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Emily C. Friedman is an associate professor of English at Auburn University and director of 18thconnect, a website dedicated to scholarship of the 18th century. Though an 18th-century literature scholar and critic by training, Emily is now one of the foremost chroniclers of the phenomenon we call actual play. She teaches games and actual play in the classroom and regularly writes about actual play on gaming website, Polygon. In fact, as of recording this, we're close to the one year anniversary of her first piece on Polygon, about New York by Night, a Vampire the Masquerade AP. She's also working on a book titled Improvised Worlds: Digital Storytelling Through Play. Also, here's her youtube channel, CriticalProf.
Show Notes:
00:46 - Emily's bio
02:28 - How did you start working on actual play?
09:22 - What is actual play anyway?
15:39 - The state of actual play today
23:07 - Examples of actual play that break the form
36:52 - Infectious Enthusiasm: The Quiet Year
38:42 - Tyranny of Numbers
40:07 - All Advice Is Advice For Myself
If you'd like a written transcript for this episode, you can find it here.
Support the show on Patreon
Emily C. Friedman is an associate professor of English at Auburn University and director of 18thconnect, a website dedicated to scholarship of the 18th century. Though an 18th-century literature scholar and critic by training, Emily is now one of the foremost chroniclers of the phenomenon we call actual play. She teaches games and actual play in the classroom and regularly writes about actual play on gaming website, Polygon. In fact, as of recording this, we're close to the one year anniversary of her first piece on Polygon, about New York by Night, a Vampire the Masquerade AP. She's also working on a book titled Improvised Worlds: Digital Storytelling Through Play. Also, here's her youtube channel, CriticalProf.
Show Notes:
00:46 - Emily's bio
02:28 - How did you start working on actual play?
09:22 - What is actual play anyway?
15:39 - The state of actual play today
23:07 - Examples of actual play that break the form
36:52 - Infectious Enthusiasm: The Quiet Year
38:42 - Tyranny of Numbers
40:07 - All Advice Is Advice For Myself
If you'd like a written transcript for this episode, you can find it here.
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the Yes Indie'd podcast created by Marx Shepherd and run by me, Thomas Manuel. This is a podcast where we talk about indie role-playing games in all their forms the people who designed them, write about them, think about them, whatever. This podcast, along with the weekly indie RPG newsletter, is powered by a gem of subtle and terrifying strength. In its facets, we glimpse ourselves and our many twisting -its patreon. This podcast is powered by patreon and if you head over to patreon.com/indieRPG. You can join folks like Smike, Kieron, Clark Olsen Smith, Lisa Padol, Will Hindmarch and many others and you would help contribute to keeping the space going, which I would really appreciate. All right. With that out of the way, let's get to the interview.
Thomas:Hello everyone. I'm sitting down with Emily Friedman. Emily is an associate professor of English at Auburn University and director of 18th Connect, a website dedicated uh, scholarship around the long 18th century, as we call it. Though an 18th century literary scholar and critic by training, Emily is now one of the foremost chroniclers of the phenomenon that we call actual play. She teaches games, she teaches actual play in the classroom. She regularly writes about it on sites like Polygon. In fact, as of recording this, I think we're, we are basically at the one year anniversary of her first piece on Polygon, which is about New York by night, a vampire the Masquerade actual play series. She's also working on a book titled Improvised
Worlds:Digital Storytelling Through Play. Emily, I'm so glad that you're joining me here today. Did I miss anything in that bio? How are you?
Emily:I am doing super I, I know you and I are both kind of slowly coming back from jet lag, from our different corners of the earth. But no, this is the most fun part of, of doing this particular kind of scholarship is getting to sit down and talk to smart people and uh, see how our perspectives align and differ. Yeah, there's a whole bunch more on the cv. The CV is like a disturbing number of pages, but most of it is, but you crystallized the important parts at this point in time.
Thomas:Yeah, I'm sure, if people want to see Emily's full cv, she has a personal website, ec friedman.com, you should go there and check it out.
Emily:Own the means of production. Folks have, have a corner of the web that you own, if you can.
