Role-play as a Heritage Practice: Historical Larp, Tabletop RPG and Reenactment

Role-play as a Heritage Practice explores physically performed role-enactments like live-action role-play (LARP), tabletop role-playing games (TRPG), and hobbyist historical reenactment (RH) from a game studies and heritage studies perspective, demonstrating their shared features and potential as heritage practices. It explores how these role-plays engage players with cultural heritage through playful, participatory, and performative forms of engagement, highlighting their multi-layered nature and connections to other media.

Format: Hardback
Length: 292 pages
Publication date: 29 March 2021
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Role-play as a Heritage Practice is a groundbreaking book that delves into the world of physically performed role-enactments, including live-action role-play (LARP), tabletop role-playing games (TRPG), and hobbyist historical reenactment (RH). This comprehensive exploration examines these non-digital forms of role-play from a combined game studies and heritage studies perspective, demonstrating their significance as heritage practices.

The book argues that TRPG and LARP, alongside RH, share many common features and can be considered as distinct genres of playful, participatory, and performative engagement with cultural heritage. By studying these role-plays as three distinct categories, the author highlights the value of exploring their unique affordances.

Mochocki demonstrates how each genre offers distinct ways for players to engage with history and heritage material. He emphasizes that a player's engagement with history or heritage is multi-layered, encompassing both conceptualizations of heritage authenticity and in-game immersion. The book clarifies that these layers can be seen simultaneously as types of heritage authenticity and as forms of in-game immersion.

Furthermore, it is made clear that RH, TRPG, and LARP share commonalities with a wide range of other media, including video games, historical fiction, and film. These role-enactments exist within and contribute to the broader fiction and non-fiction media sphere, shaped by the same large-scale narratives and discourses used by individuals, families, communities, and nations to build memory and identity.

Role-play as a Heritage Practice will appeal to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, memory, nostalgia, role-playing, historical games, performance, fans, and transmedia narratology. It provides valuable insights into the world of physically performed role-enactments and their role in preserving and celebrating cultural heritage.

Weight: 600g
Dimension: 242 x 161 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367673062