Reshaping Failure: The Design of Hospites Teatro's Theatre Games

This paper examines how Hospites Teatro, a Bologna-based theatre group founded in 2018, designs its theatre games to reframe the relationship between players and failure. Situated at the intersection of performing arts, pedagogy, and game studies, the group's socio-actorial practice treats playfulness as a central tool for countering the solemnity and fear of error often associated with theatre training. The analysis focuses on Teatrario, the group's weekly course, where games are progressively intensified to hold participants in a state of flow and where mistakes are deliberately built into the play rather than treated as endpoints.

The study identifies two reworked games from the 2024/25 season as its main evidence. In a revised version of the classic game Tag, the elimination rule that once determined success and failure was removed, and mistakes are instead celebrated with a playful gesture so that play can continue. In a ball-throwing exercise, dropped balls trigger an emergency sound and a short improvised monologue on the theme "We are the best," which both marks the error and converts it into a moment of creative expression and comic irony. Together, these examples show that small adjustments to failure conditions can substantially alter participants' experience, shifting their responses from shame and interruption toward creative risk-taking.

The work draws on game-studies concepts such as rules as shapers of play, games as systems of agency, and playfulness as a means of reframing unpleasant situations, and it connects these to pedagogical traditions represented by Barker and Boal. The methodology is primarily qualitative and grounded in the author's embodied participation in Teatrario between 2023 and 2025, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with group members and by a prior ethnographic study of the course. The paper's scope is therefore a single theatre group and a single pedagogical programme, offering a detailed case rather than broad generalization, but it proposes that failure-condition design is a productive area of inquiry for both theatre pedagogy and game studies.