This poster presentation was delivered on October 20, 2022 at the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022: Role-playing, Culture, and Heritage.
Description:
Many larp workshops aim to harmonize player cultures, norms and expectations for their engagement in fiction to flow seamlessly and as safely as possible (Koljonen, 2020). In a historical and physically heavy larp like Legion: a Siberian Story (Rolling, 2014), the authored representation of a national story encounters players’ representation of the past (Mochocki, 2021). This presentation relies on an empirical monographic study of participation and learning during Legion through a socio-anthropological lens, by participant observation as well as players and designers interviews (Freudenthal, 2020). Informal situations of learning like leisurely play remain little studied through this lens and need specific concepts and methodology to further academic knowledge of what learning can occur during play and how to elicit it (Schugurensky, 2000; Hammer et al., 2018). Drawing on fiction theory (Schaeffer, 1999; Caïra, 2011; Korthals Altes, 2022), we will discuss the relationship created between players and the historically-inspired fiction, and how the intercultural context of play affects this dynamic. Doing so, this new analysis aims to provide sociological insights on the emotional and cognitive processes at work during the intercreative improvisation specific to larps (Caïra, 2007; David, 2016). Conclusions suggest to focus research on direct observation and interviews of the players rather than the design in order to further study the socio-cultural complexities of maintaining the social frame of play as a group.
Bio:
Michael Freudenthal is a PhD student in sociology, working on the influence of fiction on participation and learning in leisurely analog games, from larp to boardgames. Their research is supervised by Gilles Brougère and Vincent Berry, takes place at the EXPERICE lab (who also has a patrimonial collection of twelve thousand analog games from the 19th century), and is funded by the Game in Lab program (supporting analog game research). As a larper they coordinated several larp conferences in France (GNiales, Convergences) and they recently authored A Missing Stair, a card-based roleplaying game on toxic situations caused by manipulation.
Click here to read PDF of 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.