Thomas:Okay. So I wanna, you know, start us off with, with kind of, I guess the obvious question. How does uh, literature scholar transition to writing about actual play? Is there one specific event that triggers it? Is it a series of events? What, what's the story there?
Emily:Well, the, the sassy overly simplified answer right, is have a global pandemic, completely ruin your decade long project. And that's part of it. But actually I was writing about actual play before the, the Covid 19 pandemic began because my other parallel research is in never published manuscript fiction. So things that are written in English primarily between 1750 and 19 hundreds. These are things that were written by hand, and so they only exist in one copy, but we have evidence that they circulated. And so I've always been fascinated by. This notion, and we can tie it to what would later be the indie scene, right, of people who are choosing modes of production that are not mass, that are for a very specific kind of coterie or collective or imagined readership. And and why would you make that decision? So the, the story had went for most of my career, that manuscript publication. So writing a bunch of handwritten copies and circulating them dies after print technology, the superior technology emerges. And so when I found these things in 2009 and found more and more and more of them, I realized that I was seeing the kind of birth of a project that might think about this, these people who are choosing differently, that are saying, I have artistic needs for expression, that the print marketplace will not allow me to circulate. And so I knew I wanted that project to speak to a wider public. And so I started experimenting with writing to different fields. And so I was writing a bunch of articles on my way to what I thought was gonna be this book. Which the working title for it is before fan fiction and someday it will get written. I've just been waylaid for a while. And along the way there was a call for papers about tabletop games in the digital age. And I've been watching actual play since the start of my academic career, which is when acquisitions incorporated is going and critical role is going. So I propose a thing on critical role in narrative time as a fun thing to write for a month. And that's how I meet Adrian Herman, who teaches that article in his class a few months after it's published and it kind of cascaded from there. And so, I've been told by colleagues that the 18th century is kind of my superpower in this field because it allows me to think differently and more capaciously about how this form both TTRPG more broadly and actual play more specifically fit into the history of people trying to do things differently with media.
Thomas:I love that. I love that. I think one of my favorite things about talking to academics is the fact that they can bring the sense of perspective to things, right? Like, like nothing is new and everything has been studied and it's, and it's nice to contextualize things, you know, as part of a long history rather than something that's completely new that's going to disappear, right?
Emily:Yeah, I, I often say I like my takes, not hot takes, but slow braised takes. Which, you know, I do a little bit more of the kind of immediate response with Polygon. And I think that's been really useful for my writing and thinking practice. But the value that I give is that I can sit with this and sit on things. You know, not everything has to come out kind of journalistically in the ways that some of my colleagues who are covering this you know, they have to for, because of the marketplace. I have tenure. I am one of the lucky ones. And so that's really helpful in those ways.
Thomas:So were you interested in tabletop games or were you playing them prior to discovering actual play, or was that semi simultaneous?
Emily:So actual play came and brought me back and reminded me what tabletop could be. I played a lot of tabletop almost to the edge of bad larp in high school. And so that's the mid to late nineties. That's the kind of dominance of white wolf. And also because I'm from Texas Steve Jackson games. So behind me, like my library includes, you know, everything from Toon to in nominee, which I went to a Catholic school. We played a lot at in nominee. Even the most hard core Catholic in our gaming group was willing to, you know, play an angel. So, and then I went to college in a place where the kind of sci-fi and fantasy nerds were like, and this is not an exaggeration on my part, they were white nationalists, right? They were eugenicists. It was really like you were drawing a line in the sand by aligning yourself with that practice. And so my Satanic panic came late in the early two thousands. And then grad school got in the way. And I had friends who were playing in grad school, but I was. Kind of, you know, trying to read every 18th century novel I could get my hands on at the time. So having the job and being able to kind of explore things. And I have dear friends in the history department, one of whom is a lifelong dungeon master. And I overheard them talking about the new fifth Edition, which I had heard about because I'd been watching the d and d next actual plays from Acquisitions Incorporated. And I was like, why are you not inviting me? We're in the middle of this party. And like, well, we didn't think you, we thought you were cool. We thought you wouldn't wanna play. And now I'm the like junior DM taking all of the good notes and bringing the good snacks, and we've been playing ever since. So yeah, and it's, and ever since then, even before I started really studying it the so-called d and d Renaissance has really brought some interesting people who are, you know, curious and then you can bring them into other games, of course. Which is what I do at my table. So I have a very traditional every Sunday fifth edition game that I play at. And then my tables are doing all kinds of strange things. There is one all 18th century scholar group. They started out by playing d and d and now we're playing Regency Cthulhu so we'll see how they react to this. These are not combat folks, but they're, they're also not normally horror folks either. So we live in interesting times.
