Project Summary
Party Mascot is an experimental design for a dynamic, interactive prop used in “actual play” streaming. Taking the form of a talking mechanical bird, the Party Mascot extends audience participation on the Twitch platform from its native chat interface to the physical playspace. Building on a critical review of frame analytical approaches to role-playing game studies and supported by an ethnographic study of actual play performers, the Party Mascot is designed to “flicker” between social, gameplay, and fictional frames of interaction. It can accommodate any number of participants and adapts to multiple roles within new mediated performance contexts. Shifting spectatorship from the screen to the physical world, the Party Mascot can reconfigure audience/performer relationships, open new avenues for game design, and engage the genre of actual play as a new site of experimentation and innovation between the producers and consumers of media.”