All the world’s a larp: how do we stop playing limited roles and open up societal space for darkness and mystery?
What roles do you play in life? In what ways do you desire to include more of the actual depth, darkness, mystery and joy of experience? And what needs to change in society to make that expression possible?
Dark times. The future is looking uncertain, grim, precarious for those who care for life.
One thing that gives me hope is that people seem thoroughly fed up with the roles they’ve been playing.
There is so much closed-hearted darkness, and fighting it requires open-hearted darkness in turn.
Live action role playing (larping) is a fascinating form of play where people are fully immersed in live environments, playing roles in a collective game. It’s a very fulfilling and joyful form of play that asks people to step over some shyness and embarrassment and just be their brilliantly nerdy selves — by allowing themselves the freedom to fully dive into a role in some fantastical world. Anticiplay PhD student Carien Moossdorff studies it, and it’s a powerful form of play for developing skills around worldbuilding and the shaping of institutions. But nowadays larping is a commonly used term and metaphor for playing a role in life as well, and there it has a decidedly negative connotation.
I think the sense that we’re being asked to larp a lot in life is recognizable to pretty much everyone. Life is really fucking strange, sad, joyous, boring, absurd, magical and full of despair at different times. This is true at the personal and collective level. There is a vertigo-inducing question at the heart of life, a mystery that just keeps going deeper and deeper the more we dare to face it.
But our roles in life ask us to ignore most of this depth. We are often asked to larp a version of ourselves that does not hold space for the mind shattering absurdity of being alive.
In the worst contexts we are asked to be small, easily readable, easily marketable. In many other situations, however, the larping is more habitual. We could probably show more of ourselves, it would probably be appreciated at least by some people, but we just don’t end up doing it. Maybe the versions of ourselves we are playing are truthful, but still incomplete. We may do this for very good and constructive reasons. And Carien has pointed out to me, drawing on Goffman’s work, that whenever we are in a social situation, we should acknowledge that role playing never really stops, and the notion that there is a ‘real’ self always has problems. Also, as a friend of mine said just today: not larping is a privilege. Erika Summers-Effler’s paper about women’s groups that support the expression of ‘deviant’ emotions is partly about the limited spaces of expression normally afforded to women.
But playing only characters that fit neatly within the bounds of accepted society can still be suffocating. We can still long for spaces where we can show more of the depth, absurdity, confusion and pain we experience on a day to day basis. Such sharing can be powerful. Erika’s work shows that small groups that allow ‘deviant’ emotions to be shared can inspire social movements. My friend and meditation teacher Rosa Lewis now summarizes her work as helping people include what they leave out of experience normally. Just this morning we spoke about that notion of open-hearted darkness to fight the closed-hearted darkness closing around us.
What character or characters are you larping as? Is it a difference of night and day with your internal experiences, or is it more subtle, just you with the edges filed off? How much do your roles differ in different circumstances? In Internal Family Systems therapy the understanding is that we have a whole ecology of subpersonalities that blend with our sense of self depending on the circumstances, which could almost be described as ‘being larped’ by our parts — who play roles that we’ve learned at a young age to protect us.
Speaking for myself, in academia and in the world of futures I’ve often habitually larped as an enthusiastic, possibilities-focused, creative type. Useful and fun! Joost will bring some positive energy. This is not an untrue persona, but it’s also limited and habitual. I remember being on a retreat with friends where we each spotlighted each other for a long time, just the whole group carefully watching one person’s body language and expressions for like an hour. I talked about how I was angry and sad at how imposed threats of failure, budget cuts and a very stressful environment at work had ruled my life in my younger years. But my meditation teacher friends noted that I was talking about this in a very sober, matter of fact tone, which was genuine, but also filtered. They asked me to actually show my sadness and anger, and woo boy, a lot of energy came out. It’s a lesson I haven’t forgotten.
Our cutting off of ourselves from the depths of life is part of what makes it possible for us to be complicit in the destruction of the planet. In the meantime, many parts of politics and public culture are turning ever more evidently dark and insane in 2024 and the most privileged of us may be forced to wake up to what many more vulnerable groups have known for a long time: there is no place for ‘this is okay’ larping.
How do we create spaces where an entirely different, shared reality can breathe and be free? A reality where no one is kidding themselves about the profound mystery of being alive? Where we don’t have to pretend not to be a bunch of living fucking miracles living together inside a crazy miracle? Because when this reality can arise, collective change becomes more possible too.
Though social situations are always inevitably framed in some way, the license to express a wide range of emotions and experiences supports the groundedness of such a shared reality — and avoids the setting of new restrictions where only ‘beautiful’ emotions such as gentle sadness are appreciated, like at a bad stereotype of a commercialized spiritual retreat or something.
This is a collective challenge — our ability to express the depth of our being must be supported in this by other people and by the right contexts, conditions and infrastructures. Set and setting, as they say in psychedelics work.
