Live Action Role Research Articles

Consumer Behavior Analysis and Marketing Strategy Optimization in the Chinese Live Action Role Playing Market

In 2016, a new variety show Whos the Murder appeared, bringing a new form of entertainment: Live Action Role Playing (LARP) game. In 2018-2019, offline LARPs appeared, soon becoming the most popular entertainment method for the Z generation. The paper focuses on the consumers of the LARP market, analyzing their consumption behavior preferences and determining the driving factors of LARP consumption behavior based on existing consumption data. Using the analytical results, the paper can predict the sales of new scripts and help LARP merchants optimize their marketing strategies. The article mainly uses descriptive and predictive analysis (regression model) to study LARPs consumption data collected from the LARP website. The paper finds that difficulty level, duration time, and issue type (price) have a significant influence on consumer behaviors. Also, the paper generates a model for future sales prediction.

Geek girl today, scientist tomorrow? Inclusive experiences and efficacy mediate the link between women's engagement in popular geek culture and STEM career interest

ABSTRACT Evidence suggests that participating in geek pop culture (e.g. fandoms, digital gaming, live action role playing, board gaming, etc.) can enhance women's interest in STEM by increasing their STEM-related efficacy. This study proposed that this effect hinges on the type of social experiences that women have in geek culture. Inclusive experiences were expected to enhance STEM-related efficacy, while experiences of hostile sexism in these spaces were expected to diminish STEM-related efficacy. An online survey of both U.S. MTurk users (N = 77) and undergraduate students (N = 172) under the age of 30 demonstrated that inclusive experiences and STEM-related efficacy does serially mediate the effect of geek culture engagement on interest in STEM careers. A second model examining the indirect effect of geek engagement on STEM career interest through hostile sexism and STEM-efficacy was not significant. These findings underscore the broader implications of creating a welcoming environment for women in geek culture. They also suggest that women who experience hostile sexism in geek culture and continue to participate might have a general tolerance of toxic geek masculinity.

Interventions in Intersectionality: Exploring Fantastical World-building to Investigate Feminist and Anti-racist Strategies

This article explores the asymmetrical treatment of race and gender, critiquing the conflation of these categories under the intersectional concept of “identity.” I conducted a three-year ethnography of the “live action role play” (LARP) community to explore this asymmetry. I found that Live Action Role Players (LARPers) consciously abandoned gender roles but were deeply invested in creating racial categories to make games “feel real.” When creativity is paramount, what makes for this differential treatment? I identified key distinctions in how these categories were conceived, embodied, and enforced. I found that LARPers engaged in collective negotiations to maintain a homogenous understanding of fictional racial categories. When players deviated, they were coerced back into uniform embodiment. These categories often drew on existing racial stereotypes, using “real world flavor.” When participants attempted anti-racist interventions, conversations shifted from confronting racism to “understanding race.” Conversely, LARPers framed gender as a self-determined choice that should have no impact on the gaming experience. Gender performance was welcome but not predetermined. This led to greater gender inclusion and effective anti-sexist interventions. Accordingly, the “both/and” framing of identity—authentic self-navigating society—is an empowering model for gender as it legitimizes autonomous choice. However, when applied to race it risks obfuscating the collective practices that fortify racism. Intersectional theorists must abandon efforts to draw similarities between race and gender. Instead, intersectional research must identify the ways in which sexism and racism persist and compound. The confrontation of racecraft is a necessary first step in developing more robust solutions.