Thomas:That sounds like a lot of fun. I assume that you are kind of very used to explaining to people what actual play is and why it's worth taking seriously, and I feel like that's the first thing we kind of need to do in this conversation.
Emily:No, we gotta, we
Thomas:yeah. Yeah. I mean,
Emily:The, the book has to do it. Every article I write for a new audience has to do it. Yeah. So actual play is a large umbrella term. And of course it has older connections to literal actual play. So recordings of play sessions for the purposes of design feedback and these sorts of things. And so that tradition combines with a kind of improvised play that was also kind of, Coming into being and thriving offline in the 1990s. And then once you get the platforms that allow for video Twitch and YouTube and before that, things like Vine, you suddenly have the ability to have a wider audience beyond kind of the convention circuit and things like that. So generally speaking actual play as we know it now kind of is about 15 ish years old in its digital form. It is most commonly associated with Dungeons and Dragons because the very biggest games play that. But there's also a significant, what I call the ambitious middle who often differentiate themselves by either being an anthology series that play many different games or you know, Play one game that they think works particularly well for their method of storytelling. So it is a big umbrella term that is quickly needing sub terms, but we are still, of course, at the early stages of saying, can we all just call it actual play? Like no, I know you wanna call it narrative play. Taylor Moore, of fortunate horse who at its worlds beyond number, among other things. But, but we're not there yet. Can we just have one term and then sub please and thank you. But yeah, it's narratalogically speaking. We talk about narrative levels. Jen Grueling has written about this, other folks have written about this, where when we are at a table together there's the narrative level of the dungeon master constructing the world. There's players who are narrating their actions. There are players speaking in character. There's the narrative level of the mechanics of the dice. What actual play adds on top of all of that is a spectator who is not a player participant. One or more.
Thomas:Yeah, yeah. And you know, at the highest level a lot more.
Emily:a lot, lot more. Most recently the channel Smosh on YouTube, which has 7 million followers, has dipped into d and d and got a half a million views in the first day. Running a very bare bones no, no fancy anything aside from multiple cameras focused on a real table.
Thomas:Yeah. It, it feels like if you are a sort of internet performer of any kind, if you're a content creator of any kind with a large audience, like you could make actual play right now and like specifically d and d actual play and, and attract an audience, right. It feels like a truth that's kind of circulating in, in, in the sort of like media world right now, right? Like that this is something you could be doing.
Emily:Yeah, and we can see kind of over time to the extent that we have good data about the number of shows that are coming onto the scene. Obviously there's a boom at the start of fifth Edition and then when critical role comes on, There's another boom of ambitious shows in its wake. And in 2018 in particular, when critical role becomes its own independent company, 2020, the pandemic means everybody has improved kind of audio visual in many cases and more free time or at least time stuck at home. So you see a huge boom, then it's, it's somewhat reduced since, but if any time of day we can get on, say, Twitch and there's at least 70 actual play shows, give or take in dozens of languages. And of course, depending on the time zone, right it's which languages are being represented is, is is then the question. But yeah, I mean, I think the, the challenge is that it is a super saturated in many ways kind of space, depending on what you're trying to do and what kind of audience you're trying to capture. If you're trying to capture the same T T R P G people, We know from survey data that I have collected of respondents of people who both make actual play, but also people who watch actual play and also people who don't watch actual play at all. And we know that, you know, the number of hours a week kind of maxes out for the majority of people at no more than 10. That's not a whole lot of shows to be keeping track with given the length of, of actual play. So there's, there's only so much time that people have to consume these things unless you're me and you make up your job. And so it really becomes, it's actual play often compared to regional theater, like community theater, right? But community theater can thrive in hundreds and thousands of different places because you have to go to, say, my town of Auburn, Alabama, or maybe the few towns over. And you've got a little group of a hundred people, 200 people Meanwhile, the new restriction is time zones, right? That, and even that with prerecorded material, asynchronous material is flattened. So, and most shows are not live. A lot of shows have moved to prerecorded, and so liveness is not as important to many shows. And so that becomes the new challenge of, okay, so are you gonna localize in other kinds of ways to a particular kind of audience and a particular kind of storytelling? Or are you gonna keep going after the, the kind of audience that has been captured by any number of shows already?
