‘It’s all wizards and elves, right? Dungeons & Dragons stuff?’ Such is the general response when you mention larp, or live-action role-play — the peculiarly Scandi pastime that conjures up images of people dressed up in the forest play-fighting with sticks. Well, they wouldn’t be completely wrong. It’s a weird world and with the help of artists it’s becoming even weirder.
In the past few years, larp has become more visible in mainstream culture. And in Britain, it has noticeably begun to infiltrate the art world, becoming popular among artists interested in the potential of play.
Major institutions such as Tate, the V&A and Serpentine Galleries have worked with artists who view larp as a solution to the longstanding issues of how to make ‘participatory’ art actually participatory. Artists such as Adam James and Hamish MacPherson in their instruction-less, non-verbal larp 🌳✋🔦 , drop players into a black box full of strange objects, where everything is worked out through touch, sound and sight alone.
Others like Brody Condon, Ed Fornieles and Jon Rafman are influenced by larp as a form of simulation; in the larp Level Five Condon recreated the mass self-improvement seminars that swept America in the 1970s. In January, London will host the second edition of The Smoke, an annual international larp festival. But what exactly is larp, and where does it come from?
Like Dungeons & Dragons but IRL, larp is a role-playing game in which a group of participants assume characters within a fictional setting authored by a larpwriter or gamemaster. Within the parameters devised by the larpwriter and set out in a ‘larp script’, the players perform the actions of their characters and co-create a fiction without a predetermined plot or outcome.
A larp isn’t scripted in any traditional sense, and instead relies heavily on player improvisation, facilitated by the gamemaster.
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