The Player's the Thing

The absurdist world of faeries that you are thrust into when starting Titanium Court is a shock to the system. There is no attempt to make itself comprehensible to the player; the titular Court —and the lands around it— shift every day. Perhaps you will never make sense of the Court, perhaps there is only the cycle of war during the day and revelry at night. And then, amongst the ebbing tide, the Mirror appears. You gaze into it. In his 1930 essay The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre, German playwright and practitioner Bertolt Brecht laid out a theatrical framework known as the ‘alienation’ effect, to counter the failings he saw in the Aristotelian model of theatre that centered around catharsis. Under the Aristotelian model, the audience is encouraged to identify so closely with the characters of a play that their struggles become the struggle of the audience. The audience vicariously lives through the rising action, climax, and falling action of a story as an outlet for emotion,…