Thomas:I assume with any kind of saturated media, there's a lot of targeted differentiation that you kind of need to do at an early stage, but I also assume that the, probably numerically the large majority of people doing actual play are. For, for lack of a better term, hobbyists, you know, people who enjoy performance and want to perform and, you know, are doing it as as a platform for that or just recording their home games. Is that, is that assumption accurate or am I off?
Emily:Well, I mean, I think that it's fair to say that most for functionally, no one in this space, with the exception of fewer than a dozen people, and this includes the cast of critical role when I say this, or Dimension 20, these big names that we're familiar with. This is no one's only job. So there is a group that is for whom this is part of a portfolio of creative labor. They are professionals in theater, in film and television or in other kind of web media. And this is a creative form of expression that may be an additional income stream or allows them creative freedom that they don't have in other parts of their job, or both? Ideally. Very few of them are being paid even in terms of profit sharing. For most of the ambitious middle, the current success is to be sustainable, which is to say that they have the resources that allow them to continue to create for the luckier ones. This also includes sustainability in terms of being able to pay themselves, or at least some, some portion of them, a kind of living wage for the labor that they're doing. But it's also alongside other kinds of work. And then, but then you do also have, you know, an enormous base of what we might call hobbyists. I mean, I think hobby is really hard to talk about. Um, Intentionality is really hard to talk about. I did this kind of mega survey that has about 4,500 respondents which is for those not familiar with academic surveys, that's, that's a really big yield. And we can talk about how that happened and how I had to explain it to my colleagues which meant I had to explain who Matthew Mercer was. But I'm hoping to follow it up with qualitative interviews, and I have a research protocol for that to kind of talk to creators more in depth about how they're defining industry versus field versus space versus community, why they do what they do. And try to speak to as many people from, as, from different kinds of positionalities, be it you know, where, where are they literally. As well as we know the creators kind of span a bunch of different ages. We know that creators and audiences are pretty equally divided across the generations and across genders. The biggest is millennials and generation Z, and those are equally n b. Masculine identified and female identified. So, but yeah, the, the kind of the whys and the wherefores are, are fascinating. And we get a hint of this, right, when we look at Twitter or social media and we watch people kind of selling. I mean, I get a lot of emails now of people pitching their actual plays to me, and I see what I, I keep saying the ambitious middle those are also the most likely folks to submit their work to Web Fests and seek that kind of validation for their work and increased visibility because discoverability is terrible. Even before social media went kaput. It's very hard to find these things on Twitch and YouTube. Cuz most live actual plays are playing to, if you've got more people in your Twitch chat than you have on screen, you're doing better than the vast majority of actual plays. So these are, these are hard things but it depends on what you're there for and for some people, yeah, they're putting their home game online very in very explicitly. But there's a big group of folks who are trying to do something more than that as a kind of creative expression.
Thomas:And I think that the thing that kind of complicates that. I mean, from my point of view at least, is that actual play is it's actually work, right?
