If Bertolt Brecht Were Alive, He Would Make Video Games!

If Bertolt Brecht were alive today, he would probably set aside the dusty curtains of theater stages and take his place in front of a screen. Because the “estrangement effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) he dreamed of is already embedded in the DNA of video games. Brecht wanted the audience to become not passive consumers, but active thinkers; games achieve this every day. When Metal Gear Solid’s Psycho Mantis scene reads your memory card and says, “You played Castlevania last week!”, that moment of magical reality-breaking is exactly what Brecht imagined. The player is suddenly confronted with “I am playing a game,” and this awareness is the very critical distance Brecht sought to create in theater.

Brecht was critical of the bourgeois tradition of “catharsis,” worrying that audiences would lose their critical faculties in emotional immersion. Games live within a similar paradox: while trying to fully immerse us, they also awaken us by revealing their own systems. In The Stanley Parable, the narrator constantly comments on the player’s choices; in Undertale, the game asks, “Do you really want to kill these innocent creatures?”—these are precisely those discomforting moments of awareness Brecht desired. These games, just like Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera,” expose their own structures and force the audience/player to think.

But where video games most intersect with Brecht’s theories is in the radical transformation of the relationship between reality and representation. Baudrillard’s concept of “hyperreality,” where reality and simulation can’t be distinguished, finds its clearest examples in video games. Games no longer just imitate reality; they create their own realities, which seep into our everyday lives. Pokémon GO’s transformation of city centers into playfields, or social media’s gamification strategies shaping our behaviors, show just how complex the relationship between games and reality has become. Brecht believed theater should be a tool for criticizing social reality; he would likely be excited by the power games now hold in this regard.

The interactive nature of video games also resonates deeply with Brecht’s concept of “gestus.” In theater, gestus was a form of behavior that revealed social relationships; in games, every player action serves this function. In Spec Ops: The Line, using the white phosphorus bomb isn’t just a mechanical act—it reveals the moral complexity of war, serving as a gestus. The game encourages the player to become a “hero,” then confronts them with the horror of their actions, deconstructing classical war narratives. These moments are the digital equivalent of Brecht’s “critical realism”: art that doesn’t just aim to show, but to make us think.

The potential for social critique in games becomes even clearer when viewed through Alexander Galloway’s concept of “allegorithm.” Galloway suggests games present allegories of social systems through their algorithmic structures. The unforgiving world of Dark Souls reflects the myth of individual struggle in neoliberal capitalism; Animal Crossing’s debt cycle offers an innocent parody of consumer society. Brecht would have believed theater should expose social contradictions; video games do this systemically. Players don’t just watch the story—they experience the logic of the system itself, producing Brecht’s desired critical awareness naturally.

Here, the “fourth wall” problem in games aligns with Brechtian theater. The traditional theater’s fourth wall is an invisible boundary between audience and stage; Brecht constantly tried to break it. In video games, the wall is already problematic, as the player is both outside the story (as a player) and inside it (as a character). Undertale’s remembering of the player’s past choices or The Stanley Parable’s direct address to the player use this ontological ambiguity to create powerful moments of critique. Brecht’s “epic theater” aimed for the audience to keep emotional distance for critical thinking; video games maintain this distance while also achieving deep engagement.

In conclusion, video games have already surpassed the revolution Brecht envisioned for theater. His “Lehrstück” (learning play) emphasized that audiences shouldn’t be passive consumers but active participants; video games make this the default. Every player is part of the performance, and this performance can become a critical interrogation of social reality. If Brecht were alive today, he might discover that what we call “playing games” is actually a new form of critical consciousness. Every “Game Over” screen, every time we hit restart, is in fact a digital manifesto of our desire to change the world. And isn’t that the very transformative power Brecht expected from theater?