Hello! All this week Eurogamer is celebrating Pride with a series of stories examining the confluence of LGBT+ communities and play in its many different forms, from video games and tabletop games through to live-action role-play. Today, Evan offers an introduction to the ever-expanding queer larping scene.
Live-action role-play (larp) is often associated with people in fantasy outfits swinging foam swords, or gothed-out college students pretending they’re vampires on weekend nights. But in a modern society saturated in genre fiction and also weirdly restrictive on what we might do with our bodies, larp is also much cooler than you think. This global entertainment medium transcends mere “entertainment”: it helps us try out new identities and maybe keep a few bits of what we’ve tried. Those of us who larp must also engage with queerness and, might I add, everyone should at least try larping.
At the 2019 Intercon S convention, “the premiere multi-genre LARP convention in the world”, a friend came up to me, dripping with sweat. “The room was full,” they said in disbelief. “Just wall-to-wall queer larpers. There are so many of us now.” My friend was referring to a meetup for LGBTQ-identifying larpers at a North American convention that, only a short time ago, required special content warnings for larp events containing “queer romance.”
In the 1990s Nordic larp scene, a running joke was that there were only four out gay or lesbian larpers among them, each from the respective countries that constituted the scene back then: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. By contrast, at the 2018 Knutpunkt Nordic larp conference held in Lund, Sweden, there were so many LGBTQ-identifying larpers that whole separate queer men/non-binary and women/non-binary room parties took place (and were full), as well as several talks, events, and group chats.
Where did all these queer people come from, and why do they now larp?
In the past 40 years, larp has gone from a medium of numerous niche subcultures around the world to a household word, and being out as queer in the larp scene has recently and rapidly become the social norm.
Media portrayals ranging from the 2003 Ogre Battle “Lightning Bolt!” video to glossy coverage of the popular College of Wizardry magic-school larp introduced the medium and subculture to mainstream audiences. One could get the impression that larp is part cosplay, part “let’s pretend!”, and part renaissance faire. Larp designers now apply their talents to a range of derivative forms, many of which you no doubt recognise: escape rooms, immersive theatre, virtual reality chat, live-action online games (LAOGs), and social media role-play. A recent strain in journalistic usage of the term “larp” connects it with politically vocal individuals dressing up as and pretending to be something they’re not.