Actual Play Podcasts

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Trans at the Table: Queer Oral Histories of Actual Play Podcast Fandom

Actual Play Podcasts

Actual play podcasts are a form of collaborative storytelling that use tabletop roleplaying games to drive their narrative structure, presenting not only the in-game story but commenting on the process of telling the story and the experience of actually playing the game. Unlike a scripted radio drama, actual play podcasts are improvisational and emergent, and they focus not solely on the story but on the actual process of telling the story and the experience of playing the games—the actual play from which they derive their name (1). Some actual play podcasts are produced with minimal conversation, presenting just the in-game narrative, while others are produced to highlight the exegetic and non-diegetic conversations. Actual play podcasts are a relatively new genre of podcast, drawing from the genre conventions and cultures of fan discussion, video game streaming, and the longer history of radio drama.

Critical Role and The Adventure Zone, two of the most popular actual play podcasts, began in December 2014 and March 2015 respectively, and Friends at the Table began in September 2014. The histories of tabletop roleplaying games and contemporary fandom, in contrast, stretch to at least the 1970s. Until recently, studies of roleplaying games understood the audience of a game to be the circle of players. Michael Robert Underwood limits the sphere of influence of roleplaying games to the small group; players absorb tropes and motifs from the media they consume and recontextualize those tropes into the seeds of their own private stories. In 2009, Underwood notes, “recording of role-playing games are uncommon and are even less commonly the primary purpose of play" (2); just over ten years later, the ground has shifted. Most people still game in private with their friends, around a table or online, but actual play podcasts play for the purpose of a public product: a podcast.

Of the existing bodies of scholarship, game studies deals most fully with the question of public play. T. L. Taylor, in her book Watch Me Play, studies the livestreaming platform Twitch.tv. Twitch.tv, Taylor argues, is marked by the transformation of private play into public entertainment, a transformation facilitated by an interplay of platform allowances and cultural uses of such platforms (3). Taylor identifies gaming as not just intertwined with social forces, but as a civic space itself, for “our play and gaming is always inextricably linked to our everyday lives. Our identities, bodies, and social and political worlds are always tied up in it." At stake in her argument is an understanding of transformative creative production within the sphere of commercialized media.

The entanglements between economics, technology, and play recur in works on livestreaming and queer gaming. In “Watching Us Play: Postures and Platforms of Live Streaming” media studies scholar and Friends at the Table host Austin Walker discusses livestreaming and the relationship between “play, labor, subjectivity, and agency” under late capitalism. He cautions against a rosy portrayal of streaming and situates the practice in a broader culture of exploitation and labor—“play is just one more node of socialized labor." He concludes by calling us to pay attention to how our actions and play are restricted, pulled, and transformed, and to whose benefit: “live streaming can be resistive… one more space for [countergaming] play to occur and spread…. But the systems we play in are limited, not only in ludic terms, but also in economic, technological, and cultural ones." The connection of games to capitalism and productivity also occurs in queer game studies. Paralleling Walker’s attention to the assimilation of certain kinds of streaming into capitalist logics of commercial productivity, Clark and kopas identify ludic systems as harnessing, regulating, and recuperating the excesses of energy, time, and motivation left unharnessed by late capitalism. Play comes to resemble work, a training ground for capacities useful to capitalism, and a queer resistance to normativity must resist the “ways in which games buttress capitalist structures.” In turning to queer people’s relationships to games, Clark and kopas ask how games can be used in ways that exceed the narrow definitions of capitalist utility and resist reincorporation into the same systems.

When a gameplay experience is recorded, new avenues emerge for its monetization and incorporation into capitalist logics of value and productivity. Actual play podcasts have not been exempted from this dynamic. Taylor notes that “[Twitch.tv] live streaming has proven to be a profound promotional tool for titles, and developers are taking notice" (5), a realization that has parallels in tabletop roleplaying games and actual play podcasts. While Underwood claims that when fans genre poach to assemble a “role-playing game world of their own, which is never intended to be used as a commercial venture but instead as a personal and small-group setting for collaborative storytelling, they have stepped outside of the mass culture consumer system without leaving behind the experiences that they gained from that system’s products" (6), such framing obscures the ways that capitalist logics are all-encompassing. Even when a game world is not intended for an audience outside the group, players who have “stepped outside of the mass culture consumer system” do not stay outside of it for long, or inevitably. In contrast to Underwood’s players, actual play podcasts are made with an audience in mind, and questions of commercialization, fan culture, and capitalism are essential to any analysis of the form and its fandom.

1. Austin Walker, Twitter (blog), June 11, 2020, https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/1271154536481271813.

2. Underwood, “The Friends That Game Together,” para. 4.4.

3. T.L. Taylor, Watch Me Play, 2018, 22, http://watchmeplay.cc/book/.

4. Austin Walker, “Watching Us Play: Postures and Platforms of Live Streaming,” Surveillance & Society 12, no. 3 (June 28, 2014): 437-440, https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i3.5303.

5. Taylor, Watch Me Play, 21.

6. Underwood, “The Friends That Game Together,” para. 7.6.

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