Squeezing Larp into “Immersive” Entertainment
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.
“The English profs keep sweeping our work under the rug, but that rug is about three feet off the floor by now, and things are coming out from under it and eating the English profs.”
–Ursula K. Le Guin (1989)
Anger and impatience, while not necessarily positive traits, are frequently my impetus to write. In this case, they came from a session at our own Playable Theatre Symposium 2025, an online event that our non-profit organization holds with the games festival IndieCade. Two individuals representing the Association of Interactive Performance Professionals (AIPP) held a town-hall meeting about their own organization, which aims to “serve creators of all forms of interactive performance by providing a forum where you can share, learn, celebrate, and collaborate in the creation of impactful interactive performance experiences” (2025). As a lifelong larper, I felt included in that group. Twice during the meeting, however, I felt notably shut down. One moment, we were asked about our motivations for why we did interactive performance, to which I responded with my interview line from the forthcoming documentary Halcyon Daze: The Final Voyages of Disney’s Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser: We larpers are frequently the sorts of people who auditioned for high-school theatre but never got the part, who were never seen as attractive enough to perform for others. During a readthrough of the chat, however, the two AIPP reps read every comment aloud except for mine. I indulged their oversight. However, in another moment – this one provoked by my curiosity about the earlier moment – I attempted to include “larping” in the catalogue of different forms of interactive performance and, once again, it was conspicuously left out on the main channel. Since the two AIPP reps didn’t know me from anybody, I had to assume there was some underlying ideological force behind their omissions: Whatever anyone says, we are not larpers, and what we do as “interactive performers” is not larping. Despite the laudable work of playable theatre (Torner 2025) figures such as Starcruiser alumnus Caro Murphy (2024) trying to pull us all closer together, standard immersive practitioners appear to hate larp. My conclusion from this exchange was that “immersive media” may be built on the adult pretend play that we call “larping,” but these foundations must apparently be disavowed when the interactive performer comes near attention or money. Larp attracts the wrong kind of attention and never truly makes money. Labour and professional organizations apparently require these matters of play to be taken seriously.
An apocryphal story told by Aaron Vanek about a more direct situation is perhaps useful, too. The first-ever Larpy Awards, hosted by the North American larp company NERO, were held on April 30, 2006 at the Avalon in Hollywood, California, and featured celebrities such as singer Debbie Gibson and baseball player José Canseco. The story goes that Canseco, who was universally known for his home runs, was standing at the bar during the Larpy Awards, when a gamer in a cape approached him with their boffer sword. “Will you autograph this?” the gamer asked. “Fuck off, nerd!” was Canseco’s reply.
Larp as a medium is a powerful basis for immersive entertainment, but also apparently necessitates mockery by established performers and omission from professional organizations that supposedly represent this precise activity. “Interactive performance professionals” are paid larpers, much like our time-honored-but-unpaid NPCs. But for every Laurie Penny (2025) who openly embraces their larp engagement, there are hundreds of Cansecos ready to preserve their social capital against larp through insults and abuse, if not also through tactical exclusion. We larpers are the abject, that which must be expelled in order for the norm to continue (Kristeva 1982). We are summoned from our dark corners when creative pretend-players are needed, only to be dispelled or disavowed at the earliest possible opportunity. Larping cannot assume the same status as, say, knitting or filmmaking, even when it already has taken over most of its participants’ remaining hobby capacity.
Admittedly, we larpers are accustomed to this, and it also sucks. Now that immersive media are professionalizing, the adult pretend play at the heart of larping is considered the “raw” material to then be “mined” by specific commercial immersive forms: the escape room, the themed dinner, the cruise, the crowdfunded role-playing game, the participatory virtual-reality theater performance. It’s not so much a progression of “first they started larping, and they went on to immersive media,” but rather that larp is the primary, “embarrassing” form of play that then must be repackaged into a more alibi-savvy form: “This is an immersive dinner in which your choices matter!” “This is a participatory ritual experience with game elements.” Euphemisms abound, despite the earlier insistence of Claus Raasted (2015) and others that we maintain the word “larp” despite all challenges posed by the use of that term. A larper holds the skeleton key to all of the commercial forms, and they are frequently better at adapting to their affordances and constraints than non-larper audiences. Whatever posi-tive international media coverage that larping has experienced, however, its stigma remains, and is now reinforced by a new generation of creators who see it as precisely the bad object from which they must distance themselves.
