Play and the Actual

 If someone is interested in TTRPGs through mainstream culture like Game of Thrones or Stranger Things, they will likely start their exploration by watching or listening to actual play. In actual play performances, influencers present a spectacular lifestyle and style of play that does not exist outside of the video or audio files that carry it, produced, often edited and scripted. It cannot reflect the messy experiences of actual real-life play. Performers aspire to a world that only exists in a representational form, so their actual animal instincts to play bow to replicating the spectacular commodity of actual play. The TTRPG curious individual learns to do the same.

Critical Role leaving Wizards of the Coast, achieved the goal of the anti-capitalist indie TTRPG world by challenging Wizards' hegemony, even throwing the flagship of indie, Powered by the Apocalypse, into the mainstream with Daggerheart. But Critical Role cannot escape the mechanics and cultural hegemony of Wizards of the Coast and Dungeons & Dragons in their actual plays. The separation between actual and spectacular change in the industry will remain total.