Emily:um, There's a great book called Not Getting Paid to Do What You Love. And it is about influencers in the beauty and fashion industry. But what's really interesting right is duffy in that book articulates that everybody who's doing this, whether they're making money or not, whether they're big or small, it's all labor. It's labor for different kinds of reasons. Some of it is with a kind of idea for professionalization in this space. Others, it's, I have a job and this is the fun, this is the fun labor. But what she's very insistent on is saying the one thing we can't do is say that these are diluted people who are acting irrationally. The world is literally on fire, right? Both your region and mine are seeing record heat waves, the likes of which we have never seen. The coast of my hometown is, is, is throwing up dead fish from the Gulf of Mexico. So in such a world, if you're going to labor you know, part of putting aside some of your labor time to something that you see of as a, as a creative expression in and of itself. Cuz I think that my suspicion is, is that like these influencers that Duffy spoke to you know, half a decade ago so too, I think more TTRPG folks than, than we usually think are aware that like there's not a, there's not a whole lot of money or we're passing the same five bucks around. But that there's a meaning in making. Do I think that they should be compensated for their labor and we should, you know, have something like universal basic income? Absolutely. But these are, you know, rational actors making kind of value driven choices that are antithetical to the market. It's funny you know, we are recording this right after I'm coming off of an actual play recording which is hilarious because that is, I do it as kind of field work more than like, this is the exciting thing. Like, I'm very nervous doing it. It's not where my joy is when I was I went to performing art schools as a child, but I was the one dressed all in black, like moving, you know, moving set pieces around or running lights. I love playing when it, when the recording is not on the line. But somehow my job, my research has, has led me to these spaces where I can observe and, and it requires me to do this. And I'm like,
Thomas:Okay. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the, kind of the form of actual play. When, when I say it, and I imagine what, what listeners are, are also picturing in their heads right now is either like a video stream where People are playing together in the same room, or we're seeing kind of like all their cameras streaming from webcams or things like that, or podcasts like, like like party of one always are not gonna miss a chance to say to shout out Jeff Stormer's amazing.
Emily:we love you, Jeff. You're the best gonna make you listen to this episode so that you know.
Thomas:I know you have a bunch of examples of actual play that maybe don't fit this, this picture. So what are those, and can you explain to my audience like, you know, what they're trying to do and why they're interesting.
Emily:Yeah, so I mean, I think you are right that there are basically two extremely common versions. We can kind of divide actual play in a couple of different ways. One is, is it borne Audio Audio is always the, the only form that the final product is imagined in versus a kind of video, usually with a podcast that also kind of comes following it. And then a further kind of division that is that is true to both of them is are you recording using video conferencing software, like the kinds that we're using right now to have a conversation or are you doing it in a studio? If you're doing it in a studio then it becomes how many cameras do you have and how, and how many people are visible to the viewer at any given time. So in the kind of format, popularized by critical role, we know you're seeing everybody. It's everyone everywhere, all at once. But yeah, and, and, and that's enormously taxing on performers, but it's enormously pleasurable for that audience who has taken to kind of. Clipping and other practices of kind of recirculation of very small parts. So much so that critical role has a very specific intellectual property rule set that encourages that practice for its long form content. So you can go and see like, do you like this one character because you saw their art? You don't have to watch an episode of Critical Wool. You can go on YouTube and watch the four hour super cut of all of the kind of emotional beats this character goes through. For, or you can watch the animated version or, or that both the kind of animated recap and then the full fledged legend of Vox Machina. There are some experiments with trying to break free of a table. Cooch by hyper R p g is kind of the classic example. In both their Cooch 1991 and their cooch most recent season they basically film LARPs with multiple cameras moving around in Cooch 1991. It is a it is a city council meeting where that is, that starts out very dry and banal and then, The horrible things that we know as the audience, because we've been watching all of the events that leads up to this. This is a game run on kids, on