Role-Playing Games and Well-Being

Do role-playing games (RPGs) affect the player’s well-being? Several studies suggest that they might have an impact, but the topic of RPGs and well-being is usually only mentioned as a side note or curiosity. A clear, coherent picture on the topic of RPGs and well-being is missing. This review article aims to provide that picture by compiling the already existing knowledge in one place. I ask the questions: What can we learn from the already existing research? How should RPGs and well-being be studied? What questions need resolving? What can be gained from studying RPGs and well-being?
 RPG studies is a young academic interdisciplinary field of research, as is also the research of arts and well-being. They both are heterogeneous and related to a variety of academic traditions. They both are also dispersed, pragmatic, and until recently, scattered and lacking cohesive traditions or methodologies. Many basic ontological questions remain unsolved and the definitions of key concepts vary. They overlap in several discourses, such as the ones about (1) practices of sociodrama and replication therapy; (2) social, cultural, and digital capital; (3) leisure time research; (4) performance studies; (5) the topic of erotic role-play; (6) problematic vs. therapeutic gaming; and (7) health education. Previous research and practices focus mainly on live action role play (larp) and well-being, suggesting a positive impact. Online RPGs share their own traditions, but studies on tabletop RPGs and well-being are difficult to find. The studies are often case-studies or examine abstract topics such as human experiences.
 In these studies, it becomes evident that RPGs do indeed impact well-being. However, questions such as how, why, and what features in RPGs affect well-being remain unanswered. In addition, the research has mainly been executed from the perspective of either RPGs or arts and well-being. Interdisciplinary cooperation is the key to successfully diving into the world of RPGs and well-being. Doing so would offer both fields useful practices, interesting perspectives, new opportunities for publication and academic discussion. It would not only add knowledge about RPGs and well-being but offer perspective to the unresolved ontological questions of each field. Eventually, further study on RPGs and well-being could transfer into the usage of RPGs in the fields of well-being, health, and therapy in a similar manner that arts are currently being used.

Playable Personas: Using Games and Play to Expand the Repertoire of Learner Personas

This article explores how playing and co-creating games in higher education contexts contributes to expanding learner personas and facilitating a multimodal learning experience. Working from the interdisciplinary perspectives of media/games studies, pedagogy, and linguistic anthropology, we conceptualize in-class learning as the making and playing of games, reporting on game experiments and playful practices targeted at learning key theoretical concepts in our disciplines. Game-based modifications to established educational practices involved: replacing lectures with Educational Live Action Role Play (Bowman 2014) sessions, using acting/performance games (Flanagan 2009) to critically reflect on ideas of community and collective identity, and introducing Twine (Werning 2017; Wilson & Saklofske 2019) to defamiliarize the expected structures and media modalities of academia. Based on evidence from participant reflections and classroom ethnographies, we argue that games can serve as a resource for extending the expressive spectrum of learner personas, for enabling embodied, participatory learning of theory, and for empowering students and educators to reflect on our internalized rules of the game of education.

More than a Game: Racecraft and the Adaptation of “Race” in Live Action Role Play

Live action role players make the imaginative worlds of tabletop games manifest through collaborative storytelling and embodied play. Escaping the everyday, these communities could radically reimagine culture and challenge oppressive ideologies. Instead, they are deeply invested in essentializing “race”. I conducted a three-year ethnographic study alongside 20 semi-structured interviews to explore racecraft in live action role play. Supporting the groundbreaking work of Karen and Barbara Fields, I find that racecraft is a social process—continually negotiated and maintained through intimate interactions and community exchanges. Through this process, the definition of “race” is continually adapted while belief in this category remains entrenched. When participants confront racist stereotypes, practitioners coerce marginalized members into a false exchange. These members are encouraged to share experiences detailing the damage of problematic representations. Practitioners then reduce these experiences to monolithic understandings of “race”. In this insidious manner, anti-racist confrontations become fodder for racecraft. Complicating this further, patterned racism is characterized as an inborn quality of whiteness, minimizing practitioners’ accountability. Responsibility is then shifted onto marginalized participants and their willingness to engage in “racial” education. This trap is ingrained in the double standard of racism, adapting “race” such that whiteness is unrestricted by the monolithic definitions applied to those outside this category.