Turning to philosophy for answers, I find Friedrich Nietzsche’s (2008) 1872 essay The Birth of Tragedy offers me two ideal types with which to discuss this matter further: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Nietzsche inherited these two categories from ancient Greek author Lucretius, interpreting Apollo’s art as the clear-eyed language of dreams and prophecy and Dionysus’s art as that of intoxication and delusion. These categories, however, are also connected with health, with Apollonian forces representing ruddiness and beauty and Dionysian forces representing sickness and homeliness. Apollonian arts are clearly formed such as sculpture and epic poetry; Dionysian arts are folk arts such as music, dance, and child’s play. These two mysterious poles nevertheless help us parse out how larp and immersive entertainment interact with one another.
Let’s use a concrete illustration of the principle: larp photography. In my youth in the 1990s and early 2000s, photographs of larpers were firmly in the “Dionysian” category. Photos of larp were discouraged, because we were participating in the exact pastime that had caused the Satanic Panic and thus did not merit thorough documentation; we were, in a word, afraid. Particularly Vampire: the Masquerade (1993) larps were intended to be secret, private, and semi-illicit. As a result, photographs from that era are the kinds of informal, blurry affairs that one would expect of the practice and technology of the time. Indeed, when Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros (2010) assembled the magisterial Nordic Larp book 15 years ago, they consciously leaned into this informal photo culture and forbade “glamour shots” from inclusion in the collection. Grainy photos of larpers in costumes or on location predominate in that work. However, with the (intertwined) advent of high-definition, Internet-shareable photos and the semi-normalization of larp as a hobby, glamour shots are so common as to even require integrating them into a standard blockbuster larp schedule. Such work, in which players and characters are looking their best, is both amazing as well as thoroughly Appollonian: the larp becomes a theater rehearsal, a film set, or a photography studio, with the intention of capturing the healthy and symmetrical, even amidst the tragedy and horror found in some larps. It is a compliment to this generation of larp photographers that they have managed to entirely re-frame a medium, for the better.
However, polished photography also plays a role in expelling the Dionysian from the hobby. Make-up intended to last a day of rough emotional and physical activity in-character is categorically different from that which best highlights facial features for high-definition photography. Worse still, larpers who incorporate streaming or recorded video into their own branded social-media production separate from the official media presence of the larp will effectively generate their own miniature film set and crew within (often blockbuster) larp productions. Players with disabilities, non-normative body profiles, and non-camera-ready appearances have felt expelled from the selective framing of an event. As Karijn van der Heij (2021) writes: “If all photographs from previous runs that are picked for the website only show conventionally attrac-tive participants, the idea that the larp is mainly meant for them will settle in the minds of the participants and make the larp harder for those that do not look like that.” Apollonian documentation – the kind that only sees the conventionally attractive – dignifies and sells the hobby and medium to the wider world, but at the cost of the Dionysian freedom to simply be oneself, as one is, in-character. The hodge-podge costumes and nondescript fields one witnesses, say, in the 1980s UK Treasure Trap (1982) documentation are increasingly replaced with coordinated uniforms, photogenic locations, and camerafriendly playstyles reminiscent of theatre.
“Immersive” performance, with all of its larp-adjacent terms and forms – playable theatre, participatory theatre, live-action experiences, high-intensity facilitated experiences, highly interactive theatre experiences, and so forth – unintentionally undermines the subcultural either to earn cred either in bourgeois art circles or in mainstream commercial circles, aspiring to a “mythical norm” (Kemper 2018) that does not necessarily swell our ranks with new larp practitioners. For example, I was interviewed by executive producer Carly Kocurek as part of Halcyon Daze when she (correctly) assumed that the Galactic Starcruiser experience was a larp in disguise. One point I emphasized in our conversations was that without the modern subcultural structures of larp regarding post-larp drop, workshops, and debriefing, the Starcruiser fans did not have helpful tools to cope with the waves of emotion they were feeling after the event. While there are now larps being run at HalcyCon, the annual Starcruiser fan event in Orlando, Florida, it still has not occurred to most participants that they were, in retrospect, larping. On the other hand, there is also the opposite: larp without larping. OMSK Social Club in Berlin hosted a May 2018 “Crypto Rave” event that was explicitly advertised as a larp, essentially a party that had an optional workshop in advance of the event. I received the character “Cyprian Toke, the crypto soothsayer,” and was treated as part of the “larp element” of the party. We even received rudimentary safety tools in email communication, although it was still unclear what we would be doing in the game. It was only after I had arrived in costume that I realized what had happened: us larpers had been summoned in to spice up what would have been otherwise a normal Berlin EDM party. I never found the game, any of the other players, or anything in which my pre-game preparations would’ve been relevant. The Dionysian club game transformed into the typical Apollonian space to see and be seen. In the Starcruiser example, the fact that the participants did not know this high-budget immersive experience was effectively a larp may have inhibited their ability to understand the experience and connect it to broader subcultural design norms, something the Halcyon Daze documentary team seeks to correct in retrospect. In the OMSK Social Club example, the larp subculture was used to lure a target audience to an event that had little to do with the medium or subculture.
