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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Experience Design for Understanding Social Withdrawal: Employing a Live-Action Role-Play (LARP) to Learn About and Empathize with Hikikomori in Japan

Author : B.-O. Kamm

Published in: Neo-Simulation and Gaming Toward Active Learning

Publisher: Springer Nature Singapore

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Abstract

“Performance ethnography” seeks to give people a voice by staging events, plays, and exhibitions together with those under study. Still, the audience of such events remains just that and gains experience only second-hand. Contrastingly, live-action role-plays (larps) provide first-hand experience. Building on performance ethnography and taking the limits of “experimental anthropology” into account (i.e. to offer only glimpses of another reality), this paper showcases a larp that was designed together with former hikikomori (people in long-term, social withdrawal) from Japan to make their life worlds experienceable to others. The co-designed larp, “Village, Shelter, Comfort”, seeks to go against the stereotype of laziness by raising awareness of the dilemmas some hikikomori are confronted with. The larp is part of an ongoing research project on learning effects of larping and an evaluation method for such effects.

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Footnotes
1
The number of hikikomori is hard to assess because people in withdrawal rarely answer surveys. Based on surveys conducted at health institutions, however, “guesstimates” range from 200,000 to 640,000 [2, 5]. The ministry stopped counting people above 35 years of age as hikikomori, which distorts the picture.
 
2
A related phenomenon has been named “parasite singles” [20]. While hikikomori are usually a matter of concern vis-à-vis a bread-winner masculinity ideal, parasite singles refer to women who stay at home and are dependent on the parents.
 
3
This “pureness”, however, is very much contested in current studies on hikikomori and comorbidity, the presence of multiple disorders [5, 12].
 
4
Originally an abbreviation, LARP, the term has become a word in its own in many languages and simultaneously became more inclusive concerning which practices are referred to. Thus, it is written in lower case, larp, throughout this chapter.
 
5
In 2018, the larp was also run at a high school in Tokyo, independent from us.
 
Literature
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Horwitz AV (2010) How an age of anxiety became an age of depression. Milbank Q 88:112–138CrossRef
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Kamm B-O, Becker J (2016) Live-action role-play or the performance of realities. In: Kaneda T, Kanegae H, Toyoda Y, Rizzi P (eds) Simulation and gaming in the network society. Springer, Singapore, pp 35–51CrossRef
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Saito T (2014) “Hikikomori” kyūshutsu manyuaru [Deliverance manual for “social withdrawal”]. PHP Chikuma, Tokyo (in Japanese)
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Stenros J (2014) What does “Nordic larp” mean? In: Back J (ed) The cutting edge of Nordic larp. Knutpunkt, Gråsten, pp 147–156
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Tajan N (2015) Social withdrawal and psychiatry: a comprehensive review of Hikikomori. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc 63:324–331CrossRef
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Tajan N (2015) Japanese post-modern social renouncers: an exploratory study of the narratives of Hikikomori subjects. Subj Int J Crit Psychol 8:283–304
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Metadata
Title
Experience Design for Understanding Social Withdrawal: Employing a Live-Action Role-Play (LARP) to Learn About and Empathize with Hikikomori in Japan
Author
B.-O. Kamm
Copyright Year
2019
Publisher
Springer Nature Singapore
Book
Neo-Simulation and Gaming Toward Active Learning

Print ISBN: 978-981-13-8038-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-13-8039-6

Copyright Year: 2019

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8039-6_36

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