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.
Introduction
Definitions – what is meant by ‘performance’ and ‘audience’
In larp, though, there is rarely a performer/audience distinction for the duration of the larp: it is thought of as an artform where these terms are not relevant. In this article, however, we will argue that there are times when we might be closer to performing while larping; and times when we might be closer to an audience role.
Many artforms have a distinction between ‘performer(s)’ and ‘audience’. The performer(s) enact the artform, and the audience members witness it as an experience. In arts such as theatre, there is (usually) a formal distinction between those people who are giving the performance, and those people who are being part of the audience. Generally, the audience are passive: art may happen within them, and may be affected by their reaction to the performance, but they are not usually actively contributing to it.
We aren’t suggesting that these are permanent states that participants may be in throughout the larp. It may be something that happens briefly during a short scene: the role of performer or audience may be with a given larper only for a short time, and they may be in both roles at different times during the larp.
What has been said about larp, performance, and audience?
Michael Such (2016) sees theatre as a special case of larp, in which performance and audience are present:
[T]heatre is a larp with a specific set of roles. These are split into those defined as ‘the performers’ and ‘the audience.’ The audience is a role because there are certain things they should not do such as walk on stage or talk. Having an audience role means two big things — that the experience is for the audience and the audience watches the performers.
Such, 2016
Other commentators are more forthright about the absence of these roles in larp:
Live-action role-playing, then, just removes the passive spectator from the equation, so that all participants are performing simultaneously. It is improvisational and not just performed for an audience…
Emma, 2013
In all larps there’s an expectation of a high level of participation and interactivity. Larp ‘customers’ are active players, not audience members.
Stenros and Sturrock, 2024
It seems clear that from the larp side and also from the theatre/performing arts side, people draw this distinction of function: larp does not have performers and audience, and that is what makes it different from the other related arts.
But is that true?
Our argument is that during much larp activity there will be times when one or more participants are ‘performing’, and others may be de facto ‘audience’ to them.
Note that we’re not talking here about when one or more characters are performing to characters who are diegetically their audience – for example, playing music, singing, giving a sermon or a speech, performing an in-game play. That situation may happen to fall under our argument, but we have a different canvas.
Rather, we are considering the broad case when a participant carries out an action in the larp with the consideration that other participants will be witnessing them. This may be conscious steering – “I’m about to do a cool thing, I will do it in a place where there are other people who will be able to see it happen” – or more at a subconscious level – “My character seems to be naturally gravitating towards a bunch of other people before doing the next interesting-to-watch thing on their journey” – but either way, during that action, one person is doing something watchable, and other people are watching.
And perhaps, at a later stage, the roles will be reversed: you are watching someone else’s cool action, as a de facto audience to their de facto performance. At most larps, participants will be moving fluidly into and out of these roles during the natural course of play.
We say that this should be considered as a performance/audience dynamic, even if it’s not the same clear-cut and ongoing separation of roles that are present in theatre.
How performance and audience operate in larp
As noted above, we aren’t in this article discussing diegetic performance during larp; nor are we considering ‘larps with an audience’ which are deliberately designed to have observers. When we talk about performance here, we are considering actions or scenes of the larp that are played for the benefit of being viewed by other participants, for a non-diegetic reason. This may be with the aim of conveying something about the character played, or to introduce a dramatic element into a scene: with a level of intentionality. An example might be an argument between two characters, played out in public so as to convey information about their relationship and about the matter under dispute, and to express drama, to other participants who are present. If it had been played out in private, the argument might have taken quite a different form.
Someone being observed during a larp is not necessarily performing: however, someone acting in a way which encourages others to watch and respond may be considered as performing, even if in practice no-one actually is watching. For example, in many larps a death scene in a public place could be considered a performance, if the setting was chosen to draw attention. A death scene that happens to be played out in a public place because of venue layout, or because of the way that the scene evolved, might not be considered a performance, because the protagonist may have had no such intention: they were constrained to play the scene that way. Therefore, we need to consider that there are different levels of ‘performativity’ possible.
Conversely, participants who are currently observing a particular larper with the intention of watching or possibly reacting, but who aren’t playing an active role in the scene or don’t have particular reason to be involved in it, may be considered as an audience. For example, a number of players might be an audience to the public death scene, passively watching it unfold, even when their characters might not have a reason to be particularly interested. If they are interested in it, they might still be considered as an audience, but they are more likely to want to react in some way. Or, the larp design might mandate participants to witness a particular scene, and might import constraints on what they are allowed to do while watching it. So, we also need to consider that there are a range of different levels of audience passivity.
‘Passivity’, here, can also vary considerably. Two participants might be silently and motionlessly watching the same scene playing out, but one is just casually spectating, while the other is deeply emotionally involved and experiencing intense internal play. So, a low level of passivity for the audience doesn’t mean just the power to disrupt the scene or to impose one’s own direction upon it. It is a broad spectrum of agency which can take many different forms.
The two scales
We suggest two scales which a participant can be considered to be on, in different places throughout the run time of a larp.
The performativity scale is about intention or value in being seen while your character is performing a particular action. For example, if someone is deeply immersed in a character who is sweeping a room as a mundane part of their daily life, and would be acting just the same if they were alone, then they would probably be low on the performativity scale. Someone playing a cult leader about to lead the cult in summoning a demon at the climax of a larp centred around a cult summoning a demon will probably be at the higher end.
The passivity scale considers how much agency the participants witnessing the scene have. If the audience has lots of agency to act and interrupt then they will be quite low on the passivity scale. If they are intended to be passive observers then they will be quite high.
There is not a direct correlation between the two scales – it is not always the case that the more performative the action is, the more passive the audience must be. For example, a character performing a mundane part of their daily life may not in practice be very interruptible (eg. if they are performing an act of religious devotion, if they are performing a task of importance to the community, if they are a very high status character). Equally, there may be many participants who wish to interrupt the demon summoning, maybe because their character wants to summon a different demon, or because they want to be cult leader, or for any other reason: so at least some of the other participants in that scene might be quite low on the passivity scale. Also, the audience may be ‘playing to lift’ the performing larper in a more or less passive way.
Performativity vs passivity, diagram by Laura Wood and Mo Holkar
Examples
Demon summoning – high performativity for the cult leader and anyone else directly involved in the ritual. High passivity for people who are just watching and waiting; lower passivity for people who might be resentfully wishing that they were the cult leader; lowest passivity for people who are going to unexpectedly summon a different demon into the circle.
Sweeping the room as a mundane daily action – low performativity. Probably low passivity for most other people, as they can readily interrupt it. But maybe higher passivity as discussed above.
Public execution – high performativity for the monarch, the executioner, and the victim. High passivity for someone casually spectating; still quite high for someone who is seeing it as a demonstration of the power of the king, but doesn’t feel particularly moved one way or another. In the middle, the child of the victim, who has internal play around the execution and is probably also playing externally (deliberately not showing emotions, or acting as if they support the monarch, or supporting family, etc. They can’t stop the action or diegetically leave the scene but they can act within it.) Then at the low-passivity end, the rebel faction who are planning to disrupt the execution and overthrow the king.
Public conversation between two characters – low performativity if carried out at normal volume. Most likely high passivity, because by default others are not going to involve themselves in it. But some may want to listen in (less passive); and others may want to intervene, or to break it up (low passivity).
Conclusion
We are rarely entirely immersed all the time: and, while steering, we often think about what it is that we are conveying to co-players. We want to be aware of what we are portraying more widely about our character; we want to find a good time and place to interject something dramatic; or, we want to ensure that we don’t leave co-players at the high end of the passivity scale for longer than is interesting.
When we larp, some of the time we are in a performing role, and some of the time in an audience role. And that is ok! It’s the same in real life, after all. We shouldn’t see this as larp falling short of an aesthetic ideal in which such concepts don’t apply. Larp doesn’t have to be ‘better’ than theatre etc in this way.
Acknowledging that some of the time we are watching others, with a greater or lesser degree of passivity – and some of the time we are putting ourselves on show, with a greater or lesser degree of performativity – doesn’t at all detract from larp’s collaborative characteristics, or from its distinction from other forms. And perhaps retaining an awareness of the role of performance and audience in larp, rather than being in denial of it, will help us to make meaningful choices and so to enjoy larp even more.
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.
We larp because we want intense emotional experiences. We want to shiver with fear, cry over tragedies, give in to the rage, and laugh with joy. Yet such feelings are not sustainable without crashing afterwards. Intense emotions might come in waves, but they leave exhaustion in their wake.
In contrast to those feelings we also need less intense, more subtle feelings. Worry, annoyance, companionship or gentleness for example. Less intense feelings offer just as rich play experiences and are needed to contrast and complement the more intense emotional spectra.
In addition we need emotional downtime, to reflect, recover, and rest – particularly during a longer larp – as larping is emotionally, mentally and sometimes physically demanding. This enables players to have the energy to really engage with the story.
This article is about how you both as a player and organizer can plan and execute your larp for maximal emotional impact as well as emotional sustainability. So how do you do it?
My suggestion is that you draw a squiggly line, but we will get to that later.
How intense do you want the larp?
First, consider how emotionally intense you want the larp. As a designer this is a big choice that will affect all players. Choose baseline intensity to fit the overall design, but be aware that there will be players both above and below whatever baseline you chose. When you make this choice as a player, you make it in relationship to whatever baseline the larp design aims for. Some larps are low-key by nature, and some larps strive for the most intense experience possible. No matter what, I think all larps benefit from some variation in intensity. Even a low-key experience about baking bread needs some variation, even if it is just an acknowledgement that some stages of baking bread are more stressful than others.
It is easy to imagine that “more intense = better”, as if larp was an extreme sport about always climbing the tallest mountain possible. It is not. Sometimes you might want to climb a tall mountain, but sometimes you just want to go on an easy hike and enjoy nature, and sometimes you might want to visit a specific site. Striving for maximal intensity is a valid agenda, but only one among many.
Decide what you want for the larp you are going to, or the larp you are designing. What mix of high and low intensity play do you want? What range of experiences would make you happy? This might be a bit hard to think about, so let me help you.
Four levels of intensity
One way to think about this is dividing the emotional intensity into four rough levels, and that is how I am going to talk about it for the rest of the article. This scale is not absolute but relative to the playstyle at the larp. At a very low-key bread-baking larp “high intensity” might mean harsh words being spoken, while at a super-dramatic save-the-world larp it might mean the possible end of humanity.
High intensity
These are the most intense scenes. If a character is angry they are as angry as they get, if they are sad they are a heartbroken mess, and if they are happy their joy couldn’t be greater. The absolute highs and lows.What this looks like might differ, as we as people express and experience emotions differently. But this might be weeping uncontrollably over your father’s lifeless body, or the primal scream of rage and betrayal, or absolute fucking panicked horror.
Mid intensity
In this one emotions and activity level might be a bit heightened, for example your character might be pissed off, but they are not raging. A character might be curious but not desperate in their search for knowledge, for example. Much of a larp might be happening on this level, because many of us want to spend most of our play at this level.
Low intensity
Here things are even more chill. There will be emotions, but the emotions are not pressing. Here you find characters that are relaxed, or a bit thoughtful, or “meh”, or displeased about something. A lot of meaningful play can be found here in the form of deep and meaningful conversations. They are just not emotionally intense.
Recovery
At this level players are actively resting. Either in character, or out of character. It might mean having a nap, doing some task like chopping firewood or going on a walk to clear their head. Or doing some very low-key relaxing play, for example I had wonderful scenes laying half-dozing in a tent next to my in game companions listening to musicians play. Some players might need to go out of character (at least mentally) to disengage from the feelings of their character to recover, either because they can’t fully relax in character or because what is going on in character is too intense to allow them to relax. As a designer you don’t always plan for this level, because this is something the player must choose to do for it to happen. But you can communicate to players when they have a chance to rest without missing out. It might be something as simple as communicating “after meals there will be a bit of a lull, so if you need to rest or go out of character it is a good time to do so”.
Check out other media
One way to help you with this analysis is to watch a movie, especially a movie with a lot of intense feelings, and try to keep track of the emotional tension in the scenes that play out. You will see that the emotional intensity comes in waves. Even a horror movie that is all about causing intense feelings will have low intensity scenes interlaced with the more tense ones, as contrast and to not exhaust the watcher emotionally and make them disengage. Try to identify where on the scale different scenes fall.
Length of the larp
Secondly, consider the length of the larp. The shorter a larp is, the less of an issue emotional sustainability is. All larps can benefit from giving some thought to emotional pacing, but a short larp faces less risk of exhausting the players. For an 1-2 hour larp many of us can maintain maximum intensity and come out on the other side of it without ever having to pull on the brakes. You probably won’t need to recover emotionally during the larp because the experiences will be over soon and the natural ebb and flow of the game will offer enough micro pauses in itself.
The longer a larp gets, the more you have to think about emotional sustainability. Already at a 3-5 hour larp you probably need some variation in the intensity of play, because very few of us can keep playing the same level of emotional intensity for hours. We want and we need some variation at this point.
Anything longer than that, especially multi-day events, larps need an emotional pacing to create the best possible experience. We will want high intensity, mid intensity and low intensity scenes and some chances to recover to be able to best engage with the story.
Draw a squiggly line
Thirdly, draw a squiggly line. Do it before the larp as a player, or during the design stage as a designer. Divide a paper into two axes. One is time, and one is intensity. On the intensity scale divide it into four zones. High intensity, mid intensity, low intensity and recovery. Then map out the larp roughly.
You are striving for waves of intensity. Ebb and flow. The map should look like a mountain landscape with peaks and valleys, where you switch between the different zones (high, mid, low and recovery) and don’t stay all the time in one zone. Like this for example:
Diagram by Elin Dalstål
As an organizer
Depending on the style of larp it might be possible to make a very detailed outline or a very rough one. For a sandbox larp, where you have a lot of factions acting independently, it can be very hard to guess what and when things are going to happen both as a player and as an organizer. Just make a rough guess based on what you know. It is helpful to plan around meals, as their timing is something you generally know. Often you can make an educated guess at the meal’s intensity as well. (Breakfast is usually a low intensity meal, while a banquet with entertainment might be a high intensity scene.)
On the other end of the spectrum you can, as an organizer, plan the curve almost down to the minute, if you have a lot of planned events and probable outcomes. Here I zoomed in on the Friday in the previous example to show what a very detailed curve might look like, dividing the two big waves into even smaller ones.
If you have a different group of characters at a larp that will have very different larp experience with different timings, draw separate curves for those groups and see how they play out.
Diagram by Elin Dalstål
Of course, whatever line you draw, it won’t work out that way. There will be delays and things happening out of sync. Every individual player will on top of that follow their own dramatic curve due to all the small events and interaction that make up a larp. Also they will find different things emotionally intense. That is natural. Going through the trouble of having drawn this squiggly line will help you troubleshoot your larp design and create at least a rough plan for the pacing.
