Videogames of the Oppressed by Gonzalo Frasca is an interesting thesis on taking video games and making them much like Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. The Theater of the Oppressed is a model of theater in which a situation is presented to the audience and they have to come up with a real world solution in order to solve it. Of course, many will probably disagree with this assertion that Frasca is suggesting but I think games could benefit from this type of interaction rather than the typical binary interaction video games typically have. Take, for example, The Black Glove which failed it’s Kickstarter goal, but has been talked about a lot frequently. In the game the player must make changes in time in order to help various characters improve themselves, so a failing singer could be changed to a star just by changing the genre they sing. It’s a bit more complicated than that of course cause there are many things you could change to change the outcome of the character.

I always believed that games should be treated in more of a way that Frasca suggests, Where you’re interaction actually has consequences rather than just a yes or no. As a result most games today have various different stories but they don’t really seem overly interactive. The players are introduced to loads of story chucks and then kill all the bad guys. There are a few games that do continue the story while there is some action, for example Skyrim, but it’s still stop, kill, return to story. Even games with side choosing, meaning being good or being evil, is only doing it two sided. For instance inFamous: Second Son you can choose to be good or infamous but there are some instances that I would do good by not having a gun waving lunatic on the streets and it’s considered evil. Secondly, why can’t Deslin just use his powers to persuade the enemies not to do these things. I mean threatening after many uses of the power is about as good as using the powers.

Games like The Black Glove need to happen just to extend and change the way stories are told in gaming, otherwise what we are left with is stories that are compelling but only really two sided.