Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
At the recent re-run of the larp Snapphaneland, I slipped into a very deep, immersive and solitary play on religion. As a fan of historical larps, I have of course played a Christian before, but never before have I had religious play as deeply immersive and moving. It made me get a glimpse of the importance that the Christian worldview had in history, and it made me want to explore and discuss these experiences. My focus in this text is describing my own experiences, and what contributed to finding that religious immersion. To do this, however, I first need to explain both the larp and the historical context, for those unfamiliar with it.
The larp Snapphaneland
Snapphaneland is a larp set during the Scanian War in the 17th century. Specifically, it focuses on the rebellion and guerilla war waged by Scanian resistance fighters (snapphanar) against the Swedish authority, the measures taken by the Swedish government and army to suppress the rebels, and how Scanian civilians were oppressed and punished, regardless if they aided the snapphane rebels or not. The larp is set in a Scanian village, and the characters in play are villagers, snapphane rebels and Swedish soldiers.
A life of toil
At the larp, I was a kitchen helper with a written character. This meant that I worked long, busy days, but could go out and play scenes now and then, and play while working in the kitchen. The kitchen was a mostly in-game area, and although it had some modern-ish equipment, many of the tasks were quite appropriate for the era – fetching water, keeping fires burning, chopping vegetables, and so on. It was also heavy work, with endless lifting, standing and walking. Although this was of course quite tiring, it also meant that the days were filled with manual labour, in a way that is quite realistic for rural life in the 17th century.
Snapphaneland. Photo by Tindra Englund.
The character I played was a farm maid (piga). Since she came from a large family, had no hopes of inheriting and slim chances of being married, this was how she would most likely spend her entire life, working very hard at someone else’s farm for food and board. Her days would be endless toil. Of course, everyone in a rural village worked, to the best of their abilities, but the farmhands (dräng) and farm maids got the heavier, dirtier tasks compared to the farmer’s family.
Most of the players at the larp did not have much work to do. There were some tasks that they could do if they chose – there was wood that could be chopped, sometimes things needed carrying, and they were always welcome to come help in the kitchen. Many of the people playing women brought knitting and similar handicrafts, to keep their hands occupied. But there were very few things that they had to do, and they could spend a lot of time sitting around talking, when not in the middle of Cool Scenes.
All this to say that while being in the kitchen for most of the larp, and not having much free time to pursue play, the benefit of my role was that the work was deeply realistic and immersive. My body ached from hard work. I was exhausted when going to bed in the evening, and then rose in the morning to do it all again. It was easy to lean into the knowledge that for my character, every day would be like this.
The Christian worldview
In Sweden in the 17th century, everyone (except minority groups of other faiths, of course) was a Christian Protestant. Belief in God was universal, it was a natural part of how the world was perceived. Not everyone was a good Christian, of course, and it was not uncommon that people did things that were considered sinful. However, everyone knew that sinning was bad, and had to somehow relate to this. Similarly, belief in an afterlife in heaven or hell was a natural part of life, and a very big part of the Christian worldview. Life on Earth was considered to be largely filled with suffering, toil, and hardship: and only those who lived good, pious lives would be rewarded with eternity in heaven.
This was a deeply important part of my experience. As described above, my character’s life really was full of toil and hardship, with no hope of becoming easier. These hardships were only increased as the oppression escalated, and life seemed almost unbearable. The thought of one day, when her life was over, being able to finally have comfort, rest and happiness in heaven was deeply important. Without it, life would just be a pointless struggle.
Snapphaneland. Photo by Tindra Englund.
Loneliness and love
Love is of course one of the great joys in life for a lot of people, something that makes life beautiful and brings meaning and hope to our lives. In the case of my character, there was not much of that to be had, however. She was the kind of person that no one really fell for, the person in the background who was perfectly nice, but just… not the girl anyone dreamed about. She herself fell in love pretty easily, but had never had her feelings answered. On top of this, she had lived most of her life away from her own village, away from parents and siblings. She was a very lonely person.
For a person like this, the thought of God and Christ was deeply comforting. Through God, there was the feeling of an ever-present love. A parent figure that, though stern and forbidding, was also full of grace and forgiveness, and would reward her if she was good enough. And someone who saw her, all of her, and cared about her deeds.
Suffering – God’s trials
Since the larp took place in a part of the country where the civilian population were tormented by both the Swedish army, and sometimes the rebels, there was a lot of suffering. Some characters (including my own) had in their background the ransacking and sometimes even burning of their homes, and having to look for a new home. There was hunger and poverty, due to soldiers and rebels taking food from civilians. And as the larp progressed and the army cracked down harder to quell the rebellion, there were beatings, rapes, and other kinds of violent cruelty.
Snapphaneland. Photo by Tindra Englund.
This created a vast wealth of internal play, with struggling with the age-old questions around God and evil. If God is good and all-powerful, why does he permit terrible things to happen? In Christianity, however, the reply is usually that God is testing your faith, and that enduring and remaining firm in your belief is how you succeed. This was beautifully illustrated and brought into play by my co-player and kitchen boss Kim Bjurström. My character had just been subjected to rape and abuse at the hands of the soldiers, and was quite broken. Kindly and gently, his character simply said: “God only gives us the struggles he knows we can bear.” It was all that was needed for my character to feel even more strongly connected to her faith, and to see meaning even in the absolutely terrible things she had endured. In a way, this is of course kind of weird and fucked up, as it can easily be construed as saying “You should really be happy that this happened to you, because it means that you are actually a really good Christian!” But, nonetheless, it was a very strong, moving, and immersive experience.
Sin
The concept of sin is great for roleplay, as it creates a strong incentive to not do things that might otherwise be very tempting to do. During the larp, my character often struggled with whether it was alright to lie – if you lied to protect someone, or if you were forced to lie by someone threatening you with violence.
Even more powerful was the thoughts around suicide and abortion. After my character had been raped, she was both traumatised and terrified of a pregnancy. On top of this, she had no future employment, and would soon be without food and housing. It was quite a heavy and hopeless situation, and the thought occurred to her more than once that she would be better off dead. But as suicide was a sin, this was of course out of the question. Similarly, if she did end up pregnant, then aborting the pregnancy would be a sin. This meant that she would simply have to submit to whatever God chose for her, and continue bearing it as well as she could.
Submitting, come what may
And this, I suppose, is the core of it: to submit. To keep faith. To suffer the sins of others, without turning to sin yourself. To bear a life with endless hardships and toil, trusting that after death all that suffering would go away, and you would be rewarded by an eternity in heaven.
Snapphaneland. Photo by Tindra Englund.
I felt this very deeply all through the larp, in a way I never have before. And it was a quite moving experience. It was also exceptionally suited to solo play, even when I was too busy working, or couldn’t find play for other reasons. The immersive relationship to God was ever-present. This is why I claim that Christianity is an excellent immersion closet.
What to take away from this article
In this article, I have focused on Protestant Christianity, since that was the religion at the larp in question. However, I think that the same playstyle can be relevant to explore in relation to other religions as well.
As a larper, I feel that it is very valuable to immerse deeply into experiences different from your own. It gives us a little bit of understanding and empathy for others, and humility before the manifold ways to live and understand life. I feel this to be even truer when it comes to getting a new perspective on religion, which is as important to many people today as it was centuries ago. I encourage other players to explore this, and to do so in an immersive, introspective way. Find your own Christian immersion closet, and/or religion as the lens through which you interpret and understand both everyday and extraordinary events.
As an organiser, I encourage designing for religious play, and not focusing solely on the outward expressions of religion – the rituals, the prayers, and so on. These things are great reminders to have during the larp, but they are not enough. Consider how you can design for religion to be always present in the back of the characters’ minds, to be informing the everyday moral choices and interpretations that they make. In short: design for more people to have religious play as their immersion closet.
Ludography
Snapphaneland (2024): Sweden. Rosalind Göthberg, Mimmi Lundkvist and Alma Elofsson Edgar (Bread and Games). https://snapphaneland.org/
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as: Greip, Julia. 2025. “Christianity is an Immersion Closet.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
Let’s get right into the action! Literally. Because “River Rafting” is a larp design methodology to help catapult larpers into play without a slow start. The purpose of this design model is to help the players experience more moments of emotional impact as well as to increase intensity and meaningful experiences throughout the whole duration of the larp.
I am a strong believer in the idea that when we act, we experience. River Rafting design helps the players to act immediately. This article is a further development of the design concept of frontloading((The idea of frontloading appeared in my realm of design thoughts in 2016 when Alexander Bakkensen and I were designing the Danish larp Victorious which I later made an iteration of to become the international larp Spoils of War. It is a bespoke larp inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, The Tudors and several other similar sources. I have also later tested and developed the concept further, based on the thoughts we had together back then. We talked about it in the 2018 version of the Danish roleplay convention Forum in the talk: “Toolbox of drama designers” which was repeated at Knudepunkt 2019.)) and covers pre-larp design, workshops and the pacing of the larp. It will explore how to do it intentionally and why designing for River Rafting can enhance the larp experience for your players. I will use perspectives from the three larps Spoils of War (Wind, 2018-), Daemon (Wind, 2021-) and Helicon (Pettersson and Wind, 2024-) to provide specific examples.
What are we trying to solve?
I have often noticed that most of the meaningful scenes on an individual level clump together at the end of a larp, but that the emotional impact of these often turns to disillusion when witnessing or participating in a cascade of dramatic scenes/deaths/reveals in the last hours. This phenomenon, Alexander Bakkensen has called “The Twilight Avalanche”. I usually feel too numb to react to yet another person screaming or crying by then.
This experience regularly contrasts with the first few hours of a larp involving mostly polite introductions and surface-level interactions like saying “greetings” and small talk for hours. In some cases, there is not a lot of emotional impact during the middle of the experience either, and often I don’t feel I have the tools to push the experience along as a player.
I think a number of design choices are supporting the slow start and place (too much) emphasis on the end of larps. One of these is if written character drama/conflicts/dilemmas are not very complex or have just one big scene in them. Another issue can be creating a setting that only provides an interesting framework late in the larp, or that builds up to a “Big Plot Ending”. This kind of ending is sometimes introduced late in the runtime, overshadowing previously built up character conflicts and tensions. It could be “end of the world”, “we are suddenly being invaded”, “we all have to die” etc. While such grand conclusions can be effective, they are not always consciously integrated into the rest of the larp’s structure. It can be frustrating as an individual player if such an ending isn’t tied meaningfully into the story of your character. A “big bang” finale can even leave players wondering what could have been if the larp had started with this level of intensity. In fact, the larp might have been a lot more interesting if it started with its ending as its beginning.
Furthermore, many players will, no matter the quality of the written setting and character, instinctively save the most interesting parts of a relation and the character until very late in a larp, playing towards a resolution only at the end unless you provide tools for them to do otherwise. We also miss the opportunity to help the players effectively use these tools to create early impact play this specific larp if workshops are not spent on practicing key mechanics and relationships. Often, on-location workshops will contain long briefings with repetition of the website instead. This approach means that players are not ready to get the full potential for emotional impact out of the written content right from the beginning. How they use the tools is up to the players, but if we don’t coach on how to unlock the usefulness of the mechanics in this specific larp, the players will spend a lot of the in-game time learning how to use the tools, or – worse – never use them at all.
Lastly, many larps have a pacing that structurally supports very few and late points of emotional impact with minimal structure and setup during the early and middle part. A slow start can make it harder to connect with the experience, relations and character early on.
All of these factors (low playability of characters/setting, poor practicing of mechanics and backloaded pacing) encourage players to save secrets or conflicts until the very last hours of the larp. Let us name this common combination of design choices the “Waterfall”((Not to be confused with the waterfall method in project management.)) method since it creates a slow start, a quiet flow of the boat on a broad river and a dramatic finish.
What we want instead of a waterfall is a more turbulent flow of the water within the themes of the larp. This doesn’t mean full intensity all the time. If we want many wavetops (experiences of emotional impact), we also need slower paced periods. But fluctuations are hard to achieve if you are already on a low point of pacing at the beginning of the larp, as this is also the time when you are practicing enacting the character in the setting and using the mechanics. If we don’t make the early rapids coming from pacing powerful enough for the players, there is a tendency that the larp experience itself will be backloaded.
What is River Rafting design?
River Rafting is a design philosophy that supports a turbulent flow of the larp experience with many opportunities of emotional impact from the beginning of the larp and throughout. I chose this term because river rafting starts slowly for a short time (pre-game and workshops) and then you hit a lot of rapids right away as well as during the rest of the trip (beginning of the larp until the end). We want to throw the boat around early and for the whole duration of the larp to offer an alternative to a Waterfall experience. If there are more rapids and more opportunities for movement, it is less important if some of it doesn’t result in a lot of impact.
In this maritime analogy, the larper’s experience of drama and emotional impact is the boat being moved. The characters, setting and mechanics are the paddles, life vests, ropes to other boats and other tools that the larper can use to make their own boat and the boats of others move at different paces down the river, and to create rapids for each other from many different angles at once. The workshops need to focus on teaching players to use these tools.
But since it takes time to learn to use the tools, early rapids must be created by providing a narrow river and intentionally plotted obstacles (frontloaded pacing/structure). Later, the river broadens and we design fewer obstacles to create rapids, but by then the players use the setting, characters and mechanics to make their own and each others’ boats move in a meaningful way.
Fig 1 – Illustration of River Rafting Design. Image by Katrine Wind.