Try to pace the low intensity scene so that if the players want to withdraw to rest they can do so at those occasions without missing out on much.
As a player
When you are a player, there are usually a lot of unknowns. You might have no idea what the organizers or your co-players are planning. I still think it is best that you draw a squiggly line to make a rough game plan. For example, try to kick off strong on Friday, round off with some calmer play late at night, head to bed, start out strong Saturday morning, try to find some time to rest on Saturday afternoon, go hard again until you head to bed and go for low or mid intensity play on Sunday because you have a long drive home.
That is still a plan that might help you get the best possible experience out of the larp. If you made a plan you can also figure out if there is anything you want to communicate with your coplayers. In this example you might want to tell them that you plan to take it a bit easy on Sunday because you have a long drive home, so the big dramatic confrontation might happen on Saturday evening instead.
Diagram by Elin Dalstål
Go for variety
While we larp it can be tempting to just go for the high drama, the high intensity all the time both as designer and as players.. Chasing the next high until we run off a cliff or into a wall. Unless the larp is very short, don’t do it. Be a boring adult and pace yourself. Remember that less intense play is just as meaningful and rewarding. It is not always the most dramatic scenes that are the best ones. On top of that you need some less intense scenes to give meaning and contrast to the dramatic scenes. Unless you establish your character’s relationship by having scenes where you just hang out and talk about nonsense, your friend’s dramatic death won’t mean as much to you if it happens later. The low-key scenes are instrumental to give the high intensity scenes meaning.
At the same time others have a tendency to hold back. Always staying at low to mid intensity, playing it safe and never getting into the strong feelings also means that they are missing out. Having a squiggly line plan can help some players actually go for more intense play without being afraid of crashing afterwards.
Either way, pace yourself and go for variety in the emotional intensity.
Abandon the squiggly line!
Lastly, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Once play starts, throw your carefully made plan out of the window, or at least revise it. You never know how things are going to play out during a larp.
Revise your plan and create a new squiggly line. As a player, if you had low intensity play, jump at the next chance to up the intensity. If you had very intense play, seek out something more low key or go have some rest. Feel your energy levels and plan ahead.
As an organizer feel out the pacing of the game. If things just unexpectedly exploded, then create space for more low key play. If there has been a long lull, see if you can turn up the heat.
Closing words
Pace yourself and pace your design. Intense emotional experiences become more available to you and more sustainable if you have variety to the intensity of your play, both as a designer and as an individual player. Enjoy the whole intensity range, low intensity scenes can be just as beautiful and captivating as high intensity scenes.
Draw a squiggly line to create a plan for the larp, and abandon your squiggly line when it doesn’t work out but still try to pace your play based on the new circumstances.
I hope this mindset helps. Pace your larps however works for you, because variety in how we design and play larps is just as important as any other type of variety.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
The art-larp paradox refers to the tensions between the development of larp as an artform in its own right and adapting to institutionalised arts spaces, compromising on the essence of what makes it art in the first place. Drawing on my experience of Situationist practices and democratised participation models, I will argue that in adapting larp practices to be suitable for artistic spaces and audiences, embodiment, and player agency is susceptible to compromise – potentially sacrificing the artistic essence of larp itself. In order to be more artistic, larp should be less like art and more like larp.
The term ‘art-larp’ is a bit of a red herring. Generally it refers to larp which experiments with form, has a social relevance, or works interdisciplinarily with other artistic genres. Nordic style larp practice often falls into one of these categories, yet sometimes we are reluctant to acknowledge this. As influence flows between larp practices and artistic practices of audience-based media, larp conforming to artistic spaces is fraught with the danger of compromising key aesthetic values.
Art has a tendency to subsume other practices to be included in its definition. If we think of art as an aesthetic form for its own sake which allows the opportunity to think, feel, and experience something outside of the everyday, then it will be undoubtedly rapacious in its appetite of feeding itself from practices which are close to it, including larp.
Art’s habitude for subsumption does not negatively impact larp. However, in combination with the lack of widespread established institutions to legitimise larp and the prevalence of commodification within late-stage capitalism, larp’s cross-pollination with more established artistic practices has the potential to compromise the artistic essence of larp. The closer larp becomes to neighbouring practices, the more susceptible it becomes to compromising on player agency and the physical embodiment of a first-person audience.
Art-larp has a tendency to be pulled towards presenting to non-playing audiences, as viewers. Whether a live audience of non-players with any degree of interactivity in the case of immersive theatre, or a secondary audience who will engage with photography or video work at a later date, both have a similar effect; by creating a passive distance of spectatorship between artwork and viewer, the simultaneous production and reception of a first-person audience is disrupted.
In the case of larp, artworks which modify the mode of engagement to passive reception through visual images mediate the social interaction of larp. This is present in visual media works which use larp such as video art, film, and theatre, as well as photo documentation of larp. The simultaneous production and reception of larp as media with a first-person audience – a personal embodied experience as part of a collective experience – is in danger of being compromised or sacrificed when we also consider the aesthetic experience of a secondary audience. Visual aesthetics possess an immersive function in larp to help players access the fiction more easily, although in cases where artistic design choices serve a secondary audience first and foremost, it is the primary ‘audience’ experience which is jeopardised; the players of the larp.
In their essay ‘On The Commodification of Larp’ (2019), Usva Seregina mentions the trends within larp to document through photography and film. In doing so, there is a shift in the ephemeral nature of the work which lives through the documentation as ersatz representation, thus beginning ‘to condense and fragment the live performance, freezing it in time to concretize its meaning’. This is not to say it happens more or less with the disputed genre of ‘art-larp’, but visual documentation is a form of social capital which can be encouraged by presenting work in both overlapping contexts as art and as larp.
According to Seregina, this is a more subtle form of commodification, eclipsed by how we engage with larp as consumers more generally. Seregina’s view is that individualising a collective experience becomes synonymous with consumer choice. The processes of individualisation and the mediation of larp through visual representation appear entangled, potentially having a far more detrimental consequence upon the collective social relations of larp.
In thinking critically about in-game social interaction altered through the consideration of aesthetics designed for secondary audiences, there are social effects beyond the magic circle. Larp is a reality when it is played, albeit temporary within the social frame of larp (Järvelä p.23). This is an important framing; how we interact in the reality of larp has sociological implications.
Considering this, larp’s ephemeral state of performance to a first-person audience is altered by aesthetic interactions with the larp which are outside the scope of participating as a player with the fullest agency to affect outcomes. Rescinding agency to visual modes results in a process of alienation: interaction is mediated through the aesthetic, the viewer as a passive consumer is susceptible to being alienated from the real aesthetic of larp – improvised and embodied co-creation. Primarily this affects in-game interaction but in the sense that we are the characters we play, this also has repercussions beyond the magic circle.
A confrontation and resistance to the process of alienation in the field of art is integral to theory and practice of the Situationist International (SI). In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1967) argues that passive spectatorship commodifies social roles and relations, and social interaction becomes mediated through visual images.
The dogmatic approach in the manifesto of the Situationist International (SI) describes the active construction of ‘situations’ as a tool for the liberation of everyday life (Debord, 1957). What the SI aimed for in the transformative process of the ‘situation’ was a reaction against the alienation of life, concerning work, private property, and the reception of cultural media. In the case of the latter, a passive state of engaging with visual media means the viewer is estranged from cultural life; the theory borrows heavily from Marx’s theory of alienation. In contrast, the embodied experience of situations were liberatory – simultaneously a rehearsal in the social frame of aesthetics and an embodied reality. This prefigures progressive ways of organising and relating, in art and life. The parallels of Situationist and larp practice that I wish to draw attention to are: the temporary suspense of social norms, physical embodiment of the practice through empowered social agency, and the rejection of forms of spectatorship.
Claire Bishop espouses a critique of non-hierarchical participatory art in her book Artificial Hells – rather prioritising aesthetics of ambiguity and antagonism. I do not believe that spaces in which art happens are somehow magically exempt from critique of power structures. Paulo Freire’s writings on education in Pedagogy of The Oppressed is useful in considering how agency matters. He writes and practices in opposition to a banking model of education, where students are empty vessels to be filled up, rather than independent agents of their own destiny, as they are in democratic learning models. This should sound familiar to anyone who has participated in larp activity; this is the agency of co-creation and often greater than the sum of its parts. Just like the passivity of the banking model of education, I believe viewership of larp in other forms of artistic media: visual arts/film/theatre denies the key aesthetics of social agency and co-creation and risks commodifying meaningful social relations of larp activity.
For better and for worse, larp doesn’t have the same institutionalised infrastructure as more established artforms. Its position as a subculture also allows artistic freedom which does not have to follow institutionalised taste patterns. Institutionalisation does allocate time and financial resources towards art making, but at a cost. Larp institutionalising itself usually must fit in the existing model of art reception which rewards artworks that can be commodified, distancing itself from the ephemeral nature of larp, and compromise the social agency of players as co-creators of the artwork. Can these practices still claim to have the liveness which larp’s foundations are built upon? Does the ‘live’ of live action role play then become redundant?
The ‘liveness’ of larp is not only about being present. Those present should be trusted and empowered to have a share in the authorship of their own actions. As players embody the work and the emotional closeness of the experience, they simultaneously create and feel it. The aesthetics of larp are inherently social; they are performative ephemeral interactions which exist between players, (inter-)acting within the diegetic frame, referred to as inter-immersion (Pohjola, 2004). When an artist triangulates to another focus point – to a viewing audience – the reception of larp moves from the result of co-created interaction to a passive alienated state.
Here we arrive at the art-larp paradox. In trying to be more like art – by adapting to existing artistic institutions and familiar modes of audience spectatorship – larp loses its aesthetic value of embodied co-creation. The point of creation and reception – the immediacy of social relations as building blocks of the artwork – become diluted. The immediate emotional reception of the work through the first-person audience is compromised at the cost of a passive relationship to the play aesthetic. Rather than larp activity being simultaneously created and received in a constant state of dynamism, the representation of the larp experience creates concretised meaning, a finished product whose meaning can no longer be in dialogue with its audience.
Nordwall and Widing lament the design optimisation of larp practice in their article ‘Against Design’. They view the well-designed experience product as failing to be in dialogue with wider culture (p.16). I understand their concerns of design related thinking dominating the discourse, but I don’t believe one negates the other: larps can be artistically designed, by means of an open-ended dialogue between larp designer and participants, to address contemporary societal questions. One suggestion they encourage is innovation of the form, which should be handled with care so as not to commodify the experience via means of spectatorship. How can artistic form innovate – continuing the development of art-larp and its relevance to society and institutionalised art spaces – but without giving up the intrinsic aesthetics of co-creation and social agency? What are the conditions for broader artistic experiments which have less of a risk of compromising agency?
A participatory artform occupying this space, which I would find intriguing to move towards, is socially engaged art – or what Grant Kester describes as a ‘dialogical aesthetic’. A key element is ‘a redefinition of the aesthetic experience as durational rather than immediate’ (Kester, p.12). This requires rethinking how we engage with character play, both as players and artistic larp designers, with durational relationality to larps as artworks. This might look like a series with themes that respond to societal issues, coupled with practices of integration. More broadly, integration is understood to be the awareness and openness to affecting change in our lives, beyond the larp itself (Bowman and Hugaas, 2019).
Resisting the art-larp paradox might look like a campaign or series with deeper critical reflection or integration built-in to the work. Maiju Tarpila’s ecological larp trilogy, ‘Kaski’, achieves this successfully by using a durational form, co-creating over a 5 year period. The players revisit the same fiction as a means for exploring ecological attitudes and values of the players (Leppä, 2024). In this approach, it centres the players as active citizens beyond the fiction who are enabled to affect change. As a larp practitioner who feels frustration with the limits to critical reflection and integration of ecological themes in blackbox and chamber larp spaces, allowing time for these processes like in Tarpila’s larps is an attractive prospect.
The art-larp paradox has created diversions for larp’s aesthetics when adapting to existing modes of viewership. Through priviness to the effects of commodification when presenting work to secondary audiences, and being aware of consumer behaviours challenging co-creation, we open up possibilities to affect long-term change. By embracing larp as an artform in its own right, staying strong to co-creation aesthetics and advancing the inclusion of integration models – potentially through durational and dialogical methods – there are means for the paradox to be broken.
References
Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
Bowman, Sarah & Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2019. Transformative Role Play: Design, Implementation and Integration
Debord, Guy. 1957. Report on the Construction of Situations
Debord, Guy. 1967. Society of the Spectacle
Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Järvelä, Simo. 2019. ‘How Real Is Larp?’ In Larp Design: Creating Role Play Experiences, edited by Joanna Koljonen, Jaakoo Stenros, Anne Serup Grove
Kester, Grant. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art
Leppä, Elli. 2024 ‘Seeds of Hope: How to Intertwine Larp and Ecological Activism’. In Liminal Encounters in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland. Ropecon ry.
Lukacs, Georg. 1923. History and Class Consciousness
Marx, Karl. 1844. Economic Manuscripts of 1844
Nordwall, Andrea and Widing, Gabriel. 2024. ‘Against Design’. In Liminal Encounters in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland. Ropecon ry.
Pohjola, Mike. ‘Autonomous Identities. Immersion as a Tool for Exploring, Empowering and Emancipating Identities’. In Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. Ropecon.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
In her book of essays Death By Landscape, Elvia Wilk (2022) describes why she decided to adapt the novel she was working on into a larp. She says she was driven by a desire to give the novel a life outside of herself, to “explode” it to see how its characters would change or stay the same (2022, 186), and to see whether there was a happy ending in the story after all, one that she herself had not been able to unravel. I recognize this desire as my own. When I create larps I am often curious to see how players will inhabit the roles that I have scripted, and more specifically, how they pick up or resist the genre conventions many of my larps experiment with. For example, in The Kids Are Not Alright (2023), I was interested to see what would happen when the creepy, horror-movie cliché of the haunted child met the underpaid and overworked social worker who has just stepped out of a Ken Loach film. For the child, monsters are real; for the social worker, evil is systemic. To explore the result of this genre-clash, the game needed to be played.
If larp is a co-creative practice, one that cannot exist without its players, what do we call larps that were never played? And what do we do with them? Can we still give them a life outside of ourselves, and enjoy their unpredictability? As will become apparent, this is a self-serving question that I nevertheless hope will chime with many readers. Who hasn’t had ideas or plans for larps that never came to fruition? Staging a larp is not easy. It requires time, money, access to suitable spaces, as well as a network of players and collaborators. In the Knutepunkt books you can find post-mortems of successful larps as well as practical how-to-guides for budding designers, but there is no discussion of designs that were never realized.
