Kelly Yeaton, 64, teaches drama at Pennsylvania State University, heads the Experimental Theater there, and is considered an authority on the development and theory of American arena theaters. A summary of Yeaton's "The Great Gaming-House" appeared in the Tulane Drama Review in 1965, but this is the first full publication. The vision transforms Theater, or transcends it. Either away, it's time it became a real place. Professor Yeaton commented in a letter, "I think it might well replace colleges...."

The Image

In my dream, everyone knew that a crew of strangers were in town. They had come to construct and Operate a new kind of recreation: a great fun-house for adults, something like the continuous shows of the Worlds' Fairs, or like Disneyland. But a much more sinister aura surrounded the project, an atmosphere of carnivals, circuses, side-shows, nightclubs and Genet's Balcony. The Public "front" was disarming. Here was a place where one could buy a little harmless but adult adventure, an answer to Tom's complaint in The Glass Menagerie, "a compensation for lives that passed like mine, without change or adventure."

A great empty warehouse on the water front had been rented. In it laborers were hard at work building a mysterious labyrinth of rooms, mirrors, doors and passages. When The Great Gaming-House finally opened its doors to the public we would be able to pay our fee and walk into the maze to meet our adventure. But what was inside? The public had only been told that there would be choices to make, obstacles to overcome, games to play, puzzles to solve and, of course, other players. But the nature of the games and choices was shrouded in mystery and subject to continual change without notice. But it was all to be synthetic and sym-bolic, naturally, and therefore perfectly safe and legitimate.

Still the sinister atmosphere persisted. Rumors suggested that concealed within these symbolic games there were also some real games. Perhaps if one could pass the scrutiny of the Gypsy fortuneteller, if one played one's cards right and chose the proper turnings, then other doors might open and real adventures beckon. Gamblers might find games where the stakes were actual and substantial. Men might find the hostesses more "accessible." The tinsel and gaudy paint of the carnival might be left behind as one moved into an inner world of actual luxury, real hazard, danger and true adventure. Yet, of course, the strangers themselves may have instigated the rumor, merely to stimulate business?

Throughout the project there seemed to be similar inseparable mixtures of the real and the illusory. Because the games were supposed to be purely synthetic and the gambling counters supposed to be worthless, it was popularly assumed that games might be "fixed." For entertainment purposes there might be "shills" playing for the house, to keep the action moving. But it was also uncomfortably plain that there was no way of   knowing.

To the sophisticated, it was obvious that The Great Gaming-House could easily be an innocent-looking  "front" for confidence games of all sorts, from the little carnival "short cons" to the elaborate plots associated with the "big stores" of Miami, Las Vegas or Chicago. No doubt it would be an easy task to separate the greedy "marks" from the steady flow of mere entertainment seekers. Suckers could be steered to outside   games, or even lured further into the "real" world that might exist inside the House, there to play out the inevitable sequence of the confidence game. So it might be dangerous? Would this keep anyone away? No, it would probably attract as many as it would frighten. How many of us would imagine ourselves as suckers? There is a large supply of suckers or "marks," as Barnum noted; The symptoms of a "mark" are that he has money, thinks he is smart, can be tempted into something a little dishonest and imagines himself to be a good judge of character. But we would be protected by the basic Rule of the House, that one could always refuse to play.

Even the knowledge that some of the players might be employed by the House has that double-edged feeling relating to illusion and reality. Suppose I meet an attractive neighbor in one of the Games. Does her  familiar face guarantee that she is not a House player? Not at all, she may be a volunteer enlisted by the management. There are gifted amateurs in every game. To me, of course, she will say she is only another player, but to the proper stranger— who knows? Thus, the ambiguity of reality and illusion within the Gaming-House might extend itself into the life of the town. Secret adventurers might come to know each other. Dreams shared inside the Gaming-House might come to spread into the world outside. Threat and promise, indeed! Any channel that leads from dreams to life is frightening Most of us have a few nightmares.

The Project

One of the disturbing qualities of the image of the Great Gaming-House, dream-born as it was, is its obvious possibility. It can be done. With adequate funds and facilities it could be built and operated. In some parts of the world, such as Tiajuana, even the sinister and secret portions might be legal. The realization brings with it an instant thrill and a sense of fear. It could be as big as Disneyland, or as small as a travelling carnival. It might be set up in a loft or empty house, a few units at a time like Happenings, or rigged to operate as a weekend party on some estate. For the Gaming-House is simply a sequence of situations which call for decisions or solutions arrived at thorough skill, intuition or luck. The sequence implies a variety of "tests" to be encountered by the individual player who must take each situation as he finds it and deal with it as best he can. That's life, isn't it?

