Brecht, Boal and (independent) video games
Horror video games like Eternal Darkness are popular and usually sell well. Teams of developers make these games to generate a profit so that any singular political message will be lost. Using Brecht and Boal to examine commercial video games is a misapplication for an apparent reason: profit-making video games are usually not political or use politics for profit. Politics may be embedded within studio-produced games like Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Development, 2012), which asks players to kill innocent civilians and then reflect upon their war crimes—and this can lead to a more considerable discussion about the U.S. “War on Terror,” for example—but still, the game is made to generate money. In contrast to more widely sold titles like Eternal Darkness and Spec Ops, independent video games like Gonzalo Frasca’s Kabul Kaboom! (Frasca, 2002) and September 12th: A Toy World (Frasca, 2003) operates as political games with a clear message and are not designed to earn cash. Both these games rework war violence to challenge players’ morals. Thus, they were made for educational purposes rather than for entertainment.
September 12th: A Toy World: a game that challenges our notions of losing and winning.
In such a game, Kabul Kaboom!, players must control a refugee and catch the hamburgers that the U.S. military dropped to help survivors while also avoiding the bombs that the same soldiers sent. The game showcases the irony of the U.S. sending humanitarian aid and destruction simultaneously. Another game, September 12th, inverts well-designed game mechanics of studio-made shooters by allowing the player to control a large reticle eyepiece (one that is far too large to shoot an exact target) to bomb terrorists. Yet the missiles are delayed, and the bombs will likely hit civilians. Once the destruction happens, more terrorists populate on-screen, implying that the civilians have transitioned into terrorists (Bogost et al., 2010, pp. 11-12; see Olson 2023, pp. 262-263). In frustrating the gaming mechanics, the designer Frasca destroys a pleasurable gaming experience, and through these mechanics, the game can become political. It is essential that September 12th: A Toy World is free to play. Using Brecht and Boal and other theater traditions of alienating the audience as the player acts are often incorporated by capitalist culture, and their intended political effects are co-opted.
According to Brenda Laurel’s foundational work Computers as Theater (1991), which began the discussion on how theater theory intersects with games,
“computer-based representations work in fundamentally the same way [as Brecht’s v-effect]: one participates in a representation that is not the same as real life but has real-world effects or consequences. Representation and reality stand in a particular and necessary relation to one another” (Laurel, 1991, p. 31).
Holger Pötzsch critiques Laurel for omitting Brecht’s Marxist roots, for these are essential to understanding his call to action for political reasons and the fundamental logic of why alienation works in the first place (2017). Social alienation can happen because the proletariat has become alienated from their labor, and they must understand that if they are to change the capitalistic institutions that dominate them (Marx, 1964, pp. 66-71). Similarly, Chaz Evans proposes “that practitioners evaluate software in terms of Bertolt Brecht’s v-effect” (2014, p. 6), and he notes,
“Like the determined emotional result of the audience member watching the classic drama, [games must] maintain…unbroken verisimilitude in software” (Evans, 2014, p. 8, to which Laurel also agrees. 1991, pp. 16-17).
According to Evans, game developers can emphasize the v-effect to
“distance the user from his avatar while adding to the visual spectacle…Brecht’s convention of speaking stage directions aloud could manifest itself in virtual space by allowing the software's code (or script) to appear creatively within the illusion. This would be a highly effective…technique that would not only expose the seams of how software is constructed but use those seams as elements of content” (Evans, 2014, p. 11).
However, this software breaking cannot be tied to Brecht as it does not create alienation but uses a formalistic approach to promote understanding of the text. Thus, Evans inappropriately applies Brecht’s theory to illuminate how and why software can be exposed when Russian formalism would have been more helpful. Evans later discusses how the video game Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004) is Brechtian because players who control the protagonist (the prince) cannot “feel cathartic, empathic closeness with the prince’s labor,” and they are thus alienated from the game, which equates to Brecht’s intentions with the v-effect (Evans, 2014, p. 13). This, again, is erroneous in that the player is playing as a character who is working; furthermore, whether playing a video game can be considered “work” is an open question. Moreover, even if we accept that the player is alienated from the prince’s labor, the game is not calling for action like Brecht’s plays do. If it were, what would that action be? To challenge the prince’s labor conditions or those of the people who made the game?
