Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
It is a quite common phenomenon after a larp. In the larp FB-group, or other social media platform, a thread is created. ”Comment with a picture of your face,” it says, ”and let people compliment you on your larping!” Then the thread explodes with pictures, and lots and lots of compliments. Such a lovely trend, right? So why does it always make me slightly uncomfortable and anxious?
The reasons are many, and I will try to detail them here. As the title suggests, this is an opinion piece. It is meant to identify a problem that I experience, and that I think I am not alone in experiencing. It also suggests alternatives that I think might work better for people who share my experience.
Unequal distribution
One of the core issues is that there will inevitably be an unequal distribution of compliments. Some will get many, some will get fewer. And while comparing is rarely something that makes us happier, it is hard to resist, especially if we are already feeling vulnerable and self-conscious.
The reasons for uneven distribution are many. One might of course be the quality of your larping (as well as casting and style, which we will return to below), and how many people you interacted with. Another is timing: those who are quick to post their picture in the thread will get more comments, while those who join the party after a few days might not get as many, as some people will already be ”done” commenting. On top of that, those who diligently compliment many others will themselves get more compliments back – which is not wrong in itself, but risks giving the compliments a transactional nature.
What is good larping?
When comparing how many, and how enthusiastic, compliments people receive, it is easy to see it as an unofficial rating; the ”best” larpers will get more positive attention, and if you do not get as much praise that means you larped poorly. However, in my experience the people who get many compliments are also the ones that were noticeable and easy to remember. People who are cast as characters who are seen and heard, or who have a more expressive, extroverted playstyle, are more likely to receive a lot of compliments. And the people with a subtle playstyle, who play subdued characters, and mainly have intensive play with a few close relations, are more likely to have gone unnoticed by many at the larp.
Personally, I quite value the more subtle playstyles, the brilliance that is mainly visible when you get up close. And while more showy playstyles are often very valuable for larps as well, most larps thrive when they have a balance of different playstyles, and the right kinds of players as the right characters. But looking at the overall picture created by compliment threads, it is easy for the less noticeable larpers to suspect that they are simply not a very good larper, and that if they were showier and took up more space, they would become a better larper.
Doubting authenticity
People approach it differently, but there is a general understanding that you should compliment as many people as possible. As mentioned above, there is also a trend of reciprocity – people try to compliment the people who complimented them. And while it is a good principle to be generous and compliment everyone, an anxious mind like my own will often doubt: is this a genuine compliment, or are you just saying something because you had to come up with something.
Why it is so tempting
After a larp, many of us are still completely absorbed by the experience. We can think of little else. And many of us yearn for connection. We want to know that we were seen, that we mattered to others. We want to feel that we were as important to our co-players as they were to us. We want to spread positivity and let people know how awesome they are, and we want them to think we are awesome too. This makes it very hard to resist the compliment threads, especially when we see the love bombing happening. There have been many times where I have initially resisted participating in a compliment thread, but eventually gave up and participated anyway, even though I know it makes me anxious.
So what am I saying?
“Are you just sore that you don’t get complimented enough for your immersive, introverted shenanigans? Just don’t participate in the compliment threads, if they’re so terrible, and let people enjoy them!” Well, this is exactly what I do. However, I thought that others that share my discomfort might feel some comfort in knowing that they are not alone, and perhaps get perspectives on what makes them uneasy.
I also do have a suggestion of what I think is a far better practice. I tend to give compliments directly – either after the larp, in person, or reaching out to them via social media. A fellow anxious friend mentioned to me how this can be really difficult and intimidating (reaching out to someone when you weren’t invited). While I absolutely understand this, I am happy that it is something I feel able to do. I rely on the fact that most people relish compliments and honest appreciation, and I try to do it in a way that is not imposing, or seems to demand reciprocation or further interaction. Something along the lines of ”hey, I just wanted to let you know, I really liked the way you played [scene]. You portray [emotion] so beautifully. It was great to see, thank you!”.
The benefits of doing this are many. For one, a spontaneous compliment is great to receive, and it usually makes people happy. It also feels enjoyable for me to give compliments in this way. Another great benefit is that there is no comparison, you don’t have to wonder if other people are noticing you more or less than others.
It should be mentioned that some people enjoy compliment threads a lot, and enjoy the benefits without any of the anxiety or overthinking that I describe. It is not necessarily something that we should all stop doing. But I think it is worthwhile to consider the options, and what feels best for you, and if there are other ways you can spread the love and appreciation after a larp.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as: Greip, Julia. 2025. “Why I hate post-larp compliment threads.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.
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.
For Mike, may he rest well.
When I learned that a dear friend and mentor had passed away, I was at home, scrolling through social media. In that moment, a part of me that usually stays quiet—my other self, the character I embody in another world—rose to the surface, refusing to remain in the background. My grief seemed to split in two. As myself, I mourned the loss of a kind and dedicated man who had spent years creating a space where imagination thrived. As my character, I froze, feeling the absence of a mentor who had guided me, encouraged me, and helped shape the person I had become in that world. I did not know Mike for as long as others, but he always had a smile and an open ear for me. Our fantasy and real-life selves often shared a space at the same time; while he mentored my character as a ritualist and taught her how to command a circle, he also mentored me—ensuring that I would not be lost under the weight of others’ wants and needs.
Even now, as I write this, I can still feel myself trying to hold back tears. Two selves wrestle for control of my thoughts: one grounded in reality, and the other still standing at my mentor’s wake, deep in a forest, where a tree now grows in his honour. The UK larp community lost a very good man the day he passed; a man who pushed the boundaries of what could be in a game, yet even when he was busy, he always gave more than just a moment of his time for others.
It wasn’t the first time I had encountered death in this hobby, but it was the first time the loss felt so permanent. There would be no new character bearing his face with a different name, no scholar sipping tea near the College of Magic, no kind smile waiting at the Watchers’ table to open the circle for me. I miss his smile.
This death was quiet. Those of us who loved Mike gathered to mourn. His closest friends shared stories of how he had helped shape Curious Pastimes; a UK larp that has been running since 1996, and currently runs four mainline events a year set in its game world. We listened, sometimes laughing in remembrance, but mostly sitting silently on the late summer grass, holding hands, hugging, crying, and honouring a man who had given so much and asked for so little in return.
The memorial was meant to be entirely out of character. We came together, ostensibly as ourselves, to grieve him. Yet, looking around, I noticed most of us weren’t dressed as ourselves. We wore the clothes of our other selves—the characters Mike might also have met through his own alter ego. It was an unusual wake, held during a time when the event itself was in full swing, laughter echoing through the trees on the hillside. But in that space, we were caught in a strange in-between, neither fully in-character nor fully out of it. Two selves occupied one body, coexisting in shared grief.
I did not walk to the wake alone, and I am forever grateful for that. A friend—a brother, really, as he has been to my heart for many years now—walked from our faction’s camp with me. I am, by nature, an emotional person, but I—perhaps foolishly—hoped that I could witness this event with the strength of an unbending face. Instead, I found strength in those around me who also allowed themselves to feel this loss.
I remember my heart-brother taking my hand as I cried. In that instant of vulnerability, he was every version of himself I had known, and I was every version of myself he had known. New friends, old friends—the Claw and his cub, the brother and sister—all of them were present in the way only this community could allow. Letting him wrap his arm around me brought far more comfort than forcing a brave face or pushing any part of myself aside. He has long been a safe place, across so many lives.
The Emotional Complexity of Larp
Death is a frequent part of larp, but it is rarely permanent. In Al’Gaia, one of the factions in Curious Pastimes, the primary belief is that when someone dies, they return to the cycle—the eternal loop of life, death, and rebirth. While the specifics vary depending on the character’s beliefs, path, and connection to the deities of Al’Gaia, the core idea remains the same. For many, this belief offers comfort, something often reiterated by those in positions of authority during in-character funerals.
When someone in Al’Gaia dies, their body is carried back to camp and laid to rest in the glade where we set up our shrine at the start of the event. We gather, sometimes packed tightly into that sacred space, mourning the loss of one of our own. Yet, we are always reminded not to grieve but to rejoice—because the departed has returned to the cycle, and we will meet them again in another life.
I’ve always found it a complicated kind of comfort to hear those words.
I’ve attended many larp funerals. In both of the larp games I play—Curious Pastimes and Wilde Realms—I’ve taken part in these ceremonies as both an active and passive participant; someone who was directly affected by a loss and spoke on the individual whose spirit was now in the stars, and as a listener there to pay my respects to another that I may not have known as well. I’ve sung beneath the trees with others as fallen comrades “disappeared” (stepped out of play). I’ve stood with my herd, setting fields of the dead ablaze with violet fire. I’ve stood among the bodies, pleading with my in-character family to remember the fallen and continue the fight in their name.
Death in real life is not as dramatic, but it is just as deeply emotional. I cry the same tears, hold the same hands, and think the same thoughts in both of my lives. The key difference is that death in larp is not supposed to be permanent. You mourn a character as though they were a real person—because, in many ways, they were. They had a family, a personality, a story. You fought beside them, bled with them, and waited anxiously for their return after a battle. It feels almost cruel to experience loss so frequently in larp, knowing it’s temporary, yet still feeling the full weight of grief as if it were real.
This is, perhaps, one of the limitations of the magic circle—the invisible boundary that separates the world of play from the real world. (Huizinga 1938, 10) In larp, though we grieve our loved ones, we eventually see their face again in another body and continue living with them. In real life, death is final. My friend will not return.
This stark difference can intensify the phenomenon of “bleed”; a concept I am deeply familiar with, originally coined by Emily Care Boss in 2007 at Ropecon. In ‘Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character’, Sarah Bowman defines this concept by writing that “role-players sometimes experience moments where their real-life feelings, thoughts, relationships, and physical states spill over into their characters’, and vice versa.” (Bowman 2015) Bowman states that bleed can occur intentionally or unintentionally, and its effects range from catharsis to profound emotional devastation.
Bleed can be observed in three ways:
Bleed-in: when the player’s emotions, thoughts, or experiences affect their character.
Bleed-out: when the character’s emotions, thoughts, or experiences affect the player.
Bleed feedback loop: when the boundary between player and character dissolves, especially in overwhelming emotional moments. (Bowman 2015)
What I experienced during Mike’s wake—and even when I first heard the news of his passing—was undeniably a bleed feedback loop. I could not tell you who I was as I sat listening to his dearest companions recount their memories. I entered the wake as myself, but my body was dressed as another, and the distinction between the two identities blurred. Or perhaps they didn’t blur at all. Perhaps they simply merged, becoming one.
I often say that playing at larp is a way to explore and embody facets of yourself—ideals, dreams, or fragments of your personality that you bring to life. In moments like these, the boundary between the player and the character collapses, creating an experience that is simultaneously beautiful and overwhelming.
The Fragility of the Magic Circle
The magic circle in larp serves as a boundary between fiction and reality, creating a space where players can safely embody characters and explore narratives. Central to maintaining this boundary is the concept of alibi; originally discussed by Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern in 2009 in ‘Philosophies and strategies of pervasive larp design’, in Larp, the Universe and Everything, (Montola, Stenros, Waern 2009, 214). It is further deliberated by Bowman in her work on bleed from 2015, and again by Bowman and Hugaas in their 2021 article ‘Magic Is Real: How Role-Playing Can Transform Our Identities, Our Communities, and Our Lives’. Alibi acts as a psychological shield for players, allowing them to place blame for their actions directly on their character when engaging in situations that might otherwise feel emotionally or morally fraught. (Bowman 2015) (Bowman and Hugaas 2021)
But although alibi allows for emotional and mental distance between a player and their character, this tool of detachment is not infallible. The strength of alibi can vary depending on the story’s proximity to the player’s real life—playing a character who experiences grief, love, or loss that mirrors the player’s own can weaken the alibi, making it harder to maintain a sense of separation. In these cases, bleed—where the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of the player and character intertwine—becomes almost inevitable.
This fragility became glaringly apparent at Mike’s wake. I entered the space carrying the raw weight of personal grief but dressed as someone else entirely—a character who also mourned. My usual reliance on alibi, the assurance that my emotions were distinct from my character’s, crumbled. Instead, my two selves began to blur. My character’s performed grief became my own, and my own feelings deepened their reaction. It didn’t matter that my character hadn’t been “let out to play” yet, I could feel their emotions just as solidly as my own. They were just as real. The magic circle, meant to protect and isolate, instead amplified the collision between fiction and reality.
This breakdown of alibi wasn’t simply jarring—it was transformative. The safety net of the magic circle exposed me to an emotional intensity that might not have been as deeply felt outside of it. I wasn’t sure where I ended and my character began. I didn’t just mourn for Mike as myself—I mourned for him through my character. This merging of identities exemplifies how bleed can erode the structures we rely on in larp, creating profound, often overwhelming emotional experiences.
The Duality of Grief and Bleed
Grief within larp exists on a unique emotional spectrum, heightened by the phenomenon of bleed. Bleed, as players know, blurs the line between character and self—emotions from one spilling into the other. This becomes particularly pronounced during moments of grief, where the loss of a character or even a fellow player can create a shared sense of vulnerability among participants. We all felt it when we lost Mike; we weren’t alone in that field, listening to his dear friends talk about him. We were together in our grief, whether we knew each other personally or not, that moment connected us; Mike connected us. In ‘Why Larp Community Matters and How We Can Improve It’, Laura Wood highlights how larp evokes intense emotions and provides spaces for connection, amplifying empathy and deepening bonds. These spaces allow grief to feel communal and cathartic but can also make players more emotionally exposed. (Wood 2021)
Grieving alongside others in a larp setting can strengthen a sense of belonging, as moments of vulnerability bring participants closer. However, this same openness can exacerbate emotional overwhelm when grief spills over, especially if the loss feels personal on both in-character and real-world levels. Without adequate support, these heightened emotions may lead to unintended consequences, leaving players feeling isolated in their dual mourning.