The Model

 Since life viewed in retrospect seems to be such a sequence of problems and situations, it should be possible to design an entertainment in which each individual player might assess himself, and others, through the behavior exhibited in games. Can one really make a symbolic model of the world in the form of a Gaming-House? It is as impossible to solve such a world-metaphor as it is to leave it alone. The mind clings to it, returns to it and can't shut off at night. The following "model" developed from this type of perseverance, but the author claims no sort of finality for it. It is presented here merely because it is more specific and concrete than the image and, therefore, easier to think about and to discuss. This particular model, Mark I, would take about a city block, but could easily be expanded to cover a small island, or contracted to a few floors of a large hotel.

Some Operating Principles

1. Ruling principle: "There is no guarantee and not much justice. One must accept chance as an opera-tive element in all games, as in life, and we can never know whether it is truly chance or not."

2. All play is strictly voluntary and no one is compelled to play any game. (This is not true in life.) There is no prejudice against the refusal of a game. A refusal leads only to different games, anyway.

3. On the other hand, one cannot stop indefinitely. To refuse one route means to accept the alternative, but if all routes are refused, one leaves the House. (Persistent refusal takes one out of play, as in life.)

4. If cheating is exposed, the cheater loses the bet, but is not otherwise penalized. If the House is caught cheating, it pays a bonus. There is to be no cheating by the House in the Gambling Rooms.

5. Illusions and problems of perception arc a vital part of the entire operation. These are at their peak in the Fun House and the mirror mazes. They are planned to be disturbing and dizzying, to loosen our mental grip on preconceptions and our sense of reality. Caillois would relate this section to the game element he calls vertigo, so much a part of carnival machines, the carousel, the rollercoaster and the Tunnel of Love, as well as to the childhood games of Blind-man's buff and snap-the-whip.

6. The use of masks and disguises causes the loss of identity by shifting the role and the self-image, and by preventing the natural feedback from others which provides us with identity reinforcement. It permits contacts with others to be fairly free of preconceptions of identity or status. Aliases are normal in the House, so much so that even a person using his true name would probably not be accepted at face value.

7. House personnel are distinguished only by a few minor markings, but should carry identification to show if challenged.

8. All the House tries to provide is adventure within the limits of the player's willingness, nerve and ability. Many of the adventures are largely symbolic, but the threat and promise of reality should be constantly present. It is probable that the best way of playing either real or symbolic games will be found to be the same.

9. The problems suggested in Game Theory of coalitions (teaming up to control a player or to beat the House) and of groups (who play as a single unit) will require further study and resolution, no doubt. At first it will be enough to plan the House for individual games. Probably in the last analysis, all such combinations must be considered temporary, and we must learn to play as if we were alone.

10. The nature and conventions of the two-person duels will also require further study, particularly the official ones on which spectator bets may be placed and on which a bonus is paid by the House to the winner. For example, a Chance Duel may be coin-matching, or scissors-paper-stone. The nature of the challenges should usually be left to the initiative of the individuals. A challenge includes the game and weapons. It is not operative until the stakes and rules are agreed upon. Challenges may be declined without prejudice.

11. Control corridors, one-way mirrors, microphones and a thorough intercom system must be assumed to be necessary, but should be kept as unobtrusive as possible. Awareness of observation tends to inhibit spontaneity.

The Sequence                                                     .

Area 1. Entrance interviews and fortune-telling, using gypsy Tarot cards and the Chinese I Ching.

Area 2. Admissions office. Rules of the House explained. Contracts with the House agreed upon. Counters issued.

Area 3. Masking, costuming, disguising, coaching. This is a separate department to which the player may return at any time. It is an identity shifting service, with a staff of make-up experts, costumiers and acting coaches. May be skipped at will.

Area 4. The Green Lounge. This is a large holding pool in which the new identity may be tested and the general situation may be explored. Duels, spy games, party games and icebreakers are conducted here.

Area 5. The Hundred Gates. After the congenial party atmosphere of the Green Lounge, the player faces an area of screens and corridors, a maze in which each turning is marked with some kind of choice to make. Will you turn toward red or green, men or women, rough or smooth? These cues may be verbal, pictorial, tactile, kinaesthetic or aural. Probably they can be changed easily to provide a different kind of sorting at any time. Will you turn toward the Mona Lisa or the pin-up girl, Beethoven or the Beatles, uphill or down, 69 or 96, through the window or under the table, Bingo or craps? Essentially this area operates like a walk-through computer, screening and sorting the players. The player emerges from the Hundred Gates into various places. With him are others who have made similar choices.

