In the last nearly 20 years that I’ve been participating in multiple larp communities, and been involved in running Intercon, I’ve developed a categorization system for larp communities. I’ve run it by many people, and refined it over the years, but have only now gotten around to writing it down.
Before I begin, I do want to make it clear that this is a categorization system for larp communities, not for larps themselves. Almost all larps contain the three elements that the three types of community each focus on, no matter which community produced them. Also, I’m talking about communities, which are almost always made of people, so nothing can ever be 100% accurate.
The three categories of larp community that will be covered are what I call “Larp as Game”, “Larp as Craft” and “Larp as Transformative Experience”. Again, larps from all three types of community are games, contain craft, and can provide transformative experiences, the difference lies in which aspect the specific community values highest.
Larp as Game
These communities tend to originate from tabletop roleplaying, and are the most common in the United States. To them, the purpose of larp is to be a game, to provide entertainment, engagement. Most big live combat games, Amtgard, Dagorhir, Dystopia Rising, as well as most of the national White Wolf games fall into this category. These larps tend to run in a producer/consumer model, like tabletop RPGs often do, where the people producing content and the people consuming it are separate groups. People are more likely to drop from events before they start, because of the more transactional nature of the community. Larp as Sport I think of as a subset of this category
Larp as Craft
These communities tend to originate from the theatre, and are much less common in the United States. To these communities, larp is primarily a craft, or an art form, and the play of it is a performance or execution of the art itself. Intercon is, as you might expect, my primary example of this kind of community, but there are others in California, Chicago, the Pacific Northwest, and in the Mid-Atlantic regions. In these communities a much higher percentage of people produce larps as well as play them, often giving design feedback or suggestions after play. These communities tend to think of a run of a larp as a performance, and there is a stronger expectation that people who have signed up will attend.
Larp as Transformative Experience
The third type of community are ones that were founded primarily through academia. To them, the purpose of larp is to provide a transformative experience to the player themselves, to actually modify the participant in some way. The American Freeform community is in this model, as is every law school that runs mock trials for prospective lawyers, or organizations that run disaster response drills for first responders. The larps that these communities produce are designed to give the player themselves a new perspective, exposure, or a new set of skills, that they take with them past the end of the game. In some of these communities (mostly the non-commercial ones) many people both produce and play larps as well. For more than I could ever write, please see their own words about this at The Butterfly Effect Manifesto
The Woodworking Analogy
I like to describe these types of communities via loose analogy by replacing ‘larpcraft’ with ‘woodworking’, and imagining a woodworker offering his latest creation:
Larp as Game
Woodworker: “I made a chair”
Consumer/Player: “Thanks, I needed a chair”
Larp as Craft
Woodworker: “I made a chair”
Consumer/Player: “Ooh, I like what you did with the arms! Is that Maple? You know, when I made my last chair, I put in some rods between the middle of the front edge of the seat and the back legs, and that really strengthened the frame a lot, maybe that would work for you?
Larp as Transformative Experience
Woodworker: “I made a chair. It’s designed to correct your posture”
Consumer/Player: “Yep, I do feel better after sitting in that chair”
Cross-community communications
As you might expect, there’s often conflict when people from different communities interact. Because different communities value different things about larp, they will prioritize different aspects. There was a game that ran at Intercon many years ago, by someone who was from a Larp as Game community. After it was over, I asked the GM how it went, and with wide eyes he said “They all wanted to give me feedback! That never happens!”
I’ve seen arguments about if every larp should be accessible to every player, where the disconnect was clearly between Larp as Game and Larp as Craft. The Larp as Game position was that one should always adapt one’s game to make space for a player who wants to play, create a new character, build in a workaround, etc. The Larp as Craft position was that if one has a specific idea for a game, it is okay to produce the game that they have in their head, even if it requires some play that is not accessible to everyone who might want to play it. The example used was a 6 player star trek game about romance played while crawling through in physically constructed 2’x2′ Jefferies tubes. Obviously someone with mobility limitations, or claustrophobia, would have a harder time playing that game. Is it immoral then to write that game and refuse to alter it, because that’s the game that the author has in their head? To people in one community, it clearly is, in the other, it clearly isn’t.
In summary
People are complicated, and don’t actually fall into neat categories. Groups of people do have trends, and it can be helpful to learn those trends and notice where conflict is coming from. Thank you to everyone I’ve attempted to explain this categorization to over the past decade, your feedback has been incredibly useful, and has changed a lot of the details of how I present this. I expect that this will continue to change as I continue to have discussions, and learn more about all the various larp communities out there.
Shadows of Imagination 