This presentation was delivered on October 20, 2022 at the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022: Role-playing, Culture, and Heritage.
Description:
Swallowed by neighbouring empires for 123 years, Poland’s sense of identity relied mainly on prosthetic memory of its pre-colonial past: the 1569-1795 PLC. Its legacy remains a significant, though contested, part of the national imaginarium. I explore PLC-themed role-plays and reenactments as heritage practices: selective and creative engagements with present-day narratives about history, legacy and identity.
Bio:
Dr. Michał Mochocki is an assistant professor at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. He studies storyworlds, narratives and role-plays in historical role-playing games, reenactment and fiction from the angles of transmedia narratology and heritage studies. His recent book is Role-play as a Heritage Practice (Routledge 2021). He is guest editor for “Games with History and Heritage” special issue of Games and Culture (2022). With grant funding from National Science Center in Poland, he currently runs a research project on historical settings as transmedia storyworlds across literature and games. Outside the Academia, he has been a writer and designer of historical larp and TRPG, and now works with False Prophet as game writer and historical consultant for a video game set in 16th-century Carpathians.
Click here to read a PDF of the slides.
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This seminar is hosted by the Transformative Play Initiative in the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. This seminar is made possible by financial support from the Sustainable Heritage Research Forum (SuHRF). The Transformative Play Initiative explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.
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Graphic Design by Liliia Chorna. Music by Elias Faltin. Video edited by Rezmo (Mohammad Mohammad Rezaie).