Promoting Safety and Awareness
Mike ensured that I knew I was more than a ritualist with powers for others to use. He spoke to me about the importance of saying “no”, and helped me manage my anxiety about being in such a prominent position. Because of Mike, I learned to be powerful and powerless; my job was to lead the players in the circle, but the outcome of a ritual was not up to me. He was my touchstone in the Watcher’s box; someone I could count on to be fair, but to encourage me with positive criticism. He was, in my opinion, the best Watcher that Curious Pastimes had. He looked beyond the play and saw the player, and I think that is something that is missing now.
We may have lost Mike, but we haven’t lost his beliefs or his words. I can do my best to advocate for myself at larp and encourage others to do the same. Together, we can create an element of larp culture that is dedicated to wellbeing, we can manage the challenges of subjects like grief and bleed, we can understand that safety—physical, emotional, and mental—must become a cornerstone of our games. Wood’s call to normalise safety tools like safe words and exit mechanics are just the start. (Wood 2021) These tools allow players to protect themselves without disrupting the experience for others, making it easier to process complex emotions such as grief. Educating both organisers and players about these tools—and creating environments where their use is encouraged and introduced to players before a game and during pre-game briefings—can help safeguard everyone’s emotional well-being.
Self-awareness is crucial when engaging with grief in larp. Players should understand their emotional limits and approach topics thoughtfully, recognising that their fellow participants may be carrying their own burdens. Community-wide education on managing grief and bleed—through workshops, post-game discussions, or even casual conversations—can create a culture of care and responsibility.
By weaving empathy, safety, and self-awareness into the fabric of larp, participants can transform grief from an overwhelming experience to an opportunity for collective healing and deeper connection. As Wood suggests, this is the magic of community: learning to protect each other’s vulnerability while embracing the shared humanity that grief uniquely reveals. (Wood 2021) I can’t help but feel that Mike would share the same sentiment.
Bibliography
Huizinga, Johan. 1938. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Angelico Press. 10.
Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern. 2009. “Philosophies and Strategies of Pervasive Larp Design.” In Holter, Matthijs, Fatland, Eirik & Tømte, Even: Larp, the Universe and Everything. The book for Knutepunkt 2009. Knutepunkt. p214.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Greenwood, Lyssa. 2025. “Grief in Larp: Bleeding Through Two Lives.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Leandro Godoy, one of the founders and producers of the larp group Confraria das Ideias (Eng. Brotherhood of Ideas), conducted an interview with a diverse group of larpers, players and designers from different regions in Brazil. He seeks to understand the limitations faced in Brazil, both inside and outside the games.
The people interviewed were:
André Sarturi, 45. Actor and university professor, founder of the Enigma larp group. Curitiba – PR.
Carolina Scartezini, 40. Witch of the word. Creator, actor and artistic advisor at Tudo Teatro group. Itaberaba – BA.
Effe Schmidlin, 29. Multi-artist and teacher. Member of the Sangria larp group. Belo Horizonte – MG
Henrique Marins, 44. Teacher. São Paulo – SP
Larissa Forchetto, 28. Video editor. Sao Paulo – SP
Luiz Falcão, 36 Designer, Visual Artist, Set Designer and Art Educator. Founder of the group Boi Voador and NpLarp. Sao Paulo-SP
Rafael Silva, 32. Realtor. Member of the Sangria larp group. Belo Horizonte – MG
Raissa Alonso, 32. Historian. Sao Paulo-SP
Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama, 39. Teacher. Member of the Coral Amarelo larp group. Sorocaba – SP
Thais Pistorezzi, 43. Journalist and actress. Maceió – AL
Vanessa Mayumi, 29. UX Designer. Sao Paulo-SP
Viviane Silva, 40. Art Promoter. Member of the Matilha da Garoa rpg group. Sao Paulo-SP
On factors limiting participation in larps
Luiz Falcão: For a long time, what limited us was that there were no larps to play. Organizing or running a larp is a lot of work. There was a time with a greater variety of larps (between 2010 and 2016), but today we are somehow back with scarcity once again.
Larissa Forchetto: For me, the biggest challenge is exactly this – there aren’t that many larps to go to.
Luiz Falcão: There was a time when we knew there were larps out there: there were the Graal larps, São Paulo by Night (and other vampire larp groups), and Megacorp, for example. But – this is a thing that we end up not considering – sometimes there are games, but they are not always for our player profiles. (see e.g. Falcão 2014).
Luiz Falcão: In 2013 there were a series of initiatives to change the situation, such as Luiz Prado’s larps. But it wasn’t enough.
André Sarturi: I don’t know many people in Curitiba who larp. The ones I know are much younger than I am, and I’m not really involved with the scene. If there were more larp groups, I would end up playing more larps.
Thais Pistorezzi: I moved from São Paulo to Maceió, and there are no larp groups in the region.
Luiz Falcão: Parenting, its complexity and all its invisible work. I work on the weekends (because I work with art and culture), and during the week I am at my daughter’s disposal. I don’t even have weekends for free time.
Henrique Marins: Family and professional commitments require, for example, traveling more frequently on weekends.
Tadeu Rodrigues: Calendar. And adding to this the issue of logistics and the main thing for me, the demands of day to day life. I have to put a lot of things in my daily life aside to be done during the weekend – besides, of course, spending time with my daughter. And these are everyday things, cleaning the house, cooking for the week, etc. Having more weekends participating in larps would mean having fewer full weekends to take care of these everyday demands.
Rafael Silva: Adult life consumes our time, leaving little space for pretend play.
Carolina Scartezini: I don’t play that many larps, basically for reasons of time and logistics – these are the only reasons why I’ve never been able to go to an in-person larp at the Confraria, for example.
Viviane Silva: For me, transportation and larp schedules are very relevant factors.
Vanessa Mayumi: My biggest impediment is transportation, combined with the calendar. The city (São Paulo) is huge and transport takes a long time, so when I go to a larp I have to reserve the whole day just for that. If I have more things to do during the day, I am not able to go to the larp. The sooner I find out about a larp, the more likely that I can plan.
On themes and great larps
Raissa Alonso: Currently I also prefer more reflective themes, like in the larp Último Dia em Antares (Brazil 2016, Eng. Last Day on Antares) or in the incredible larp inspired by Tommy: Cegos, Surdos e Mudos (Brazil 2017, Eng. The Blind, the Deaf and the Dumb).
Leandro Godoy: In Último Dia em Antares, a family has decided to flee to a planet orbiting the star Antares (on a one-way trip) to escape a catastrophic crisis on their own planet, but upon arrival, they discover that the star is about to explode. They wait for the end of the world, dealing with frustrations, the feeling of impotence, the fear of death, and trying to enjoy their last moments together. The larp is non-verbal: participants must interact with their bodies, by miming, and via facial expressions – without saying a single word.
Cegos, Surdos e Mudos was inspired by the rock opera Tommy (The Who, 1969) and the episode Apenas Bons Amigos (Just Good Friends) from the Brazilian tv series Comédia da Vida Privada (Private Life Comedy, Guel Arraes, Jorge Furtado and Luís Fernando Veríssimo, 1995). The story begins with a group of friends who get together at the end of high school and decide to test the legend that, by listening to the Tommy album with a lit candle, a person can glimpse their own future. From then on, the players begin to play the group’s meetings from time to time, permeated by the history of Brazil over the last sixty years. The group has to deal with their own traumas, constructed from the lyrics and characters of the songs on the album. The larp’s delicate design combines music, Brazilian history, and the characters’ personal relationships as they search for new meanings for past events and learn to value the friendships we make in life. (see Godoy 2021)
Vanessa Mayumi: The topic is very important to me. If the theme doesn’t motivate me, I end up thinking it’s not worth the effort of organizing everything to be able to go.
Luiz Falcão: I’m not interested in boffer larps, just as boffer larp audiences sometimes aren’t interested in the larps that I like. Nor in campaign larps that often try to simulate character evolution in electronic role-playing games. To me, they seem to try to reproduce a certain capitalist game where hierarchy and meritocracy are mandatory and relationships are mediated based on the accumulation of points. I also do not like larps that are based on established intellectual properties such as Vampire, Harry Potter, etc. Even though I might really like the IP itself, these games tend to have issues around canon. They generate hierarchies and conflicts… and they reduce the creative potential of the experience in favor of reproducing familiar narratives.
Lack of larp culture and resources
Luiz Falcão: One limiting factor is that larp is not seen as normal and socially accepted the same way many other activities are. We don’t even have a scene, a subculture. Soccer, cinema, theater, and video games are everywhere. There are cinemas in every shopping mall, films appear on TV, on YouTube, there is a hype. Your colleagues at work play soccer. Your father takes you to the soccer stadium. And there is no Brazilian larp community or the community is very small. Furthermore, the cost of living in Brazil is very high – and most players are not in the upper classes of the population.
Rafael Silva: The term “hunger larp” is not for nothing. There is a lack of transportation, food, and costumes to participate in larps. If you can’t afford it or don’t have a support group or network, you’re out.
Luiz Falcão: And there was the dismantling of culture from 2016 to now, with the Coup d’Etat, accompanied by a destruction of the economy for the poorest and an increasing precariousness of work (with the imposed labor reform that dismantled workers’ constitutional rights), with a drop in purchasing power, galloping inflation and a reduction in leisure time.
Leandro Godoy: You are referring to the sad incident of President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached in 2016 despite being innocent of the charges and who faced misinformation and hatred in the media. The process followed the rites of the congress but served the interests of a ruling class unhappy with social reforms and the loss of economic power.
Effe Schmidlin: And this gets in the way of finding resources to create scenography. Even accessing more private locations is difficult. Meetings in Belo Horizonte city take place mainly in parks and public squares.
Luiz Falcão: Even if you are working with art and culture, it is very difficult to work with larp – because it is not a recognized artform. It is no exaggeration to say that larp was on a rising tide until the 2016 Coup d’Etat – and after that it has been in a downward spiral. The reported problems of lack of money, time and health, all or almost all, are directly related to the precariousness that has been ongoing since 2016.
Leandro Godoy: And unfortunately, this led directly to the fascist government of Jair Bolsonaro between 2018 and 2022, which greatly compromised social relations, and had the dismantling of culture as a government plan, among other terrible policies.(see Prado & Godoy 2022).
Luiz Falcão: It is also worth highlighting the role of social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), from 2016 to now. Aggressive behavior on these networks has increased at the same time that the reach of dissemination has decreased. Participating in online communities (not just larp communities but all kinds of online communities) or publicizing activities on these networks is no longer productive. The publicity doesn’t reach the players, but the haters are always there, ready to attack.
Leandro Godoy: I think we can observe some patterns: scarcity of larps, themes, difficult urban mobility, social inequality… Any and all of these can end up limiting players in one way or another.
Do limits in larp restrict or support players?
Luiz Falcão: It depends on the game. There is no difference between support and restriction. Freedom without limits is the freedom of the oppressor. The guardrail, on the balcony, supports you and restricts you. The problem with restrictions is when they are not well applied. Beyond limits, without any limits, there is oppression. Going beyond the previous limits is alright. Beyond the current limits there is always a new limit. Every larp is a game of subjection. The question is “what do I agree to subject myself to”.
Larissa Forchetto: I think that when I’m playing, the word limit captures both things. If it’s a limit of what I know or what I can do, like acting or knowing the subject, I can push myself to overcome it. However, I feel limits are also an important support for me. They help me know how far I can go with certain things within the game itself.
Raissa Alonso: It’s a dialectical relationship. I think it boosts and supports. I feel safe when we define the limits of what we feel comfortable with in the game. I prefer it to playing blind. I think limits can be built based on consensus. When there is conversation, I feel driven to test things within larps. When there are no limits, I always prefer to be cautious, because I don’t want to be invasive with other players.
Henrique Marins: I have always found it very important, in the larps I have participated in, that the organizing team has been concerned with people’s physical and emotional safety. Knowing that there are limits increases confidence that this security is maintained. You can play freely, within the agreed limits. At the same time, knowing that the limits are there and that they can be activated at any time supports your play.
Thais Pistorezzi: I believe that an open dialogue is necessary, at least to clarify doubts. If there is a restriction in a larp, players are allowed to question it. When it is properly explained, it can be respected by the players, and it can boost ideas and even character and story building. A limit can also be a form of support. It helps us understand how far we can go, so that everybody respects each other’s boundaries. When a person knows there is a restriction, they are not supposed to ignore it and cross the boundary it defines.
Luiz Falcão: It’s an ethical issue. Who guarantees compliance with a limit during the game? Who guarantees that a security code works? The best way for shit not to happen is to not do shit. It isn’t difficult to give a false feeling of security or participation. Sometimes, the rules say something, but unwritten rules produce conflicting interpretations by players, leading to unexpected things.
André Sarturi: I’m an artist and I think there are ethical limits, but at the same time art shouldn’t have limits, so in my understanding limits should be negotiated. I currently run larps for students at the university I work in, in an environment where people are linked to the arts. We have been able to explore 18+ themes in the larp O Baile do Cara de Cavalo (Brazil 2022, Eng. The Horse Face Ball), and we are studying e.g. cabaret and urban violence.
Rafael Silva: Limits are created in dialogue. They are social agreements. And as such, they enhance the larp experience. I have few limits when it comes to larping, but I understand those who need more space to enjoy the experience.
Viviane Silva: Restrictions that are there to guide the game stimulate much more than they limit. I believe they should not be or treated as a dead end.
