This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the latest research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in one single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 40 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live-action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Baldur’s Gate, Genshin Impact, and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies, and more. Other chapters integrate insights from RPG studies around broadly significant topics, like worldbuilding, immersion, and player-character relations, as well as explore actual play and streaming, diversity, equity, inclusion, jubensha, therapeutic uses of RPGs, and storygames, journaling games, and other forms of text-based RPGs. Each chapter includes definitions of key terms and recommended readings to help students and scholars new to RPG studies find their way into this interdisciplinary field. A comprehensive reference volume ideal for students and scholars of game studies and immersive experiences and those looking to learn more about the ever-growing, interdisciplinary field of RPG studies.

What do we mean when we describe theatre as political today? How might theatre-makers' provocations for change need to be differently designed when addressing the precarious spectator-subject of twenty- first century neoliberalism? In this important study Liz Tomlin interrogates the influential theories of Jacques Rancière to propose a new framework of analysis through which contemporary political dramaturgies can be investigated. Drawing, in particular, on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Lilie Chouliaraki and Judith Butler, Tomlin argues that the capacities of the contemporary and future spectator to be 'effected' or 'affected' by politically-engaged theatre need to be urgently re-evaluated. Central to this study is Tomlin's theorized figuration of the neoliberal spectator-subject as precarious, individualized and ironic, with a reduced capacity for empathy, agency and the ability to imagine better futures. This, in turn, leads to a predilection for a response to injustice that is driven by a concern for the feelings of the subject-self, rather than concern for the suffering other. These characteristics are argued to shape even those spectator-subjects towards the left of the political spectrum, thus necessitating a careful reconsideration of new and long-standing dramaturgies of political provocation. Dramaturgies examined include the ironic invitations of Made in China and Martin Crimp, the exploration of affect in Kieran Hurley's Heads Up, the new sincerity that characterizes the work of Andy Smith, the turn to the staging of the spectators' 'other' in Developing Artists' Queens of Syria and Chris Thorpe and Rachel Chavkin's Confirmation, and the community activism of Common Wealth's The Deal Versus the People.

This edited collection gathers together leading voices in theatre and performance studies to debate the politics of participation and find points of connection across a range of performative forms – including community theatre, live art, applied theatre, one-to-one performance and marathon running. Arranged in three sections, 'Recognising Participation', 'Labours of Participation', and 'Authoring Participation', the book raises productive questions about how and why audiences are encouraged to participate in creating the artistic work. This intersection, the authors suggest, blurs the boundaries between producer and consumer, promising modes of engagement that are at once political, social and aesthetic. Applying theoretical ideas to concrete discussions of practice, this is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of applied theatre, political and socially-engaged theatre, participatory theatre making and performance studies.

Dramaturgies of Interweaving explores present-day dramaturgies that interweave performance cultures in the fields of theater, performance, dance, and other arts. Merging strategies of audience engagement originating in different cultures, dramaturgies of interweaving are creative methods of theater and art-making that seek to address audiences across cultures, making them uniquely suitable for shaping people’s experiences of our entangled world. Presenting in-depth case studies from across the globe, spanning Australia, China, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, the US, and the UK, this book investigates how dramaturgies of interweaving are conceived, applied, and received today. Featuring critical analyses by scholars—as well as workshop reports and artworks by renowned artists—this book examines dramaturgies of interweaving from multiple locations and perspectives, thus revealing their distinct complexities and immense potential. Ideal for scholars, students, and practitioners of theater, performance, dramaturgy, and devising, Dramaturgies of Interweaving opens up an innovative perspective on today’s breathtaking plurality of dramaturgical practices of interweaving in theater, performance, dance, and other arts, such as curation and landscape design.

Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2023), July 20–24, 2023, San Francisco, USA

Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies invites readers to think with affect about performance, pedagogies and their inherent activist, embodied and collective natures. It works across multiple spheres to help readers understand how to deploy affective approaches rather than to simply think with affect theory about traditional methods. The book is structured and curated across three main thematic sections: affective movements, methods and pedagogies, each of which treats the core explorations of affect and performance through a different perspective. It is concerned with the ways performance and theatrical methods work with and through a theoretics of affect. The sixteen chapters include work that models theoretical practices in writing, and demonstrates how theorising affect and its methods is itself a performative practice. The contributors offer rich examples from diverse geopolitical as well as disciplinary contexts, innovative methods, and finally, intersectional theoretics. This collection will be of interest to higher education students exploring methodologies, and academic researchers and teachers in the fields of performance studies, communication, critical studies, sociology and the arts.