Overview

Do you want to play a game? Incarceration Games reexamines the complex history and troubled legacy of improvised, interactive role-playing experiments. With particular attention to the notorious 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-player’s perspective.

Full Product Details

Author:   Stephen J. Scott-Bottoms
Publisher:   The University of Michigan Press
Imprint:   The University of Michigan Press
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9780472076710

ISBN 10:   047207671
Pages:   398
Publication Date:   31 May 2024
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

Figures Note on Sources Preface: Wanting to See. Part One: The Stage Production Era Setting the Scene: Role-Playing and its Discontents From Sing Sing to Psychodrama: J.L. Moreno and the Invention of Spontaneity The Trouble with Normal: Sherif, Asch, and the Theatre of Insecurity The Performance of Compliance: Prisoner Coercion and Dissonant Cognition From Teacher to Torturer: Playing Obedient for Stanley Milgram Part Two: Approaching Stanford Good Cop / Bad Cop: Interrogation, Confession, and Philip Zimbardo Things Fall Apart: Experimenting with Urban Crime Theatre of Cruelty: Designing and Implementing the Stanford Prison Experiment The Role of the Prisoner: Learned Helplessness and Earned Resilience The Role of the Guard: Dark Play and Dirty Work Part Three: Beyond the Lab The Medium is the Message: Stanford Stories and the San Quentin Six Lifting the Mask: The Prisoner, the Self, and Geese Theatre Attack of the Clones: Ethics, Entertainment, and Re-enactment Mission Drift: Role-Playing Torture in the War on Terror Consenting Adults: Toward an Alternative Paradigm Acknowledgements and List of interviewees Bibliography

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Author Information

Stephen Scott-Bottoms is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement and coauthor of Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance.

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