Returning to Spec Ops, Lars de Wildt argues that the game presents a strong-willed protagonist, Martin Walker, with whom the player can identify (de Wildt, 2014, p. 11). In Spec Ops’ loading screens, the game questions the player’s actions by asking them, “How many Americans have you killed today?” For de Wildt, because the player identifies as an anti-hero, Spec Ops subverts war game traditions by using Brecht’s estrangement strategies to present the genre unfamiliarly. The game seemingly asks the player to reflect upon Walker’s war crimes and thus awaken them to form
“a critical potential: it serves to remind the interpreting subject of the unabashedly cruel actions taken for granted as enacted by the power structure of the game’s affordances and constraints” (de Wildt, 2014, p. 16).
However, as Spec Ops undermines the conventions of military games, it does not call for change. For Holger Pötzsch, de Wildt “correctly situates Brecht’s theory of the theatre, and the V-effect in particular, within the frames of Marxist dialectics asserting the relevance of games and play for the creation of a ‘critical distance’ that enables conscientious engagements with real-world challenges and contradictions thus facilitating political empowerment and agency” in Spec Ops (2017, n.p.). While Spec Ops might ask players to think critically about the U.S. military’s might, it is not challenging the player to engage with the American army politically. The game highlights this via its messages on the loading screen: “To kill for yourself is murder, to kill for your government is heroic, to kill for entertainment is harmless” (my emphasis). Spec Ops (like Eternal Darkness) is entertainment, and the developers depend on selling copies to consumers to thrive as a company. While it can cause the player to question why they play violent games, this purpose aligns primarily with artistic purposes rather than political reasons.
Regarding Boal and video games, Gonzalo Frasca argues that video game modders can modify “preexistent templates based on classic videogames (Space Invaders, Street Fighter, Pac-Man)” (Frasca, 2004, p. 90) or Sim City (91) to generate games that can address political issues in the same way that Boal’s theater would allow the spectator to become a “spect-actor,” thereby intervening in the play’s conflict and learning to how to create a more just life (see Boal, 2013, pp. 119-120). While video game modders are likely to be people who are not involved in the game industry and thus not (usually) profiting off the remixed products, the games Frasca uses as examples were designed to generate profit, and even in modifying them, they cannot enact change in the same ways that Brecht’s and Boal’s plays do since their art was initially designed to awaken theater audiences. Frasca’s September 12th is inherently political, whereas the formerly discussed games are less so because they are tied to the company’s bottom line. This is also the case for “freemium games” (which “allow players to download and play…game[s] at no cost while offering optional in-app purchases to supplement their experience” (Apple App Store, n.d., n.p.)) because they rely on in-game advertisements to generate income.
Compared to the politically motivated games, Eternal Darkness uses horror to entertain players and make players think about the construction of games. Like the make-up of video games, Russian Formalism is interested in “how literature is put together…. [it] focuses on how something is made…shifting from meaning to construction” (Fry, 2009, n.p.). For Jakobson, “The subject of literary science is not literature, but literariness, i.e., that which makes a given work a literary work” (Jakobson, 2017, p. 21). To reiterate Shklovsky’s quote, dissecting art using formalism is necessary “to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art…. By ‘estranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious’” (Shklovsky, 1991, p. 6). This estrangement process makes familiar objects unfamiliar. Shklovsky calls attention to how art defamiliarizes—art leads people to see things in a new light. He uses the term “estranging” not to call for political action like Brecht does but to address how art must alienate the reader/viewer for them to see it anew. In this way, the audience can understand how art is self-reflexive and that analyzing how it is made is necessary to understand it as a whole.
In “The Structure of Gogol’s The Overcoat” (Eikhenbaum, 1963), for example, Eikhenbaum does not focus on the themes of humanity and how people mistreat the hardworking protagonist, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, in the tale. Instead, Eikhenbaum argues that Nikolai Gogol’s
“short story depends…on the kind of role which the author’s personal tone plays in it, i.e., on whether this tone is an organizing principle, creating more or less the illusion of a narrative in the first person, or whether it serves only as a formal tying together of events… The primitive short story and the novel of adventure have nothing to do with the first-person narrative, nor do they need it because their whole interest and their whole movement are determined by a rapid and diverse succession of events and situations” (Eikhenbaum, 1963, p. 377).
