ABOUT

Bjorn-Ole Kamm gained his doctoral degree from Heidelberg University and today works as Junior Associate Professor in Transcultural Studies at Kyoto University, where he coordinates Japan’s first international joint degree program in the humanities. His previous research engaged stereotypes, media use, gender, and the border-crossing flows of nondigital gaming in and from Japan (Role-Playing Games of Japan: Transcultural Dynamics and Orderings, Palgrave, 2020). His work covers how live-action role-play was re-arranged for the Japanese environment and the role of the horror genre in Japanese analog gaming. He is editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed, diamond open-access, bilingual Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies, dealing with various forms of role-playing, including in educational and therapeutic contexts. Together with colleagues in special needs psychology, digital health, and experience design (Waldritter NPO), funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and a Japanese-German university network, he explores live-action role-play (larp) as a method for knowledge transfer/science communication/civic education. Based on interviews and co-creative approaches involving the people concerned, he has co-designed edu-larps about social withdrawal and the challenges of neurominorities in Japan. Building on PAC-analysis, he has co-developed an open-source debriefing tool for larps, named reLarp.