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 art-larp paradox refers to the tensions between the development of larp as an artform in its own right and adapting to institutionalised arts spaces, compromising on the essence of what makes it art in the first place. Drawing on my experience of Situationist practices and democratised participation models, I will argue that in adapting larp practices to be suitable for artistic spaces and audiences, embodiment, and player agency is susceptible to compromise – potentially sacrificing the artistic essence of larp itself. In order to be more artistic, larp should be less like art and more like larp.
The term ‘art-larp’ is a bit of a red herring. Generally it refers to larp which experiments with form, has a social relevance, or works interdisciplinarily with other artistic genres. Nordic style larp practice often falls into one of these categories, yet sometimes we are reluctant to acknowledge this. As influence flows between larp practices and artistic practices of audience-based media, larp conforming to artistic spaces is fraught with the danger of compromising key aesthetic values.
Art has a tendency to subsume other practices to be included in its definition. If we think of art as an aesthetic form for its own sake which allows the opportunity to think, feel, and experience something outside of the everyday, then it will be undoubtedly rapacious in its appetite of feeding itself from practices which are close to it, including larp.
Art’s habitude for subsumption does not negatively impact larp. However, in combination with the lack of widespread established institutions to legitimise larp and the prevalence of commodification within late-stage capitalism, larp’s cross-pollination with more established artistic practices has the potential to compromise the artistic essence of larp. The closer larp becomes to neighbouring practices, the more susceptible it becomes to compromising on player agency and the physical embodiment of a first-person audience.
Art-larp has a tendency to be pulled towards presenting to non-playing audiences, as viewers. Whether a live audience of non-players with any degree of interactivity in the case of immersive theatre, or a secondary audience who will engage with photography or video work at a later date, both have a similar effect; by creating a passive distance of spectatorship between artwork and viewer, the simultaneous production and reception of a first-person audience is disrupted.
In the case of larp, artworks which modify the mode of engagement to passive reception through visual images mediate the social interaction of larp. This is present in visual media works which use larp such as video art, film, and theatre, as well as photo documentation of larp. The simultaneous production and reception of larp as media with a first-person audience – a personal embodied experience as part of a collective experience – is in danger of being compromised or sacrificed when we also consider the aesthetic experience of a secondary audience. Visual aesthetics possess an immersive function in larp to help players access the fiction more easily, although in cases where artistic design choices serve a secondary audience first and foremost, it is the primary ‘audience’ experience which is jeopardised; the players of the larp.
In their essay ‘On The Commodification of Larp’ (2019), Usva Seregina mentions the trends within larp to document through photography and film. In doing so, there is a shift in the ephemeral nature of the work which lives through the documentation as ersatz representation, thus beginning ‘to condense and fragment the live performance, freezing it in time to concretize its meaning’. This is not to say it happens more or less with the disputed genre of ‘art-larp’, but visual documentation is a form of social capital which can be encouraged by presenting work in both overlapping contexts as art and as larp.
According to Seregina, this is a more subtle form of commodification, eclipsed by how we engage with larp as consumers more generally. Seregina’s view is that individualising a collective experience becomes synonymous with consumer choice. The processes of individualisation and the mediation of larp through visual representation appear entangled, potentially having a far more detrimental consequence upon the collective social relations of larp.
In thinking critically about in-game social interaction altered through the consideration of aesthetics designed for secondary audiences, there are social effects beyond the magic circle. Larp is a reality when it is played, albeit temporary within the social frame of larp (Järvelä p.23). This is an important framing; how we interact in the reality of larp has sociological implications.
Considering this, larp’s ephemeral state of performance to a first-person audience is altered by aesthetic interactions with the larp which are outside the scope of participating as a player with the fullest agency to affect outcomes. Rescinding agency to visual modes results in a process of alienation: interaction is mediated through the aesthetic, the viewer as a passive consumer is susceptible to being alienated from the real aesthetic of larp – improvised and embodied co-creation. Primarily this affects in-game interaction but in the sense that we are the characters we play, this also has repercussions beyond the magic circle.
A confrontation and resistance to the process of alienation in the field of art is integral to theory and practice of the Situationist International (SI). In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1967) argues that passive spectatorship commodifies social roles and relations, and social interaction becomes mediated through visual images.
The dogmatic approach in the manifesto of the Situationist International (SI) describes the active construction of ‘situations’ as a tool for the liberation of everyday life (Debord, 1957). What the SI aimed for in the transformative process of the ‘situation’ was a reaction against the alienation of life, concerning work, private property, and the reception of cultural media. In the case of the latter, a passive state of engaging with visual media means the viewer is estranged from cultural life; the theory borrows heavily from Marx’s theory of alienation. In contrast, the embodied experience of situations were liberatory – simultaneously a rehearsal in the social frame of aesthetics and an embodied reality. This prefigures progressive ways of organising and relating, in art and life. The parallels of Situationist and larp practice that I wish to draw attention to are: the temporary suspense of social norms, physical embodiment of the practice through empowered social agency, and the rejection of forms of spectatorship.
Claire Bishop espouses a critique of non-hierarchical participatory art in her book Artificial Hells – rather prioritising aesthetics of ambiguity and antagonism. I do not believe that spaces in which art happens are somehow magically exempt from critique of power structures. Paulo Freire’s writings on education in Pedagogy of The Oppressed is useful in considering how agency matters. He writes and practices in opposition to a banking model of education, where students are empty vessels to be filled up, rather than independent agents of their own destiny, as they are in democratic learning models. This should sound familiar to anyone who has participated in larp activity; this is the agency of co-creation and often greater than the sum of its parts. Just like the passivity of the banking model of education, I believe viewership of larp in other forms of artistic media: visual arts/film/theatre denies the key aesthetics of social agency and co-creation and risks commodifying meaningful social relations of larp activity.
For better and for worse, larp doesn’t have the same institutionalised infrastructure as more established artforms. Its position as a subculture also allows artistic freedom which does not have to follow institutionalised taste patterns. Institutionalisation does allocate time and financial resources towards art making, but at a cost. Larp institutionalising itself usually must fit in the existing model of art reception which rewards artworks that can be commodified, distancing itself from the ephemeral nature of larp, and compromise the social agency of players as co-creators of the artwork. Can these practices still claim to have the liveness which larp’s foundations are built upon? Does the ‘live’ of live action role play then become redundant?
The ‘liveness’ of larp is not only about being present. Those present should be trusted and empowered to have a share in the authorship of their own actions. As players embody the work and the emotional closeness of the experience, they simultaneously create and feel it. The aesthetics of larp are inherently social; they are performative ephemeral interactions which exist between players, (inter-)acting within the diegetic frame, referred to as inter-immersion (Pohjola, 2004). When an artist triangulates to another focus point – to a viewing audience – the reception of larp moves from the result of co-created interaction to a passive alienated state.
Here we arrive at the art-larp paradox. In trying to be more like art – by adapting to existing artistic institutions and familiar modes of audience spectatorship – larp loses its aesthetic value of embodied co-creation. The point of creation and reception – the immediacy of social relations as building blocks of the artwork – become diluted. The immediate emotional reception of the work through the first-person audience is compromised at the cost of a passive relationship to the play aesthetic. Rather than larp activity being simultaneously created and received in a constant state of dynamism, the representation of the larp experience creates concretised meaning, a finished product whose meaning can no longer be in dialogue with its audience.
Nordwall and Widing lament the design optimisation of larp practice in their article ‘Against Design’. They view the well-designed experience product as failing to be in dialogue with wider culture (p.16). I understand their concerns of design related thinking dominating the discourse, but I don’t believe one negates the other: larps can be artistically designed, by means of an open-ended dialogue between larp designer and participants, to address contemporary societal questions. One suggestion they encourage is innovation of the form, which should be handled with care so as not to commodify the experience via means of spectatorship. How can artistic form innovate – continuing the development of art-larp and its relevance to society and institutionalised art spaces – but without giving up the intrinsic aesthetics of co-creation and social agency? What are the conditions for broader artistic experiments which have less of a risk of compromising agency?
