Taiwan Interactive Theatre Society
Taiwan Interactive Theatre Society
- Location
- Taipei, Taiwan
- Genre
- Scenario-Based Theatre-Style Interactive Drama Freeform LARPS
- Established
- 1991
- Chapters
- 1
- Credits
- Brian David Phillips, Michael Cheng, Lorraine (Law) Phillips, Tom Mullen
- Website
- the Society website
Taiwan Interactive Theatre Society is a theatre-style focussed organisation based in Taipei that runs and documents larps.
Through their website they publish the Journal of Interactive Drama, which curates peer-reviewed papers on larp theory, design, and practice. They also maintain a Scenario Archive, where many freeform larps are published and available for free download. Alongside the work of the Society founder Brian David Phillips, the archive includes notable contributions from Australian freeform writers including Robert Prior, James O'Rance, and Scott Beattie; and Irish writer Nick Huggins.
Attendees are required to have fluency in English to participate, due to many written scenario materials being in English; but live play is inclusive of multiple spoken languages.
Mission statement
- The purpose of the group is to provide entertainment for the members. If we can do a little advocacy for interactive drama and other forms of improvisational theatre-style live roleplay on the way, then great, but our main goal is to have a good time. In that regard we will focus mostly on self-contained or "stand-alone" scenarios rather than series or "chronicle" systems as we'd like to have a chance to play in as many different genres, situations, and portray as many wild and crazy characters as we can.
History
The Taiwan Interactive Theatre Society is a direct descendant of the Taipei Interactive Theatre Society which came out of the Taipei RolePlayers table top roleplaying game hobby group founded by Brian David Phillips, Michael Cheng, Lorraine (Law) Phillips, Tom Mullen, and a like-minded group of RPG enthusiasts in 1991. Over the years, the group changed membership several times but managed to keep a core of hardcore players. A few of these core players are now with T.I.T.S. while others have moved on to other pastures (many of the expatriate members have returned to their home countries while new ones have joined the group).
At one point Brian was actually running games for the main TRP group, a group of students at National Chengchi University interested in the hobby, his RPG class at NCCU, and a few conversational English classes.
Both Brian and Michael have used interactive drama freeform live roleplaying games in their English Conversation classes at National Chengchi University for a number of years. Brian also runs the Interactive Dramas scenarios and information archive on the web as well as editing the Journal of Interactive Drama. In addition, Brian's doctoral dissertation in comparative literature is a critical analysis of scenario structures for interactive dramas.
All this led eventually to someone saying, "Hey, this stuff is really fun, why don't we do it for real!" The result is the T.I.T.S. troupe, a hodgepodge group of Chinese and expatriates in Taiwan dedicated to having a good time playing out their fantasies via scenario-based interactive drama live roleplays.