LARP practice: Live action role-playing in Canada (Photo by Vince Talotta/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
Who would have guessed that a weekend hobby for outdoorsy nerds could spawn an era-defining political metaphor?
LARP, or live action role-playing, is an offshoot of the fantasy roleplaying subculture. It involves dressing up in costume and acting out a fantasy-fiction game narrative in real time and space, sometimes over several days. A witty friend once characterised the experience as something akin to ‘cross-country pantomime’.
Thanks to lockdown, no one’s LARPing this year — at least not in the cross-country pantomime sense. But the word ‘LARP’ has escaped into the wild: far from being the preserve of fantasy fans, I’ve noticed it appearing with increasing frequency in political discourse.
When riot police finally pushed activists out of the Chapel Hill Autonomous Zone following the murder of one joyriding teenager and serious wounding of another by CHAZ ‘security’, resistance to the advancing riot shields was so paltry it prompted contemptuous accusations of ‘revolutionary larping’. Weird Christian Twitter (it’s a thing) hosts arguments where people are accused of larping more traditionalist theologies than they truly espouse. Still further out on the fringes, the QAnon conspiracy rabbit hole (don’t go there) is fiercely defended by its True Believers against accusations that it is, in fact, a bunch of people LARPing.
Around the time my friends were discovering LARP, I got into LARP’s Very Online cousin, Alternate Reality Gaming (ARGs). An artefact of the age before Facebook and Twitter colonised most of the internet, ARGs are a hybrid of online treasure hunt, mystery story, and live-action immersive theatre. The first mass-participation ARG was a promotional stunt for the 2001 film AI, and featured a series of fiendish clues for participants to crack and follow, which unlocked further elements of story including live-action segments.
For a moment in the mid-Noughties, ARGs looked like the future of storytelling. The idea of internet communities over-writing stable systems of meaning with playful new narratives that danced back and forth between the web and real world felt refreshing and subversive. With hindsight, though, the phenomenon was just a more-than-usually-creative moment in a widespread unmooring of reality that’s been under way for decades.
It’s not all the fault of the internet. In 1955, the philosopher J L Austin developed a theory of ‘performative’ language: that is, language that does something to reality in the act of being spoken. ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ is an example of performative speech — words that effect change through the act of being spoken.
Then, in 1993, the queer theorist Judith Butler borrowed the concept of ‘performative’ language wholesale and applied it to sex and gender, arguing that the identities ‘man’ and ‘woman’ — along with the bodies and biologies associated with those identities — are performative. In taking these roles on, Butler claimed, we make them real.
While these ideas pre-date mass adoption of the internet, the notion that we participate in creating our own realities has been wildly accelerated by social media. Online, it’s easy to get the impression that we can reinvent ourselves entirely, independent of our bodies or other dull ‘meatspace’ constraints. Unsurprisingly, Butler’s conception of sex and gender as performance has long since escaped the petri dish of academia and, like the concept of LARPing, is evolving rapidly in the wild.
Strikingly, the word ‘performative’ has also mutated. Today, it isn’t used as Butler did, to mean “a performance that shapes reality”, but the opposite: an insincere performance for social kudos. So, for example, celebrity endorsements of social justice orthodoxies are often accused of being ‘performative’. It means much the same as ‘larping’, but with an added payload of cynicism. So where ‘LARPing’ means “playacting at something you wish you were”, ‘performative’ means “playacting at something you don’t really believe”.
Meanwhile, the LARP is no longer confined to cheery camping trips accessorised with pretend armour. Back in the noughties, online communities refactoring reality to fit a fantasy storyline felt like a fun game, but as I stare into the sucking void of the QAnon conspiracy, that perspective now seems hopelessly naïve. It’s not a game today: it’s how we do politics.
Liberal commentators spend a great deal of energy trying to explain why this is bad. Countless writers ‘fact-check’ Trump’s bloviations, seemingly unaware that from the perspective of reality-as-ARG, the fact that Trump is lying doesn’t matter. Nor does it really matter whether QAnon is real or not. Reality is, to a great extent, beside the point.
