Games as a Medium for Forum Discussion.

In the Videogames of the Oppressed article, Frasca attempts to break away from analyzing games from the perspective of Aristotelian theater. He argues that their interactive nature makes video games more akin to a simulation than to a narrative, and uses this perspective as a starting point to discuss how their potential for social critique might be better realized. To that end, he introduces Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed,” which attempts to blend the roles of actor and spectator by methods such as “Forum Theater.” Boal’s “Forum Theater” consists of a group of people acting out a previously unscripted scene from some starting scenario; the initial scenario always presents some form of oppression or social conflict against the protagonist. When a person in the group thinks of a possible course of action for the protagonist, that person would share their idea by acting it out in character of the protagonist. This roundtable method of acting out a developing scene offers an interesting medium for discussion, and Frasca goes on to provide examples of how this might be achieved with video games. His adaptation of Boal’s methods to what Frasca calls “Forum Videogames” is a notably different approach to the topic than most we’ve encountered thus far, as it embraces the adaptive, non-narrative aspects of gameplay; the approach definitely parallels Galloway’s idea of “procedural rhetoric,” but involves a higher level of direct social involvement and discussion.