As designers, we have three arenas where we can significantly influence the potential for emotional impact of our provided material: Highly playable characters/setting, mechanics and workshops, and pacing/structure.((I realise a lot of things influence a player’s experience: Co-player chemistry, off-game mood, room design, communication style of organisers and crew, feeling of safety, physical needs being met etc. But the focus of this article is purely on how to provide tools for the players to get the biggest emotional impact out of your writing and structure.))
What you want to achieve by this is to help the players get going right away, keep and vary intensity and take the interplay between the overall arc and the arc of the individual player into account.
So the three key elements of River Rafting design are:
Highly playable characters and setting: Focus on crafting characters and a setting that encourages immediate action. Emphasize extensive and complex character relations and highly playable dynamics. Please notice that I don’t say “long character backgrounds” or “as many pages of lore as possible”. It is about the volume and complexity of highly playable content.
Mechanics and workshops: Provide a few key mechanics for the players to create impact. Workshops should ideally quickly go from instructional briefings to a more tool based and practice heavy approach where players practice core mechanics of the larp, embrace important themes and actively play on character relationships early in the larp. Encourage the players to dive into conflicts and dynamics from the outset – and keep reminding them. Make a safe environment to help players to be brave. Additional workshops in act breaks can support this.
Early impact pacing: Start the larp with compelling events or tense scenarios, supported by a lot of designed structure and tense content in the very early parts of the larp.
Below is an illustration of how I perceive each design approach’s attempt to structurally influence emotional impact throughout the runtime of a larp.
Fig 2 – Emotional Impact Potential from the Design. Image by Katrine Wind.
The wavetops in River Rafting design don’t have to be at exactly these points of the larp. The later spikes symbolise how structured content and potentially mid-game workshops etc. can make extra rapids. However, the expectation is that the potential of provided content and structure to help create meaningful emotional impact is much less later in the larp because the players have practiced the characters, relations and mechanics and create the rapids themselves by then.
Please note that the illustration is not a visualisation of the individual player experience. Many players will experience climaxes at the end of the larp, and that is great. The point is also having a lot of potential emotional impacts earlier – the aim is to increase the volume and frequency, not just to move the curve.
I will go through the three different aspects of River Rafting design in detail and with examples below.
Setting and Characters
If you write a setting and characters for your players, you are already frontloading this part of the design to some degree. Well done! Sending out characters as well as facilitating workshops are the gentle start that can teach the players how to use the paddle and steer with the tools they have been given. This means that when you start the larp, the players are already in the water, can create movement in the boat and feel brave and ready to do so.
But what is necessary for a specifically River Rafting design is for you to provide an engaging setting right at the end of an interesting time which creates a setup and something to talk about. You also need complex, highly playable characters containing dilemmas that will lead to more drama while dealing with them. The intention is to provide all players with a springboard for their personal stories supported by an engaging narrative framework.
Spoils of War opens with this engaging setting; the interesting part to play is happening right now.((The idea for the setting was originally created together with Alexander Bakkensen for the Danish larps Victorious 1 and 2 in 2016 and 2017.)) We are at the very end of a brutal civil war. The characters have already experienced the horrors of it, but the emotional impact hasn’t fully hit them yet. The players know that their characters are either on the losing or the winning side, and that the war will end early in the larp. They don’t spend time playing the lead-up to the war or competing over who will win. Because all the characters will be in a state of turmoil with many options for the aftermath, the setting gives us something recent and impactful to play on right away. Furthermore, the characters contain complex relations with slights, dilemmas, heartbreaks, love, despair and uplifting camaraderie happening right now, combined with shared history from before the war.
Another example which illustrates the design principles regarding characters and setting is Helicon (Maria Pettersson and Katrine Wind, 2024).((Maria Pettersson and I had no conversations about the term River Rafting design in the design process of Helicon, and she cannot be held accountable for any of my theoretical descriptions of the perspective as I hadn’t conceptualised my design preferences in this way at the time. We completely agreed on the need for complex/highly playable characters and setting – and we have an equal part in the design of all aspects of Helicon itself. But the description of what I perceive we did when looking back and any criticism of the conceptualisation thereof is completely on my own account.)) Helicon is a larp about a group of artists, scientists and leaders who have captured the Muses of old to keep all of the inspiration in the world for themselves. The larp is based around dyadic play where the couple has a deep relation with each other. Some of the Muses want to be there or are even emotionally in power, and this setting of ambivalent slavery is relevant to every single player. It is significant and interesting to have Helicon play out at exactly this point of time in the setting, since it is time for the yearly binding ritual to keep the Muses caught.
To give plenty of content to play with on a character level, the humans (the Inspired) have fifteen years of complex history together. Also, the Muses are thousands of years old, they are all siblings and they have significant relationships with one another. As the Muses have been prisoners for fifteen years, there are also extensive relations across the two groups: Characters are lovers or ex-lovers; many of the Muses have stolen artists from each other over the years; some are currently best of friends with their captors etc. Thus, you have dilemmas all across the base of characters as well as with your dyadic partner.
A misinterpretation of the frontloading concept, in my opinion, is writing extensive characters but where the most interesting content is in the past (or in the future after the larp). Why would you write that a conflict or dilemma is already dealt with or easily resolved, unless it has led to an even more interesting conflict? We have to give players the opportunity to have the most meaningful experiences while they are in play. Therefore, I am not advocating for long characters. Instead, I recommend putting in a lot of playable content in the provided material no matter the length of the text. This could be complex, unresolved conflicts, established and significant relations, challenges to the character, dilemmas, goals etc.
A great way to help players be ready for River Rafting is providing the setting and character material a long time before the larp. That also entails the pacing structure and schedule as well as other forms of expectation management that helps them structure their own experience no matter which degree of transparency you want for what actually happens in the larp. For example: Do you expect the players to talk to co-players before the larp or will you allow time for that on location? Do they sleep off-game? What will they physically do with their bodies and spend their time on during this larp? When is a good time to take a break?
Workshops and Mechanics
Setting and characters take time to learn to use. I often find that organisers underestimate the value of structured time for people to talk with co-players about their relations during the workshop time as a means to enable players to use the material right away. If you provide a highly playable setting and characters, the players will do wonders for themselves to be ready to play intensely right from the outset of the larp, if they just have time to talk with each other. Talking about their relations and maybe even trying out flashback scenes is also practicing to use the written material before the larp instead of practicing and finding each other when the larp has already started. No matter how many online meetings you have for calibration before a larp, I find that players meeting each other just before the larp is where they have the best opportunity to find each other and create the trust it takes to play bravely together – and be ready to do so. This is more valuable for the emotional impact of their experience than more instructional briefing about the setting.
Furthermore, I suggest that you introduce one or a few core mechanics to support the experience you want the players to have, and to practice them during workshops. This enables the players with more tools to move their boat and the boat of others. Structured practice of the tools given to the players is an excellent way to help them get going from the start of the larp. If you don’t do this, most of your opportunity as a designer to meaningfully influence the emotional impact on the individual player experience (before the larp) will rely on just the characters and setting.
For the workshops, I encourage not providing information pieces and practicing mechanics until they are needed. If you have act breaks, and a tool is not used before act 3, then wait to provide this information until it is necessary. If you have a debriefing, don’t instruct about that at the beginning of the larp.
A mechanic that I use in several of the larps I am involved in is Dinner Warfare (Wind, 2024). It is a way of designing meaningful mealtime situations and using seating plans to create subtle but strong emotional pressure based on specific relations. But I introduce it differently for each larp depending on the purpose and importance of the tool. I use it extensively in Daemon and provide off-game instructions before the larp as well as an in-game alibi that has to do with classicism to stay in the seats of the horrible seating plan. It is a less prominent mechanic in other larps I am involved in and therefore not introduced as thoroughly.
Instruction and Coaching
As a larp runner you have to consider when to give instructions and when to let the players practice tools themselves in a more coaching style of leadership. While I strongly emphasize the value of the latter, there is no shame in being instructive: “You must use this mechanic in the game”. The coaching approach is letting players know that the rest is up to them: “You decide what to do within the framework”. This will help them be more comfortable using them from the beginning of the larp by practicing. A combination of the suggestions above is illustrated in Spoils of War. The players know before the larp which side has won or lost, but the characters don’t. The first night starts with the siege of the last standing castle. The losing side has been caught inside for three months but hasn’t quite given up yet. It is hard to start right in the middle of a siege and be ready to react to what it has been like being at a standstill for three months. Everybody is frustrated.
We try to explain it briefly at first and underline that the frustration is a specific mechanic for the very beginning of the larp (instruction), and then we lead the players into the game by making a “frustration workshop” where we play the same scene three times (coaching). First, it is at the beginning of the siege: The losing side has plenty of hope and food and the winning side is patient. Then we jump a month and the players are prompted to escalate how annoying it is being around the same people and that food is scarce. Finally, we play the same scene where three months have passed and everyone is desperate. The scenes only take about five minutes each, but it underlines the feeling we start the larp with. After the last scene, the intro song plays and the larp begins with this exact feeling of frustration. Almost right away there is an inspection of prisoners of war where the two sides meet, which means that the players are more ready to play the emotional rapid of seeing their loved ones but not being able to save them from imprisonment than if they just started cold.
It is almost impossible not to have some degree of briefing with instructions when you start the workshops, but I encourage going from instruction to coaching as soon as possible.
Mechanics take time to learn
In Daemon, the core vision is experiencing being two people who together portray one character. Daemon is inspired by the trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (1995–2000) where humans live with their soul outside of their body in the form of an animal. Daemons are the expression of the inner lives of the characters and the human and daemon can’t move very far away from each other.
It might seem like an obvious mechanic that one player is portraying the human itself and the other is portraying the inner life of the character. But if I was mostly interested in the universe or characters of the books instead of the human-daemon relation, I could have decided mechanics-wise that the players just have a toy animal on their shoulder and then play in the setting. However, I wanted to make a larp where you could experience dyadic play in a way where you together portray one character.
The other core mechanic I chose to support the vision is that the player can’t go more than two meters from their dyadic partner the whole in-game playtime, which requires immense attention to what your partner is doing.
Dyadic play is a new way of larping for most people – and if they didn’t play Daemon before, they probably never had to play this physically close to another player for such a long time before. We also have to practice how the daemon player acts on a continuum from underlining and mirroring what the player of the human is portraying to showing what is really going on inside or between two humans when they interact. So in the workshop I explain briefly about the bond, and we then practice it extensively.
I have seen players struggle with the mechanics during Daemon despite extensively trying it out – my workshops were not enough. The players spent too much time worrying about the mechanics and moving too far away from each other/not mirroring enough instead of focussing on the character and what was happening around them. What has really helped in later iterations is saying to the players in the instructional part of the workshops right before the first act of Daemon that the first night will be clunky. I tell them that I realise that even though we have practiced the mechanic, we have to try it out during the first night before we know how we want to play it with our partner and in our dyad together towards others, and then we calibrate before act two. I find that verbally validating the fact that the key mechanic takes time to learn has made some larpers braver – especially when it is a tool not usually used in other larps. I have witnessed this bravery helping players to bring out interesting content from very early on in the larp in later runs of Daemon.
But if prewritten characters, setting, mechanics and workshops – no matter the quality – were enough to achieve rapids in the river in the beginning of the larp, more larps would feel like a River Rafting experience instead of feeling slow and backloaded.
For Daemon, the physical closeness is a good example of a mechanic that becomes much more impactful later in the larp when they have had time to get used to it. I often hear people forgetting right after the larp that they don’t have to stay within two metres of their dyadic partner anymore. But it is obvious that the players benefit from something else to create opportunities for emotional impact until the mechanics work for them and they have a feeling for their characters. What is lacking is a strategy for pacing. As mentioned before, I think that more larps would structurally support emotional impact early if they had a frontloaded pacing.
Pacing
As a designer, you have the best opportunity to provide a meaningful overall structure early in a larp. Later and by the end of the larp, most players will have been practicing, utilising and developing the character drama, setting and mechanics, making overall pacing and structured content much more irrelevant – or at worst – meaningless. By then, the main part of the emotional impact should come from the larpers themselves, the co-players and utilisation of the mechanics.
River Rafting design encourages establishing a high intensity starting point pacing-wise for the players to react to and talk about as well as more structured content in the first parts of the larp – to create “the narrow river and the first rapid”. Structured and intense openings help to actualise the tools and encourage players to take action early because their boat is already moving. We learn even more from our first actions in a larp than in the workshops about utilising the characters, setting and the mechanics. But if nothing pushes us to act, it is harder to convert this to meaningful experiences, and the emotional impact is also postponed.
The opening of the larp does not have to be the same for all players but should in general tie into the themes and core experiences as well as be relevant to the individuals.
It is not an original idea to start in mediās rēs. It is just not very prevalent in larp designs in my opinion. Or at least the opening scene is often not meaningful for the individuals or coherent with overarching themes, in the way the River Rafting design suggests.
This leads me to what I think really happens when “backloaded” pacing is the choice in so many larps following the Waterfall design model and why I don’t want to design like that.
Backloaded Pacing
Pacing in larps often mirrors the “Hollywood model” of storytelling.
The “we start slow and everything only climaxes in the end, and something even more interesting happens at the end of or after the larp” structure outlines schematically the progress of a classical “good story” split into (usually three) different acts. It makes sense that we consciously or otherwise use this structure in our medium: It’s how we usually see stories unfold in the content we consume.
Here are a few examples of the classical Hollywood model. I would argue that often larp pacings (not necessarily the individual experiences) will stop at the climax.
I think the Hollywood model is fine. It can be a good way to tell a story – why else would so many pieces be structured like that? Movies, video games, plays etc. can benefit greatly from this approach, because when you have a predetermined outcome you can structure the whole experience around this pacing. However, at larps, pacing needs to accommodate the double-layered structure: The overall story arc and the individual character arcs. So you can’t make this structure work for a majority of the players just by making a larp end in a certain way or culminating everything in the overarching arc in the end.
