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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scott-Bottoms, Stephen., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Role playing.

Prisons--United States--History.

Prisons.

Prisoners--Experiments.

Prisoners.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (399 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

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.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Illustrations

Note on Sources

Preface: Wanting to See

Part One: The Stage Production Era

1. Setting the Scene: Role-Playing and Its Discontents

2. From Sing Sing to Psychodrama: J. L. Moreno and the Invention of Spontaneity

3. The Trouble with Normal: Sherif, Asch, and the Theatre of Insecurity

4. The Performance of Compliance: Prisoner Coercion and Dissonant Cognition

5. From Teacher to Torturer: Playing Obedient for Stanley Milgram

Part Two: Approaching Stanford

6. Good Cop / Bad Cop: Interrogation, Confession, and Philip Zimbardo

7. Things Fall Apart: Experimenting with Urban Crime

8. Theatre of Cruelty: Designing and Implementing the Stanford Prison Experiment

9. The Role of the Prisoner: Learned Helplessness and Earned Resilience

10. The Role of the Guard: Dark Play and Dirty Work

Part Three: Beyond the Lab

11. The Medium Is the Message: Stanford Stories and the San Quentin Six

12. Lifting the Mask: The Prisoner, the Self, and Geese Theatre

13. Attack of the Clones: Ethics, Entertainment, and Reenactment

14. Mission Drift: Role-Playing Torture in the War on Terror

15. Consenting Adults: Toward an Alternative Paradigm

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

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

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472221677

0472221671

9780472907410