Open Access‘Whose were those feelings?’ Affect and likenessing inHalat hisarlive action role-playing game
Author(s) -
Sonja Pöllänen,
Jonne Arjoranta
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of cultural studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.673
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1460-356X
pISSN - 1367-8779
DOI - 10.1177/13678779211023520
Subject(s) - action (physics) , affect (linguistics) , feeling , context (archaeology) , politics , palestine , everyday life , sociology , aesthetics , social psychology , psychology , political science , art , communication , history , law , ancient history , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics
Halat hisar was a live action role-playing game (larp) organized in Finland in 2016. Halat hisar’s ambition as a larp was to mirror the current situation in Palestine. In larps, participants take on different roles and improvise without the presence of an audience. Larps offer a place where emotions and affectivities are transmitted through the embodiment of characters. Larps offer forms of likenessing, which create new affective states for the players. We conclude that larps can be powerful tools for portraying political alternatives of actual events, and they can serve a role in raising awareness. Larps offer a productive context for studying subjectivities where the focus is on affective relationalities because larps place the participants in social positions where they take up roles that might be inaccessible to them in everyday life. Larps offer a window to visit other ‘world-lines’ – and other ways of living.