Even for the pop culture pieces that start out in media res, my point would be that this rarely accounts for all individual characters – it’s mostly for the overall story. Because of the improvisational nature of larp, since we have so many moving pieces and because we care about every individual player’s experience, the backloaded pacing or Hollywood model is less applicable to larp if you want more emotional impact for the individual.
With River Rafting design, you can more easily design for the players to be hit by so many different waves and rapids on their path down the narrow river that they have had enough meaningful experiences along the way, so that it doesn’t matter if their ending is a waterfall, a whirlpool or a quiet stretch of river – none of the players will have their whole experience be dependent on the ending.
Daemon as a pacing example
Below is an example of how the pacing for the overall larp works for Daemon (Katrine Wind, 2021–). This is not the model of River Rafting pacing design. That can take a lot of different forms – this is just the general visualisation of the pacing in a larp with a lot of structure and planned events in the beginning more than in the end.
Fig 5 – Katrine Wind (2024): River Rafting Pacing Design for Daemon larp
In Daemon, the setting is the aftermath of a war where we have just killed God. The characters themselves are centered around themes like creating meaning, victory/defeat, grief/relief and building a new future. A lot of the characters are already gathered in the castle of one of the nobles on the winning side (facilitator character). The guests are there to celebrate the war heroes, mourn the fallen and exploit the opportunity created from the fall of a controlling theocracy to experiment with scientific projects that have up until now been illegal. But the theocratic power has thrown one last bomb of a biological weapon in the form of a powder that affects the bond between human and daemon (a core mechanic of the larp).
The opening scene creates a sense of urgency and immediate possibility for the players to take action, as enemies and people with complex relations to the guests originally invited for the celebration are evacuated to and quarantined in the castle. They have just been hit by the powder. These people are soldiers from the war, former fiancées, traitors and other people whose relations are significant, complex and problematic to the original guests. The scientists present immediately need to start working on helping those affected.
The next structured event comes almost right away when the hostess and an original guest continue to award medals to people who have killed family members of the newly arrived characters’ families. Very soon after this, everybody is thrown into an excruciating three course dinner where they have to endure each other but have a lot to talk about from the workshops, characters and starting scene. The social structures as well as the urgency of the powder situation force the adversaries to be around each other (see Dinner warfare, Wind 2024).
The peak in the third act is again a reflection on a Dinner Warfare scene, but it is disruptive in the pacing as the hostess creates a last, unhinged seating plan fuelled by a retaliation where she surrounds herself with other peoples’ daemons. They are placed almost too far away from their humans to make it physically uncomfortable to be at dinner and stay polite. For a larp to be designed for “frontloading” as part of River Rafting design, this would not be necessary as the concept focuses more on the first part of the larp, but the structured spike in intensity is a design choice for other reasons than overall pacing.
In the pacing overview from Daemon, you also find another tool. The act structure cuts up the pacing in three, and I choose to put in off-game breaks between the acts to allow more opportunities for me as a designer to add structured content in the beginning of act 2 as well as have more workshop time which enables me to make more rapids. I deem that it is not necessary with an intense start scene for the beginning of act 3, as the mechanics and characters drive the emotional impact almost solely by then.
For River Rafting design, you don’t have to have a quiet ending as a player. Don’t be fooled by the fizzling out of structured content in the third act of Daemon. This refers only to the larp pacing itself – for some players it will still be the most dramatic part of the larp.
But by not pressuring structured content into the end, in my experience, it will help avoid some of the “Twilight Avalanche.”
You can still facilitate a dramatic ending
Maria Pettersson and I decided to make a structured ending of Helicon (2024–) with focus on a highly dramatic situation, even though I still consider it a “frontloaded” larp which follows the principles of River Rafting design. We wanted to include a specific end scene where a choice is required, shifting certain dynamics. However, the key element for me that makes this ending meaningful for each individual is that they have influence over their own arc in relation to this scene. We also provide the tool that each player can be informed of the ending and the choice that they will face (transparency) during the final act break, or they can choose to be surprised.
However, I still consider the opening scene and structured content in the beginning of Helicon to be much more significant design aspects to the players’ experience of emotional impact as they set the tone of the larp and help the players to get into the characters and mechanics right away.
Fig 6 – Katrine Wind (2024): River Rafting pacing design for Helicon larp (larp designed with Maria Pettersson)
Already in the character descriptions, an intro scene is added where the players have to act on their relations. It is described how last night, the Muses tried to escape and failed. To establish the uneven power dynamic that is so central to the larp, Helicon begins with a ritualised, common punishment scene for this slight with each couple focussing on each other, and the significance of this intro scene is already emphasized in each individual character. Bowman describes this scene and its significance to kick off the larp in her article about Helicon (Bowman, 2024). Since ritualistic content is very important to the experience, we practise the rituals in the workshops. In this case, the Inspired have practiced this specific Punishment Ritual but the Muse players don’t know what is going to happen. All of the individuals and couples have a huge stake in this scene, no matter if the Muse was an instigator of the escape attempt or urged along by their siblings. Thus, the event is meaningful to each individual character (and hopefully player) when we start with high drama.
This is another point of River Rafting design. I don’t advocate just throwing in any action scene or dramatic beginning to kick off the larp in a frontloaded manner. The intro scene should emphasise the themes of the larp and be relevant to the players. Something can be meaningful and dramatic without being loud.
During the Larp
Once the larp is running, you obviously have to execute the plan for events and structure which can take a lot of work. You might even be able to make little adjustments in your design plan if you see a need for it during a pre-planned event. You learn a lot from rerunning larps, and there have been plenty of pacing events that have not worked as intended in larps I have been involved in.
Despite our intention to make Dinner Warfare a mechanic all the way through Helicon, Maria Pettersson and I decided during the first run to loosen our plan so the seating was only very tense for everyone on the first night. We had planned to do it for all three meals, but we decided for the two other in-game meals to just provide the opportunity for players off-game to wish for people to sit with or not sit with. We didn’t deem it necessary to place the rest of the players to create the most possible tension as other structured content was more impactful in the later part of the experience. Granting player wishes for seating plans is the most advanced version of Dinner Warfare, and we still deemed that the mechanic served a purpose enough to not scrap it completely even though we adjusted our plan.
Act changes with off-game breaks are your greatest chance of affecting the larp significantly as a designer later in the larp. Act break calibrations can for example be helpful to catapult the players into the new part of the larp. Many players will do this themselves with individual relations, act breaks or not, which is wonderful, but structuring time for it can be a helpful tool for some to ask something from the group. This works best in smaller or medium sized larps or in smaller groups.
For Daemon (28 players) and Spoils of War (58 players), I do a calibration round in each act break where I ask if anyone needs something generalized from the group. Either you say that you don’t need anything or you can for example ask for: “Could someone oppress me about my class” or “I need someone to have more quiet conversations with”. Then I will ask if someone can see themselves doing this, and usually some other players are happy to help provide this type of play. I specify that you should only raise your hand if you are really going to commit to it so the player asking actually gets what they need. Chances are that when I try to make people accountable and three raise their hand to help, at least one of them will actually cast the rope from their boat to their co-player’s.
You can also choose to provide a new workshop piece or a significant and possibly dramatic event in the beginning of a new act. In Daemon, act two starts with a cutting edge science presentation with shocking discoveries with all characters present. After this, there are spikes in the pacing but the larp includes less and less content that I design because the impact of the individual character arcs take over. I also signify this with my facilitator character being less and less important and prevalent to create pressure.
Final Remarks
River Rafting design can help create a more engaging and dynamic player experience from the very beginning of a larp with a higher chance of many moments of emotional impact instead of very few towards the end. By designing highly playable characters and setting, focussing workshops on practicing the tools you provide and designing your pacing for immediate action, you empower players to experience and create more emotional impact.
Whether you choose to put more content in the beginning of the experience or not, I encourage you to consider how pacing can shape your larp and communicate these design intentions to players. Even if you don’t want your larp to follow the River Rafting design methodology, you can help your players by making your choices clear. That will enable them to better structure their larp experience and engage with your vision more effectively.
Happy designing!
References
Bakkensen, Alexander, and Wind, Katrine, “Toolbox of the drama designers”, Forum convention, Denmark, 2018
Victorious 1 + 2 (2016–2017). Denmark. Alexander Bakkensen and Katrine Wind.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Wind, Katrine. 2025. “River Rafting Design.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: Helicon larp. Photo by Kai Simon Fredriksen.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
Kai, photo by Prison Escape
This is Kai. Kai taught me how to overcome my fear of heights. Or rather, by playing the character of Kai, I was able to find a new part of myself. And later, that new part enabled me to face my fears. I learned from bleed.
I didn’t play Kai with this intention. But Kai inspired me to develop ways to intentionally learn from bleed and that lead to the formation of our company, Live Action Learning. In this article we’ll write about how you can learn from bleed yourself and how you design a larp in such a way that your participants can learn from their bleed, if they want to.
This article is based on the workshop “Learning from bleed” at the 2024 Edu-Larp Conference by Gijs van Bilsen and Kjell Hedgaard Hugaas, and all participants of that workshop, who discussed the topic together. It’s also based on the professional development training “Live Action Leadership” that we, Anne van Barlingen & Gijs van Bilsen with our company Live Action Learning, ran in April 2023 and November 2024, and the keynote speech “Summon your talent”.
What happened with Kai
Kai wasn’t a kind man. But Kai possessed an unshakable inner strength, grounded in a calm conviction that nothing could sway him. This kind of inner strength and resilience was new to me, and playing Kai had given me access to this. In other words: I learned something through bleed.
First, let’s define bleed. According to Hugaas (2024) “Bleed occurs when feelings, thoughts, emotions, physical states, cognitive constructs, aspects of personality and similar ‘bleed over’ from player to character or vice versa.” There are several types of bleed, as presented by Hugaas:
Emotional bleed (Montola 2010; Bowman 2015), in which emotional states and feelings bleed between player and character.
Ego bleed (Beltrán 2012), in which fragments of personality and archetypal qualities bleed between player and character.
Procedural bleed (Hugaas 2019a), in which physical abilities, perceptual experience, motor skills, traits, habits, and other bodily states bleed between player and character.
Memetic bleed (Hugaas 2019a), in which ideas, thoughts, opinions, convictions, ideologies and similar cognitive constructs bleed between player and character;
Relationship bleed, in which aspects of social relationships bleed between player and character. Romantic bleed (Waern 2010; Harder 2018; Bowman and Hugaas 2021) is the most frequently discussed subtype.
Emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2017, 2020), in which players from marginalized backgrounds experience liberation from that marginalization through their characters.
Identity bleed (Hugaas 2024), which deals with the sense of self and with how different parts of the self (“multiplicities of identities”) bleed between character and player.
In the case of Kai, the bleed can be classified as emotional bleed (the calm emotional state), but also as identity bleed (It did something with the way I think about myself; ‘I’m someone who can stay calm under stressful circumstances’).
Why is learning from bleed interesting?
To effectively integrate new behavior in your system, you need a couple of things: Opportunities to experiment with the behavior, feedback to fine-tune it, time to integrate it into your system, and a safe environment that allows for mistakes.
In a regular training session, you’ll have the opportunity to try new things, but often confined to a few minutes or maybe an hour. Training by practicing new behavior solely in your real life isn’t a safe environment in which you can make multiple mistakes or suddenly behave completely differently. But using larp and bleed… Well, talk about having it all!
But, of course, there are difficulties. For one, bleed is personal; you can’t make bleed happen. However, you can inspire bleed (Edu-larp conference, 2024). The level at which bleed is present, but also the level of bleed that is noticed, differs per person and even over time. This is called the “bleed perception threshold” (Hugaas 2024). This means you might not notice any bleed at all. Or you can be completely overwhelmed.
The ingredients: designing for bleed
So when designing for bleed, whether it is for you personally or for a group of participants, be aware. Random, unfocused bleed can be very unhelpful, to put it mildly. In order to learn from bleed, you need direction, agency, priming, safety, time and space (Edu-larp conference, 2024). Using bleed on purpose, especially to learn, should always be with informed consent of what bleed you are designing for, preferably with agency of a participant to choose their own bleed and learning goals. Direction, agency, and priming shape bleed into something useful, while safety and time enhance immersion.
In our four-day Live Action Leadership training we’ve made very conscious decisions on these elements. The main theme was very clear: Leadership. The complete setup revolved around situations and scenes which required leadership skills, integrated in an overarching story about a failing management team. The participants were actively involved in formulating their personal learning goals and how those goals were translated into a character. The concept of bleed was clearly explained at the beginning, during the workshops. This made the participants aware of the signs of bleed and what they might experience. Having multiple opt-out options, and very openly discussing them as a safe and viable option to leave the game, made participants comfortable enough to immerse themselves.
And then, last but not least, the ‘thin alibi’, or ‘playing close to home’. Bleed occurs more quickly when the character you are playing resembles your real-life persona. For example, we might deliberately choose names for the characters that are close to their own. Björn might play a character called Bjarke, or Susanne might play a character called Suzette. We also thinned the border by choosing a realistic and recognizable setting. It is very possible to have bleed and learn from bleed from characters and settings that are further away from you. But the further away you are, the harder it is to find an applicable use in everyday life.
The timeline: Three phases of integration
We believe that learning from bleed is not about pretending to be someone else in your everyday life, but about finding a different version of yourself through playing. Therefore, especially in longer experiences, we have three phases for the participant to go through during play:
finding the character
challenging the character, and
integrating to a competent version of the character.
