Understanding immersive practice with live action role players
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2025
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Melbourne Authors
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School of Social and Political Sciences
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PhD thesis
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© 2025 Josiah Henry Lulham
Abstract
This ethnography explores live action role playing communities in Melbourne, and considers the ways that the people in these communities aim to create experiences of immersion into the settings they enact in their play. Live action role play (larp) is a playful practice of ‘immersive’ world building: folks gather together at events to enact fictional settings and embody characters for the duration of a larp event. Immersion—an increasingly ubiquitous descriptor for experiences delivered through mediums such as virtual reality, digital games, interactive theatre performances, and more—is often discussed in terms of acute experiences of attention ‘absorbed’ (Murray 1997 [2017]; Calleja 2011; Bowman 2018) or as a process engaged in by individuals such as gamers (Keogh 2018) and members of immersive theatre audiences (Kolesch 2019). In contrast, by observing the unique ways in which larpers prepare for, enact, and make sense of the immersive settings they produce, this dissertation proposes considering immersion as a community practice.
Drawing on both ethnographic participant-observation and auto-ethnographic reflection with role players involved in the doing of larp, this dissertation traces how role players learn and develop a practice of immersion through their involvement in larp communities. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted with members of a larp community in Melbourne all of whom regularly attended a larp called Swordcraft: a volunteer led organisation that ran events every Friday evening, and several camping events throughout the year. Fieldwork took place during and outside of live action role playing, encompassing the play of and preparation for immersion into the fictional settings enacted. Preparation involved collaboratively assembling costumes, erecting campsites, imagining characters, and speculating on how games might unfold; while play involved enacting a space of immersive alterity. As I participated in larp events over time, I learned a practice of immersion from those I played with, and my auto-ethnographic reflections on this burgeoning practice I put in conversation with my participant-observation, and with formal semi-structured interviews and focus groups conducted with larpers. By attending to the ideas about and practices of immersion role players participated in, I detail how these practices of immersion were aimed at creating contexts that, though delineated from ‘real life’ contexts through play, felt ‘real.’ In turn, I also attend to the ways the ‘realism’ of the fictional settings role players enacted in their play were contested both during and after larp events, role players reflected on their participation in larp.
I suggest that the immersive practices role players participate in offers a productive reframing of immersion as a collaborative doing rather than as an individual experience. These suggestions have consequences for anthropological methods, for game design, for the making of immersive theatre: all contexts in which researchers and participants are invited to imagine particular kinds of alterity. Thinking with the immersive practices of larpers, I argue, invites considerations as to how social contexts and the selves that are bound to those contexts are produced and delineated from one another, and how these contexts and selves come into sometimes uneasy relation, exposing the blurry and contested ways in which the socially constructed boundaries that separate contexts and selves are produced and dispelled.
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Keywords
anthropology, game studies, larp, live action role play, role play, role playing, play, immersion