Event Title
Video Games as Drama
Status
graduate student
Faculty Sponsor
Ben Samuel
College(s)
College of Liberal Arts, Education & Human Development
Submission Type
Performance
Description
Augusto Boal has this to say about games: “Games help enable the de-mechanisation of the body and the mind alienated by repetitive tasks of the day-to-day…games facilitate and oblige this de-mechanisation...they demand the creativity which is their essence.”
In other words, games have the ability to help us think and act in ways that are different from the everyday by engaging with parts of our minds that we don’t normally use. While he is talking about live theater games, computer games can also exercise what Boal calls the Aesthetic Process, or the process that artists go through to create a work of art. He says, “the Aesthetic Process allows the subjects to exercise themselves in activities which are usually denied them, thus expanding their expressive and perceptive possibilities”. Players get an enlarged view on life. Ebru, a Boal scholar, puts it this way, “Boal contended that it [theater] enabled people to observe their reality, ‘perceiving what it is, discovering what it is not, and imagining what it could become."
I believe video games have this potential as well, to not just entertain, but to awaken us to the world around us and enrich our lives. To that end, I present two video game projects, discuss their development, and how dramatic theory can influence video game creation.
Video Games as Drama
Augusto Boal has this to say about games: “Games help enable the de-mechanisation of the body and the mind alienated by repetitive tasks of the day-to-day…games facilitate and oblige this de-mechanisation...they demand the creativity which is their essence.”
In other words, games have the ability to help us think and act in ways that are different from the everyday by engaging with parts of our minds that we don’t normally use. While he is talking about live theater games, computer games can also exercise what Boal calls the Aesthetic Process, or the process that artists go through to create a work of art. He says, “the Aesthetic Process allows the subjects to exercise themselves in activities which are usually denied them, thus expanding their expressive and perceptive possibilities”. Players get an enlarged view on life. Ebru, a Boal scholar, puts it this way, “Boal contended that it [theater] enabled people to observe their reality, ‘perceiving what it is, discovering what it is not, and imagining what it could become."
I believe video games have this potential as well, to not just entertain, but to awaken us to the world around us and enrich our lives. To that end, I present two video game projects, discuss their development, and how dramatic theory can influence video game creation.
Comments
1st place, Graduate Performance