Kara Güt staged a two-person play inside Red Dead Online at a Dutch film festival

The documentation photo is doing a lot of work. A projection at the front of a theater splits into two Red Dead Online feeds; below it, four people sit at a folding desk with monitors, controllers and paper scripts, lit like a table read; in front of them, rows of strangers sitting in the dark. Mitchell Bosch shot it at Go Short in Nijmegen this April, where Kara Güt performed My Desert Heart—a two-person play staged live inside Rockstar's multiplayer server.

The plot is one sentence: two players try to reach each other. Güt has been building the Desert Nexus universe since 2021, when Welcome to My Desert Nexus premiered at Pioneer Works as a three-act play—four actors driving avatars, Güt narrating and cutting between their camera feeds on a video switcher, 45 minutes with an intermission. My Desert Heart is the second installment, and Go Short named Güt its Maker in Focus for 2026 on the back of it.

What I love is the liveness of it when the server doesn't cooperate. Weather rolls in on its own schedule. Strangers ride through the scene. Characters die and respawn across the map, and the performers keep talking. (Same feel as Grand Theft Hamlet.) Güt has called the frontier of digital space a facade for the fantasies players bring to it, a fair description of a proscenium, too. Theater has always been a machine for agreeing to believe something in a room together; Red Dead Online just happens to supply the bullets.

Killscreen made a version of this argument in 2015, when Chris Priestman wrote up Jack King-Spooner's The Stage, a game built as a venue rather than a system—one where you "only interact with The Stage to incite the show." That piece imagined an audience. 11 years later, Güt sold them tickets.