With this article I’d like to start such a discussion, and to do so I turn, again, to Wilk who concludes her essay with another metaphor for the creative process. She argues that rather than explode her novel, what she really did (and continues to do) with the story is compost it, recycling the material and using it “as soil for new seeds” (2022, 192). I like this metaphor. There is value in a good concept; dreaming and ideation are worthwhile. They are like nutrients that need to be kept in circulation, otherwise creative ecosystems get depleted. This is a call to start composting your ideas. I will try to lead by example by composting a solarpunk larp that never got off the ground: ‘The Antarcticans.’ In the block quotes below, you’ll find excerpts from an initial pitch, beyond which the idea was never developed. This is the raw material that I offer back to the soil in the hope that from it new ideas may grow.
Project description The Antarcticans is an imaginative excavation and worldbuilding experience. We will design a larp for 20-40 players to be played this summer, casting players as citizens of a solarpunk society living on a deglaciated West Antarctica. Over the course of play, we will generate customs, rituals, and artifacts, to be embedded in displays for future guests of the museum to find. These will reflect the values, politics, technologies, and lifestyles of the Antarcticans.
I have been walking around for years with the ambition to design a solarpunk larp. In the summer of 2023, I came pretty close when, together with a glaciologist colleague, I applied to an open call put out by an NGO currently overseeing the reopening of the massive, saucer-shaped museum of technology in Eindhoven. They were looking for creators to contribute to the museum’s exhibition. Long story short, we did not secure the funding.
The call to which we replied was named ‘Spaceship Earth,’ after a phrase coined by Buckminster Fuller: a futurist and innovator known for popularizing the geodesic dome and other icons of the techno-hippie counter-culture. Ironically, one of Fuller’s many projects was a kind of larp that was also never fully realized. The World Game provided instructions for a real-life, resource management simulation played on a massive map of Earth (Stott 2021). Players were charged to solve global problems by collaboratively itemizing and allocating resources. The game was supposed to be supported by a high tech knowledge infrastructure composed of screens that would display live data from around the world. Alas, the infrastructure was not developed in time and so the game was never played, though it did spawn several smaller-scale seminars and workshops.
This example shows that games that get stuck in phases of ideation or development can have interesting afterlives. In his book Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and its Legacy, Timothy Stott (2021) traces the transformation of the utopian, technocratic blueprint for the The World Game as it was delivered by Fuller, into the more delimited actualized versions that spun off from it, which, although different in format, were similar in spirit. The Antarcticans too might find its way into different forms and formats. It was conceived believing that if we gathered the right people in the right place, and gave them a context conducive to self-organization, we could engender more intimate and more sustainable ways of relating to energy, to technology, and to the changing environment of Antarctica. This assumption might still be tested using different exercises of the imagination.
Why do you consider this project to be a meaningful project for Spaceship Earth? This project combines science, the arts, and humanities to generate a lived experience of the future, contextualizing new technologies through their social and cultural use. West Antarctica’s extreme environment serves as an analogue for the post-Anthropocene, requiring its society to confront energy scarcity during polar nights, bio-hack their bodies for warmth, and explore new socio-political practices. Thus the project launches a method of participatory futuring, harnessing player creativity.
In scholarly terms, solarpunk is a “sociotechnical imaginary” (Jasanoff 2015, 4); these are science fictions that emerge within institutions or communities, detailing desirable visions of the future. In more familiar language, solarpunk is a kind of online “mood-board” of sustainable futures growing on Tumblr, Reddit, and Instagram (Williams 2019, 7). I come to solarpunk from the study of ‘petrocultures’—a body of work that investigates the way our reliance on fossil fuel impacts society by fostering certain kinds of narratives, aesthetics, politics, infrastructures, and social practices. By extension, ‘solarcultures,’ or societies powered sustainably, might look and operate very differently. Solarpunk fiction runs with this idea and imagines whole cities transformed by a more intimate relationship to energy production and collectively organized according to a postcapitalist ethos that is attentive to more-than-human interests.
Much of solarpunk fiction is unabashedly utopian. It often imagines the problem of energy scarcity solved by the sun’s natural abundance. While I believe literature that fosters hope is important, the more gratifying solarpunk stories for me are those that face issues of energy head-on; The Weight of Light for example illustrates the different social and political implications of urban, rural, big, and small solar architectures (Eschrich and Miller 2019).
In the Antarcticans, I was interested to explore the challenges of a very particular energy culture, one characterized by polar seasonality. Can you do solarpunk without the solar? When six months out of the year are claimed by darkness, what does that do to the utopian imagination? With batteries struggling in subzero temperatures, and maintenance jobs complicated by inclement weather, this vision of a solarpunk community is a far cry from the garden-cities imagined in most popular fiction. To simulate these polar nights I wanted to create spaces of total darkness, and use sunlight therapy lamps in the staging, as they make concrete the difference between light and warmth, and because they put in stark relief the importance of light for psychological wellbeing.
Beyond its reluctance to deal with the nitty gritty of energy infrastructure, there is another concern with solarpunk fiction. As Cindy Kohtala argues, “The emphasis on storytelling and either narrative, literary forms or visual illustration […] lends the impression that ‘solarpunk’ is a genre that is rarely actually practiced or used as a motif in eco-social making and prototyping” (2024, 4), even though the genre often imagines “a ‘maker-hero’ as counterpoint to the hacker-hero of cyberpunk: an archetype who embodies various ingenious maker, fixer and grower skills” (1). I too initially understood solarpunk as something to engage with narratively, but because the call for submissions spurred us to think of objects or experiences that could be installed as part of a wider exhibit, the design of The Antarcticans became much more centered around making things.
My collaborator and I geeked out over independent printing techniques as well as our shared appreciation of the garish color palette of Antarctic clothing and shelter design—chosen because it stands out against the snow. We talked about the need for customizing clothes so that people could be individuated in dark and stormy weather, and even planned for one of the larp workshops to involve (loom) knitting a high-vis beanie with reflectors. In this way, the Antarcticans re-centered for me the place of creative making-practices in larp. Already I can sense that in composting this project, I am nourishing other ideas, my own, as well as, hopefully, yours.
The first aim of this open call is to commission works that demonstrate a clear link to either the geosphere, the biosphere, the technosphere or the mindsphere. How does your proposal meet these requirements? The game and its artifacts will engage all four spheres. We involve the geosphere through artifacts related to geology and soil–fossilized plastics, nuclear legacies, and mineral deposits; the biosphere through animal domestication–records of selective breeding and biohacking; the technosphere through new methods of communication and sensing; and the mindsphere by involving Antarctican politics, kinship relations, and cosmologies, which will have to account for polar days and nights.
I sometimes feel like I read more games than I get the chance to play; I purchase interesting TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games) that I never find the time to run; and because of my reluctance to travel by plane I also don’t get to play as many larps, though I read about them quite a bit. What brings me consolation is that there is experience to be gleaned from merely reading games, and that, in fact, not all games are meant to be played.
Lyric games, or game poems, are typically brief texts formatted like TTRPGs. They generally don’t require you to go through the motions of play, but instead ask you to engage with the game’s instructions hypothetically, as yourself and (often) by yourself. Writing about this nascent genre—big on itch.io—Lin Codega (2021) argues “Lyric games are not for playing but, rather, for recontextualizing common experiences in order to challenge the game-playing process… [they] are experiments in pushing the boundaries of guided, immersive experiences.”
With the power of retrospection, some Fluxus artworks of the sixties and seventies could be identified as lyrical games. Dick Higgins’ Piece For Meredith Monk’s Apartment (1968, see Figure) has struck me, since I first read it, as a lyrical game poem. At first glance it looks like a location-based larp script, of the dancerly, non-verbal kind that you might find programmed at Grenselandet or Blackbox CPH. But the hyper-specificity of the language evokes a context and a history that is not physically replicable. Blurring media borders in this way (between poetry and larp), creates new audiences for both artforms, and makes us appreciate aspects like brevity, and control of language.
Figure: Piece For Meredith Monk’s Apartment, by Dick Higgins
Larp designers have also experimented with extremely short, lyrical formats. Matthijs Holter (2017) calls his 15 minute games “role-playing poems.” I don’t believe they need to be played for them to generate wonderful insights. For example, in The Elf archaeologists are saying hurtful things about your skeleton (2017) you play yourself, dead on the floor, for at least 1000 years while the other players say hurtful things about you based on your remains. To me this is funny. I imagine that there is barely anything you could say about a person’s skeleton that would be seriously offensive. Our skeletons don’t reflect our personalities at all. And why should we mind the opinions of elves anyway?
Since lyric games are not scared to ask for the impossible, featuring instructions that may be vague or impractical, perhaps it’s an appropriate format for an idealistic solarpunk larp. Step 1: gather strangers. Step 2: create a better world. Step 3: keep at it. Or, as this article’s reviewer Markus Montola suggested, larps written specifically for communities out of (our) time, whether in the past or the future. I would welcome such thought-provoking hypothetical larps, or larp poems, in publications like the Knutepunkt books, offering a healthy counterbalance to the discourse’s otherwise pragmatic focus (with its emphasis on tips, toolkits, and nitty-gritty design talk).
The second aim of this open call is to commission unconventional ways, yet tangible experiences that invite the audience to discover, unfold and engage with the next stages of evolution; the project must include an interactive component in which the audience can discover, learn and grow in their own personal ways. How does your proposal meet these requirements? Museum visitors encounter artifacts through printed, audio, and AR prompts designed to feel like a paleo-anthropological study.
I would love to reframe The Antarcticans as a larp to be read, rather than one that needs to be played. I certainly feel that the strict character limit for the submission forced a condensation of the concept so that the result is ambiguous and evocative in the way that lyrical games often are. Unlike the detailed larp scripts I produce, The Antarcticans is mute on things like staging requirements, workshop exercises, rules and mechanics. I hope this muteness invites speculation. How would you simulate a deglaciated, future Antarctica in a museum space in the Netherlands? How would you involve participants in the hands-on processes of making and co-design called for by the larp?
More than a poem, of course, it reads like an academic abstract, which is why, rather than a poem, then, I should frame The Antarcticans as a piece of design fiction. Design ethnographer Mark Blythe (2014) describes design fictions as stories or semi-working prototypes that function a little like conceptual art, or speculative design. He writes, “Conceptual art or installation art is an art of ideas […] It is not of the utmost importance that critical designs actually function, neither, perhaps, is it necessary for them to exist” (2014). Design fictions may be provocative or ironic, or they may help tease out flaws or consequences in the design. For example, Blythe presents a series of imaginary abstracts for design journals that describe prototypes or media installations that were never actually developed. He finds that writing these abstracts “questions and explores a design space without committing too much resource. It allows for a number of possible outcomes to be generated and forces the imagined prototype into a research context” (2014).
Too few people get the chance to design larps. I think we can do more to onboard new designers. The formats that I have mentioned in this chapter: game poems and design fictions, provide templates for larp writing that are efficient and provocative. They also allow us to generate ideas and to share them with others more rapidly. Moreover, being more upfront with our failures (failures to get funding, failures to get games off the ground), and sharing unrealized concepts builds up the soil for other ideas to take root. It means being more transparent about the creative process of larp design, which does not always bear fruit, but which might, in talking about it, might scatter seeds of inspiration anyway.
Acknowledgements
Big thanks to Elizabeth Case with whom I co-wrote the application for The Antarticans. Thanks also to Jana Romanova and Sophie Allerding for co-signing the application. Thanks to the editors, reviewers, and proofreaders.
References
Blythe, Mark. 2014. “Research through Design Fiction: Narrative in Real and Imaginary Abstracts.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 703–12. CHI ’14. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557098.
Joey Eschrich and Clark A. Miller, eds. 2019. The Weight of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination. https://csi.asu.edu/books/weight/.
Jasanoff, Sheila. 2015. “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity.” In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, edited by Sang-Hyun Kim, 1–33. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo20836025.html.
Kohtala, Cindy. 2024. “Solarpunk as a Maker Imaginary.” In Fab 24 “Fabricating Equity.” Puebla, Mexico, 3-9 August 2024: Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.13221345.
Stott, Timothy. 2021. Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and Its Legacy. Routledge.
Wilk, Elvia. 2022. “A Book Explodes.” In Death by Landscape, 180–92. Soft Skull Press.
Williams, Rhys. 2019. “‘This Shining Confluence of Magic and Technology’: Solarpunk, Energy Imaginaries, and the Infrastructures of Solarity.” Open Library of Humanities 5 (1): np.
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.
“Daddy, tell me a story? But not that scary one!”
My father kindly let my brothers and I lie down on his bed in the space between him and my mother. He liked to start by telling a short story about how things were in his and his father’s time, and then continue with the terrifying stories that we supposedly didn’t want to hear. All of them were told as if they were real stories, events that had actually taken place many years ago somewhere in the interior of São Paulo – and they usually involved fantastic creatures that stealthily tried to deceive the living and take their souls to the afterlife.
This was part of my early childhood. It is known that the tradition of oral storytelling is one of the oldest and most powerful forms of cultural transmission, but curiously, until much later in my adult life, I had never realized how much this had manifested itself within my own history, and not only in what we learned in books.
The years passed, and my father became harder and more bitter due to the traumas, fears and frustrations of life, and I followed my own distinct paths in life, trying not just to survive, but to find my place in the world. And these paths led me to a peculiar way of telling and experiencing stories, larp!
“Father, I tell stories!”
I don’t think he ever really understood what I was doing. Nor had I been able to see any kind of connection between my larp-making and listening to these stories when I was little.
I had already spent about fifteen years doing larp. To be more precise, it happened in October 2015, a week before the opening of a larp of the group I am part of, and my father had to be rushed to the hospital. I took turns with my brothers to accompany him during his stay in the hospital.
I remember most of all the day before he was discharged from the hospital. He was excited because he was going home soon, so he had put aside some of the bitterness of life. We talked a lot and I had the opportunity to talk a lot about what I had done in the larps.
And at some point in the night I felt like I could ask again: “Dad, tell me those stories you used to tell when we were little?”
And he told me not only one of the chilling stories, but also a new one, one that I didn’t know – or didn’t remember. And it was the best one of all! I listened intently, not just to each word, but to the way he told it, the dramatic pauses, the intonation of the words, the rhythm of the speech and the plot of the story.
My father recovered and at that time he was able to return home.
As for me, I went to the place where the larp would take place. And now I had a new story in my head, one that carried a lot of meaning. I had reconnected with my father. And on top of that, I had received a very valuable gift, one of those that cannot be bought.
Self-portrait of the author and his father
My father was discharged on Thursday and the larp had its first session on Saturday.
It was a larp about national folklore. The theme spoke directly to the stories my father told. So I suggested to my partners in organizing the larp that I tell the story my father had taught me as part of the game’s immersion. But it ended up being much more than that, for that session and for all the following ones.
