Larp as an Anticipatory Practice for
Socio-Technological Change
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.
As humans, we often ”extend” our bodies and cognitions: clothes, glasses, weapons, tattoos… or prosthetics, exoskeletons, smartphones, or mind-reading devices. Sometimes, extensions even give us new senses, such as a person grafting magnets below their skin. For a few decades, scholars devoted particular attention to hybridi-sation with technology, framed as people becoming cyborgs. Crucially, every time we create new forms of cyborgs, something changes in how we relate to each other – sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically.
In this article, I argue for the potential of larp to explore how forms of cyborgisation may change our personal interactions and societies. By embodying present and future cyborgs, we can experience and engage with the invisible forces governing technological systems, which in turn affect us, adding or removing extensions and senses.
Introduction
A fundamental part of the human experience is that of interacting with a multitude of objects and tools. These tools, in many ways, extend each person’s capabilities, forming a figure that has been called, since at least the 1960s, the cyborg (Clynes and Kline, 1960).
Throughout our daily lives and existence, we are in a way always cyborgs, using various machines that are enmeshed with ourselves by permanent physical implantation (e.g., a pacemaker), temporary bodily extension (e.g., clothes, eyeglasses), or practice (e.g., smartphones). Some technical tasks, such as monitoring crowds or tracking people in indoor spaces, are so much easier if one takes our cyborg nature for granted, and decides to track a person’s machine extensions rather than their human bodies!
In spite of this, the number of larps made to explore the cyborg experience are not many.
In this article, I will try to elucidate this gap, focusing on the following questions:
- Can we use larp to explore future forms of cyborgisation?
- How can we use larp to explore how “being a cyborg” might feel in the future?
- How would these new forms of cyborg-isation change the interactions between people?
- What social change could result from new forms of cyborgisation?
I will argue that not only can we use larp to explore these questions, but that there is a considerable design space to explore if we decide that we should, and propose some possible ways to do it. By connecting reflec-tions in sociology, philosophy, computer science, futures studies, and organisational learning, I will sketch the outlines of how larp can become an ”anticipatory practice”: how, through play and reflection on play, we can create suitable conditions to explore the potential social effects of technological change, and how to prepare for it.
Cyborgs and extensions
The contemporary view of the cyborg arguably derives from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway, 1985), a piece of writing that is just over forty years old. In the Manifesto, Haraway calls the cyborg
“a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”
If the cyborg inhabits the intersection between reality and fiction, then it shares this space with another creature: the player of larps. In a 2025 article, Roda Martínez reprises the idea of Gary Alan Fine’s “laminations” (Roda Martínez, 2025) and maps them to a five-phases model of play to highlight how everyone engaging in a larp is at the same time a person, a player, and a character, and that even though each phase of play sees one lamination as the dominant one, the others coexist. In other words, the game’s ”magic circle” creates an intersection between fiction and reality. This idea of liminality is later reprised by Haraway, that calls the cyborg
“[a creature] simultaneously animal and machine, who populate[s] worlds ambiguously natural and crafted”
The wording ”worlds ambiguously natural and crafted” describes surprisingly well both a cyborg and a larp. If a cyborg is a creature that threads between organic and machine, natural and crafted, and reality and fiction, it may make sense to explore its liminal nature in a context that mirrors its nature: the larp.
Yet, I argue, many larp scenarios are implicitly about cyborgs in the meaning that Haraway defines. When humans are cyborgised, machines form an extension of human bodies, creating a novel, more-than-human entity (More and Vita-More, 2013). Achieving ”more-than-humanity” can happen in many different ways, and we can trace the idea to the origins of humanity: clothes are a very ancient extension, allowing humans use to extend the capabilities of their bodies to regulate temperature; writing, as studied by scholars of antiquity such as Carlo Sini (Sini, 2010), can also be framed as an extension of the human. We can see these technologies (clothes, writing) or even mythological figures such as chimeras, as forms of early cyborgs.
What all of these examples have in common is that the use of a technology extending human capabilities creates a ”new human” – a cyborg – made of their ”normal human” body, plus an extension. But how do these extensions work?
Cyborg extensions affect our bodies and senses in three ways: the individual, the relational, and the collective. An individual extension affects one’s interactions with themselves; relational extensions change the way we interact with specific other persons, and collective extensions change the way we interact with generic ”people”. If the individual dimension is quite self-explanatory, we may need to delve deeper on the difference between the relational and collective. To grasp the difference, think of how different it is to talk about a controversial topic with your friends or family (all of whom share history with you) or in front of a crowd at a protest. The first situation is relational (you can tune your message specifically to each person), the second is collective (the people in front of you may have a common objective, but you can’t hope to connect with each individual person).
