Actual stories in actual play: on meta/narrative immersion as seen in the tabletop role-playing game

Concepts of narrative immersion tend to be associated with concepts of media transparency, or immediacy, as termed in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s foundational media theory. However, accounting for phenomena of narrative immersion that persist amidst today’s pervasive self-reflexive and conspicuous forms of mediation, or hypermediacy, requires new conceptual frameworks. This article proposes meta/narrative immersion to theorize the aesthetic experience of entering a storyworld under conditions of hypermediacy: specifically, a narrative recipient’s simultaneous immersion in a fictional story and the actual story of its telling. The tabletop role-playing game (TRPG) campaign, as represented in the emerging entertainment genre of actual play, exemplifies this experience. Actual play depicts TRPG campaigns as games of collaborative role-play storytelling requiring players to embody fictional characters while consciously negotiating non-fictional gameplay. Taking Dropout’s actual play series Dimension 20: Neverafter (2022–2023) as a case study, the article shows how TRPG campaigns afford meta/narrative immersion by producing narratives while concomitantly becoming narratives themselves. Theorizing narrative immersion in terms of hypermediacy ultimately speaks to questions of subjective agency during the reception of contemporary entertainment media.