WoW’s two factions are the Alliance and the Horde: Your standard Human / Elf / Dwarf power trio pitted against the Orcs, the Trolls, and the Walking Dead. But whereas Tolkien and others in the literary tradition clearly see this as a contest between good and evil (and even Good and Evil), WoW equivocates. Good, yes: Alliance characters (human, anyway) make frequent reference to light and righteousness. But Evil, not so much: Horde characters include the Undead and spells make frequent use of demons and imps. But these are not malevolent. Sometimes they are “bad,” and frequently merely “different.”

Indeed, the idea of the Horde as some overwhelming, ubiquitous evil is frequently skewered. On one recent outing, for example, a horrifying giant ogre asked me to help him fetch “gloom weeds” for an zombie apothecary who had built him with leftovers from the graveyard. After a considerable effort, I brought the gloom weed to the frightening skeletal pharmacist, who complained, loudly, that he wanted “doom weed, not gloom weed.”

There is no evil here. The Horde is just like the Alliance, except the Horde’s narratives are infused with irony and humor.

In a happy echo of Anne Munster’s vocabulary, he calls theater “an assemblage.”

He writes: “It is an assemblage of extremely disparate components, both material and ideal, whose only existence lies in the performance, in the act of theatrical presentation.” The components are gathered together repeatedly, “each and every time time, the performance is evental, that is, singular.” This event, “an event of thought,” produces “theater ideas,” unique and unprecedented. “The idea arises in and by the performance… The idea is irreducibily theatrical and does not preexist before its arrival ‘on stage’” (72).

Of course, Frasca (and after him, Bogost) has already made use of a linkage between theater and games, via the work of Boal.

Indeed, Badiou’s observations about the nature of theatre call Bogost’s characterization of simulation to mind: “Theater is an experiment,” writes Badiou, “—simultaneously textual and material—in simplification” (emphasis mine). He even goes so far as to point out that simplification, for mathematicians, at least, is not always simple. Tout court, Simplification is all.

In Badiou’s further consideration of theater, I see parallels with Munster and Levi. “The theater-idea comes forth,” he writes, “in the (brief) time of its performance, its presentation.” But this presentation is not an interpretation: It is a complementation (and herein lies the parallel with Munster’s discussion of virtuality). “Every performance or representation is thus a possible completion of [the theater idea].”

Finally, a propos lengthy discourse on the artful nature of games, Badiou has this to say about theater: It does not serve to cultivate, but to provoke. “The public…comes to the theater to be struck. Struck by theater-ideas. It does not leave the theater cultivated, but stunned, fatigued (thought is tiring), pensive… It has encountered ideas whose existence it hitherto did not suspect” (77).

I can imagine elegant M. Badiou listening quietly to these parallels and then letting out a polite, but dismissive, laugh. But it is on the back of his weightier theses that I intend to investigate the dimensions of “game thought.”