Watch Us Roll: Essays on Actual Play and Performance in Tabletop Role-Playing Games

Description

Actual play is a movement within role-playing gaming in which players livestream their gameplay for others to watch and enjoy. This new medium has allowed the playing of games to become a digestible, consumable text for individuals to watch, enjoy, learn from, and analyze. Bridging the gap between the analog and the digital, actual play is changing and challenging our expectations of tabletop role-playing and providing a space for new scholarship. This edited collection of essays focuses on Dungeons and Dragons actual play and examines this phenomenon from a variety of different disciplinary approaches. Authors explore how to define actual play, how fans interact with and affect the narrative and gameplay of actual play, the diversity of gamers (or lack thereof) within actual play media, and how audiences can use actual play media for more than mere entertainment. Cover Acknowledgments Table of Contents Preface Introduction What Is Actual Play? Actual Play Reports Birth of a New Medium or Just Bad TV? Audience, Framing and Flow Critical Role and Audience Impact on Tabletop Roleplay Communal Narrative in Actual Play Environments “Your fun is wrong”: Actual Play and Fans Diversity and Audience Interaction in Critical Role and The Adventure Zone Critical Fails Actual Play Audience as Archive Commodification and Pedagogy Consumable Play Actual Play as Actual Learning Conclusion About the Contributors Index