Area 6. The Obstacle Courses. Some of these are physical, some tests of skill. The first courses are frank and open enough, but the later ones involve trickery. One becomes aware of trying to outwit the designer and the other players. The House may complicate the obstacle courses by introducing arbitrary elements of chance.

Area 8. The Elite Lounges. These comprise a Second Level holding pool of clients. Various kinds of people have been sorted out by the previous Areas into groups with similarities. Each group has won admittance to a particular Lounge by the sequence of their previous choices, successes and failures. Here the inner likenesses should make possible the playing of various Theatre Games, social games, and the enactment of Happenings with much more interesting results than would have been possible at the unsorted First Level in the Green Lounge. At least the clients will now have common experiences to talk about among themselves.

Area 9. The Gambling Rooms. With the counters each player has managed to acquire or retain, he may play the tables at will; Whether or not the counters are actually worthless may depend upon the player's contract with the House and the legality of gambling in the actual location.

Area 10. Restaurant and Bar.

Area 11. Carnival Ballroom and Theatre. Masked Ball in the evening. Other activities of a theatrical  nature, probably.

Area 12. Garden, Patio, Swimming Pool;" One crosses this area on leaving the Restaurant and Ballroom to return to the Hotel. A maze of hedges and trees might facilitate the breaking-off of relations between masked identities. "No one is compelled to play any game longer than he wishes"

Note: The Secret Third Level is not apparent on the ground-plan since it docs not involve any separate area. Entrance to it may be granted in the Elite Lounges by cutting out the candidates and channeling them  other rooms at the Second Level. Various Secret Games may be played among the others without their awareness of it, as spies and lovers play their secret games in ordinary society.

The Form

The essential action-form dictated by the structure of The Gaming-House is quite familiar, a journey through a sequence of choices, situations, decisions, contests, puzzles, obstacles and games. The structure of the House controls the sequence in which these will be presented to the traveler. Each fork in the road leads to new situations and other choices, and these, in turn, lead to others. The walk-through shows of the World's Fairs permit only one sequence of events, the labyrinth lies only one True Path, the cinema and movie have but one ending. Hamlet always dies. In the Gaming-House there are many roads and many endings. Most theatrical events provide only the illusion of suspense, in the Gaming-House the suspense is real.
In plays and films we, as audience, maintain a tenuous empathic identification with the heroes. In the  Gaming-House we our own heroes and adventurers. There is no aesthetic distance left, save insofar as we may observe ourselves while playing or from the realization that the games we play are only symbolic. The  Monopoly player loses counters, not money; the symbolic duelist loses, rather than dies. (Theorists are welcome to debate the problem of the possibility of aesthetic distance between the facets of the self. Self-perception of this nature seems to be an element of Brechtian acting, of high-comedy acting, and was once specified by Ouspensky and Gurdjieff as an esoteric discipline. But here it is a mere philosophic digression.)

The structure of the Gaming-House can offer, as no theatrical form can, an experience tailored to the   player's unique nature and demands, one that he chooses for himself, step by step. The pattern of his choices will inevitably reflect his personality, his skills, his daring, caution, and momentary moods. The Gaming-House might be as revealing as a Rohrschach test, or any method of projective analysis.

The apparent freedom of choice is also illusory, for all the alternatives are determined by the preset structure. With a given "setting" of the House only certain choices are offered the player, and the sequences are arranged so that strategies are clearly limited. Many of the situations permit only two or three choices, and perhaps, for many people only one of these will seem tolerable. Given a choice of doors—one apparently leading to a beer-drinking poker party, the other to a tea-drinking bridge game—— would there really be a genuine choice for a person like Stanley Kowalski, or for one like Blanclie DuBois?
Charles Morgan has defined illusion as "form in suspense" and has said that dramatic illusion implies  that "while the drama moves a form is being fulfilled." Suzanne Langer, after quoting Morgan, adds that this form in suspense is "the illusion of Destiny itself that is given in drama." Does the sequence of choices available to the player in the Gaming-House provide this suggestion of Destiny and of an inevitable form being  fulfilled? I think so, although it is not a fixed series of actions or words as in the structure of a play or film.  I suggest that the form which is being fulfilled while it is being discovered is nothing less than a reflection of  the player's character, his identity, his Self.