These “events and situations” are constructed through literary devices such as “jokes, plays on meaning…verbal mimicry and gesture, inventing special comical ways of speech, sound effects, whimsical word order” (Eikhenbaum, 1963, p. 378). For Erlich, Eikhenbaum’s reading of
“The plot of The Overcoat is described entirely on a verbal level, as a resultant of the interplay between two stylistic layers—comic narration and sentimental rhetoric” (Erlich, 1980, p. 75).
In other words, Gogol’s story is about how art is made—how to build a story is to build textual logic. In “The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,” Shklovsky states that art
“is unsympathetic—or beyond sympathy—except where the feeling of compassion is evoked as material for the artistic structure. In discussing such emotion, we have to examine it from the point of view of the composition itself, in exactly the same way that a mechanic must examine a driving belt to understand the details of a machine” (1991, p. 155).
Writers like Gogol are not calling attention to the emotion associated with Akaky’s suffering in The Overcoat, but rather how that agony is conveyed, and it is done so by literary devices. Similarly, with Eternal Darkness, we examine the horror that Alexandra Roivas faces (along with the 12 personalities that engage with the horrors in the game). The game’s horror expands further than the action within the text as the game threatens to delete the player’s memory. Again, this calls attention to why we play, as the game threatens to delete our progress and thus the possibility of completing our achievements as game players.
To return to Shklovsky, he also uses the metaphor of a machine and how one can examine all its parts to understand how it operates. Such a comparison helps analyze the GameCube (a game system or machine) and its ability to store memory—to remember our progress in Eternal Darkness. Peter Steiner states that the machine analogy “furnished the conceptual viewpoint that enabled Shklovksy to redirect attention from the external conditions of the literary process to the internal organization of the work” (1984, p. 48). For Vught, the machine metaphor is helpful as it allows Shklovksy to explain the “internal laws of literature and look ‘under the hood’ of the literature machine” (Vught, 2022, p. 288).
In the same way, Eternal Darkness uses the various elements involved in video games (such as the heads-up display (HUD), memory, and sound) to show how they are essential for gameplay and the continuation of play. When developers like Dyack manipulate these elements in unconventional ways, they draw attention to their functions and, thus, how a game works. For Bo Kampmann Walther, games come into existence because rules are always intrinsically self-referential, which normalizes self-reference and renders games incapable of commenting on themselves. Walther’s argument addresses the problem of ludic self-referentiality to consider partially medium-specific surface phenomena and games’ inherent qualities. According to Walther, “games are games because they are fundamentally self-referential” (p. 219). Other theorists like Agata Waszkiewicz argue that the “breaking of the fourth wall should not be synonymous with any self-referential comments, but rather it relies on direct communication with the player” to advise them on how to play the game (2020, n.p.).
With Eternal Darkness, players must engage with the sanity effects to finish the game. The game will play with the concept of noise by showing the volume bar, which will increase the game’s volume tremendously. In that way, the game is stripping (even seemingly) the player’s autonomy away from them. Player agency is an integral part of gameplay, as players are given the idea that they are free to do as they please. Of course, games are constructed through rules and obstructions that guide the player. They must play within the boundaries of the game. When games like Eternal Darkness frustrate those boundaries, it is a call to consider how the game is made—not Brecht and Boal’s call to action.
Conclusion
This essay argued that Russian Formalism is a productive way to analyze games directly addressing the player. To do this, I analyzed Eternal Darkness to show how the game represents a metacommentary on video games, which is not tied to political messages but to entertainment. In constructing this argument, I also compared triple-A video games like Eternal Darkness and Spec Ops to Frasca’s independent games that display clear political messages. I then discussed the scholars who appropriated Brecht and Boal for unclear reasons, especially given Brecht’s groundings in Marxist political theory and practice. I hope this paper will help resituate how game studies can examine direct address, especially Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum’s analysis of art.
