Understanding immersive practice with live action role players

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; B..