What Is Actual Play, and Who Gets to Decide?

 WHAT MAKES AN ACTUAL PLAY?

The fundamental problem that must be resolved before one can begin their thoughtful critique of actual play as an art form is definitional. What is an actual play? One could say, “any media where some group of people play tabletop games for an audience,” but as we ponder actual play as a topic worthy of criticism, this answer’s accuracy far outshines its usefulness. How does one work with a category so broad it includes both multi-million-dollar franchises and amateurs streaming their Zoom calls on Twitch?

There’s a certain strangeness to it, honestly. Actual play is inescapably defined by Critical Role and Dimension 20. Their dominance is such that hobbyist game masters are forced to confront “the Mercer Problem” at their home tables, and aspiring content creators measure their own success in degrees of separation from Brennan Lee Mulligan. Even highly produced and superbly cast projects like the By Night series and Bookshops of Arkham stare jealously at their colleagues’ fan base, longevity, and (Dungeons and) Dragon’s hoard of cash.

But these titans and their laudable imitations bear little resemblance to the preponderance of content produced under the guise of actual play – how is it that our exemplars are also such poor examples of the genre? The average audio-only game is lightly edited by someone trained via Google search; the great majority of streamed actual plays take the form of “talking heads” on a primitive overlay. Both want for anything approaching professional sound or lighting design. The mere concept of a studio space is a distant dream, let alone a prop department or set designer to dress it up. And there's scarcely a trained actor or celebrity guest in sight.

We’re forced, then, to ask: is it appropriate to calibrate our critical lens on productions that are clear, obvious outliers? On its face, it seems a bit silly to compare the modal actual play to projects using branded dollars to pay card-carrying actors to make a television show about playing role playing games. I would posit – and I am by no means the first person to make the analogy – that it makes as much sense to study actual play by watching Dimension 20 as it does to study human sexuality by watching pornography.

There’s nothing wrong with porn. Plenty of people enjoy it, plenty of people study it, and plenty of people take what they learn from it back to their, err, “home games.” But we also agree that it shares only a base-level mechanical resemblance to the version most people experience, and would consider it a problem if someone expected every Adventure in their Zone to look and feel that way in the bedroom. We understand intuitively that it isn’t real.

Considering, then, that most actual plays are more dads in their dungeon than Dungeons and Daddies, we should think carefully about where “big” shows fit within our discussion. Would including Invitation to Party in our analysis be a form of sampling error, by which we have wrongly included an improvisational theater television program in our data? Is Acquisitions Incorporated a natural novelty, functionally meeting our definition but unique to the point that its inclusion would skew our analysis?

The first is easy to solve: delete the outlier. The second suggests we analyze the case, but be extremely careful before drawing broad conclusions. My position leans towards the latter. For all their professional contrivance, these are “media where some group of people play tabletop games for an audience.” Each is worthy of study, if for no other reason than so many creators strive every day to replicate them. For many, actual play has stopped being “watch me pretend to be someone I’m not” and become “watch me pretend to be someone ‘famous’ pretending to be someone they’re not.”

But Normative and Mimetic Isomorphism in the Performance of Role Playing Games is an article for another day. For now, if we’re serious about being scholars and critics, we should first recognize that the most popular actual plays are deviations from the norm, develop a continuum of “bigness” such that like can be measured against like, and focus our analysis such that we’re capturing the median actual play rather than the extremes.

WHAT MAKES A BIG ACTUAL PLAY?

The next question is obvious: what is “big?” Creators and critics agree upon the need to differentiate between actual plays according to technical or artistic sophistication. Despite the overwhelming desire to “be the next Critical Role,” the bulk of actual plays are not and will never be. We recognize a need to keep “new” or “amateur” or “hobbyist” productions distinct from “professional” or “big name” productions, especially when it comes to matters of festivals and awards. The two most-discussed suggestions involve categorizing projects either by budget or by “production value.”

Separating projects by budget is popular in the film and television world, and makes sense as a first idea. There will be an obvious difference in quality between a ten-thousand dollar project and a none-thousand dollar project. Does it create categories that are meaningful for the erstwhile critic, or can be operationalized by an awards committee, though?

Although it succeeds at separating high budget projects from low budget projects, there are only a handful of projects with five-figure budgets, and we already know who they are. Another tier for shows operating on more than $1,000 would keep KOllOCK and The Dungeon Rush from squaring off against Mssrs. Mercer and Mulligan, but we’ve still only accounted for a small percentage of the genre. All but a handful of actual plays exist in the “under $1,000” category, or “under $500” category, which we were able to deduce without consulting an accountant.