A participatory artform occupying this space, which I would find intriguing to move towards, is socially engaged art – or what Grant Kester describes as a ‘dialogical aesthetic’. A key element is ‘a redefinition of the aesthetic experience as durational rather than immediate’ (Kester, p.12). This requires rethinking how we engage with character play, both as players and artistic larp designers, with durational relationality to larps as artworks. This might look like a series with themes that respond to societal issues, coupled with practices of integration. More broadly, integration is understood to be the awareness and openness to affecting change in our lives, beyond the larp itself (Bowman and Hugaas, 2019).
Resisting the art-larp paradox might look like a campaign or series with deeper critical reflection or integration built-in to the work. Maiju Tarpila’s ecological larp trilogy, ‘Kaski’, achieves this successfully by using a durational form, co-creating over a 5 year period. The players revisit the same fiction as a means for exploring ecological attitudes and values of the players (Leppä, 2024). In this approach, it centres the players as active citizens beyond the fiction who are enabled to affect change. As a larp practitioner who feels frustration with the limits to critical reflection and integration of ecological themes in blackbox and chamber larp spaces, allowing time for these processes like in Tarpila’s larps is an attractive prospect.
The art-larp paradox has created diversions for larp’s aesthetics when adapting to existing modes of viewership. Through priviness to the effects of commodification when presenting work to secondary audiences, and being aware of consumer behaviours challenging co-creation, we open up possibilities to affect long-term change. By embracing larp as an artform in its own right, staying strong to co-creation aesthetics and advancing the inclusion of integration models – potentially through durational and dialogical methods – there are means for the paradox to be broken.
References
Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
Bowman, Sarah & Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2019. Transformative Role Play: Design, Implementation and Integration
Debord, Guy. 1957. Report on the Construction of Situations
Debord, Guy. 1967. Society of the Spectacle
Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Järvelä, Simo. 2019. ‘How Real Is Larp?’ In Larp Design: Creating Role Play Experiences, edited by Joanna Koljonen, Jaakoo Stenros, Anne Serup Grove
Kester, Grant. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art
Leppä, Elli. 2024 ‘Seeds of Hope: How to Intertwine Larp and Ecological Activism’. In Liminal Encounters in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland. Ropecon ry.
Lukacs, Georg. 1923. History and Class Consciousness
Marx, Karl. 1844. Economic Manuscripts of 1844
Nordwall, Andrea and Widing, Gabriel. 2024. ‘Against Design’. In Liminal Encounters in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland. Ropecon ry.
Pohjola, Mike. ‘Autonomous Identities. Immersion as a Tool for Exploring, Empowering and Emancipating Identities’. In Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. Ropecon.
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.
A recent article entitled “Against Design” (Nordwall and Widing 2024), republished here from this year’s Solmukohta book Liminal Encounters (Kangas, Arjoranta, and Kevätkoski eds. 2024), was the inspiration and provocation for this article, and whilst naturally I thank its authors for their frank and lively debate, I have to resoundingly disagree with just about everything said in it.
Naturally, I would encourage you, my dear reader, to give it a read here, and then perhaps come back to read the thoughts of one who proudly claims the mantle of “designer”.
Firstly, my most important point: designers are not the enemies of artists. In fact, I would go a step further, and say that there is no real line between designers and artists, which is one of the things I most profoundly dislike about the article. No person, filled with the spirit of the muses, is sitting in a pine forest somewhere, hewing larps from great pieces of monolithic marble. Every person who writes, weaves, conspires, or conceives of larps is doing so considering their audience, to the materials, the spaces, the minds, and to the resources they have available to them. Whether it be decisions about communicating the message of a larp, the ways it is expected to be run, or even (and hopefully so) the ways to keep their participants safe and happy.
We create larps for human beings, real people who dwell on this earth with fears, and delights, and backstories, and jobs, and houses, and a preciously limited time to share with us. So the thought that “design”, spat out as a dirty word, as the antithesis of art, as the enemy of the artist, is in any way a bad thing, quite frankly baffles me. It would baffle me in just about any medium, be it painting, or cinema, or music, but most profoundly does it baffle me in larp.
Because unlike all those other mediums, larp is entirely unique. I might ask the philosophers to leave the room for a moment while I say this: a sculpture remains sculpted even when no one is looking at it, paintings do not cease to be when the gallery closes for the night, the cellulose in a film doesn’t melt if it hasn’t been watched in a decade, and the air still bends to the plucking of a violin even if that air should touch no person’s ears.
But a larp? A larp as a medium, as an artform, only exists, and can only exist, in the fleeting moments amongst a group of people, playing it, living it, creating it, in real-time, and only for as long as those people are there and building that story together. You can write the most fantastically beautiful, upliftingly soul-wrenching larp that has ever been conceived, but unlike a painting that may well be considered complete at the final stroke of the artist’s brush, a larp is not complete until the last word passes a player’s lips, until the last breath of someone, inhabiting the life of another, is taken.
I’m sure some may argue over whether trees falling in the forest make a sound, (and perhaps by some assessments as a mere “designer” I could be seen as unfit to have those discussions). But regardless, for now I believe it can stand without question that a larp is nothing without its players, and that we have in this medium of ours possibly the most collaborative, the most actively participatory medium that has ever been devised.
And I’d reckon that the authors of the article would agree with me, at least in broad principle, and they seem immensely passionate about protecting what they see as this special and unique medium. They might wish to hide it away, shelter it from the corrupting influences of capitalism, of commercialisation, keep it sacred, tucked away in the hills, whispered of only from the lips of ordained monks raised from birth to know the meaning of “true larp”.
But alas, I don’t live in those hills, I live in capitalism, I live in commercialisation, I live in a society, with grit under my nails, a cheap keyboard at my finger-tips, and smog in my lungs. And don’t get me wrong, sometimes I dream of running off to those forgotten places of the Earth and rejecting the modern world and all its trappings. If I didn’t need the medicine that this modern world creates to even stay alive, maybe I would’ve done so already. But for now, I still live amidst the concrete, where money talks, and the traditional ways of living have been gutted by the gods of industry.
And so when I can, I escape. I escape into TV, I escape into video games, I escape into movies, and even on occasions I have the brain space to escape into a book. I don’t think that’s too rare, all in all. But when I am escaping, sometimes I feel like I want to escape just a little bit more, y’know? To push that boundary just a smidge further, to immerse myself just a little bit more, in another life, in another place, in another reality…
And on occasions, I do.
Me and a group of my friends will get together in some field somewhere, or a scout hall, or some community centre, and dressed in cheap costumes, maybe a prop or two, and some garishly written characters, and together, we escape. And in those times, I am very glad that somebody was being a designer, because unfortunately I don’t come from a country with centuries of tradition in collaborative storytelling, at least not any that survived the Industrial Revolution. I didn’t have the opportunity to immerse myself in this artform from childhood. I don’t even generally have the luxury of knowing half the people I am playing with most of the time.
In the article, the authors make a reference to the Norwegian term for larp creating, lage, meaning ‘to make’, and reference it being the same word as used for when one makes soup. Now I realize at this point I am committing the sin of media analysis and introducing a food metaphor, but I hope you’ll forgive me. But it does seem as though the authors feel that everyone should only be eating soup. A carefully crafted, small home-cooked larp soup, made from fresh home-grown ingredients, lovingly cultivated in some little farm somewhere.
And I’ll be honest, that sounds delicious. But I don’t have a little farm somewhere; I live on a council estate in Manchester. My food comes in packets and tins, and sure, I could maybe spend lots of money on trekking out to produce markets, and then lots more time on making a beautiful fresh soup every day, and sometimes I do. But I can’t do that most of the time. To do so is a privilege that I, and most of the people I know, are not afforded. And so, when I am tired from work, when I am poor, when I am lonely, and when I am above all else: hungry, I’ll go get a burger.