Walory edukacyjno – terapeutyczne gier fabularnych - metaanaliza

Teza: Artykuł porusza kwestię wykorzystywania gier fabularnych (ang. RPG - Role Playing Game) w procesie edukacyjnym, ale także terapeutycznym. Autor dąży do zestawienia aktualnych danych krajowych i zagranicznych na ten temat. Podstawowym założeniem, jakie jest motywem przewodnim artykułu jest analiza procesu dydaktycznego pod kątem wartości doświadczenia własnego i spontanicznej aktywności.
 Omówione koncepcje: Zaprezentowane badania pochodzą z praktyki pedagogicznej lub terapeutycznej wykorzystującej gry fabularne. Różnorodność tej rozrywki sprawia, że niektóre z prac skupiają się na aspekcie klasycznych gier RPG, inne zaś bardziej na teatralnych grach fabularnych (ang. LARP - Live Action Role Play), często w uproszczonej formie gier dramowych.
 Wyniki i wnioski: Zasadność używania gier fabularnych w edukacji opiera się na wartości doświadczenia własnego oraz wyciągania z niego wniosków, które pełni istotną funkcję w procesie nauczania. Uczestnictwo całym sobą w grze osadzonej w realiach historycznych lub z użyciem języka obcego, znacząco podnosi poziom zaangażowania uczniów oraz jakość ich przemyśleń. Jednocześnie wielu badaczy zwraca uwagę na trudności metodologiczne w ustaleniu rzeczywistej efektywności gier RPG jako metody nauczania. Pojawiające się w badaniach refleksje autorów zmierzają do wspólnego stanowiska, mówiącego, że zarówno brak rzetelnych badań dotyczących gier fabularnych, jak również olbrzymia schematyczność obecna w polskim kształceniu sprawiają, iż szerokie stosowanie gier różnego typu w trakcie lekcji wciąż pozostaje pojawiającą się sporadycznie ciekawostką, nie uznawaną za wartościową metodę.
 Wartość poznawcza podejścia: Praca ma charakter zestawiający polskie opracowania z zagranicznymi i dokonuje porównania tych badań, co prowadzi do stosunkowo krytycznych wniosków dotyczących stanu polskiej edukacji i myślenia o istotności osobistego doświadczenia zarówno w nauce, jak i procesie terapeutycznym.
 Słowa kluczowe: gry fabularne, RPG, LARP, CRPG, edukacja, terapia, uczenie się przez doświadczenie.

O LARP COMO FERRAMENTA DE TRABALHO DO ATOR/PERFORMER

Esse artigo propõe uma pesquisa sobre larp (sigla de Live Action Role Playing Game), uma expressividade artística contemporânea com forte presença nos países escandinavos e trazida ao Brasil nos últimos anos, e sua relação com a performatividade de artistas cênicos de outras áreas, com especial atenção o teatro. Abordando o conceito de performatividade, traçamos uma relação entre o larp e a atuação/performance, e analisamos como algumas concepções do encenador Constantin Stanislavski podem estar relacionadas ao larp. Por fim, procuramos entender como a prática de diferentes jogos - produtos da arte do larp - podem auxiliar o ator/performer no exercício de seu trabalho.

Embedding virtual environments into the physical world: memorability and co-presence in the context of pervasive location-based games

Realistic 3D virtual environments, such as existing city models, have the potential to be used in pervasive games as a passageway between physical and virtual. Smooth attention displacement and transitions between these two realities are largely unexplored in the context of pervasive gameplay. We conducted two field trials using a pervasive live action role playing game to study the effect moving between the virtual and the physical has on co-presence and memorability. Although differences in co-presence during gameplay were small, they highlight the subtleties in the social structuring of pervasive gameplay. Spatial similarity between the physical and virtual environments made the 3D virtual environments more memorable. We identify two important issues to consider in embedding virtual environments into pervasive games: structuring of social interactions and the spatial realism of the VEs.

