Tag: Solmukohta

Where do we find beauty in larp? Can we make sense of the moments in larp where we, as players, have an aesthetic appreciation of the larp? Can we account for moments that are striking, that leave us breathless, that stay with us for the rest of our lives, that propel tears or joyous rapture? Can we develop theory to render at least some of the logic of those moments visible?

Larp is a specific form of expression that has similarities to performance, theatre, tabletop role-playing, sports, installation art, and to games, yet it is clearly distinct from all of these (Stenros 2010; Simkins 2015). Working out the aims, conventions, and methods of the form implies an aesthetic theory. In this article, we unpack what makes larp play beautiful. We wish to explicate the aesthetics of larp in a way that is recognizable for practitioners (i.e., players and designers) while also being potentially useful for people coming from different fields.

Aesthetics is a broad, even terrifying, term. It covers the subjective, emotional sensations we experience when encountering an object or environment, from pop music to a sunset viewed from the top of a forest ridge. It also pertains to a set of principles that may govern the production of aesthetic objects; an aesthetics of jazz, for instance, gives a general outline of what makes jazz jazz, and also what makes jazz beautiful. It is also a term for a field in philosophy relating to the nature of art, and so on. Indeed, Leonard Koren (2010) has identified ten different ways to understand the term, explaining why the ‘aesthetics’ is sometimes hard to grasp. In this article, we develop an aesthetic theory of larp that describes the ways in which we find larp beautiful, as well as the principles of design and play that make larp an object of aesthetic appreciation.

The beauty of larp has been discussed surprisingly little previously. Obviously the form of larp has received quite a bit of attention, particularly in the Knutepunkt community (e.g. Koljonen et al. 2019). However, while descriptions of design and play abound and there is a rich tradition of implicit standards of beauty couched in declarative accounts of how larps should be (i.e., manifestos), accounts of beauty and the aesthetics of larp are scarce (cf. Zagal & Deterding 2018, see also MacDonald 2012; Stenros 2013).

Two key limitations need to be noted here. This article approaches the beauty of larp from the point of view of the player. Beauty in larp is probably different if it were to be pivoted around the designer or an external audience. Second, although this article talks of beauty in larp in general terms, it is important to realize that it emerges in the context of Nordic and international larp, in a very specific artistic tradition, and is meant to make sense of that tradition.

Setting the Stage

Larp is embodied participatory drama. It unfolds in real-time, in physical surroundings, through the actions of participants bodily portraying characters. Larp can incorporate other forms of expression, and when it does include other art forms, they can be analysed with aesthetic tools developed for those specific expressions. For example, tools borrowed from theatre, music, visual arts, cinema, and the emerging field of aesthetics of games (e.g. De Koven 1978; Myers 2010; Kirkpatrick 2011) can fruitfully be leveraged to make sense of larps((There is no question, for instance, that a musical performance inside a larp will be evaluated and enjoyed by players on the basis of how we usually enjoy music. However, while it may be important that the music is good, the song might also be beautiful for reasons germane to the larp: perhaps the character is expressing a major change in their life; perhaps the song choice refers to things that are known to the players but not to the characters; or even, a “bad” performance of the song can create larp beauty if it is meaningful in a way that the players appreciate.)). However, while we will draw from these other fields, the focus is on understanding what is beautiful in larp specifically.

To understand the form of larp one needs to consider how larp is created and appreciated — and how these two processes are tied together. The participant in a larp is present in two ways. They are both a character within the fiction, and a player participating in a larp. The participant has a sort of dual consciousness, seeing everything both as real (within the fiction) and as not-real (as in playing). The participant is both a character and a player, able to flip between the two modes, and able to see things in double. We can call this bisociation (Koestler 1964, 35).

The participant is both a player and a character, which creates interesting frictions because there is only one body to inhabit, and one set of experiences to encounter (Sandberg 2004). The participant experiences the events as a character who has agency within the fiction, but they can also appreciate the larp from a wider perspective as a player with meta-awareness, and can shape this structure as a player.

Obviously the division of the participant into two roles is not real in the sense that these two personas would be somehow fully distinct and separate (Järvelä 2019). Instead, the role-play agreement — that the player and the character are to be treated as separate entities — is a social contract, one that gives alibi to act in ways that conflict with the participant’s story of self (Sihvonen 1997). This social contract obviously has limits; there are acts one cannot get away with as a player, even if done in character.

The main audience in larp is the player/character participant. However, the participant is also the main performer in a larp — for that audience. The performer and the spectator are also brought together in one body, and thus in larp we talk of the first-person audience (Sandberg 2004). In order to see and witness these works, one must participate. A significant part of the work is internal. The thoughts and feelings of a character, from doubts and schemes to joy and surprise, are only accessible from the first-person point of view (Montola 2012). The private landscapes conjured by a participant’s imagination are very much part of the experience, even if never shared.

Furthermore, first person is not just a metaphor for personal experience, but a concrete description. The participant will, very literally, only see what their character sees, experience only those scenes where they are present, in body. The participant is the lens through which the work unfolds.

This first person audience differs from, say, theatre, art, and music, where the division between the artist/performer and the audience/appreciator has traditionally been clear. Here we cannot make such a separation. Even someone at a larp who is watching a scene is not an “audience”. They are actively listening; their physical and social presence is meaningful to the other players, and at any moment their watching may turn into doing.

In considering beauty in larp, we find it useful to separate the question into two categories: first, the beautiful things that others have done and can be appreciated and, second, the beautiful things that we do (or participate in doing) ourselves that we ourselves can appreciate.