Finding the character
How can you help the participant exhibit the traits that they want to learn? Experimentation is key in this phase. When not playing or designing for bleed, we might want to prioritize portraying the character consistently. But if you’re focusing on a specific character trait that is not natural to you, it’s important to experiment with different strategies to find a way that works for you. So if somebody wants to learn to be more outspoken, this phase is about finding multiple ways for them to play that outspoken character.
Challenging the character
This phase is about trying to entice the participant to exhibit the opposite behavior of what they want to learn, so that they can notice this and return to the character. Ways to do this can be to introduce a high pressure environment, such as a quest with a specific deadline, or by designing more emotional scenes. If you opt for this approach, it is good to have ways to remind the participant that they are slipping into old behavior. Having them choose one gesture, word or feeling that symbolizes their character is a good way for them to be able to go back to their character again.
Integration
The third phase is integrating the character into a competent version: a sort of mix between the character and the participant. Instruct the participants during an offgame calibration, to let go of a negative trait of the character and to replace that with a positive trait of their own. This will bring the character closer to resembling the participant and helps them to associate positively with the character. This can also be described as ‘learning to love the character’. If participants dislike their character, it is harder for them to want to learn from things that the character did. However, if you want to achieve the opposite effect, unlearning unwanted behavior, disliking the character works well.
After playing: Separation and anchoring
After de-roling and debriefing, we start the separation and anchoring phase. There are three questions central to this:
Separation: What traits do you want to keep, and what will you let go?
Anchoring: What anchor will help you summon these traits?
Summoning: When do you want to summon these traits?
Separation:
We want our participants to take a ‘version of themselves’ home, not the complete character, because characters have negative traits as well, traits that we don’t want to keep. Kai, the example from the beginning of the article, was a very powerful character with a deep source of inner strength and resilience. But, as you can see from the photo, he was also a criminal. So after playing that character, I separated the useful characteristics (inner strength and resilience) from the rest of the character. I found a way to access that inner strength by playing Kai, but now I needed only that part.
Anchoring:
After separating comes anchoring. Here we build on the word, gesture or feeling that participants already have chosen to symbolize their character (see: Challenging the character). It can be a simple thing that helps you find this version of yourself. And from that thing, more of the behavior you associate with that version will follow. Besides a gesture, word or feeling, other possible anchors are:
A name: the characters name, a nickname (‘the professor’) or an adjective, coupled with your own name (‘curious Gijs’)
Music, from a short tune you can hum/whistle to an entire playlist which helps you find the character
An object, preferably one that you can carry with you
A smell, such as a perfume, that differs from your normal one
A piece of clothing that you can put on in special circumstances
A location where you want to have access to the character.
A posture you adopt when you need it.
Summoning:
It is important to think about when you want to have access to the talents you learned from bleed. There are three ways to determine when to summon your characters:
Triggers. Think of a sudden situation where you might need it, and identify a trigger that will remind you. For example, I played Kai, who was calm and resilient. Traits I can use when I start to feel my fear of heights taking over. When I feel my knees getting weak, that’s the trigger to summon that calm, focused part of myself.
On purpose beforehand. If you know you will go into a situation where that version of yourself might help you, you summon your character on purpose just before going in. For example, just before an important meeting or social event.
Integrating it into yourself. Finally, you can integrate this version of yourself into yourself, meaning that it becomes an unconscious part of you. This takes time and practice. It generally goes from noticing well after the fact that you would’ve wanted to use what you’ve learned, to noticing it shortly after the fact, to adjusting your behavior during the situation and finally to before the situation. The final step is that it has become something you do without thinking about it.
Learning from regular larp experiences
The above steps detail how to design for others. But you can easily use these at a larp that is not designed for learning, even if you’re only using it after the larp. Kai was not intended as a character for self-learning, but by separating and anchoring aspects of him, I found playing him highly valuable.
In short, the steps to take if you want to learn from the larp as a player, are:
Decide what you want to learn.
Decide where you want to make the border between you and your character thinner.
Take some time to reflect on your learning experience so far.
If possible, use the three phases (finding, challenging and integrating your character).
Afterwards, separate and anchor what you want to keep/learn.
Finally, summon the new version of yourself whenever you need it.
We hope this article inspires you to learn more from larp and learn more from bleed yourself and, if you’re a larp designer, introduce parts of the design process into your larps so you give your participants the option of learning from it.
References
Beltrán, Whitney “Strix.” 2012. “Yearning for the Hero Within: Live Action Role-Playing as Engagement with Mythical Archetypes.” In Wyrd Con Companion Book 2012, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, 89-96. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2012.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2015. “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character.” Nordiclarp.org, March 2.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne, and Kjell Hedgard Hugaas. 2021. “Magic is Real: How Role-playing Can Transform Our Identities, Our Communities, and Our Lives.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde, 52-74. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
Harder, Sanne. 2018. “Larp Crush: The What, When and How.” Nordiclarp.org, March 28.
Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2019a. “Investigating Types of Bleed in Larp: Emotional, Procedural, and Memetic.” Nordiclarp.org, January 25
Hugaas, K. H. (2024). Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-out from Role-playing Games Can Affect a Player’s Sense of Self. International Journal of Role-Playing, (15), 9–35.
Kemper, Jonaya. 2017. “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity.” Nordiclarp.org, June 21.
Kemper, Jonaya. 2020. “Wyrding the Self.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Mia Makkonen, Pauliina Männistö, Anne Serup Grove, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta.
Montola, Markus. 2010. “The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-playing.” In Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players. Stockholm, Sweden, August 16.
Waern, Annika. 2010. “‘I’m in Love With Someone That Doesn’t Exist!!’ Bleed in the Context of a Computer Game.” In Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players. Stockholm, Sweden, August 16.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
van Bilsen, Gijs and van Barlingen, Anne. 2025. “‘Learning from Bleed.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
Dissimulation: Adopting roles to conceal true intentions, from politeness to deception.
As the term roleplaying expanded beyond its theatrical roots, it embarked on a fascinating journey of transformation. European sources from the 18th and 19th centuries describe phenomena occurring during, or as a result of roleplaying, that we might now recognize as bleed. But what was the historical context of these cases, and what lessons can they offer for our understanding of roleplaying today?
Bleed, a concept first introduced by Emily Care Boss (2007), refers to the way emotions, thoughts, or experiences can spill over between a character and the player; flowing either from the character into the player or vice versa (Hugaas, 2024). After immersion, bleed is likely the most talked-about aspect of larping (Jeepen, 2007; Montola, 2010; Montola, 2011; Bowman, 2013; Kemper, 2017; Leonard and Thurman, 2018; Hugaas, 2019). This happens because the line between social reality and pretense is naturally blurred (Järvelä 2019). When we larp, our minds cannot fully separate the experience from reality, as we are actively thinking, physically embodying, and socially co-creating these moments (Kapitany et al., 2022).
This article is part of an ongoing Hungarian research line (Turi & Hartyándi, 2022; Turi & Hartyándi, 2023; upcoming) that investigates how the concept and notion of roleplaying is evolving through the centuries, instead of projecting the contemporary notion of larp into past or adjacent activities (Hartyándi, 2024).
The etymology of roleplaying and its early usages
The word rôle is of French origin, originally referring to the scroll (Latin rotula, English roll) that contained an actor’s lines and written instructions for a theatrical performance. From this, it later acquired its figurative meaning of role. Since actors perform their roles on stage, the phrase ‘to play a role’ is undoubtedly very old, with documented usage by Diderot, Goethe, and Schiller in the 18th century.
If actors play roles on stage, could it be that we are also playing roles in our lives? Shakespeare’s famous monologue in As You Like It (1623) — “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” — expresses not a groundbreaking insight into social behavior (Goffman, 1959), but rather a popular cliché of the time, likely tracing its roots back to Roman times (Garber, 2008). Nevertheless, humans are undeniably social roleplayers (Moreno, 1943).
In this linguistic and historical context, both the term ‘roleplaying’ itself, and its usage in the the sense of dissimulation, originally emerged in German. Dissimulation involves taking on roles to present an image contrary to one’s true feelings or intentions (Corsini et al., 1963). This can range from simple acts of politeness to elaborate uses, such as deception in scams or espionage.
Fake it till you make it
Justus Möser, a humble yet proactive giant, was a polyhistor and statesman of the small state of Osnabrück in today’s Lower Saxony. In his Patriotische Phantasien (1776), a compilation of previous newspaper essays addressing various societal-political issues relevant to Osnabrück, he sought to inspire a sense of civic responsibility through concise but playful and dramatic prose. One notable piece is likely one of the earliest sources to use the phrase ‘playing a role’ (eine Rolle spielen) to describe a dissimulation.
In this story, a married couple (the narrator and her husband) receive unexpected guests in the countryside. Feeling annoyed and unprepared, they decide to pretend to be the most charming hosts despite their initial frustration. As the narrator assesses: “In that very moment, our guests arrived, and we began playing our roles so brilliantly that the good people were utterly delighted.” (Möser, 1776, p. 370.)
This strategy is not only successful towards the guests. Unintendedly, after a quarter an hour, the pretense leads to genuine joy for the hosts, transforming their moods and fostering an atmosphere of mutual warmth and enjoyment. By making a polite effort to appear attentive, the hosts quickly became so themselves, as their attitude bled through the pretense.
As the title (‘A proven remedy for a bad mood, shared by a lady in the countryside’) shows, Möser often used fictional correspondence’ in this case, presenting the piece as a letter from a rural woman, offering practical advice on overcoming melancholy. This story is particularly intriguing, as it represents an early example of emotional bleed, showcasing a timeless self-help strategy: intentionally using dissimulation to influence and improve one’s mood through bleed. Yet, the records suggest that this practice went beyond such innocent uses of pretense.
Getting caught up in one’s own act
Half a century later, writer Karl Leberecht Immermann (1839) reimagined Rudolf Erich Raspe’s famous Baron Münchausen adventures, combining the baron’s fictional tall tales with sharp commentary on contemporary society. One chapter in Immermann’s version includes the reversed phrase of ‘roleplaying’ (Rollenspiel), possibly for the very first time in written German, and details its psychological effects.
The story unfolds in the crumbling castle of Schnick-Schnack-Schnurr where the eccentric hosts turn against their guest, Baron Münchhausen, who pretends to suffer from chronic sleeping to escape accountability. Interestingly, the often exaggerating and flamboyant baron is not the story’s biggest pretender. He prompts his servant, Karl Buttervogel, to impersonate Prince von Hechelkram to gain influence, and Emerentia, the host’s romantic daughter, falls for the ruse. As a twist, Münchausen covertly exposes Karl’s act, and the disillusioned young woman remarks that the servant “had identified with the role through continuous roleplaying” (ein fortwährendes Rollespielen mit der Rolle identifizirt, Immermann, 1839, p. 229).
Immermann describes Karl’s gradual immersion into his assumed role. Initially portrayed as a thoroughly practical character, he adopts noble mannerisms and grows increasingly confident in his act, thriving in his role, but slowly becomes frustrated by the constraints of his deception. Not only does Karl maintain the pretense, but he gradually inhabits the role; altering his behavior, attitude, and life expectations to such an extent that even outsiders, like the disappointed Emerentia, notice the transformation. This blurring of the line between pretense and social reality prompts Emerentia to question how sustained deception can shape identity. The story could be interpreted as an example of bleed that extends beyond emotions, influencing deeper levels of personality.
Alone in the circle
It may be mere coincidence, but it is worth noting that in both stories we are in a German-speaking area, in the fictional countryside, and the narrator reflects on the roleplaying from a female identity. What might be even more important is that compared to theatre and larp, these pretenses are not transparent and reciprocal, but dissimulative and pervasive (Montola, 2012) occurrences.
Generally speaking, both in theater and larp, pretend play is created by integrating two aspects. First, we behave as if we were in a different setting and situation; in other words, we are simulating an environment. Moreover, we are behaving as if we were other persons, so we roleplay characters. These two aspects create a complex pretense, regardless of whether there is an audience, sets, costumes, etc. The two examples discussed above are probably the first to mention the terms playing a role and roleplaying in a German context where setting-simulation is absent and the magical circle of play is not transparent; only one party pretends for dissimulative purposes.
Interestingly, these early cases not only exemplify dissimulation but also illustrate its unintended consequences. In Möser’s 18th-century essay, playing a role secretly leads to emotional bleed in the pretenders, while in Immermann’s 19th-century tale, dissimulative roleplaying goes even deeper. Could it be that bleed was particularly prevalent in both cases because the roles were not transparent, demanding the pretenders to perform with great effort and credibility—taking it more seriously than within the more permissive framework of playfulness? If we are alone within the magical circle of pretense, could we be more profoundly affected by it?
Later developments
As the notion of playing a role had escaped the walls of the theatre, it did not stop at these dissimulative interpretations, but gradually became increasingly abstract. Just as the notion of bleed can be extended to include any crossover between character and player, so too could the idea of playing a role. In its most derived meaning, as a synonym for ‘to have an effect or impact,’ it regularly appeared in late 18th-century German texts (e.g. Werthes, 1791) and was also evident in many examples in English and French.
Later, in the form of ‘rôle playing’, the reversed phrase entered English texts; first only in terms of children’s pretend play and its connection to identity development (Groos, 1901). From a psychological point of view, children roleplaying is inherently tied to bleed. Its primary function is imitating, practicing, and rehearsing; in other words, adopting new behaviours and experiences through playful experimentation (Kapitany et al, 2023).