Carolina Scartezini: When I’m playing, a limit serves both purposes: it is an inspiration (in the same vein as a creative restriction) that drives me, and it gives me a feeling of security. In general, I deal well with limits. I think they are important both to provide clarity and security and to instigate creativity. In my view, when the people participating feel that they can simply do anything, without any restrictions, they end up doing nothing as they are lost.
Tadeu Rodrigues: When I’m participating in a larp, I think the word limit means a parameter. I think it can support play. But above all, I think it gives parameters to the participants’ experience.
Effe Schmidlin: In some situations, safety rules and meta-techniques allow me to go further. In others, limits prevent me from causing problems for other people by playing. The ways in which the limits are drawn define how I will engage in the game, and how the magic circle where the game happens is built.
Limitations in the game
Leandro Godoy: What limits you during a larp? Knowledge of themes, language, resources for creating costumes, time to study characters and plot beforehand, or any personal limits?
Luiz Falcão: Text, rules, and rituals have to be available for consultation somewhere since an excess of rules and symbols can contain too much information to remember. Or too many mechanics, like in Vampire larps – consulting the rules can interrupt the larp and does not increase dramatic tension.
Leandro Godoy: I have a lot of difficulty remembering many of the rules during a larp. In fact, after I started playing more larps, I started to reduce the amount of text in the larps I organize.
Luiz Falcão: Assuming that players know or handle something that they don’t necessarily know or handle is a problem.
Tadeu Rodrigues: It limits me if the larp requires a lot of time to read and memorize the character and the plot. Brazilian larps don’t typically require much prior preparation but if a larp does, it becomes a barrier for me. So if I need to invest time before the larp, it bothers me a little, which limits me.
Leandro Godoy: Larps in Brazil don’t often require much preparation from the players. We try to make participation as practical as possible, becaus
Histórias Extraordinárias Sesc Belenzinho.
e everyday life leaves little time to read a lot of materials for a larp or to obtain complex costumes. But sometimes larps require greater preparation from players.
Henrique Marins: I think I have had the most fun when I have had more time to prepare for my character – to come up with a costume, to study the materials, and to plan some action for the larp. Of course I’ve also had really good experiences in larps where I jumped aboard almost at the last minute.
Raissa Alonso: Time needed for reading and internalizing the character depends a lot on the larp – its design and atmosphere. Sometimes it is nice to have prepared beforehand, sometimes the fun is in the improvisation.
Thais Pistorezzi: Limitation is a word that brings so much anxiety. I don’t remember feeling limited in any larp. There have been situations in which some points in the story or the characters’ costumes have caused difficulties because of a design problem. However, everything has always been resolved and worked around so that the larp could continue smoothly.
Raissa Alonso: I think it’s cool when resources are offered by the organization, so that no one feels limited. When I have to bring costumes from home, I always feel like people are comparing me to others.
Larissa Forchetto: The costumes and customizing them are the issue that limits me most at a larp. However, finding them is not something that I consider impossible. It’s a limit that I can work with.
Tadeu Rodrigues: Costumes are not really an issue in our productions, but there can be issues with ready-made costumes – I’m big! And often when there is a larp that has ready-made costumes, I know in advance that there will probably not be an outfit in my size. When there is a ready-made costume available, it often does not fit me which creates physical discomfort. Of course, this is a question of resources. We are a third world country, so investing a lot in costumes is not something that is in the spending priorities.
Effe Schmidlin: Resources for creating costumes are a problem.
Raissa Alonso: I think the strongest personal limit I have is the body issue. It needs to be negotiated, always. It can be really cool to explore it, but at the same time it is a really sensitive topic. I hate it when I feel pressured to do something, which can happen a lot when you play in a group. I think that when the game pushes you into doing something exceptional with your body, there should be a content warning. I wouldn’t play a larp blindfolded, for example, without having complete trust in the organizers and without having very clear limits on what is allowed to be done.
Luiz Falcão: Body, affection, sensitivity, sexuality, all of these need to be well discussed. Depending on how it goes, they can be issues for me too.
Henrique Marins: In some cases, the character can limit the player’s performance in a larp. For example, if the character is an introvert, you might need to avoid more intense scenes.
Tadeu Rodrigues: Interpersonal issues also limit me at larps. I don’t feel comfortable particitating if there are people whom I don’t like spending time with. If there is somebody who makes me feel rejected or refused, then I often don’t even participate. And if I do participate, I keep my distance during the larp. If I don’t like somebody outside the larp, I don’t feel comfortable playing with that person.
Carolina Scartezini: Until now, only two things have made me not to want to participate in a game: if the theme and the way it works do not interest me (generally, this happens with boffer larps or larps that seem too pedagogical to me) or if I know that something about the topic actually is a painful trigger for me (like in the larp about the military dictatorship Soldier Pereira and his school friends).
Vanessa Mayumi: My biggest limits are my health (physical and mental) and how much the activity will affect me and others. Of course, if I’m sick and contagious, I stay home. But beyond that, if I’m not mentally healthy to interpret the character and the themes, if the topic affects me personally, or if I’m not well enough to socialize with other people, I end up not going.
Viviane Silva: What limits me is my health. It is difficult for me to see in dimly lit locations. Moreover, I find it hard to stand still for a long time.
On resources, collaboration, and inter-disciplinary larp
André Sarturi: Resources limit me the most. Even though it is possible to organize larps with minimal resources, it can be interesting to do something that requires elaborate technology – for example video projection, video mapping, and electronics prototyping platforms. These are not necessary, but it is cool to be able to try another experience inside a larp design and to test the limits.The question is how to acquire and manage these resources. You also need to consider whether using technology makes sense for the game or not.
Luiz Falcão: I feel it is quite limiting to try to larp when you are filmed or when there is an audience watching but it is not properly included in the design. If you’re offering something to the audience, it is theater, not larp. In the larp Grimm Agreste (Brazil 2014), the relationship between the players and the Grimm Agreste exhibition – a beautiful installation inspired by the tales of the Grimm brothers reimagined with the aesthetics of the Brazilian wilderness and countryside – and its audience worked well because of the costumes and the design of the game. However, I have seen other experiences where this relationship did not work well, frustrating not only the participants but also the larp designer.
Leandro Godoy: In general, it is interesting to see how the practice of larp evolves with these collaborations. Ten, fifteen years ago, we weren’t discussing negotiations, costume discomforts, or how much game design and agreements can affect us during the experience. I believe we have a lot to talk about and a lot to experience. As a community, we can evolve beyond the issue of resources needed for games to happen safely and provide incredible artistic experiences.
Thank you everyone for your contribution to the conversation. I hope we meet soon, in a new larp or chat, and that these questions can lead us – participants and readers of the interview alike – to reflect more on the challenges and limits, and to have increasingly inclusive, safe and unforgettable experiences!
Bibliography
Luiz Falcão (2014): New Tastes in Brazilian Larp. In The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp, edited by Jon Back. Knutpunkt.
Leandro Godoy (2021): The use of music as a magical element for the larp experience. In Book of Magic – Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein er al. Knudepunkt.
Luiz Prado and Leandro Godoy (2022): Larp Against Fascism. In Distance of Touch, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Knutpunkt.
Ludography
Grimm Agreste (2014): Brazil, Sesc Interlagos. Confraria das Ideias.
Cegos, Surdos e Mudos (2017, 2022, 2023): Brazil and Sweden, Centro Cultural da Juventude, Sesc Pompéia and Konsert & Kongress. Confraria das Ideias.
Último Dia em Antares (2016): Brazil, Sesc Ipiranga and Centro Cultural da Juventude. Luiz Prado and Boi Voador.
O Baile do Cara de Cavalo (2022, 2023): Brazil, online at FLO (Brazilian Larp online festival) and UNESPAR – Faculdade de Artes do Paraná. André Sarturi, Luiz Falcão.
Soldier Pereira and His School Friends (2021, 2022): Brazil, Sesc Pompéia and online at FLO (Brazilian Larp online festival) and International larp festival by Chaos League. Leandro Godoy and Confraria das Ideias.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Godoy, Leandro. 2024. “In the Limits Below the Line – An Interview with Brazilian Larpers.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
At the end of 2019, I wrote an article on the commodification of larp (Seregina 2020), suggesting that larp has become a commodity and analysing the activity from a commodification point of view. The topic felt timely and sparked a lot of interesting and important discussions. In this article, I return to the topic of larp as a commodity, taking a look at it in a context that is defined by numerous crises. We are at a point in time where financial resources are becoming scarce for many, while a need for communal activities is high.
Before delving any deeper, it is central to note that the development of larp into a commodity is, in many ways, a logical development within contemporary society, a society which largely functions around consumption-oriented logic. This forms what is commonly referred to as consumer culture (see Slater 1997; Baudrillard 1998; Bauman 2001; Cohen 2003). Hence, the commodification of larp, in itself as a development, is neither good nor bad. It merely follows the development that has become commonplace within contemporary society. In fact, commodification comes with many positive aspects.
For example, a commodified larp becomes more accepted and legitimised in wider society, as it takes on familiar legal and financial forms, as well as clearer producer and consumer roles. Thus, in reflecting structures common in society and taking on a financial element, larp becomes a more ‘acceptable,’ ‘worthwhile’ use of one’s time. Commodified larps also gain more streamlined production processes, as elements become optimised and repeatable. Hence, creation and production of larp can become easier and faster (for more on this, see Seregina 2020). However, it is important to be aware of what these developments do to larp as a practice in its entirety, as the positives do not come without the negatives (no matter how hard we try).
The terms consumer and commodity can often feel cold and removed, and hence larpers often do not want to think about their beloved hobby as part of the market economy. However, ignoring the fact does not address any of the issues that the development of larp into a more commodified form brings with it, and may potentially even make them worse. While I do not believe commodification in itself is bad, I do believe that it can result in negative outcomes for our community if left unchecked. Hence, I would like to re-address the topic of larp as a commodity and reflect on what it means for larpers to become consumers.
Co-Creation of a Commodity
What exactly does larp as a commodity mean? Commodification is often incorrectly equated with paying money for something, as well as with passively interacting with something. However, it is more about the form of and attitude toward a thing (Campbell 1987; Slater 1997): larp becomes a commodity, as it becomes a resource within the exchange economy. In other words, it becomes valued not for what it is, but for what capital (whatever form this may take) it provides in exchange for people engaging in it. This capital is aimed at fulfilling a want or need, and can be financial, but also cultural or social capital, such as status or experience. The latter would be more common in the context of larp.
Following the above, co-creation or active participation does not exclude something being a commodity. Commodification rather becomes an issue of what participants (or now consumers) expect from the activity, and what their attitude toward it is. In fact, many traditional commodities are becoming co-created or gamified, as it has been shown that an actively interacting consumer is more engaged and thus more invested (for example, Oli Mould (2018) talks about the commodification of creativity overall). In that sense, larp fits perfectly into how contemporary markets are progressing.
As I explain in my 2020 article, larp has developed into a commodity via various characteristics and circumstances, including increased media coverage, rising growth and demand, as well as inclusion of elements from the market economy (such as catering, cleaning services, etc.). The latter ties into the idea of us ‘buying back’ our leisure time in order to use our time and resources more efficiently (following Frayne 2015). In essence, many convenience commodities, such as microwave meals or cleaning services, allow us to free up the time we would normally use to engage in their creation (such as cooking or cleaning). While ‘buying back’ time allows organisers and participants of larps to focus more on the larp itself instead of all the chores that come with it, it also means that we engage less materially with the practicalities of the event, thus tying larp into consumerist norms. In other words, as we ‘make’ less of the larp ourselves and together, it becomes created for us and thus removed from us as a commodity functioning through forms and structures of consumer culture.
Another important aspect of how larp becomes a commodity is rooted in how we talk about it. The past years have seen us change a lot of terminology and description of larp toward a more commodified and consumerist logic. Society in general is extremely performative, in that social meanings exist merely because we have decided to collectively give them these meanings, repeating the same meanings over and over (following Austin 1962, Turner 1987). Coming from this logic, things have meaning and status and value because we actively give them that meaning and status and value. For example, something is posh or stylish only because we have collectively decided that these things are posh or stylish. Hence, when we call larp participants “customers” or when we call sign-ups to larp “ticket purchases”, we further instill the essence of consumerism onto larp through wording it as such.
Photo by Pixabay, Pexels
The Customer is Always Right
If an activity becomes approached as a commodity, its user naturally takes on a consumer or customer role. This is a role that we are extremely accustomed to in today’s society, as we are acculturated into it within consumer culture, and take it on in many contexts (such as service and shopping situations, but also governance, education, and culture). Hence, we slip into the role of a consumer very easily, without necessarily recognising it as such.
The consumer role comes with its own preset modes of interaction with the service provider (in this case, the larp organiser), other service users (other larp participants), and the product itself (the larp). A consumer is driven by their wants and needs, and fulfills these by consuming products (Campbell 1987). While attending a larp may have a multitude of underlying goals (which I will not go into here), we could roughly sum these up as the want to have a good experience (whatever that is classified as). However, the consumer is only driven by their own needs and wants. This does not mean consumers become passive or exclusionary: as I mention above, a consumption experience can be very interactive and co-created. However, the end-goal of such an experience will always be one’s own experience, with other participants becoming a part of the background or potentially even seen as service providers along with the larp organiser. The co-creation will thus not be on equal terms, but rather as a consumer and producer, with the former holding a lot of power over the latter in terms of expectations and demands.
At the same time, the consumer relinquishes any responsibility over the product (following Slater 1997; Ritzer 2001; Cohen 2003). The product is created by the service provider, and hence its value is created during its production. However, the complex issue with larp is that its production and consumption are, in many ways, overlapping processes that cannot be distinguished or disentangled. We create larp as we consume it; forever an ephemeral process. As I noted in my 2020 article, in the long run, this loosening of responsibility may lead to collapse of communal larping as everyone merely focuses on their own experiences.