The two forms of storytelling connected, perhaps in an encounter like the moment my father and I had. I began to tell the story as a character who, around the campfire, enchanted the participants just as parents enchant their children on unpretentious evenings, awakening their capacity to imagine. By the end of the story, all the characters had already been transported directly into the game setting and were experiencing the larp. Of course, the work on scenography, sound and the larp text itself also supported this immersion.
The various stories of Brazilian folklore have already been portrayed in many books, films and plays, but there are many of them that have no record other than oral transmission that passes from generation to generation.
The larp in question was “A Peleja dos Vivos na Noite dos Mortos” (The Fight of the Living on the Night of the Dead), in which the characters gather, in the 1920s, and camp in search of protection to survive the night of the dead, when the dead and other entities from beyond are said to walk among the living.
And the stories my father told me had this same aspect, of fantastic beings walking among the living, testing them.
“Guys, I’m going to tell you a chilling story.”
By immersing the players and telling the newly learned story, I was able to express the oral tradition in the larp and enrich the experience, not only calibrating the game’s expectations, but also adding drama and resources for the characters’ interactions.
Photo by Thomaz Barbeiro, from larp A Peleja dos Vivos, na Noite dos Mortos, by larp group Confraria das Ideias (Sesc Bauru, 2018)
After that moment, my father lived for another eight years, but his stories will live forever as long as someone tells them, whether around a campfire or during a larp.
Oh, and what story did my father tell me? It’s a scary story with lots of twists and turns, but if you want to hear it, you will need to be lucky enough to find a storyteller who knows it in the interior of the State of São Paulo, or go and play this larp with the Confraria das Ideias, at some time and some place, because that is the tradition!
Cover image: photo by Thomaz Barbeiro, from larp A Peleja dos Vivos, na Noite dos Mortos, by larp group Confraria das Ideias (Sesc Bauru, 2018).
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.
At the recent re-run of the larp Snapphaneland, I slipped into a very deep, immersive and solitary play on religion. As a fan of historical larps, I have of course played a Christian before, but never before have I had religious play as deeply immersive and moving. It made me get a glimpse of the importance that the Christian worldview had in history, and it made me want to explore and discuss these experiences. My focus in this text is describing my own experiences, and what contributed to finding that religious immersion. To do this, however, I first need to explain both the larp and the historical context, for those unfamiliar with it.
The larp Snapphaneland
Snapphaneland is a larp set during the Scanian War in the 17th century. Specifically, it focuses on the rebellion and guerilla war waged by Scanian resistance fighters (snapphanar) against the Swedish authority, the measures taken by the Swedish government and army to suppress the rebels, and how Scanian civilians were oppressed and punished, regardless if they aided the snapphane rebels or not. The larp is set in a Scanian village, and the characters in play are villagers, snapphane rebels and Swedish soldiers.
A life of toil
At the larp, I was a kitchen helper with a written character. This meant that I worked long, busy days, but could go out and play scenes now and then, and play while working in the kitchen. The kitchen was a mostly in-game area, and although it had some modern-ish equipment, many of the tasks were quite appropriate for the era – fetching water, keeping fires burning, chopping vegetables, and so on. It was also heavy work, with endless lifting, standing and walking. Although this was of course quite tiring, it also meant that the days were filled with manual labour, in a way that is quite realistic for rural life in the 17th century.
Snapphaneland. Photo by Tindra Englund.
The character I played was a farm maid (piga). Since she came from a large family, had no hopes of inheriting and slim chances of being married, this was how she would most likely spend her entire life, working very hard at someone else’s farm for food and board. Her days would be endless toil. Of course, everyone in a rural village worked, to the best of their abilities, but the farmhands (dräng) and farm maids got the heavier, dirtier tasks compared to the farmer’s family.
Most of the players at the larp did not have much work to do. There were some tasks that they could do if they chose – there was wood that could be chopped, sometimes things needed carrying, and they were always welcome to come help in the kitchen. Many of the people playing women brought knitting and similar handicrafts, to keep their hands occupied. But there were very few things that they had to do, and they could spend a lot of time sitting around talking, when not in the middle of Cool Scenes.
All this to say that while being in the kitchen for most of the larp, and not having much free time to pursue play, the benefit of my role was that the work was deeply realistic and immersive. My body ached from hard work. I was exhausted when going to bed in the evening, and then rose in the morning to do it all again. It was easy to lean into the knowledge that for my character, every day would be like this.
The Christian worldview
In Sweden in the 17th century, everyone (except minority groups of other faiths, of course) was a Christian Protestant. Belief in God was universal, it was a natural part of how the world was perceived. Not everyone was a good Christian, of course, and it was not uncommon that people did things that were considered sinful. However, everyone knew that sinning was bad, and had to somehow relate to this. Similarly, belief in an afterlife in heaven or hell was a natural part of life, and a very big part of the Christian worldview. Life on Earth was considered to be largely filled with suffering, toil, and hardship: and only those who lived good, pious lives would be rewarded with eternity in heaven.
This was a deeply important part of my experience. As described above, my character’s life really was full of toil and hardship, with no hope of becoming easier. These hardships were only increased as the oppression escalated, and life seemed almost unbearable. The thought of one day, when her life was over, being able to finally have comfort, rest and happiness in heaven was deeply important. Without it, life would just be a pointless struggle.
Snapphaneland. Photo by Tindra Englund.
Loneliness and love
Love is of course one of the great joys in life for a lot of people, something that makes life beautiful and brings meaning and hope to our lives. In the case of my character, there was not much of that to be had, however. She was the kind of person that no one really fell for, the person in the background who was perfectly nice, but just… not the girl anyone dreamed about. She herself fell in love pretty easily, but had never had her feelings answered. On top of this, she had lived most of her life away from her own village, away from parents and siblings. She was a very lonely person.
For a person like this, the thought of God and Christ was deeply comforting. Through God, there was the feeling of an ever-present love. A parent figure that, though stern and forbidding, was also full of grace and forgiveness, and would reward her if she was good enough. And someone who saw her, all of her, and cared about her deeds.
Suffering – God’s trials
Since the larp took place in a part of the country where the civilian population were tormented by both the Swedish army, and sometimes the rebels, there was a lot of suffering. Some characters (including my own) had in their background the ransacking and sometimes even burning of their homes, and having to look for a new home. There was hunger and poverty, due to soldiers and rebels taking food from civilians. And as the larp progressed and the army cracked down harder to quell the rebellion, there were beatings, rapes, and other kinds of violent cruelty.
Snapphaneland. Photo by Tindra Englund.
This created a vast wealth of internal play, with struggling with the age-old questions around God and evil. If God is good and all-powerful, why does he permit terrible things to happen? In Christianity, however, the reply is usually that God is testing your faith, and that enduring and remaining firm in your belief is how you succeed. This was beautifully illustrated and brought into play by my co-player and kitchen boss Kim Bjurström. My character had just been subjected to rape and abuse at the hands of the soldiers, and was quite broken. Kindly and gently, his character simply said: “God only gives us the struggles he knows we can bear.” It was all that was needed for my character to feel even more strongly connected to her faith, and to see meaning even in the absolutely terrible things she had endured. In a way, this is of course kind of weird and fucked up, as it can easily be construed as saying “You should really be happy that this happened to you, because it means that you are actually a really good Christian!” But, nonetheless, it was a very strong, moving, and immersive experience.
Sin
The concept of sin is great for roleplay, as it creates a strong incentive to not do things that might otherwise be very tempting to do. During the larp, my character often struggled with whether it was alright to lie – if you lied to protect someone, or if you were forced to lie by someone threatening you with violence.
Even more powerful was the thoughts around suicide and abortion. After my character had been raped, she was both traumatised and terrified of a pregnancy. On top of this, she had no future employment, and would soon be without food and housing. It was quite a heavy and hopeless situation, and the thought occurred to her more than once that she would be better off dead. But as suicide was a sin, this was of course out of the question. Similarly, if she did end up pregnant, then aborting the pregnancy would be a sin. This meant that she would simply have to submit to whatever God chose for her, and continue bearing it as well as she could.
Submitting, come what may
And this, I suppose, is the core of it: to submit. To keep faith. To suffer the sins of others, without turning to sin yourself. To bear a life with endless hardships and toil, trusting that after death all that suffering would go away, and you would be rewarded by an eternity in heaven.
Snapphaneland. Photo by Tindra Englund.
I felt this very deeply all through the larp, in a way I never have before. And it was a quite moving experience. It was also exceptionally suited to solo play, even when I was too busy working, or couldn’t find play for other reasons. The immersive relationship to God was ever-present. This is why I claim that Christianity is an excellent immersion closet.
What to take away from this article
In this article, I have focused on Protestant Christianity, since that was the religion at the larp in question. However, I think that the same playstyle can be relevant to explore in relation to other religions as well.
As a larper, I feel that it is very valuable to immerse deeply into experiences different from your own. It gives us a little bit of understanding and empathy for others, and humility before the manifold ways to live and understand life. I feel this to be even truer when it comes to getting a new perspective on religion, which is as important to many people today as it was centuries ago. I encourage other players to explore this, and to do so in an immersive, introspective way. Find your own Christian immersion closet, and/or religion as the lens through which you interpret and understand both everyday and extraordinary events.
As an organiser, I encourage designing for religious play, and not focusing solely on the outward expressions of religion – the rituals, the prayers, and so on. These things are great reminders to have during the larp, but they are not enough. Consider how you can design for religion to be always present in the back of the characters’ minds, to be informing the everyday moral choices and interpretations that they make. In short: design for more people to have religious play as their immersion closet.
Ludography
Snapphaneland (2024): Sweden. Rosalind Göthberg, Mimmi Lundkvist and Alma Elofsson Edgar (Bread and Games). https://snapphaneland.org/
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as: Greip, Julia. 2025. “Christianity is an Immersion Closet.” 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.
Let’s get right into the action! Literally. Because “River Rafting” is a larp design methodology to help catapult larpers into play without a slow start. The purpose of this design model is to help the players experience more moments of emotional impact as well as to increase intensity and meaningful experiences throughout the whole duration of the larp.
I am a strong believer in the idea that when we act, we experience. River Rafting design helps the players to act immediately. This article is a further development of the design concept of frontloading((The idea of frontloading appeared in my realm of design thoughts in 2016 when Alexander Bakkensen and I were designing the Danish larp Victorious which I later made an iteration of to become the international larp Spoils of War. It is a bespoke larp inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, The Tudors and several other similar sources. I have also later tested and developed the concept further, based on the thoughts we had together back then. We talked about it in the 2018 version of the Danish roleplay convention Forum in the talk: “Toolbox of drama designers” which was repeated at Knudepunkt 2019.)) and covers pre-larp design, workshops and the pacing of the larp. It will explore how to do it intentionally and why designing for River Rafting can enhance the larp experience for your players. I will use perspectives from the three larps Spoils of War (Wind, 2018-), Daemon (Wind, 2021-) and Helicon (Pettersson and Wind, 2024-) to provide specific examples.
What are we trying to solve?
I have often noticed that most of the meaningful scenes on an individual level clump together at the end of a larp, but that the emotional impact of these often turns to disillusion when witnessing or participating in a cascade of dramatic scenes/deaths/reveals in the last hours. This phenomenon, Alexander Bakkensen has called “The Twilight Avalanche”. I usually feel too numb to react to yet another person screaming or crying by then.
This experience regularly contrasts with the first few hours of a larp involving mostly polite introductions and surface-level interactions like saying “greetings” and small talk for hours. In some cases, there is not a lot of emotional impact during the middle of the experience either, and often I don’t feel I have the tools to push the experience along as a player.
I think a number of design choices are supporting the slow start and place (too much) emphasis on the end of larps. One of these is if written character drama/conflicts/dilemmas are not very complex or have just one big scene in them. Another issue can be creating a setting that only provides an interesting framework late in the larp, or that builds up to a “Big Plot Ending”. This kind of ending is sometimes introduced late in the runtime, overshadowing previously built up character conflicts and tensions. It could be “end of the world”, “we are suddenly being invaded”, “we all have to die” etc. While such grand conclusions can be effective, they are not always consciously integrated into the rest of the larp’s structure. It can be frustrating as an individual player if such an ending isn’t tied meaningfully into the story of your character. A “big bang” finale can even leave players wondering what could have been if the larp had started with this level of intensity. In fact, the larp might have been a lot more interesting if it started with its ending as its beginning.
Furthermore, many players will, no matter the quality of the written setting and character, instinctively save the most interesting parts of a relation and the character until very late in a larp, playing towards a resolution only at the end unless you provide tools for them to do otherwise. We also miss the opportunity to help the players effectively use these tools to create early impact play this specific larp if workshops are not spent on practicing key mechanics and relationships. Often, on-location workshops will contain long briefings with repetition of the website instead. This approach means that players are not ready to get the full potential for emotional impact out of the written content right from the beginning. How they use the tools is up to the players, but if we don’t coach on how to unlock the usefulness of the mechanics in this specific larp, the players will spend a lot of the in-game time learning how to use the tools, or – worse – never use them at all.
Lastly, many larps have a pacing that structurally supports very few and late points of emotional impact with minimal structure and setup during the early and middle part. A slow start can make it harder to connect with the experience, relations and character early on.
All of these factors (low playability of characters/setting, poor practicing of mechanics and backloaded pacing) encourage players to save secrets or conflicts until the very last hours of the larp. Let us name this common combination of design choices the “Waterfall”((Not to be confused with the waterfall method in project management.)) method since it creates a slow start, a quiet flow of the boat on a broad river and a dramatic finish.
What we want instead of a waterfall is a more turbulent flow of the water within the themes of the larp. This doesn’t mean full intensity all the time. If we want many wavetops (experiences of emotional impact), we also need slower paced periods. But fluctuations are hard to achieve if you are already on a low point of pacing at the beginning of the larp, as this is also the time when you are practicing enacting the character in the setting and using the mechanics. If we don’t make the early rapids coming from pacing powerful enough for the players, there is a tendency that the larp experience itself will be backloaded.
What is River Rafting design?
River Rafting is a design philosophy that supports a turbulent flow of the larp experience with many opportunities of emotional impact from the beginning of the larp and throughout. I chose this term because river rafting starts slowly for a short time (pre-game and workshops) and then you hit a lot of rapids right away as well as during the rest of the trip (beginning of the larp until the end). We want to throw the boat around early and for the whole duration of the larp to offer an alternative to a Waterfall experience. If there are more rapids and more opportunities for movement, it is less important if some of it doesn’t result in a lot of impact.
