The writer Bekah Brunstetter is decidedly not a video game aficionado. Her personality type — “psychotically obsessed with productivity,” as she put it — has sealed off all gaming rabbit holes for the past 25 years.
And yet Brunstetter, perhaps best known for her television work on “This Is Us” and the book for the current Broadway adaptation of “The Notebook,” has now written not one but two plays about the ways that video games can hinder or facilitate human connection.
“The Game,” which is currently having its world premiere, is about a fictionalized version of Fortnite Battle Royale, a third-person shooter where each round ends with only one survivor. It comes seven years after Brunstetter’s “The Oregon Trail,” inspired by the game that condemned countless 1990s middle schoolers to an array of awful deaths (cholera, dysentery, snake bites, etc.) as they tried to replicate the grueling 19th-century passage west from Independence, Mo.
In “The Oregon Trail,” Brunstetter paralleled the modern-day struggles of a young woman with the higher-stakes perils of her video game counterpart. With “The Game,” she is taking the outsider perspective, focusing on a support group of wives who decide to withhold sex to get their partners off Fortnite — or The Game, as it is called here. (The play is a very loose adaptation of “Lysistrata,” the ancient Greek comedy in which the sex strike is designed to end the Peloponnesian War.)
Brunstetter, 41, spoke over a video call about “The Game” the day after its final dress rehearsal at Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, N.C. She discussed the two plays, her learning curve and the TV show that might lure her back into the world of gaming.
Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Your characters show a familiarity with The Oregon Trail that they comically lack with The Game. Is that a fair estimation of your own expertise? Did you research Fortnite for “The Game”?
I know what I know about video games from my husband, mostly through hearing the one-sided version of conversations he has on his headset as he plays. I took a deep dive into the gaming terms after I finished my first draft. He read them and would be like: “That would never happen. This is completely inaccurate.” Sometimes, when I’m writing, I like to make fun of my own ignorance.
It sounds like you learned about the perils of the Oregon Trail the hard way back in middle school.
I always died because I have zero skill or patience for games. I went to this private Lutheran school where we went right from chapel to the computer lab and killed a bunch of people. It’s crazy that this thing we called a game had so much danger that we took so lightly. How much do humans need to feel scared and feel danger for our own comfort?
For the women in “The Game,” an open-world update of The Game is a source of dismay. Did the preordained nature of The Oregon Trail dictate a different approach to your storytelling than the sandbox of Fortnite?
The technology back in 1995 and the way we related to it were so different. “The Oregon Trail” was much more about finite choices. The main character in my play is in her early to mid-20s, which is where I think a lot of people start to feel: “Oh, no. I made the wrong mistake. My life is over.”
As for “The Game,” it’s an open world, which I think speaks to right now. How is the real world going to keep these men here when this other world is becoming so much richer and giving them so much control?
Not just men, though. One woman in the support group is there because of her female partner.
That was something my husband pointed out to me years ago: Somewhere around 45 percent of gamers are women. I knew I had to include that. Especially in terms of the shoot-’em-up games, it’s easy to assume that this is a male space. But of course women also have rage and frustration, and they need an outlet for that as well.
Whereas war in “Lysistrata” is definitely a male space.
“Lysistrata” ended up being more of a springboard. It had a lot of what I would call boner comedy — big, bawdy, crowd-pleasing comedy — and I wanted to find the similarities there. So I created the same women and started with the same story, but then just played it out in a contemporary setting. Also, unlike in “Lysistrata,” the sex strike doesn’t work.
Near the end, you also make a point of showing some of the more positive, world-building aspects of The Game.
The first idea I had for the play came from this in-between space in our lives where my husband and I were trying to have children and it wasn’t working out. And he showed me what he had been building in Fallout. And it really struck me that he wasn’t just in there shooting things. He was making something. Then, during the pandemic, he set me up with this really calming farm game where you make crops grow. But I wasn’t very good at it.
So you have done a bit of gaming in the last 25 years!
Well, and I did get into Words With Friends for a while. My thing is more looking at shoes that I don’t need or, like: “My kid needs a raincoat! I’m going to look at kids’ raincoats for the next half-hour!” But the game thing — it just feels like it has no point to me. And as I say that, I recognize that the thing I need to do more than anything is to do things with no point.
Do you have any particular titles in mind?
Actually, yes. My husband and I watched “The Last of Us,” and I just loved that father-daughter — well, father-surrogate daughter — relationship. I am really curious to see if I ever find-slash-make the time to play that one.
