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

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.