ABSTRACT
This essay explores the application in live participatory performance of “participant engagement,” an ethnographic method of participant observation originally developed to study online roleplaying communities, but which has also been applied to the study of theatrical, coperformative events in which the audience has meaningful agency. The challenge here is how to frame “audience ethnography” in contexts where the relationship between audience and performer is blurred. This can involve a range of dynamics, whether the performer and audience are one and the same, such as in online or live action roleplaying, or in cases where audience agency has an active role in composing the work. Many of these forms do not allow for passive participation, requiring researchers to actively engage in the coperformance. Through the lenses of performance and feminist ethnography, participant engagement frames the embodied researcher as performer and the act of participant observation as a performance to address three paradoxes inherent in studying immersive fictional worlds: (1) the need to adopt a fictional persona compatible with the world being studied; (2) the need to fully engage with the play activities proscribed by the fictional context; (3) the need to reconcile the inherent contradiction within factual ethnographic accounts of a fictional worlds.
