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The City as Escape Room: Place, Participation, Meaning, and Affect

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The City as Escape Room: Place, Participation, Meaning, and Affect

By Dr. Roy Hanney

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 26 (2024) 112–132

DOI: 10.47745/ausfm-2024-0013

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 defamiliarize 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.

Keywords: affect, experiential, storytelling, transmedia, narrative.

https://acta.sapientia.ro/en/series/film-and-media-studies/publications-acta-film/volume-26-2024-intermedial-practices-affective-immersions/the-city-as-escape-room-place-participation-meaning-and-affect

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