Role-play as a Heritage Practice

Historical Larp, Tabletop RPG and Reenactment

Michal Mochocki

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367652
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Art
• Thema: Museum Studies

Role-play as a Heritage Practice is the first book to examine physically performed role-enactments, such as live-action role-play (LARP), tabletop role-playing games (TRPG), and hobbyist historical reenactment (RH), from a combined game studies and heritage studies perspective.

Demonstrating that non-digital role-plays, such as TRPG and LARP, share many features with RH, the book contends that all three may be considered as heritage practices. Studying these role-plays as three distinct genres of playful, participatory and performative forms of engagement with cultural heritage, Mochocki demonstrates how an exploration of the affordances of each genre can be valuable. Showing that a player's engagement with history or heritage material is always multi-layered, the book clarifies that the layers may be conceptualised simultaneously as types of heritage authenticity and as types of in-game immersion. It is also made clear that RH, TRPG and LARP share commonalities with a multitude of other media, including video games, historical fiction and film. Existing within, and contributing to, the fiction and non-fiction mediasphere, these role-enactments are shaped by the same large-scale narratives and discourses that persons, families, communities, and nations use to build memory and identity.

Role-play as a Heritage Practice will be of great interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, memory, nostalgia, role-playing, historical games, performance, fans and transmedia narratology.

Chapter 1

Heritage authenticity meets game immersion

This methodology-heavy chapter builds an analytical framework that will be used throughout the book. I start by looking at the notions of experience and authenticity (and experiential authenticity) in heritage studies, heritage industry, and the experience economy. Then, I comment on the concept of historical accuracy or authenticity as it is employed in historical game studies. Most importantly, I align the conceptual map of heritage authenticities with the typology of role-playing immersions. The resulting mixed Calleja/Bowman/Schmitt/Wang model of authenticity+immersion will then structure my comparative studies of the formal and experiential affordances of SEV in Chapter 2, and RH+TRPG+LARP+SEV in Chapters 7 to 10.

1.1 The concept of authenticity in heritage studies

Selwyn (1996) describes ‘cool authenticity’ based on knowledge and ‘hot authenticity’ of feeling. The entry “Authenticity” (Agnew & Tomann 2020) in the recent Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies explains how notions of authenticity are either object-, or subject-focused. Following Bruner (1994), they link the object focus to mimetic verisimilitude: the primary concern of curators of heritage sites. The traditional Western museology, archaeology etc. favoured a ‘cool’ materialistic view of authenticity: either original artefacts from the past, or perfect replicas created with period-accurate materials and techniques to the best of existing (academic) knowledge (Silverman 2015, 71–74). The Jorvik Viking Centre in York and Pigrim’s Way in Canterbury in Urry and Larsen (2011) exemplify the latter: “a curious mixing of the museum and theatre. Everything is meant to be authentic, even down to the smells, but nothing actually dates from the period” (153).

An alternative understanding prioritises the perceived authenticity of ‘hot’ experience, not necessarily connected to accuracy of objects. Discussing historical memory through the lens of Morton’s idea of ‘emotional truth’, Campbell (2006) argues that the feeling of authenticity does not necessarily need a detailed material accuracy or factual correctness. A heritage experience may be faithful in its representation of human emotional states, and may evoke analogical emotional responses in visitors (370). This is the subject-orientation (Agnew & Tomann 2020): on the experiencing self. Sometimes visitors/consumers realise that their feeling of authenticity is driven by popular accounts of history, which are factually inaccurate – and feel “torn between a desire for authenticity… and for accuracy” (Rosenzweig & Thelen 1998, 201). The liminal nature of tourism typically makes people open to “existential authenticity” (Wang 1999).

In contemporary social constructivist view, it matters not how products and experiences are related to the documented past. As Silverman (2015) puts it, “Contemporary authenticity works from the premise that society generates new contexts in which human beings produce meaningful acts and objects without necessarily bringing the past ‘faithfully’ into the present” (85). According to Bagnall’s (2003) research, the emotional response (‘mapping’) to the physical contents of a heritage site plays an important role in visitor’s overall experience, with expectation of “emotional realism” (88). What really matters is the subjective feeling of an authentic contact (meaningful relationship) with the past.

Agnew & Tomann (2020) take a “four-part typology” of authenticity from Bruner (1994): object-based mimetic verisimilitude; subject-based feeling of truth; authority-based certification; and postmodern acceptance of the impossibility of reaching it. My own reading of Bruner does not validate it as a typology, though. The basic object vs. subject dichotomy certainly makes sense, but I find it hard to accept authentication as the third type. The question “who authenticates?” cuts across the object-subject divide. The fourth part (impossibility) does not even pretend to be a type of authenticity. My choice of typology is Ning Wang’s “Rethinking authenticity in tourism experience” (1999).