But as we have seen from the two cases, adults are also affected by pretense. This is why the term roleplayer (Rollenspieler) first appeared in the works of Jacob L. Moreno (1924), who viewed social roles not as rigid constraints but as opportunities for spontaneity, experimenting with their utilization. Searching for the origins of larp, theorists often trace larp back to Moreno through an unbroken chain of influence, referring to him as the ‘father of roleplaying’ (Fatland, 2014; 2016). As demonstrated in this article, Moreno did not invent the term roleplaying in either German or English; however, he was likely the first to integrate what larpers now call bleed into his developmental methods for adults (Moreno, 1943). Ironically, this generative aspect of roleplaying was first demonstrated by fictional writings about dissimulative pretense.
Bibliography
Boss, Emily Care. 2007. “Romance and Gender in Role-playing Games: Too Hot to Handle?” Presentation at Ropecon 2007. Helsinki, Finland.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2013. “Social Conflict in Role-playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study.” International Journal of Role-Playing 4: 4-25.
Garber, Marjorie B. 2008. Profiling Shakespeare, Routledge, New York.#
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Groos, Karl. 1901. The Play of Man. Appleton, New York.
Hartyándi, Mátyás. 2024. “Larp: the Colonist.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2024. “Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-Out from Role-Playing Games Can Affect a Player’s Sense of Self.” International Journal of Role-Playing 15: 9-35.
Immermann, Karl. 1839. Münchhausen. Band 3. Düsseldorf.
Järvelä, Simo. 2019. “How Real Is Larp?” In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen. Copenhagen: Landsforeningen Bifrost
Kapitany, Rohan, Tomas Hampejs and Thalia R. Goldstein. 2022. “Pretensive Shared Reality: From Childhood Pretense to Adult Imaginative Play.” Frontiers in Psychology 13: 19.
Leonard, Diana J., and Tessa Thurman. 2018. “Bleed-out on the Brain: The Neuroscience of Character-to-Player.” International Journal of Role-Playing 9: 9-15.
Montola, Markus. 2012. On the Edge of the Magic Circle: Understanding Role-Playing and Pervasive Games. PhD dissertation, University of Tampere, School of Information Sciences. https://trepo.tuni.fi/handle/10024/66937
Montola, Markus. 2010. “The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-playing.” Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players. Stockholm, Sweden.
Montola, Markus. 2011. “The Painful Art of Extreme Role-playing.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 3, 219–237.
Moreno, Jacob Levy. 1924. Das Stegreiftheater, Verlag des Vaters u.a., Potsdam.
Moreno, Jacob Levy. 1943. “The Concept of Sociodrama: A New Approach to the Problem of Inter-Cultural Relations.” Sociometry 6/4: 434–449.
Möser, Justus. 1776. Patriotische Phantasien. Band 2. Berlin.
Turi, Bálint Márk, and Mátyás Hartyándi. 2022. “Tribes and Kingdoms.” Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine. Edited by Juhana Pettersson, Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura 90-99.
Turi, Bálint Márk, and Mátyás Hartyándi. 2023. “Playing With The Fictitious ‘I’: Early Forms of Educational Role-Playing in Hungary, 1938-1978.” International Journal of Role-Playing 14: 47-60.
Werthes, Friedrich August Clemens. 1791. Margeritha, der Königin von Navarra, romantische Erzählungen. Band 2, Berlin.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Hartyándi, Mátyás. 2025. “Bleed Before it was Cool: Early descriptions of dissimulative pretense, their unintended effects, and their impact on the evolution of roleplaying.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Editorial note: The following articles present an introductory overview of the history of larping, and of the present state of larp, in various countries around the world. They are based on the author’s own researches, and on information that he gained from larpers in those countries. It would be great to hear from other people who know about larp activity that isn’t mentioned here — please contact contribute@nordiclarp.org if you would like to write a supplementary article for this site, or contact andrzej.pi3rzchala@gmail.com to send updates and additions directly to the author to include in his country-by-country compilation.
Larp in Greece
Introduction
First of all, I wanted to thank Stavris Gianniaris, Joan Kim Moraiti, and especially Chris Panagiotopoulos for their help.
The Greek LARP scene has evolved, characterised by a unique, or at any rate unusual, combination of historical themes and fantasy. It has very strong links with the re-enactment movement, while most of their games draw from history or mythology. In general, larps in the Balkan region are much more often linked in campaigns, often spanning many years. Single and chamber games are much rarer, although they do of course happen. From the words of my interlocutors, it seems that the scene is torn by disputes between, as far as I understand, fans of fantasy and historical games. And disputes between groups of creators, somewhat reminding me of the situation in Poland from around 2010-14.
Their main larp group on Facebook, Larp Club of Greece, has 2200 members, albeit some no longer active. The activists themselves estimate the peak of active larpers at 450 people. This is not a very large community. There is also a fairly limited pool of larps per year. Sometimes there are months of intervals in between.
The community communicates mainly via Facebook and, to a much lesser extent, via Discord. This is interesting, because the Slovak or Swiss communities have mostly migrated to Discord. I am curious as to the reasons for these differences.
Aeonia Larp: Call of the Gods (2-day event) 1-2 March 2025, created by Cerebral Productions, photo by Leuteris Liou Photography
If you would like to start looking for something on the Greek scene, hit up the group: Κοινότητα LARP Ελλάδας ~ LARP Club of Greece. They are super helpful and have a group of responsive activists.
According to my interlocutors, Greece is at a rather early stage in the development of its community, if we understand it according to Polish, German, Nordic, etc. assumptions and standards. There is a lot of sad sarcasm and probably a certain regret about this state of affairs when talking about its ‘backwardness’. However, it is apparent that they are diligently trying to bounce back after the pandemic and are pushing forward intensely. A new generation is beginning to take an interest in larps and invest their commitment and time in it. The significant number of young creators, under the age of 25, who are committed to creating larps and their communities is highlighted. However, they still lack a proper ecosystem.
As for the reasons, they cite two decades of economic problems, meagre cultural spending and austerity, depleting Greeks’ purchasing power on the one hand and their willingness to engage in anything that requires extra mental effort on the other.
It was emphasised that the community continues to fight against toxic behaviour and attempts to educate participants about what larp is, beyond hitting each other with foam swords (most fantasy larps) and malicious intrigue (most vampire games — these are not now a large part of the Greek scene).
Aeonia Larp: Mystagogy (chamber larp) 12 November 2023, created by Cerebral Productions, photo by Leuteris Liou Photography
To quote Chris Panagiotopoulos:
“It’s a tough battle with ideological/social stakes, as sexists, homophobes, bigots and abusers continue to lurk on the scene, segmenting it into cults of personality. [ed. groups being led by charismatic ‘chiefs’, the cult of the individual, and other wonders we’ve managed to bury a lot of, but I still remember them in Polish larp as being massive once upon a time.] However, I am optimistic that sooner or later people will understand the message and start rejecting these bad actors to build a real community to run and play larps for fun.”
History
Since when has there been a larp scene in Greece? It started to form in the 1990s with the larps of Vampire: the Masquerade, but the modern history of the larp scene is set by those involved themselves to begin in 2015.
A brief history of larps in Greece, by Chris:
1990s – early 00s: The intersection of gaming, goth and metal subculture, larps were monthly events in boardgame shops and later in RPG clubs such as (ESPAIROS, founded in 1999). In the World of Darkness formula: most of them were Vampire: the Masquerade. There were also a few successful local common larp/ARG hybrids (unfortunately, the only surviving materials from these are physical books written in Greek). Vampire became synonymous with larp, with about 16 events a year, about 100 larps in total. Divided into 3 to 5 campaigns of 20-40 players each.
Late 00s – early 10s: the larp scene in Athens was absorbed by the role-playing game scene. Other cities (Heraklion, Thessaloniki, Patra) created and maintained separate vampire larp scenes with 10 to 30 players.
Early 2010s: Athens had practically no larp scene anymore. Heraklion and Thessaloniki were doing a bit better, but not much better. Conversations started in a Facebook group about fantasy larps, such as Mythodea and DrachenFest.
Late 10s: A new community formed in Athens — Aeonia — to play fantasy larps. Larps in Athens attracted a new generation of role-playing game players. Many more larps were created. Fantasy larps were mostly played in parks for free. Athens fantasy gamers started to visit Bulgaria for larps. The number of participants peaked in 2018, around 450 players (Greek games, plus Greeks at The Fog Larp in Bulgaria).
COVID: All larp events came to a halt throughout Greece. Most of the communities became dormant, as students went home for the lockdown. The only exception was Portal 2021, which took place in Athens
After Covid: New games appear, and some old games resume. With a reduced number of participants, but increasing plurality. The pandemic blocked the expected expansion of the scene, and destroyed many communities which disintegrated after more than two years without events. On the other hand, it drove away some of the toxic influences on the community and gave us, burnt out from trying to create games, a chance to reassess and consolidate our efforts. The result was the formation of Cerebral Productions. [Edited to include Chris].
Aeonia Larp: Journey to Quadath (5-day event) 1-5 May 2025, created by Cerebral Productions, photo by Leuteris Liou Photography
Currently, only Aeonia and Primal regularly organise outdoor games (about 30-50 participants each). Athens also hosts occasional chamber larps (10-30 participants) and some hybrids of board games and larps. Larissa has its own board game/larp scene and efforts are being made to create new communities in Thessaloniki, Serres, Janina, and Patra
Larps active at the end of the previous decade in Athens:
Important games, and what they recommend, what is the situation with foreign players
The only international game currently running is Aeonia, which is developed and run in English. Participation in The Fog Larp[there is more about this in my article about the Bulgarian scene] was still significant until last summer. Most players do not leave their city to participate in larps. Efforts are being made to attract more international players.
On the LARP Club Greece Facebook group there is a list of available larps, all declaring themselves to be foreigner-friendly, in the sense that all GMs and the vast majority of the player base are able to communicate in English to some extent.
Contemporary larps that interviewees highlight as being particularly accessible to foreigners:
Aeonia Larp (Cerebral Productions) (from June 2015 – the present)
Renaissance fantasy
Primal (Larponomicon) (2023 – present)
Post-Apocalyptic Drama
Larp in Romania
Introduction
This will be a rather short text about a small but interesting larp scene. Romania is not a country too close to us [ed. written from a Polish perspective], but with a rich culture. I hope their larp scene has its best years ahead of it. Let’s get started.
Mihaela Georgescu at the larp Synthocracy Conclave, photo by Flobo Studio
I collected the material thanks to Berna Okumus from Bucharest.
History
A few years ago, there was a Larp House team in Romania. Its Facebook group collected 1100 followers, albeit starting that at a time when Facebook reaches and likes were quite easy. Today, this attempt requires a lot of effort. Larp House appeared on the larp scene around 2015 and disappeared from communication channels with the end of 2017, according to some witnesses – although others place it in 2019, before the pandemic. It is inconclusive which of these versions is more likely. The team organised at least eight games over two years. Their prices hovered around €10-22. They probably numbered in the area of 10-20 participants.
After they disappeared there was a vacuum created. The current developers know little about them and in fact absolutely nothing about the times before them. I guess you could say that today’s Romanian creators survived their own dinosaur extinction or some other Jedi purge there.
Currently
At the moment, the scene is centred around a team called Ministry of Roleplay. They are made up of several creators. Berna Okumus, who answered my questions, started creating games two years ago, as Red Saga LARP | Bucharest. In her own words:
“[…] I started organising larps on my own, but it quickly became too difficult because it’s not a one-person job. Previously, we applied for Erasmus larp projects and organised several larps. […] We organise a larp once every few months and try to build a larp community in Romania. Our larps tend to be 10-20 players, but we have a group chat of about 60-70 people with people who have played one of our larps before or are very keen to join the next one.”
So there is no big larp scene in Romania, but there are similar communities to draw from. There are large airsoft groups that have an element of role-playing and narrative. There is also clearly a large community of improvisational theatre and rpg games.
My interviewees (Berna, and others who preferred to remain anonymous) are aware that re-enactment groups organise occasional events with elements of role-playing and storytelling, but have no contact with them and know little about them.
Larpers from Romania, actually from Bucharest, play mainly fantasy, but also other genres: comedy, thriller, competition, romance. Their games are usually 6 – 8 hours long.
Their sample projects:
La Bloc – meaning ‘in the block’. A parody of Romanian life in a typical post-communist block neighbourhood. The characters were clichés of all the character tropes that can be found in a typical Romanian neighbourhood; thugs, old ladies gossiping about youth, drug dealers, a budding rapper/DJ, the building’s president, a gigolo uncle, children playing, people eating sunflower seeds, etc. [ed. which proves we, in Poland, are not too different].
Veilbound – a larp Halloween fantasy event, with monsters in an abandoned Bucharest amphitheatre. It’s worth noting that they hit the front pages of the local newspapers at the time.
Leylines of Los Angeles – a meeting-style game, set in the council of magicians.
Circle of Shadows – an elimination larp, hosted as part of Larp Alchemy Nausika in Krakow. The game was about recruiting for the mafia.
Serban Pitic at the larp Synthocracy Conclave, photo by Flobo Studio
They are now starting to expand their collaboration with the rpg community. They organised a live streamed larp about artificial intelligence as part of a 16-hour rpg marathon broadcast on Twitch.
Anything else? They have enthusiasm and are competing bravely – let’s keep our fingers crossed for them, we were there once too!
Larp in Switzerland
Introduction
Let’s talk about the Swiss larp scene today. It dates back to around 1999, although some sources suggest that it may be ten years older. Their larp groups are strongly affiliated to the Italian, German, and French language communities (mainly the latter two), and maintain strong contact with other larp communities playing in those languages. Switzerland is, let us emphasise, quadrilingual. The Confederation’s constitution recognises four languages as national languages, and they are also official in federal institutions: German, spoken by 63.7% of the population, French, spoken by 20.4% of the population, Italian spoken by 6.5% of the population and Romansh, spoken by 0.5% of the population.
