The politics of interaction and spect-actors in world rescue, eco, and plasticity: a Boalian perspective on digital environmental games

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I explore the politics of engagement in environmental games from a political theatre theory perspective. Specifically, I focus on digital environmental games developed with classrooms in mind, and examine player interaction as politicized through the lens of Boalian theatre. To this end, I overview gaming as an intervention tool in the form of serious, environmental games. Next, I introduce the poetics of Boal’s TO, and connect its aim to restore theatre as a popular form of conversation and discussion to the aspiration of digital environmental games to develop an eco-friendly outlook. I build upon a rule-based approach to computer game rhetoric, and analyze how environmental games use rules as a rhetorical tool to create a pro-environmental statement. Lastly, I suggest that players in environmental games are not mere game players but rather ‘spect-actors’.

KEYWORDS:

• Serious games
• environmental games
• Augusto Boal Theatre of the Oppressed
• game rhetoric and game rules
• the Joker
• games and politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The games I have chosen to explore in this paper are, in small or big amounts, funded through education funds. They are developed with the purpose of developing and promoting games as a form of education tool, with the help of educators, researchers, and even students.

2 Since videogames simulate systems that have no real referents, Frasca expands “the term ‘simulation’ to include the representation of processes that mimic a system by the behavior of another, even if its source system is not real” (Frasca, 2001, 19).

3 While Plasticity is developed with the goal of encouraging pro-environment mind and conduct, it does so with fewer edutainment design patterns (such as explicit real-world numerical data, heavy use of text) because it aims to reach a wider audience beyond the classrooms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jihay Park

Jihay Park has an English Literature and Theatre Studies background (Indiana University, Bloomington), and her research interests include American and British theatre, performance studies, gender studies, game studies, and AR/VR theory. She has extensively published on modern American and British theatre, including Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Research International, SHAW: the Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, the Journal of English Language and Literature, and the Journal of Modern English Drama. Currently, she researches and teaches Theatre and Drama at the department of English Language and Literature at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, and at the department of English Language and Literature at Korea University, Seoul.