bikes usually that come into the room. Right. And Mo it's a who, who's who of of Los Angeles Day players in the tabletop space who have been given very minimal directions and the driver is moving around when there's a role to be made, kind of adjudicating those kinds of very, very streamlined mechanics in order to make that happen. And then they do it with big fancy virtual sets in the council of the Gods episode that they did most recently. But yeah, so there's a lot of experimentation in the space in terms of narrative time in terms of what players do and don't know. My favorite example of players who are able to use the medium to transform meaning Is Dungeons and Daddies, which is the most successful podcast that is supported by Patreon. And they in their first season propose a solution to a problem that involves time travel, and they propose it to the DM and the dm calls for a roll, allows it, and then they pull out the podcast, you know, RSS feed, have him go to the second episode where they travel back in time. And the players have already rerecorded and re-uploaded to the stream. Um,
Thomas:Which, which is such, which is such a funny and clever thing to do
Emily:it's remarkably clever, especially since they use the, the fact that they have this huge back catalog of the DM's utterances to be able to insert him authorizing it into that second episode. And it's fascinating because depending on when you listened to this podcast, your second episode experience is of this completely random like time travel event that comes out of nowhere and is never addressed again for 62 episodes, which is, which is fabulous. I mean, they're clever in all kinds of ways, but that's what's lovely. And what I live for in this form is when the play extends to what is being displayed, right? Because actual play, like turning on your cameras and recording play session, Is a thing, and it has certain kinds of uses, but audience aware, actual play for me is, is where the transformation into something different becomes very, very interesting. And not just, you know, a cheap imitation, but instead it's Pokemon level up. There's a transubstantiation that's happening where now we, as audience matter. Kollok is another, is a good example of that too. Cause they have this whole parallel game where it does not impact, generally speaking, the events. It's not a kind of, you pay your money and always are, you know, changing the outcome of something, but you're playing a game with the audience and maybe your character gets plucked out and becomes an npc. Maybe they never do. But you're, it's parallel play in an interesting kind of way. And there's other, and I think there's more experimentation to come. I hope with that kind of thinking about what is, what can this form do that just recording us playing can't do. And not just in terms of like making the lighting hues better or that sort of thing, but instead really playing with what does it mean to use mechanics to tell a story?
Thomas:Yeah. It's a really interesting point about how actual play, because of what's successful in terms of streams, also has some kind of genre baked in. Right? Very often they're either Comedies, you know, very out and out, kind of goofy comedies, it is usually like a vehicle for like comedy improvisation, and then there's the kind of slow burn, multi multi hour kind of drama.
Emily:What's striking to me, and, and this has been very recent, like the last couple of days thinking through like what genres are working and not working and which genres are we seeing at the kind of most watched and listened to forms. Which is not to say that other, they're not people who are doing these genres, but they are not, they do not have the kind of market share. I hate that word, but you know what I mean. And that's romance. You know, there's so many, you know games, you know, Pasion de la Pasiones and Emily Care-Boss' romance Trilogy, and Monster Hearts, although Monster Hearts gets a fair amount of play. But you know, that require a delicate hand and the girl Girls Run these worlds has, has done a fair amount of this good society gets a lot of play, I think because it is a romance that doesn't require physicality cuz of the regency-ness of it all. But it's interesting to me that while romance and sex have featured and been referenced in these kinds of big blockbusters, so to speak, or relatively speaking actual plays, critical role, tried monster hearts. It, I think the general audience consensus was it didn't go especially well. And that's, you know, any number of completely understandable reasons. But I'm very curious because you would think that in a deeply parasocial form that has been often compared to pornography, that romance performance would be precisely the kind of thing that people would want, want to watch and want to do. And I, I don't think that's actually true, although, What's interesting to me, like I, I put out, cuz you know, we're all on like 5 million platforms right now at during this, the death of Twitter. But so I, as a kind of AB testing, I asked on Mastodon and Blue Sky and Twitter, like, Hey, if you perform actual