포스트 브레히트 시대의 공연으로서의 디지털게임

Abstract

This paper tries to investigate social and critical functions of ‘serious games’, which is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. Especially, it will pay attention to work and alternative models of Gonzalo Frasca who is game designer and academic researcher. He claims that videogames could indeed deal with human relationships and social issues, while encouraging critical thinking. He explores the possibilities of non-Aristotelian game design, mainly based on the work of drama theorist Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal. For Frasca, Boal is a practical spiritual mentor. 'The Theatre of the Oppressed' is Augusto Boal's most academically influential work, in which the reader follows Boal’s detailed analysis of the Poetics of Aristotle and the early history of Western theatre. Boal contends that the Aristotelian ethic means of oppressing the masses, the people, the workers and the spectators in favour of stability and the continued dominance of a privileged few. Forum Theatre is a type of theatre created by the innovative and influential practitioner Augusto Boal as part of what he calls his “Theatre of the Oppressed.” While practicing earlier in his career, Boal would apply ‘simultaneous dramaturgy’. In this process the actors or audience members could stop a performance, often a short scene in which a character was being oppressed in some way. The audience would suggest different actions for the actors to carry out on-stage in an attempt to change the outcome of what they were seeing. This was an attempt to undo the traditional actor partition and bring audience members into the performance, to have an input into the dramatic action they were watching. Gonzalo Frasca will follow Boal’ theatrical idea and alternative methods, particularly, spect-actor. The term “spectator” brands the participant to be less than human hence is necessary to humanize them, to restore them their capacity of action in all its fullness. They must too be a subject, an actor on equal plane with those accepted as actors, who in turn must also be spectators. Digital Games can provide best conditions for performance that can promote social discussion and critical consciousness-raising. Mod games are good examples. Mod or modification is a term generally applied to PC games, especially first-person shooters, RPGs and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public or a developer, and can be entirely new games in themselves. As early as the 1980s, computer game mods have also been used for the sole purpose of creating art, as opposed to an actual critical game. This can include recording in-game footage into a movie, as well as attempting to reproduce real-life areas inside a game with no regard for gameplay value. It enables to create user-based innovations, that reflect social realities and various oppressions.