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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.
List of contents
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Preface
Shelly Jones
Introduction: From Actually Playing to Actual Play
Shelly Jones
What Is Actual Play?
Actual Play Reports: Forge Theory and the Forums
Evan Torner
Birth of a New Medium or Just Bad TV? Framing and Fractality of Actual Play
Julia J.C. Blau
Audience, Framing and Flow
Critical Role and Audience Impact on Tabletop Roleplay
Robyn Hope
Communal Narrative in Actual Play Environments: Roles of Participants, Observers and Their Intersections
Anthony David Franklin
"Your fun is wrong": Actual Play and Fans
Diversity and Audience Interaction in Critical Role and The Adventure Zone
G.L. van Os
Critical Fails: Fan Reactions to Player and Character Choices in Critical Role
Christine Dandrow
Actual Play Audience as Archive: Analyzing the Critical Role Fandom
Shelly Jones
Commodification and Pedagogy: Other Approaches and Uses of Actual Play
Consumable Play: A Performative Model of Actual Play Networks
Mariah E. Marsden and Kelsey Paige Mason
Actual Play as Actual Learning: What Gamers, Teachers and Designers Can Learn About Learning from Actual Play Videos
Alex Layne
Conclusion
Shelly Jones
About the Contributors
Index
About the author
Shelly Jones is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Delhi and an editor for Analog Game Studies. Their research examines analog, digital, and role-playing games through the lens of intersectional feminism and disability studies.