Many humans today have all sorts of extensions. To find examples, I will look at a typical day of mine, and highlight some of the extensions involved in it.
When I wake up, I use a smart watch to look back at my night’s sleep. As a vivid dreamer, and someone who often has lucid dreams,1 that’s quite helpful: the data gathered from the watch helps me understand my sleep patterns better (was I restless last night, or was I dreaming about being restless?), or reflect on my dream recall (I remember a particularly long and vivid dream: did it actually last that long?). My smart watch, in this case, is an example of an individual cyborg extension: the technology provides me a new way to relate with myself.
As I move on with my day, I check the online workspace I share with my colleagues. Andrea wrote unusually late yesterday, at 3 AM… I may try to reach out to see if everything is alright when they show up later at work today, or just don’t bother them if they don’t seem to be in the mood. And here’s a relational cyborg extension: seeing the time at which Andrea wrote gave me an insight on their potential mood.
I hop on my bicycle, and because I’m in a new city, I plot the route on a GPS navigator, which helpfully tells me there is heavy traffic on the route. Oh, right, today there is a march downtown! Should I change my path and avoid traffic, or go join the march? Whatever my decision, the navigator is serving as a collective cyborg extension.
These few examples from daily life hopefully give an idea of how we commonly use more extensions than we might be aware of. Crucially, also, these cyborg extensions impact ourselves, our interactions with others, and the world around us at all times, even when we are not consciously aware of using them.
Cyborgs in larps: props, mechanics, metatechniques
While the examples I provided in the previous sections are taken from mundane daily life, there are situations in which cyborg extensions drastically change one’s life and how they experience reality. Cyborg extensions may also create or deepen social issues such as fairness (think about athletes with access to better equipment), unequal opportunities (when one can’t access public services without a smartphone), or even outright discrimination (for example, when airport scanners enforce gender normativity (Costanza-Chock, 2018)). A larp’s story and social dynamics, however, can help with bringing potential issues to the forefront in a relatively safe space.
In larp, we can use proxies, props, mechanics, and metatechniques to create cyborg extensions, or proxies for cyborg extensions,2 and experiment with the interactions they enable… all of this, potentially, without needing for those extensions to actually work as they’re supposed to!
Chaos League’s Eclipse: A New Home (Poland, 2025) features a versatile cyborg extension (which is not declared as such): each player is given a ”datapad”. The datapad serves many functions: it lets players review game procedures (making them always appear competent, an individual extension), send texts to characters or groups (a relational extension), receive broadcasts, and interact with the base’s systems (collective extensions). Bugs and glitches in the datapad’s systems (while in my understanding not willed by the organisers) lend to the game’s sense of frontier exploration and precariousness. When the datapads don’t work flawlessly (for example, when a base-wide alert is not broadcasted to everyone, or one can’t reread a procedure), the players’ detachment from their characters’ knowledge suddenly reveals the players’ and characters’ nature of confused cyborgs.
A quite different example, Mobilized: An Essay Pretending to Be a Game (Finland, 2025), gives explicit commentary about our contemporary nature as cyborgs. Mobilized sees players follow the instructions given by a web application on the players’ smart-phones. The application guides players through a number of sequenced ”mini-tasks” that invites players to reflect on their relationship with technology, inviting them to act chorally, following the application’s instructions, and then establishing a 1:1 ”controller/controlled” relationship with another player, with roles being occasionally swapped.
The application that powers the experience is a cyborg extension used in the context of the game. Most crucially, going through the experience makes participants realise that their smartphone itself is a cyborg extension they use in their everyday life. Mobilized’s application reshapes each player’s perceptions and capabilities collectively (in that all players are hybridised, and ”mobilized”) and relationally (in the controller/controlled activity). Implicitly, however, Mobilized invites the players to reflect on the smartphone as the epitome of contemporary individual cyborg extensions. Through its activities, Mobilized draws the participants’ attention to how our hybridisation with technology – our cyborg nature – redefines social relations.
Neither Eclipse nor Mobilized explicitly cast their players as cyborgs, but both games add elements of cyborgisation through their design choices. This is particularly clear in Mobilized: even though this is not declared, all person-to-person interactions are mediated through the application. In other words, all players interact through their cyborg nature.
These examples provide varying degrees of implicit commentary on our contemporary cyborg condition. I argue, though, that larp has space to explore at least two more directions: direct, explicit commentary of contemporary cyborgs, and reflections and concrete paths of action for future forms of cyborgisation.
The distinction between explicit contemporary commentary and paths of future action is somewhat blurry. Larp can help us explore the implications of these choices by creating a safe space in which we can play with the effects of adding, removing or altering cyborg extensions.