Murphy, Raasted, Montola, and Stenros have joined Celia Pearce, Lizzie Stark, Johanna Koljonen, Adrian Hon, and myself, among others, who have tried to normalize larp as a folk artform and legitimate practice in the public sphere. However, it is safe to say that we haven’t properly apprehended what the public sphere does to larp, especially when we cheat outward (in the theatre sense) to an audience that may turn on us and bully us at any moment, that will use us for marketing, for play infrastructure, and for ideas amidst a larger machine that only affords money and attention for itself.
In brief, I want larp to have a more dignified existence, in which it is valued, celebrated, and even archived. However, I want it to avoid the kind of commercialization and visibility that costs its essence, when there are no longer on-ramps for the ugly, the private, the neuro-atypical, the disabled, and the poor. Adult pretend play can be done by anyone, anywhere. To watch the Apollonian exclude the Dionysian is not only painful, but it also mirrors what we feel when we watch our neighborhoods gentrify, our jobs get replaced, and our legacies vanish. My anger and impatience come from a place of love: larp offers the world so much, and it must continue to exist for its own sake, preferably in harmony with so many other forms of human expression. “Immersive” and larp are not only mutuals, but they both thrive on each others’ contributions.
Bibliography
The Association of Interactive Performance Professionals (2025), https://www.interactivepro.org
der Heij, K. (2021), ‘We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps.’ Nordiclarp.org https://www.nordiclarp.org/2021/06/14/we-share-this-body-tools-to-fight-appearance-based-prejudice-at-larps-for-participants-and-organizers/
Halcyon Daze: The Final Voyages of Disney’s Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser (forthcoming), Film. https://www.halcyondazefilm.com
Kemper, J. (2018), Playing to Create Ourselves: Exploring Larp and Visual Autoethnographic Practice as a Tool of Self Liberation for Marginalized Identities (Unpublished Master’s Thesis). New York University, New York City.
Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, New York City.
Le Guin, U. K. (1989), ‘Prospects for Women in Writing’ in Le Guin, U. K., Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. Grove Press, New York City, 176–179.
Montola, M. and Stenros, J. (2010), Nordic Larp. Fea Livia, Stockholm.
Murphy, C. (2024), ‘A Proposed Taxonomy of the Immersive Arts’, Medium. https://medium.com/the-playable-theater-project/a-proposed-taxonomy-of-the-immersive-arts-8f797bf3a84b
Nietzsche, F. (2008), The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, Johnston, I. trans. Richer Resources Publications, Vancouver.
Penny, L. (2025), ‘I Designed My Own Squid Game. You’ll Never Guess What Happened Next.’ Penny Red. https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/i-designed-my-own-squid-game-and
Raasted, C. (2015), Why LARPing? YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTCBzR8smLI
Torner, E. (2025), ‘Make Theatre Playable’. Public Humanities 1, https://doi.org/10.1017/pub.2024.56van
Ludography
Crypto Rave (2018) Germany, OMSK Social Club
Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser (2022–2023) USA, Disney
Treasure Trap (1982) Carrey, P. and Donaldson, R., UK
Vampire: the Masquerade: Mind’s Eye Theatre Storybook (1993) Stone Mountain, USA, White Wolf
This article is republished from the Knutpunkt 2026 book. Please cite it as:
Torner, E. 2026. ‘A Crowded Field.’ In Seasons of Larp eds. Erlandsson, A., Svanevik, M., Holkar, M., and Brind, S. Gothenburg. Knutpunkt.
