After Reality in Rio de Janeiro: Gods and Snitches in the Wargaming Encounter

Morrinho, or Little Hill, is an Afro-Brazilian youth collective who, since 1997, have fictionalized everyday experiences in a role-playing game set in a hand-built miniature model of Rio de Janeiro. This 4,000-square-foot space, constructed from terra cotta bricks, ceramic tiles, and myriad found objects in the forest abutting a hillside favela, stages a diminutive world inhabited by thousands of inch-tall figurines living out dramas of commerce, violence, romance, and banality. In effect, Morrinho participants play with their own reality. Yet, under the intense gaze of military police who have used their favela as a tactical training ground for over two decades, the very claim to be playing a game raises broader questions about mimesis, fictionality, and innocence. Tacking back and forth between the miniature play world and full-sized ‘real life’ to unsettle assumptions about the two as discrete spheres of sociality, I both describe my interlocutors’ experiences with police ‘pacificatory’ violence and play out these same kinds of encounters alongside them, usually as my avatar, Alex. I consider, with my interlocutors, a kind of sensuous noticing and familiarity with territorialized violence and racialized belonging and exclusion.