Let’s say for example that we wanted to give some characters a form of cyborg telepathy. We could, of course, agree on a mechanic that gives players that wish to communicate ”telepathically” a gesture they can use to communicate in secret. But what if we wanted to push the idea further?
The idea of ”synthetic telepathy” is not new: the US military has financed grants on the topic since 2008 (with a study discussing preliminary results in 2010 (Deng et al., 2010)), and has in 2024 opened a grant ”to develop high-performance, bi-directional brain-machine interfaces.”3
The suspension of disbelief and social contracts of larp can ease the technological requirements of providing telepathy to some characters. A subvocalization recognition interface (see, for example, the AlterEgo prototype (Kapur et al., 2018)) combined with non-occlusive headphones (for example, bone conduction headsets)4 can become a first approximation of confidential audio communication that cannot be heard by those that don’t have the appropriate devices. It is much easier for ”non-telepaths” to immerse in the fantasy of dealing with ”telepath” characters if they literally cannot hear it!
If implementing telepathy is per se an interesting idea, what is arguably of even greater interest is exploring the social implications that stem out of this new technology. With larp, we have the option of designing scenarios where these social tensions might take place. We can easily imagine that telepathy might affect adversarial dynamics, romance, negotiations, and more. But what social dynamics might arise in the interactions between telepaths and non-telepaths? Through larp, we can play and see where the situation takes us.
Without creating ex-novo technologies, we can use larp to rethink our interactions with existing technologies. Hearing aids, for example, are an individual cyborg extension with strong relational impacts. We can design larps, however, that challenge the stereotypes and stigmas associated with hearing aids, creating worlds where relations unfurl differently, and letting people experiment different roles in these relationships.
Stories and social dynamics: towards larp as anticipatory practice
One of the greatest potential for larps, when used to discuss potential social issues connected to technology, is that of exploring dangers of discrimination. This activity, however, is not without risks. In a 2021 paper, Leonard, Janjetovic and Usman discussed the benefits and risks of using larp to experience marginalisation, particularly in practices of ”dark tourism” (Leonard et al., 2021).
In the article, the authors argue that larping marginalised identities can lead participants to empathise more deeply and promote equity at a relational or collective level. The same practice of larping marginalised identities, however, may also perpetuate stereotypes or lead to culturally inappropriate representations. Can this dynamics change, however, when we turn our attention not towards the past or the present, but towards the future? In other words, what if we were trying to use larp not with the objective of creating an emancipatory practice (one of the goals of ”dark tourism”), but an anticipatory practice?
When I say we can use larp as an ”anticipatory practice”, I borrow the meaning of ”anticipation” from a subfield of sociology called futures studies. Futures studies is the discipline of sociology that is concerned with working with the future, ”being open, ready for surprises, and prepared to manage them” (Poli, 2019, p. 5).
The disciplinary theory of futures studies is based on three modes of engagement with the futures: forecasting, foresight, and anticipation (Poli, 2019, pp. 10-16). If forecasting reminds us of the weather, with mathematical models useful to provide quantitative indications of how the future may evolve, foresight and anticipation may be less familiar. Foresight helps us explore some of the possible futures that may unfurl from an unpredictable situation: what are, for example, some of the possible complications one may encounter when embarking on a long-distance biking trip from Italy to Sweden?
If foresight tells us what complications we may find, anticipation is concerned with translating these insights into decisions and actions. When a sailboat skipper is preparing for an ocean crossing, forecasts may tell them that heavy winds are unlikely, foresight reminds them of how dangerous it is to encounter a storm, and anticipation makes them double-check that their safety gear is well-maintained, just in case.
Much like a well-written piece of speculative fiction, aptly-designed larps can go beyond providing deep commentary about our current condition, and make us imagine different ways our world could evolve. In other words, a larp’s design can become a source of foresight. Nór Hernø’s Panopticon (Denmark, 2025), for example, tells us of a world that could – unfortunately – be:
“In the Panopticon prison, those trapped within live under constant surveillance, until the prison begins to glitch and you are finally afforded moments free from observation.”
While Panopticon’s prison may not present a projection of our current state, it is nonetheless a plausible future: surveillance is, after all, a theme that is receiving substantial real-world attention. Panopticon includes elements of foresight in raising questions such as: ”What could happen if our societies were to turn up the volume on surveillance?”, or ”How do people’s behaviours change when they know they are placed under constant, close surveillance by an oppressive system?”, or again ”How would different types of people react to a progressive loosening of surveil-lance?”. Beyond larp design, play is a source of foresight: repeated runs may unfurl in radically different ways, with different patterns of player-to-player interaction emerging in successive runs. Each run explores the same questions and finds different answers: some answers may be incompatible with those found in previous runs, but play is the proof that all of these answers are possible given the same scenario.
