“The most thorough treatment to date of Philip Zimbardo’s so-called Stanford Prison Experiment and its cultural afterlives, Incarceration Games moves well beyond ‘gotcha’ sensibility to delve into the multiple and varied cultural mediations of the study and its kin, as they became iconic shorthands for understanding disciplinary institutions, social control, and dehumanization. The reading of social psychology through a performance studies lens is long overdue and well executed, providing a refreshing, novel perspective.”
— Michael Pettit, author of The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America
“Ambitious, timely and original, Incarceration Games develops new understandings about role-play and imprisonment in relation to ideas of audience, agency, control, and coercion. The author brings a diverse range of performance examples into dialogue in a way that is playful, rigorous, and illuminating.”
— Caoimhe McAvinchey, author of Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System
“Incarceration Games recasts two notorious social psychology experiments by bringing to bear methods familiar to theatre historians—the meticulous analysis of words, movement, sets, costumes, performers, and audiences. While deeply researched and theoretically savvy, the writing is accessible, witty, humorous at times, and always conscious of the human stakes of this research: people incarcerated to serve the purposes of power and, putatively, justice . . . a fascinating, readable, rewarding book.”
— Mike Sell, author of Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism
"Testing questions of ethics, institutions, and theater, Incarceration Games tracks the use and abuse of role-playing games across a range of harrowing cases. Scott-Bottoms exposes how the quest of gaining and researching personal and collective subjectivity through theatrical means has taken tortuous turns in psychology and prison, and outlines an alternative, ethico-aesthetic performance paradigm."— Jon KcKenzie, Cornell University