I’ve been excited to see this change in my own contexts. Earlier this year I was invited to be a part of a festival with the name For Love of the World at Delft University of Technology. The public festival, organized by Studium Generale under the leadership of philosopher Leon Heuts, brought together technology, philosophy, art and other perspectives to explore new stories for the world. I spoke about infrastructures of mystery, and I was part of the closing panel facilitated by NRC journalist Wouter van Noort. Things got profoundly trippy in the best possible way. Biologist, philosopher and nature writer Andreas Weber, known for his ideas about an ‘enlivenment’ period after the enlightenment era emphasized the need to move beyond a ‘shopping list’ of managerial solutions. He invited the audience to get in touch with the true depth of their realities then and there. This, he argued, is the place from which action can spring naturally. We proceeded to speak very directly to and from the mystery. There was the sense of a real paradigm shift unfolding in the room, and a full heartedness and soulfulness to the conversations, as well as a sense of urgency and realness. It felt like coming home.
Impressive. This was TU Delft — a university that is historically known to be completely entangled with modernist progress and innovation thinking. Sure, there was a robot walking around as well — things had to be at least a little ‘Delfty’. But the readiness with which a deep sense of mystery was given center stage was beautiful.
More recently, my colleague Josie Chambers led a three day workshop on ‘Utopia*Art*Politics’ in Utrecht, inviting a host of really fantastic people working in the interface of these three topics, with guest speakers Lola Olufemi and Stephen Duncombe who are both doing amazing work on the cutting edge of radical politics and public imaginations. Everything about the workshop — the locations at radical imagination spaces BAK and Moira, the flexibility of the structure, the involvement of different artistic expressions — created a sense that everything could be included, that people could be as big and wild as they wanted to be. The workshop offered another real sense of coming home for me. But this time there was also an explicit focus on the darkness, pain, grief and anger of our time.
I was part of a small group session discussing how these difficult emotions relate to the mystery of life. The thing that really stayed with me was the question — how do we make ‘leaving the house of modernity’ attractive? How do we develop an appetite in people to be with the full pain, depth, immensity, magic and darkness of a bigger reality, when this is not going to be neat or fun? How does this being with a bigger reality include having the really difficult conversations about colonial and capitalist destruction? How can people find attraction to that hard, reality shattering work? Researcher, activist and artist Felipe Viveros resonated very strongly with me when he was describing his ritual work as a ‘death doola of capitalist modernity’. We discussed the guided use of psychedelics like ayahuasca and psilocybin as a useful example of how many people are actually willing to dive into the difficult work needed to connect to a deeper reality in all its light and darkness. This included the ritual and structured nature of such deep dives. We also focused on the need to allow an actual diversity of emotions and experiences, and not just the curated corporate retreat version of ‘sharing from the heart’.
Josie asked us to report back from our conversation not with a dry summary, but with a performance. So we ended up creating a makeshift, open set of instructions of a ritual for leaving the house of modernity, which we then performed for the larger group. In the ritual, each member was invited to express something about their inner world in as raw a form as possible, and then offer a sign or gesture that the group had to emulate. When it came to my contribution, I said that I was dead tired of larping. Tired of pretending that life isn’t an unfathomable mystery and that we are not all deeply connected. Expressing this live on stage brought a well of emotion out of me. My ‘sign’ to end my contribution was me using my black metal voice to just scream. Everyone else howled in unison. Another participant ended her contribution by stating a desire to dance. She suddenly jumped up and started dancing wildly through the BAK theatre space. Almost instantly, all of us jumped up as well and started bounding through the room. People watching our little ritual said that they were sure this was all prepared. But it wasn’t. A simple but powerful ritual, easy to perform. A role playing that sought to incorporate more than can normally be expressed. We’ll write it up soon and I will update this text to include the link.
A question I have been working on is — what does this kind of experience look like for people with very different backgrounds? I’ve been working on this notion of ‘infrastructures of mystery’ — research that starts from the premise that people have very different ways of getting in touch with the depth of self and world. Our work around this question is interested in seeing the very personal connections that people have to mystery first, and then asking the question — what do you need for that to become more accessible to you? What are the conditions that make that possible? And what societal infrastructures (physical, financial, social, cultural, educational and more) shape those conditions? Having a real appreciation for the different worlds that people inhabit and the different needs they have for accessing the depths of life seems key. We organized a session on Infrastructures of Mystery on June 20th as the Transforming Cities Hub to ask participants this question at the wonderful Sonnenborgh Stellar Observatory. Again, there was a real sense of allowing for the depth of life to emerge in conversation. People’s experiences of mystery were very diverse — from taking care of family members to experiences in nature to psychedelics to engaging deeply with art or ideas. Now the challenge is to ask this question in very different contexts, and especially to people who are normally left out of such conversations. And to bring the question to policy makers and others who can do the infrastructuring work. I’m also very interested in how role playing in video games can resonate with people’s deeper experiences and can be infrastructures of mystery in that way. We are applying this thinking to the deeper and more mythical layers of our game All Will Rise.
Carien and I will be offering more reflections on larping, ‘real’ experience, and breaking the fourth wall of reality in the near future on this blog. And our next Infrastructures for Mystery event will happen on the evening of December 11. Join us in Utrecht!
Dr. Joost Vervoort is an Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at Utrecht University. His work focuses on connecting games and creative practices, mystery, politics and action to create better futures. He leads the NWO Vidi project Anticiplay and is a leading researcher on the Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES which focuses on the transformation of the European game industry. He sings about the global crisis in Terzij de Horde and paints weirdly dark album covers for other bands.