If foresight is found in design, play, and re-playing, I argue here that anticipation can be found during, but especially after, game time. Observing how characters react to a given situation and evaluating whether they’re successful in pursuing their goals can be a source of anticipation, but the game’s debriefing, or a successive analysis exercise, can also inform anticipation. The principles of reflecting-in-action and reflecting-on-action mirror Donald Schön’s Reflective Practice method (Schön, 2017): retracing one’s steps and reflecting on how characters reacted to the game’s situation and the emotions and consequences characters explored in the game may have parallels in the real world if players were to face similar situations is a powerful source of anticipation.
The embodiment present in larp can also be a catalyst for deeper foresight: when a player wonders ”what would happen in that same situation if I were to replay the game with a different character?”, they are applying foresight. Successive play, re-playing, and reflection can then bring the focus back to anticipation.
When applied to technological change and cyborgisation, larp can have the potential to be a meaningful source of anticipation about issues connected to technological change. By structuring the debriefing in moments of individual reflection, small-group interaction and plenary discussion, designers can mirror the individual, relational and collective nature of cyborg extensions, enabling different levels of ref-lection on the social dynamics generated by cyborgisation.
I argue here that there is ample space for design, with effects that range from larp’s individual transformative potential (Bowman et al., 2024, p. 50), to educational impacts (for example through EduLarp, for example as reported in the Computer-Human Interaction education space (Robinson et al., 2023)), to making debrief-ings an act of collective anticipation and elicitation of change.
Conclusions
In this contribution, I explored the potential of larp to investigate the potential future effects of social change enacted by technology. I did so by focusing on the figure of cyborgs – hybrids of human and machine that inhabit multiple spaces at once – and their machine extensions, combining the idea of Reflective Practice and ”anticipation” from the field of Futures Studies to define larp as an ”antici-patory practice”.
In the introduction, I set out to explore whether we could use larp to explore future forms of cyborgisation, how being a cyborg might feel in the future, and how cyborgisation may affect relations and social change in the future. While this piece is theoretical, I argued that the potential of larp for reflection on futures lies in all of its phases: from ideation, through play and replay, to debriefing. Diffe-rent phases lend themselves to foresight or anticipatory aspects, highlighting the ample design space that larp has to inform reflections on social impacts of technologies.
As a future direction for those who wish to explore this line of reasoning, I’m inviting our community to start explicitly including reflections on cyborgs in their own larp designs. Donna Haraway’s seminal essay goes well beyond technological commentary, and includes a thorough analysis of the interactions between modern technology and, most prominently, womanhood.
I wonder, then, how larp can help us explore these ideas even further. In these last few decades, cyberfeminism has been thoroughly explored in academia (for example, in Braidotti’s work), speculative fiction (Le Guin), and the arts more broadly. In larp, we have not explored these themes as much. Uniquely, though, our medium lets us temporarily inhabit the bodies of other lives: how can we push further on the idea of embodying future cyborgs? The anticipatory potential of larp lies in how, during and after play, we can reflect on our lived-by-proxy experiences, and wonder what they tell us about our current condition, and in what place we wish to be in the future. What happens after the larp, and our futures, are all about how we play our cards, and larping lets us imagine, create, and pick new cards, helping us to strategise with the ones we have. So… where are our cyberfeminist larps?
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Diana Domenichini for the partnership and support in developing some of the reflections about cyborgisation that are foundational to this piece.
Ludography
Eclipse: A New Home (2025) Krakow, Poland. Chaos League.
Mobilized: An Essay Pretending to Be a Game (2025) Landin, N., and Widing, G., Turku, Finland, Immersion Larp Festival.
Panopticon (2025) Hernø N., Copenhagen, Denmark, Blackbox Copenhagen.
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Bowman, Sarah Lynne, Elektra Diakolambrianou, and Simon Brind. 2024. Transformative Role-Playing Game Design. Uppsala University. https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-543097.
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This article is republished from the Knutpunkt 2026 book. Please cite it as:
Angeli, Lorenzo L. 2026. ‘Embodying Future Cyborgs.’ In Seasons of Larp eds. Erlandsson, A., Svanevik, M., Holkar, M., and Brind, S. Gothenburg. Knutpunkt.
- Lucid dreaming is what happens when a dreamer realises they are dreaming. ↩︎
- A proxy is an object that symbolises something else. When players agree that a broom handle is a wizard’s staff, for example, the broom handle is a proxy for the staff. ↩︎
- See https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/next-generation-nonsurgical-neurotechnology (Accessed 2025/12/12) ↩︎
- See example images at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bone_conduction_headset (Accessed 2025/12/12) ↩︎
