Boal and Videogames Revisited: A Paper I Want to Write Someday

I've been toying with returning to Gonzalo Frasca's work on Augusto Boal for a while now. Recently, I was able to visit Badu in Madhyamgram thanks to my colleagues in CSSSC and meet Sanjoy Ganguly, the founder of the theatre group Jana Sanskriti, which Boal had worked with closely. Speaking to Sanjoy babu, I was reminded of the many synergies between Boal's ideas and videogames, something that Frasca focused on in his Masters' thesis but which has been largely forgotten in recent years. In my PhD years, I had looked at Boal's Games for Actors and Non-actors and had always wanted to return to it in connection to videogame narratives and Frasca's excellent Masters' research.  So here's the very rudimentary beginnings of an idea, something that I hope to turn into a paper. I did write a little on Boal, Aristotle and videogames in a recently published book chapter  (in Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India eds. Nishat Zaidi and Sean Pue) but I want to do something more detailed on Boal and games. Let me know if you are interested.

Tentative title: Videogames for Actors and Non-actors: Reading Augusto Boal in Videogame Poetics


Videogame narrative theories started off with a distinctly Aristotelian poetics with Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre and other ensuing research. Such analyses were based on the assumption of a protagonist endowed with agency and the primary concern with understanding videogame narratives vis-a-vis Aristotle was multiple endings of these games and therefore, the deviation of the ‘beginning, middle and end’ model in Aristotle. The ultimate aim of the game narrative still remained Aristotelian in the sense that it was supposed to be cathartic, in a process variously considered to be a purging or a purification of emotions. Going beyond how videogames may modify the thinking around the narrative telos, this paper will re-examine how videogames play or can be played (in the theatrical sense) and whether there can be videogames where player agency is not considered paramount. Indeed, some earlier scholars have already commented on the ‘illusion of agency’ in videogames; here, a concomitant but different model is being considered. What happens when videogames represent the oppressed and those who do not feel enabled or lack the agency to effect a change of fortune (even if it is from good to bad, as Aristotle posits as the basis of tragedy)?

Writing about the videogames of the oppressed, Gonzalo Frasca introduced the work of the Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal to game studies way back in 2001 in his Masters’ thesis submitted to the Georgia Institute of Technology. Boal has famously called the catharsis-based thinking behind Aristotelian tragedy as ‘coercive tragedy’ and sees the political in the way such tragedy is thought through. Frasca in his Master’s thesis writes:

This thesis examines the potential of videogames as a medium for fostering critical thinking and discussion about social and personal problems. [...]Therefore, videogames have the potential to represent reality not as a collection of images or texts, but as a dynamic system that can evolve and change. After studying how the process of interpretation functions in simulations, I propose to adapt the basic elements of the work of drama theorist Augusto Boal into videogame design. Boal created a set of techniques for participative theatre that raises the spectators awareness about their reality and encourages personal and social change. (Frasca 2001)

To my knowledge, Frasca’s early work on Boal and videogames has not been followed up in game studies discussions and if it does critically examine the agency and catharsis based thinking of the poetics of videogames through the Boalian lens, then the fuller implications of such thinking need to be made clear. In this paper, I intend to address Boal’s concept of the ‘spect-actor’ in videogames, developing on the earlier research by Frasca and clarifying how it disrupts the agency-based thinking in videogames as the player is seen as both a spectator and actor. In the process, it will also question the catharsis-based model as well as the ever-popular ‘Hero’s Journey’ of Joseph Campbell that is a favourite among games researchers and designers. The spect-actor concept, in itself, is not without its flaws as Boal’s critics have pointed out but instead of only focusing on his better known Theatre of the Oppressed, this paper will also include the ludic activities that Boal envisaged for his theatre in his Games for Actors and Non-actors. Boal’s ludic theatre has found a niche far away from his homeland - in the remote village of Badu in West Bengal, India. As Sanjoy Ganguly, the director of Jana Sanskriti, which extensively uses Boalian techniques claims: ‘the exercises require the participants to create images and the initial stages of scenarios, and it is clear that these are derived from the personal experience of the performers’ (). Ganguly also goes on to explain how Boalian theatre can directly affect the living scenarios of those who feel oppressed: ‘Forum theatre can lead them to understand that it is not a question of a family, it is not a problem between a man and a woman: it is the problem of patriarchy’(). Frasca has already addressed the connect between Forum theatre and the way in which videogames resemble it through his mods of The Sims. This paper will examine further examples, from both mainstream and lesser known games, such as Papers, Please!, 80 Days and Undertale come to mind. It will address the games that Boal designed for his theatre and examine possibilities of analogues in videogames in order to challenge and unsettle entitled, agency-based and cathartic conventions prevalent in current thinking around the poetics of narrative games.

Indicative Bibliography

Boal, Augusto. 1993. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. McBride. Tcg ed. edition. New York: Theatre Communications Group Inc.,U.S.

— 2002. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Translated by Adrian Jackson. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Campbell, Joseph. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato, CA: New World Library.

Frasca, Gonzalo. 2004. ‘Videogames of the Oppressed’. Electronic Book Review. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/Boalian.

Ganguly, Sanjoy. 2020. From Boal to Jana Sanskriti: Practice and Principles. Edited by Ralph Yarrow. 1st edition. New York: Routledge.

Laurel, Brenda. 2013. Computers as Theatre. 2nd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison Wesley.