Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane
Theatre in a Hostile Sandbox: Making Grand Theft Hamlet
What changes when your audience is inside the world with you - watching, interfering, commenting live, trying to kill you - and you still have to make the story land?
Grand Theft Hamlet started as an idea in lockdown - then turned into a full production staged inside GTA Online, with an in-game audience, a livestream audience, and all the messy unpredictability that comes with performing in a hostile multiplayer world.
In their MAC session, Pinny and Sam go beyond the headline (“Hamlet in GTA”) and talk about the deeper machinery - how you build a shared experience when nobody’s in the same room, how game systems quietly direct performance, and why audiences get obsessed with what’s “real” even when they’re watching a documentary inside a videogame.
They’ll also share what they’re exploring next - a hybrid performance that merges physical theatre space and the in-game world, bringing new layers of spectatorship into the mix.
What you will learn in this talk:
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STEP 1
1. Staging for the Sniper:
How to build a "theatre" in a world where the audience can literally kill the actors.
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STEP 2
2. The "Playboy Mansion" workaround:
Why technical constraints - like not being able to kill someone indoors—forced their best creative staging.
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STEP 3
3. The "Machinima Bro" Fallacy:
Why keeping the "game-y" clutter (HUD/Maps) on screen actually makes the story feel more authentic.
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STEP 1
4. The Resettable Loop:
The repeatable method for turning a catastrophic game crash into "just another take."
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STEP 2
5. The Edit as Co-Writer:
How to find a narrative in 300 hours of "live mess" without sanitizing the chaos.
Bio
Pinny Grylls is a documentary filmmaker and Sam Crane is an actor and theatre-maker. Together they wrote and directed Grand Theft Hamlet - a feature documentary created entirely inside Grand Theft Auto Online, built from live performance, improvisation, and the unpredictable behaviour of online crowds. Their work sits right in the overlap between cinema, theatre and game spaces, exploring what “liveness” and audience participation really mean when the world you’re performing in can fight back.
XTRAS:
“5 secrets” in full
5 secrets Gareth’s talk will reveal about getting 100,000 people to play at once
The Reveal (The Actual Secrets):
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STEP 1
Design for the Ears First:
Piing starts by deciding exactly what sound they want the audience to make (cheering, booing, laughing) and at what exact second. The game is merely a "prop" to earn that specific vocal reaction.
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STEP 2
Real Play vs. Shallow Mechanics
Crowds have a "BS detector" for "chocolate-covered broccoli" - tasks that feel like work but are masked with points. True engagement requires voluntary escapism where the reward is the play itself, not just a prize.
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STEP 3
The Trinity of Agency, Skill, and Luck
A successful mass game must offer total control (Agency), the ability to improve (Skill), and enough randomness (Luck) to ensure the best player doesn't win every single time, which would kill the room's energy.
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STEP 1
The Power of "Friendly Otherism"
To trigger "pack behavior," you don't need a common enemy. You use "us vs. them" formats - like Grown-ups vs. Kids or South Stand vs. North Stand - to create an instant sense of belonging without the toxicity of traditional rivalry.
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STEP 2
Engineer the Crescendo
In mass play, the "Wow" moment often happens on a simple data visualization. By using sound effects and "tick-tick-tick" animations on a bar chart reveal, you can turn a statistical result into a stadium-wide eruption.