In itself the consumer role is in no way problematic, as long as it does not undermine the organiser and the other players. However, one big issue I see arising is what happens when someone has a bad time. Obviously, if it’s a safety concern or another similar matter, these need to be dealt with properly by the organiser. But what happens when someone does not have an experience that has lived up to their expectations? Or they don’t feel they’ve got their money’s worth? From a commodification point of view, the organiser should be fully responsible for the consumer having a good time, yet this is not necessarily feasible in the way larp is set up now. I address this further below.
Moreover, who will be seen as the producer? A larp organiser naturally falls into this role, even as they may not have as much power in it as a producer would traditionally. But what about the crew and the volunteers? And potentially even more active players participating alongside? This set-up may result in some players falling into the role of a service provider without actually having anything to do with the organisation of the larp, skewing power relations in dangerous ways among participants.
Pressure to Professionalise
Photo by Albin Biju.
There has been a strong push to organise larp more professionally and to view larp organisation as work (not to be confused with labour). This is, once again, a very logical development in contemporary consumption-oriented society, in which work is the ultimate form of status and legitimisation. No matter whether we like it or not, work is how we largely define our identities and our value within contemporary capitalist society (Frayne 2015; Mould 2018). Consequently, many fields such as larp that are initially not commercialised see a movement toward ‘careerisation’ of their practices (Seregina and Weijo 2017). When something becomes work, it also becomes more productive and profitable, and hence a more legitimate use of time. Simultaneously, the product of this activity also becomes more legitimised and a valuable use of one’s resources in the eyes of others. It is important to talk about professionalisation of an activity in the context of its commodification because consumption and work are two sides of the same coin, with one pushing the other.
Professionalisation can be seen in a few main ways within larp. Firstly, many directly want to turn larp-organising into a job. Secondly, professionalisation emerges in higher production value and use of support services. This includes a higher level of scenery, lighting, catering, and costuming, among other things. Lastly, larp is more and more often documented and merchandised. A lot of events are photographed and sometimes even filmed, and we also see a rise in possibilities of buying add-on products like t-shirts that advertise the event and/or can be used in-game. Such elements solidify what is otherwise an ephemeral performance, making it more of a produced material entity.
The result of professionalisation can be higher-value events, which can create amazing experiences for participants and organisers alike. The processes involved in it can further help make larp organisation easier, putting it into an easily and conveniently reproducible form.
At the same time, professionalisation of larp in many ways presents the activity as a commodity to those planning to attend. This means that (mostly indirectly) participants are getting the message that they should be approaching the event as a commodity, altering their expectations and attitude toward it. If larp organisation is presented as a for-profit job and larp takes on easily reproducible, mass produced characteristics, we cannot expect participants not to approach the event as something with which they have customer expectations and consumer rights. As a result, it becomes natural for the participant to focus only on their own experience and demand that the experience matches what was promised, cementing larp’s place as an element of market exchange within a capitalist system.
Professionalisation further requires streamlining and standardisation of activities, repeatability of events (or elements of events), as well as higher larp ticket costs in order to become economically viable. The first characteristics are central for pushing down costs for the organiser in order to attempt to make a profit, but run the risk of changing the nature of larp as quite ephemeral, interpersonal events. The latter is necessary to be able to pay organisers and crew for labour that is now their work. In reality, however, organisers and crew are rarely paid a wage, especially a fair one, often because of budgeting reasons. Hence, even for-profit larps largely rely on volunteers or low-pay workers, which, in turn, creates ample possibilities for misuse of labour (as well as potential legal issues with taxation and labour laws), once again skewing power relations within the community.
When organising a larp, it is important to reflect on how the event itself as well as the forms of production that it has involved impact larp as a community. The professionalisation of specific larp events reflects on the community as a whole, raising standards and expectations for all future events. This growth and expectations that come with it puts an immense amount of pressure onto larp organisers to provide events up to par, potentially creating organiser stress and burnout (something discussed a lot previously; see e.g., Lindve 2019, Pettersson 2022).
The Value of a Larp
In the above described context, monetary value becomes extremely complicated and potentially problematic. To begin with, higher cost of a larp easily becomes interpreted as the event providing a ‘better experience’ to the larper. In a consumer culture context, higher cost is generally associated with higher value and higher demand in our society. Moreover, limited access to larp in general makes the activity a scarce commodity, immediately making it intrinsically more valuable. This results in higher expectations on personal experience: participants feel that they are investing more financial capital and hence are entitled to reap more social and cultural capital from it.
The issue for larp specifically in this setup is that the organiser, in the long run, has limited capacity in making sure the player’s experience is of high value, as I’ve already noted. A good larp experience can depend on a large number of ever-changing elements, including but not limited to personal investment, engagement, and preparations; other participants and their contribution; weather, terrain, the venue, and associated travel. In a professionalised set-up, the service provider becomes responsible for all of this despite having little control over many elements that feed into a good experience.
Moreover, because larpers as consumers relinquish much of their responsibility over the event, they are more likely to focus on their own experience rather than aid others’. Hence, the inherent value that we gain from larp in some ways can be seen to actually go down in a commodified form because a good experience in larp largely relies on the interaction among and support of other larpers. In focusing solely on our own experiences, we expect more, but also give less. Other larpers easily become seen as a part of the commodity we are consuming, while organisers as well as any crew, volunteers, and NPCs will become seen as service providers.
Financial Inaccessibility
Photo by Evgeni Lazarev.
With raised costs of larping, a big issue that arises is financial inaccessibility. This is an extremely difficult subject, especially in light of everything else discussed, such as fair labour, and thus easily becomes the elephant in the room. Moreover, we, in many ways, have little control over rising costs, as overall rise in cost of living undoubtedly has its effects on larp organisation as well, reflecting in the prices of venues and catering to name a few things. Yet because any inaccessibility is viewed as bad, we seem to steer away from this conversation as a community.
It is important to stress that a costlier larp should not in any way be seen as bad. Most of the time, the attendance costs are merely covering any investment organisers have put in, which is only fair to ask for. However, if someone’s choice of whether or not to attend a larp is mainly or even solely dependent on the costs associated with that larp, that is, indeed, textbook financial inaccessibility. And we should not ignore that.
Many support systems already exist for financial inaccessibility, such as discounted and tiered tickets or payment in installments. These are definitely helpful and make larp more accessible to those with lower means. However, costly larps will remain costly (and most likely become even costlier); oftentimes even discounted tickets remain inaccessible. Sadly, there is little we can do about high costs, as I already noted. What we can do and what we need to do is be able to discuss these issues.
In line with a commodity point of view, a more expensive larp easily becomes viewed as better. Following this, those attending costlier, larger, better advertised, and thus ‘higher value’ larps can easily become seen as ‘better larpers,’ which creates problematic hierarchies and power structures within the community. Larps with higher production value also come with more hype, more discussion, and more coverage in media and social media, and thus, inadvertently, more social and cultural capital. Simply put, those who go to costlier larps and those who create costlier larps accrue more capital within the community (be it cultural, social, financial). Thus, while the fact that we pay more for larp does not directly make it a commodity, the fact that we reap more capital from costlier larps and use that capital within our community does.
At the same time, we see a certain subsection of larpers becoming priced out of the activity. More and more people are having to limit how many events they attend, or even stop going to larps entirely, due to financial reasons. We also see more and more of those from lower economic strata crewing and volunteering at events. While this is a great way to make an event financially accessible, if these roles are seen as service provider roles that attendees can demand from and take their frustrations out on, it will further skew power relations among larpers. Hence, financial inaccessibility runs the risk of creating wildly different ways people with different economic means can access larp, and they may be unable to access it at all.
Concluding Thoughts
Following my brief analysis of larp as a commodified activity, I’d like to wrap this article up with a few thoughts and suggestions. I want to begin by reiterating what I stressed in my 2020 article. Commodification in itself is not good or bad. However, we cannot reap its positive qualities without its negative characteristics, as many seem to try. Hence, we should question why we structure things the way we do – as larp organisers and as larp participants. As organisers, we should consider: what kinds of audiences do we reach, and what audiences will be able to access our larp? How are participants viewing the larp? How do they view their own role as part of the larp, and how do they view others attending the larp? What does commodification of larp bring to the event specifically? Is it valuable to you? And to the players attending, as well as the wider larp community?
As participants, we should similarly reflect on our role within the event. How am I taking part in the larp? How am I taking into consideration the organisers? The crew? Other players? What do I want to get out of the experience, how am I obtaining that, and who do I think is responsible for that?
We should also reflect on why we are pushing for professionalisation and thus commodification of larp. What is the purpose of this? Is it to create better events? Is it to gain legitimisation within wider society? Is it to create jobs?
Photo by Sora Shimazaki.
In 2020, I noted a fear of fragmentation of our community. Today, I definitely see more economic, social, and cultural inequalities within larp, as well as a growing divide between high cultural capital and low cultural capital events. I think we need to push hard for giving value to different kinds of larp, independent of their cost and production value or ‘type’ of larp (be it so-called Nordic larp, boffer larp, international larp, or localised larp groups, among various other types). We are running the risk of creating a hierarchy of larps in terms of what are seen to be ‘better’ larps than others: something that, at this point, often coincides with the market and production value of the event. In other words, costlier larps are currently associated with being higher culture and thus better than lower culture, cheaper larps.
Along with this divide, we bring growing class differences and potential skewed power relations among those attending and those who are organising; among those attending different types of events; among those who are attending on different terms (be it different ticket types; as volunteers, crew, players). We are already a very white, very middle-class activity, but with the cost of living crisis we are becoming even more so. Hence, it is critical to be aware of, reflect on, and aim to address these issues in organising larp. What’s more, all of the discussed issues will further tie into the acculturation of new larpers. What kind of community are we welcoming them into, and what kinds of roles will they be learning to take on?
Reflecting on one’s roles and actions can be difficult, especially for topics of commodification, which come to us quite naturally and unintentionally, yet can feel alien and cold, with people tending to push away or disassociate from them. But denying these issues does not remove consumption as a central structuring force of contemporary society. Its ideology remains, reinforced by our own actions. The aim of the reflexive actions I am suggesting is not to judge anyone, but rather to get larpers to understand their own choices when engaging in larping. Perhaps the reflection will not change anything, perhaps it will only change things a little, and perhaps it will change someone’s approach entirely. But I believe that by being conscious and aware of what we are doing as well as how our actions affect the activity of larping and the larp community as a whole, we will create a more inclusive and communal entity.
Bibliography
Philip Auslander (2008): Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge.
L.J. Austin (1962): How to do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Eds. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jean Baudrillard (1998): The Consumer Society. London: Sage.
Zygmunt Bauman (2001): ”Consuming life.” Journal of Consumer Culture. 1 (1): 9-29.
Pierre Bourdieu (1984): Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Colin Campbell (1987): The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.
Lizabeth Cohen (2003): A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf.
David Frayne (2015): The Refusal to Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work. London: Zed Books.
Douglas P. Holt (1998): “Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?” Journal of Consumer Research. 25 (1) 1-25.
George Ritzer (2001): Explorations in the sociology of consumption: Fast food, credit cards and casinos. London: Sage.
Richard Schechner (1982): The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance. New York: PAJ Publications.
Anastasia Seregina and Henri A. Weijo (2016): “Play at any cost: How cosplayers produce and sustain their ludic communal consumption experiences.” Journal of Consumer Research. 44(1): 139-159.
Usva Seregina (2020): “On the Commodification of Larp,” Nordic larp. https://nordiclarp.org/2019/12/17/on-the-commodification-of-larp/, retrieved 1.8.2023
Victor Turner (1987): The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Seregina, Usva. 2024. “Readdressing Larp as Commodity: How Do We Define Value When the Customer Is Always Right?” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
One handful of larpers
Two spoons of diversity (feel free to add as much as you want, it will only make the result that much more exciting)
Three pinches of dialogue
Four shots of open minds
Five cups of awareness
Five splashes of understanding
Four drops of respect
Three sprinkles of tolerance
Two dashes of love
One sprig of community
Mix all the ingredients in a venue of your choice. You can add them in any order you would like; one at a time or all at once. When all the ingredients have been thoroughly mixed; let it set for a while and have a cup of coffee (or whisky if you like). Enjoy your magical larp experience and remember to share with your co-players. The recipe can be scaled up or down as need be.
Cover photo: Image by Borkia on Pixabay. Photo has been cropped.
This article is published in the companion book Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Hegre, Torun. “Recipe for a Magical Larp Experience.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.
This article is Part 1 in a series on Grooming in the Larp Community.
Content Advisory: Sexual abuse, mental health issues.
On a bus on my way to Poland, I met Julie, and we struck up a conversation.
It is pretty commonly known that teenage girls can come off as deceptively mature, but as someone who has worked professionally with teenagers, I am not usually surprised about people’s age. In Julie’s case,((This article uses anonymised names. The real names are only known to the author. )) she certainly seemed mentally older than her 19 years. It did not occur to me at the time that her maturity might have had a cost.
We found out that we had a lot in common and agreed to meet up for coffee once we were back home. It was only after a few talks that I came to know of the things she had been through.
Role-playing is a hobby that spans the gap between adults and children. While this gives us a great opportunity to interact with and even form friendships with people outside our own age group, it also means that romantic and sexual relationships occur. In that sense, role-playing isn’t different from football, basketball, scouts, and many other hobbies. The difference is that in role-playing, there are no clear guidelines to what is acceptable or what is not. As opposed to e.g. the 113-years-old scouts movement, we are a young hobby without an established hierarchy or procedures.
