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Paper Short Abstract

In theorising fun and play, it can be useful to experience playfulness. Based on workshops run for a live action role playing (LARP) community in Melbourne, Australia, this presentation invites attendees to participate in and reflect on a movement activity: an experiential offering to think with.

Paper Abstract

Live Action Role Playing (LARP) games involve players dressing up and inhabiting a character and their world, embodying that character for the duration of a LARP event (see: Harviainen et al 2018). Role playing events are not sustained exclusively by LARP events, however, but by communities of role players committed to the enterprise of playing characters: a play community (see: De Koven 2013 [1983]). LARP is an activity that makes its participants vulnerable. The narrative situations in LARP can involve interpersonal conflicts as a source of dramatic yet playful action, and as such role playing communities go to great lengths to create play that is safe and consensual (Maersk et al 2019; Brown 2017). As part of my ethnographic fieldwork with role players in Australia I participated in and then organised LARP games. As an organiser, I ran three workshops with between forty and eighty role players in the lead up to a three day LARP event. The workshops my organising team and I ran were aimed at building a play community by inviting role players to embody a set of play principles that could undergird their role playing activities during the three days of play. In this short workshop, I will speak a little about the vulnerable fun of LARP, followed by running a movement exercise from our LARP workshops. The exercise will be followed by a reflexive discussion with participants. Consider this a playful offering for further theorising.