Incarceration games / a history of role-play in psychology, prisons, and performance / Stephen Scott-Bottoms.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scott-Bottoms, Stephen., author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Role playing.

Prisons--United States--History.

Prisons.

Prisoners--Experiments.

Prisoners.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (363 pages)

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, 2024.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 353-364) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472221677

0472221671

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.