play, what game do you really love to play that you would never play on stream? And if you are an audience member, what would you never wanna watch other people play? And. I was surprised. I was expecting you know, this is what happens, right? You, this is why you asked the question, because you're gonna be wrong in, in an interesting way. And I thought a lot, a lot of people would talk about erotic games, and they didn't. They talked about crunchy games. They talked about games that were too complex for actual play or that they didn't wanna get into. Like, pen Dragon is too long, or, you know, it would, you'd have to edit the hell out of, you know, shadow Run or you, you get the idea. There were a couple of people who said Blue Beard's Bride which is interesting because there's an actual play of Blue Beard's Bride that's that's doing the festival circuit at the moment. But a lot of people were like, oh, that's too intimate. But that was a very small number of people mentioning like, something is too emotionally intimate for me to either watch or perform on stream. And I don't, I still don't know whether that's an unawareness of that genre of game, which is
Thomas:Yeah,
Emily:or whether it's people have very different boundaries than I do. Both can be
Thomas:yeah, yeah,
Emily:More, more data needed. But, but yeah, the other thing that I was noting recently In these kinds of like, what are the limitations, what are the constraints is that at the highest levels the things that are most, like you wanna have a long term company with a kind of successful brand is you don't wanna have player versus player antagonism. So I was asking around for examples of long term campaigns where the main party, not a guest, not a limited appearance, found themselves in irreconcilable conflict for a significant amount of time, and the power of friendship did not fix it. And of course, like who does this the best? I mean, the answer is almost always friends at the table because they're constantly switching between systems and they're willing to kind of go to those kinds of places in, in interesting kinds of ways. So they've done that kind of conflict so many times that, like my mentions were pinging with multiple different seasons where people were highlighting, ah, yeah, that, that ended in bloodshed. But if you compare it to the other, really well known kind of shows when there's conflict, it's very limited. it's resolved. It cannot, it cannot sustain itself. Even when, you know, the, the, the famous example is Brennan Lee Mulligan in a crown of candy. He wants Game of Thrones. And so, but as a safety tool, he goes to the players before they film and he says, okay, so here's the deal. We're doing a vote. And it's one veto means we don't have P v P and someone vetoed. And so the ethic season did not have p v P violence in a game of throne season, right? So the antagonism had to come from somewhere else. I've talked to folks since who are like, yeah, this would be terrible for branding. And there are people who are thinking about that, you know, that is not like a critical role dimension 20 kind of thing. That is all the way down people thinking about, you know what does it, what does it mean if people don't like me because my character makes particular kinds of choices? Or what does it mean if, if people are having to pick sides in a, in a show. That doesn't mean that people aren't trying this and doing really interesting and ambitious things with it. But there, there's definitely the sense of, oh, that's an extremely risky thing to
Thomas:Okay.
Emily:Which I find unless, unless. And this, we do come back to mechanics, unless the system has basically built into the, the contract that the audience understands. Like vampire game. Absolutely. Right. You know, you're gonna have conflict. And in fact, New York by night is built to facilitate that kind of conflict in a really interesting way because the first season was one coterie the second season was an adversarial coterie. These coteries are now breaking apart because their own internal tensions, but they can reconstitute into new alliances for the third season. So you can get these kinds of shifting alliances in a way that doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to, to freak out. But yeah, you can do that in a vampire game. You can do that, you know, if you're playing paranoia and you don't think that there's gonna be pe you know, that kind of. But yeah, no, d and d is, we talk so much about d and d as a power fantasy, but the, the found family trope is so incredibly important to that, to the prevalence of that form
Thomas:Agreed. Agreed. Just looking at the time here, I would love to get into the standard questions I ask everybody who comes on the show. My first question is in a section called Infectious Enthusiasm, I ask, what's a game that you've had a lot of fun with and wanted recommend to my listeners?
Emily:I don't know if this makes me basic or but. I, I, I, I, I don't care. I adore the quiet year. I teach it in my classes. I ran it most recently for my nephew who is eight. So a classroom full of eight and nine year
Thomas:Ooh.