Live Action Role Play: Transmediality, Narrativity and Markers of Subjectivity

This work frames larp as a multimodal medium: based on live-action role-playing but also open for inclusions of other media and technologies. It is approached as a narrative medium, used for performative and participatory cocreation of dynamic storyworlds. The emergent story is experienced by the full sensorium of the players’ bodies and simultaneously uses the bodies as a medium of representation. Players combine the roles of authors, actors, characters, and audience. In its prototypical model, larp strives for a high degree of perceptual unity between player and character and prefers iconic representation via live action and live acting, with lesser importance of indexical and symbolic signification. This study reaches for J.-N. Thon’s (2014, 2016) typology of forms of representation of character’s subjective perception in film, graphic novels, and video games, and applies it to live-action role-playing. The fundamental difference lies in the ‘firstperson audience’ (Sandberg 2004; Stenros & Montola 2010) mode of participation in larp. Unlike the audiovisual media discussed by Thon, in which it is intersubjective perception that comes unmarked, larp by default is experienced from a subjective spatial point of view. The first-person audience mode makes it hardly possible to switch to (quasi-)perceptual overlay, and to ever leave subjective spatial point of view, unless some of the prototypical principles of larp are broken. By contrast, representations of (quasi-)perceptual point of view and of imagined internal worlds are possible, although with some danger of unwanted metaleptic contact with another character’s delusions. For this and other reasons, larp has limitations in the use of simultaneous content markers and representational markers of subjectivity, whereas contextual content markers and all narratorial markers present no difficulty. The paper adds one category to Thon’s framework: symbolic markers, which are based on a pre-established code of arbitrary signs and are used to regulate the active agency or perception of the audience, e.g. a player’s gesture marking off-game status of the character, or movement from the main game area into a metaroom used for role-playing internal worlds. The overall discussion compares medium-specific affordances of live-action role-playing, which are fairly limited in representing subjectivity, to the affordances of larp as a multimodal genre, able to include many other forms of live, recorded and digitally mediated representation.

Larp sem fronteiras: um estudo sobre como os territórios ocupados palestinos refletem nas práticas lúdicas em diferentes países

This study aims, through bibliographical research and ethnographic reporting, to discuss the concept of border within the larps (live action role play) developed by Palestinians and executed in countries such as Brazil and Finland, in addition to the State of Palestine itself, either through writtings by other participants and through reflections from participation. Although it is an article in the field of Communication, we seek an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, with particular emphasis on Mircea Eliade (Science of Religion), Carl Jung, Jacob Moreno and Donald Winnicott (Psychology), Johan Huizinga (Game Studies), in the scope of embrace the complexity of the theme. Among the findings of our course, we highlight that larp could be seen as a transient inter-place, a space for dialogue between self and other, between imaginary and concrete, between subjective and objective. Because of this, it is evident an environment that favors the emergence of communicational processes among the participants.Keywords: Communication. Imaginary. Borders. Palestine. Larp

Harun Farocki, Serious Games III (Immersion) (Review)

Immersion is the third of four documentaries by Harun Farocki that explores the use of video games in the U.S. military. The first film demonstrates training software in which a young soldier called Watson is killed; the second, a live action role play training exercise; the third, virtual reality (VR) immersion therapy; and the final film compares these pre- and post-war simulated environments side by side. The demonstration of the virtual reality software Virtual Iraq employed in Farocki’s film Immersion will be reviewed here.

Live Action Role Play and the Development of Teacher Competences: Evaluation of “Everyday Life in the Classroom”

Building on Dörner’s (1996) theory of complex problem-solving, a learning scenario for teacher students was created and tested. Classroom management is interpreted as a complex problem, which requires the integration of competing interests and tackling multiple, simultaneous tasks under time pressure and with limited information. In addition, rising emotions are likely to impede thinking and the quality of decision-making. To prepare student teachers to understand and reflect the complex problem-solving challenges inherent in classroom management, we developed the live action role play “Everyday Life in the Classroom” which was embedded in a seminar structure to guide the development of analytical competences and emotion regulation of prospective teachers. In two pilot studies, we found that Everyday Life in the Classroom was perceived to be authentic and helpful for learning. Preliminary findings suggest that the intended learning processes have been stimulated. We propose developing Everyday Life in the Classroom further and investigating the scope and sustainability of learning psychology through live action role play.

