Larp Festivals as Democratic Spaces

This report is the first deliverable from Work Package 5: Design of Spaces for Human Encounter in the Horizon Europe funded research project Larpocracy. It lays the foundations for our research on larp festivals and larp conventions as democratic spaces and describes the first stages in the development of a forthcoming toolbox supporting the experience design of participatory cultural events. In this first report, we map out the context and form of larp festivals and conventions, consider how “democracy” in the context of in-person events can be understood and modelled, and discuss the design of participatory experiences – including the design of participation itself – as it is understood within the design movement known as Nordic larp. 

The goal of our research project, of which this report covers the first year of work, is twofold. We seek evidence-based tools for strengthening democratic culture at larp-cultural events, and to give guidance for how these can be applied in other co-creative and/or participatory contexts. In line with the wider Larpocracy project, this could include e.g. participatory democracy, civic participation, or civil-society organisations in and beyond the cultural sector. 

This report does not present results, any completed theoretical model, nor indeed practical recommendations, although our preliminary analyses, when taken all together, suggest interesting directions. Larp (live-action role-playing) as an expression is relatively young and while the form itself is relatively well understood, phenomena and cultures connected to it have not been systematically studied or in most cases even properly documented. This is also the case for larp festivals and conventions, the connected and partly overlapping event types that we study. 

This report discusses how to understand larp festivals (showcases of multiple short-form larps) as arts festivals and why drawing a line between them and conference-style larp conventions is not straightforward. Our academic research is focused on larp festivals and conventions in the Nordics, situated here in a wider international context, but always focusing volunteer-run non-profit events. We trace the history of larp conventions and the closely related role-playing conventions back to the literary science fiction fandom convention that originated in the United States in the 1930s and describe their variety today. 

Analysing their functions, we suggest that larp festivals and conventions – and their co-creating participant communities – be understood as sites both of play and cultural co-creation, and of processes both developing and legitimising the cultural forms they centre. We argue that larp festivals and conventions are sometimes cultural institutions, and always part of a cultural public sphere. They commission new works and support their circulation; are loci for artistic work, criticism, academic study, and publication activities; and offer models for cultural production and centre formation with no or limited public investment, yet outside the commercial marketplace. Larp festivals and conventions are places for being and thinking different: for experimentation with, transformation through, and participation in alternative models, identities, communities, and ways of being. 

We review a range of theoretical approaches to democratic spaces, arriving at a multi-perspectival understanding of democratic space as a site of communication, contestation, power, capital, and the social production of spaces and subjectivities, while also foregrounding networks of care, embodied play, and alternative temporalities. Larp festivals and conventions are described as actors in society, as volunteer productions, as experienced by their participants, as arenas of democratic imagination, and as conduits of democratic imaginaries into the public sphere. For each of these approaches, relevant research directions are suggested as wider context for our own ongoing work, which is also sketched out. 

The final section of the report discusses the practice of experience design; how it is understood in the Nordic larp design community; how we hypothesise that these design practices may be shaping the larp-cultural events we study; and briefly our ongoing work to both document design practices and evaluate their outcomes. Core concepts from participation-focused experience design illustrate how every aspect of an experience can enable or hamper the participant’s sense of agency, ownership, and belonging. 

Looking ahead, fieldwork results will help us iterate on models of democratic participatory spaces as well as of their design. Conceptual tools from Nordic larp are at minimum pedagogically useful for understanding of how physical and social environments interact. At best, they may provide a basic framework for a design language for human participation.