The City as Escape Room: place, participation, meaning, affect (Affective Intermediality, Sapientia University, October 2023)

Abstract

Through the lens of ecologies of belonging, The City as Escape Room transfers a simple and commonly held understanding of the escape room into a metaphor that reveals a complex layering of place, participation and affect in meaning-making for transmedia storytellers. It situates the city as a play space where community participation, meaning-making and co-creation are interwoven as meaningful story experiences. By mirroring the practice of urban foraging, the discussion explores transmedia storytelling as a form of sympoiesis that brings into being a shared memory, a becoming-with the city for the community that resides within. Avoiding the common placemaking tropes associated with public sector marketing and economic (re)generation, city-wide transmedia storytelling is instead considered a form of speculative fabulation that can defamiliarise the familiar and generate affective story experiences. The offering of a case study that contrasts commercial and community-driven transmedia experiences further illuminates how immersive experience design can take hold of a city as a play space and render it as a meaningful story experience.

ROY HANNEY (Solent University, Southampton, UK): presentation at the AFFECTIVE INTERMEDIALITY CONFERENCE, organized between 20-21 October 2023 at the SAPIENTIA HUNGARIAN UNIVERSITY OF TRANSYLVANIA, Cluj-Napoca (Romania), within the framework of the Exploratory Research Project: Affective Intermediality. Cinema between Media, Sensation and Reality, supported by a grant of the CNCS – UEFISCDI, PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-1297.