Incarceration Games explores the history and legacy of improvised, interactive role-playing experiments, focusing on the Stanford prison study and its impact on popular culture. It challenges traditional understandings of role-playing and offers a fresh perspective on the role-players' choices.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 416 pages
Publication date: 31 May 2024
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

Incarceration Games is a book that examines the complex history and troubled legacy of improvised, interactive role-playing experiments. With a particular focus on the infamous Stanford prison study, the author draws on extensive archival research and original interviews with many of those involved to refocus attention on the in-game choices of the role-players themselves. Role-playing as we understand it today was initially developed in the 1930s as a therapeutic practice within the New York state penal system. This book excavates that history and traces the subsequent adoption of these methods for lab experimentation during the postwar "stage production era" in American social psychology. It then examines the subsequent mutation of the Stanford experiment, in particular, into cultural myth, exploring the ways in which these distorted understandings have impacted on everything from reality TV formats to the "enhanced interrogation" of real-world terror suspects. Incarceration Games asks readers to reconsider what they thought they knew about this tangled history and to look at it again from the role-players perspective.

Incarceration Games: Reexamining the Complex History and Troubled Legacy of Improvised, Interactive Role-Playing Experiments

Incarceration Games is a book that explores the complex history and troubled legacy of improvised, interactive role-playing experiments. With a particular focus on the infamous Stanford prison study, the author draws on extensive archival research and original interviews with many of those involved to refocus attention on the in-game choices of the role-players themselves.

Role-playing as we understand it today was initially developed in the 1930s as a therapeutic practice within the New York state penal system.

This book excavates that history and traces the subsequent adoption of these methods for lab experimentation during the postwar "stage production era" in American social psychology. It then examines the subsequent mutation of the Stanford experiment, in particular, into cultural myth, exploring the ways in which these distorted understandings have impacted on everything from reality TV formats to the "enhanced interrogation" of real-world terror suspects.

Incarceration Games asks readers to reconsider what they thought they knew about this tangled history and to look at it again from the role-players perspective.

Weight: 578g
Dimension: 151 x 228 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472056712