Epic Glory and Manhood Acts in Fantasy Role-Playing

Based on a yearlong observational study of participants in a “Live Action Role Playing” group called “Dagorhir,” using the manhood acts perspective, we focus on how masculinity is constructed among low-status, subordinate men who self-define as “nerds.” We demonstrate that through fantasy role-playing, men are given opportunities to increase their group status, while women are typically relegated to subordinate positions. Increasing status in Dagorhir involved a type of self-enhancement strategy that we termed “epic glory,” which positioned men as social dominants. Epic glory was earned through training activities, at Dagorhir events, and through simulating dramatic death scenes. Such actions served as a performance of masculinity that was not possible for these men outside the role-playing experience. Importantly, women were excluded from many of the opportunities to enact epic glory, which helped reproduce inequalities both among males and between males and females participating in the events.

The Imaginary World as a Motive of Craft Making and a Way of Dressing Up

This article focuses on communities of live action role players and specifically on their handicrafts-related activities. The participants create costumes and artifacts for an imaginary character, and the process of dressing up is an essential part of the ritual. Through their imagined characters, they both construct a new personality and develop their handicrafts identity. The research material includes text excerpts from discussion forums, interviews with enthusiasts, video and photographic materials, and questionnaires. The materials are collected mainly from the members of the Finnish live action role playing association Suomen live roolipelaajat ry and from an association for reviving medieval culture, Elävä Keskiaika ry. The analysis indicates that the handicrafts activities can be interpreted through three distinct frames. The first of these is the Experience Frame, which highlights the very idea of the recreational activity in question. The second, the Skills Frame, demonstrates the enthusiasts’ (hereafter also termed buffs) versatile arts and crafts skills. The final frame is the Network Frame, which is significant with regard to the actual making of handicrafts in that these groups utilize new media in the process. Furthermore, the costumes and artifacts crafted by the participants constitute a significant visual dimension for the audiences of the events.

Constructing of Group Identity During Live-Action Role Playing Games

A LARP, or live-action role-playing game, is an activity enabling participants to act out their fictional characters in a make-believe world. It has followers all over the world. Research for this article was conducted in Moscow and St. Petersburg LARP communities, establishing a database with over 600 cases of “going out of character” in 2012-13. Analysis suggests that in certain cases breaks of game frame can enrich a LARP for its participants rather than spoil it. The results can be useful for enhancing sociological and anthropological understanding, including in such approaches as interaction analysis, community building research, game studies, and ludology.

An Exploratory Study on Simulated Teaching as Experienced by Education Students

Empirical research has shown that simulated teaching could be one of the most powerful tools in preparing college education students for a solid field teaching experience. With the right function and mechanics, this pedagogy can equip students with the necessary teaching skills, aptitudes and competencies. Using a 30-item Likert-type Perceptions Scale on Simulated Teaching this 3- year exploratory study examined 352 undergraduate education students' perceptions on their simulated teaching experience wrapped in a live action role play. The study, anchored on the model-centered instruction, transfer of learning and embodied cognition theories further probed into their beliefs, attitudes and responses in the course of the immersion process. Results showed that majority of the respondents strongly believed they should be exposed to teaching prior to practicum and agreed that early training could develop their competence in teaching. They showed a highly positive attitude towards simulated teaching as an effective way to acquire and apply both content and skills in teaching and learning. Based on the findings, it may be concluded that when simulated teaching functions under conditions such as clear goals, guidelines, proper mentoring and guidance from teachers, students are then able to unlock and develop their potentials and prepare for every issue they will face in their practicum stage. The study further confirms a long-held principle that prolonged practice builds expertise.

Museums as Gameworlds: The Use of Live Action Role Playing Games in Greek Museums

Museums as Gameworlds: The Use of Live Action Role Playing Games in Greek Museums