Ex.2: What is cultural significance of Live Action Role-Playing game subculture?

Role-playing may be seen as part of a movement in Western culture towards participatory arts, as opposed to traditional spectator arts. Participants in a LARP cast off the role of passive observer, and take on new roles that are often outside of their daily life and contrary to their culture. The arrangers of a LARP and the other participants act as co-creators of the game. This collaborative process of creating shared fictional worlds may be associated with a broader burgeoning “geek” culture in developed societies that is in turn associated with prolonged education, high uptake of information technology and increased leisure time. In comparison to the mainstream video-game industry which is highly commercialized and chiefly marketed towards “hardcore gamers” with an adolescent male sensibility, LARP is less commoditized and women actively contribute as authors and participants.

All LARP games take place within an agreed upon theme or narrative setting that provides the context for players’ actions and character roles. This theme can be pretty much anything you can imagine; the possibilities are inexhaustible. To give some obvious and common examples, it may be fantasy and involve magic, heroes, and fantastic creatures, much like the game world settings of the classic tabletop role-playing games. Or, it may be realistic, based on historic events or contemporary life. Or it can be futuristic post apocalyptic environments, involving mutants and cyborgian characters dwelling in deserted cities. Or, it can be any combination of these.

Theatre-style or freeform LARP is characterised by a focus on interaction between characters that are written by the gamemasters, not using simulated weapons for combat, and an eclectic approach to genre and setting. Some very large events known as fests (short for festival) have hundreds or thousands of participants who are usually split into competing character factions camped separately around a large venue. There are relatively few fests in the world, all based in Europe and Canada, however their size means that they have a significant influence on local LARP culture and design. Language classes can also be taught by immersing students in a role-playing scenario in which they are forced to improvise speech or writing in the language they are learning. Politically-themed LARP events may attempt to awaken or shape political thinking within a culture. An example is a World War II-themed LARP event that was run in Russia and Belarus with the intention of providing Russian and Belarusian youth with new perspectives on the place of civic courage and patriotism in their modern society. In Russia Middle Age-themed LARP events are very popular and they are organized by local military patriotic clubs.

LARP is not well known in most countries and is sometimes confused with other role-playing, reenactment, costuming, or dramatic activities. While fan and gamer culture in general has become increasingly mainstream in developed countries, LARP has often not achieved the same degree of cultural acceptability. This may be due to intolerance of the resemblance to childhood games of pretend, a perceived risk of over-identification with the characters, and the absence of mass marketing. In the Nordic countries, LARP has achieved a high level of public recognition and popularity. It is often shown in a positive light in mainstream media, with an emphasis on the dramatic and creative aspects. However, even in Norway where LARP has greater recognition than in most other countries, it has still not achieved full recognition as a cultural activity by government bodies.

Communities have formed around the creation, play and discussion of LARP. These communities have developed a subculture that crosses over with role-playing, fan, reenactment, and drama subcultures. Early LARP subculture focused on Tolkien-like fantasy, but it later broadened to include appreciation of other genres, especially the horror genre with the rapid uptake of the World of Darkness setting in the 1990s. Like many subcultures, LARP groups often have a common context of shared experience, language, humour, and clothing that can be regarded by some as a lifestyle.

LARP is increasingly the subject of academic research and theory. Much of this research originates from role-players, especially from the publications of the Nordic Knutepunkt role-playing conventions. The broader academic community has recently begun to study LARP as well, both to compare it to other media and other varieties of interactive gaming, and also to evaluate it in its own right. Because LARPs involve a controlled artificial environment within which people interact, they have sometimes been used as research tools to test theories in social fields such as economics or law. For example, LARP has been used to study the application of game theory to the development of criminal law.