In this maritime analogy, the larper’s experience of drama and emotional impact is the boat being moved. The characters, setting and mechanics are the paddles, life vests, ropes to other boats and other tools that the larper can use to make their own boat and the boats of others move at different paces down the river, and to create rapids for each other from many different angles at once. The workshops need to focus on teaching players to use these tools.
But since it takes time to learn to use the tools, early rapids must be created by providing a narrow river and intentionally plotted obstacles (frontloaded pacing/structure). Later, the river broadens and we design fewer obstacles to create rapids, but by then the players use the setting, characters and mechanics to make their own and each others’ boats move in a meaningful way.
Fig 1 – Illustration of River Rafting Design. Image by Katrine Wind.
As designers, we have three arenas where we can significantly influence the potential for emotional impact of our provided material: Highly playable characters/setting, mechanics and workshops, and pacing/structure.((I realise a lot of things influence a player’s experience: Co-player chemistry, off-game mood, room design, communication style of organisers and crew, feeling of safety, physical needs being met etc. But the focus of this article is purely on how to provide tools for the players to get the biggest emotional impact out of your writing and structure.))
What you want to achieve by this is to help the players get going right away, keep and vary intensity and take the interplay between the overall arc and the arc of the individual player into account.
So the three key elements of River Rafting design are:
Highly playable characters and setting: Focus on crafting characters and a setting that encourages immediate action. Emphasize extensive and complex character relations and highly playable dynamics. Please notice that I don’t say “long character backgrounds” or “as many pages of lore as possible”. It is about the volume and complexity of highly playable content.
Mechanics and workshops: Provide a few key mechanics for the players to create impact. Workshops should ideally quickly go from instructional briefings to a more tool based and practice heavy approach where players practice core mechanics of the larp, embrace important themes and actively play on character relationships early in the larp. Encourage the players to dive into conflicts and dynamics from the outset – and keep reminding them. Make a safe environment to help players to be brave. Additional workshops in act breaks can support this.
Early impact pacing: Start the larp with compelling events or tense scenarios, supported by a lot of designed structure and tense content in the very early parts of the larp.
Below is an illustration of how I perceive each design approach’s attempt to structurally influence emotional impact throughout the runtime of a larp.
Fig 2 – Emotional Impact Potential from the Design. Image by Katrine Wind.
The wavetops in River Rafting design don’t have to be at exactly these points of the larp. The later spikes symbolise how structured content and potentially mid-game workshops etc. can make extra rapids. However, the expectation is that the potential of provided content and structure to help create meaningful emotional impact is much less later in the larp because the players have practiced the characters, relations and mechanics and create the rapids themselves by then.
Please note that the illustration is not a visualisation of the individual player experience. Many players will experience climaxes at the end of the larp, and that is great. The point is also having a lot of potential emotional impacts earlier – the aim is to increase the volume and frequency, not just to move the curve.
I will go through the three different aspects of River Rafting design in detail and with examples below.
Setting and Characters
If you write a setting and characters for your players, you are already frontloading this part of the design to some degree. Well done! Sending out characters as well as facilitating workshops are the gentle start that can teach the players how to use the paddle and steer with the tools they have been given. This means that when you start the larp, the players are already in the water, can create movement in the boat and feel brave and ready to do so.
But what is necessary for a specifically River Rafting design is for you to provide an engaging setting right at the end of an interesting time which creates a setup and something to talk about. You also need complex, highly playable characters containing dilemmas that will lead to more drama while dealing with them. The intention is to provide all players with a springboard for their personal stories supported by an engaging narrative framework.
Spoils of War opens with this engaging setting; the interesting part to play is happening right now.((The idea for the setting was originally created together with Alexander Bakkensen for the Danish larps Victorious 1 and 2 in 2016 and 2017.)) We are at the very end of a brutal civil war. The characters have already experienced the horrors of it, but the emotional impact hasn’t fully hit them yet. The players know that their characters are either on the losing or the winning side, and that the war will end early in the larp. They don’t spend time playing the lead-up to the war or competing over who will win. Because all the characters will be in a state of turmoil with many options for the aftermath, the setting gives us something recent and impactful to play on right away. Furthermore, the characters contain complex relations with slights, dilemmas, heartbreaks, love, despair and uplifting camaraderie happening right now, combined with shared history from before the war.
Another example which illustrates the design principles regarding characters and setting is Helicon (Maria Pettersson and Katrine Wind, 2024).((Maria Pettersson and I had no conversations about the term River Rafting design in the design process of Helicon, and she cannot be held accountable for any of my theoretical descriptions of the perspective as I hadn’t conceptualised my design preferences in this way at the time. We completely agreed on the need for complex/highly playable characters and setting – and we have an equal part in the design of all aspects of Helicon itself. But the description of what I perceive we did when looking back and any criticism of the conceptualisation thereof is completely on my own account.)) Helicon is a larp about a group of artists, scientists and leaders who have captured the Muses of old to keep all of the inspiration in the world for themselves. The larp is based around dyadic play where the couple has a deep relation with each other. Some of the Muses want to be there or are even emotionally in power, and this setting of ambivalent slavery is relevant to every single player. It is significant and interesting to have Helicon play out at exactly this point of time in the setting, since it is time for the yearly binding ritual to keep the Muses caught.
To give plenty of content to play with on a character level, the humans (the Inspired) have fifteen years of complex history together. Also, the Muses are thousands of years old, they are all siblings and they have significant relationships with one another. As the Muses have been prisoners for fifteen years, there are also extensive relations across the two groups: Characters are lovers or ex-lovers; many of the Muses have stolen artists from each other over the years; some are currently best of friends with their captors etc. Thus, you have dilemmas all across the base of characters as well as with your dyadic partner.
A misinterpretation of the frontloading concept, in my opinion, is writing extensive characters but where the most interesting content is in the past (or in the future after the larp). Why would you write that a conflict or dilemma is already dealt with or easily resolved, unless it has led to an even more interesting conflict? We have to give players the opportunity to have the most meaningful experiences while they are in play. Therefore, I am not advocating for long characters. Instead, I recommend putting in a lot of playable content in the provided material no matter the length of the text. This could be complex, unresolved conflicts, established and significant relations, challenges to the character, dilemmas, goals etc.
A great way to help players be ready for River Rafting is providing the setting and character material a long time before the larp. That also entails the pacing structure and schedule as well as other forms of expectation management that helps them structure their own experience no matter which degree of transparency you want for what actually happens in the larp. For example: Do you expect the players to talk to co-players before the larp or will you allow time for that on location? Do they sleep off-game? What will they physically do with their bodies and spend their time on during this larp? When is a good time to take a break?
Workshops and Mechanics
Setting and characters take time to learn to use. I often find that organisers underestimate the value of structured time for people to talk with co-players about their relations during the workshop time as a means to enable players to use the material right away. If you provide a highly playable setting and characters, the players will do wonders for themselves to be ready to play intensely right from the outset of the larp, if they just have time to talk with each other. Talking about their relations and maybe even trying out flashback scenes is also practicing to use the written material before the larp instead of practicing and finding each other when the larp has already started. No matter how many online meetings you have for calibration before a larp, I find that players meeting each other just before the larp is where they have the best opportunity to find each other and create the trust it takes to play bravely together – and be ready to do so. This is more valuable for the emotional impact of their experience than more instructional briefing about the setting.
Furthermore, I suggest that you introduce one or a few core mechanics to support the experience you want the players to have, and to practice them during workshops. This enables the players with more tools to move their boat and the boat of others. Structured practice of the tools given to the players is an excellent way to help them get going from the start of the larp. If you don’t do this, most of your opportunity as a designer to meaningfully influence the emotional impact on the individual player experience (before the larp) will rely on just the characters and setting.
For the workshops, I encourage not providing information pieces and practicing mechanics until they are needed. If you have act breaks, and a tool is not used before act 3, then wait to provide this information until it is necessary. If you have a debriefing, don’t instruct about that at the beginning of the larp.
A mechanic that I use in several of the larps I am involved in is Dinner Warfare (Wind, 2024). It is a way of designing meaningful mealtime situations and using seating plans to create subtle but strong emotional pressure based on specific relations. But I introduce it differently for each larp depending on the purpose and importance of the tool. I use it extensively in Daemon and provide off-game instructions before the larp as well as an in-game alibi that has to do with classicism to stay in the seats of the horrible seating plan. It is a less prominent mechanic in other larps I am involved in and therefore not introduced as thoroughly.
Instruction and Coaching
As a larp runner you have to consider when to give instructions and when to let the players practice tools themselves in a more coaching style of leadership. While I strongly emphasize the value of the latter, there is no shame in being instructive: “You must use this mechanic in the game”. The coaching approach is letting players know that the rest is up to them: “You decide what to do within the framework”. This will help them be more comfortable using them from the beginning of the larp by practicing. A combination of the suggestions above is illustrated in Spoils of War. The players know before the larp which side has won or lost, but the characters don’t. The first night starts with the siege of the last standing castle. The losing side has been caught inside for three months but hasn’t quite given up yet. It is hard to start right in the middle of a siege and be ready to react to what it has been like being at a standstill for three months. Everybody is frustrated.
We try to explain it briefly at first and underline that the frustration is a specific mechanic for the very beginning of the larp (instruction), and then we lead the players into the game by making a “frustration workshop” where we play the same scene three times (coaching). First, it is at the beginning of the siege: The losing side has plenty of hope and food and the winning side is patient. Then we jump a month and the players are prompted to escalate how annoying it is being around the same people and that food is scarce. Finally, we play the same scene where three months have passed and everyone is desperate. The scenes only take about five minutes each, but it underlines the feeling we start the larp with. After the last scene, the intro song plays and the larp begins with this exact feeling of frustration. Almost right away there is an inspection of prisoners of war where the two sides meet, which means that the players are more ready to play the emotional rapid of seeing their loved ones but not being able to save them from imprisonment than if they just started cold.
It is almost impossible not to have some degree of briefing with instructions when you start the workshops, but I encourage going from instruction to coaching as soon as possible.
Mechanics take time to learn
In Daemon, the core vision is experiencing being two people who together portray one character. Daemon is inspired by the trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (1995–2000) where humans live with their soul outside of their body in the form of an animal. Daemons are the expression of the inner lives of the characters and the human and daemon can’t move very far away from each other.
It might seem like an obvious mechanic that one player is portraying the human itself and the other is portraying the inner life of the character. But if I was mostly interested in the universe or characters of the books instead of the human-daemon relation, I could have decided mechanics-wise that the players just have a toy animal on their shoulder and then play in the setting. However, I wanted to make a larp where you could experience dyadic play in a way where you together portray one character.
The other core mechanic I chose to support the vision is that the player can’t go more than two meters from their dyadic partner the whole in-game playtime, which requires immense attention to what your partner is doing.
Dyadic play is a new way of larping for most people – and if they didn’t play Daemon before, they probably never had to play this physically close to another player for such a long time before. We also have to practice how the daemon player acts on a continuum from underlining and mirroring what the player of the human is portraying to showing what is really going on inside or between two humans when they interact. So in the workshop I explain briefly about the bond, and we then practice it extensively.
I have seen players struggle with the mechanics during Daemon despite extensively trying it out – my workshops were not enough. The players spent too much time worrying about the mechanics and moving too far away from each other/not mirroring enough instead of focussing on the character and what was happening around them. What has really helped in later iterations is saying to the players in the instructional part of the workshops right before the first act of Daemon that the first night will be clunky. I tell them that I realise that even though we have practiced the mechanic, we have to try it out during the first night before we know how we want to play it with our partner and in our dyad together towards others, and then we calibrate before act two. I find that verbally validating the fact that the key mechanic takes time to learn has made some larpers braver – especially when it is a tool not usually used in other larps. I have witnessed this bravery helping players to bring out interesting content from very early on in the larp in later runs of Daemon.
But if prewritten characters, setting, mechanics and workshops – no matter the quality – were enough to achieve rapids in the river in the beginning of the larp, more larps would feel like a River Rafting experience instead of feeling slow and backloaded.
For Daemon, the physical closeness is a good example of a mechanic that becomes much more impactful later in the larp when they have had time to get used to it. I often hear people forgetting right after the larp that they don’t have to stay within two metres of their dyadic partner anymore. But it is obvious that the players benefit from something else to create opportunities for emotional impact until the mechanics work for them and they have a feeling for their characters. What is lacking is a strategy for pacing. As mentioned before, I think that more larps would structurally support emotional impact early if they had a frontloaded pacing.
Pacing
As a designer, you have the best opportunity to provide a meaningful overall structure early in a larp. Later and by the end of the larp, most players will have been practicing, utilising and developing the character drama, setting and mechanics, making overall pacing and structured content much more irrelevant – or at worst – meaningless. By then, the main part of the emotional impact should come from the larpers themselves, the co-players and utilisation of the mechanics.
River Rafting design encourages establishing a high intensity starting point pacing-wise for the players to react to and talk about as well as more structured content in the first parts of the larp – to create “the narrow river and the first rapid”. Structured and intense openings help to actualise the tools and encourage players to take action early because their boat is already moving. We learn even more from our first actions in a larp than in the workshops about utilising the characters, setting and the mechanics. But if nothing pushes us to act, it is harder to convert this to meaningful experiences, and the emotional impact is also postponed.
The opening of the larp does not have to be the same for all players but should in general tie into the themes and core experiences as well as be relevant to the individuals.
It is not an original idea to start in mediās rēs. It is just not very prevalent in larp designs in my opinion. Or at least the opening scene is often not meaningful for the individuals or coherent with overarching themes, in the way the River Rafting design suggests.
This leads me to what I think really happens when “backloaded” pacing is the choice in so many larps following the Waterfall design model and why I don’t want to design like that.
Backloaded Pacing
Pacing in larps often mirrors the “Hollywood model” of storytelling.
The “we start slow and everything only climaxes in the end, and something even more interesting happens at the end of or after the larp” structure outlines schematically the progress of a classical “good story” split into (usually three) different acts. It makes sense that we consciously or otherwise use this structure in our medium: It’s how we usually see stories unfold in the content we consume.
Here are a few examples of the classical Hollywood model. I would argue that often larp pacings (not necessarily the individual experiences) will stop at the climax.
I think the Hollywood model is fine. It can be a good way to tell a story – why else would so many pieces be structured like that? Movies, video games, plays etc. can benefit greatly from this approach, because when you have a predetermined outcome you can structure the whole experience around this pacing. However, at larps, pacing needs to accommodate the double-layered structure: The overall story arc and the individual character arcs. So you can’t make this structure work for a majority of the players just by making a larp end in a certain way or culminating everything in the overarching arc in the end.
Even for the pop culture pieces that start out in media res, my point would be that this rarely accounts for all individual characters – it’s mostly for the overall story. Because of the improvisational nature of larp, since we have so many moving pieces and because we care about every individual player’s experience, the backloaded pacing or Hollywood model is less applicable to larp if you want more emotional impact for the individual.
