“We Play Games to Make Stories Out of Sound”: Actual Play at the Nexus of Game, Performance, and Literature

Abstract

Actual play is a new and burgeoning genre which thus far has limited scholarship attending to actual play texts themselves, especially the narrative meanings present. This thesis addresses the literary significance of actual play, with close attention to aspects of game and performance as well, through a genre analysis drawing on several actual play texts and a close reading of Chapter 1 of The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One, the first campaign released by the independent actual play podcast Worlds Beyond Number in 2023. This work argues that actual play is able to produce uniquely complex narratives that resist dominant ideologies and reinforce values of community and collaboration through the process of collective storytelling. In addition to methodologies from game, performance, and literary studies, this work draws on postcolonial and feminist theories to analyze The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One’s representation of witches through innovative game design and narrative structure.