Beautiful to See

American artist Brody Condon has formulated a way of appreciating larp from the outside. He has noted that larp is a “generative engine” that creates an interesting visual surface (Condon 2010). While Condon works with this visual surface in a sophisticated way, we can see more straightforward examples in larp photographs and videos that try to capture the visual beauty of the scene. While it is possible to look at a larp as one looks at a painting, as a surface, while playing, this is not something that players commonly report, even though players can spend dozens of painstaking hours preparing costumes and props to contribute to this visual surface. It seems that this surface becomes most visible to people who do not participate in the play of the larp. Anyone can access it when it is mediated with a camera (see Torner 2011).

It is perhaps worth noting that the visual surface is part of what has sometimes made larp an object of derision or ridicule. From the outside, the props may look less authentic than what we have come to expect from films, just as the dialogue may sound stiff compared to what we expect from plays, and the narrative may appear completely disorganised when compared with what we expect from novels. It is important to acknowledge that larp is not trying to imitate these forms — the failure of larp to be like a play is not an aesthetic failure.

In expressive forms where there is a clear division between the artist and the audience, we often marvel at performative excellence. The artist has spent thousands of hours becoming excellent at something, and now this skill is on display. We find this in larp as well.

We can talk about performative excellence in larp, when someone portrays their character perfectly with exquisite body language and pitch perfect accent, or when someone has the perfect costume and carries it in the most fitting fashion, or when the scenography of the larp location is a perfect fit with fully functioning props. “Perfect” here means some kind of a combination of “appropriate”, “pleasing”, “fulfils all the requirements of the imagination” and “supports play”. We can appreciate the skill that goes into such performances and creations, and we can gaze on in appreciation when faced with such displays. Sometimes performative excellence is created in the moment; sometimes we see a truly beautiful artefact or encounter another kind of residue of a creation that took place before the larp.

The third source of external beauty in larp is rooted in their structure. Larps are rule-bound. Like games, they are constituted through the enacting of the rules the designers have created and curated (Suits 1978). Shared rules provide the necessary foundation for playing together. They also provide a framework for moments of delight to emerge, just as the rules of football provide the framework for astonishing feats of athleticism that were never specifically called for; yet they are made possible by the framework.

Nordic larps tend to have bespoke rules, meaning that the rules are written (curated, combined, created) specifically for that work (Koljonen 2019). By contrast, in other larp traditions there are tendencies to create general rules that can always be used, or to attempt to take into consideration any and all possibilities. In the Nordic tradition, the rules tend to be light; a minimal amount of rules is preferred in order to create the foundation for a shared experience with a specific topic, theme or situation, with enough of a safety net. Simplicity of rules is regarded as elegant((To avoid the notion that simple rules are superior rules, it is worth pointing out that the lighter the explicit rules, the greater reliance there is on unspoken rules, herd competence, and shared values. Extremely light rules may simply mean that players are only playing with people who are very familiar to them.)).

This is the part of the beauty of games that can be attributed to the designer — or in the case of larps, the larpwrights. They create the rules and the structure of larps. Rules here include the actual dos and don’ts (that usually are inherited from tradition), but more importantly the replacement techniques and metatechniques, as well as the interaction codes that are used in play, and the overall structure of the larp. There are different ways to create the structure, from character and character network design to timed events and thematic acts. The minutiae of the design that larpwrights do is not the focus here; the important thing is that this larp design can be beautiful in and of itself. It is possible to appreciate elegant design when reading the rules, while playing, or when hearing someone talk about a larp. Indeed, a great deal of larp talk revolves around design, and it produces the same kinds of appreciative “oohs” and “aahs” one would expect to hear from rocket scientists working to get a new model off the ground. “Did you hear how they solved the hierarchy issue in the last iteration? It’s genius.”

Of course, since this is an area of design, there are competing design ideals that value things differently. For example, some find high resolution interaction (Nordgren 2008) to be beautiful, enabling nuanced play indecipherable to an observer, while others may favour a 360° illusion and a WYSIWYG aesthetic (Koljonen 2007). Naturally, fashion is also a component here.

The rules must be explicit to the participants. Everyone needs to know them in order to participate in constituting the fictional world into being. (The structure of the larp can also be transparent, although it is more common that it is only revealed to the players as the larp unfolds.) As participants interpret written rules in different ways, it is common to have a shared workshop amongst the participants before the runtime of a larp begins to test out rules and interaction codes. This helps get participants on the same page before play starts, and minimizes play-style conflicts.

Sometimes designers, especially when they are coming from outside larp, want to hide the rules. Artists more accustomed to, say, theatre or film can regard explicit rules as ugly and inelegant, preferring to communicate the rules within the fiction. This is usually a mistake (MacDonald 2019). In comparison to larp, film and theatre have intuitive seamless interfaces. This means that we know how to read them, mostly because we are encultured to understand them. Even experimental pieces tend to contain keys to unlock their meaning. You are supposed to be able to understand a film or a play just by watching it. The director of a film usually does not appear before the screening to explain what a film is about, or how the colour red symbolizes desire in this particular piece. Despite, obviously, a whole paratextual industry of marketing, reviews, and behind-the-scenes featurettes, mainstream films, plays, and books are supposed to stand on their own. In culturally established forms of expression where there is a division between the audience and the work, there is a strong hesitancy to give explicit guidelines or rules.

However, when the work is created through doing things together, the rules of conduct must be haggled out in advance, settling the language of the work. When everyone knows the rules going in, it is possible to engage in subtle play knowing that all participants understand, even if it would be completely incomprehensible for an external audience. This very structure is what separates larp from free play. Anything communicated within the fiction is subject to interpretation. To take an example from another co-created form with rules, if a jazz band is playing Ain’t Misbehavin’ and the tenor sax solo starts to riff on Mary Had a Little Lamb, the band interprets the nursery rhyme within the musical frame of Ain’t Misbehavin’. Nobody in the band thinks that everyone is supposed to switch songs, or even genres.