And that’s what we designers are: we’re burger-flippers. We make things people can get easily, as cheaply as possible, have a good time doing it, and get value for their money. And sure, it ain’t the healthiest, it ain’t the best for us, hell it ain’t even probably the cheapest most of the time. But it’s meeting people where they’re at. Because far too many people I know are tired, poor, lonely, and hungry for a bit of respite from this world that was built around us.
So we design mechanics that allow people to jump into games without weeks of prep. We write games based on popular properties so that everyone has a baseline understanding of tone and content. We build safety systems so people can feel alright having deep personal conversations with strangers. We craft experiences that can run and give people an immersion in someone else’s world for a little while. We flip burgers. We “design”.
And when it comes to making larps that can run, I think it’s about time we talked about the elephant in the room: selling tickets. It’s a dirty business, I’d reckon there’s no larp writer in the world who really likes it, but we have to face the facts. People only have so much money, they only have so many days off work, they only have so much time they can take away from children and pets and families, they only have so much energy at the end of the working week. And larps cost money.
You combine these two facts, what do you get? The nemesis of my existence, the boss-fight at the end of every larp development process, the big bad horrible beast: the break-even number. How many tickets do I have to sell to cover my budget? How many butts in seats do I have to reach to allow this project to be a reality? Now you can have all the artistic craft in the world, you could craft the most effervescently perfect creation in larping history, but if you don’t get the people, you ain’t got nothing.
And so I do marketing. In the first few months of a larp’s creation, I’m not writing characters or doing world building or thinking up mechanics, no. I’m building a website, I’m calculating budgets, I’m pricing up venues, I’m designing graphics, and I’m figuring out how to say to people, “Hey, this is a cool larp that you should come to.” And I hate it, oh boy do I hate it, and I reckon the authors of that article hate it too, if they’ve ever done it.
So what’s the solution? Well I could just stop. I could never build another website, never create one more fancy graphic, put Facebook away, and just whisper the existence of my purely crafted larp into the breeze. Cool, well now I have a larp with no players, which as we’ve said before is less than worthless.
Alright, so we’ll appeal to the hearts of our players, implore them to stop being so picky. Why do you have to be so demanding? Just sign up to every larp you hear about, go to them all, give us all your money! Now wouldn’t that be nice, but I won’t belabour the point, it’s not really feasible, is it.
So what do we do?
Well the authors of that article have a suggestion: “stop designing”. Stop making larps that haven’t been grown organically in the forests by sustainable larping communes with at least forty years of pedigree and blessed by Idunn herself. Retreat into the wilderness and just, please, stop making larps for people. Well, I’d say that’s just about as impractical as the previous two.
Now, as said, I would love to go live in a forest for the rest of my life, with a small group of fellow larpers who I’ve known for decades and only create and share together, and let the rest of the world go kick rocks. But unfortunately for me, I was born in a failed industrial town where the smog is baked into the bricks, and where that was never really an option for me. My culture has a vibrant tradition of storytelling, mostly through song, and I am very proud that I get to carry it on into the future, and do genuine work in preserving and sharing it.
Because contrary to the implication of the article there, we aren’t all godless barbarians in these cities, we aren’t all traditionless, religionless heathens bashing rocks together for entertainment. We have a culture, we have a history, and we want to share that. And part of the way we share that is through larp.
This is very much close to my heart, as the sort of larps that I predominantly write are historical and theological larps, where I try and give people an opportunity to experience the lives and the beliefs of those that came before us. I feel it’s essential to understanding yourself and your world to be able to relate on a personal level to the lives of others, be that others who live with us now, or others who lived in the past. And larp is of course an unsurpassed tool for this, to allow someone to immerse themselves in the feelings, the life of another person. If that isn’t art, then I don’t quite know what is.
And even if we’re not making the world a more harmonious place, even if we’re not giving people the opportunity to develop empathy and all we’re doing is giving people an escape: that’s okay too. I am so proud to see this medium of ours grow ever larger. It fills me with such profound joy at every event we run where there is someone who hasn’t larped before and gets to take their first steps into this brilliant community. And I love it even more when those people get a chance to contribute to the story, to bring in their experiences and their knowledge and their feelings and ideas.
In the article, the authors accuse design of stifling innovation. They claim that designing one’s larps and focussing on the experience of participants leads to stagnation and intellectual decline. And I again, frankly, could not disagree more. Design lowers the bar to entry, it brings people in, from more places, from more backgrounds, from more peoples, and from more cultures. And that is how you innovate. By offering more people a seat at the table, from learning, and growing, and sharing, and mixing, and giving everyone you possibly can a voice to contribute and create something beautiful.
We have in our hands an artform that is unique, because it relies on the hands, the hearts, the voices, and the souls of everyone in the audience to make it what it is. Not only to experience it, but to craft it along with us. Most of the people I play larps with or make larps for wouldn’t consider themselves artists, and yet that’s entirely what they are. And so are we, the designers. Because we are making art, by getting people there, by giving them the tools to engage with the game, to play with other people, to feel safe and supported and free to create according to where they are at. If a larp is an artistic medium, then making a larp happen is art, designing a larp is artistic.
And I shall come at last to the final paragraph of that article, in the penultimate of my own. Therein they say, “Larps can happen through community building, collaborative creation, or even serendipity.” And in this I agree, larp and collaborative experience-centred design can come from anywhere. But I am led to another quote I once heard, by Plutarch, saying, ”No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as though there would be bricks by chance and fortune.”
Well, I and my fellow designers aren’t gonna just wait around for larps to pop out of the ground, or be handed to us on gilded tablets by our Scandinavian cousins. We are the brick-makers, and we are working very hard, with the clay we have, to build a community of wonderful players and incredible experiences, out of those bricks.
Larp in general, and Nordic style larp in particular, is often claimed to be an artistic practice, a frontier of participatory arts. However, discourse on larp by larp organizers, larp participants and game studies researchers has, in recent years, started to frame larp making primarily as a design practice. By that logic larps are now designed by larp designers using larp-specific participatory interaction design methods. Discussions on these design methods have become the mainstay of larp conferences such as Knutpunkt/Solmukohta. Let’s discuss what this hegemony of design thinking does to our practice.
The overall project of design thinking is constructive. Design has lowered the thresholds of participation as well as enabled and structured larp organizing. In the best case, larp designers evaluate best practices and share methods. Although every step in this direction seems like a small success of self-understanding and self-improvement, we argue that the long-term consequences do not necessarily benefit larp as a culture nor as an artistic form. The current hegemony of larp as design does the groundwork for an ongoing reification and commodification of larp. Design transforms larp participants into larp consumers.
New larp projects are now pitched to participants with methods catering to various larp audiences (or rather intended target groups). Post-mortems of past projects serve the function of user experience (UX) evaluation examples to optimize the design of future projects. The design methods are reevaluated based on past successes in relation to informally segmented target groups (such as fantasy-chillout, dystopian-play-to-lose, or post-apocalypse-over-the-top larp consumers), combining setting with interaction style to form specific and recurring audiences. These target groups can then be matched to tried and tested larp design methods to successfully form an iterative and recursive feed-forward UX loop. In practice, this leads to repeating ideas and design elements that have proven to be successful, at the expense of new innovation.
In their marketing, larps can “attach” themselves to commercially successful and well-known IPs and franchises to pitch projects with similar names, using brand recognition to drive participance, forming a secondary volunteer-run streaming service experience. The success of this strategy indicates an environment where even the overall set and setting for a larp is purposefully used as a design method to drive interest in and communicate intended participation. Adopting commercially successful mass media culture is the optimal strategy for producing predictable participance.
