Actual Play Time, Part 2: Depends on How You Slice It

[This is the second post in a series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time, we talked about my discovery of actual play and my realization that it was a whole new medium.]

You know, for writing about novels there’s the language of literary criticism; for writing about movies, the jargon of movie critiques is also well-established.  But actual play is new enough that the terms haven’t evolved yet.  Which means I get to make up my own.

In examining the burgeoning actual play medium, there are a few different ways to cut it up, but the most useful one, in my opinion, is by length of story arc.  For this purpose, I think of actual plays as falling into one of three categories: short form, medium form, and long form.

Short form content is your typical one-shot.  A “one-shot,” in TTRPG parlance, is a short adventure designed to be played, start to finish, in a single session.  Of course, a session of D&D (or any TTRPG) can last several hours, so even short form actual plays are often 3 – 5 hours long.  And, sometimes, you just can’t fit it all into one session after all, because things always take longer than you think they will, and the “one-shot” ends up becoming more of a two-shot (or even three-shot).  So a short form actual play is typically one episode, but up to 3, and it’s typically anywhere from 2 – 10 total hours of viewing time.  That doesn’t seem particularly short, if you’re comparing it to a sitcom, or your average comic book.  But trust me when I tell you it’s short compared to other actual plays.

Medium form content is usually around 5 – 20 episodes, which can be 50+ hours of viewing time.  These are longer stories, often corresponding to a longer adventure in TTRPG terms.  You can think of it as roughly equivalent to a season of television, just with more hours and more likely to be wrapped up at the end.  For some people, this is such a massive investment that it hardly seems possible, let alone worthwhile.  Yet there are several medium form actual play shows that are well worth the time investment.

Finally, long form content is a full TTRPG campaign.  For regular people playing TTRPGs, this is often a multi-year proposition, and we rarely get the opportunity to wrap them up neatly.  Somehow actual play shows manage to polish them off on a regular basis, with there being far fewer actual plays that peter out mid-storyline than there are TV shows cancelled mid-season.  (There are reasons for that, which we’ll dive into shortly.)  But we’re talking about anywhere from 50 – 150 episodes here, with the total time investment often ranging into the hundreds of hours.  Which means that the shit’s got to be pretty damned good to get people on board for a time expenditure of that size and scope.

But it also begs the question: why are there so many of these, when each one has the potential to produce hundreds of hours of content?  Surely there can’t be that much of an audience ... right?  Well, a number of factors in our entertainment landscape have conspired to change the way we think about these sorts of things.

When I was a kid, right on up to the point where my children were born, the landscape of entertainment, but television in particular, was moderately simple.  There were movies and novels and so forth, but those were seen more as one-off time investments.  You could produce a book, but you had to think about how long it was: readers might be intimidated by an overly large tome, and they might also have a big backlog of reading material, meaning that your longer novel might be less attractive than a short book that could be knocked out with a smaller time investment.  Same for movies: people were willing to sit still for maybe two hours, if you were lucky, but often the major studios shot for an hour and a half, tops, with many stories of crucial cinematic scenes getting “cut for time.” All of that eventually changed, of course: Harry Potter proved that people would gobble up multiple near-thousand-page novels, and Titanic proved that you could make people sit through 3+ hours of a movie if it was popular enough.

But television was a bit different.  We had 3 major networks, because creating a TV network was a gargantuan task that took a huge amount of money, and the existing networks didn’t much care for any more competition.  We had PBS, sure, and the occasional indy TV station, but, in general, 3 networks, and each one had 24 hours in the day, and that was it.  The attention span of the consumer was no longer the limiting factor.  No matter how much content people might want to put out, there simply wasn’t room for any more than 72 hours of it every day.  Where would it go?  As a result, a lot of great ideas never got made, and sometimes you’d even get great ideas that were made and then never saw the light of day.  Television shows were cutthroat, and they lived and died by ratings that purported to tell how many people were watching, and any show that didn’t appear to be garnering a big enough following was swiftly replaced by what they hoped would be the next big thing.  Even after we (finally) got a couple more networks in the 90s, things didn’t change all that much.

But then there was cable, and suddenly there were dozens of channels.  And then along came streaming, and suddenly the number of hours in a day was no longer relevant at all.  The Internet can play as many shows at once as there are users (at least theoretically), and suddenly the race for more content was on.  Of course, the audience was completely fractured as well.  In the “golden” era of television, every show had to appeal to the broadest possible audience to justify its existence.  And it meant that, on the consumer side, you often had to settle.  But now you can demand—and usually find—the exact sort of content you want.  I recall that, 10 years ago, I used to work upstairs from the offices of the Tennis Channel and, every day I would walk past their door on my way to the elevator and think to myself, do we really need a whole channel for tennis?  But then again I am not a tennis fan, so of course I would think that.  Other people who are tennis fans no doubt think the Tennis Channel is a great boon.  So we ended up with channels for just about everything, and streams for even more things, and a huge raft of content.

But of course content takes money to produce, which means that folks are always looking for cheaper and cheaper ways to put out more and more content.  That’s how we got reality TV: with no need for scripts—and therefore no need for script writers, script editors, script supervsiors, etc—and with most performers being non-union, unscripted TV is often significantly cheaper ... and, in an often overlooked aspect, significantly faster to produce.

And actual plays fit this mold.  You can make an actual play with minimal equipment, zero scripting, and whoever wants to be a player at the table.  You can crank out tons of content with only a modicum of effort, and there is apparently a hunger for it.  As with any new medium, more and more people are discovering it, and discovering what it can do.  So they’re willing to watch a wide variety of options.  Now, of course it is the case that the low-effort actual play shows will likely be the least popular, with the really well-established ones having full crews these days: directors, producers, sound engineers, editors, etc.  But you can make it cheaply and quickly, especially when you’re first getting started, and that’s the key.  It’s not really that surprising that a show can put out hundreds and hundreds of hours of content when the cost of doing so is moderate at worst and the appetite of the audience is continuing to be expansive.

Next time, let’s look at some of the big names in the space and see how they got that way.