The feeling of familiarity with which we encounter the form of the Gaming-House is only momentarily surprising. It is the model of the games of life. in which every choice leads only to other choices, other rooms, other roads, and other players. This is the pattern of the Rites of Passage traditionally marking the transition of an individual from one social status to another— birth, initiation, marriage, death. It is the pattern of progress in all the secret societies, the guilds, the sports, and the modern business Organization. Our movement through life seems marked by gates, by choices of roads and by irrevocable decisions. This is the pattern of Everyman, Pilgrim's Progress, Mother Courage, Camino Real, Virginia Woolf and Tiny Alice. It is the very .shape of subjective experience, of life as we encounter it. The form is so familiar that it seems that we have |always known it, yet 1 do not think we have. The Great Gaming-House is unlike most of the older "models" of the world in its lack of concern for the True Path, the Right Way, the Middle Way or the Path/of Salvation? The Gaming-House, like the world, offers many paths for many people. The Player may be very serious in trying to find thc One True Way, but there is no guarantee that such a path exists.

The Themes

There are at least three primary themes. The first may be seen in the persistent confusing of the real  with the illusory. Evreinoff, Pirandello, Shaw, lonesco and Genet come immediately to mind. The theatre is an inevitable medium for discussing the confusions between reality and the symbol of reality, the face and the mask. In no other medium does the symbol, thc actor, so closely resemble the tiling symbolized, the character. Since the development of Realism and of the cinema has led to the type-casting of actors, the  general ambiguity about actor and character has become widespread. In some modern sociology, human roles are taken as being the primary unit of social structure, displacing the human being himself. Genet suggests that these roles or functions actually, are the dominant reality. In the Great Gaming-House there are   innumerable devices challenging the ability of the player to distinguish reality from illusion, the person from the role, the actor from the mask. But here there is no stage to insulate him, no fixed script to be played out no predetermined program.

A second theme lies in the game-form itself. Life may be played as a game, and games may be rehearsals for Life. In these games the symbolic form is quite similar to the form of reality, so much so that it is possible to test oneself with the symbolic form as a preparation for actuality. The O.S.S. used game forms and obstacle courses as training and assessment techniques during World War II. In those spy-training schools an important technique was to mix the artificial and the real, the rehearsal and the actual operations, so gradually that the agents were never entirely sure when supervision and control were being relinquished. Close control was followed by looser control, and that by mere observation, and then by full freedom of action. One might say that they were trained in a symbolic mode and that Reality was allowed to replace the Symbols until the agents responded to real events just as they had been trained to respond to the staged events.. Flight simulators, war games and rehearsals of landing operations, all remind us that non-serious games may be symbolic forms which arc useful in preparing us for actualities.

The third theme is that of chance. In the Gaming-House chance must be accepted as a vital factor. In many sports chance is minimized so that the result will be largely dependent upon skill, but in many other games (dice, bingo, roulette) skill is a negligible factor. Most games, like bridge and poker, involve both factors. But in the Great Gaming-House the acceptance of chance as a possibly decisive factor is complicated by the idea of a Management which may control lie games under the disguise of chance. Paul Caillois calls attention to the casting of lots in primitive societies as a way of consulting an oracle. The person who wins   the cast is looked upon as one favored by the gods. In the Gaming-House thc Management seems to sit in the place of the gods, able to control the games at will through the manipulation of chance. And who is able to
say whether or not the Game of Life is fixed?

The Potentials

Gaming-Houses have been operated here and there already, but the Great Gaming-House has never been attempted. What should the Great Gaming House be? It should be an ultimate testing ground involving situations of all kinds. The nearest we may have come to such sequences have been devised  by specialists from their partial insights. Religious disciplines, sports, academic life, criminal society, technical or social groups, all have requirements that must be passed before a stranger can be admitted to equality. Some are formal and specified, others are intangible and unspoken. But these represent only isolated facets of the total being. The Great Gaming-House ought to be a kind of testing of the total self, all of the self that can be brought into action with others. It should involve mental, physical and intuitive skills. It should make demands on the  physical, intellectual, sensory, sexual and moral elements of a person. The techniques now being used in the  choosing of spies, of executives, astronauts, doctors and presidents are often primitive compared to the kind of knowledge that might be available from the record of play in a Great Gaming-House.

Games and performances in controlled situations are not only tests, but are also rehearsals, methods of training.  Skills are developed by constant play or repeated trials of specific tasks. The apprentice moves upward through journeyman status to that of a Master by his performance in a sequence of set tasks. the student progresses through courses, tasks, examinations, orals to his recognition as a scholar. assessment and training are done simultaneously. Might the Great Gaming house become an established institution comparable to the University? It seems entirely possible that such devices might serve as entertainment, training and assessment in a genuinely new social function. The Master of Games might come to have more prestige than Olympic champions or the winners of Nobel prizes in narrower areas of specialization.

A few years of research and testing might develop a useful social institution which could begin to halt our present plunge toward specialization and the splitting of man into hundreds of different fractions. Games and performance situations insist upon the integrated man-in-action and, I think, can help mankind to put itself together again.