For 52 hours, Davide Orazi didn’t break character, not even when retiring to his bunk. In this live-action role play (Larp) called Conscience, based on HBO’s Westworld, he’d been assigned the role of a guest, the type that gets to flaunt their power over the host robots of the amusement park, without consequence.
Ultimately, Orazi found a path of redemption for his man in black, but an added complication came in the form of a romance with another character within the plot – when both he and they were married to other people in real life. “Which is problematic, because your brain doesn’t know,” Orazi tells Guardian Australia. “Now my brain is full of endorphins and I’m basically falling in love with a person that does not exist.”
Such ethical dilemmas are rife in Larp; in fact the themes are often designed to present “what-ifs”. Conscience, which veered on being another Stanford Prison Experiment in its psychological exploration of power dynamics, questioned the nature of humanity. Orazi, a veteran of Larp for 20 years (since he realised a mere Dungeons and Dragons table couldn’t contain him) counts the experience as one of his favourites.
“In our daily life we will never necessarily know whether we are horrible beings or fantastic creatures,” he explains. “Being exposed to situations that are so radically different is quite upsetting when you come back, and so it prompts you to ask yourself questions.”
Orazi is senior lecturer of marketing at Monash University and the co-author of a new academic article, There and Back Again: Bleed from Extraordinary Experiences. Part of his job was to embed in different Larp games. His co-author, Dr Tom van Laer – associate professor of narratology at the University of Sydney – had to stay firmly grounded in reality.
“The deal was, once this is done, then I get to go too,” Van Laer laughs.
Think of Larping and your mind might go to enthusiasts in rubber elf ears wielding duct-taped swords – something not helped by the 2008 Paul Rudd movie Role Models, in which the nerdy characters are all a bit “off”. But, as Orazi explains, Larp is just a medium, like theatre.
Some Larps are high-budget affairs, such as Bunker 101 in Italy, set in the year 2057 after global thermonuclear war and held in a real fallout shelter, and the Monitor Celestra in Sweden, with a submarine simulator standing in for a spaceship, which explored “cultural and personal conflict in the shadow of the destruction of the 12 colonies of mankind”. Conscience was in Tabernas, Spain – spaghetti western country.
The pursuit tends to attract nine-to-fivers who feel unfulfilled, Van Laer says, but also those who have intense jobs but are missing out on fun. Many doctors and nurses reported that the Whitby Goth Weekend role play was a way to process their daily dealings with death. “There are also people that are really frustrated with the way markets function; they’re over the whole capitalist society.”
Chris Price is a plastic treatment plant supervisor, but his hidden world is that of Scy’kadia, which he created in 2015. Up to 120 people turn up to the fortnightly games at western Sydney’s Rooty Hill Reserve (“occasionally there will be kids playing cricket, but we affectionately call them ‘the ghosts in the field’”), and even more at the biannual gatherings at a scout camp, which allow for four-day immersion. He made the decision to keep Scy’kadia generic to the fantasy genre, rather than focused on a specific book or film, to allow for a wide scope of participants.
“If you’re a big Aragorn fan, you can easily find a way to make a rustic mercenary living in the woods,” he says of the Lord of the Rings character, “and we have all the D and D species that everyone knows and loves. We have a database where we keep track of the players and snippets of their backstory that we can feed into the plot. If we find that the 18th Viking called Bjorn has joined, we tell them they might want to come up with a different deed name so that when we go ‘Bjorn’, 18 people don’t go, ‘Yes?’”
Price says that the more time someone spends in character, the more it starts to overlay their personality – and it’s possible to draw on those qualities. Certainly the improvisation skills – for confident and curious dialogue with other characters – can be useful to take into the work environment.
“You also sometimes see people learning appropriate ways to deal with trauma as a result of some of the darker side of it,” he says.
But there’s a tension when Larpers return from their extraordinary life to their ordinary life. The person might feel only partly present, or emotional, or depressed. It’s known in Larp terminology as “bleed”.
“Most people do get a positive transformation out of it, but underestimate that to get to that stage they first have to go through this much more complex space,” says Van Laer.
The violence of a fantasy world might unexpectedly trigger something that takes time to process back in the ordinary world. There can also be a sentimental longing for a lost world; one that seems more utopian or heightened. There and Back Again gives the example of the gender-role-reversal world of Demetra, held in Italy, set in “an unbalanced, unfair and sexist matriarchal society”. There, the “frames” of reality and fiction collided for one male participant, a German IT manager. Upon returning to his normal life, he and a woman both paused at a door, each waiting for the other to hold it open.
“Some people, after they deal with the bleed, they change their relationships, they change jobs, they change the way they think about things and react to people,” Van Laer says. He uses the example of “Theresa”, an Austrian web developer.
“She was quite powerful in the Larp. She had a lot of agency and realised that she didn’t in her relationship,” says Van Laer. In her interview with the researchers, Theresa said, “the Larp and my bleeds set in motion some processes that led to me stepping out of harmful and abusive structures a year later, in my real life.”
Most of us can relate to the difficulty of integrating back into normal life after an extraordinary experience. When I conduct these interviews I’m struggling to re-enter the swing of work after three weeks in Bali. There and Back Again gives the examples of Burning Man, Mardi Gras, Tough Mudda, ultra-running and Harley Davidson rallies as extraordinary experiences. And then, of course, there’s lockdown life. In 2020, Van Laer was asked to present to the inquiry into the Australian government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and spoke about the “bleed” effect in that context.
So how can we best adapt to reality after a profound experience? Orazi speaks from personal experience.
“At the beginning it’s an overflowing river of emotion, so resistance is futile, as nerds will say. Then I try to embed myself in what my daily life is,” he says. “I focus on work. It helps me to punch a speedball at the gym, because the physical exercise and repetitive sound makes me come back. And I play music, which is my form of meditation. Usually after a week, it goes back to being a pleasant memory.”
Others feel the need to share their experience, either on forums or in person at smaller events; or simply by immersing themselves in a film or book, if that’s what the Larp was based on.
I mention to Orazi that this reintegration sounds much like the way that seasoned psychonauts will download after an intense psychedelic experience, with someone else who has shared knowledge. He agrees.
“It’s not really that different from a trip,” he deadpans. “Because you see dragons in Larps as well.”