With River Rafting design, you can more easily design for the players to be hit by so many different waves and rapids on their path down the narrow river that they have had enough meaningful experiences along the way, so that it doesn’t matter if their ending is a waterfall, a whirlpool or a quiet stretch of river – none of the players will have their whole experience be dependent on the ending.
Daemon as a pacing example
Below is an example of how the pacing for the overall larp works for Daemon (Katrine Wind, 2021–). This is not the model of River Rafting pacing design. That can take a lot of different forms – this is just the general visualisation of the pacing in a larp with a lot of structure and planned events in the beginning more than in the end.
Fig 5 – Katrine Wind (2024): River Rafting Pacing Design for Daemon larp
In Daemon, the setting is the aftermath of a war where we have just killed God. The characters themselves are centered around themes like creating meaning, victory/defeat, grief/relief and building a new future. A lot of the characters are already gathered in the castle of one of the nobles on the winning side (facilitator character). The guests are there to celebrate the war heroes, mourn the fallen and exploit the opportunity created from the fall of a controlling theocracy to experiment with scientific projects that have up until now been illegal. But the theocratic power has thrown one last bomb of a biological weapon in the form of a powder that affects the bond between human and daemon (a core mechanic of the larp).
The opening scene creates a sense of urgency and immediate possibility for the players to take action, as enemies and people with complex relations to the guests originally invited for the celebration are evacuated to and quarantined in the castle. They have just been hit by the powder. These people are soldiers from the war, former fiancées, traitors and other people whose relations are significant, complex and problematic to the original guests. The scientists present immediately need to start working on helping those affected.
The next structured event comes almost right away when the hostess and an original guest continue to award medals to people who have killed family members of the newly arrived characters’ families. Very soon after this, everybody is thrown into an excruciating three course dinner where they have to endure each other but have a lot to talk about from the workshops, characters and starting scene. The social structures as well as the urgency of the powder situation force the adversaries to be around each other (see Dinner warfare, Wind 2024).
The peak in the third act is again a reflection on a Dinner Warfare scene, but it is disruptive in the pacing as the hostess creates a last, unhinged seating plan fuelled by a retaliation where she surrounds herself with other peoples’ daemons. They are placed almost too far away from their humans to make it physically uncomfortable to be at dinner and stay polite. For a larp to be designed for “frontloading” as part of River Rafting design, this would not be necessary as the concept focuses more on the first part of the larp, but the structured spike in intensity is a design choice for other reasons than overall pacing.
In the pacing overview from Daemon, you also find another tool. The act structure cuts up the pacing in three, and I choose to put in off-game breaks between the acts to allow more opportunities for me as a designer to add structured content in the beginning of act 2 as well as have more workshop time which enables me to make more rapids. I deem that it is not necessary with an intense start scene for the beginning of act 3, as the mechanics and characters drive the emotional impact almost solely by then.
For River Rafting design, you don’t have to have a quiet ending as a player. Don’t be fooled by the fizzling out of structured content in the third act of Daemon. This refers only to the larp pacing itself – for some players it will still be the most dramatic part of the larp.
But by not pressuring structured content into the end, in my experience, it will help avoid some of the “Twilight Avalanche.”
You can still facilitate a dramatic ending
Maria Pettersson and I decided to make a structured ending of Helicon (2024–) with focus on a highly dramatic situation, even though I still consider it a “frontloaded” larp which follows the principles of River Rafting design. We wanted to include a specific end scene where a choice is required, shifting certain dynamics. However, the key element for me that makes this ending meaningful for each individual is that they have influence over their own arc in relation to this scene. We also provide the tool that each player can be informed of the ending and the choice that they will face (transparency) during the final act break, or they can choose to be surprised.
However, I still consider the opening scene and structured content in the beginning of Helicon to be much more significant design aspects to the players’ experience of emotional impact as they set the tone of the larp and help the players to get into the characters and mechanics right away.
Fig 6 – Katrine Wind (2024): River Rafting pacing design for Helicon larp (larp designed with Maria Pettersson)
Already in the character descriptions, an intro scene is added where the players have to act on their relations. It is described how last night, the Muses tried to escape and failed. To establish the uneven power dynamic that is so central to the larp, Helicon begins with a ritualised, common punishment scene for this slight with each couple focussing on each other, and the significance of this intro scene is already emphasized in each individual character. Bowman describes this scene and its significance to kick off the larp in her article about Helicon (Bowman, 2024). Since ritualistic content is very important to the experience, we practise the rituals in the workshops. In this case, the Inspired have practiced this specific Punishment Ritual but the Muse players don’t know what is going to happen. All of the individuals and couples have a huge stake in this scene, no matter if the Muse was an instigator of the escape attempt or urged along by their siblings. Thus, the event is meaningful to each individual character (and hopefully player) when we start with high drama.
This is another point of River Rafting design. I don’t advocate just throwing in any action scene or dramatic beginning to kick off the larp in a frontloaded manner. The intro scene should emphasise the themes of the larp and be relevant to the players. Something can be meaningful and dramatic without being loud.
During the Larp
Once the larp is running, you obviously have to execute the plan for events and structure which can take a lot of work. You might even be able to make little adjustments in your design plan if you see a need for it during a pre-planned event. You learn a lot from rerunning larps, and there have been plenty of pacing events that have not worked as intended in larps I have been involved in.
Despite our intention to make Dinner Warfare a mechanic all the way through Helicon, Maria Pettersson and I decided during the first run to loosen our plan so the seating was only very tense for everyone on the first night. We had planned to do it for all three meals, but we decided for the two other in-game meals to just provide the opportunity for players off-game to wish for people to sit with or not sit with. We didn’t deem it necessary to place the rest of the players to create the most possible tension as other structured content was more impactful in the later part of the experience. Granting player wishes for seating plans is the most advanced version of Dinner Warfare, and we still deemed that the mechanic served a purpose enough to not scrap it completely even though we adjusted our plan.
Act changes with off-game breaks are your greatest chance of affecting the larp significantly as a designer later in the larp. Act break calibrations can for example be helpful to catapult the players into the new part of the larp. Many players will do this themselves with individual relations, act breaks or not, which is wonderful, but structuring time for it can be a helpful tool for some to ask something from the group. This works best in smaller or medium sized larps or in smaller groups.
For Daemon (28 players) and Spoils of War (58 players), I do a calibration round in each act break where I ask if anyone needs something generalized from the group. Either you say that you don’t need anything or you can for example ask for: “Could someone oppress me about my class” or “I need someone to have more quiet conversations with”. Then I will ask if someone can see themselves doing this, and usually some other players are happy to help provide this type of play. I specify that you should only raise your hand if you are really going to commit to it so the player asking actually gets what they need. Chances are that when I try to make people accountable and three raise their hand to help, at least one of them will actually cast the rope from their boat to their co-player’s.
You can also choose to provide a new workshop piece or a significant and possibly dramatic event in the beginning of a new act. In Daemon, act two starts with a cutting edge science presentation with shocking discoveries with all characters present. After this, there are spikes in the pacing but the larp includes less and less content that I design because the impact of the individual character arcs take over. I also signify this with my facilitator character being less and less important and prevalent to create pressure.
Final Remarks
River Rafting design can help create a more engaging and dynamic player experience from the very beginning of a larp with a higher chance of many moments of emotional impact instead of very few towards the end. By designing highly playable characters and setting, focussing workshops on practicing the tools you provide and designing your pacing for immediate action, you empower players to experience and create more emotional impact.
Whether you choose to put more content in the beginning of the experience or not, I encourage you to consider how pacing can shape your larp and communicate these design intentions to players. Even if you don’t want your larp to follow the River Rafting design methodology, you can help your players by making your choices clear. That will enable them to better structure their larp experience and engage with your vision more effectively.
Happy designing!
References
Bakkensen, Alexander, and Wind, Katrine, “Toolbox of the drama designers”, Forum convention, Denmark, 2018
Victorious 1 + 2 (2016–2017). Denmark. Alexander Bakkensen and Katrine Wind.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Wind, Katrine. 2025. “River Rafting Design.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: Helicon larp. Photo by Kai Simon Fredriksen.
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.
Kai, photo by Prison Escape
This is Kai. Kai taught me how to overcome my fear of heights. Or rather, by playing the character of Kai, I was able to find a new part of myself. And later, that new part enabled me to face my fears. I learned from bleed.
I didn’t play Kai with this intention. But Kai inspired me to develop ways to intentionally learn from bleed and that lead to the formation of our company, Live Action Learning. In this article we’ll write about how you can learn from bleed yourself and how you design a larp in such a way that your participants can learn from their bleed, if they want to.
This article is based on the workshop “Learning from bleed” at the 2024 Edu-Larp Conference by Gijs van Bilsen and Kjell Hedgaard Hugaas, and all participants of that workshop, who discussed the topic together. It’s also based on the professional development training “Live Action Leadership” that we, Anne van Barlingen & Gijs van Bilsen with our company Live Action Learning, ran in April 2023 and November 2024, and the keynote speech “Summon your talent”.
What happened with Kai
Kai wasn’t a kind man. But Kai possessed an unshakable inner strength, grounded in a calm conviction that nothing could sway him. This kind of inner strength and resilience was new to me, and playing Kai had given me access to this. In other words: I learned something through bleed.
First, let’s define bleed. According to Hugaas (2024) “Bleed occurs when feelings, thoughts, emotions, physical states, cognitive constructs, aspects of personality and similar ‘bleed over’ from player to character or vice versa.” There are several types of bleed, as presented by Hugaas:
Emotional bleed (Montola 2010; Bowman 2015), in which emotional states and feelings bleed between player and character.
Ego bleed (Beltrán 2012), in which fragments of personality and archetypal qualities bleed between player and character.
Procedural bleed (Hugaas 2019a), in which physical abilities, perceptual experience, motor skills, traits, habits, and other bodily states bleed between player and character.
Memetic bleed (Hugaas 2019a), in which ideas, thoughts, opinions, convictions, ideologies and similar cognitive constructs bleed between player and character;
Relationship bleed, in which aspects of social relationships bleed between player and character. Romantic bleed (Waern 2010; Harder 2018; Bowman and Hugaas 2021) is the most frequently discussed subtype.
Emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2017, 2020), in which players from marginalized backgrounds experience liberation from that marginalization through their characters.
Identity bleed (Hugaas 2024), which deals with the sense of self and with how different parts of the self (“multiplicities of identities”) bleed between character and player.
In the case of Kai, the bleed can be classified as emotional bleed (the calm emotional state), but also as identity bleed (It did something with the way I think about myself; ‘I’m someone who can stay calm under stressful circumstances’).
Why is learning from bleed interesting?
To effectively integrate new behavior in your system, you need a couple of things: Opportunities to experiment with the behavior, feedback to fine-tune it, time to integrate it into your system, and a safe environment that allows for mistakes.
In a regular training session, you’ll have the opportunity to try new things, but often confined to a few minutes or maybe an hour. Training by practicing new behavior solely in your real life isn’t a safe environment in which you can make multiple mistakes or suddenly behave completely differently. But using larp and bleed… Well, talk about having it all!
But, of course, there are difficulties. For one, bleed is personal; you can’t make bleed happen. However, you can inspire bleed (Edu-larp conference, 2024). The level at which bleed is present, but also the level of bleed that is noticed, differs per person and even over time. This is called the “bleed perception threshold” (Hugaas 2024). This means you might not notice any bleed at all. Or you can be completely overwhelmed.
The ingredients: designing for bleed
So when designing for bleed, whether it is for you personally or for a group of participants, be aware. Random, unfocused bleed can be very unhelpful, to put it mildly. In order to learn from bleed, you need direction, agency, priming, safety, time and space (Edu-larp conference, 2024). Using bleed on purpose, especially to learn, should always be with informed consent of what bleed you are designing for, preferably with agency of a participant to choose their own bleed and learning goals. Direction, agency, and priming shape bleed into something useful, while safety and time enhance immersion.
In our four-day Live Action Leadership training we’ve made very conscious decisions on these elements. The main theme was very clear: Leadership. The complete setup revolved around situations and scenes which required leadership skills, integrated in an overarching story about a failing management team. The participants were actively involved in formulating their personal learning goals and how those goals were translated into a character. The concept of bleed was clearly explained at the beginning, during the workshops. This made the participants aware of the signs of bleed and what they might experience. Having multiple opt-out options, and very openly discussing them as a safe and viable option to leave the game, made participants comfortable enough to immerse themselves.
And then, last but not least, the ‘thin alibi’, or ‘playing close to home’. Bleed occurs more quickly when the character you are playing resembles your real-life persona. For example, we might deliberately choose names for the characters that are close to their own. Björn might play a character called Bjarke, or Susanne might play a character called Suzette. We also thinned the border by choosing a realistic and recognizable setting. It is very possible to have bleed and learn from bleed from characters and settings that are further away from you. But the further away you are, the harder it is to find an applicable use in everyday life.
The timeline: Three phases of integration
We believe that learning from bleed is not about pretending to be someone else in your everyday life, but about finding a different version of yourself through playing. Therefore, especially in longer experiences, we have three phases for the participant to go through during play:
finding the character
challenging the character, and
integrating to a competent version of the character.
Finding the character
How can you help the participant exhibit the traits that they want to learn? Experimentation is key in this phase. When not playing or designing for bleed, we might want to prioritize portraying the character consistently. But if you’re focusing on a specific character trait that is not natural to you, it’s important to experiment with different strategies to find a way that works for you. So if somebody wants to learn to be more outspoken, this phase is about finding multiple ways for them to play that outspoken character.
Challenging the character
This phase is about trying to entice the participant to exhibit the opposite behavior of what they want to learn, so that they can notice this and return to the character. Ways to do this can be to introduce a high pressure environment, such as a quest with a specific deadline, or by designing more emotional scenes. If you opt for this approach, it is good to have ways to remind the participant that they are slipping into old behavior. Having them choose one gesture, word or feeling that symbolizes their character is a good way for them to be able to go back to their character again.
Integration
The third phase is integrating the character into a competent version: a sort of mix between the character and the participant. Instruct the participants during an offgame calibration, to let go of a negative trait of the character and to replace that with a positive trait of their own. This will bring the character closer to resembling the participant and helps them to associate positively with the character. This can also be described as ‘learning to love the character’. If participants dislike their character, it is harder for them to want to learn from things that the character did. However, if you want to achieve the opposite effect, unlearning unwanted behavior, disliking the character works well.
After playing: Separation and anchoring
After de-roling and debriefing, we start the separation and anchoring phase. There are three questions central to this:
Separation: What traits do you want to keep, and what will you let go?
Anchoring: What anchor will help you summon these traits?
Summoning: When do you want to summon these traits?
