Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutpunkt 2026 book Seasons of Larp. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
When we talk about larping for transformation, it feels like there’s often a focus on very individualistic experiences. These usually come with an emphasis on transformation through suffering, living it or inflicting it. However, in a world that is rapidly enacting scenarios that we didn’t want to imagine as a reality, does it still make sense to embody these same scenarios in our games? Instead of learning from a position of privilege why we don’t want certain things to happen (again), is it not worthwhile to focus on learning to hope again instead?
The privilege of type 2 ‘fun’ and hopelessness
Type 2 fun is a term that a lot of larpers, especially in the international Nordic and Nordic-inspired community, frequently refer to. It’s a type of play and narrative game design the same community often may go looking for. With this term, I refer to the type of fun that doesn’t feel like you’re having fun in the moment, but afterwards, you look back on the event as a good and fun experience. For larp, type 2 play can also refer to the situation where your character is not having fun at all in the reality of the larp, while you as a player are very much enjoying playing out their story. When discussing this term further in this context, I wish to purposely leave the word ‘fun’ out of it, for reasons tied to privilege that will hopefully become clear in the next few paragraphs.
Within transformative play, I see type 2 as a term for the kind of games in which we change perspectives by embodying stories that give us insights into why people commit horrible acts. But also into how decision-making can be steered into directions we don’t want to see in the world, as well as into how certain societal structures, behaviours etc. sustain systems of oppression, to mention a few.
I want to acknowledge that these experiences can be valuable and important from an educational point of view, and that the transformative experiences people have through them are valid and can be life changing. However, it’s important to also not be blind for the privilege that lies in being able to embody these stories. Exploring underprivileged and unsafe points of view within the bubble of a safe space is a privilege, and so is being able to step out of these situations at any given moment.
Stepping out of your comfort zone and into the brave space of exploring these type 2 stories is easier when you have a place to return to afterwards that:
- Is relatively safer,
- Doesn’t confront you with the same extremities in being powerless and underprivileged,
- Or is just a comfort zone.
It’s more difficult to do this if your everyday reality forces you out of your comfort zone or even into survival as a constant, instead of as an exception.
Hopelessness is a privilege. This is a statement that is true, not only in our current reality, but also in our larp design and communities. I remember attending a silent memorial for the Nakba, when two people walked by and one told the other they didn’t understand why people would still protest, as the situation was hopeless anyway. This way of considering a situation hopeless is something that comes from a position of privilege. Choosing to accept a situation as it is, and opting for apathy instead of action, is a massively understated privilege, and one that is rapidly shrinking. People in underprivileged circumstances cannot afford to give up in the same way people in privileged lives can. Similarly, it’s easier to play on hopeless situations and narratives when you’re returning to an individual life situation that doesn’t have to face the circumstances for this hopelessness on a daily basis. However, it is exactly the privilege of being able to play on hopelessness that should have us rethink why we would do so in the first place.
Agency for growth and the power of community
Powerlessness and a lack of agency are an important and undeniable part of living in underprivileged and oppressive circum-stances. They are also a circumstance that hinders growth and healing, and that can be or often just is impossible to overcome. Trying to empower people to (re-)discover their agency and their potential and trying to inspire people to heal and grow is impossible when their circumstances force them into survival. When I was coaching people in the past, one huge hindrance when you finally got someone to find some self-confidence again, was often the ways in which they couldn’t follow through on their dreams and plans, as their circumstances often forced them into having to take care of other, more primary and pressing needs instead. You cannot heal and focus on individualistic needs when the world around you imposes a difficulty to just exist in groups and communities as a whole.
As bell hooks made abundantly clear, we do not heal in isolation. Healing is an act of communion. It happens in community, and the unique co-creative nature of larp as an artform holds an incredible potential to create safer spaces for communal healing, discovery and learning.
The antithesis of fascism, of populism, of right wing rhetoric and practice, lies in community and connection. We need to step away from looking at playing and designing larps as a purely individualistic experience and practice when we’re talking about larping for transformation. You can have individually important and meaningful experiences within a larp and a community, but it’s important to understand that it is exactly thanks to the existence of these communities surrounding the game and the space they create that one is able to have these experiences. Thinking about designing for and playing within the com-munity is indispensable. Both as an element in the narratives and structures we create as well as within the context of larp as a whole, and hence, also in how we create these temporary communities while we are not our characters, but ourselves.
Creating shared spaces in which people can explore narratives while feeling supported by the community they are surrounded by can be incredibly empowering, especially when they are not used to having a sense of agency. Being allowed to feel and explore difficult feelings and narratives and having the support and opportunity to not just embrace them, but to also move past them is an experience that can change lives as well as communities and their dynamics and hopes.
So why not imagine the effect it can have to not just design for the experience of being stuck in a difficult situation and understanding how we got there, but instead, to design for being in that situation of powerlessness to then move beyond it by your own and your community’s doing? Having played with narrative and structural design for healing and hope in my own larp designs, it has been very powerful as well as meaningful to see stories unfold in which people were allowed to move from problems to solutions, instead of the other way around. When asking a group of participants to one of my larps in Al-Khalil (Hebron) to summarise the feeling they left with in a few words, all of them voiced some variation of ‘tomorrow will be a better day’. So, why not design more stories that allow people to find this kind of hope for the future? Why not reclaim our agency in our stories first, and then carry on this hope and this interdependency into our interdependency into our everyday practice?
The radical choice for hope
‘We find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’ This is a quote that stuck with me ever since I heard it in a radio broadcast about how to design alternative narratives in today’s world, and I hope it’s one that can encourage others to shift their thinking about play and design as well.
Instead of focusing on gaining an understanding about the how and the why of bad things happening, we should shift our focus on how to move beyond the difficulties, the trauma and the end of everything, and think about growth and rebuilding instead.
I will not deny the value in telling these stories, and in understanding how oppres-sive systems come to be, I just want to raise the question whether this is really what we currently need to focus on, when we’re living it in real time?
We live in a world that requires us to hope. Our current reality is clearly showing us our privilege if we are able to choose when we do or do not acknowledge the worst of it. We need to reclaim our stories, our narratives, and ultimately, our realities, and this is not going to happen by creating stories that soothe us by having us realise how bad certain realities are. Instead, we need to retell the endings of these stories. We need to not accept that hopeless situations are where our stories end, but instead, we need to act and rewrite these endings with growth, hope, and communal belonging, first in our imagined worlds, and next in our actual one.
This article is republished from the Knutpunkt 2026 book. Please cite it as:
Bailly, Sandy. 2026. ‘Designing and Playing for Hope in a Hopeless World.’ In Seasons of Larp eds. Erlandsson, A., Svanevik, M., Holkar, M., and Brind, S. Gothenburg. Knutpunkt.
