Experiential Spectatorship: Immersion, Participation, and Play During Times of Deep Mediatization

Experiential Spectatorship offers a lens for analyzing audience experience with(in) a variety of contemporary media. Using a broad-based perspective this media includes participatory theatre, video games, digital simulations, social media platforms, alternate reality games, choose your own adventure narratives, interactive television, and a variety of other experiential performance events. Through a taxonomy that includes Immersion, Participation, Game Play, and Role Play the book guides the reader to understand the ways mediatization and technics brought about by digital technologies are changing the capacities and expectations of contemporary audiences. In the daily interactions and relations with their technologies they become mediatized spectators. By reading these technologies' impacts on individual subjectivity prior to acts of spectatorship, one gains the tools to best describe how the spectator creates forms of relational exchange with their interactive media. This book prepares the reader to think in a digital manner so they can best recognize how performance and spectatorship in the twenty-first century are evolving to meet the needs of future waves of spectators brought up in a postdigital world.