Separation:
We want our participants to take a ‘version of themselves’ home, not the complete character, because characters have negative traits as well, traits that we don’t want to keep. Kai, the example from the beginning of the article, was a very powerful character with a deep source of inner strength and resilience. But, as you can see from the photo, he was also a criminal. So after playing that character, I separated the useful characteristics (inner strength and resilience) from the rest of the character. I found a way to access that inner strength by playing Kai, but now I needed only that part.
Anchoring:
After separating comes anchoring. Here we build on the word, gesture or feeling that participants already have chosen to symbolize their character (see: Challenging the character). It can be a simple thing that helps you find this version of yourself. And from that thing, more of the behavior you associate with that version will follow. Besides a gesture, word or feeling, other possible anchors are:
A name: the characters name, a nickname (‘the professor’) or an adjective, coupled with your own name (‘curious Gijs’)
Music, from a short tune you can hum/whistle to an entire playlist which helps you find the character
An object, preferably one that you can carry with you
A smell, such as a perfume, that differs from your normal one
A piece of clothing that you can put on in special circumstances
A location where you want to have access to the character.
A posture you adopt when you need it.
Summoning:
It is important to think about when you want to have access to the talents you learned from bleed. There are three ways to determine when to summon your characters:
Triggers. Think of a sudden situation where you might need it, and identify a trigger that will remind you. For example, I played Kai, who was calm and resilient. Traits I can use when I start to feel my fear of heights taking over. When I feel my knees getting weak, that’s the trigger to summon that calm, focused part of myself.
On purpose beforehand. If you know you will go into a situation where that version of yourself might help you, you summon your character on purpose just before going in. For example, just before an important meeting or social event.
Integrating it into yourself. Finally, you can integrate this version of yourself into yourself, meaning that it becomes an unconscious part of you. This takes time and practice. It generally goes from noticing well after the fact that you would’ve wanted to use what you’ve learned, to noticing it shortly after the fact, to adjusting your behavior during the situation and finally to before the situation. The final step is that it has become something you do without thinking about it.
Learning from regular larp experiences
The above steps detail how to design for others. But you can easily use these at a larp that is not designed for learning, even if you’re only using it after the larp. Kai was not intended as a character for self-learning, but by separating and anchoring aspects of him, I found playing him highly valuable.
In short, the steps to take if you want to learn from the larp as a player, are:
Decide what you want to learn.
Decide where you want to make the border between you and your character thinner.
Take some time to reflect on your learning experience so far.
If possible, use the three phases (finding, challenging and integrating your character).
Afterwards, separate and anchor what you want to keep/learn.
Finally, summon the new version of yourself whenever you need it.
We hope this article inspires you to learn more from larp and learn more from bleed yourself and, if you’re a larp designer, introduce parts of the design process into your larps so you give your participants the option of learning from it.
References
Beltrán, Whitney “Strix.” 2012. “Yearning for the Hero Within: Live Action Role-Playing as Engagement with Mythical Archetypes.” In Wyrd Con Companion Book 2012, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, 89-96. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2012.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2015. “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character.” Nordiclarp.org, March 2.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne, and Kjell Hedgard Hugaas. 2021. “Magic is Real: How Role-playing Can Transform Our Identities, Our Communities, and Our Lives.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde, 52-74. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
Harder, Sanne. 2018. “Larp Crush: The What, When and How.” Nordiclarp.org, March 28.
Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2019a. “Investigating Types of Bleed in Larp: Emotional, Procedural, and Memetic.” Nordiclarp.org, January 25
Hugaas, K. H. (2024). Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-out from Role-playing Games Can Affect a Player’s Sense of Self. International Journal of Role-Playing, (15), 9–35.
Kemper, Jonaya. 2017. “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity.” Nordiclarp.org, June 21.
Kemper, Jonaya. 2020. “Wyrding the Self.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Mia Makkonen, Pauliina Männistö, Anne Serup Grove, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta.
Montola, Markus. 2010. “The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-playing.” In Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players. Stockholm, Sweden, August 16.
Waern, Annika. 2010. “‘I’m in Love With Someone That Doesn’t Exist!!’ Bleed in the Context of a Computer Game.” In Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players. Stockholm, Sweden, August 16.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
van Bilsen, Gijs and van Barlingen, Anne. 2025. “‘Learning from Bleed.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
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.
Dissimulation: Adopting roles to conceal true intentions, from politeness to deception.
As the term roleplaying expanded beyond its theatrical roots, it embarked on a fascinating journey of transformation. European sources from the 18th and 19th centuries describe phenomena occurring during, or as a result of roleplaying, that we might now recognize as bleed. But what was the historical context of these cases, and what lessons can they offer for our understanding of roleplaying today?
Bleed, a concept first introduced by Emily Care Boss (2007), refers to the way emotions, thoughts, or experiences can spill over between a character and the player; flowing either from the character into the player or vice versa (Hugaas, 2024). After immersion, bleed is likely the most talked-about aspect of larping (Jeepen, 2007; Montola, 2010; Montola, 2011; Bowman, 2013; Kemper, 2017; Leonard and Thurman, 2018; Hugaas, 2019). This happens because the line between social reality and pretense is naturally blurred (Järvelä 2019). When we larp, our minds cannot fully separate the experience from reality, as we are actively thinking, physically embodying, and socially co-creating these moments (Kapitany et al., 2022).
This article is part of an ongoing Hungarian research line (Turi & Hartyándi, 2022; Turi & Hartyándi, 2023; upcoming) that investigates how the concept and notion of roleplaying is evolving through the centuries, instead of projecting the contemporary notion of larp into past or adjacent activities (Hartyándi, 2024).
The etymology of roleplaying and its early usages
The word rôle is of French origin, originally referring to the scroll (Latin rotula, English roll) that contained an actor’s lines and written instructions for a theatrical performance. From this, it later acquired its figurative meaning of role. Since actors perform their roles on stage, the phrase ‘to play a role’ is undoubtedly very old, with documented usage by Diderot, Goethe, and Schiller in the 18th century.
If actors play roles on stage, could it be that we are also playing roles in our lives? Shakespeare’s famous monologue in As You Like It (1623) — “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” — expresses not a groundbreaking insight into social behavior (Goffman, 1959), but rather a popular cliché of the time, likely tracing its roots back to Roman times (Garber, 2008). Nevertheless, humans are undeniably social roleplayers (Moreno, 1943).
In this linguistic and historical context, both the term ‘roleplaying’ itself, and its usage in the the sense of dissimulation, originally emerged in German. Dissimulation involves taking on roles to present an image contrary to one’s true feelings or intentions (Corsini et al., 1963). This can range from simple acts of politeness to elaborate uses, such as deception in scams or espionage.
Fake it till you make it
Justus Möser, a humble yet proactive giant, was a polyhistor and statesman of the small state of Osnabrück in today’s Lower Saxony. In his Patriotische Phantasien (1776), a compilation of previous newspaper essays addressing various societal-political issues relevant to Osnabrück, he sought to inspire a sense of civic responsibility through concise but playful and dramatic prose. One notable piece is likely one of the earliest sources to use the phrase ‘playing a role’ (eine Rolle spielen) to describe a dissimulation.
In this story, a married couple (the narrator and her husband) receive unexpected guests in the countryside. Feeling annoyed and unprepared, they decide to pretend to be the most charming hosts despite their initial frustration. As the narrator assesses: “In that very moment, our guests arrived, and we began playing our roles so brilliantly that the good people were utterly delighted.” (Möser, 1776, p. 370.)
This strategy is not only successful towards the guests. Unintendedly, after a quarter an hour, the pretense leads to genuine joy for the hosts, transforming their moods and fostering an atmosphere of mutual warmth and enjoyment. By making a polite effort to appear attentive, the hosts quickly became so themselves, as their attitude bled through the pretense.
As the title (‘A proven remedy for a bad mood, shared by a lady in the countryside’) shows, Möser often used fictional correspondence’ in this case, presenting the piece as a letter from a rural woman, offering practical advice on overcoming melancholy. This story is particularly intriguing, as it represents an early example of emotional bleed, showcasing a timeless self-help strategy: intentionally using dissimulation to influence and improve one’s mood through bleed. Yet, the records suggest that this practice went beyond such innocent uses of pretense.
Getting caught up in one’s own act
Half a century later, writer Karl Leberecht Immermann (1839) reimagined Rudolf Erich Raspe’s famous Baron Münchausen adventures, combining the baron’s fictional tall tales with sharp commentary on contemporary society. One chapter in Immermann’s version includes the reversed phrase of ‘roleplaying’ (Rollenspiel), possibly for the very first time in written German, and details its psychological effects.
The story unfolds in the crumbling castle of Schnick-Schnack-Schnurr where the eccentric hosts turn against their guest, Baron Münchhausen, who pretends to suffer from chronic sleeping to escape accountability. Interestingly, the often exaggerating and flamboyant baron is not the story’s biggest pretender. He prompts his servant, Karl Buttervogel, to impersonate Prince von Hechelkram to gain influence, and Emerentia, the host’s romantic daughter, falls for the ruse. As a twist, Münchausen covertly exposes Karl’s act, and the disillusioned young woman remarks that the servant “had identified with the role through continuous roleplaying” (ein fortwährendes Rollespielen mit der Rolle identifizirt, Immermann, 1839, p. 229).
Immermann describes Karl’s gradual immersion into his assumed role. Initially portrayed as a thoroughly practical character, he adopts noble mannerisms and grows increasingly confident in his act, thriving in his role, but slowly becomes frustrated by the constraints of his deception. Not only does Karl maintain the pretense, but he gradually inhabits the role; altering his behavior, attitude, and life expectations to such an extent that even outsiders, like the disappointed Emerentia, notice the transformation. This blurring of the line between pretense and social reality prompts Emerentia to question how sustained deception can shape identity. The story could be interpreted as an example of bleed that extends beyond emotions, influencing deeper levels of personality.
Alone in the circle
It may be mere coincidence, but it is worth noting that in both stories we are in a German-speaking area, in the fictional countryside, and the narrator reflects on the roleplaying from a female identity. What might be even more important is that compared to theatre and larp, these pretenses are not transparent and reciprocal, but dissimulative and pervasive (Montola, 2012) occurrences.
Generally speaking, both in theater and larp, pretend play is created by integrating two aspects. First, we behave as if we were in a different setting and situation; in other words, we are simulating an environment. Moreover, we are behaving as if we were other persons, so we roleplay characters. These two aspects create a complex pretense, regardless of whether there is an audience, sets, costumes, etc. The two examples discussed above are probably the first to mention the terms playing a role and roleplaying in a German context where setting-simulation is absent and the magical circle of play is not transparent; only one party pretends for dissimulative purposes.
Interestingly, these early cases not only exemplify dissimulation but also illustrate its unintended consequences. In Möser’s 18th-century essay, playing a role secretly leads to emotional bleed in the pretenders, while in Immermann’s 19th-century tale, dissimulative roleplaying goes even deeper. Could it be that bleed was particularly prevalent in both cases because the roles were not transparent, demanding the pretenders to perform with great effort and credibility—taking it more seriously than within the more permissive framework of playfulness? If we are alone within the magical circle of pretense, could we be more profoundly affected by it?
Later developments
As the notion of playing a role had escaped the walls of the theatre, it did not stop at these dissimulative interpretations, but gradually became increasingly abstract. Just as the notion of bleed can be extended to include any crossover between character and player, so too could the idea of playing a role. In its most derived meaning, as a synonym for ‘to have an effect or impact,’ it regularly appeared in late 18th-century German texts (e.g. Werthes, 1791) and was also evident in many examples in English and French.
Later, in the form of ‘rôle playing’, the reversed phrase entered English texts; first only in terms of children’s pretend play and its connection to identity development (Groos, 1901). From a psychological point of view, children roleplaying is inherently tied to bleed. Its primary function is imitating, practicing, and rehearsing; in other words, adopting new behaviours and experiences through playful experimentation (Kapitany et al, 2023).
But as we have seen from the two cases, adults are also affected by pretense. This is why the term roleplayer (Rollenspieler) first appeared in the works of Jacob L. Moreno (1924), who viewed social roles not as rigid constraints but as opportunities for spontaneity, experimenting with their utilization. Searching for the origins of larp, theorists often trace larp back to Moreno through an unbroken chain of influence, referring to him as the ‘father of roleplaying’ (Fatland, 2014; 2016). As demonstrated in this article, Moreno did not invent the term roleplaying in either German or English; however, he was likely the first to integrate what larpers now call bleed into his developmental methods for adults (Moreno, 1943). Ironically, this generative aspect of roleplaying was first demonstrated by fictional writings about dissimulative pretense.
Bibliography
Boss, Emily Care. 2007. “Romance and Gender in Role-playing Games: Too Hot to Handle?” Presentation at Ropecon 2007. Helsinki, Finland.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2013. “Social Conflict in Role-playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study.” International Journal of Role-Playing 4: 4-25.
Garber, Marjorie B. 2008. Profiling Shakespeare, Routledge, New York.#
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Groos, Karl. 1901. The Play of Man. Appleton, New York.
Hartyándi, Mátyás. 2024. “Larp: the Colonist.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2024. “Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-Out from Role-Playing Games Can Affect a Player’s Sense of Self.” International Journal of Role-Playing 15: 9-35.
Immermann, Karl. 1839. Münchhausen. Band 3. Düsseldorf.
Järvelä, Simo. 2019. “How Real Is Larp?” In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen. Copenhagen: Landsforeningen Bifrost
Kapitany, Rohan, Tomas Hampejs and Thalia R. Goldstein. 2022. “Pretensive Shared Reality: From Childhood Pretense to Adult Imaginative Play.” Frontiers in Psychology 13: 19.
Leonard, Diana J., and Tessa Thurman. 2018. “Bleed-out on the Brain: The Neuroscience of Character-to-Player.” International Journal of Role-Playing 9: 9-15.
Montola, Markus. 2012. On the Edge of the Magic Circle: Understanding Role-Playing and Pervasive Games. PhD dissertation, University of Tampere, School of Information Sciences. https://trepo.tuni.fi/handle/10024/66937
Montola, Markus. 2010. “The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-playing.” Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players. Stockholm, Sweden.
Montola, Markus. 2011. “The Painful Art of Extreme Role-playing.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 3, 219–237.
Moreno, Jacob Levy. 1924. Das Stegreiftheater, Verlag des Vaters u.a., Potsdam.
Moreno, Jacob Levy. 1943. “The Concept of Sociodrama: A New Approach to the Problem of Inter-Cultural Relations.” Sociometry 6/4: 434–449.
Möser, Justus. 1776. Patriotische Phantasien. Band 2. Berlin.
Turi, Bálint Márk, and Mátyás Hartyándi. 2022. “Tribes and Kingdoms.” Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine. Edited by Juhana Pettersson, Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura 90-99.
