Watch Us Roll: Essays on Actual Play and Performance in Tabletop Role-Playing Games

by Shelly Jones (Editor, Contributor), Evan Torner (Contributor), Julia J.C. Blau (Contributor)

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.

226 pages, Paperback

Published August 13, 2021

About the author

Shelly Jones is a professor by trade and a nerd by design. Woefully introverted, their pockets are full of post-it notes and their head is full of (unsaid) witty come-backs and un-won arguments from years past. Their cozy mystery, Player Elimination, was nominated for the 2026 Agatha Award for Best First Novel. When they aren’t grading papers or writing new mysteries, Shelly can often be found hiking in the woods or playing a board game while their cats look on. Find them on BlueSky @shellyjones.bsky.social, Instagram @shellyjonesauthor, or sign up for their newsletter at https://shellyjonesauthor.com/.

Reviews

[Kellynn Wee]

Jones has put together an anthology of research about Actual Play videos in TTRPGs--the scholarship is nascent, because the phenomenon itself is also new (barring board games AP videos, which the last chapter helpfully points out!). As with any other edited volume, there are some chapters here that I felt were very good and others that I had more questions about. My favourite was Jones's own on "saccharine fan practice", where she looks at how Critters scrub or elide some questionable practices of the CritRole cast from paratexts such as wikis, and what this says more broadly about the nature and relationship of fandom to TTRPG creators (Jones is trying to grapple with the nuances of "toxic positivity" in a fannish context here, which I found really interesting). I also liked the chapter by Hope, which looks at how actual play can be examined through the lens of performance to understand what players are creating and why it appeals to viewers. Hope points out that the narrative-rich storytelling of The Adventure Zone and Critical Role is central to viewers' enjoyment, but that part of the enjoyment also derives from viewers' access to other frames of performance, such as the social frame (players' friendships) and mechanical frames (the combat, rules, etc). As she puts it: "The scaffolding of the game is always exposed. Instead of detracting from the narrative, these external structures are also consumed as part of the spectacle: like a charming metatextual narrator, they are entertainment in their own right."

There were some chapters where I felt the method were in question, such as Dandrow's; I wondered about the logic of using questionnaires to evaluate fan responses to controversy on Critical Role rather than just scraping the rich database of public comments that already exist, which are probably more reflective of fans' responses than a questionnaire (available for responses only briefly--after 48 hours) conducted many months after the fact. Others I thought made points that have already been frequently discussed, at least in popular media, such as the lack of diversity on these shows. Overall, I found the book accessible and entertaining, and a valuable beginning to the study of TTRPG actual play.

[Neveah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second read through this, picking out even more absolutely vital scholarship about both actual plays themselves and the act of taking part in observed play. There are a lot of frames in this book, and interestingly, Shelly Jones has allowed the collection to contain a number of perspectives that actively contradict each other. Really good stuff, and a founding work in this area. (Also I ended up making notes about a potential paper on actual play and romance, since the collection is capped by time before some fairly major queer relationships in APs happened)

[Al Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

My dissertation wouldn't exist without this text, the single most important and extensive writings on actual plays I've ever read.