There was a time when mass media enviously glanced at the rich culture and engagement surrounding Nordic larp. By now, the roles are reversed. When larp designers take turns riding on various commercial successes in mass media, larp becomes a cecum of Hollywood film and streaming culture. Such an approach would be highly unusual in artistic fields, where originality merits artistic value.
We argue that larp as a form is being restricted by its own success as a participatory design practice and that innovation in larp is over (other than sporadic and local). We see several reasons why larp as design practice hampers larp innovation.
Firstly, design thinking avoids conflict at all costs to deliver a product. Any kind of conflict or disagreement is considered a failed interaction design. But culture can be nurtured by conflict, and we would argue that Nordic larp developed through cultural and subcultural clashes, not through consensus-based “everything is okay as long as you know what you want” design thinking. Bring back dialectics; it’s not smooth, but it’s also not harmful.
We are concerned that larp as a field at this point is emulating some of the worst aspects of experience design commodity culture: start-up ambitions among organizers (including burn-out syndrome) and reification of participants’ social interactions: social interaction becomes a “product” that is delivered by the larp through strategic employment of larp design methods.
The idea of clarity of purpose that design brings makes larp a “readerly” practice – a practice where interpretation (and interaction) is “prepared” for the participant, rather than a “writerly” or artistic-oriented practice, open for the plurality of interpretation (and potential conflict). Clarity of interpretation is optimal for designing and delivering predictable and serviceable interaction for a defined target group. This results in predictable and shallow cultural practices and artifacts.
Remember, there are many ways to make larps. Norwegians use the word lage, a verb that could be utilized for larp making as well as for cooking a soup. Larps can be written, created, organized, dreamt up, or they can be born from artistic practice. We want to encourage a plurality of ways of creating larp.
Think about larp as a culture. It has been said that design is “the opposite of tradition.” Then maybe it’s time to value some of our subcultural traditions, the mutual knowledge of gathering and making stories come alive through our community. Here, we have to understand the limits of design thinking. For example, one of the key features of Nordic larp is trust. We have developed trust in our subculture by nurturing it for many years and events, to the point where we can say trust is part of our tradition. This makes some scenarios possible that would otherwise not be possible. However, you can not replace the tradition of trust by design. The harder you try, the further you fall when something goes wrong.
We argue that larp should not be reduced to a streamlined, well-designed experience product, but rather nurture an aesthetic field, an artistic form in dialogue with the participants as well as the culture at large. The reason larp fails to claim a culturally relevant position is because the primary focus on design optimization reduces our capacity to form an aesthetic or artistic field in dialogue with the wider culture. As an artistic form, larp makers should look for autonomy and integrity in our practice.
Stop using experience product delivery as the primary factor when evaluating larp projects. Instead, focus on how it innovates the form and how it can reshape culture by doing so. The latter is not necessarily realized through “good design”, but through good art.
Know that there is a difference between feedback and critique. We know how to give and get the former, not the latter. When engaging in society, larp will become criticized for how it, as a participatory form, approaches important issues. Be ready for, welcome, and enable criticism, not just on how well participatory methods worked out or whether the experience delivered quality time, but on how the form of larp itself can interpret and address cultural issues relevant to society in a wider context. Instead of targeting cultural and societal matters, larp has become a recursive product design improvement loop that is increasingly optimized for a decreasingly creative field.
If we consider larp-making as an artistic creation process, it does not necessarily involve problem-solving or a user-centered approach. Larps can happen through community building, collaborative creation, or even serendipity.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Nordwall, Andrea, and Gabriel Widing. 2024. “Against Design.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Aesthetics, Possibility and Ethics of an Immersive Mass Media
This article is a personal commentary on a few major topics I picked up throughout the past six years of creating for VR/new media and larp. The principal aim of this text is to touch on philosophical themes related to industrial technology, as our community gravitates closer and closer to new media and A.I.. I also wanted to address the main question I have been asked by larpers: why VR, when we can just larp? This article thus blends thoughts on common grounds between larp and VR, impressions from VR experiences that I found inspiring, nostalgic rants, and speculations on the future. Finally, it opens a discussion on the possibility of larp contributing to an emerging immersive mass media.
I. an.other_reality
One of the first things I associate with larping is the idea of some sort of trip. If not in kilometers, it feels like a travel in time, consciousness or fantasy; a displacement from oneself and one’s own reality. If our perception of the world is called lifeworld,((Husserl (1936) calls “lifeworld” the evident reality that we perceive and experience together. A fiction-based reality that is experienced collectively as a group can be referred to as “storyworld”. Others also use the term “storyworld” to refer to a worldbuilding method or in previous larp literature (Brind 2019), but in this text it is purely a deviation from the phenomenological concept.)) we attempt to travel to a storyworld – a fictional reality that we perceive together.
When experiencing larp in non larp-spaces – arts spaces, tech spaces, video games spaces etc – I realized that such ability to travel to a storyworld relies as much on the larp design and environment as it relies on the culture nurtured by the larp community. In the way larpers interact, relate, find activities, open-up while playing, they help each other suspend disbelief and co-create the storyworld (Bowman 2017). In other words, larp designers and players alike tend to have a creativity that spans across fields. It is through this interest and ability to seek out fine details of reality building that we create levels of illusion, making the event feel more special and intricate.
Such attention put into layering ideas to engage ourselves or our players is what makes VR a promising ground for larpers: VR is not a medium, or a media, it is a milieu – which in French refers to environment, setting and social environment at the same time.
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR.
As such, VR has its own creative tools, that are ambidextrous,((VR headsets, like a minority of game consoles, generally include two controllers, one for each hand, which frees movement potentials for both limbs. Consequently, VR apps and games make use of these ambidextrous possibilities.)) 360 degrees and embodied; it is close to what our bodies can do and experience, and therefore it is more intuitive than our usual screen-keyboard-mouse tools or even our digital pads. For example: a few days ago, defeated by my inability to explain an exhibition concept to a collaborator, I hopped into the 3D VR software Gravity Sketch and drew the rigging I imagined. Visiting the exhibition’s life-sized model and looking up at the suspended objects, I realized from my own physical sensations that some ideas didn’t pan out as I had intended, and I corrected them.
Other than a creative tool, VR can be a sensational spectacle. Earlier this year, I was at a Fatboy Slim concert, dancing while free falling. From the sky, along with the rest of the audience, I overlooked his perfectly modeled Pioneer deck, before landing on the oversized table of an American diner. On the table, we could ride cockroaches alone or with someone else, towards the gigantic face of Steve Buschemi. As I was teleported from one impossible setting to the next, I felt the thrill of being effectively transported into someone’s unhinged imagination (Eat, Sleep, VR, Repeat (2023)).
For some, VR spaces can also be the avenue to explore transcendence; and I have met VR practitioners who have been exploring the similarities between traveling in VR and reaching other states of consciousness – through spiritual pursuit, drugs, or both. Today’s state of the technology is already allowing “VR shamans” to guide volunteers through digital spaces as though those were the meanders of their own consciousness, and some even explore the creation of VR psychedelic trips, like Ayahuasca VR (2020).
VR is certainly not perfect; not the “customer friendly” headsets at least. Despite the skyrocketing progress of VR graphics and playability in the past 10 years, I am still hearing the same comment: “I won’t be sold to VR until the pixels are invisible.” It can be cranky, it can be laggy, it can be obtuse or even painful. But if we can convince ourselves that a latex sword is Excalibur or that a green patch behind a parking lot is a lush forest, shouldn’t we also see giants as we ride jittery horses towards pixelated windmills?
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR.