In French, in German
French larper Thomas B. has published a very cool video presentation on the Swiss larp scene, which was originally prepared for Knudepunkt 2011. It’s a bit out of date, but in English and describes how the Swiss scene communities differ: the German and the French. The video presentation focuses mainly on the French-speaking scene.
Most games are played in groups of 10 to around 80 players, with a few larger events. To quote one of the larpers interviewed, Stephan Kaufmann: “Most of the community shares stories and friendships far beyond our Swiss borders.” Their larp calendar shows about twenty-something larps (mostly from the German-speaking community) per year.
The pandemic has killed many projects — as everywhere, unfortunately. After the pandemic, the Swiss tried to open as many as they could of the killed projects. With some they succeeded, with others they did not. This is significant because the core of their larp scene is in the form of long larp campaigns.
The larp scene consists of a hard core of around 100 players who go to almost every Swiss larp and who attend meetings such as Stammtisch (irregular social gatherings). There are about 1,100 people in the Larp Schweiz Facebook group, and their very lively Discord counts 200.
Again quoting, “Players from abroad are often part of us if they speak German (Austrians and Germans). You can also participate if you at least understand German and speak German or English.”
Most games in Switzerland are ‘bring your own character’ larps instead of casting and writing characters in advance. Many of their fantasy games are set in one dedicated world, collectively developed.
The world, or rather the country they play in, is called Candara. It was founded around 2010, when a number of organisers with their own world and storyline decided to merge them, to make it easier to play the same character in multiple games and have more games with the same background.
The German-speaking scene, the largest, is just heavily campaign-based, loose and not very mechanical. They claim to draw from the German school, but this is only partly true. German larpers divide in terms of their approach to mechanics and rules — mainly, north and south. There will be a text about this in my article about German larp, but note that the north is less battle-larp-oriented and has more rules, while the south is more battle-larp-oriented and has less rules and mechanics and more DKWDDK (Du kannst, was du darstellen kannst — you can do what you can represent.) So the Swiss are closer to the southern part of German larp.
The French-speaking scene is more chambery and one-shot oriented, more mechanical, structuring its games more strongly.
Most Swiss games include a location with room and board, so a certain set of comforts and an appropriate level of comfort. Purely outdoor, camp-based games are very rare. Which, given their climate, is not surprising.
Again quoting a local larp player, Lorenz:
“The big difference between Swiss larps (the German-speaking part) and French or German larps is the language. We all speak Swiss German, a local dialect that is only understood by our closest German or Austrian neighbours. In the game, ordinary German is spoken (the same German in which we already read and write). So basically, we are playing in a language other than our everyday language all the time. Swiss German is usually used for conversation outside the game during larps. I’ve only been to one game played in Swiss-German and most of the feedback was that people didn’t like it. French and German influences are very evident in Switzerland, with the French-speaking part largely adopting their style and the German-speaking part adopting the German influence.”
The Nordic larp style emerged quite late in Switzerland and is still not very widespread. ‘Nordic’, in the sense that our Polish scene is also Nordic, from their perspective.
A few years ago there was a large Vampire: the Masquerade community in Switzerland, which, as far as I know, is now mainly active on games in Germany, while others have either stopped playing VtM altogether or only do small VtM games.
Curiosities
Swiss people generally tend to have a very laid-back approach to games and avoid difficult topics.
The probably oldest Swiss LARP campaign, Tikon, had around 90 games from 1986 to 2005, set in a fantasy caliphate and was very much in the style of Terry Pratchett.
The community organizes regular offline meetings: every two weeks in Zurich, and also bi-weekly online on Discord. There have also been or currently are meetings in other cities, for example, there was a long-standing Stammtisch in Baden for Vampire: the Masquerade players.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
The purpose of this qualitative survey study was to discover the perceived benefits for adults participating in Live Action Role-Play (larp) games or events. The study builds on and contributes to work in creativity theory, Self-Determination Theory, and student engagement theory. The constructs from these salient theories include autonomy, collaboration, perceived competence, and emotional, behavioral and cognitive engagement. Knowing the answers to what motivates adults to spend time, money, and emotional energy on a game seemingly not valued, may provide insights into developing roleplay further as pedagogy beyond recreation.
The context: SWORDCRAFT Australia
Australia has over thirty-seven larp groups throughout the country. The Australian larp community “Swordcraft” is the largest larp community in Australia, boasting the largest medieval battle game and live action roleplay events. Set in the medieval “Warhammer Fantasy Universe” (originally a board game), it follows the storyline of the Border Lands. Their website describes the game as follows:
“Our battles boast the involvement of hundreds of people in large scale field and forest battles, sieges and skirmishes.…we fight with authentic-looking foam weapons and real steel armour, chain maille, leather, and high-quality costumes…Swordcraft hosts weekly battle games across Australia.”
The Swordcraft website describes week-long “Quests” that happen annually. The event brings larpers and merchants from all over Australia to “roleplay, eat, drink, and battle.”
Swordcraft began in 2011 and is a well-established not-for-profit organisation that seeks to “develop an inclusive community”. Leadership positions include president, treasurer, secretary and founders. Other positions include logistics and new player training, community liaison compliance, quest event organizer and head martial. Additionally, you have officers for rules and equipment, community engagement, public relations and media liaison. There are ten chapters of Swordcraft in Australia, including Brisbane, Melbourne and South Australia.
Swordcraft is set in one world involving battles in the medieval Warhammer universe. Participants’ characters are inspired from the vast list created for the board game and Swordcraft battles take place in field settings across Australia. Despite its obvious differences with Nordic larp, what I wanted to study is rooted in collaboration among players and organizers, something universal to larp.
Methods: An Open-ended Online Survey
Swordcraft agreed to sponsor my research survey on their websites.((The research used a Qualtrics online survey that ensured the ethical requirements were met: all respondents had to indicate that they were 18 years of age or older before beginning the survey, and all survey respondents were anonymous. All data collected is securely stored at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia.)) A total of 58 respondents completed the survey over a six month period. The survey consisted of four questions, with no limit to the length of responses allowed:
What factors influenced your decision to join a larp group?
List, describe, explain the different benefits you get from participating in larp.
List, describe, explain the different challenges you face participating in larp.
What would you like others to know about participating in larp?
The questions were open-ended, because I wanted to investigate larp as a lived human experience. Self-reflexivity and references to personal experiences were the primary sources. I recognized and respected the participants’ subjective meaning contained within their statements. I chose this approach, because roleplaying and game-playing itself involves constructing subjective meaning.
Theoretical frame: Creativity, Autonomy and Self-Determination Theory (SDT)
Education and training platforms are increasingly calling for the development of critical skills, which Lisa Gjeddes identifies as “creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication” (Gjeddes 2013, 90).
During this study, I was interested in looking at creativity as developed through social environments that foster “autonomy” (Manucci, Orazi, and de Valck 2021, 650). As defined by Blumenfeld, Kempler and Krajcik (2006), “autonomy” is experienced when the social context of the activity affords adults with a sense of psychological freedom and perceived choice over one’s own actions. Sam Bolton, who also wrote about Swordcraft, makes clear that the basic requirements for creativity, namely collaboration and autonomy, are key in larp:
“There is a shared sense of creation, a constant reinforcement that your imagination means something to the collective. Swordcraft promotes collaboration and asks you to immerse yourself not only in a roughly medieval fantasy world of epic battle and adventure, but in a much richer community of like-minded participants, working toward the same vision” (Bolton 2013, 36).
In my research, I have combined these references to the frame of Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is a macro theory of human motivation. There, autonomy, perceived competence, and relatedness are identified as psychological needs innate to the individual, and fulfilling these needs facilitates intrinsic motivation (Ryan and Deci 2000). As Finnish scholar Tuomas Harvianen notes, there is much speculation on player motivation. While most studies use a predetermined list of motivators,((See McDiarmid (2011), Stark (2012), and Yee (2012).)) Bienia allowed participants to add their own (Bienia 2013). Bienia then found that “Support” was an added motivator from 44 individuals, “…stressing the motivation of supporting other players and the game”. This notion of “support” speaks to the construct “perceived competence” in SDT theory, making it a motivator but also part of the constructs of relatedness (collaboration) and autonomy, which are key to developing “creativity” in creativity theory.
Research questions
Respondents to the survey do not point to autonomy and perceived competence: Autonomy is built into the larp experience, and participation happens through the supportive larp network, enabling feelings of competence. To keep my theoretical frame at the center of this study, I used three main questions when analyzing the larp participants’ open-ended survey responses:
What indicators of the constructs of engagement (emotional, behavioral, and cognitive) are reported by larp survey respondents?
What indicators of the constructs of autonomy, collaboration, and perceived competence are reported by larp survey respondents?
Will the qualitative data be corroborated by the quantitative data? The validity of inferences arising from research findings will be strengthened through this analysis, showing magnitude (Creswell, Plano Clark, Gutmann, and Hanson 2003).
Methodology
I used deductive thematic analysis, utilizing both qualitative and quantitative approaches, aligning with content analysis to assess the magnitude of responses. The frequency of responses indicating an identified construct are shown as percentages. For example, if a question has 46 “social indicating” responses out of 58 participants, the percentage or strength of that response is 79%. I also averaged the responses for each construct over the four questions. Some responses to individual questions pointed to more than one engagement construct. Tabulations were made for each engagement construct for each question.
I included quotations for some of the responses which can illustrate motivating factors and key types of engagement. Sample responses are indicative of the most commonly represented.
Data Analysis: What Resonated Most in the Four Question Responses
Although larp provides emotional, cognitive and physical engagement, and although larpers enjoy the creativity of developing their character and kit, what stands out most is the social benefits.
Question 1: What factors influenced your decision to join a larp group?
SOCIAL: “I have met a huge group of people with common interests and made many new friends”…”Having this amazing and friendly community to be a part of, socialization”
PHYSICAL: “fitness”…”it is really good exercise, physical health”
EMOTION: “I discovered a new confidence in myself, stress levels have gone down”
CREATIVITY: “drives me to be creative in my costuming and characterisation, it pushes me to try new things”
COGNITIVE: “skill gain, increased confidence, organizational skills”…”Practice skills like leadership and critical thinking”
Question 3: List, describe, explain the different challenges you face participating in larp.
EMOTION: “It’s bloody fun”…”it can be a very engaging and rewarding hobby”
COGNITIVE: “learn new skills in a community with a wide range of skills, knowledge, and passions”
SOCIAL: “that there is a broad range of people that participate, we have teachers, plumbers, electricians, it really is its own little community”
PHYSICAL: “There is competitiveness, adrenalin, fighting, physical combat”
CREATIVITY: “recreating costumes to fit the era”…”immersion”
Note: While the survey shows that social motivation is central to larpers, larp also suffers from negative stereotypes that, in turn, can impact participants’ social status. However, when questioned about these negative stereotypes, the respondents further advocated for larp as an opportunity to be part of a community and do something fun.
Reflections
In my teaching career I found roleplay to be an extremely effective way to learn, both in live simulations and writing in role. Similarly, larp-like simulations, both physical and virtual, are employed in a wide range of settings including the military, various workplaces, and higher education. The constructs embedded in the larp experience showcase the power of roleplaying beyond leisure. Larp benefits are seen as especially important for the development of “21st century skills” such as creativity, social and interpersonal skills etc. Larps are being used to enable people to engage with history, heritage, and culture. Larp can be instrumental in creating positive change for communities through raising awareness and generating solutions and possible interventions.
McDiarmid, who also studied the motivations, benefits, and challenges facing larpers, urged further research in this area with a call to “compare larp motivations internationally” (McDiarmid 2011, 102). My study’s findings regarding the motivations of Australian larpers and how they are engaged by the activity aims to contribute to this dialogue with Nordic larp researchers. Of particular interest to me is McDiarmid’s assertion, “With the rise of mobile computing and augmented reality technology, more possibilities for different ways of larping arise” (McDiarmid 2011, 102), predicting further interesting comparisons between traditions of larping and player’s motivation.
References
Bienia, Rafael. 2013. “Why Do They Larp? Motivations for Larping in Germany”. In The Wyrd Con Companion Book, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek. Creative Commons.
Bolton, Sam 2013. “Crusades and kinship: Live action role play in Melbourne”, Kill your darlings new fiction, essays, commentary and reviews. 29-36. The INFORMAT.
Blumenfeld, P.C., Kempler, T.M., and Krajcik, J.S..2006. “Motivation and cognitive
engagement in learning environments”. In The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, edited by R.K. Sawyer. Cambridge University Press.
Creswell, Plano-Clark, Gutmann and Hanson. 2003. “Advanced mixed methods research
designs”. In Handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioural research, edited by A. Tashakkori and C. Teddie. SAGE.
Gjedde, Lisa. 2013. “Role Game Playing as a Platform for Creative and Collaborative
Learning”. European Conference on Games Based Learning. Proquest.com.
Manucci, P.V., Orazi, D.C., and de Valck, K. 2021. “Developing Improvisational Skills: The
Influence of Individual Orientation”. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 66 (3): 612-658. SAGE. DOI: 10.1177/000183922095697
McDiarmid, Rob. 2011. “Analyzing Player Motives to Inform larp Design”. In Branches of Play: The 2011 Wyrd Con Academic Companion, edited by Amber Eagar. Creative Commons.
