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: Paperback / softback
Length: 292 pages
Publication date: 26 September 2022
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 all three types of role-play, whether digital or non-digital, share many common features with RH. It suggests that these forms of engagement with cultural heritage can be considered as distinct genres, each offering unique opportunities for playful, participatory, and performative forms of engagement. By studying these role-plays as three distinct genres, the book showcases how an exploration of their affordances can be valuable.

Mochocki demonstrates how each genre offers different ways for players to engage with history or heritage material. He shows that a players engagement with history or heritage is always 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 types of in-game immersion, contributing to a deeper understanding of the role-play experience.

Furthermore, the book highlights the commonalities between RH, TRPG, and LARP and other media, such as 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 that individuals, families, communities, and nations use to build memory and identity.

Role-play as a Heritage Practice will be of immense interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, memory, nostalgia, role-playing, historical games, performance, fans, and transmedia narratology. It provides a valuable contribution to the field, offering insights into the complex relationships between role-play, cultural heritage, and memory formation.

Weight: 472g
Dimension: 156 x 234 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367673499