If we were to approach larp as a designed object or a procedural artefact, we could conclude our analysis here. However, as we are interested in larp as played, performed, and co-created, we need to go further. Most often, when larpers speak of beautiful larp moments, they are not talking about the design or the setting. Instead, they say that something beautiful happened to them and to their character, or that someone did something beautiful.

Beautiful to Do

There are three different ‘larps’ we can talk about: the larp as designed, the larp as played, and the larp as remembered (Stenros 2013). The first is the larp as created by the designers. This includes the rules, the characters, pre-scripted events, spatial design, sound design, time design, possible metalarp rules, and other such design information. This ‘larp as designed’ can be published as a larp script. Also, if the ‘same’ larp is staged a number of times, this is (more or less) what remains the same. The larp as designed is largely covered in the previous section.

The larp as played is what happened during the runtime of a larp. This is where the players bring the design to life through improvisation guided by the rules and characters. Larp as played is, of course, ephemeral. The moment a larp is complete, it ceases to exist (Koljonen 2008). It cannot be revisited or replayed, and each participant can only ever experience from their own point of view.

The third larp, larp as remembered, emerges after the larp. As participants talk about the larp afterwards, find out about what happened to other participants and hear their interpretations, a reading of the larp starts to emerge. Usually some kind of hegemonic view of the larp emerges, though that can never be too specific. Still, enough people might agree on what the larp “was about”. This larp as remembered is shaped by analysis, documentation, reflection, photographs, and even interpretation by people who did not play the larp. Participants with more social capital may have a stronger influence of how a larp is remembered. Even so, dissenting voices on how a larp is remembered are common, and are equally part of the larp as remembered.

Considering larps as beautiful to do, from the point of view of the participants, we concentrate on the larp as played. The rules, the designed structure, and the material reality provide a shared ground for the participants stepping into the fiction of the larp. However, it is the emergent play of the participants (including the larp organizers) that constitute the larp as played.

But what does that mean in practice? Players talk about being part of the fictional world, about immersing into the world, the character, and the situation; of creating a satisfactory story, and of sublime moments of bliss. These memorable moments rise out of the design of the larpwrights, but also from other players, the environment, or even the weather; and might exist in juxtaposition to whatever else is going on in their lives outside the larp. These are moments of synchronicity and perfect happenstance. We might try to label these moments apophenia (Dansey 2008) or pronoia (McGonigal 2006), but players often talk about “larp magic”. Let us try to pick apart a little bit more what emergent co-creation includes and how it can lead to larp magic.

Consider an example of two characters in a multiple-day larp, who do not have any pre-written relationships or interests. The players never speak to each other in the workshops. On the first day of the larp, their characters happen to both be queueing at the bar; one tells a joke and the other laughs. They introduce themselves to each other and think nothing more of it. On the second day, they find each other at the bar again, and this time end up having an unexpectedly candid conversation. On the third day, they react to a crisis together, side-by-side, and realise that they were always meant to be friends and allies. The offhand joke told on the first day becomes one of the most meaningful moments for them both. Their stories are now inseparable.

Larp is socio-dramatic play (see Burghardt 2005), in which everyone pretends to be their character. Sometimes people attempt to not only act and look like their character, but to actually think and feel as the character. This ideal we call immersion, immersing into a character. Other players have a more instrumental attitude towards their character — even if the character is, basically, their body. However, it is not enough to pretend that you are your character. You need to pretend that everyone else is their character as well. This gives rise to inter-immersion (Pohjola 2004), the collective experience that ideally arises from pretending together. You do not play just your characters, but everyone’s. We cannot have prisoners without jailors; no kings without subjects.

Larping is fundamentally a social endeavour, done together with others. Doing things together is hardwired in humans. It is fundamentally different to do things together than to do things side-by-side. Social play is different from parallel play (there are a lot of terms for this in game studies, see Stenros 2015 for a discussion). Furthermore, liveness is an important part of doing things together. In this kind of mutual creation, each participant has agency. An ensemble is revelling in togetherness. Participants see each other and are seen by others. The validation of one’s performance, identity, and actions is important.

If we take the example of the allies who met at the bar, we can tease out an important point: both players are open to larp magic, and the experience deepens when both players know the experience was magical for the other((We call this the friendship is magic principle. This is when the to and fro of inter-immersion leads to beauty, where one knows that the other is also experiencing the magical moment in a way that feels like synchronicity and telepathy.)). There is a template for high-pitched, breathless postlarp conversations recounting these moments that goes roughly: “And then your character did this… and my character had no idea, but then I did this… and then you did that… and then we both did this…”, etc. It’s interesting that we capture, confirm, and re-live the moments that were important to us with the people who were also there.

The creation of an aesthetic object out of the act of doing things together is not just from game studies; it’s also performance art. Those unfamiliar with performance art (now sometimes called Live Art) often find it confusing that “anything can be performance art” and that it often does not look good, like art traditionally is expected to. But performance art very frequently uses the same elements for its canvas that larp does: behaviours, bodies, rituals, social norms, interactions, or time-based processes. It sometimes creates a trace or residue, but this is distinct from the ephemeral performance itself. It is making art out of what we do as humans; when we encounter it, we reflect on how things are done, by whom, and why. Performance art shares with larp an inseparable connection to the social world, but also to the process of reflecting on how we create this world socially((See Nicolas Bourriaud’s (1998) Relational Aesthetics as a basis for situating art in relationships rather than in artistic objects.)).

Inter-immersion is what transports us to the fictional world. It is not just that one steps into a carefully constructed fantastic setting, but that one is seen as part of it and recognized as having agency. This is how a new social reality is created. It does not matter if a larp is full-on escapist fantasy or a critical exploration of sociological alternatives, the alternate reality is still constructed in the same way. Of course, this inter-immersion and new social reality is also supported by the physical location, props, and scenography, but mostly it is about the new world being played into being.

