Dr. Emily Friedman on the history of actual play
We talk with TTRPG expert and academic Dr Emily Friedman about the history of Actual Play
Watch as a full video interview on YouTube
Emily C. Friedman teaches courses on British literature, book history, games, and playful media. Trained as a book historian, narratologist, and digital humanist, her work examines the history of cultural production outside of commercial mass media from the eighteenth century to today, from never-published manuscript fiction to analog games. Now one of the senior scholars and public intellectuals in the field of "Actual Play," a new media form where roleplaying games are performed for audiences, her research on the topic has appeared in multiple academic books and journals, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the game media site Polygon. Her next book, The Actual History of Actual Play, is forthcoming from MIT Press (2028), and she is at work on a book on the comic and roleplaying game DIE for University of Michigan Press, a multiauthored critical companion to major Actual Play Dimension 20, and future work on microcelebrity and "nerd fame".
We loved speaking with Emily about her work, learning about the study of unpublished manuscripts, and how she first got into studying actual play. We talk about the amazing rise of this new form of entertainment (though it goes back further than you may think), hear about the teething difficulties of Critical Role, and much more!
Links:
Pre-order Emily's book, The Actual History of Actual Play
Narrative Damage is the TTRPG podcast that asks authors to put down their pens, pick up the dice and tell stories together. Watch or listen to our actual plays with authors as the players on our YouTube or listen on your favourite app!
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