{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0315955766192733, 'fraction_numerical': 0.00315955766192733, 'mean_word_length': 5.564766839378239, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Tilted Dramaturgy: Combined Spectatorship, Playwriting, and Role-Playing in Bully Pulpit’s Fiasco

Abstract:Bully Pulpit Games released their Fiasco play system around 2010 to a variety of online and game convention awards. In their own words, Fiasco is “inspired by cinematic tales of small time capers gone disastrously wrong. You’ll play ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control” (Bully Pulpit Games). Fiasco not only allows people who love games, improv, writing, and genre to have fun over the course of a few hours collectively creating a two-act play, but also renders divisions between spectator and participant moot. In a classroom context, I’ve used Fiasco as a model for introducing affective, artistic, and unexpected reactions to theatre; creativity; audience response theory; entertainment; and phenomenological responses to performance experiences. The game uses a ‘tilt’ table to offset the plans of all the players/actors in the experience, ultimately introducing them to complications they did not anticipate. Fiasco lets everyone win by rendering all their characters through degrees of narratively satisfying loss, which include cinematic-style cliffhangers and final moments—epilogues—by each person to end the experience.