This is why larp is so often about community. As a form, larp lends itself particularly well to the study of networked interpersonal relationships. While larp is pretence, the relationships and interactions feel real, for they are real — even if they are fictional.

Consider an example of a character who undergoes a coming-of-age ceremony within a larp. The ceremony contains ritualistic elements that are made up for the larp, and the whole concept of becoming an adult is different in this society. One comes of age, say, at 50. The player has only been in this “society” for 30 hours, but when the ritual comes, it is devastatingly emotional for both character and player. He is touched by the care his society takes in him, feels apprehension at his new social role, and feels personal ownership of the ritual objects and texts. He reflects on these social processes in his real life and what they have meant to him.

In larp we are transported to another meaning, but we are there in our bodies. Larp is embodied. The play is in the body, and the body is, fully, in play. This is not just a linguistic point, but a concrete and physical thing. Larp design consciously addresses the body: sleep deprivation, discomfort or luxury, dance as communication, sensual and sexual play. Often, this means using sensations, exertion, or discomforts that cannot be ignored: the body is in the foreground when players need to march 25 kilometers in the wintry countryside as soldiers. But even a larp with players seated around a dinner table is equally embodied.

Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) describes the body as “our general medium for having a world.” His writings in phenomenology (the field of philosophy investigating things as we experience them) have been invaluable to analysis of contemporary dance, particularly as dance spilled over from conventional stages and created choreography from natural movement of human crowds, everyday movements, and social interactions. He describes the social world as not an object or sum of objects, but “as a permanent field or dimension of existence.” In larp we create experiences that are emergent, inter-immersive, and embodied; it would be remiss to leave phenomenology out of an aesthetics of larp when we essentially use “being-in-the-world” as a designable surface.

The things that happen to our characters also happen to us. Yes, simulation does take place, but our bodies are moving and being moved, touching and being touched. This is, of course, also connected to the liveness. The experience is immediate. Even if larp is heightened and artificial, our bodies often do not distinguish between the artificially-induced and ‘the real’ — it’s all real. Larp pushes our buttons with bodily experiences: surprise, arousal, freshness, exploration, and neophilia. There is also the physical exhaustion of repetition, and embodied learning. Doing things for real, even when ‘the real’ is fictional, is a powerful aesthetic. When larpers speak of having had a beautiful larp, often they are talking about having had a meaningful sense of physical and mental engagement, presence, and authenticity.

Furthermore, larp is most beautiful when we are present not just in body, but in mind. Larpers talk about authenticity, generosity, and being present in the moment as being beautiful. These are all affirmations of existence — they say “I am here right now.” We can call that presence((Theatre director Herbert Blau (1982) has written eloquently about presence. His words resonate with the larp experience: “With mortality as a base, Presence is fragile, subject to change (and chance), yet persisting through that. Breath blood nerves brains, the metabolism of perception.”)). Being sensitive to the emotions around you, understanding the exact situation, creating the right character response, feeling the emotion.

Sometimes we see this as overcoming personal boundaries, being able to do something in larp one would not do outside it. Being vulnerable and open reduces the distance between the participant and the character they embody.

The idea of fully being in the present with all sense modalities is certainly part of doing something beautiful. However, even the term ‘beautiful to do’ is not without its problems — it is not necessary to do anything. Larpers talk about beautiful boredom. Those are moments when one is just chilling in the fictional world; present, and in character, but not doing anything. One is simply present and content, hanging out in the moment. Here it is important to note that beautiful boredom requires agency. If there is nothing to do, or if the agency of a participant is strictly limited, then the boredom is not pleasurable, meaningful, or beautiful.

However, being present in the moment is a bit more complicated than first might look, since the participant is present both as a player and a character. Everything is simultaneously real and not real, fictional and not fictional, authentic and representational. Playing larp is always reflexive, building on dual consciousness and bisociation. This is what enables larp to move beyond game-like goals such as winning, and significantly opens up the design space and aesthetic realm available for exploration. The player can win even if the character loses. This is not failure, but tragedy. This is a key difference between traditional games and role-playing games. Larpers call this friction between the character failing while the player has a meaningful experience positive negative experience (Hopeametsä 2008). Sometimes this is also called, tongue in cheek, Type 2 Fun. When players use terms like Type 2 Fun, it usually signifies that something has not been pleasurable, but it has been beautiful.

However, reflexivity also means that while the participant chooses to treat the fiction as real, they are also alienated from it, since they know that it is not real. Back in the mid-1990s, the ideal was to stay fully within the fiction from start to finish. While this kind of continuous illusion is still important, over the years the Nordic design ideals have drifted and now bisociation is recognized as an important part of the larp form as something to be played with (e.g. Pettersson 2006; Westerling & Hultman 2019)((Today, there is a valorization of the continuity of the experience, even if the in character continuity is disrupted.)). Nordic larp is Brechtian in the sense that the estrangement effect is built in due to this space for reflection between fiction and non-fiction (see also Levin 2020). This has created the space for metatechniques to design in the space between the player and the character. We also talk about playing close to home: creating a character that is very similar to the player to make the events in the larp feel more immediate. The term bleed is used to discuss how the emotions of the character travel (or bleed) into the player, or vice versa. Notice that bleed is not necessarily a negative experience, but something participants crave. They play in order to feel something (and then to reflect on those feelings, once they have some distance). It is also possible to consciously use larps as reflective tools, and play towards emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2020).