I have noticed that many people are accepting of these relationships. But should they be? Does love conquer all differences — including age?
Are Relationships between Teenagers and Adults Harmful?
As it turned out, Julie was one of the many young role-players who had experienced grooming.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, grooming is “the criminal activity of becoming friends with a child in order to try to persuade the child to have a sexual relationship.”((Cambridge Dictionary. N.d. “Grooming.” Cambridge Dictionary)) And that is exactly what happened to Julie, with role-playing as a backdrop.
Julie described herself as having been a lonely child. She felt ostracized at school — people would bully her for being a nerd. She was preoccupied with manga, Harry Potter, and games, while her classmates were discussing boys and make-up.
Things were not easy at home. Julie’s parents had divorced when she was five. Her mother, whom she lived with most of the time had found a new husband — one who didn’t like kids, and had very strict rules. He wedged himself between Julie and her mother, and expressed how much he looked forward to the day when she was old enough to leave home. Her father, on the other hand, would alternate between harsh criticism and undeserved praise.
Julie told me of how she got into contact with her abuser, “When I met H, I was 12 years old and starving for kindness and acceptance, and when he offered it to me, I ate it all up. You get less picky when you are really, really hungry.”
H. worked in an after-school youth club (a common form of childcare facility in Denmark). Julie described him as “the coolest adult ever.” He was a larper, and he organised trips for the kids to go larping. Also, he told Julie that she was his favourite.
When Julie was 13, H. began inviting her back to his place, where they could be alone. He would also take her out to sushi restaurants. One evening, after a visit to a restaurant, H. took Julie to a secluded wooden shelter in the forest and had her perform oral sex on him.
“I remember throwing up and shaking with disgust,” said Julie. “But I also felt so happy I could scream that I was his favorite.”
The Price of Belonging to a Community
For Julie, the pain and disgust were a price she was willing to pay for H’s attention.
At the same time, H also began taking Julie to adult larps. He had to sign a form saying that he would take responsibility for Julie while she was at the larp since she was underage. It was like the wolf signing for the sheep.
“I was so proud,” said Julie. “He told me to lie to the other participants and tell them I was 14. That way they would accept us more easily, he said.”
H also brought Julie along to his boardgaming events. Julie estimated that she was the only person under the age of 30 at those sessions. She knew that the people she met there were not really her friends — she was seen as an extension of H — and she knew it. Still, it was better than not having a social life.
As Julie got older, H’s demands got worse. Although she still slept at home during weekdays, she visited him every day in his small flat, and played along with his make-believe. It was like they were role-playing an adult couple.
“I was so grateful for the company and I would let him perform more and more different sexual acts on me as the previous ones got boring to him,” Julie explained. Along with the one-sided sex, he also became more controlling. He demanded that Julie count calories in order to stay skinny, and she had to remove all body hair. She began to develop an eating disorder. Starvation made her exhausted, and she barely had energy left for anything else.
When Julie started high school, she somehow found the strength to leave H. She had fallen in love with a boy at school, and that gave her a reason to move on. “I guess I had a glimpse of something different,” she said. “Could I just be a normal person going to school, having a boyfriend, going out after school instead of having to get the first train back so I could do the dishes of this adult man who had become my life?”
An anti-abuse event in Berlin. Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash.
Where are the Parents?
Here is another account, as seen from the point of view of a mother.
Karin was the mother of a happy and smart 13 year-old who happened to love larping. She described her family as pretty harmonious. She and her husband were divorced, but had a very friendly relationship, and were good at working together when it came to the children.
Like Julie, Karin’s daughter had a lot of adults around her. Also like Julie, her daughter was perceived as being mature for her age.
Karin saw herself as a liberal person. She thought there were lots of things children could learn from having adult friends, and she loved the role-playing community. Trusting that her friends would protect her daughter from harm, she let them look after her. Little did she know that these so-called friends were using her young daughter for sex behind her back.
It was statutory rape, but at the time, Karin’s daughter would have denied it.
“The problem is that people are very focused on ‘no means no’,” Karin explained to me. “But teenagers don’t say no. They say a resounding ‘yes’. They agree, body and soul, to having sex with this adult who is so interested in them.”
And she continues,“Children have no idea what that yes means. They just don’t know. They might also think that downing an entire bottle of vodka might be a good idea, even though it might actually kill them.”
It took many years before Karin realised what had been going on. In the beginning, her daughter told her nothing, but she started getting ill. She suffered from shattering depression and had trouble with her studies. Karin was confused: What had happened to her lively, intelligent child? Only when her daughter was in her late teens did she start talking about what had happened. Her daughter had kept it all secret.
When Karin found out, she immediately contacted the police. Both men were sentenced and went to jail.
As for Julie, she and her mother went through a period of estrangement. H had told Julie not to trust her own mother: “She just wanted to separate us because she didn’t understand our love,” was what he told her.
Julie’s mother accepted that there was nothing she could do. Even when Julie told me about her experiences, she believed she would have threatened to run away and never see her mother again if her mother had reported H to the police. That is how much of a hold he had over her.
The Role of the Larping Community
Thinking about Julie and Karin’s experiences, I feel ashamed. Ashamed of the larp community — my community — but also on a personal level. This has been going on since I started larping. Why haven’t I done anything about it?
You might think that what happened to Julie and Karin is unique or at least rare. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
I am one of the witnesses who is here to tell you differently.
So why did I not react?
Because I didn’t know any better. I was repeatedly told by both the abusers and their friends that I needed to accept these relationships. I was even told by the children themselves to mind my own business.
There are some very strong voices within the Danish community that are telling us to be open and accepting to all types of love, no matter what the age difference might be. Asking questions is perceived as “ageist.” Not accepting relationships between adults and teenagers is framed as prudish and meddlesome.
The general position at Danish larps and larp conventions is that unless there is a conviction, there is no reason to call out the behaviour. People who are known to have repeatedly dated very young larpers are able to use our community to pick up teens.
However, to Julie it turned out that even a conviction didn’t change how people saw the relationship she had been in with H. In the beginning of 2018, Julie went to the police. She went through a mentally draining procedure where the police questioned everything she put forward and demanded evidence of her.
Once confronted with his actions, H. denied having had sex with Julie while he was still working at the youth club. Since it had only happened while they were alone, Julie had no way of proving her accusation.
In December of 2018, the case went to court. H. was sentenced with a fine and community service.
After the sentence, Julie experienced a backlash from the Danish role-playing community. H. was part of an extensive network of friends who were willing to support him, and who attacked Julie for having taken him to court. The general feeling was that she had been a willing participant, and old enough to be taken to account for her choices. They saw the charges as an attempt to ‘ruin’ H.
Anyway, if she was not happy in the relationship, why did she stay so long?
“Can you know that you are unhappy, even if all you’ve ever experienced are different flavors of misery? I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but that was my situation,” Julie explained to me, when I asked her the same question.
Within the Danish community, there are several examples of well-liked and influential roleplayers who have had relationships with either young teenagers or people who were in fact their pupils. Although some of these relationships are not allowed legally, people are willing to overlook them, because of the general feeling of goodwill towards these persons. However, what people are most likely not aware of is the long-term damage done to the teenagers due to the asymmetrical power distribution in such a relationship.
Karin, too, described being disappointed with the role-playing community.
“It was not just those two guys!” She said. “It was 30-40 other adults who bought my daughter alcohol, who saw her drunk and saw her flirting with adults without telling me, the mother”.
A female larper whom Karin considered her friend knew about the repeated rapes for an entire year before she revealed it to Karin.
The Long-Term Effects
According to a report by the Danish national board of social services,((Click here to download the full report as a PDF.)) PTSD is one of the most common reactions to childhood abuse in adults. Although reactions are individual and dependent on both the severity of the abuse, the duration of the abuse and the role of the abuser, there is a long list of common symptoms: anxiety, depression, low self-worth, problems with body image and sexuality, suicidal or overly sexualised behaviour.
It was the same for Julie.
“I mean, how doesn’t it affect me?” she said, when I asked about how she is still affected.
She went on to describe the long-term physical damage to her body from the strict calorie counting that had been forced upon her. The damage to her bones, teeth, and fertility.
“Less concrete but just as consequential for my health are the nightmares. It is very rare that I can get a full night’s sleep without waking up from nightmares once or twice. Sometimes they are about him touching me, sometimes he kills himself (as he threatened to do countless times), and sometimes I’m just back in his apartment, doing everyday things. If anything, the latter dreams are the scariest, as they are often the most realistic and the ones it takes the longest for me to shake off of me once I’m awake.”
Julie has attempted suicide several times and attributed these attempts to the abuse as well.
She also found it hard to have romantic relationships. She described to me how her first experience with relationships and sex had twisted her idea of what a normal relationship should be.
“I have a hard time handling conflict, as my body and brain shuts down in preparation for the situation to escalate into physical violence. At the same time, things I should see as red flags are not even registered by my brain. Certain behavior that other people tell me is manipulative and cruel seems normal to me, and normal human behavior which I should be able to expect from anyone, not only a romantic partner, can bring me to tears because of how kind it seems to me and how undeserving I feel.”
There was nothing Julie would have wanted more than to move on. However, the consequences of the abuse was not something she was able to just shrug off.
For Karin’s daughter, it took more than ten years from when she was raped and when she was finally able to overcome the PTSD, the anxiety, and the personality disorder that were direct consequences of the abuse.
The Healthy Relationship?
Is it even possible for a 16-year-old and an adult to have a healthy relationship? Perhaps a more relevant question is this: What does an adult want to get out of having a relationship with a child?
As the power balance between adults and children is naturally skewed to the benefit of the adult, it is not a stretch to suspect that what they are after might be a situation where they find themselves in control. We are then looking at is a narcissistic drive to be sexually and otherwise dominant, in which the adult is interested neither in their responsibility nor in the moral duty to protect the child.
In the role-playing community, a lot of adults have grown up feeling stigmatised. We were called names — nerds, geeks — and perhaps we did not get a lot of attention. Growing up and becoming the subject of a child’s adoration might be tempting. Perhaps even too tempting. We, the peers, need to interfere. We need to ask questions. We may even need to report our best friends to the police if they refuse to change their behavior, if that is what is necessary in order to stop this culture of abuse.
Cover Photo: An anti-abuse event in Berlin. Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash.
A community is made up of a group of individuals and the larp community is particularly broad, encompassing people who take part in a range of different activities that come under the heading of larp. These can be vastly different, ranging from competitive larp, to larp with immersion as a goal, to solo larps and larps with thousands of participants. Possibly the only thing that the members of the larp community have in common is that they adopt a character to participate. The differences in what larp is can make discussions of community difficult to frame.
This year, the majority of larps including one of mine have been cancelled due to COVID. When the organizers announced their decision to disappointed players, they were met with almost universal support. When I postponed my larp, in addition to supportive players saying that they understood, and it was the right decision on the social media post, and in response to e-mails, I also received several private messages acknowledging that it must be disappointing for me. There was no expectation of me to manage other people’s emotions – just recognition that it was a difficult decision. This is an example of when a community comes together.
However, the community can also have issues. We can perceive “the larp community” as a separate entity that we are not part of, particularly when trying to address the problems that it has. In this view the individual has no responsibility and the community as a whole, sometimes presumed to be guided by influential people, needs to change and improve – to be more inclusive and less toxic.
At the other extreme it’s an unhelpful message to say that, as the community is made up of individual larpers, its problems can be addressed by each person at an individual level. An individual can only do so much and telling larpers to address every problem in the community by themselves is at best naive and at worst ableist.
There are some activities that can, and as far as possible should, be taken by individuals to help improve the larp community as a whole.
Educate Yourself as a Designer and Player.
Consider what choices you’ve made around accessibility and why. Read up on why, even if you aren’t actively excluding people, they may feel excluded. You are always going to exclude some groups unless you get very lucky with logistics, e.g.:
Looking for locations accessible to people with certain disabilities may increase your price range;
Your 20Km hike larp isn’t going to work for people with certain disabilities or who don’t have a certain level of fitness;
Your horror larp may not be accessible for people with certain mental health issues;
Casting by lottery is going to exclude players who are anxious to go without their friends; and
First come first served sign ups may limit access to people who are working or have childcare responsibilities or just a slower computer during the sign up period.
You need to understand and be mindful about this rather than falling into exclusion by default.
Be Helpful and Inclusive, Including with the Organisers and Volunteers.
If you’re going to a larp or a festival, chances are none of the organizers or volunteers are being paid for what they’re doing: in practice, the volume of labour that the organizers have put in is going to be far more than is covered by the ticket prices. One way to contribute is to be helpful and inclusive. Entitled behaviour is stressful for organizers and volunteers. When attending a larp consider what you can do to help, for example being inclusive of new players, helping with setting up and taking down, and ensuring that your communication with organizers and volunteers is polite and non- aggressive.
Be Aware of What’s Required for the Larp You’re Attending.
The majority of larps require active engagement. The is likely to include creative collaboration and working with other participants to creative a narrative that is satisfying for everyone participating. This is not to say everyone has to be the perfect larper, or always in a supporting role – but consideration for other’s experience is necessary. Also, you may decide that what’s required isn’t something you can offer or something that you would enjoy. For example, if there is a requirement that costuming is authentic and you don’t particularly enjoy costuming you may decide that the larp isn’t for you.
Don’t Use Larp as an Alternative to Therapy.