Ryan, R.M., and Deci, E.L. 2000. “Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic
motivation, social development, and well-being”. American Psychologist, 55(1): 68-78. Doi: 10.1037//0003-066X.55.1.68
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Barta, Sam. 2025. “What Do Adult Participants Get Out of Larp? A qualitative survey based on SWORDCRAFT Australia.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
In my larp Hyvät museovieraat (Eng. Dear Museum Visitors), artworks came alive and possessed the bodies of the participants. I designed the larp for Amos Rex, one of the three big art museums in Helsinki, Finland. I ran it twice at their exhibition Musta tuntuu, toistaiseksi (I Feel, for Now), which presented artworks from their collections. It was a scalable larp that could accommodate at most 50 players, and tickets were sold online on a first-come-first-served basis. Players included both experienced larpers and newcomers. The larp was run when the museum was closed, so there were no spectators and players had privacy.
Amos Rex profiles as a “young” museum. For example, they have featured exhibitions by teamLab, Hans Op de Beeck, Ryoji Ikeda, and other artists who create immersive installations – sometimes like alternative visual realities that you experience from the inside. Amos Rex has also held Game Amos seminars about game art. No wonder, then, that they also wished to have a larp in their repertoire.
I could have used the exhibition as merely a venue where some events happened to play out, but I did not want that, I wanted my larp to be in dialogue with the exhibition. Neither did I want the larp to be just one art piece among others in the exhibition. I wanted the larp to be about the exhibition, and I wanted the participants to be in constant interaction with the artworks as they played.
The game scholar Jaakko Stenros pointed out to me that I was doing in reverse something that artists like Brody Condon and Adam James have been involved with. Whereas they make art objects (such as a film) out of a larp, I made a larp out of an exhibition of art objects. Each player used one artwork as a basis for creating a character that would then possess the player’s body during the larp. The idea was that the artworks were living creatures with personalities of their own. In the beginning of the larp, they would take over museumgoers’ bodies: Each player walked into the exhibition as themselves, stopped in front of their artwork, and let it take control of their body (or, in other words, began playing the artwork-character). Thus, there was a pervasive element, and the players became the artworks.
Design philosophy from the blackbox tradition
For the Amos Rex museum, the larp was a way to draw in new audiences that might revisit the museum on other occasions. At the same time, we were showcasing larp as a form of expression to people with no previous experience of it. When a larp is advertised on the social media channels of a large museum, it attracts people from outside the larp community.
I aimed for a beginner-friendly design and for a larp that would be easy to access: Participants needed to be able to walk in without preparing beforehand. Dropouts and no shows were common at museum events, so I went for a scalable larp. It could not be too long; it had to be something that could be played in one evening after work. As no preparations, short duration and scalability are common in Nordic blackbox larps, I applied several design innovations from that tradition.
I aimed to fit the larp in 4 hours (which is the typical length of a larp slot at blackbox festivals). We ended up with a 2-hour workshop and about 2 hours of play. As in many blackbox larps, most of the design effort went into the workshop. I began the workshop with a guided meditation that introduced players to the themes of the larp. Then, there was a warmup designed to help them play artworks physically, and finally, we created characters and relationships.
Newcomers can find it difficult to come up with things to do in a larp. It becomes easier if there are experienced larpers present, whose example the beginners can follow. This is called herd competence (Lundqvist 2015). To achieve herd competence, we aimed for half of our participants to have some previous larp experience. There were two ticket categories, one for beginners and another for experienced larpers.
In the fiction of the larp, Amos Rex was a museum where artworks came alive and possessed the bodies of visitors every now and then, and the guides knew about it. It was their job to advise paintings, sculptures and other pieces of art who were confused in their newly acquired human bodies. Most of the guides were played by actual museum guides, and we had a lot of fun together brainstorming “nighttime personalities” for them in preparation for the larp. Participants could always consult these museum guides – either in-game or off-game – if they felt at loss during the larp and did not know what to do.
Goals and Rituals
Clear (and perhaps even slightly gamist (see Edwards 2001, Bøckman 2003) goals are often helpful for first-time larpers. When players focus on a goal, it is easier to come up with things to do, and they don’t get bored. Goals generate action that helps structure playtime.
Another possibility to make a larp beginner-friendly is to have a lot of pre-planned events to which the players can react. Since Hyvät museovieraat involved exploring a large exhibition space, planned events didn’t feel practical, and I decided to go for goal-oriented play. Moreover, I wanted to give players who so wished the possibility to just freely delve in the museum space and concentrate on interactions, and in a larp it is easier to ignore goals than planned events.
The goal for some characters was to stay in the body of a visitor, leave the museum, and become a human (the players got to decide for themselves whether their characters wanted this). To achieve this, an artwork had to perform a ritual that attached it permanently to the body, and it needed help from two other artworks. However, these assistants would have to give up the possibility of performing the ritual for themselves and thus give up on their hope of becoming human!
Keiken (2023-2024): Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚. Photo: Niclas Warius / Amos Rex.
Museum guides instructed characters on how to perform the rituals, which meant we did not need to use workshop time on practicing them. Experiential artworks were used as ritual sites. One of these was Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚ (2023–2024), a science-fiction style installation by the artist collective Keiken (see photo above). It is a glowing, shell-like space curtained off from the rest of the exhibition, where visitors lie down on soft pods with a vibrating silicone womb on their abdomen, listening to the installation’s soundscape through headphones (see Amos Rex 2024). In the ritual, the group of three artworks – one who wished to stay in a human body and two helpers – would occupy one of the pods.
Characters could also have other objectives. Some of them wished to continue their existence as artworks somewhere else than in this particular museum. Others wanted to prevent another character from escaping the museum so as not to be separated from them. Players came up with these goals in guided workshop exercises. Sometimes the outcomes could be quite drastic: one painting hated its maker and wanted somebody else to escape the museum and kill the artist.
Characters who went for the ritual option faced the challenge of persuading two other artworks to assist. One way to do this was to offer deals. An artwork could promise to do a favor for another one once it was outside the museum. The characters could trust each other’s word on it since the ritual would bind them to it. Kalervo Palsa’s painting Itseriittoisuus (1978; Eng. Self-sufficiency, see cover photo) desired to be hung on display in a meeting room of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, a lobby group and major wielder of economic power. It helped another painting in the ritual on the condition that the escapee would convince the Confederation to purchase it from the museum.
Emotions and inter-character drama
Unlike many collection exhibitions, I Feel, For Now did not present artworks chronologically or arrange them based on art movements. Instead, the art pieces were organized thematically, with a focus on the emotions they expressed (in the curators’ opinion). Five major themes had emerged this way: Beneath the Surface, Memory Games, A Moment of Extasy, Emotional Language and Carried Away by the Senses.
Since the exhibition was about emotions, I hoped the larp could be about them too. Moreover, I wanted to incorporate the main themes of the exhibition in the larp. So I decided that the curators’ theme groups would determine who could help a given artwork in the ritual.
All the characters were artworks from either the Beneath the Surface part of the exhibition or the Memory Games part or A Moment of Extasy part. The emotional life of an artwork was more limited than that of a human. Thus, in the ritual, an artwork who wanted to stay in a human body had to absorb the whole spectrum of human emotions. This meant that an artwork who was labeled under Beneath the Surface (which usually meant that they had dark, hidden emotions) needed the playful childlike emotions embodied by the Memory Games artworks and the feelings of almost religious ecstasy from A Moment of Extasy. Each ritual group would contain artworks from three different theme groups, and in the ritual, the two helpers would donate part of their own emotional landscape to the character who was going to become human.
To create emotional drama, I wanted to make the decision to leave or stay in the museum hard. Either way, the character would have to make a sacrifice – to let go of something. One obvious design choice was to divide the characters into tight-knit groups that would split during the larp.
In the workshop, we divided the characters into groups of about five. These artworks had been displayed close to each other in the exhibition, and their group dynamics resembled that of a family. We workshopped the details with the players and instructed them to create both negative and positive relations within the group. These groups would eventually break apart when some members would stay in the museum and others leave.
Physicality
Physicality was another thing to be considered in the design process. There is a social script for a museum space: a mode of behavior to which you tend to instinctively fall back when you enter an exhibition. In an art museum, people are likely to slowly wander around looking at the objects and talk in low voices. One of the goals with Hyvät museovieraat was to break the script and encourage people to behave in ways you don’t usually see in a museum. For this to succeed, it was crucial that there were no outsiders in the museum during the larp.
The rules of the museum constrained the possibilities for physicality. For example, running is not allowed in the exhibition space, and there are other limitations in place to ensure the safety of the artworks. Moreover, intense physical touch was ruled out since the larp was in the official program of the museum and tickets were sold online on a first-come-first-served basis. Participants could touch each other on hands and arms and hug each other after asking for permission.
However, nothing stopped players from e.g. crawling on the floor or moving their bodies in unexpected, non-human ways. A museum representative mentioned this at the beginning of the workshop when explaining the museum rules. During the workshop, I encouraged participants to explore new ways of moving that could suit their characters. The players warmed up for the larp with an exercise where they looked at different artworks and then tried to move the way the artwork would move if it were a living being.
In the character creation exercise, participants chose an artwork from a given area in the exhibition, and we would then broadcast from the museum PA system a list of questions that helped them create the character. There were questions about the character’s personality and goals, as well as questions that inspired the participants to look at the artwork in new ways. Some questions guided them to think about movement, such as the following:
When you take over the human body, how do you move it? How does this movement convey your true essence? Take a few steps and try out this way to move.
The first run of the larp became surprisingly physical and emotional, given that it was such a short larp. One participant kept his hands behind his back all the time since a character in the artwork lacked arms. People crawled on the floor and screamed at each other. There was emotional drama, and players cried. I hadn’t expected it to be so intense and wondered where the emotions came from. Maybe it was the artworks that inspired people’s play.
On the other hand, the second run seemed much less physical and emotional. In the end, every player group makes a different larp.
Art pedagogy
Ultimately, Hyvät museovieraat was a way to experience art in a new fashion. The participants concentrated on one artwork and went quite deeply into it – often the way you immerse in a larp character. Thus, it was like looking at the artwork from inside.
Melanie Orenius, who works as a curator of education at Amos Rex, brought an art pedagogical angle to the larp. She formulated character creation questions that had to do with the size of the artwork or the technique used to create it. These questions guided the participants to pay attention to details they might have otherwise ignored. For example, one question was:
“Think about the colors in the artwork. Is there a tinge that dominates it, and is it tranquilizing or energizing? What do the colors tell you about the character?”
The questions also discussed how art is displayed and went into deeper inquiries about its worth. Part of the PA announcement went:
“Dear artworks. You are part of the collections of Amos Rex. But did anyone ask your permission for it?
Would you rather be in another museum, in a public space, or in somebody’s – maybe your own – home? How valuable do you feel you are, and what determines your value?”
When we were workshopping the small family-like groups, players looked at each other’s artworks when creating relationships. One group spontaneously came up with the idea of checking the years when the artworks were made and created a seniority hierarchy based on them: The older artworks would treat the younger ones like children or little siblings.
Curation and display became major topics during the larp. Many artworks wished to be moved to another place in the exhibition. In the second run, there was even a discussion about what would happen to the artworks who stayed in the museum once the exhibition ended. When I told them, in the role of a museum guide, that they would be moved into a storage space, it created an uproar.
Artworks who permanently took over a human body had to find a place to store the human spirit (that of the players) – a suitable artwork in the exhibition. At the end of the larp, everybody filled in details about their artwork (either the one they played, or the one they stored their human into) on a small form with questions like the name of the artwork, how it should be cared for, and how it should be displayed.
Many players left these little pieces of paper in the museum, and they were archived. It was fun to read them afterward. One participant renamed her artwork – a stylistic, acrylic neon sculpture of a pig – The Plexiglass Queen and wrote that champagne should always be served in front of it. Another one wrote that his artwork should not be displayed at all: curtains should be drawn in front of it.
Radical interpretations
During the larp each participant held the interpretative authority on what their artwork-character was truly about. There were no introductions to the exhibition or its artworks beforehand. It was the participants who decided how exactly to transform the artworks into characters.
This meant that there were some unorthodox and unusual interpretations. For example, one participant found their artwork ugly – a horrible sum of mistakes that just wanted to be destroyed and to destroy the artist who had made it. Based on the feedback, some participants found others’ ways of seeing the artwork shocking.
How a larp turns out always depends on the ensemble of players. A group of curators and critics would probably have played Hyvät museovieraat differently. Maybe their interpretations of the art would have carried more weight and been better justified. However, some motivations for the larp came from the field of audience development, where guides and curators who do interactive tours wish they could get visitors to be bolder about expressing their thoughts on the art.
The larp functioned as a platform for exactly this. Most people who look at art are not art professionals, and they always make their own readings and judgments on the art. They just don’t usually express them to people within the art world. The new and radical thing about the larp was that it served as a forum to voice those thoughts and play with them.
Other reflections
All in all, Hyvät museovieraat got good scores on the participant feedback forms. Originally, the larp was to be run only once, but a rerun was scheduled because of the positive feedback. However, the larp probably wasn’t as beginner-friendly as it looked on paper – even experienced larpers reported that it was not an easy larp.
In some sense, I knew this all along, deep down. Shortness and no preparation requirements lower the threshold for newcomers to participate in the larp, but they don’t make it easy to play. First-time larpers often need clear instructions and struggle when they have to come up with stuff themselves. They are not sure what is possible, and they wonder what they are supposed to do. It is often more difficult to make your own character than to play a pre-written one. Furthermore, it is definitely easier to throw yourself into something familiar than to start creating characters and relationships out of artworks that might not have obvious connections to each other. There are a myriad of ways to turn an artwork into a larp character, even with guiding questions, and that very freedom makes it difficult.