There is one further duality in larp: the participant is both the performer, and the director/ writer. The participant is living in the moment, being and performing, but also able to plan and steer playing in a way that makes sense in a larger context. This is another source of beauty in larp: narrative or structural excellence produced by meta-awareness. This means that the playing creates a satisfactory story (the term ‘story’ is used loosely here). We might see narrative forms like seeding and call back, closure, and fugue structure. This requires being in and out of the larp at the same time, experiencing it first hand, but also looking at it from a distance as a thing that will be a whole.

We can appreciate and get pleasure from moments of larp magic, from playing a world into being together, playing out interesting social dynamics, from physical pleasure of embodied play, from a sense of being present, generous towards, and vulnerable with others, and from the meta-awareness that we are creating something satisfying, either for our character’s arc, or the fictional world as a whole. We can also find pleasure in our ability to steer in a larp by acknowledging our dual consciousness and playing with it. Of course, the question we have not answered is why we find these things beautiful. Those answers may take us deep into psychology, physiology, and anthropology, and they are likely to remain as slippery as similar enquiries about dancing and architecture. But to develop an aesthetic theory of larp, we must first be descriptive, not causal. We can say ”larpers say they find this beautiful” without knowing why.

On Dualism and Failure

In this article, we have divided the beauty in larp into the seeing and doing. This division is practical when we consider whether “this is beautiful” or “that is beautiful”. Are we looking for beauty that exists without our participation beyond witnessing it, or beauty that exists only when we are integrated into it?

If we take the binary to its extremes, we can still find beauty. For example, when considering performative excellence, we see sometimes the appreciation of a performance or other pre-created piece takes us out of the work. If a participant is performing their character perfectly, but it feels like acting and not larping, it puts us in a different position. It moves us from co-creator to viewer. The player-participants, at least temporarily, are not part of the thing they are appreciating. This is just beautiful to see, this is ‘that’.

On the other hand, when we are very deeply engrossed in the larp, we may find ourselves in a state where we are only lightly conscious of the fact that this activity is framed as fictional; our emotions and thoughts feel like there is no distinction between the self and character. In such moments, we do not reflect and have no meta-awareness of other players’ experiences. This, and it is ‘this’, is just beautiful to do.

However, this dualism is purely an analytical distinction. It is a model we have constructed to understand larp; it is not the reality of larping. None of the analytical dichotomies we have used are ‘real’, but attempts at mapping the terrain of actual larp experience. A speech by a queen in a larp might be performed beautifully, but is also touching, meaningful, and so rooted in the social moment, that it is beautiful as something we are doing together. After all, the queen is a queen, because we are playing that she is — we are playing a world into being. And we are aware, in the moment, that there is a beauty to playing this world into being together with others, right now. This comes close to what Levin (2020) discussed as metareflection, and it is the space where most beauty occurs in larp.

Finally, one way to look for beauty is to consider its opposite. When is there an absence of beauty? When are larps ugly? It is not beautiful when we are aware that we have no agency. It is not beautiful when we do not connect with our co-players. It is not beautiful when the physical setting does not support play. It is awful to be cold and hungry unless we are meant to be cold and hungry. It is not beautiful when we are lonely in a larp. It is ugly when we feel disconnected from our own character, and that speaking and acting is “work” all the time. It is not beautiful when we are emotionally disengaged. There is no beauty when we physically cannot take part. It is not beautiful when the world played into being is disjointed, disappointing, or never shows up at all. It is not beautiful if we have a good time but our co-players do not.

These are our failure modes, our ugly spots. But they are also sites to invite beauty to appear. Risk is important as it implies commitment; vulnerability is beautiful because it contains the possibility of rejection; presence is beautiful because it defies absence, refusal, and death.

Coda

Larp is both beautiful to see and beautiful to do. Participants can appreciate the performative excellence of individual performances and other skilful exhibitions, there is a visual surface that can be enthralling regardless of the context, and certainly there is the intricate work in crafting the rule-bound bespoke design. These elements we can appreciate from afar, as an audience, whether we are also participants, or even just someone going through larp documentation, be it design documents (larp-as-designed), photographs, video, written reflections, or costumes (larp-as-remembered).

The larp as played, for the participants, has three additional ways to encounter beauty. In larp, the participants mutually play a world into being by improvising within the rules and structures given by the design, partaking in emergent co-creation through play and inter-immersion. Furthermore, participants engage in vulnerable and generous play while being mindful, embodied, and present. Yet they also remain reflexive about the conceit of larp and strive for structural and narrative excellence.

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Have you gone to a larp that somehow required more work than your day job? Have you done work in a larp and been compensated with fictional resources in the larp rather than money or in-kind, real resources such as shelter and food? Have you had video of your larp experience used in a commercial setting outside of the play context? While larp is in no need of a Marxian revolution, the community is in need of a reckoning with regards to players’ play being also valuable as labor.

Let me explain.

Modern societies operate based on a division between human activity considered “productive” — i.e., that delivers value to someone — and “non-productive,” that seems to deliver value to no one. Value is a central part of labor, and also part of play. Despite recent public discourse on the topic (Bogost 2019), few players care about the distinction between play and labor. We all understand that the line between work and play is murky in late capitalism, as evidenced by so-called “modding” culture, streaming, eSports and other “playbour” movements (Kücklich 2005). But, as Aleena Chia (2019) asserts, players do care about who is gaining what benefit at the expense of others, and whether or not they are burning themselves out in the process:

Vocational passion energizes social, cultural, and organizational practices that create economic value for companies, yet drains workers and aspirants through class-based expectations to compromise employment security in ‘doing what you love.’

Few play more intensely and passionately than larpers.