Although larp can be transformative, it isn’t therapy. Treating it as such may have a negative impact on the participant’s psychology. For example, the participant may discover after a scene that they have tried to use a character to explore personal issues and misjudged the long term impact, or forced themselves to play a scene relating to personal trauma, expecting it to be helpful, only to realise that they should have listened to their feelings of discomfort. This is not to say that larp can’t have a psychologically positive impact, but if the participant is trying to work on a specific issue, they should do it with the assistance of a professional. It is also unfair to use your fellow players as adjuncts in your own journey without their knowledge or consent.
Understand and Use Safety Tools in Larps. Normalize their Use.
Participants should never feel uncomfortable about prioritising their own comfort and safety over a scene. If they need to use safety tools to leave a scene that should be considered unremarkable. Organizers should make this clear, but it’s also the duty of other participants to respect tools as they are used and allow play to continue around them.
Be Aware and Considerate.
People have different privileges, opportunities, and energy, which make certain actions easier or more difficult – the important thing is to be aware of yourself and how you relate to others. Some problems you can’t solve on your own but you can be part of the solution.
Reach Out to New Players.
Or if you’re a new player, reach out to people that you’ve had interesting conversations with. Don’t feel it should be the other person’s responsibility – people don’t always have the energy to initiate contact, regardless of their standing in the community.
Accept “No” Gracefully.
Whether it’s playing a certain scene, being involved in a collaboration, or to hooking up after a larp.
Examine Your Own Behaviour.
In terms of general talk of toxicity in the community – check you’re not part of this. There are people who may not recognize that they are actively acting in toxic ways, and examining our own behaviour is always useful. There is also a passive part of this where we might allow toxic behaviour within larps we run, or defend people after someone has disclosed difficult, abusive, or toxic behaviour on their part because they are a friend, or respected in the community. If you have done either of these they aren’t necessarily insurmountable obstacles to you being part of the community but do what you need to do to change.
Look at Who’s Being Held Accountable.
Sometimes talking about the community being toxic can disguise specific bad actors. Look at who’s being held accountable. This is not to say that anyone is obliged to name and confront an abuser.
The magic of community and of finding a place to belong is powerful. I have been very fortunate to have people around me who have supported me in learning and continuing to learn how to better myself and the community around me, while making the process of discovery fun. One of the unique aspects of larp is the emotions that are invoked during play that allow us to be vulnerable with people who we don’t know outside of their character. Such vulnerability is both what we must protect by educating ourselves on safety, and what we can use to become more compassionate and helpful members of any community, starting with the larp one.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Wood, Laura. “Why Larp Community Matters and How We Can Improve It.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
One of the most important tenets of the communities built around Nordic larp these past few years has been inclusivity. “Inclusiveness” was defined by Lars Nerback in a 2013 Nordic Larp Talk as the feeling of being culturally and socially accepted, welcome, and equally treated (Nerback 2013).
From a larpmaker’s perspective, it designates the effort to design spaces in which people who experience discrimination in their ordinary lives are actively supported and encouraged. Over the years, people involved with Nordic larp have consequently developed practical and educational tools to support their claim of being inclusive. For example, papers have been written about how to perform cultural calibration so that players have the same vision and understanding of the culture depicted ingame (Nielsen 2014) or of the actual culture and everyday experiences of the people whose lives are being used as a direct inspiration for the larp (Kangas 2017). Others have written to address discrimination experienced in larp contexts, for example due to race (Kemper 2018) or body type (Kessock 2019).
Those tools, although primarily designed to be used in larp contexts, contribute to shaping the behaviors and practices expected on a community level. Indeed, if larps are the ground from which most social relationships among larpers grow, sociability doesn’t end at larps. For most people, it continues, through Facebook, chat, public meetings, events, etc. That’s why, in this chapter, I will address larp primarily as a community — a social group sharing common interests, supported by a feeling of belonging.
In addition, many (larp and non-larp) communities, seeking inspiration from Nordic larp or following the spirit of the times, also strive towards inclusivity. Those communities may encounter similar problems: inclusivity questions our collective ability to remain actively open while taking part in a group of interests. It is, at its essence, a matter of community skills.
The partial success of the effort towards inclusivity is especially apparent in the increasing visibility of queer people, for example at Solmukohta — from Drag me to KP to “queer at KP” badges to the prominence of rainbowcolored pieces of clothing. However, the larp world remains strikingly homogenous, revealing limits to how inclusivity is currently practiced. Even though it is not true of all larp cultures, most Nordic larpers are white, able-bodied, and come from moderately wealthy, educated backgrounds: people of color, people of reduced mobility, and people with low income or education, are scarce.
Intersectionality, a notion created by African American academic Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), helps us understand how different discrimination (for example, race, ability, and class) combine in ways that make it necessary to address all its aspects in order to understand how a person is being limited or suppressed based on their identity. We must also take that into account in designing for inclusivity.
The aspects we need to consider to make a community effectively inclusive are many: gender, class, race, ability, but also education, and even social skills. Nordic larp was born out of an endeavor to get several emerging larping traditions to share practices and ideas, and it worked tremendously well. However, this creative proliferation has, over the years, built to increase the distance between insiders and outsiders. From the outside, the threshold to participate in the Nordic larping community now seems ridiculously high.
I joined the Nordic scene two years ago at age 23 during Knutpunkt 2018 after a pretty short larping career in France, in the pursuit of a degree in Social Anthropology. I was fortunate enough to have a motive to join (research), a feminist background, and a compulsive learning attitude forged by years of university training. Yet, even today, after spending some time in the Nordics countries, reading as much larp theory as I could stomach, and writing a thesis I’m pretty happy with, it still feels I can never, ever catch up with what was produced during the last twenty years.
As a result, I feel dangerously ignorant of the cultural and social ways of the community, and constantly in danger of making a misstep. I think it is safe to say I’m far from being the only one. Many other larpers I had the chance to talk to shared similar feelings. The cost of access, i.e. the amount of specialized knowledge required to participate in the Nordic larp community is very high.
Some of the cost of access that impedes inclusivity is, in fact, due to the efforts to support it. There’s two sides to every coin: to be inclusive to certain people, a space has to be exclusive of others — and it is not always clear who.
This is the paradox of inclusivity.
In this chapter, I would like to address how “being inclusive” and “feeling safe” come into contradiction, notably in the way that we design community spaces. Then, I will try to question the phenomenon of community violence and how it relies on our in-group conceptions of difference and ways to confront it. These thoughts will help build a clearer vision of what inclusivity does, and can, mean. Finally, I will try to offer practical advice to help us build more inclusive communities, encourage collective reflexivity, and conceive of larpers’ spaces as a piece of a more global society, which needs to become more inclusive as well.
Inclusivity vs. Safe Space: Bringing In or Keeping Out
When trying to achieve inclusivity in practice, the first obstacle encountered is the exclusiveness of general society. Just because a space seems public, or open, doesn’t mean that it is: homeless people are constantly pushed away, people of color are at risk of police violence, openly gay couples often have to fear assault, sex workers are criminalized and stigmatized, etc. Therefore, all attempts to build an inclusive community must deal with the matter of the space in which events, gatherings, or larps take place.
In short, we need to make the participants feel safe. According to Johanna Koljonen, this involves the following:
Participants need to feel seen and secure, they need to know they’re in the right place, and have a reasonably good idea of what kinds of experiences and activities they are about to engage in. This makes them not have to worry, which allows them to be present in the moment and explore the actual instance of the experience in a playful, mindful and proactive manner.
Koljonen 2016
The careful framing of such spaces, the rules and limitations we actively give them, differ from how we experience our everyday lives. There are no safety mechanics in real life, no word that magically stops your boss from yelling at you, no graceful opt-out that’ll let you walk free of a street harasser.
What we try to achieve through all the rules, the caring, the long discussions about consent, is commonly called a safe space. And, as society itself is certainly not a safe space, we need to build a space that is separated from it and tries to counter it, to cancel the prejudices, power relations, and inequalities that we encounter in our ordinary lives.
We try to build an inclusive environment by removing it from society, and by making sure unwanted elements of society don’t follow inside. We try to bring (people) in by keeping (the problems which individuals are a part of) out.
In short: safe spaces, which are instrumental in allowing for inclusivity, are exclusive. Then again, what choice do we have? The world in general remains a dangerous place for many of us. In the absence of other options, we must ponder what we call safe and what (or who) we deem unsafe.
First, it is important to acknowledge that safety is a collective concern requiring all members of the community to actively contribute to the social design that organizers — primarily — come up with. As Maury Brown puts it:
For a community to be safe, all of its members must: uphold the agreed-upon social contract of respectful behavior; be intolerant of harassment, abuse, and assault within the group; share the duty of monitoring behavior and educating new members; support the decisions of organizers to enforce safety norms; and respect and offer support to those who make reports of safety violations.
Brown 2017
These are no small tasks: the exact meaning of words like harassment, abuse, and assault, is far from evident. Safety requirements are specialized knowledge, and contribute to raising the cost of access to communities such as the Nordic larp scene. Fortunately, in larps, cultural calibration tools and workshops provide support, and have shown remarkable efciency in including, for example, autistic people (Fein 2015).
Blockbuster larps and performance or art games marketed to the general public have an ability to attract new faces, thus building an entry point to the community. However, becoming part of the community, being a valid, full member of the group, able to participate in Facebook conversations, is not easy.
In fact, during my first Solmukohta, I felt so distressed and alone (I knew barely a handful of people among the 500, and none of them well) that I spent a whole afternoon in my room writing about “extrovert privilege”. The first time I wrote the Nordic larping community was not actually inclusive was the first time I came into contact with it. Being told this community was “a big family”, it was hard to realize that it was as difficult to take part in for an introvert as anywhere else.
The amount of community skills required to support a safe space is high, and at odds with the concern for inclusivity. To address it we can, at least partly, rely on “herd competence” — hoping the people bold enough to enter our spaces learn by doing in contact with others. However, by relying on the rather elusive notion of safety, we court confusion.
Safety is a many-sided issue: we need to be safe to play, express our identities, meet our needs, voice our opinions, etc. (what Friedner 2019 calls the brave space), but also safe from. There’s a positive safety, rooted in empowerment, and a negative safety, emerging from the perceived need of protection and defense.
Although enforced in more or less tangible ways, safety is a feeling, not a state of affairs. As such, it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with reality: we may feel unsafe while running no risk at all, or engage in risky behavior because we feel safe.
In an interview for the Knutpunkt 2018 Companion Book, Johanna Koljonen says that larp safety “is about feeling safe to play rather than being safe from harm” (Svanevik and Brind 2018, my emphasis). However, this principle of safety offers very little ground for facts. It relies largely on subjectivity.
It is difficult to decide what constitutes a threat, and even more so to distinguish between an actual threat and one we project based on our own past experiences.
What (supposedly) makes the larping community safe or inclusive is primarily the language we use to qualify it: it is safe because we’ve said so. It is inclusive because we’ve written about it. This is what is commonly called, following linguist John Austin (1962), a performative use of language: uttering a certain speech, in appropriate circumstances, may produce effects in reality. When we collectively declare “larp is safe”, we make safety happen, because all of a sudden we become mindful of others, their vulnerability, the precariousness of any social situation, etc. But when we have no clear definition of what “safe” means and the word “inclusivity” is little more than gibberish to many community members, the performative function of language is in jeopardy.
That’s when crises happen.
What We Do to Each Other: Community, Care, and the Making of Forgiveness
We often perceive safety as a human right. As far as I’m concerned, this is true. However, the chasm between “the right not to be shot on the way home” and “the right to not feel uncomfortable” is wide. As Sarah Schulman, author of an essay called Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016), warns:
Feeling “safe” of course is already a problematic endeavor since there is little guarantee of safety in our world, and the promise of it is a false one, as the effort to enforce this is often at the expense of other people.
Schulman 2016:130
There is no way to ensure 100% safety, and by trying to increase our chances, we might put other people at risk. If safety is a feeling, so is the impression of threat, unsafety, or intentional harm.
According to Sarah Schulman, projecting fears and insecurities onto others (the people who are “not us”, not part of the safe group) is common with two attitudes that we usually do not think to associate with each other: supremacy and trauma. Supremacy is the belief that the reference group is superior to other groups (by way of race, nationality, gender, ability, etc.), and therefore their own needs must be prioritized. This can lead to hate crimes, but more mundanely manifests in the feeling that the members of the supremacy group are put at risk of harm by non-members, and it’s therefore legitimate to use whatever means of “protection” against the (imaginary) threat they deem necessary.
In Europe, supremacist ideology directly translates to anti-immigrant laws, horrendous detention camps, and thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean each year.
Schulman describes supremacist attitudes in terms of the irrational feeling that one’s group must be protected against and separated from others, who are deemed dangerous, unworthy, or inferior. She draws a disturbing parallel with the attitude of traumatized people, whose feeling of being unsafe can be based not on actual risks in the present tense, but “a projection in the present based on dangers that occurred in the past” (ibid.). Because both supremacy and trauma are rooted in an analogous feeling that the group is being at risk of harm from non-members, the traumatized can become the supremacist. The Israeli occupation of Palestine constitutes a major institutional example of that escalation.
It is natural to seek to be, and feel, safe. However, when it leads to expecting others to comply with our own (not necessarily clear, visible from the outside, or reasonable) needs, conflict becomes inevitable. Moreover, conflict is often simplified until one can clearly distinguish a victim and an abuser.
The following pattern is common especially in communities using a lot of social media: A person commits, often without realizing it, an act that makes some members of the community feel hurt. These people share their pain, unease or dismay with other members. As more and more people become aware of the situation, the initial feelings flare up and reach a level where the status quo can’t hold, inducing a crisis.
At this point, it seems like nothing can be done: sides are taken, the community becomes polarized, and a stable state is only reached through splitting the community or shunning the wrongdoer. When this process targets public figures, it can take the form of “canceling,” an attempt from an active minority to deplatform a creator by publicly denouncing, slandering, and threatening them and their supporters.