We could take this vast low-budget assembly and divide it into micro-categories $100 at a time, but this fails to account for passionate labor freely given. Consider Queen’s Court Games, whose cast includes a professional artist. Commissioning the character portraits, overlays, brand assets, and other art she provides would cost in excess of $1,000 every month – is that number included in our budget? Would a hobbyist editor bill their time at the union rate? Or would the lack of money exchanged make it a “zero-budget” show, and allow them to compete against five high school students recording in the library after school, on a single Blue Yeti?

Come to think of it, do we include the cost of equipment? Dimension 20 has more cameras than most shows have dollars of revenue, and their cost and quality is orders of magnitude higher than your average webcam. How does one account for that? Do we include the cost of a channel's in-home studio in every budget tally?

No, it seems more prudent to align series by “production value,” though the choice is not without its own drawbacks. First, this requires us to define what the markers of “production value” are, and catalogue them according to objectively measurable criteria. Second, actual play does not reliably separate according to any markers that might make the list. The average hobbyist actual play does not take advantage of time-code editing to repair dialogue or manage narrative pacing; neither does Critical Role. Very few entry-level actual play podcasts make use of diagetic soundscapes; neither does Dimension 20.

This inevitably leads to some form of rubric. We would generate a list of X markers worth Y points each, and assign any show above score Z to the “highly produced” category. In a binary setting – an awards show that can’t afford to give out two-dozen different actual play trophies, for example – this still means aspirational hobbyist productions will be trounced by Dark Dice when the ballots are counted. But in contexts that allow for additional granularity, such a system would create much-needed space between minimally, modestly, and majorly produced content. It only asks if your production has unique art or sound design, not if you were charged for it.

The next step would be determining what the markers are, how much they matter, and what cut-off scores make sense for our use cases. But before we go down this road, we should also ask if “production value” is the only metric worth considering. The largest actual plays speak in the language of film and television, and it’s easy to copy and paste those preconceptions onto actual play and call it settled. We should resist this impulse – there’s more than one way to tell a story.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD ACTUAL PLAY?

Assuming our original definition of the art form – “any media where some group of people play tabletop games for an audience” – there are two words that stand out as useful foundations for our nascent critical framework: media and game. Actual play is indisputably a media product, drawing its influences from film, television, and radio theater. It is also a game, with rules and mechanics that distinguish it from narrative fiction. Any system we devise for analyzing and comparing actual play should include both.

As media, actual play lends itself to the vocabulary of its influences. A concept like “production value,” encompassing factors like sound and lighting, sets and costumes, editing and digital effects, is easy to transpose from actual play’s creative siblings. Considering the background of most creators, it’s also easy to judge. Everyone making actual plays has watched film or television; many also make film or television for a living. The scoring might be informal, but we all know “production value” when we see it.

As a game, easy comparison is more challenging. While methods for analyzing scripted media or improvisational theater may offer insight, neither neatly captures the combination of creative freedom and authorial restraint present in role-playing games. Moreover, role-playing games are an art form unto themselves. If we intend to argue that crafting an actual play is something distinct from crafting television or novels or Second City revues, then our analytical framework should also be distinct. We need to identify the performative components of role-playing games.

Thankfully, we already have a framework. We recognize “out-of-character” elements like dice mechanics, explanation and negotiation of rules, non-diagetic planning, meta-gaming, and meta-commentary. Let’s call this Process. We also recognize “in-character” elements, which includes most activities covered under “role playing.” Let’s call this Narrative. The distinction is minor for a home game, but the two sides are pulled into tension when games becomes content.

Combining the media and game aspects of actual play, we could create a graph like this:



While both axes lie firmly within the realm of the subjective, we’ve at least arrived at a partial taxonomy of actual play. With a bit of conversation and guidance, scholars and critics could both divvy up the genre into sub-categories, studying each quadrant as its own component of the broader actual play universe. The keen-eyed among you will also have noticed by now: this framing also doesn’t answer our question. What does a “good” actual play look like?

For that, we’ll need to dive into questions of taste and distinction, which means brushing up on my Bourdieu before I embarrass myself in public. Or maybe the conversations that follow this post will lead us somewhere else entirely. Maybe this framework isn’t as useful as I think, and one of you will eagerly and expertly explain why?

In either case, as we say at Queen’s Court Games: that’s a story for another night.

With thanks to Michael Underwood, Clara Allison, Joshua Pangborn, and Adrienne Wilson for their insights, input, tough questions, and above all, patience.