This chapter continues research begun four years ago with our piece Playing At Work: Labor, Identity and Emotion in Larp (Jones, Koulu, Torner 2016), where we asserted that core larp activities — playing roles as supporting characters, pretending to dig ditches, putting up with off-putting players — involve labor during the game’s runtime. Larpers’ passion for play means a lot of work before, during, and after the game. We also introduced a three-fold taxonomy of labor during a larp: first-order labor (that which keeps players alive, beyond any system of value), second-order labor (non-survival-critical work that would otherwise be financially compensated in other contexts), and third-order labor (entirely fictional work performed with entirely fictional rewards.)

Such research continues to accompany discussions as they evolve around a wide range of labor-related topics: the art of larp volunteering (Mutsaers 2018), in-game larp counseling and post-game debrief (Atwater 2016) as well as the range of skills that larp requires as an assemblage of practices (Kamm 2019). Our work focused on in-game labor, as pre-game and post-game labor has a different set of issues associated with them.

It appears that structured live-action role-play with preparation, rules, and unspoken play cultures is indistinguishable from labor. When players enter the “magic circle” of play, supposedly they have entered a space in which different rules apply from social reality. Yet from the start of the game, players perform intensive work to keep the game itself afloat as well as support their own play experience. Moreover, such “playbour” may create surplus value for the players themselves or, more frequently, others. This work is inseparable from the bodies and emotions of the participants, just as play is (Keogh 2018). Using the conceptual framework of the human body, a model used in a notable film theory textbook (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010), I discuss below the varied ways in which play and work intermingle, and how players actively evolve skills not only to do this labor well, but also to effortlessly elide it from their consciousness as “play.” Relying on several examples from Nordic larp and freeform, I explore the complex relationship between play, work, the body, mind and, above all, capital.

Hands and Feet

Let’s begin with the hands and feet as metaphors for physical labor play, the most obvious form of playbour. Building, crafting, cleaning, cooking — there is so much to be done in a larp, and much of it can be done in-character. Olle Nyman’s post-apocalyptic larp Skymningsland (Dusk Land 2010), for example, incorporated chopping wood, making coal, pumping water and other labor-intensive jobs into the design, so as to let the refugee and marginalised characters in the game feel their lower stations in life in their very bodies. Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo’s five-day larp experience Just a Little Lovin’ (2011-) has a whole kitchen staff, the cooks of Pepper’s Diner, that is also in-character; they spend most of the game preparing food for the other characters, but are also able to get involved with fictional plotlines and take part in the party. The Czech game Legion: Siberian Story (2016) involves long, physical treks on foot through January snow in order to move from one location to another.

This form of in-game, physical labor has wildly variable value, since its value as play may not be as high as its first-order contribution to the basic survival of the larpers (i.e., food preparation, custodial work, transport), but such physical activity can certainly contribute to the deepening of one’s investment into one’s character and the core themes of the larp itself (i.e., survival, hardship, labor inequality, etc.)

It is interesting to note that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed his concept of flow (1975), or the pleasurable mental states produced by a steady, voluntarily chosen set of achievable tasks and competence at those tasks, against the backdrop of Italian fascism. His family was in Italy during the chaos of war, and he was able to nevertheless maintain a stable mental state by playing chess. How do certain physical and mental activities secure our minds against fear and despair? How could both play and work be actually two sides of the same coin? Csikszentmihalyi’s schema Flow is created through concentration and effort, a revolving state of being mildly challenged and rising to meet the challenge.

Losing track of time in the “playbour” state of larp can be a positive thing: it means the player is thoroughly engaged in activity, whatever it may be. In the larp context, Sarah Lynne Bowman (2018) calls this “immersion into activity,” or when the physical and cognitive tasks of a game become rewarding in themselves and, in turn, a player’s activity as a character becomes spatial-motor and tactile. Neither play nor labor induces flow by necessity, however. There can be play that is not remotely fun (Stenros 2015, Sharp and Thomas 2019), and there is plenty of work that serves no purpose in society other than to subjugate us with mind-numbing tedium (Graeber 2018). Players must voluntarily enter into the activities of a larp, but they’re better when conscientiously designed and implemented.

Larp as a medium often exhibits its best side when these structured physical tasks are introduced by way of conscious design. Rather than simply standing around as if at an awkward party, players have something concrete to do that may require additional in-character problem-solving, player physical effort, and time. Larp designs that revolve around professionals performing small talk while taking care of volumes of tasks, either fictional or not, preoccupy the players with various stakes in their characters’ stories as well as brute reality. If dinner at the historical larp Fairweather Manor (2015- 2018) isn’t served by in-character servants, for example, then players do not get to eat.

As we have argued earlier (Jones, Koulu, Torner 2016), first-order and second-order labor in larp can also cause jarring context collapse: the vital tasks that would ordinarily be compensated with money are both (A) variably or not remunerated outside the larp and (B) now mixed in with ingame drama that may interfere with the tasks themselves, forcing players to make a choice between dropping character and doing the task well or doing the task poorly (or not at all) and risking both ingame and out-of-game consequences.

Larp play can itself produce objects of value and transaction in the open market. For example, Martin Tegelj’s game Polka Pillow Production (2018) simulates a Slovenian workers’ co-op that stuffs pillows, all while interrupting work on occasion for music and dance. The four stages of production — spinning yarn, looming the cloth, embroidering the cloth, and constructing and stuffing pillows — can be play-acted, but there is at least one group who has played the game and constructed actual pillows. Who owns these pillows? These are clearly artifacts of play, having emerged from a fictional context, and one with starkly different regimes of value (i.e., Slovenia under communist rule) at that.

Larps that produce actual goods, even those just meant as keepsakes for their participants, have added “commodity creation” as one of the design outcomes, meaning that the play that produced them now has monetary value, scant as it may be.