I like inviting VR newcomers to lean into how conspicuous and ugly those spaces can be – firstly because you might discover you can get used to it as comfort adjusts, and secondly because these might be a few precious years before we enter an avalanche of hyper-realistic or hyper-convincing virtual realities. In fact, there might be questions to consider beyond the aesthetic appeal or revulsion of this imperfect VR. Adorno (1938) developed a praise for “dissonance” in musical aesthetics, as a disturbance that allows the listener to see the material “truth” behind harmony. Dissonance keeps us critical, while a perfectly harmonious music piece lulls us into accepting whatever purchase or ideology comes with it (Adorno, 1938). In this state of pleasant artistic immersion, we become “acquiescent purchasers”, ready to be mouthfed with an advertisement or a lifestyle. This praise of dissonance is similar to the “epic theater” developed by Brecht and used to describe “meta-awareness” in larp by Hilda Levin (2020). Somehow though, for some, realism seems like a sine qua non of VR, rubbing out entirely the question of keeping an awareness that we are in a virtual milieu. And so, I wonder: do all these people who told me VR wasn’t realistic enough really want to be fooled? And if so, why is that, and are they quite sure of themselves?
II. an.other_body / no.body
Have you ever wondered what your larp experience would have been like if you hadn’t felt limited by your body ability, appearance, normativity, humanness?
One of the first VR games I played was called Drift. It was a “die and retry game” developed by my highschool friend Ferdinand Dervieux. In Drift, you are a bullet sent out in full speed in a brightly coloured cubist world on hard electronic beats. If you touch something (a wall, an obstacle etc) you lose and restart. Throughout the experience, only your head movements control your trajectory and only the position of your head matters. After being reborn a projectile again and again for 30 minutes, a metonymic transformation happened: I was fully my head.
Experiencing Drift made me first wonder: how long would it take for us to get fully used to not being a human body? And what are the spaces we would crave, un-bodied in worlds that obey impossible physics rules? I regularly reopen the book Mind in Architecture edited by Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa (2017) that accounts how we conceive and build spaces based on embodied sensations. What we perceive as sheltering and comfortable, or towering and divine, or angular and dangerous, is an immediate physical reaction. Supposedly, we learned to create spaces based on those evolutionary instincts. As a projectile, almost annihilated, I craved movement, I sought feelings of orbiting and my comfort came from always sensing a spatial opening somewhere. Had there been other bullets, I would have wanted our trajectories to flirt with each other; for our interaction to be confrontational collision, cheeky scraping, avoidance. What spaces will we create for our other-bodies? Who, or what, can we discover we can also be?((VR headsets, like a minority of game consoles, generally include two controllers, one for each hand, which frees movement potentials for both limbs. Consequently, VR apps and games make use of these ambidextrous possibilities.))
Ancient Hours (2022): a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc (Design) and Josephine Rydberg (Production).
Some abstract forms of larp already invite us to imagine ourselves as non-human or more-than-human((See the work of Nina Runa Essendrop, Jamie Harper, Alex Brown, Nilas Dumstrei, to name a few.))and there is a prodigious potential in VR to explore our ability to transpose our mind into different bodies. In particular, we can already reroute our motor functions via puppeteering.((Puppeteering commonly means manipulating the limbs of a puppet to make it lifelike.)) VR pioneer and technical artist Rikke Jansen colloquially uses the word puppeteering to refer to a finer way of controlling the motions and visible emotions of our avatar, by assigning them to a variety of physical gestures that are recognized by controllers or sensors. For instance, a sensor on a foot could control a cluster of your avatar’s tentacles, another one at your waist could stretch out your outer membrane, raising your right index finger could get your helix to turn etc. In other words, digital prosthetics do not have to be thought of in terms of achieving a normative, valid body interpretation, but can be conceived as ways to experience full other-bodiedness. Puppeteering is likely to be a transitory device, as the technology is fast evolving towards image recognition through camera, full haptic body suits, and perhaps even EEG controllers.((Creating controllers that are directly connected to our “thoughts” by measuring our brain activity through electroencephalogram or EEG has been a longstanding area of research. Despite some misleading commercial communication, they are not functional yet. See Padfield et. al (2022).)) However, it is a functional current solution to explore the sensations of our mind being connected to another body.
Other than those extreme examples of being other-bodied, there is a more obvious point to emphasize about VR bodies in conjunction with larping or any other form of VR socializing: we can create or find whatever body we want. I have raved as a very large astronaut, held a speech as an orb of light, walked around as Laura Palmer, I have been the gray default robot avatar and an uncanny rendition of my IRL self.
What this also means is that we can make our VR body as conforming and valid as we wish for it to be, and VR social spaces are a testimony of it.
VR Chat, picture by Lhannan.
Discussions around ageism, lookism, fatphobia, racism, ableism etc. regularly arise in the larp community. Like in any part of our flawed society, presenting as normative as possible will grant us better social capital, integration and play opportunities (van der Heij 2021). If we push the thought experiment far enough, we land in a potential digital future where what our bodies are in the lifeworld does not matter socially anymore, as long as our avatars conform. Let’s stay with that scenario a bit longer: the dominant aesthetic might not be available to us in the real world – body type, skin color, hair, fashion, etc – but it is in the virtual world. All of us get to access valid-presenting bodies, publicly celebrated bodies, or even a gender representation that might alleviate some personal pain. Dissociated from our own body, our mind fully identifies and appropriates these virtual bodies. Is that the body equality that we crave?
This question should linger on throughout the process of designing a VR larp: which avatars are available to the players? What normativity do they shape? How can design and facilitation frame our relation to these digital bodies? Sometimes of course, budget or technical limitations will restrict design choices, as I experienced with my VR larp prototype Lone Wolves Stick Together.((VR Larp for six players designed by Nadja Lipsyc and inspired by the film Stalker by Tarkovsky (1979). The design was prototyped as a physical larp in 2018, then as a full VR prototype in 2023 in collaboration with Breach VR.)) We were only able to develop one avatar model for all six players; a half body, vaguely female, vaguely dark and masked. In this case, the larp is very discursive, and players’ voice coats those basic avatars with more embodiment and personality.
I won’t expand much on the topic of voice, but I’ll let some of my thoughts reverberate here. Voice recognition and voice alteration are still marginal in VR and in online spaces, despite already being technically achievable and available to the public. As such, voice remains the one close-to-intact physical impression of another person – a particularly vulnerable shadow that lets our mind speculate on what body could withhold it. This is quite mysterious to me and I wonder: is our ease of recording and transmitting live sound (compared to recording and transmitting 3D bodies) the reason why we do not disguise our voices in digital spaces? Would we default to avatars of ourselves if scanning ourselves convincingly was easier? Has our cultural obsession for visuals simply raided all our workforce? Or, perhaps, is there a particular attachment to sending our own naked voice out there?
III. technical difficulties / \ the cult of the technical
The app crashed. My headset died. The controllers are not recognized. You’re so glitched. I fell through the floor. I have no idea what’s happening. I feel sick. I’m lagging so much.
VR Chat avatars demonstrating avatar skinning issues and tracking glitch.
We lack a word to describe the specific flavor of pain that we experience when technology fails us. We are so close to our devices that we flirt with being cyborgs: the immediate reactivity of our computer or our phone feels just like any other action that happens seamlessly from intention to execution. Grabbing a plate from the cupboard, aligning pens on a table, and juggling through dozens of tabs and apps require a similar level of effort. However, at times, we might attempt what feels like a simple digital action, such as fixing the alignment of a paragraph in one click or connecting our computer to the only printer in the area, and it fails. Something imperceptible stops us – and this is infuriating. How to explain such fury, while we are aware of the complexity of the technology we use? Could it be connected to the profound sensation that technology should be easy, intuitive; the perfect extension of our will? These expectations of perfect performance and immediacy are in line with our expectations of high resolution when it comes to VR. If it pretends to be a digital reality, then the technological interface ought to be a perfect continuation to our experience of the world.
