its various artistic pleasures, the experience was a master class.

Johnson talking about their own processes.

Half an hour in, I thought:Every theater syllabus in the country needs this game.

Songs extended casting period was the deepest investment Ive experienced yet in remote theater.

That hour thrummed like a theatrical probability engine: Each proposed haircut or aspiration opened up a multiverse ofSeagulls.

Then swiftly she clicked through to a slumpier walk, and a less competent Konstantin came into focus.

Either version gave you a fascinatingSeagull; each changing detail unlocked valid readings of the play.

(He gave them away as creepy love tokens.

Thats our Kostya!)

The taxidermied seagulls in Konstantins room kept glitching, flashing in and out as the characters mental state deteriorated.

Chekhov was in the code, laughing.

These happy collisions werent the only reasonSeagullworked so well in this creatively devolved adaptation.

If you count the games developers, and you must,thousandsof people built this show.

Chekhovs own humanism is in that attitude of detached kindness.

Song conveyed it beautifully.

I think Songs game-play/play-game managed the trick by capturing the experience not ofgoingto a show but ofworkingon one.