Issues concerning the building of a safe space are involved in such crises. Designating a space as safe leads to the passive exclusion of people who do not know, or feel they know, enough, and the active exclusion of people thought to threaten the safety of the group. By creating a space that is viewed as separate, different from “the rest of the world,” and validating it through a feeling — safety —, those attitudes may lead to creating a critical differentiation between “us” and “them,” and to posit otherness (difference, disagreement, strangeness, etc.) as a threat. As a consequence, it becomes difficult to treat others with the same care as we expect to be treated as rightful members of our community. A Finnish larper who had been part of a recent community crisis as one of the wrongdoers told me: “You heard about the Week of Stories? We didn’t even have five minutes.”
The “Week of Stories” is a short period of time after an event (generally a larp) in which the participants withhold their criticism to give the organizers an opportunity to recover — and let the steam cool down.
As the actions of the organizers of this particular event were deemed outrageous, many attendants reacted by expressing their shock and indignation immediately. These feelings were, of course, legitimate: all feelings, in fact, should be acknowledged — although not always acted upon. In that case, though, the immediate outburst caused the organizers to feel hurt and disregarded in turn.
The rules and norms of care and attention in larps are largely there not to be used: they are there in case of need, but their primary purpose is to support a feeling of “safe enough” to participate — much like a lifejacket or a seatbelt. But when those rules, like the Week of Stories, could come in handy to address a particularly difficult situation, we are not always able to resist the initial flare of emotion.
Unfortunately, social media encourage us to react immediately to stimuli, and facilitates emotional outbursts at the expense of caution and reflection. As the authors of the Living Games’ Crisis Management Workshop put it:
While many communities and events are working hard to make their spaces safer, it’s not enough to have a Code of Conduct. You need to practice it.
Stavropoulos and Steele 2016
Speaking about safety is not enough. Imagining safety measures is not enough. We need to practice understanding why we made those rules.
Violence happens. Conflict happens. But violent reactions, even verbal, even righteous, even targeted at the people who wronged us, are unlikely to lead to positive outcomes in a community. There are other ways than exclusion to support a safe and inclusive space, and resorting to it too often may weaken the space we try to preserve.
We frequently use the metaphor of the missing stair to describe an individual that we know to be “problematic” in a community, yet carefully avoid instead of confronting (putting at risk those who are unaware a stair is missing). It could have provided a nice basis for understanding how to address detrimental elements in a community, but this metaphor was built on a logical error: we don’t fix a stair by removing it, but by safely replacing faulty parts, adding safeguards, and making sure the stair doesn’t put people at risk anymore.
If shunning can be a temporary solution to address a potential danger in the short term, it is not likely to support understanding of the harmful behavior, for the perpetrator or the community.
Being denied the right to speak, the perpetrator can experience a strong feeling of unfairness and rejection. This won’t help them listen and understand the consequences of their actions. As for the community, it cannot reach an adequate comprehension of the sociological causes of the harm done without facing the perpetrator and hearing them too. As a consequence, the community renders itself incapable of preventing similar behaviors in the future. Furthermore, enforcing safety rules using the fear of shunning encourages perpetrators to hide and deny their actions instead of acknowledging them and trust the community to resort to transformative justice.
Transformative justice is a comprehensive and non-legal approach to problem solving and peacemaking that doesn’t seek to punish the perpetrator, but to collectively reach a new state of balance through educating, supporting, and encouraging dialogue. It doesn’t mean that we are responsible for fixing people: in some cases, that would simply be impossible. However, “sacrificing” members of the community who are known to misbehave may be beside the point. In fact, punishment for the sake of righteousness is often beside the point. I believe that it is our individual and collective duty to try to understand the etiology of a crisis. Otherwise an appropriate response remains impossible.
Reaching Past the Choir
By keeping us from reaching more people, building our communities as safe spaces fails to allow us to fully benefit from the educational and transformative powers of larp (e.g. Bowman and Hugaas 2019). To change that, we need to be inclusive towards other kinds of people, to be able to extend the safe space in ways that allow anyone to step in and benefit from the kind of awareness we’ve had.
The para-larp environment is awfully technical, albeit for good reasons: in general society, something as widespread as e.g. sharing one’s pronouns is mostly unheard of. Being for once in a space where people won’t misgender you is priceless — that’s also why I’m not rejecting inclusivity as we usually conceive of it, simply pointing at some of its dark spots.
Most people quickly become allies when they are placed in an environment that is appropriately forgiving with their missteps, yet encourages their efforts in learning and being included. On the contrary, hurtful reactions to honest mistakes can create more anger, confusion, and a feeling of rejection that fosters resistance and hatred. Getting angry happens, of course: but offering the other person an explanation for our reaction can help bridge the difference, and slowly bring them to our side.
Shunning hurts us. When addressing community issues, violence is almost always detrimental. If inclusivity is synonymous with purity, we are not protecting ourselves from harm, but ensuring it happens.
As it stands, the community requires specialized knowledge and legitimacy to talk about many sensitive topics. As a consequence, it is more difficult for newer and low-status members to achieve social recognition, while older and high-status members benefit from a kind of indulgence that might result in unhealthy power relations (especially in the event of a crisis). Muriel Algayres’s article about social capital in larp offers a detailed account of the effects of status differences on play opportunities and social dynamics (Algayres 2019).
The Nordic larp community is inclusive, but not all the time, and not to everyone. In fact, inclusive is, in my opinion, not the right term to use for the larp community: instead, it is queerfriendly, with (white) feminist values, and an education to difference. Not bad, but with a few fixes, we can do better. By understanding that the need for safety may come into contradiction with the ideal of inclusivity we can move to an increased awareness of how to address and support differences in our community. Here are a few steps:
Acknowledging feelings, while at the same time recognizing that feeling alone cannot be the baseline for acting upon a conflict situation.
Ensuring the persons who felt hurt receive appropriate care, but remaining careful in assuming the intentions of the wrongdoers or initiating punishment.
Keeping in mind that being inclusive means making space for different people and opinions to coexist.
Holding the space to hear all parties involved in a crisis, and offering or asking a neutral community member or entity for mediation.
Refraining from immediate social media exposure.
Instead of projecting our expectations based on a unilateral understanding of a given situation, we need to assume the best of others (at least provisionally) and create the space for reasonable dialogue to occur.
A lot of good can arise from constructing a safe space around positive tenets meant to cancel, or compensate, behaviors at play in general society. However, we need to be wary of the risk of seclusion and insularity. Indeed, such a state of affairs would give way to distorted thinking about the state of the world and the intentions of the people who don’t belong. In wanting to defend the group from harm, insular communities may thoughtlessly replicate harmful behaviors such as bullying, shunning, and rejecting difference. In doing so, community spaces become less resilient to change and dissent and thus more precarious.
Inclusivity has to meet a double logic. First, the creation of a safe space allows, from the outside to the inside, to take in people whose identities do not meet the dominant social norms. Second, from the inside to the outside, larp and larp communities can create opportunities for educating people to difference and provide alternative social models that contribute to the struggle against all oppression — a purpose the seminary The State of the Larp in Oslo in December 2018 explicitly pursued.
However, neither the one nor the other should be taken for granted or implied: what makes a space safe is far from obvious, and the power of larp is only as great as the people it reaches. In the design of our larps and communities, we must explicitly ask ourselves: what do we think we are doing, and what do we want to do in practice? To put it provocatively: to make a better place in the world for ourselves, or to make the world a better place.
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989): Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum.
Elizabeth Fein (2015): Making Meaningful Worlds: Role-playing Subcultures and the Autism Spectrum. Cult Med Psychiatry, 39(2), pp. 299-321.
Kat Jones, Mo Holkar and Jonaya Kemper (2019): Designing for Intersectional Identities. in Johanna Koljonen (ed.), Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost, 2019.
This article explores the development of larp as an activity and a community in the face of a growing tendency of contemporary culture to become commodified. Through presenting the wider cultural setting of consumer culture and its impact on larp, the article proposes a variety of characteristics and developments that have lead to the commodification of larp. The author investigates the positive and negative influences of commodification on larp and questions whether this is a direction we wish to be taking as a community.
In recent years, we have witnessed a definitive growth of the larp community and a growth in recognition of larp in wider culture as a legitimized activity. As larp begins to be more present in society, the wider culture also penetrates the social structures of larp as a community and an activity, one of the central outcomes of which is the commodification of larp. In this article, I discuss how larp is becoming commodified, what that means, and what the repercussions of this development are for specific events as well as the community at large.
To begin discussing the commodification of larp, it is first important to define commodification. Commodification is the process by which an object, a behaviour, an interaction, or really just about anything becomes a commodity that we consume in the role of a consumer. Consumption is often mistakenly equated with buying or with accumulating material possessions, but the purchase of goods is only a small element of consumption, with the desires, values, and experiences that we interact with via an act of consumption taking a more important role. Consumption is an act of establishing one’s self, one’s agency, and one’s place in the world through a process of making choices and evaluating alternatives. It is at its core a relationship to the world: a power structure, in which the consumer appropriates the commodity. In this setup, commodification can be seen as the process of objectifying something with the aim of appropriating it. Such consumption-oriented logic largely penetrates contemporary Western society, forming what is often called consumer culture. The power structures of consumer culture emerge in previously non-commercial settings, such as citizenship, public services, local communities, and interpersonal relationships (following Slater 1997; Baudrillard 1998; Bauman 2001; Cohen 2003). I believe that such consumption-oriented logic is also seeping into larp.
Larp has largely managed to ideologically exist on the outskirts of consumer culture, mainly due to its previously marginalized and almost hidden nature from the perspective of mainstream culture. Perhaps because of small budgets and a lack of existing blueprints for organization, larp has always been a very communal activity, in which everyone has been required to pitch in and thus literally create events together. This includes both the content of the larp itself as well as many of the practicalities surrounding event organisation. As larpers often stress, no one has a “lead part” in larp, but it is rather working together and supporting one another that is the main attraction of the activity. This allows for an extremely egalitarian power structure, as individuals co-create the performance together and thus share power, responsibility, and benefits.
A commodified larp sees a change in the relationship between a larper and a larp, where the larper becomes a consumer that appropriates the larp as a commodity. The power structure shifts significantly, as larpers now relinquish their power to co-create in return for social legitimization, wider accessibility, growth, and development of larp as an activity. This is not a power structure that is necessarily consciously taken on, but one that is enacted through changed responsibilities and focus of engagement. In practice, commodification emerges through how we approach a larp, how we engage in its performance, and what we expect from the event as well as its participants and organizers.
How is Larp Becoming a Commodity?
I propose that there are a number of factors that have contributed to the commodification of larp. Firstly, I believe that media coverage as well as a wider acknowledgement of larp as an activity aids its commodification. In acceptance by the wider culture, we have inadvertently begun to be a more intertwined part of it. We naturally begin to take on forms of consumer culture, as this is what we have all been acculturated into. Media coverage is by no means a bad thing: it has helped larp gain a better standing in wider society, allowed for novel funding and collaboration opportunities, and eased access into the community. At the same time, however, media coverage helps to objectify larp (as I will elaborate below) and bring in a wide array of actors from outside the community, most often with profit-making aims. For instance, we now see larp-like events organized by companies run by individuals with little knowledge of larp. The most prominent example of this is Disneyland’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the designers of which have taken on elements of larp to create interactive theme park experiences.
Secondly, larp has seen a growth in interest toward it, which contributes greatly to the commodification of larp, as a growing demand requires us to reconfigure how events are organized and pushes us toward professionalization. If an event is geared toward hundreds of people rather than dozens, commodification becomes an issue of handling practicalities. Instead of communal cooking, it becomes more logical to hire catering; instead of having everyone clean up together, it is easier to pay a cleaning company; etc. Bigger larps also become more ambitious in terms of providing a more realistic experience, engaging detailed propping, make-up, lighting, machinery, and space construction to name a few. As Harviainen (2013) has explored in detail, any larp event requires management, even if it is not often acknowledged as such. Yet bigger larps require acknowledged professional organization for them to work.
We can see a clear strive toward professionalization of larp through an influx of high-budget, high-production value larps, which have ironically been given a commodified name of “blockbuster larps.” These are often either directly based on or at least heavily borrow from popular media franchises, such as Harry Potter, Downton Abbey,X-men, or Hunger Games (on blockbuster larp, see Fatland and Montola 2015). In line with the common misconception of consumption as purchasing, it is important to stress that the commodification of larp does not go directly hand in hand with the professionalisation of larp. Hence, I do not believe that blockbuster larps are the cause of commodification so much as they are a symptom of the commodification already taking place. Nevertheless, the growing presence of blockbuster larps clearly supports further commodification of larp. Such larps take place in bigger and fancier venues, with large groups of staff and/or volunteers that take care of cleaning, catering, decorating, and propping. Consequently, the expectations for customer service rise, with larp slowly becoming more of a service rather than a communal experience. The large scale of production also raises standards and expectations for larp, as well as sets certain “procedures” for events, thus further objectifying the practice by solidifying the form larp should take.
As larps become more and more professionally organized, the role of a participant diminishes in terms of any practicalities surrounding an event. It may seem silly to say that larp becomes commodified because we are less involved in doing chores, but such lack of physical engagement leads to less time forming bonds among participants and with the space that we interact in together. Similar issues can be seen in wider consumer culture, where we increasingly “buy back” our leisure time through convenience commodities such a microwave meals or cleaning services. We become seemingly free from chores, but we also lose touch with the materiality of our world and our ability to engage in it practically, as we no longer know how to create or fix many of the things that surround us (Frayne 2015).