Graphic quality aside, technical difficulties in VR are still dissuasive to many, as there is a heightened risk of bug/crash/undiagnosed issues compared to the platforms we are used to. One way of alleviating the anxiety one can feel when facing technical issues is to learn enough about the machines not to feel completely helpless – should it be VR, a 3D software, a synthesizer, etc. To many of us, this seems difficult to prioritize, and we would rather wait for simpler interfaces. However, I do believe we should examine our passive (or even avoidant) posture towards the efforts required to understand technology. Such passivity could have worse consequences than keeping us frustrated in front of a stubborn printer.
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR.
Günther Anders’s (1956) concept of Promethean shame points at the inferiority complex we experience when we face the intricacy and performance of the technologies we have created. We escape that shame by avoiding any comparison to those machines – including our attempts at understanding them. We get used to machines thinking and executing for us, to the point we also lose track of our pragmatism and our faculty to foresee their impact on our lives. Our human abilities, both cognitive and emotional, cannot conceive the scale in which the things we create can operate. Anders takes the example of the nuclear bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 as a result of the gap between our understanding of concept and use.
With bringing more advanced technologies in larp, we can also question the gap between what we understand and what we might end up creating. As we merge larp with VR and with A.I., perhaps with little incentive to get more technologically educated, what use of our creations can we get blindsided by?
We are incapable of creating an image of something that we ourselves have made. To this extent we are inverted Utopians: whereas Utopians are unable to make the things they imagine, we are unable to imagine the things we make. (Anders 1981)
Rather than being defeated by the fear of future technological monstrosities, we can take Anders’s analysis of industrial times as a call to stay active and involved when dealing with new technology. Rather than distancing ourselves from how things work and rather than constructing inconspicuous technologies, we can learn to keep discomfort, emotions and difficulties a part of human-computer interactions. In fact, our human limitations and anxiety must remain part of the future if we want the future to have room for humans.
Photo of the author, Ancient Hours (2022).
IV. poetics of >presence< / <presence>
“But why VR, when larp is about being there together?”
Fragments of VR presence:
A distant voice calls, I turn the other way, just in time to see a silhouette of light vanish.
Notes on Blindness, Ex Nihilo, ARTE France, Archer’s Mark
I pick up a pen and draw around me the roots of a tree 4 times my size. The ink pulsates to the repetitive rhythms of a track I chose.
Tilt Brush, Google
I mute myself and approach my players as discreetly as possible. The sound is local, so I need to get close enough to hear them and judge whether it is a good time or not to trigger a flashback scene.
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR, by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR
In a karaoke room where 20 people with accents from all over the world sing on top of each other, I notice that someone is trying to get my attention. Their avatar is small and doll-like and they jump around me. I open my wings wide and cover them entirely.
The furry karaoke room by Duustu (VRChat)
I am playing with the animated locks of my co-actor’s hair, while laying on a bed by the sea. Our avatars are almost spooning. The warm light is softly reflected on the mediterranean stones, and red curtains gently move with the breeze. The director yells “Cut!”, I remove the headset and find myself lying alone on a wooden platform, in vast and austere black film studios.
Dates in Real Life, Maipo Film production.
the space between us, a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc and Josephine Rydberg.
I already miss larping, the way it felt “to be there together” 15 years ago, and that is widely due to technological changes. I miss larping before the avalanche of websites, before we checked our smartphones in our beds after playtime, before social media tipped us on the best and the worst, and before a plethora of pictures would mold my mental representation of larps.
Most of all, I miss larping when we had few enough opportunities to play that most of us were full of anticipation and entirely present at each event. This first flavor of presence is related to a mental and emotional availability; an ability to bring focus and commitment to the current experience that is perceived as an exceptional occurrence. In a form relying on togetherness, the unavailability of some will impact the sentiment of presence of all.
This longing doesn’t mean I am not fully enjoying the options, media and discussions that I now have; but larp already feels different than it did when it comes to this quality of presence – both because of technology and of commodification (Seregina, 2019). Whether the larp is physical or virtual, I am interested in discussing how we can create, participate, organize and self-organize for that sort of presence. I am making this point first, because I do not believe that digital interfaces are the main obstacle to nurturing it.
From Dates in Real Life TV series (2024).
“It’s not the same as being in the same place as someone else, it will never feel like a larp.”
The term teleabsence (Friesen 2012) categorizes the lack of bodily flow of information that prevents us from fully understanding and enjoying one another online((See Lindemann, Schünemann (2020) for more discussion on the concept of presence in digital spaces.)): I cannot look you directly in the eyes, sense the warmth of your skin when we are close, see a chest inflate and deflate or perhaps catch onto a loud deglutition. All of these clues are what allow us to react to one another in subtle and intimate ways. In this sense and as of now,((We should of course imagine a near future where most of our perceptible biofeedback can be transmitted to our avatars.)) VR is more mediated: there is a stronger need to represent or magnify our emotions if we want to convey them. Much like roleplaying with masks, our body language doesn’t disappear, but we must make it bigger to be understood. Although we can get accustomed to it with practice, and although some can experience phantom touch,((Phenomenon when a VR user gets physical sensations from perceiving a virtual touch or impact. VR is frequently used as a treatment for phantom pain or as exposure therapy due to its ability to trick our sense of reality.)) it is undeniable that VR larping takes us away from these finely sensual encounters and confabulations. However, it can be intimate, raw, and strange too.
Co-creation between VR players can flower just as much into the moments of beauty which Stenros and MacDonald (2020) also refer to as presence: “being sensitive to the emotions around you, understanding the exact situation, creating the right character response, feeling the emotion.” Presence in VR also has its signature poetics which lie in the expressive fluidity of spaces and bodies, in the playfulness of planes and perspectives, in the richness of sound integration and in forbidden intimacies.
Space and scale become potentially expressive and reactive as both the environments and the bodies you chose can be molded following your emotions or intentions: they can be gigantic or minuscule, they can form a vast open field or the most angular of cells, etc. We rarely intentionally fully design physical larps taking into consideration the perspectives of our space, where people are, how they can hear one another. VR spaces can be fully understood by the designers, either because they built them, or because visiting them and learning all their nooks and crannies is only a headset away. This option opens a more filmic or theatrical relationship to larp creation, which calls to refine our relation to larpmakers’ artistry, artistic emergence, and players’ creative agency.
But a rather easy and crucial element that I want to highlight is the potential that lies within VR larp sound design. Surround sound with outputs all around the space can create an “immersive” soundscape a lot more easily than by using physical sound sources or speakers in real life larp. On top of this immersive soundscape, you can localize sound sources as expressively as you desire: to bring objects to life, to bring participants’ attention to a specific spot, etc. And finally, you can create player-specific sound cues: whisper directly to the ear of each of your players, have them hear individual musics or, like in Lone Wolves Stick Together VR, have individual streams of thoughts for each character. This larp is about contradictory desires and introspection, and the streams of thoughts are triggered between each roleplaying scene to represent or prompt an evolving mental state. The soundtracks therefore help to guide the players going from act to act: from doubts to nostalgia, to disillusion, despair, and then finally, truth.
Screenshot from the prototype of Lone Wolves Stick Together, developed by Breach VR.
Sound alone can induce sensations of variation, call back previous moments, and give spatial and environmental impressions. Blackbox larps often rely on soundscapes and music to displace the fiction to a different place, and, with VR sound design, this trick is all the more potent: we can recreate the acoustics of an immensely tall building, make the players’ footsteps sound wet or frosty, create a musical space that reacts to players movements, etc.
There would be a lot more to explore and describe when touching upon the poetics of presence in VR, but the last trail I will allude to here is that of forbidden or impossible intimacies. VR lets us be where we shouldn’t be: in places that are inaccessible to the public, in places where sustaining life is impossible, in voyeuristic points of view. This emotion of looking at an impossible artifact from up close, of being a ghost, of being a speck of dust in a piano, of seeing someone from behind another person’s eyes, triggers an uncomfortable and shy curiosity that I have found to be a VR-specific source of inspiration.