Laurie Penny got closer to the truth in this 2018 piece, where she characterises the very notion of a ‘marketplace of ideas’ as being a kind of LARP: “a Classical fever-dream of a society where pedigreed intellectuals freely exchange ideas in front of a respectful audience”. The reality, she argues, is that this ‘marketplace of ideas’ is less free, rational exchange than dick-swinging theatre.
Those who like to imagine this pessimistic perspective is new, wholly the fault of the Orange Man (or perhaps Facebook), should recall the words of an unnamed aide to George W Bush, quoted in 2004 on the relationship between facts, reality and the military invasion of Iraq:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works any more,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Though his approach was less overtly hubristic, Tony Blair’s embrace of spin reflected a similar belief in his own ability to manipulate public narratives. ‘Political communications’ has only grown in significance since those days, and taken a self-referential turn. Today it’s as common for commentators to criticise a politician for performing badly at a presser — for poor-quality larping, or bad theatre in Penny’s formulation — as for saying things that are immoral or factually wrong.
Donald Trump is distinct from George W Bush not so much in disdaining facts as in lacking the religious conviction Bush deployed to fill in the gaps left behind by their disregard. But both, in different ways, embodied or embody the idea that what you believe is what is. If you LARP hard enough, this view says, your larp will come true.
Boris Johnson’s administration has something of the same cavalier attitude to the relationship between facts and rhetoric. To date, the handling of coronavirus has routinely over-promised and under-delivered, while seeming indifferent to the disorienting effect on public life of a string of announcements only very loosely tethered to everyday experience.
It’s not a coincidence that this larpification of politics has evolved in tandem with a public fixation on ‘evidence-based policy’. The political polarity of absolute LARP — blatant political lying — and absolute insistence on evidence are two sides of the same loss of faith in a common understanding of reality.
If you’re not convinced, consider SAGE, the government’s scientific advisory committee. Then consider ‘Independent SAGE’, a kind of counter-SAGE comprising scientists every bit as eminent as those on SAGE. This august body produces its own carefully evidence-based reports, which are then used as a foundation from which to disagree with whatever positions the Tories choose to adopt from official SAGE.
Who do we believe? That’s politics. If the Brexit debate hadn’t already killed your faith in ‘the evidence’, the competing claims of SAGE and counter-SAGE should be the death-blow. There is no dispassionate foundation of facts we can deploy to take the politics out of political decisions. The original LARPers might have a fun weekend, then pack up and go back to their normal lives; but in its political sense, there’s no outside to the game. It’s larping all the way down.
Some parts of our culture are coping better with this shift than others. Among the worst performers, to my eye, are mainstream liberals of both left and right. Many have responded to the larpification of everything by concluding that in losing objectivity we’ve lost reality. Some then imagine they can make reality whatever they want it to be by sheer force of will (the Trump/Bush approach). Others suggest we can fix things by supplying enough facts to prove whatever we already believed (the SAGE/counter-SAGE approach). Others, such as Laurie Penny, try to refuse to play.
But we haven’t lost reality, just the fixed vantage point we pretended we had from which to evaluate it. What we have instead is a kind of reality-shaping free-for-all, and there’s no opting out.
As most of us flounder, disoriented, we’re starting to see subcultures adapting. The old story about the Inuit having 50 words for snow is (appropriately) itself probably fake news. But much as a snow-dwelling people might be expected to develop specialist terminology for different types of frozen precipitation, we should understand the emergence of words like ‘larp’ and ‘performative’ as analogous. We’re developing a specialist vocabulary for types of unreality.
We’re also having to find new ways to talk about the reality that, inconveniently, refuses to go away completely. The grim story of the Iraq invasion and its destructive and bloody aftermath gave the lie to Bush’s messianic faith in his capacity to create a new reality to order. Humans still can’t really change sex. And no amount of fiddling the statistics can bring back those people who’ve already died of coronavirus.
The political future turns on our being able to get used to parsing our new Babel for what’s actually happening, and what actually matters. We have to get used to doing this without trying to eliminate the element of LARP (spoiler: can’t be done) or pretending we can abolish reality (ditto).
