Episode 139 - Dungeons & Dragons - The Fantasy Adventure Board Game (with Cat Mahoney)
Dungeons & Dragons - The Fantasy Adventure Board Game.
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Episode 139 marks something of a first as Chris and Alex play ‘The Fantasy Adventure Board Game’ Dungeons & Dragons originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, taking on its array of characters, weapons, and quests live during the podcast with special guest (and Dungeon Master) Dr Cat Mahoney, Derby Fellow in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. Cat is the co-editor with Jilly Boyce Kay and Caitlin Shaw of The Past in Visual Culture Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media (McFarland, 2016) and author of the monograph Women in Neoliberal Postfeminist Television Drama: Representing Gendered Experiences of the Second World War (Palgrave, 2019), as well as multiple book chapters and articles engaging with representations of gender through historical and historiographical frameworks. Discussions during this roll-by-roll episode of the Dungeons & Dragons game include the suitability of fantasy as a genre conducive to the table-top role-playing game format; the influence of Gygax and Arneson’s fame upon the 1980s resurgence of fantasy cinema; Dungeons and Dragons as an enduring transmedia property and the possibilities of world-building; and how ‘metagaming’ in Dungeons and Dragons offers a way to think about the player’s complex relationship to character and embodiment.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bruno, Giuliana. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Donaldson, Lucy Fife. 2018. “Rough and Smooth: The Everyday Textures of Toy Story.” In Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature (Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers series), edited by Noel Brown, Susan Smith, and Sam Summers, 73-86. London: Bloomsbury.
Garwood, Ian. 2015. The Sense of Film Narration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Holliday, Christopher. 2018. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.