Patrick Szczotka
Scott Horstein
THAR 379
12 May 2015
Program Note
Aaron Loeb is a local San Francisco resident who, by day is a video game
designer and by night is a playwright. Loeb has written a few main stage
shows including Ideation, a corporate comedy that strike moral issues into a
the audience as they watch a team prepare for a video conference to their
CEO, and First Person Shooter which is about a school shooting that was
influenced by a video game, as we follow the company who created the
game coping with the disaster. Though he did not start out this way, Loeb
originally wrote small one act plays that were written and performed in one
week. His process then grew to writing main stage shows in conjunction
Picture From sfweekly.com
with San Francisco Playhouse and Playground, which is where Abraham
Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party came from. Loeb’s process of playwriting has
shifted slightly from when he was writing one acts to main stage. “I start my
process originally with a single line that I will build a character around. Something
that I want to explore, whether it was a certain kind of person or I will try to draw
a picture with words of the person.” Loeb said in an interview. He loved
discovering threads that he didn’t even know he was going to put into the play.
Now that Loeb is writing full two to three act plays he has to spend more time of
the character development and social interaction. In a recent interview he was
asked where he gets his inspiration, He said “it comes from conversations with
friends, people being irritating in public and finally, theater.” People often
wonder if it is easy to design games and theater and it appears it isn’t, there aren’t many video game
designers and playwrights, because a video game is meant for
players to duck in and out while theater is meant to capture
attention the whole time. Loeb’s day job has influenced his work
however, First Person Shooter spawned from his job as a video
game designer and the violent video games he produced. This
included a game called “Counter-strike” that had a school shooting
setting, the Play was released and shown shortly after the Virginia
Tech Massacre, in which a single gunman killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus, but it was
released to spur talk not change within its audience. Loeb does not design video games anymore; he is
now the Vice President of NA Studios/Kabam, one of the largest online Free to Play video game
companies in the world. Loeb is still working on writing new plays and we can’t see what he will produce
next.