Wang (1999) explores the object-vs-subject dualism under the names of “object-related” and “activity-related” (359), with subtypes in both categories:

1. Object-related ‘objective’: genuine originality of objects and places
2. Object-related ‘constructive, or symbolic’: validated by (and mutually validating) the tourist’s pre-conceptions formed by knowledge, beliefs, and media representations
3. Activity-related, or ‘existential’: driven by “bodily feelings” (363)
4. Activity-related, or ‘existential’ intra-personal: driven by “self-making” attempts to “realize their authentic selves” (363)
5. As in 3 and 4, but ‘inter-personal’: “in the dimension of inter-human relationships” (364)

Overall, Wang’s model supports the idea of the complex interconnectedness of the physically tactile, the emotionally felt, and the cognitively imagined, as postulated by the 21st-century heritage studies (see Introduction). This view will reappear with Connerton’s (1989) ideas on the bodily-performative dimension of social remembering (Chapters 7 to 10).

Interestingly, Wang combines the corporeal dimension of embodied sensation with the philosophy of “existential state of Being” (359). Similarly, role-playing studies highlight the power to develop one’s Self through role-play (Beltrán 2013; Bowman 2017a). A more recent study on visitor’s own perception of ‘The Real Thing’ [TRT] in museums in the USA exposed ‘Self’ as one of four dimensions: Self (‘The Real Thing’ resonates with the person’s self); Relation (experienced as a connection to other people, objects, stories, events); Surround (realism achieved by the surrounding audio, visual, space, and means of communication); and Presence (“an actual physical thing that was there and is right here in front of me now” (Latham 2015, 5)).

Many more reflections on authenticity have been produced by heritage and tourism studies (see Matos & Barbosa 2018) and philosophy (Varga & Guignon 2020), and this is no place to discuss them at length. The most visible trend since the late 20th century is the declining emphasis on factual in favour of experiential authenticity. Dealing with performative media, “we can observe and critique an explicitly ‘staged’ authenticity in moments of performance” (Kidd 2011, 24). As Waterton & Watson (2015, 8) have it,

We are all judges of authenticity, and where it resides is ultimately less important than where we find it. We are just likely to feel it in the commodifications of an “olde worlde” teashop or a theme park as in an unearthed object cleaned up, selected and displayed by an expert for our pleasure.

Judging by this principle, even an incomplete costume of a historical reenactor, awkward fake-combat with latex weapons in a larp, or fictionalised and historically erroneous game setting can facilitate meaningful (authentic!) heritage experiences – if so experienced by participants (Gapps 2020).

On the other hand, against the constructivist theorisations, 2010s research on visitor behaviour is said to repeatedly demonstrate that “people value original objects over replicas, looking at them for longer and differently” (Dudley 2018, 196). This should be kept in mind in further considerations.

As outlined by Matos & Barbosa (2018), all debates on authenticity can be categorised along the lines of Wang’s (1999) three types: objective, constructive, or existential. They often correlate with competing philosophical stances positivism, constructivism, and existentialism – and much of the debate consisted in arguing about which type was superior. As a way out of this insoluble conflict, Matos & Barbosa (2018) propose an integrative approach based on Edgar Morin’s complexity theory. The nature of authenticity, as they argue, cannot be reduced to a fixed model. The experience of authenticity is a complex multi-layered whole, with objective, constructive, and existential aspects interrelated. Moreover, they are affected by social and situational contexts, including marketing and branding. In my research, the social context includes the hobbyist communities of role-playing and reenactment, as well as the commercial market of gaming and heritage industry. This is why I include the lens of experiential marketing in the picture.

1.2 Authentic heritage experiences in the experience economy

While Holbrook & Hirschman (1982, 132) locate the origins of “the experiential view” in consumer studies as early as the 1970s, the full-fledged concept of experience economy comes from Pine and Gilmore at the turn of the millennium (1998, 1999). In their view, the Western economy has shifted its emphasis from offering services to staging experiences. This was the fourth evolutionary stage: from 1. Agrarian Economy based on commodities to 2. Industrial Economy based on goods, then 3. Service Economy and 4. Experience Economy. (Later, they (2011, xvi) added 5. Transformations, heralding the “nascent Transformation Economy” (2011, 297).) What has emerged as one of the top qualities 21st-century consumers expect in experiences is authenticity.

According to Gilmore & Pine (2007), authenticity-driven customers make decisions “based on how well those purchases conform to their own self-image. What they buy must reflect who they are and who they aspire to be in relation to how they perceive the world—with lightning-quick judgments of “real” or “fake” hanging in the balance”. Importantly, as the authors repeatedly assert thr...