Watch the asses.masses trailer.
There’s a stage, and an audience – and a video game controller. Are we the performers, or are the donkeys in the video game the stars of the show?
Learn more about asses.masses.
Office Hours: Coming Soon
Get Into It
Get Thee to the LIbrary
Recommended readings to get you in gear for the show.
Kelly I. Aliano. The Performance of Video Games: Enacting Identity, History and Culture through Play. McFarland & Co, Inc., 2022.
Ioana-Iulia Cazacu. Designing Games Meant for Sharing. CRC Press, 2025.
William W. Lewis. Experiential Spectatorship: Immersion, Participation, and Play During Times of Deep Mediatization. Routledge, 2025.
Souvik Mukherjee. Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back. Palgrave MacMillan, 2017.
Bo Ruberg. How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding through Video Games. New York University Press, 2025.
Read All About It
intermission Magazine | Sep 28, 2023
REVIEW: asses.masses is an endurance performance that takes boredom as its subject
“But a couple of hours into asses.masses‘s marathon runtime, it occured to me that the audience isn’t just the show itself (that’s evident from the start), but that we might also be test subjects in an anthropological study of what an audience can endure.”
Concentrate | February 12, 2025
asses.masses brings nearly 8-hour interactive amalgam of theater and video game to Ann Arbor
“Blenkarn and Lim both draw attention to the social — and even political — skills that gamers draw upon as they play: “It really is all about playing together and taking turns,” Blenkarn says.”
Creative Bloq | April 4, 2025
How two artists made a game that plays like interactive theatre
“…And what ensues is an eight-ish hour adventure of a herd of donkeys trying to get their jobs back from a world that is more interested in machines”
Kingston Alliance Theater | June 13, 2023
‘asses.masses’: One FOLDA-goer’s Assessment
“The theatre is dark. A single video game controller sits under a spotlight in front of a projector screen. With no rules, and in no established order, audience members take turns leaving their seats and approaching the stage.”
Curricular Spotlight
The NYU Game Center is the place to be on campus, for the theory and practice of gaming.