Actual Play Time, Part 1: Discovery of the New World

[This is the first post in a new series.  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.]

[If you’re wondering why D&D is such an important part of my life, I encourage you to read my D&D and Me series.  Parts of this post are adapted from part 8 of that series.]

While I am safely on the Gen X side of the Garofalo curve, I have to cop to being on the backside of that arc.  And one of the things I never understood was the fascination with watching other people play games, especially videogames.  My brother (11 years younger than I) and his friends would do it all the time: I specifically remember going out with him and his friends our first Christmas home after his high school graduation.  We went to someone’s house to play videogames; there were about six of us, and two controllers.  And, when people weren’t playing, they were avidly watching.  I was bored.  I don’t specifically remember thinking to myself “I’m too old for this shit,” but I may as well have.  (And, given that the rest of the crowd was only 10 when the R-rated movie which that quote references came out and so likely never got to see it, it would have been oddly appropriate.)

Later, when I had kids, there was a lot of watching other people play videogames, because: YouTube.  Twitch and YouTube have made videos of watching other people play games something of a new artform (often called “Let’s Play” videos).  These are often very long videos—hours and hours, sometimes—and yet our children, with their suppoedly short attention spans, watch them all the time.  Sometimes this is to see if they want to purchase the game (videogames can be quite pricey, so it’s a good way to be smart with your allowance money), and sometimes it’s just background noise while they do other things, but often they just enjoy watching the people play.

And I was always someone to whom this seemed kind of silly.  Why watch other people play? just play yourself!  Or so I would think.  And I always just shook my head in a “kids today” sort of fashion.  I didn’t tell them not to watch, of course—nothing makes your child want to do a thing more than forbidding them from doing it—but I thought it was a dumb thing that hopefully they would grow out of eventually.  Certainly I never imagined that I would ever spend hours watching someone else play a game.

I can no longer remember when this happened—hell, I can’t even remember which kid it was at this point—but it was most likely in 2016 or ‘17 when I happened to wander through the room where one of my kids was watching a Let’s Play video.  No clue what game it was either, but I distinctly remember the joy in the player’s voice, and the lilting Irish accent.  The guy was hilarious.  “Who’s that?” I asked, drawn to watch over my child’s shoulder.  And, the answer, delivered in that “what are you, stupid?” tone that only your children can deliver, was: ”Jacksepticeye.” This was unlike any of the other Let’s Play videos I’d ever seen: Jack wasn’t trying to make me love the game, he wasn’t trying to make fun of the game, he wasn’t trying to do some artsy or clever commentary on the game ... he was just playing the game, and having fun, and being damned entertaining while doing it.  Even though I can’t claim to have become a big Jacksepticeye fan after that—I didn’t go around watching a bunch of his other videos or anything—I have to credit him with changing me in a fundamental way.  Before I discovered Jacksepticeye, I didn’t think watching other people play games could be fun.  Afterwards ... it was like discovering I’d been fundamentally wrong about something my whole life, and, now that I had realized it, I couldn’t go back to the way it was before.  Pretty much exactly like that, in fact.

And I began to understand that my whole attitude (which, from hanging out on the Internet, I already knew was not unique to me) was kind of stupid.  Why watch someone else play a game when you could just play yourself?  By that logic, the entire sports industry becomes meaningless, and yet there’s a multi-billion-dollar business—several, even!—in having people play games so other people will watch them.  But of course this illuminates why it’s tricky: sure, watching an NBA game can be pretty damned exciting, but that doesn’t mean that watching any random game of people playing basketball will be fun.  There are many factors to consider: the talent of the players, the production value of the presentation, the knowledge of the commentators, and so on. 

But, still, Jacksepticeye proves one thing: it is possible to make watching other people play videogames entertaining.  And, if I could enjoy watching someone else play a videogame, when I don’t even like videogames all that much, surely I could enjoy watching someone play D&D, which I absolutely adore.  Because, up until that point, the idea of watching other people play D&D had seemed just as stupid as watching other people play videogames.  How could that possibly be entertaining?  But now I was living in a whole new mental paradigm.  And I knew that there were a lot of these D&D videos out there (what would eventually come to be called “actual play” shows) ... not just videos, but podcasts too.  The field was still fairly young back then, but there was already a bewildering array of choices.  So, cautiously, I decided to try a few.

And, honestly, none of them were that great.  Oh, sure, they had their moments, but they weren’t sucking me in the way good ol’ Jacksepticeye had.  There were a bunch of “CelebriD&D” videos on YouTube, but they were edited to hell and back.  In a way, this makes sense.  Going with the sports analogy, D&D is not basketball.  It’s more like baseball, at least in terms of pacing (if not golf).  And, if you don’t have time to watch the 3 or 4 hour baseball game, what do you do? you watch the highlights, of course.  But the thing is, you can boil a baseball game down to just highlights.  There’s not a whole lot of context required for any given play, and what little there is can be described by a competent color commentator in a few brief sentences.  But D&D is different: there’s an underlying story, and, without that context, the exciting moments are far less exciting.