However, we got positive feedback also from newcomers who had great experiences. Many of them also created beautiful play. Creating content for Hyvät museovieraat lay heavily on the players, but I don’t see any other way in which we could have made this larp. If the goal is to engage participants with art, you have to do it on their own terms, with no readymade interpretations and easy-to-apply formulae.
Hyvät museovieraat (Eng. Dear Museum Visitors)
Location: Amos Rex art museum, Helsinki
Runs: May 21th and August 20th, 2024.
Duration: 4 hours
Number of participants: scalable, at most 50
Admission fee: 30 / 15 euros
Design: Kaisa Kangas (larp design) and Melanie Orenius (art education)
Producer: Sanja Kulomaa
Special thanks: Syksy Räsänen, Dare Talvitie, Bjarke Pedersen, Halden Pfearsen, Miles Lizak.
Bøckman, Petter. “The Three Way Model”. In As Larp Grows Up – Theory and Methods in Larp, eds. Morten Gade, Line Thorup and Mikkel Sander. Projektgruppen KP03. 2003.
Edwards, Ron. 2001. “GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory, Chapter 2” The Forge, October 14, 2001. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/3/ (last accessed Jan 26, 2025)
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Kangas, Kaisa. 2025. “Experiencing Art from Within.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
This article describes our artistic practice and design principles focusing on the bodily experience. First, we theorize what we are doing and then give a practical overview of some of our pieces.
We have worked mainly in the Finnish art field as an artistic duo. As artists, we look at larp from a slightly different angle, and there is no perfect word for our approach. Our interdisciplinary artistic works are not quite like larps are usually understood. We call them instruction-based performances, built around short directed scenes emphasizing a particular theme or experience. Embodily design often plays a big role in our pieces, both in creation and the final piece.
Vili and Nina on one of the actual sites where a coven did rituals working on a larp about them. Photo: Vili Myrsky Nissinen 2024
What we mean by embodied art
Larp is the art of experience, but not all larps are embodied art. For us, embodied art is art created by researching bodily experiences and trying to find ways to replicate them for the participants. Embodied art designs the bodily experience directly.
Larp designers often focus on fiction, information, and physical objects to create an immersive setting, skipping thinking about the participants’ bodies beyond keeping them safe and accommodating basic physical needs like food and sleep. Larp designers expect emotions and experiences to emerge from the information and setting they have created, and many times they do. But, larp is first and foremost experienced through the participants’ bodies, and what happens in the participants’ bodies creates the piece. In larp, participants strive for certain emotions, narratives, and human experiences. All things humans start from our body and senses. The bodily experience can be designed; bodies guided and prompted towards the emotions we aim to create to support our narrative. We as creators believe that body-focused design is a very direct and reliable way to achieve the experience larp designers want to create and that it significantly accommodates participants in achieving it.
The body as a design tool
Our pieces in the art scene are mostly based on the history of queers and other oppressed. For us, a crucial part of doing background research on certain groups or events is recreating their footsteps and actions using our bodies to understand what they were doing. We aim to understand how the events felt in the bodies of the people whose stories we are telling. This is crucial for us to tell their tale respectfully and in the right tone.
For example as preparations for Fenezar! (2024), a larp about a working-class witch coven that radicalized and did horrific acts in 1930s Helsinki, we visited two of the coven’s actual ritual sites and did spells there based on their rituals. The other ritual site is not easy to reach, as it is far away from the center of Helsinki and in the middle of an overgrown grove. But it was important for us to follow down the witches’ road to the sacred wellspring and sink an offering there, just as the coven did. We got a glimpse of what they might have felt during the exhausting trip and while practising their magic and this bodily experience we tried to transfer directly into the piece we created.
After bodily experimenting and researching, we verbalize what our bodies experienced and figure out how to translate those experiences into exercises and meta techniques so that our participants can safely get the right feeling. In test runs, we try out these exercises and evolve them when needed. If test runners express that they felt the feelings we aimed for, it is a sign that our body-based exercises are working and that the design is reaching its final form.
Experiencing the right bodily reactions and emotions is a powerful tool for the participants to understand the tale we are telling. We, as creators, don’t find larp an unpredictable and uncontrollable medium like many larp designers do, and we think this is because of our focus on bodily experience. Embodied design can do miracles in finding the core of the piece and giving the players the tools to reach it.
Easy things to design from the body perspective
We think the bare minimum of bodily design all larp creators should do is to check that your participants’ bodily experience is not against aimed content. For example, being cold or hungry makes it hard to feel like you’re in a comedy, or being on a tight schedule and in a hurry makes it hard to drop into the feeling of being in a slow-paced slice of life experience, or uncomfortable and complicated costumes may make it impossible to engage in a free form dance improvisation larp. Make sure your participants can easily engage in the emotions you want them to feel and that their bodies will not be against it by design.
Examples of bodily design from our pieces
In Inner Domain players draw together on the floor. Photo: Nina Mutik 2024
In this section, we will give several practical examples of how we have used our bodies as design tools, and how this has been transformed into exercises or meta techniques and the experience replicated in the actual piece.
Finding Tom (2020) tells the story of Tom of Finland’s (1920-91) art’s effect and meaning on the freedom fight of Finnish gay men of his time. We researched a lot on how it was being a gay man between 1940 and 70s in Helsinki. In Finland, homosexual acts were a crime until 1971 and homosexuality was classified as a disease until 1981. Homosexuality was a shame and not a lifestyle choice or an identity, but rather a heavy burden. Gay men mostly met at parks, finding contacts for sex in secret. After reading history and documentation from those times and interviewing researchers and gay men, we went to the actual cruising sites and followed Tom of Finland’s routes. We re-enacted finding company in the shadows of the parks and tried to embody the fear of getting caught, the shame of being ill this way, the strong sexual urge, and the short relief of relieving the symptoms. We immersed ourselves in the stories we found and tried to feel how being torn between sexual need and shame under heavy oppression felt.
To embody the shame of being gay and the pressing feeling of hiding your true self we created a prop that we call the oppression jacket, a relative to a straitjacket. It is a trench coat with straps sewn into them over the chest and stomach. The straps can be pulled tight so that it is a bit hard to breathe. The oppression jacket does not restrain the participants’ movement but gives a pressing feeling around the chest and stomach. Each participant wears one during the larp. The jacket represents the feeling of shame, fear and being oppressed and at the start of the piece the participants have the jackets closed, the collars pulled up to hide their faces and the straps pulled as tight as they are still comfortable with. As the piece progresses and the characters start slowly finding community and identity, the jacket’s straps gradually loosen and open, until the jackets are dropped off and left behind completely as the characters go into Finland’s first Pride parade. The oppression jacket has gotten a lot of thanks from participants as they help get into the right emotions. They are both great metaphors and cause parts of the right emotions directly in the participants’ bodies.
Inner Domain (2024) tells the story of an all-female esoteric group gathered around the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint at the start of the 20th century. These women used theosophy and spirituality to create a safe space for women to break gender norms and to explore same-sex romance and sexuality in a time when women’s roles and possibilities in society were extremely narrow. We picked one method from their rituals, automatic drawing, to be the center of our piece. Drawing together, close to each other on the floor, guided by the spirits allows exploring things that can not be voiced in another way. Communication through touching creates a wordless way to experience the sensual and fragile erotic tension and emotional relationships we were looking for. The touches while drawing could be gentle, shy, brave, flirty, or even violent. All the character communication in the piece happens only through touching and drawing, there is no talking. During the workshops, participants go through a series of touching exercises, so that it is easy and safe to touch and communicate wordlessly during the larp. This piece has also received a lot of thanks and has surprised its participants on how safe it felt to engage and how intense narratives they lived through in such a short time.
Part of Fenezar!’s design aims to imagine how it was to be poor, suffering from illness, pain, and hunger and existing with no hope of finding anything better, all added to the shame of being poor as it was considered to be your fault by authorities. Endless meaningless physical labor that leads to nothing permanent became the core of this experience. In the larp, we give players some carpet rag to crochet with their fingers as they sit around a table over empty plates and talk. After each act, we unravel the crocheting, and they have to start the same roll of rag from the start again. The constant crocheting also physically narrowed down what they could do, so the meaningless work was restricting them in play. Our participants felt the frustration and the repetitiveness of manual labor well through this tool. In Fenezar! we also discuss radicalization. As the coven does rituals and magic to improve their situation in life and nothing happens, the magical acts become more and more severe to keep up the hope that things will improve, and these people have agency in their lives. To embody this we created props based on actual sacrifices the coven sank into the well-spring, and they become physically heavier and larger as the story progresses. Carrying your more and more extreme deeds was concretely heavier and harder. This had a direct emotional impact on participants they found easy to engage with.
These are some examples of how to affect player bodies directly as a medium for the larp to create the emotions and narrative you are aiming for. These tools can not be invented without experiencing the emotions or events you’re trying to tell with your own body or without testing and iterating with test participants.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Mutik, Nina & Vili Myrsky Nissinen. 2025. “Larp As Embodied Art.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: Doing rituals at the actual wellspring the coven used to create Fenezar! Photo: Nina Mutik 2024
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
It is a quite common phenomenon after a larp. In the larp FB-group, or other social media platform, a thread is created. ”Comment with a picture of your face,” it says, ”and let people compliment you on your larping!” Then the thread explodes with pictures, and lots and lots of compliments. Such a lovely trend, right? So why does it always make me slightly uncomfortable and anxious?
The reasons are many, and I will try to detail them here. As the title suggests, this is an opinion piece. It is meant to identify a problem that I experience, and that I think I am not alone in experiencing. It also suggests alternatives that I think might work better for people who share my experience.
Unequal distribution
One of the core issues is that there will inevitably be an unequal distribution of compliments. Some will get many, some will get fewer. And while comparing is rarely something that makes us happier, it is hard to resist, especially if we are already feeling vulnerable and self-conscious.
The reasons for uneven distribution are many. One might of course be the quality of your larping (as well as casting and style, which we will return to below), and how many people you interacted with. Another is timing: those who are quick to post their picture in the thread will get more comments, while those who join the party after a few days might not get as many, as some people will already be ”done” commenting. On top of that, those who diligently compliment many others will themselves get more compliments back – which is not wrong in itself, but risks giving the compliments a transactional nature.
What is good larping?
When comparing how many, and how enthusiastic, compliments people receive, it is easy to see it as an unofficial rating; the ”best” larpers will get more positive attention, and if you do not get as much praise that means you larped poorly. However, in my experience the people who get many compliments are also the ones that were noticeable and easy to remember. People who are cast as characters who are seen and heard, or who have a more expressive, extroverted playstyle, are more likely to receive a lot of compliments. And the people with a subtle playstyle, who play subdued characters, and mainly have intensive play with a few close relations, are more likely to have gone unnoticed by many at the larp.
Personally, I quite value the more subtle playstyles, the brilliance that is mainly visible when you get up close. And while more showy playstyles are often very valuable for larps as well, most larps thrive when they have a balance of different playstyles, and the right kinds of players as the right characters. But looking at the overall picture created by compliment threads, it is easy for the less noticeable larpers to suspect that they are simply not a very good larper, and that if they were showier and took up more space, they would become a better larper.
Doubting authenticity
People approach it differently, but there is a general understanding that you should compliment as many people as possible. As mentioned above, there is also a trend of reciprocity – people try to compliment the people who complimented them. And while it is a good principle to be generous and compliment everyone, an anxious mind like my own will often doubt: is this a genuine compliment, or are you just saying something because you had to come up with something.
Why it is so tempting
After a larp, many of us are still completely absorbed by the experience. We can think of little else. And many of us yearn for connection. We want to know that we were seen, that we mattered to others. We want to feel that we were as important to our co-players as they were to us. We want to spread positivity and let people know how awesome they are, and we want them to think we are awesome too. This makes it very hard to resist the compliment threads, especially when we see the love bombing happening. There have been many times where I have initially resisted participating in a compliment thread, but eventually gave up and participated anyway, even though I know it makes me anxious.
So what am I saying?
“Are you just sore that you don’t get complimented enough for your immersive, introverted shenanigans? Just don’t participate in the compliment threads, if they’re so terrible, and let people enjoy them!” Well, this is exactly what I do. However, I thought that others that share my discomfort might feel some comfort in knowing that they are not alone, and perhaps get perspectives on what makes them uneasy.
I also do have a suggestion of what I think is a far better practice. I tend to give compliments directly – either after the larp, in person, or reaching out to them via social media. A fellow anxious friend mentioned to me how this can be really difficult and intimidating (reaching out to someone when you weren’t invited). While I absolutely understand this, I am happy that it is something I feel able to do. I rely on the fact that most people relish compliments and honest appreciation, and I try to do it in a way that is not imposing, or seems to demand reciprocation or further interaction. Something along the lines of ”hey, I just wanted to let you know, I really liked the way you played [scene]. You portray [emotion] so beautifully. It was great to see, thank you!”.
The benefits of doing this are many. For one, a spontaneous compliment is great to receive, and it usually makes people happy. It also feels enjoyable for me to give compliments in this way. Another great benefit is that there is no comparison, you don’t have to wonder if other people are noticing you more or less than others.
It should be mentioned that some people enjoy compliment threads a lot, and enjoy the benefits without any of the anxiety or overthinking that I describe. It is not necessarily something that we should all stop doing. But I think it is worthwhile to consider the options, and what feels best for you, and if there are other ways you can spread the love and appreciation after a larp.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as: Greip, Julia. 2025. “Why I hate post-larp compliment threads.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.