Turi, Bálint Márk, and Mátyás Hartyándi. 2023. “Playing With The Fictitious ‘I’: Early Forms of Educational Role-Playing in Hungary, 1938-1978.” International Journal of Role-Playing 14: 47-60.
Werthes, Friedrich August Clemens. 1791. Margeritha, der Königin von Navarra, romantische Erzählungen. Band 2, Berlin.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Hartyándi, Mátyás. 2025. “Bleed Before it was Cool: Early descriptions of dissimulative pretense, their unintended effects, and their impact on the evolution of roleplaying.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Editorial note: The following articles present an introductory overview of the history of larping, and of the present state of larp, in various countries around the world. They are based on the author’s own researches, and on information that he gained from larpers in those countries. It would be great to hear from other people who know about larp activity that isn’t mentioned here — please contact contribute@nordiclarp.org if you would like to write a supplementary article for this site, or contact andrzej.pi3rzchala@gmail.com to send updates and additions directly to the author to include in his country-by-country compilation.
Larp in Greece
Introduction
First of all, I wanted to thank Stavris Gianniaris, Joan Kim Moraiti, and especially Chris Panagiotopoulos for their help.
The Greek LARP scene has evolved, characterised by a unique, or at any rate unusual, combination of historical themes and fantasy. It has very strong links with the re-enactment movement, while most of their games draw from history or mythology. In general, larps in the Balkan region are much more often linked in campaigns, often spanning many years. Single and chamber games are much rarer, although they do of course happen. From the words of my interlocutors, it seems that the scene is torn by disputes between, as far as I understand, fans of fantasy and historical games. And disputes between groups of creators, somewhat reminding me of the situation in Poland from around 2010-14.
Their main larp group on Facebook, Larp Club of Greece, has 2200 members, albeit some no longer active. The activists themselves estimate the peak of active larpers at 450 people. This is not a very large community. There is also a fairly limited pool of larps per year. Sometimes there are months of intervals in between.
The community communicates mainly via Facebook and, to a much lesser extent, via Discord. This is interesting, because the Slovak or Swiss communities have mostly migrated to Discord. I am curious as to the reasons for these differences.
Aeonia Larp: Call of the Gods (2-day event) 1-2 March 2025, created by Cerebral Productions, photo by Leuteris Liou Photography
If you would like to start looking for something on the Greek scene, hit up the group: Κοινότητα LARP Ελλάδας ~ LARP Club of Greece. They are super helpful and have a group of responsive activists.
According to my interlocutors, Greece is at a rather early stage in the development of its community, if we understand it according to Polish, German, Nordic, etc. assumptions and standards. There is a lot of sad sarcasm and probably a certain regret about this state of affairs when talking about its ‘backwardness’. However, it is apparent that they are diligently trying to bounce back after the pandemic and are pushing forward intensely. A new generation is beginning to take an interest in larps and invest their commitment and time in it. The significant number of young creators, under the age of 25, who are committed to creating larps and their communities is highlighted. However, they still lack a proper ecosystem.
As for the reasons, they cite two decades of economic problems, meagre cultural spending and austerity, depleting Greeks’ purchasing power on the one hand and their willingness to engage in anything that requires extra mental effort on the other.
It was emphasised that the community continues to fight against toxic behaviour and attempts to educate participants about what larp is, beyond hitting each other with foam swords (most fantasy larps) and malicious intrigue (most vampire games — these are not now a large part of the Greek scene).
Aeonia Larp: Mystagogy (chamber larp) 12 November 2023, created by Cerebral Productions, photo by Leuteris Liou Photography
To quote Chris Panagiotopoulos:
“It’s a tough battle with ideological/social stakes, as sexists, homophobes, bigots and abusers continue to lurk on the scene, segmenting it into cults of personality. [ed. groups being led by charismatic ‘chiefs’, the cult of the individual, and other wonders we’ve managed to bury a lot of, but I still remember them in Polish larp as being massive once upon a time.] However, I am optimistic that sooner or later people will understand the message and start rejecting these bad actors to build a real community to run and play larps for fun.”
History
Since when has there been a larp scene in Greece? It started to form in the 1990s with the larps of Vampire: the Masquerade, but the modern history of the larp scene is set by those involved themselves to begin in 2015.
A brief history of larps in Greece, by Chris:
1990s – early 00s: The intersection of gaming, goth and metal subculture, larps were monthly events in boardgame shops and later in RPG clubs such as (ESPAIROS, founded in 1999). In the World of Darkness formula: most of them were Vampire: the Masquerade. There were also a few successful local common larp/ARG hybrids (unfortunately, the only surviving materials from these are physical books written in Greek). Vampire became synonymous with larp, with about 16 events a year, about 100 larps in total. Divided into 3 to 5 campaigns of 20-40 players each.
Late 00s – early 10s: the larp scene in Athens was absorbed by the role-playing game scene. Other cities (Heraklion, Thessaloniki, Patra) created and maintained separate vampire larp scenes with 10 to 30 players.
Early 2010s: Athens had practically no larp scene anymore. Heraklion and Thessaloniki were doing a bit better, but not much better. Conversations started in a Facebook group about fantasy larps, such as Mythodea and DrachenFest.
Late 10s: A new community formed in Athens — Aeonia — to play fantasy larps. Larps in Athens attracted a new generation of role-playing game players. Many more larps were created. Fantasy larps were mostly played in parks for free. Athens fantasy gamers started to visit Bulgaria for larps. The number of participants peaked in 2018, around 450 players (Greek games, plus Greeks at The Fog Larp in Bulgaria).
COVID: All larp events came to a halt throughout Greece. Most of the communities became dormant, as students went home for the lockdown. The only exception was Portal 2021, which took place in Athens
After Covid: New games appear, and some old games resume. With a reduced number of participants, but increasing plurality. The pandemic blocked the expected expansion of the scene, and destroyed many communities which disintegrated after more than two years without events. On the other hand, it drove away some of the toxic influences on the community and gave us, burnt out from trying to create games, a chance to reassess and consolidate our efforts. The result was the formation of Cerebral Productions. [Edited to include Chris].
Aeonia Larp: Journey to Quadath (5-day event) 1-5 May 2025, created by Cerebral Productions, photo by Leuteris Liou Photography
Currently, only Aeonia and Primal regularly organise outdoor games (about 30-50 participants each). Athens also hosts occasional chamber larps (10-30 participants) and some hybrids of board games and larps. Larissa has its own board game/larp scene and efforts are being made to create new communities in Thessaloniki, Serres, Janina, and Patra
Larps active at the end of the previous decade in Athens:
Important games, and what they recommend, what is the situation with foreign players
The only international game currently running is Aeonia, which is developed and run in English. Participation in The Fog Larp[there is more about this in my article about the Bulgarian scene] was still significant until last summer. Most players do not leave their city to participate in larps. Efforts are being made to attract more international players.
On the LARP Club Greece Facebook group there is a list of available larps, all declaring themselves to be foreigner-friendly, in the sense that all GMs and the vast majority of the player base are able to communicate in English to some extent.
Contemporary larps that interviewees highlight as being particularly accessible to foreigners:
Aeonia Larp (Cerebral Productions) (from June 2015 – the present)
Renaissance fantasy
Primal (Larponomicon) (2023 – present)
Post-Apocalyptic Drama
Larp in Romania
Introduction
This will be a rather short text about a small but interesting larp scene. Romania is not a country too close to us [ed. written from a Polish perspective], but with a rich culture. I hope their larp scene has its best years ahead of it. Let’s get started.
Mihaela Georgescu at the larp Synthocracy Conclave, photo by Flobo Studio
I collected the material thanks to Berna Okumus from Bucharest.
History
A few years ago, there was a Larp House team in Romania. Its Facebook group collected 1100 followers, albeit starting that at a time when Facebook reaches and likes were quite easy. Today, this attempt requires a lot of effort. Larp House appeared on the larp scene around 2015 and disappeared from communication channels with the end of 2017, according to some witnesses – although others place it in 2019, before the pandemic. It is inconclusive which of these versions is more likely. The team organised at least eight games over two years. Their prices hovered around €10-22. They probably numbered in the area of 10-20 participants.
After they disappeared there was a vacuum created. The current developers know little about them and in fact absolutely nothing about the times before them. I guess you could say that today’s Romanian creators survived their own dinosaur extinction or some other Jedi purge there.
Currently
At the moment, the scene is centred around a team called Ministry of Roleplay. They are made up of several creators. Berna Okumus, who answered my questions, started creating games two years ago, as Red Saga LARP | Bucharest. In her own words:
“[…] I started organising larps on my own, but it quickly became too difficult because it’s not a one-person job. Previously, we applied for Erasmus larp projects and organised several larps. […] We organise a larp once every few months and try to build a larp community in Romania. Our larps tend to be 10-20 players, but we have a group chat of about 60-70 people with people who have played one of our larps before or are very keen to join the next one.”
So there is no big larp scene in Romania, but there are similar communities to draw from. There are large airsoft groups that have an element of role-playing and narrative. There is also clearly a large community of improvisational theatre and rpg games.
My interviewees (Berna, and others who preferred to remain anonymous) are aware that re-enactment groups organise occasional events with elements of role-playing and storytelling, but have no contact with them and know little about them.
Larpers from Romania, actually from Bucharest, play mainly fantasy, but also other genres: comedy, thriller, competition, romance. Their games are usually 6 – 8 hours long.
Their sample projects:
La Bloc – meaning ‘in the block’. A parody of Romanian life in a typical post-communist block neighbourhood. The characters were clichés of all the character tropes that can be found in a typical Romanian neighbourhood; thugs, old ladies gossiping about youth, drug dealers, a budding rapper/DJ, the building’s president, a gigolo uncle, children playing, people eating sunflower seeds, etc. [ed. which proves we, in Poland, are not too different].
Veilbound – a larp Halloween fantasy event, with monsters in an abandoned Bucharest amphitheatre. It’s worth noting that they hit the front pages of the local newspapers at the time.
Leylines of Los Angeles – a meeting-style game, set in the council of magicians.
Circle of Shadows – an elimination larp, hosted as part of Larp Alchemy Nausika in Krakow. The game was about recruiting for the mafia.
Serban Pitic at the larp Synthocracy Conclave, photo by Flobo Studio
They are now starting to expand their collaboration with the rpg community. They organised a live streamed larp about artificial intelligence as part of a 16-hour rpg marathon broadcast on Twitch.
Anything else? They have enthusiasm and are competing bravely – let’s keep our fingers crossed for them, we were there once too!
Larp in Switzerland
Introduction
Let’s talk about the Swiss larp scene today. It dates back to around 1999, although some sources suggest that it may be ten years older. Their larp groups are strongly affiliated to the Italian, German, and French language communities (mainly the latter two), and maintain strong contact with other larp communities playing in those languages. Switzerland is, let us emphasise, quadrilingual. The Confederation’s constitution recognises four languages as national languages, and they are also official in federal institutions: German, spoken by 63.7% of the population, French, spoken by 20.4% of the population, Italian spoken by 6.5% of the population and Romansh, spoken by 0.5% of the population.
In French, in German
French larper Thomas B. has published a very cool video presentation on the Swiss larp scene, which was originally prepared for Knudepunkt 2011. It’s a bit out of date, but in English and describes how the Swiss scene communities differ: the German and the French. The video presentation focuses mainly on the French-speaking scene.
Most games are played in groups of 10 to around 80 players, with a few larger events. To quote one of the larpers interviewed, Stephan Kaufmann: “Most of the community shares stories and friendships far beyond our Swiss borders.” Their larp calendar shows about twenty-something larps (mostly from the German-speaking community) per year.
The pandemic has killed many projects — as everywhere, unfortunately. After the pandemic, the Swiss tried to open as many as they could of the killed projects. With some they succeeded, with others they did not. This is significant because the core of their larp scene is in the form of long larp campaigns.
The larp scene consists of a hard core of around 100 players who go to almost every Swiss larp and who attend meetings such as Stammtisch (irregular social gatherings). There are about 1,100 people in the Larp Schweiz Facebook group, and their very lively Discord counts 200.
Again quoting, “Players from abroad are often part of us if they speak German (Austrians and Germans). You can also participate if you at least understand German and speak German or English.”
Most games in Switzerland are ‘bring your own character’ larps instead of casting and writing characters in advance. Many of their fantasy games are set in one dedicated world, collectively developed.
The world, or rather the country they play in, is called Candara. It was founded around 2010, when a number of organisers with their own world and storyline decided to merge them, to make it easier to play the same character in multiple games and have more games with the same background.
The German-speaking scene, the largest, is just heavily campaign-based, loose and not very mechanical. They claim to draw from the German school, but this is only partly true. German larpers divide in terms of their approach to mechanics and rules — mainly, north and south. There will be a text about this in my article about German larp, but note that the north is less battle-larp-oriented and has more rules, while the south is more battle-larp-oriented and has less rules and mechanics and more DKWDDK (Du kannst, was du darstellen kannst — you can do what you can represent.) So the Swiss are closer to the southern part of German larp.
The French-speaking scene is more chambery and one-shot oriented, more mechanical, structuring its games more strongly.
Most Swiss games include a location with room and board, so a certain set of comforts and an appropriate level of comfort. Purely outdoor, camp-based games are very rare. Which, given their climate, is not surprising.
Again quoting a local larp player, Lorenz:
“The big difference between Swiss larps (the German-speaking part) and French or German larps is the language. We all speak Swiss German, a local dialect that is only understood by our closest German or Austrian neighbours. In the game, ordinary German is spoken (the same German in which we already read and write). So basically, we are playing in a language other than our everyday language all the time. Swiss German is usually used for conversation outside the game during larps. I’ve only been to one game played in Swiss-German and most of the feedback was that people didn’t like it. French and German influences are very evident in Switzerland, with the French-speaking part largely adopting their style and the German-speaking part adopting the German influence.”
The Nordic larp style emerged quite late in Switzerland and is still not very widespread. ‘Nordic’, in the sense that our Polish scene is also Nordic, from their perspective.
A few years ago there was a large Vampire: the Masquerade community in Switzerland, which, as far as I know, is now mainly active on games in Germany, while others have either stopped playing VtM altogether or only do small VtM games.
Curiosities
Swiss people generally tend to have a very laid-back approach to games and avoid difficult topics.
The probably oldest Swiss LARP campaign, Tikon, had around 90 games from 1986 to 2005, set in a fantasy caliphate and was very much in the style of Terry Pratchett.
The community organizes regular offline meetings: every two weeks in Zurich, and also bi-weekly online on Discord. There have also been or currently are meetings in other cities, for example, there was a long-standing Stammtisch in Baden for Vampire: the Masquerade players.