Emily:And I had, you know, you cut the deck so it's shorter. I removed some some of the cards that had kind of what I thought were either vocabulary words that were, that I didn't necessarily wanna get into too complex, or concepts that I thought were a little too dark. And then of course, their eight and nine year olds, they bring their own darkness to the table. Right. You know homicidal ducks and all kinds of things. It was a amazing experience and it's such a lovely game to play with that kind of kind of player cuz you know, eight, nine year old, everybody wants to talk right now and the quiet ear makes you wait. But you have a mechanism for interacting even when it's not your turn. Cuz you can take contempt tokens and the, the tiny skulls that come with the print version of this game are just comedy gold. It was. It was hilarious. So yeah, I, I love that game. I, I wish there was a comparable physicality to the the deep forest, which is the kind of flipped post-colonial version. And I keep thinking about what, you know, what is the visual distinction that, that would need to be made for the deep forest. But yeah, love the quiet year
Thomas:Okay. So in my next question, which is a section title, tyranny of Numbers, I ask, what's a number that you can share from your work
Emily:well, I'll keep on I have so many statistics in front of me cuz I, I pulled the survey data. And I'll say that I'll give a, a good one and a, and a bleak one. And so we know that most people who listen or watch actual plays, the majority watch fewer than four a week or a month. So, you know, when you're trying to capture the Xtant audience they can only be loyal to so many shows at a time. What's really lovely about the data that I've collected is, while Dungeons and Dragons is still by and large, the biggest kind of chunk of the pie, there is a significant numbers of forged in the Dark Games, kids on bikes and Brooms, monsters of the week, pathfinder and Call of Kaulu games, including, you know call of Kaulu is getting an enormous amount of support from Cassium in terms of really ambitious, full set, full costume kind of actual play productions And there are literally. Dozens of systems that are reflected in the, in the data of people reporting. You know, what systems are they paying attention to when they're when they're watching and listening, which I think is, is a good thing.
Thomas:In the section, all advice is advice for myself. I ask what's a habit or technique you're trying to get better at, at your table?
Emily:I think a lot of what I'm trying to do right now, and this is pedagogical practice, as well as player practice uh, hahaha. is uh, Listen you would think having gone to a Quaker college that I would be better at holding in the silence, but I am not, I confess. But every time I, I have interviewed people who are responsible for casting actual plays at the kind of quote unquote highest levels. And I ask them, what makes a good player? What they're looking for is not flashy performance. What they're looking for is who's listening to the other people when it's not their scene and reacting and being the good first audience. So a lot of what I'm trying to kind of cultivate in my own practices, being the good first audience for my students, for my interview subjects, for my colleagues and collaborators cuz that's how I can serve them best.
Thomas:Wow. That is great advice for everybody . Thank you so much, Emily. Is there, is there a place you'd like to point people at to where they can find you?
Emily:Sure. Platforms are, are shaky at the moment, I know. But I, I own and have owned for over half my life. God help me. The website, EC Friedman, that's fried man.com. And I am F R I E D E or the German word for peace. The first part of my surname just about everywhere on the internet except for YouTube, where I, when I am teaching tabletop an actual play in the classroom, because I teach in a de-centered classroom, I record 15 to 20 minute reflections on what we did. My students don't watch them, although it's designed for them. But many of my colleagues who are thinking about teaching tabletop games or just wanna know what scholarship is like that's there for them, as well as kind of conference presentations and things like that including Virtual Jane Conn, which has been where my colleague Emily Kugler and I have kind of used games of all kinds to kind of spread as a, as a kind of way to lure in Jane Austen nerds. Not just good society, but lots of other video and tabletop games. So, critical Prof is the YouTube
Thomas:Nice. Yeah, I, I just subscribed to it today actually. It seemed really cool. I can't wait to watch those videos.
Emily:It's so janky. It's, it's, it's so, it's so put together with iMovie and spit and tape. But, you know, Evan Toner and I are working on a longer term project to create free to access materials for the teaching of tabletop and actual play kind of short explainer videos since so much of the space has a lot of content that's designed for you know, how to play the game or how to get started. We wanna kind of add in quick explanations for concepts like bleed. What is a tabletop role playing game to the extent that we can describe it in 10 minutes? Those kinds of things. And with the, with the help of production teams affiliated with my university we may just make this into something that is less, you know, homemade and more exciting and dynamic.
Thomas:Thank you so much, Emily. Thanks for chatting. I really appreciate your time and you know, your expertise on the subject.
Emily:My deep pleasure.