Role-playing games as performance
Found this great paragraph in "The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art" (Daniel MacKay, 2001). It neatly hits some points that I've been thinking about for a dozen years or more.
"That the roles of performer and audience are played by a single group at different times rather than by distinct groups at the same time does not jeopardize the role-playing game's status as a performance form. Instead, it further supports the work of theater and performance theorists and practitioners such as Bertolt Brecht, Richard Schechner and The Wooster Group, to name a few, who have complicated, blurred, and confounded these traditional categorical distinctions. This trend, in fact, extends well beyond performance forms and extends into literary reception theory, cognitive psychology, and cybernetics, where work emphasizing the reader or receiver's control of the message indicates a movement in thought meant to confound the lucid, rational distinctions and divisions of labor that separate sender and receiver. Now - in the age of multimedia workstations, postcolonial economies, and postdisciplinary academia - artists, theorists and researchers are attempting to reconfigure our inherited social, artistic and cultural roles (e.g. performer-audience) in a knowing return to premodern structures, where those roles are blurred (e.g., role-player = performer-audience)." (p58)
Posted here for interest. I intend to return to this subject once I'm through Heck Month.
"That the roles of performer and audience are played by a single group at different times rather than by distinct groups at the same time does not jeopardize the role-playing game's status as a performance form. Instead, it further supports the work of theater and performance theorists and practitioners such as Bertolt Brecht, Richard Schechner and The Wooster Group, to name a few, who have complicated, blurred, and confounded these traditional categorical distinctions. This trend, in fact, extends well beyond performance forms and extends into literary reception theory, cognitive psychology, and cybernetics, where work emphasizing the reader or receiver's control of the message indicates a movement in thought meant to confound the lucid, rational distinctions and divisions of labor that separate sender and receiver. Now - in the age of multimedia workstations, postcolonial economies, and postdisciplinary academia - artists, theorists and researchers are attempting to reconfigure our inherited social, artistic and cultural roles (e.g. performer-audience) in a knowing return to premodern structures, where those roles are blurred (e.g., role-player = performer-audience)." (p58)
Posted here for interest. I intend to return to this subject once I'm through Heck Month.