NATALIE NEALE-LORELLO

My thesis addresses the literary significance of actual play, with close attention to aspects of game and performance as well, through a genre analysis drawing on several actual play texts and a close reading of Chapter 1 of The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One, the first campaign released by the independent actual play podcast Worlds Beyond Number in 2023. Actual play is a new and burgeoning genre which thus far has limited scholarship attending to actual play texts themselves, especially the narrative meanings present. My work argues that actual play is able to produce uniquely complex narratives that resist dominant ideologies and reinforce values of community and collaboration through the process of collective storytelling. In addition to methodologies from game, performance, and literary studies, I draw on postcolonial and feminist theories to analyze The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One’s representation of witches through innovative game design and narrative structure.