‘Whose were those feelings?’ Affect and likenessing in Halat hisar live action role-playing game

Abstract

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.