The great Hollywood film of the summer, Christopher Nolan's Inception, is still an old-fashioned item of narrative art. You, the audience member, sit down in a cinema seat; you watch and listen from beginning to end; you get up and leave. The film doesn't ask you to make choices, push buttons, answer questions, vote or to make a fool of yourself.
Behind Nolan's traditional storyteller's direction of your consciousness for 148 minutes, though, Inception makes more than a nod to the realm of the participatory form that is its great rival, the video game.
The story, about a team of dream designers trying to secretly alter a dreamer's ideas, is a model of video game society. Substitute "video game" for "dream" and the film still makes sense. The dream infiltration is bankrolled by a big Japanese corporation; the dream has a series of increasingly difficult nested levels; the dream architect creates spaces that channel the dreamer towards a certain goal without actually forcing them to go there.
In fact the relationship between Inception and video games goes further. There is a moment when the dreamers shift to a fresh level and the audience sees a new, wintery, Alpine landscape. Personally, I fear the time-devouring qualities of video games too much to play them but the genre is embedded in the culture now and the instant I saw the Alpine scene even I recognised it as a video game set-up.
A bunker-like fortress on a hilltop that has to be penetrated, rooms to be cleared (in the military sense), a small team of players/dreamers with different weapons to choose from, unlimited numbers of faceless enemy soldiers streaming out to oppose. It's a paradigm lifted clean from the video game genre known as "first-person shooter". It's as if Nolan were saying to cinemagoers: "You can't participate in this experience now, but you'll be able to soon. Think of this as a trailer for the game, and I apologise for obliging you to be passive recipients of our story in the meantime."
In The Book of Shadows, Don Paterson writes: "A vital component of the awe we feel before a work of art is the knowledge that we could never make it ourselves." This remains true of the expanding sphere of participatory art, assuming we accept video games as art. If you play Grand Theft Auto or Modern Warfare you don't imagine yourself as one of the team that scripted, voiced and coded these intricate narrative trees into being. But you do expect to be able to clamber around in that tree, not simply sit at a distance and watch it grow.
Nicholson Baker, writing in the New Yorker this month, endorsed the game designer David Cage's claim to be advancing an art form like a latter-day Orson Welles, even though he described his latest oeuvre, Heavy Rain, as "clinical depression served up in a shoebox". Lest non-gaming readers think these works are about nothing more than killing imaginary people, Nicholson describes a moment in the game where you, the player, use your controller to put a frozen pizza in a microwave for your game son, heat it and put it on a plate for him.
Perhaps it's the participatory zeitgeist of the digital age – whether expressed by playing video games, voting in TV reality shows or posting responses to the writings of paid journalists - that is encouraging participatory art to spread beyond the digital world, in the same way that the emergence of mainstream photography coincided in France with the rise of impressionist painting.
In London, the theatre company Punchdrunk has created a series of "immersive" productions. They take over a large building, construct a series of exquisitely designed and detailed period spaces within it, populate it with characters with pre-determined relationships and narrative paths, and let an audience pick up the threads of a story.
I went to Punchdrunk's Masque of the Red Death, in which the audience was given conical white masks that gave us the appearance of inquisitive, ghostly rodents. At first, I wandered from room to Gothic room, exploring; missing a sense of story, I started following a single character. That was when I saw the distinctive feature of this style of participatory art.
According to how passionate or melodramatic a character or group of characters is being, they attract more audience members around them. A character walking alone, or going about some mundane task like packing a bag, might not have anyone watching. As soon as a character begins to go mad, or make love to another character, or make a rousing speech, masked figures cluster round till they're surrounded by a swarm of sinister nosiness. It's like watching fate in action; it's like being fate – because what is fate, if not an audience to the spectacle of human self-destructiveness?
I took a step deeper into participatory art last month, also in London, where another set of theatrical innovators, Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, took over another large building for their You Me Bum Bum Train concept. In YMBBT, the audience, known as "passengers", pass through elaborately designed role-playing scenes, following one after the other at fairground ride speed.
By the time I'd heard about it, it was sold out. But it was possible to participate, and "watch" by being a member of the all-volunteer cast. So for five nights of the show's three-week run, I put on a suit, stood in a tiny, sweaty room and pretended to be a political adviser, to 80 different people, having been given the roughest script outline and told to get on with it. Across the building, in scores of different roles, hundreds of other volunteers were doing the same.
Traditional notions of "audience" and "performer" were confused. The audience was watching and listening to the performer, but the audience was also expected to perform. The performer was enjoying watching and listening to the audience, but was also performing for the other performers, who formed a second audience.
At times I felt like the Gulag forced labourer in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: "I'm a slave, but I still want to do a good job." Yet like the other unpaid volunteers I found the experience as exhilarating as the paying audience. Each night I longed for it to end, and once it ended I wanted to do it again.
The potential flaw in participatory art is the same problem that has led, in recent times, to the elision of meaning of the words "elite" and "elitist". How does an egalitarian society deal with the notion of exclusion implied by the idea that some people are better at certain things than others? There will always be people in democracies, for instance, who feel that excluding people from running the country because they're ignorant is as wrong as excluding people from running the country because they have a certain ethnicity – if not more so.
The more democratised art becomes, Paterson – a poet, not coincidentally – goes on to argue in The Book of Shadows, the more we recognise in it our own mediocrity. We feel fraternal love for that, he says, but we aren't amazed by it.
For a while the advance of participatory art made me fear for those art forms that seem to depend on people just sitting still and taking it. I'm less worried now. It occurs to me that the art form I hold most dear, the novel, was participatory from the beginning. A good book needs a good reader. What could be more participatory than a kit made of nothing but 26 letters of the alphabet? Words are only a sequence of glyphs without the participation of a skilled reader's imagination, memory and wit to dress them with the gifts the senses bring.