Obvious physical labor in larp thus straddles a wide range of value to the players and organizers. Ingame cooking, cleaning, and security may be vital to the larp, or entirely marginal. Tasks that players must perform in-character may create flow states, allowing the player to lose themselves and induce a positive mental state in the player or they may be distractions and liabilities that sideline play away from the larp’s core focus.

In turn, larps may create objects with exchange value or services with use value, in which case an organizer team has an ethical obligation to their players in being transparent about who profits from those goods or services. Larps have the power to engage their participants in vigorous, meaningful physical activity, but design and play must mediate against distraction, drudgery, and economic exploitation.

Eyes, Mouth, Ears, and Brain

Turning next to the eyes, mouth, ears, and brain in our metaphor, we conceive of our ideal larper as someone actively investing their cognitive energy and sensory capacities in making the larp work: they are noticing details, making sense of them, and communicating about them in a certain way. Players work and create value in the larp as a whole when they pay attention to others, in particular to in-play cues. They then perform additional labor by sorting the cues and acting upon them with their full cognitive and emotional capacities.

Almost any play advice worth mentioning will encourage players to, at bare minimum, listen to each other. Players in larps are typically not “lost” in character, but rather are constantly shifting their attention between various in-character goals, extant player needs, and just “being” in the game. This requires active awareness, or the devotion of one’s full attention to the comprehension of one’s environment and fellow players. For example, in blockbuster games such as the magic school larp College of Wizardry (2014-), whether or not someone is aware of a group of students headed off to follow a serpent spirit or is in an area cordoned off for an impromptu magic ritual can make or break multiple players’ larp experiences.

The core skill being exercised in many games is reflective listening, or the basic repetition of material one has perceived to ensure one understands. Players do this every time they noticeably state a fellow player’s character name aloud instead of their real name: “Hi Miguel!” They are confirming “I understand you are playing a fictional entity by the name of Miguel and acknowledge you as this entity.” Reflective listening in larps also manifests with respect to all the meme-like nuggets of plot information normally circulated: “The king has a traitor in his court!” “Susanne has an illegitimate child.” “I am not actually a horse.” Larps are usually robust enough to deal with the social realities of tacit misinformation — think of how a message transforms over time during a child’s game of “telephone” — but accurately passing on the message “Stefan is not actually a horse” can have profound effects on subsequent play, due to the host of fictional triggers and social opportunities at hand in a larp.

It turns out that paying attention and good communication are some of the most basic and valuable work skills there are. German rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff already outlined in Psychologia empirica (1732) and Psychologia rationalis (1734) the formal bases of our perception, apperception, and attention, with the goal of controlling one’s own conscious thought for as long as possible. Centuries of inquiry have been devoted to how to increase one’s self-control over one’s attention, and it is an overt commodity in the digital age (Dean 2012). 21st Century capitalist societies both require extensive intellectual work in programming, engineering, teaching, and management to survive, and also relentlessly exhaust those capacities through advertising, email, and the daily distractions of digital life. John Tierney (2001) argues that this relentless struggle over our attentive decision-making capacities is more taxing than one would think:

When we larp well, we are not just good players. We are also good co-workers and employees of the larp (Saitta 2012) — we not only submit to its rules system and genre expectations, but we also watch out for fellow players and listen to the various subtleties in their expression and demeanor. Taking it all in and making in-character decisions is both the object of most games and also, as described above, substantively exhausting.

Listening empathically to both player and character, performing emotional labor where needed (see Koulu 2020, also in this volume) — a responsibility that often falls to the already marginalized — can be part of play for certain, but also constitutes labor in the informal sense. Participatory art is thorny in this way. Cognitive and emotional load take center stage in larp design (Li and Morningstar 2016), and players self-manage their labor on this front, regardless of whether organizers do.

One scenario I have witnessed on occasion is the labor performed by close social acquaintances of high-maintenance players. If said player regularly does not have a good time at games without playing with their acquaintances, they will likely steer their play toward these acquaintances, who suddenly have the labor of providing a decent larp experience for this player. I mention this after encountering multiple players weighing their in-game emotional labor before a large event: “If Janaki is in the larp, then that will mean they will eventually wind up playing with me, and I do not know if I can handle it this time when they suffer their typical emotional breakdown after Act II.”

Another scenario includes players actively steering away from portions of the larp that make them uncomfortable, especially when they know someone in power might nevertheless choose not to keep them safe (Algayres 2019). Much of this labor goes unseen, but is absolutely vital for maintaining seemingly “effortless” play.

Skin

We turn to the metaphor of skin specifically to validate costume and beauty work as an immense portion of both pre-game and in-game player efforts, as well as the physical preparations to embody a character. Such efforts are often feminized and de-valued, something I consider every time I watch a woman apply make-up on a man’s face when he exhibits no capacity to put it on himself.

For events that last hours, one wants a topnotch look that acceptably portrays one’s character for the evening. For events that last days, one wants a durable set of costumes that can be easily donned or taken off at the end of a larp day. And in our current era, we also need to look good for the cameras: larp photographers dart amidst us, taking hundreds of photos for perusal afterward. Sharing good photos shores up self esteem and confers social capital.

Preparing one’s body for the portrayal of a character can prove intensive. Characterization changes one’s posture, voice, facial expressions, hand gestures, and dozens of other details that, often, only the player knows about. Characters that require cultural sensitivity to play also mean that players must balance between their own desires for the character and what is respectful and acceptable in a cosmopolitan, multicultural society; embodying the character without using harmful accents or mocking bodily movements. Costuming and make-up simply add another layer of labor on top of this. Larp costuming and make-up straddle four primary focal areas: character portrayal, comfort, durability, and overall polish, and few of these come without a financial or labor cost.To portray a character, it can take anywhere from 5 minutes to upwards of an hour to get ready for a game prior to a larp’s start time. This is not to mention all of the planning, measuring, shopping, sewing, experimentation, and touch ups required before one even sets foot on the larp site. Some larps such as the period game De la Bête (2016-) provide costumes themselves in order to achieve desired “looks” for the game; others such as Inside Hamlet (2015-) rely on players to supply their own costumes, but one needs to fit the 1930s style for an “epic party and heartbreaking tragedy.” Players scour online photo boards, consider historical fashion textbooks, and do video make-up tutorials in order to get the proper look.