But there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. If the ground is moving under all our feet now, the way forward is learning how to dance.
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SubscribeThe stranglehold that computer gaming has over the leisure time of certain groups, in particular young men should come as no surprise. They represent worlds of certainty and rules-based control that the real world appears to lack. They give regular emotional highs and hero status is assured with time spent in the game. Contrast that with the real world where none of the above appears to be true. Which would anyone prefer given the choice?
The real world does have rules but they require some knowledge of history and human nature to understand. In buying a used car one can either rely entirely on the veracity of the nicely turned out, smiley salesman or do one’s own research into what common faults to look for in that particular model, how quickly they depreciate, is it overpriced relative to other available examples etc.
In assessing politicians and their motives the same rules apply. Was Jeremy Corbyn a kindly old geezer with wonky glasses who seems harmless enough or a communist sleeper agent intent on dismantling our society and replacing it with a Marxist utopia? The challenge is the same today as it has always been. The really great news is that doing one’s own research and slowly learning to think for oneself is so much more interesting and fulfilling than waiting for the empty cyber worlds of gaming and social media to tell you what to think.
LARP and ARG as much as you want. Then sit down and have a good read.
I love the last sentence. A lot of what’s wrong with the modern world, I think, can be attributed to the fact that many people have given up on reading books!
Very true. Declining concentration spans have affected some people’s ability to read and think things through. Worrying.
I’m always glad to see JL Austin mentioned, if only so I can recall the greatest-ever title for a philosophy book: “Sense and Sensibilia by J Austin”!
But if we are talking about philosophical frameworks to understand this moment, I think that the most useful is Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe. He models fiction as being true in the relevant game of make-believe, like a child making a mud-pie. I can heartily recommend his most famous book, Mimesis as Make-Believe.
In this context, referring to “LARPers” and “performers” is just a popular way of referring to individuals engaged in a game of make-believe. Their actions are valid within that game, so long as they stick to the rules of the game.
This is not purely a coherentist theory of truth, because the make-believe must accord to the fiction’s mapping onto the reality, like the ARGs that Mary refers to. In the mud-pie example, if mud with pebbles in it is a raisin pie in the child’s make-believe, then mud without pebbles cannot be a raisin pie without changing the rules of the game. The rules of the game concern precisely the relating of make-believe entities to real-world objects.
And this relating of make-believe entities to real-world objects is why Walton’s theory of make-believe is so important for resolving the conundrum that Mary ends with:
Working with both the fiction and the reality is exactly what the theory of make-believe is all about.
Thank you very much – that sounds like a book I need. Ordered
You’re welcome!
Humans still can’t really change sex.
Is that because, by definition, one cannot change one’s sex?
Or is it something humans will one day be able to achieve?
Depends how you define “sex”. If it’s just about genes, then retroviral gene therapy could in theory do it, maybe?
You’ve confused evidence and communication of evidence there and appear to be misrepresenting [Independent] SAGE.
Why would the Brexit debate have killed my faith in the evidence? It might’ve killed my faith in the media’s willingness or ability to communicate it but that’s an entirely different matter.
What reason – evidence – do you have to support a claim that either SAGE or Independent SAGE have abandoned basic principles like that? [My “null hypothesis” is that both groups are diligent in their evaluation of the evidence and in their construction of advice based on it. Where SAGE doesn’t publish its advice presumably we don’t even know if there is disagreement, and if there is it could be a reasonable one given the evidence and the uncertainties anyway.]
Actually two people were killed in CHAZ although, all things considered, that is fewer than one might have expected.
I won’t wander that far from human needs, morality and accountability.
Narrative, narratives, narratives (again), immersive, refactoring, trope, parsing. [Sigh.]
Lol. We are back to Simulacra and Simulation again
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/…
and simulation in particular whereby modelling become the new reality.
This is then further complicated by imposing simulacra upon simulation so that we end up modelling simulacra instead of reality.
At this point, the distinction between virtual reality and actual reality becomes harder and harder to discern whereby the virtual is fused with the actual.
Add in sophistry and life becomes very complicated indeed.