Actual Play

I listened to an episode of Adventuring Party where Brennan had on Dr. Emily Friedman, who’s very involved in Actual Play, what they call this thing where performers play TTRPGs with an audience.

She wrote a book on eighteenth-century smells and reconstructing them, struggling to do so. Think ambergris, the Jorvik Viking Museum claiming to pump viking smells into the exhibits. We should really go back to calling York Jorvik.

So she’s been interested in kinds of storytelling outside of the dominant pipeline and forms of traditional publishing and fiction: puppetry, illegitimate theatre. Before the pandemic and the British Library cyberattack fucked up the research, she was studying unpublished manuscript fiction.

Then she moved onto covering Actual Play. She contributed to an essay collection called Watch Us Roll; it sounds like it sort of founding the field of study. Now she’s working on a book called Actual Play as Actual Art that drew on some of Brennan Lee Mulligan’s game master notes in the research phase. She describes him as her friend and her research subject, being basically the dominant public figure in this form. He’s going to write the foreword to her book, which she recognises makes it more commercial.

Some fun trivia: Aabria Iyengar was her student at Auburn University in Alabama. Friedman grew up in Houston, Texas.

In the conversation, they stumble into the meta-conversation about how she’s gone from being a student of Brennan and the other players and their audience, to being a friend of those actual people, to appearing in this content and therefore Brennan’s audience becoming aware of her existence and perhaps developing a parasocial relationship with her, parasocial relationships and microcelebrity being one of her own topics of study. Interestingly, she says that whereas for journalists everything is on the record unless marked otherwise, academics have a duty of care to their topic and to their human subjects.

Brennan told a great story about going to the funeral of an old friend from home and his phone and laptop dying all at once. In the two hours he had to wait for his new phone and/or laptop at the Apple Store, he was wondering around the mall with a bucket of popcorn and getting spotted by happy fans while being in a grieving mood. He tried to hide out in the board game section of Barnes & Noble but of course, anybody going to that place now would immediately recognise him, in the place that used to be his obscure place of refuge before he brought it to broad awareness.

P.S. Dimension 20 is improv actors and Critical Role is video game voice actors. Who knew!