V. the possibility of larp as mass media
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Donna Haraway 2016)
Larp has changed a lot over the past decade. It has become more international, more professional, it has blossomed into a vast array of players’ aspirations and of creative styles, it has even become mainstream in China (Shuo & al. 2022) and commonly played as an online form (Otting 2022). Industrial media and mainstream entertainment have had a more or less distant eye on larp; from big tech companies to audiovisual studios and theme parks. This proximity with the industry reinforces the expansionist dream that is a source of both excitement and trepidation among larpers. As someone working professionally with larp and VR, the first question I am asked when talking to game studios or stakeholders is: how can we reach more players or sell more copies? It is a question which generally turns into: how can we automate the game mastering or facilitation, massify the experience?
the space between us, a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc and Josephine Rydberg.
VR, like many new technologies, is connected to an all-encompassing need to massify. Its biggest actors, which are Facebook/Meta, Google and soon Apple, operate on a mass level, with only widespread adoption being able to stomach the developmental costs of their technologies and projects. Similarly, massification is what would allow more larp designers to live off their craft, and perhaps even prosper from it – an unprecedented potential.
I have been thinking that larp and VR were a match made in heaven due to their common affordances and potentials for presence, interaction, spatial creation, etc. (Lipsyc 2017). Retrospectively, I wonder how much of my initial excitement came from contemplating those creative potentials, and how much came from another sort of intuition: that larp could be the most appropriate form to create an immersive mass media.
With immersive technologies being more and more customer friendly and with the ascend of creative A.I., larp will potentially be able to rely on proceduralenvironments,((Procedural generation combines human-crafted assets with algorithms to automate and randomize the creation of large amounts of content, for instance entire game environments.)) scenes and characters. Similarly, our most brilliant designers might train digital automated facilitators, which could be combined with massively multiplayer immersive digital spaces and even possibly persistent open worlds.((Persistent worlds are digital spaces that are maintained online for all players to join and leave as they please without losing any data.)) This might thus be the way for larp creators to land an industrial career, but what are the other implications?
the space between us, a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc and Josephine Rydberg.
Who’s getting paid for larp?
Larp is not free as is – it comes with a lot of labor, which in our society must be paid by someone (in this case, the designers and their direct support network for non-profit larps, as well larper-customers for commercialized ones) – and it is not free to attend, with continuously inflating participation costs. The cost is mutual, just like the quality of a larp experience relies sometimes almost equally on designers’, organizers’ and players’ competence and engagement (Torner 2020; Jones, Koulu, & Torner 2016). Altogether, larp has been dependent on the goodwill and gratefulness that exists between designers, organizers and players.
However, this goodwill might collapse like a house of cards if larp effectively leads to some people becoming individually prosperous, famous or ascending socially thanks to the free labor of many others. The digital age has been normalizing free creative labor that people do at home: social media relies on its own customers’ content creation, creative A.I. is growing thanks to the free training its customers provide, and a mass media based on larp is just as likely to run thanks to the free contribution of its players. In other terms, many of us are or will be working a daytime job in order to be able to pay to work a creative job.((Günther Anders (1956) writes: “In a certain way, each individual is employed and occupied as a domestic worker . . . whereas the classical domestic worker made products in order to assure himself of a minimum of consumer goods and leisure, today’s domestic worker consumes a maximum number of leisure products in order to collaborate in the production of the mass-man.”))
Larp as a sustainable practice
A wonderful quality of larp is that it can be a very sustainable activity, given that we do not order cheap Chinese merchandise for costuming and that we do not fly ourselves to faraway countries every time we’re given a chance to (Brown 2022). As such, the environmental costs and political questions that come from working with technology are still unforeseen in larp. From relying on A.I. which demands extreme amounts of energy to train, to persistent multiplayer digital spaces, the maintenance of which also depends on keeping powerful computers churning at all times, and to supporting the electronics industry where mere components are obtained through excessive mining of rare materials at the expense of ecosystems and underprivileged workers in South America, Africa and South Asia (Asher 2022).
To remain sustainable, must we oppose the development of larp in the industry? Or, by excluding ourselves from those chances out of moral purity, do we also exclude ourselves from decision-making and shaping what this artform can become? How to react and act in the face of the climate crisis and what to do with industrial capitalism are questions that vastly exceed the scope of this article, but the possibility of industrial development should always come with self-reflection.
the space between us (2022) crew.
What other realities will we create?
If larp makers are potential creators for a future mass media, their influence and creative choices will radiate beyond our small community and pervade the general society. Both for the sake of our current community and our future practices, we must examine the realities we have been creating and plan to create. In particular, we must interrogate our tendency to reenact a glamourized dominant history (see Wood & Holkar in this volume). Nietzsche (1874) warned us against the temptation of over-studying history and fetishizing the past; such a tendency to “idle in the garden of knowledge” prevents us from taking action to bravely shape our lives.
Not only can a fantasy based on historical fallacy further cut us from the desire and ability to impact the current history, but our romanticisation of history is also contributing to making larp a space perceived as white and exclusive. Larp is not a diverse form for many reasons, one of them being that it ceaselessly recycles eurocentric history, representation, and codes of conduct. This isn’t to say that larp is particularly flawed as a form or a community. In fact, larp has more representation of gender and sexual minorities than most tech fields.((We now see the impact of these population biases on the technology these fields create (Zalnieriute & Cutts 2022, Buolamwini 2019).)) Yet, larp is profoundly biased.((See on YouTube the Larpers of Color Panel – Unlocking the Spectrum from Knutpunkt 2018 with great insights from Jonaya Kemper, Mo Holkar, Clio Davis, Aina Skjønsfjell Lakou, Kat Jones & Ross Cheung. See also Kemper (2018) and Holkar (2020).)) What body we wear, what space we create, those are not simply a creator’s preference or some fan service; those are statements on the digital future we are vouching for, and we now have very concrete options to challenge our usual aesthetics.
Massification’s impact on the artform
As a mass media, larp wouldn’t be the form that we now know – it would not be, feel or look the same, and we might never recognize it as larp. We might call it worldhopping, sim, VR MMORPG or VR gaming, and this immersive mass media might even mostly ignore the larp community’s praxis and reconstruct its own independent history towards storyworld-building and roleplaying.
In all cases, massification calls for mainstream content: less room and visibility would be given to experimental forms, but a bigger number of people would be getting something out of it. If it is anything like other mass media, an immersive mass media would be a constant flux of standardized content, of adaptations and of franchises. A.I. content creation being a condition to massify larp, we are likely to witness a new degree of standardization((Usva Seregina (2019) already pointed at the standardization that stems from commodification.)) in larp and across all artforms.
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR (2023) by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR.
Another consequence of using A.I. in our creative processes is that it can go as far as removing the dialectic we engage in with our creative materials: instead of dealing with the limitations that come with mastering a media, a material or an interface, we generate references and tweak them to get closer to our intuition or what we imagine. These limitations are what allow us to think of original solutions: it is because I cannot program the physics system I have in mind that I am adding the extra jumping power to my character which turns out to be the most fun part of the game, it is because the pigments I can access are not the right shade of blue that my sky is a bit green and all the more evocative, it is because I cannot find the right drum set in my sounds library that I recorded and distorted the sound of a bottle floating on the shore, relentlessly hitting a rock. Originality often comes from that friction between what we desire to create and what we can achieve. In a world of automated combinations of references, not only are we losing control and mastery over the creative technologies we use, we might accidentally lose one of our greatest creative tools: our ability to find ways to overcome difficulties.