The attitude of diminished responsibility easily transfers from the practicalities surrounding larp organization to activities involving the content of the larp. For instance, while previously larps would assume for you to obtain your own costume, there is now a growing possibility to rent or buy ready costumes from organizers. Of course, organizer-provided costuming can in itself become a communal endeavour or help alleviate stress about high standards for props, yet such ”add-on services” do make it easy to just show up to the event without preparing much, without talking to other larpers, without taking the time to read up on larp materials. In the same way that we buy back our free time from practicalities, we seem to buy back our time from preparation for larp, making more “efficient use” of our resources.
Many new participants may also not be fully aware of what they are signing up to and what they are expected of at events. This results in situations where more experienced larpers feel as if they are providing entertainment for those who only engage passively. This seems to be especially common for larps based on popular media franchises, as they attract fans wishing to purchase an experience of their favourite fantasy world. Of course, it is completely okay for newcomers to need an introduction to the practices of a new activity they are engaging in and it is the role of any community to mentor its new members, but this can become an overwhelming task when expectations clash violently.
Thirdly, we are objectifying larp more and more, which makes it easier for larp to be commodified. The most obvious examples include things like “fan products,” such as t-shirts or patches that are now visibly present at larp events. The marketing of larps is also taking on new levels, with larps often having trailers, distributed print ads, as well as planned and timed social media communication plans (e.g., every week new information about a larp is revealed). On a wider level, larp also becomes the focus of various social media channels, such as video blogs, with individuals gaining the possibility to experience larp though photos and videos without actually being there.
We can also see objectification in how our language is changing in regards to larp. For instance, larpers will now talk about “buying a ticket” to a larp rather than “signing up” to a larp. Larpers will also refer to events fulfilling intended experiences or expectations, as if they were purchasing a service. Language both reflects and influences our mindset and attitudes, pointing to the shifting nature of our relationship to larp.
More subtle forms of objectification can be seen in the documentation of larp. It is now extremely common for larps to be photographed or even filmed. One of the defining aspects of larp has always been its ephemeral nature: it only exists while it is being performed, with its meaning emerging in the interaction among participants (Auslander 2008). In documenting these fleeting performances as much as we do, we begin to condense and fragment the live performance, freezing it in time to concretize its meaning. Larp now gains an objective truth to its experience, which can be revisited at one’s convenience. Documentation is further used for marketing purposes to sell tickets to larps, as well as to secure funding and expensive venues for future events. Such objectification can easily slip into repeatability of experience or even its mass production, which may cause us to lose creative and lively aspects of larp.
Fourthly and perhaps most importantly, commodification is driven by our own wish to be recognized and legitimized as a community and as an activity, which demands taking on power structures of consumer culture. This is especially visible in how we are organizing and communicating about larp. Larp is clearly becoming legally and financially much more organized, with various companies emerging that either organize larp events or help cater to them on some level. The foundation of companies has been explained by a need to get “ahead of the game,” which is completely understandable. With larp becoming more commonplace, many larpers rightfully fear that people outside the community will come in to create and take over a commercialized larp field. And we do see this happening, as I noted above. It is, however, unclear what it is that we fear they will steal from us. Money? Potential “customers?” The “brand name” of larp? Moreover, are we merely responding to an “outsider threat” or are we actually building larp into an activity geared toward efficiency and profit-making?
In line with the above, there is a clear drive to make larp something to live on. Many individuals are striving to create jobs out of larp, with the formation of companies being the first clear step in that direction. While this is a noble idea, in practice we must face the issue of transformation of power structures and the nature of interaction within the larp community once certain individuals begin to profit from larp. This brings us back to the cultural context that larp exists as part of. In our society, work is seen as the ultimate form of status and legitimization, which leads to a setting, in which activities and individuals performing those activities are not seen as valid before they are made productive and profitable (Frayne 2015; Mould 2018). As a result, many fields that are not originally commercialized see a clear development towards “careerization” of practices, that is, the creation of careers out of non-work activities. This allows for legitimization, but comes with a multitude of psychological and community disrupting issues (see e.g., Seregina and Weijo 2017). When larp becomes a job, the power structure between organizer and player shifts from shared responsibility for creating to one of exchange of an objectified and potentially repeatable experience.
Larp always has and always will involve a lot of labor. As Jones, Koulu, and Torner (2016) describe, this involves a variety of activities, such as emotional labor, labor aimed at fulfilling self-actualization off-game or in-game, and labor aimed at fulfilling physiological and safety needs. It is important to stress that labor is not the same thing as work. Work is a formalised type of labor, which is done for a producer in exchange for capital and the result of which is a commodity that can be exchanged for capital by consumers. Labor, however, can exist outside of a work setting and its power structures. Hence, in making larp work, we transform the nature and power structures around the labor done as part of it.
Jones, Koulu and Torner (2016) further note how problematic the organisation, distribution, and acknowledgement of labor is in larp, as many tasks go unnoticed while others require very specific skills or resources. Building on this, in professionalizing larp, duties previously open to any member of the community may become limited to professionals of that specific field. Moreover, as skilled workers become booked for professional projects, they may not have time or energy for other projects, heavily skewing the ability to organize larp to those with more economic and social capital. Who will be able to do labor (both in-game and off-game) in larp in the future if larp continues to be commodified and professionalized?
The Impact of Commodification
If larp is indeed becoming commodified, what kind of impact does that have on the activity and on our community? To begin with the positive impact, a commodified larp becomes much more widely accessible and approachable. More people are able to access information about events, and it becomes easier for new larpers as well as larpers with various accessibility needs to engage in the activity. Moreover, larp becomes much more recognized and legitimized by the wider culture, giving larpers much more social capital in terms of what they spend their time, money, and energy on, as well as allowing the activity to be taken seriously in wider society. Larp as commodity further allows us the individualistic freedom that comes with consumer choice: we become absolute sovereigns in deciding what we want to gain out of the experience and how. This allows for steering and personalizing experiences to be in line with our desires.
Commodification goes hand in hand with raised standards and expectations, as well as formalization of structures and organizational practices. Standardized, formalized practices allow for safer, predictable spaces of interaction for participants, both in terms of how to act themselves and what kind of behaviour to expect from others. The result is larp with better protection from harassment and less stress about preparation and/or expectations. At the same time, in building on existing blueprints for creating and managing experiences, organizers gain better tools for designing larp and engaging in more ambitious projects.
Reflecting the above, consumption was intended to be an avenue for individual freedom and equality, as all parts of culture now become supposedly accessible to all regardless of class or status (Slater 1997; Cohen 2003). In reality, in its focus on liberal freedom, consumption is inherently individualistic and classist, leading to alienation, collapse of communality, and growing differences between layers of society. Following this, a commodified larp becomes chained by the limitations of consumer culture. Such larp involves focus on personal experience and personal gain, which leads to a lack of attachment or perceived responsibility, with individuals merely drifting from fancy to fancy. In the long run, this can lead to the collapse of a sense of connection and communality, as larpers begin feeling alienated in their focus on their own experiences. With no obligations to others, larp slowly turns into just one of the many consumer experiences that can be purchased and consumed at one’s leisure. A community can still be born in such a setting, but it becomes a subculture of consumption (Schouten and McAlexander 1995) or a brand community (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001), where connections are built through our link to the same commodity rather than through our direct relationships to one another.
Power house mechanic working on steam pump by Lewis Hine, public domain.
Standardization of larp brings many advantages, but it also causes larp to become objectified and thus easily repeatable. In other words, larp runs the risk of becoming a service that can be replicated on an assembly line, thus losing much of its improvisational, creative, and lively nature. Similar developments have taken place in many creative fields, such as design of public space and academic research. Mould (2018) describes how creativity as a practice in general has become commodified and commercialized in today’s culture, with only specific, capitalised forms of creativity being valid. In becoming formalized, larp becomes easy and efficient, but may also lose many of its creative aspects.
Professionalization of larp and the resultant raising costs associated with larp further encourage growing class differences among larpers, with certain high-profile larps becoming inaccessible to those without economic means. While at this time there are larps requiring different economic investments (with many larps being low-cost or even free), it is important to acknowledge that the inaccessibility of certain parts of larp as an activity strongly shifts the egalitarian power structures within the larp community. In effect, some larp becomes upper class and other larp becomes lower class. While sponsor tickets do exist and are a noble cause, they further mark us as participants of a different nature and a different class. Such tickets are also often of little help to larpers with less economic means, as inaccessibility does not always rely on the cost of the larp itself, but is also associated with such things as travel, planning of the care of dependants, or time taken off work. Yet the sponsorship itself may come along with praise, freebies, or sometimes even guaranteed spots and preferred characters, further raising the status of sponsors.
In light of growing interest toward larp, the activity may also develop into a scarce commodity and hence become more coveted, objectified, and high-class. Scarcity is a central tool of commodification (Slater 1997), as it makes commodities more desirable and thus fuels our need to consume, often making something feel in short supply within a fragmenting context of abundance. If some larps become accessible only to the few because of economic and social difference and the number of potential participants for each event grows disproportionately to the available spots, we face the increasing problem of how to choose participants fairly. The rejection and disappointment associated with not getting into events can break communality and create different classes based on social capital among larpers. Algayres (2019) shows that differences in social capital influence how we interact within larp and the extent to which we can influence the direction that a larp takes. Hence, by enforcing structures that strengthen class differences, we further a context in which individuals cannot engage on equal terms.
We witness a continued drive for growth in larp, which is another clear symptom of consumer culture. A culture focused on commodification involves an incessant drive to grow and develop, yet for no other purpose than growth itself (Slater 1997; Baudrillard 1998). We are driven by desire for more, for something new, for something different, and this desire is never satiated (Campbell 1987). Reflecting this, we see a push toward making bigger larps, more expensive larps, more ambitious larps. And while there is nothing wrong with exploring and developing the creative boundaries of the activity, I sometimes wonder what the end goal of this growth is? Are we just caught in a capitalist frenzy for development?
Lastly, commodification may lead to the exploitation of labor, especially in contexts where individuals involved in creating larp come in with a mixture of commodified and non-commodified perspectives toward larp. Making use of a background of communal event creation, many profit-oriented larp events only succeed through the labor of unpaid (and often overworked) volunteers. These volunteers are only paid in social capital or “exposure,” just like those working in already heavily commercialized creative industries (Mould 2018). Jones, Koulu and Torner (2016) propose that larp organizers need to rethink what is defined and proposed as work, what kinds of skills are necessary to organize or engage in larp, as well as who can be asked to do labor and to what extent within larp. As larp grows, we will see more and more instances of complex power structures around labor and possible exploitation of labor. Hence, we need to be aware of and reflect on how we will develop as a community and an activity.
Questioning Linear Development
As I near the end of my article, I want to stress that the aim has not been to moralize or to spell out a better or worse form of larping. Consumption is beyond any moralization: it is in itself merely a form that a power structure can take. Commodification of larp further emerges as normal linear development of an activity within consumer culture and one that feels logical, as this is the way anything progresses in our world today.
Commodification is structural, but it is also an internalized power structure and a logic via which we interact with objects, people, spaces, and the world. Whether or not a larp becomes a commodity is thus a matter of balance of structure and individual attitude toward larp and other larpers. As a result, I do not think it is possible to fully steer toward a commodified or non-commodified type of experience either as an organizer or a participant. Yet I believe we have a responsibility to be aware of how we potentially help along the process of commodification, whether we are for or against it.
As I outlined above, commodification of larp comes with both positive and negative aspects. However, the positive aspects of commodification tend to mask the negative impact that it brings along, with many proponents of commodification arguing that the benefits outweigh or can be taken on without the drawbacks of this development. But commodification is always a packaged deal. It is foolish to think that commodified larp can be reaped only for its positive values and that it will not influence the community at large. Commodification has a long history of crushing anything in its way through firing up endless desire and an incessant need for growth until the entirety of an activity is set up to work for its purposes.
What becomes important now is to become aware of the development that is happening and that we enable through our actions. One of the biggest issues that living in consumer culture has caused is the seeming impossibility to imagine any other form of existence. Yet in its roots at the margins of consumer culture, larp has the potential to provide emancipatory and utopian visions of alternatives (e.g., Kemper 2017; Bowman and Hugaas 2019; Hugaas and Bowman 2019). Let’s not squander that in hopes of being legitimized and normalized by a culture that will only use us up.
We must question what commodification does for and to our community, and we must be aware of and ready to accept all the repercussions that come with our decisions. I do not think it is feasible for our growing community to exist in consensus of what larp is and how it should be approached. As a result, we will most likely see an increased fragmentation of our community and our practice. Some will think commodification is the right direction for development, while others will combat it. At the same time, I do not believe it is possible to fully stop the commodification process, as the wider context of consumer culture will continue to push our community into that framework. Larp will continue to develop, but we can set the tone to this development.
What we need to do is to try to imagine what we intend to see as the goal for our need to commodify and grow. We need to question the linear development that consumer culture provides us and think about what kind of future we want to carve out for larp. What will engagement in larp look like as an organizer and as a participant? How will we treat each other and larp events? What kinds of responsibilities will we have to ourselves and to others? Moreover, what will accessibility look like? Will we exist among increasing economic, social, and cultural inequalities? Will we see a juxtaposition of upper class and lower class in larp? Who will be able to participate and how?
Furthermore, we must strive to understand why we want to develop larp into a certain direction and whether the outcomes of such a development are what we really want to end up with. Why do we strive for more social acceptance? Why do we aim for higher production value and better marketing? Why do we want more media coverage? Who will profit and what will it cost? As we begin to give up our power as co-creators of larp experiences, who are we giving power to? And how will they wield it?
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Editor: Elina Gouliou
Photo selection: Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, All photos free use from Pixabay.