Eventually I came across Force Grey (this would have been the first season).  Now, I didn’t really know who this Matt Mercer guy was, though I recognized him from a bunch of the other videos (apparently he was quite popular for running D&D actual plays).  And I’m sure I knew Ashley Johnson because I had almost certainly started watching Blindspot by that point.  But mainly I was here for Chris Hardwick and Jonah Ray.  A couple of comedians I knew and liked, playing a game of D&D?  This should be good!  And ... it was okay.  Mercer was competent, and discovering Utkarsh Ambudkar was an unexpected joy, and the story was decent, but it just didn’t grab me.  Some of the players were competent, others were just learning, but it was obvious they were having difficulty gelling as a team.  Once again: you can’t just throw 10 people off the street onto a basketball court and expect magic to happen.  Season 2 would eventually come along and be much better, but season 1 was just ... meh.

And then I heard that a new show was going to come out with Deborah Ann Woll, who I knew (and liked) from True Blood and Daredevil.  And, back then, it was still fairly unusual to see a woman in the DM’s chair, and I thought that might be worth checking out.  Episode 1 was set to feature Matthew Lillard, who most probably think of as Shaggy or “that kid from Hackers,” but I always preferred him in Scream and Thirteen Ghosts, so that seemed promising as well.  As soon as the first episode was out on YouTube, I sat down to watch it.

Relics and Rarities was all I’d hoped for, but also much more.  First off, it was perfectly edited: not just the highlights, like the failed attempts in the “CelebriD&D” videos, but not completely unedited, as seemed to be popular in other, longer videos.  It was still people sitting around a table and actually playing the game—no cheap gimmicks like animation or puppets—but the set dressing was excellent, and there were sound effects.  When Woll described the party as being in a dank castle with a fierce thunderstorm raging outside, a crack of lightning could be seen in the faux window set into the faux stone wall behind the players, and peals of thunder punctutated the table talk.  Just enough, mind you: not so much as to be distracting, but not to little as to make no difference.  Lillard knew what he was doing, obviously; I could tell he was a long-time player, but I could also tell that he was one of those folks for whom D&D is somehow a competitive game, even though it very much is not.  He was the sort of player who competes with his fellow players (and sometimes himself) to always do the optimal thing, always do the coolest thing, and often got frustrated when he couldn’t (or tried to and failed).  But the other four players were very solid: two were obviously actors, and the other two (who I would eventually come to know as two of the best players in the actual play space) were consummate professionals.  Watching Jasmine Bhullar and Xander Jeanneret play was perhaps not like watching Jordan play basketball, but certainly as satisfying as walking into a no-name dive bar and realizing that the rhythm section of the band that just happens to be playing that night is more amazing than three-quarters of the musicians on the albums you own.  And, by the end of the first episode, they had changed Lillard in a fundamental way, teaching him something about the game that he seemed surprised he could still learn.  And Woll herself?  A master storyteller, fond of setting puzzles for her players, always understanding how to motivate the PCs, perhaps a bit more lenient than I personally would be, but always in service of the Rule of Cool.  I was blown away.

Because, you see, I realized that I had been watching this new actual play thing all wrong.  I was treating it like sports: the thrill of watching people at the top of their game perform amazing feats, the empathy of experiencing the highs and lows, the satisfaction of armchair-quarterbacking a game that you yourself play well (or used to).  But, no: actual play is not that.  Or, it sort of can be that, and some of it is nothing but that.  But those aren’t the good ones.  The good ones are the ones that are taking advantage of this entirely new medium of storytelling to tell tales that you can’t really see anywhere else.  Just as a novel can tell stories that a movie can’t (and vice versa), or a comic book series can tell stories that a TV series can’t (and vice versa), actual play can tell stories that nothing else can.  Unlike a novel, it’s collaborative, and far more so than a comic.  Movies and plays and televsion are more collaborative, but still there’s usually one writer (or at most a handful), and the characters in all those other media serve the plot.  If someone forgets something, it’s because they needed to forget that thing for events to be set in motion.  If one character hurts another, it’s because the one character needs to learn from it, or because the other character needs to have something to regret, or because the audience needs to pick a side.  Characters die because an author or screenwriter decided it would have maximum dramatic effect.

But, in actual play (at least when done well), the GM builds a world and sets the PCs loose in it.  Each character has their own arc, and that arc is completely controlled by the “actor” portraying them.  Normally an actor, whether in film, television, or stageplay, has the constraint of playing the character as written on the page, using the words they’re given.  But, in actual play, a player can do anything they want with their character, take them in any direction that feels natural.  And, most importantly, there are dice.  The element of randomness the dice provide adds something that no other medium can compete with.  A good DM harnesses that unpredictability, never letting it derail the story, but letting it add wrinkles and twists and complications.  The resulting tapestry of big swings and near misses, huge triumphs and massive failures, is both complex and beautiful, and unlike any other form of storytelling.

Actual play is a new medium.  The fact that you’re watching people play a game is almost incidental to that fact: it’s a bit fun, especially if you know the game yourself, but it’s totally unnecessary to enjoy the story.  The story is the thing, the thing that makes actual play special.  The stories told via actual play are unique, amazing, engrossing, and transcendent.  And that’s what this series will explore.

Next time we look at some of the different forms actual play can take.