Live-Action Role-Play or the Performance of Realities
Live-action role-play (larp) has been named a “new performative art,” an immersive experience, and an educational tool, but it is much more: A playground of intermingling social and cultural realities, a door to new worlds. This paper offers an introducti
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Abstract Live-action role-play (larp) has been named a “new performative art,” an immersive experience, and an educational tool, but it is much more: A playground of intermingling social and cultural realities, a door to new worlds. This paper offers an introduction to larp, its transcultural history, and its disruptive and creative possibilities, as well as key aspects, such as immersion. It sets the theoretical frame for the game “Staying Alive,” in which the researchers and also the audience engage in a shared “mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience.’” Many aspects of “everydayness” can be called “collateral realities,” realities that are done implicitly, unintentionally, such as nations, cultures, time, or distinctions of subject and object, or of presenter and audience; realities that could be different. Taking performativity seriously, larp can be a tool to step outside of a Euro-American commonsense ontology and its singular reality “out there” by playing with collateral realities and making their production explicit. During a larp, players (“larpers”) consciously undo objects and meanings, space, and even their very bodies to creatively weave new material-semiotic fabrics. They become cultural mediators between a worldthat-supposedly-just-is and its partially connected others, in which Japaneseness or Chineseness may fade and Elvishness is translated into a reality. With a global player base, larping is not only a practice of intersubjective or cultural negotiations but also of intra-subjective mediation of cultural realities. Keywords Collateral realities • Cultural mediation • Larp • Live-action role-play • Performativity
B.O. Kamm (*) Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan e-mail: [email protected] J. Becker British Cultural Studies Section, Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 T. Kaneda et al. (eds.), Simulation and Gaming in the Network Society, Translational Systems Sciences 9, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0575-6_4
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B.O. Kamm and J. Becker
1 Introduction Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, [. . .].
This quote originates from On Looking (Horowitz 2014, p. 1), a study about the often-neglected visions and practices of the ordinary, by psychologist
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