The comfort of costumes or make-up cannot be underrated as part of a player’s labor. Discomfort impacts all aspects of play, including the sheer amount of energy required to simply “be” that character. One makes oneself comfortable through a variety of means: padding, extra zippers, breathable fabrics, and lightweight materials. A heavy make-up mask that looks stunning for staged larp photos can be substituted for a lighter make-up mask for actual play. Those who have theatrical or dress-up skills that allow for such shortcuts are able to help the players who have chosen onerous costume and make-up arrangements. The same goes for costume and make-up durability: regardless of one’s monetary investment in a particular look, a player must be mindful of wearing out the elements of that look before the end of the larp. That level of care and attention to one’s materials is also labor.

A player with an appearance that nails the character and period, looks sharp for others and the camera, and is easy to take on and take off is what Karl Marx would call “congealed labor,” in which the commodity’s effortless appearance belies how much labor went into its creation, and that it is not correspondingly valued either. And yet we also deny social capital to those nerds who just throw on a cape over street clothes and show up for a larp: they have not shown proper deference to the play of the larp through their labor, and will pay a subsequent social cost. This can vary, from exclusion from recognition in the larp itself — and thus, play — to visual absence in the post-game documentation.

Smartphone

Finally, I have included the smartphone as a body part, as it represents an object that is both an extension of our being and also something fully external to us. Modern smartphones represent outside forces endlessly pushing in on our lives, as well as our externalized memory and communication with the world. In our metaphorical universe of larp labor, the smartphone represents the permeability of the magic circle and the pressures of non-larp forces on our larp play. Larp as a medium demands much of its participants but generates little to no profit, as one can see from the collapse of many for-profit larp companies over the years and the struggle of even Disney’s 2019 Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge immersive entertainment resort. Nevertheless, there are many stakeholders lurking at the edge of our play. Larp-adjacent activities such as military or search & rescue simulations are designed to teach real, testable skills and responses. Political messages can be advocated in a larp (Rantanen 2016), and larps funded through government grants may be obligated to take a particular position on a topic or on the outcome of the larp itself. Larp organizers and players are not necessarily the owners of the overall larp business which pays for the event itself, and thus labor on behalf of for-profit entities.

It is odd to think the actual play of a larp could be financially exploited, but the 21st Century has seen to it that neoliberal financialization will creep into every activity we do. In particular, content creators on social media and video-sharing platforms, many of whom seek clicks and advertisers for revenue, now use larp as a rich trove of imagery and stories with which to provide content for a wider audience.

Gone are the earlier days of stilted larp documentary (Torner 2011), replaced by “influencers” and media professionals making high-quality webisodes for Larp House or The Nerdist. Influencers can increase the Internet attention paid to a particular larp, and there are occasions in which their publicity labor is exchanged for perquisites such as free admission, lodging, and more. Yet the players’ playbour becomes contested terrain once the influencers’ cameras start rolling. Players are suddenly “performing” for an unknown, broadly conceived global Internet audience, and their playbour is likely to go uncompensated, despite the congealed result of their physical, mental, emotional, and cosmetic efforts. Even if organizers clearly state in the photography and video policy that their images will be circulated in such a fashion, the value being derived from the players’ play is highly suspect. Players are in theory exchanging money for not only the larp but also high-quality imagery of them in-costume and in-character, and yet in practice are providing surplus value to be extracted by others in the digital economy.

Organizers must be mindful of the external stakeholders in the images generated by a larp, and streamers must be particularly mindful of the wishes of the players for the circulation of their larp character images online. It is hegemonic to simply ask players to be happy that they are getting high-quality images taken of them. Moreover, the labor of creating quality streaming material means, in practice, that the influencers become a separate larp within the larp with different stakes and stipulations. Players are forced to take on more labor to collaborate with or avoid such entities.

The Whole Body

It is not of much intellectual or social benefit to distinguish between play and work — the modern age has produced a surreal sliding scale of play that also makes its participants millions of dollars and worthless work that serves only to occupy the time of those who do it. It is, however, of great importance to recognize the value of one’s playbour as a player. Physical and/or remuneration-worthy work in a larp can be of great surplus value to the players and organizers, or not. Players who pay active attention to each other, communicate, and respond in consensual, socially acceptable ways are absolutely crucial for most larps, and are thus producing value internal to the whole operation. When we travel long distances or do uncompensated emotional counseling of fellow players, we are putting work into making the play experience better. But when we make ourselves beautiful, presentable for the camera and the outside world — beyond our own gratification and the game itself — the value of our playbour becomes increasingly clear.

When our larp play becomes consumed vicariously — through photos, videos, or a live, ticketpaying audience — then our playbour is producing surplus value for outside stakeholders. When we actively employ it to teach a lesson or transmit a political message for some institution, our playbour now has investors seeking a particular outcome or effect, possibly resulting in the conferral or denial of future resources.

Good play and good make-up/costuming among the players does indeed increase the larp’s value to others. Our communities can be financialized and, in doing so, our playbour alienated. One begins to think of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s long-rolling DAU project: players staying in costume and on a set for 24 hours a day, but still being filmed for some future moving-image project.

Above all, our players should attend to these principles:

Your play is also labor.

Your play has value.

Keep track of what others do with the products and recordings of play.

Do not subjugate yourselves.

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