Recorded larps
An additional disruptive potential for the larp form is the possibility to fully record a runtime: from all the players’ points of view, from all corners and angles. As of now, larp can contain a lot of secrets and privacy; a confession far away at the edge of the playscape, a joke that would only be appropriate for your good mate to hear, an off-game discussion to talk about a personal trigger, etc. In a virtual space, larp can be recorded, witnessed or re-lived. A larp recording can be an immersive reality roleplay TV experience for an external audience, or a pilgrimage through our own memory for returning players. Challenging the ephemeral and private attributes of larp, immersive mass media could become a persistent form, a voyeuristic form, and a place of collective memory (Yasseri & al. 2022).
Much customized such me wow
Streaming platforms, e-commerce platforms and social media all rely on learning and predicting customer preferences. Any digital mass-production is going towards data-driven content. As such, we can easily imagine that commercial data-driven larp would be informed by our recorded player behavior. Characters could be customized for us – with the tensions, surprises and alien elements we need, with the themes and flamboyance we want to address, with the aesthetic variations that feel the closest to our deeper selves. Although cultural products are already sold to us using the familiar language of our cultures, subcultures and social class, roleplay and identity play add the use of our own individual data: biofeedback, idiosyncrasies, fantasies and aspirations, furthering the ability to customize our online and offline experiences.
How to remain critical without being left out?
VRChat avatars. Photo courtesy of Rikke Jansen.
A larp mass media could also be extraordinarily connecting, enriching and educational. Larp has allowed a lot of us to explore our identity, to overcome personal limits, to develop a sense of community, to expand our knowledge and creativity – why not open those wonderfully enriching opportunities to everyone? Why deprive ourselves of contributing to a field that might make larp creators prosperous? Why shield ourselves from the excitement of discovering more immersive forms that might enthrall and stimulate us?
Automation, sustainability and accessibility are complex and abstract concepts that are close to impossible to grasp and handle at an individual level. However, we can aim to develop tools to measure impact and risks, and balance out our contributions. We can ask what our environmental budget is. Or how much do we use free labor for our own interest? And how much do we truly return to the wider community?
This isn’t a radical solution to oppose the changes of the world, but to keep in touch with our complex realities and remain alert enough to make decisions for ourselves and as citizens. Industrial arts and new technologies are defined by a rapid progression, a rush to new projects and new ideas in order to “make it”, with little breathing time spent on forming critical opinions. Such speed, combined with the massification of our expression and desire to constantly create more and more content has been flagged by thinkers contemporary to the rise of fascism in Europe – the school of Frankfurt, Günther Anders, Hanna Arendt, Guy Debord (1967), etc.
Walter Benjamin (1936) ends his famous text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction with the following sentences:
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.
He urges us to remain critical thinkers and active actors, as opposed to creators and consumers. Similarly, Hannah Arendt (1953) argues in Understanding and Politics that fascism does not build on the radicalization of masses, but in deconstructing their ability to form opinions. With the possibility of our community being closely involved in immersive mass media and disruptive technology, we must confront one another, debate, take stances, and use the democracy tools accordingly, however eroded and illusionary they seem to be – voting, protesting, rioting.
Bibliography
Theodor Adorno (1938): On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, The Culture Industry, Routledge.
Günther Anders (1956): The Obsolescence of Mankind. Editions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances, Editions Ivréa. Vol. 1. English translation publically available on https://libcom.org/
Günther Anders (1981): The nuclear threat, Radical reflections on the atomic age. Beck
Hannah Arendt (1953): Understanding and Politics.Partisan Review, vol. 20.
Simon Brind (2019): Narrative Design. In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen. Tampere; Knudepunkt 2019.
Guy Debord (1967): The Society of the Spectacle, Gallimard Blanche, 1992.
Norm Friesen (2014): Telepresence and Tele-absence: A Phenomenology of the (In)visible Alien Online. In Phenomenology & Practice, vol 8 special issue Being Online, edited by Norm Friesen and Stacey O. Irwin.
Donna J. Haraway (2016): Staying with the trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press Books.
Karijn van der Heij (2021): We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps for Participants and Organizers. In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
Mo Holkar (2016): Larp and Prejudice. In Larp Realia, edited by Jukka Särkijärvi, Mika Loponen and Kaisa Kangas. Solmukohta 2016.
Edmund Husserl (1936): The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press, 1970.
Katherine Castiello Jones, Sanna Koulu, and Evan Torner (2016): Playing at Work: Labor, Identity and Emotion in Larp. In Larp Politics. In Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen and Jukka Särkijärv. Ropecon ry.
Hilda Levin (2020): Metareflection. In Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen (eds.). What Do We Do When We Play? Helsinki; Solmukohta 2020.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1874): On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for life, Hackett, 1980.
Ylva Otting (2022): The Online Larp Road Trip. In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Natasha Padfield, Kenneth Camilleri, Tracey Camilleri, Simon Fabri, and Marvin Bugeja (2022): A Comprehensive Review of Endogenous EEG-Based BCIs for Dynamic Device Control. In Sensors 22, vol. 15.
Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa (2017): Mind in Architecture, Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design. The MIT Press.
Xiong Shuo, Wen Ruoyu, and Mátyás Hartyándi (2022): The Chinese Hotpot of Larp. In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Jaakko Stenros and James Lórien MacDonald (2020): Beauty in Larp. In What Do We Do When We Play? edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen. Solmukohta.
Evan Torner (2020): Labor and Play. In What Do We Do When We Play? edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen. Solmukohta.
Taha Yasseri, Patrick Gildersleve, and Lea David (2022): Collective Memory in the Digital Age. In Collective Memory, edited by Shane O’Mara. Elsevier.
Monika Zalnieriute and Tatiana Cutts (2022): How AI and New Technologies Reinforce Systemic Racism. Study commissioned by the United Nations.
VR Experiences and Softwares
Ayahuasca VR (2020): Experience by Atlas V, Small Studio by MacGuff, and Ryot.Dates in Real Life (2024): Series partly shot in VR, directed by Jakob Rorvik and produced by Maipo Films for NRK.
Drift (2015): VR die and retry by Ferdinand Dervieux and Aby Batti.
Eat, Sleep, VR, Repeat (2023): Fatboy Slim Concert by EngageVR.
Gravity Sketch: VR native design software that allows you to model 3D objects with collaborators.
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR: larpdesigned by Nadja Lipsyc as part of the Norwegian National Artistic Research PhD program. Developed with Breach VR and playtested in 2023. Older prototypes were tested in 2020 and 2018.
Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (2016):short film directed by Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton & James Spinney and produced by Ex Nihilo, ARTE France, Archer’s Mark.
VRChat (since 2014): social online virtual world platform that relies on Unity-based user-content. VRChat worlds mentioned in this article: Club Babylon by Rikke Jansen (private), VR Furry Karaoke by Duutsu (public), Wind and Grass by Byanca (public).
Further Relevant VR Experiences
Ancient Hours (2022): a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc (Design) and Josephine Rydberg (Production). Playtested at Grenselandet 2022 and premiered at The Smoke 2023.
Oxymore (2022): Jean-Michel Jarre Concert by Vrroom.
The Under Presents: Tempest (2020): immersive theater piece directed by Samantha Gorman and produced by Tenderclaws.
Welcome to the Respite (2021): immersive theater piece by the Ferryman Collective.
Talks
VR & Larp (2017), talk by Nadja Lipsyc, State of the Larp.
VR & the Future of Larp (2021), panel discussion organized by Anders Gredal Berner, facilitated by Johanna Koljonen, with Francis Brady, Rasmus Hogdall, Nadja Lipsyc, Bjarke Pedersen, Josefine Rydberg, Knutpunkt.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Lipsyc, Nadja. 2024. “Comments on VR, Larp, Technology, Creation: Aesthetics, Possibility and Ethics of an Immersive Mass Media.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Cover photo: VRChat avatars. Image authorized by Rikke Jansen.
the space between us, a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc and Josephine Rydberg.
the space between us (2022) crew.
