Collaborative performance and asynchronous action: World Without Oil's fragmented forum

This article considers how the politically engaged forum theatre of Augusto Boal may drive an understanding of networked collaboration and identity in recent participa-tory web dramas. Focussing on the recent web drama World Without Oil (2007), this discussion considers how theatrical and political logics within Boal's work grounded in synchronicity and embodiment may be challenged by practice that is distributed, asynchronous and fragmented.
Accordingly, this article proposes where strategies within World Without Oil that echo Boalian dramaturgy (such as the notion of play as rehearsal for change within the real world, and the potential of individuated, local expertise) may be transformed by the operation of mixed and alternate reality gaming. As this discussion will argue, such thinking which in challenging the centrality of synchronicity seeks to extend the account of mediation presented by Phillip Auslander's Liveness involves a re-examination of claims made to the political potential of hypertext and hypermedia