David Carpenter '96: Where Fine Arts and Technology Meet

From the HIES stage to Broadway and beyond, David Carpenter '96 has built a career defined by imagination, innovation and fearless creativity. A Tony-nominated producer with more than 25 years in entertainment, David has produced hit shows like "Puffs," "Slava’s Snowshow" and "Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern." Today, as Founder and CEO of Gamiotics, he’s reshaping how audiences experience live performance—blending theatre and technology to create interactive “choose-your-own-adventure” productions where the audience drives the story in real time.

Heidi Domescik, director of fine arts, caught up with David to talk about his journey from traditional theatre to cutting-edge storytelling, the surprising ways audiences respond when given control of a narrative and his advice for HIES students who dream of building creative, unconventional careers of their own.

Could you talk a little about your company Gamiotics and what inspired you to merge live theatre with gaming?

I've been a life-long gamer. Playing games was always my activity outside of my working hours. Video games, board games, anything that would occupy my attention. I started working on Broadway 25 years ago. I produced a play called "Puffs," which was a parody of the Potter universe that became a hit and ran in NYC off-Broadway for three years. It was there that I started becoming interested in creating live shows for fandoms, and around the same time, I was experimenting with bringing technology to live entertainment to create video game-style architecture for the live stage. I had become disillusioned with Broadway and decided to go all in on the emerging world of experiential/interactive/immersive entertainment and put these two passions together. The result is my first show on the platformv, "Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern," a live-action D&D game where the audience uses my tech to play along and participate in a two-and-a-half-hour D&D adventure on stage.

With Gamiotics now used by over 100,000 audience members, what’s the most surprising or funny choice you’ve seen an audience make that totally changed a performance? 

It's actually 150,000 and climbing now!  I've been at this for over five years, and we have learned a lot about how an audience is going to behave in our environment when given choices. They are always going to go for the choice that is going to have the biggest result in their minds. We try and structure increasingly important story choices with the consequences becoming bigger the farther you get into the show. The thing that has never stopped surprising me is the level of enthusiasm from the audience when making choices. There are times when they shout and scream to the same intensity as at a football game.

As someone who’s redefined how audiences engage, what do you think is the next frontier for interactive storytelling?

I think the answer is just getting more and more out in the market. I am starting my second seed round for financing the company, and one of my missions over the next two years is to build shows that people can license and do in their own communities and schools, and then just license the software and build their own interactive shows using my platform. I want to see interactive experiential entertainment go past the tipping point and become a staple of live entertainment experiences in people's lives.

If you could reimagine a classic like Romeo and Juliet or Annie (our fall productions at HIES) using Gamiotics, what twist might audiences get to decide? 

So my software doesn't quite work that way. It's a tool to allow for the creation of branching narrative experiences with the audience deciding the direction of the narrative, rather than a gimmick. It's integrated into the creation of the story from the beginning. A better way to look at it is what if the Audience got to decide WHO adopts Annie at the beginning of the story and then what the resulting adventure would be. The billionaire or the fishmonger? What kind of life does Annie lead as a result, and what kind of ending do we get as an audience? The pathway the audience chooses decides the experience. 

For students at HIES who love both creativity and technology, what advice would you give about blending those passions into a career as unique as yours?

Never stop exploring your creativity and interests. And create things that you would be the #1 audience member for. Don't ever try to create something you think will please someone else. If you create the best art you possibly can, other people will follow it along.