Blog 1: Larpocracy Symposium March 2025
Can larp create a space to help foster democracy?
On March 24th, the EU-funded project Larpocracy was shared publicly at the Humanities Theatre, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Larpocracy launched on January 1st 2025, with the Larpocracy Symposium as the first time that the seven world-leading partners in larp and larp-adjacent artwork involved in the three-year project came together.
The Symposium saw activists, educators, larp practitioners, and academics from multiple disciplines worldwide come to Uppsala to share insight and excitement, ask questions, and conduct deep analyses of larp game design, ethics, and all things larp festivals and events
Barbara from Europe4Youth said, “Our sole purpose was to immerse the project in political science, education, and transformative game design and show it to the world. Accidentally, we discovered more evidence that Larpocracy is a ground-breaking project."
With plenty of exciting developments on the way, we thought you might want to hear first-hand from some of those involved in this exciting project.
Barbara continued: "Firstly, it became evident that the global political context of this project has made it more imperative than ever. In many countries, the political forces that play ugly with the fundamental values underpinning democratic systems rise in power. In many, the assumed consensus on democratic norms has been replaced with power play and popularity plebiscite, allowing undermining, overlooking and excluding a group of citizens based on the ‘common sense’ premises. The public discourse filled with post-truth disables citizens to make informed choices. The foundations of democracy are trembling together with the global order paradigm, and many project partners openly express concerns about the breakdown of such foundations. One of the project's new challenges is to confront these issues with openness and courage.
Secondly, it became evident that not all of us define and experience democracy the same way. The workshop in which we connected democracy with pictures, emotions, and scenes showed a large variety of associations, emotional connections, and aspects of democracy that we found essential. The way we experience democracy is constructed for us in our countries - at a local level, national, rarely European. Thus, for many, democracy is about protesting, fighting, and demanding - because without it, there are no other structures to be vocal about. Democratic expression often goes into alternative spaces, where especially marginalised groups feel safer to speak up. That comes with frustrations, anxiety, stepping up and taking stands - this takes effort. Many chose to remain silent.
For some of us, democracy is about collectively deciding about common things. This requires trust in the jointly developed rules and participation in given structures, or co-developing them. That generates senses of being heard, important and equal. According to the presented studies, it does not always end with ‘getting my way’, but at least with being understood better. Deliberative democracy is ideal and takes into account all voices and perspectives. Does such a utopian-sounding concept work? As we've learned on Symposium - depends what do we take as criteria of success. Undoubtedly, deliberation is costly and inefficient in the sense of reaching all-agreeable decisions. What it does is facilitate social cohesion and acceptance of commonly decided solutions, even if they don't match one's private interest. This, again, requires a number of conditions…
It is then evident that Larpocracy has to take into account changing global architecture and different perceptions and experiences of democracy in its fragile elements. It has to if its purpose is to deliver tools that will foster democratic progress in the few continents, east and west, north and south, including those of us who are affected by different types of wars.
So how can we fix this mess? Where can we learn making inclusive, deliberative spaces that can glue back together our broken pieces of almost-failed democracies?
In a search for spaces where active participation is encouraged, supported and inclusive, the Larpocracy project chose to zoom in larps, larp-adjencent events and larp festivals. We will examine their impact, track down design choices and conditions in which larps can feed democracy. We will organise events to test our assumptions, participate in large larp-adjecent and political events and much more. We will learn from those alternative forms of participation to apply some screws to the deliberation spaces in modern democracies. Will it work? On what scale? Are there any current, tangible issues we can solve?
All that will develop organically. But first we need to sort out variety of approaches, multidisciplinary collaboration and find a common language for our studies ourselves.
Jakko Stenros from Tampere University added: "My highlights of the pan-project Symposium were meeting members of the advisory board and domain expert panel, who represented a particularly wide range of institutions, activities, and interests -- yet all of them had a clear connection to the project of Larpocracy. I also really enjoyed getting to engage in play with other members of the consortium. We played edu-larps and instruction-based performances, and this was useful not only in getting to know each others' works in an embodied fashion, but also strengthen connections through shared play.
From the point of view of Work Package 5 (Design of Spaces for Human Encounter), where our work concentrates on larp festivals, it was wonderful to have a whiteboard session on mapping the different aspects of such events and to start working on the central design choices that need to be made when organising a larp festival. Comparing experiences between people from numerous countries and cultures is a fun and fast way to expose norms and traditions, to establish a starting point for mapping the different aspects of festival design."
Sarah Lynne Bowman from Uppsala University shared her experience while giving a detail recount of the three days that encompassed the public launch.
”The first Larpocracy pan-project symposium kicked off at Uppsala University in Sweden March 24-26! The three day event included presentations, workshops, discussions, work package planning, and most excitingly, demos of larps and adjacent activities. Project members joined domain experts, brainstorming, playing, and planning with one another in an invigorating exchange.
One of the most exciting parts of the Symposium was the public launch of Larpocracy, which featured two incredible panels with people from the project and was hosted by Johanna Koljonen from Tampere University. Here is the lineup:
In ‘Introducing Larpocracy,’ Larpocracy lead Prof. Annika Waern offered a short talk making the case for why larp (live roleplaying) is relevant to democratic and deliberative processes – and an introduction to the research project that will look into how they can strengthen each other in practice.
In Panel 1: Larp in an Age of Stressed Democracies, panelists discussed: We all live in stressed democracies now, and permacrisis will shape the rest of our lives. How does this context affect our views on the potential, importance, or uses of larp?
Participants included, PerOla Öberg, professor in Political Science, Uppsala University, Sweden; Tamara Nassar, creative director, Palestinian larp organisation Bait Byout; Elektra Diakolambrianou, academic staff at Counselling and Psychological Studies in Athens and larp designer from Larpifiers, Greece; and Celia Pearce, game designer and professor at Northeastern University, US.
In Panel 2: Privilege and Participation, another group discussed: larps and deliberative processes both rely on high levels of trust and active participation to function and tend to be better if participants are diverse. How does privilege affect access to and participation in these spaces, processes, and experiences? The lineup included Persis Jadzé Maravala and Jorge Lopes Ramos, ZU-UK, United Kingdom; Alessandro Giovannucci, Lead designer and founder, Chaos League, Italy; Josephine Rydberg, PhD student at Stockholm University of the Arts and Domain Expert panel member, Sweden; and Barbara Moś, youth educator, Europe4Youth, Poland.
For the Effects of Democracy-Based Larps work package, the team hosted a planning meeting and a workshop. During the workshop, Designing Democracy: Past, Present, and Future: An Explorative Workshop about Democracy as a Theme and Topic for Larp, all consortium members worked together in small groups to share what democracy means to each of them individually; larps they have played with democratic-themes; and activities that they consider particularly democratic in nature. They then co-designed brief scenarios that addressed a chosen activity on the list, framing it within the context of a larp idea, including the setting, the genre, and a scene in which the chosen activity could take place in the fiction. The idea was to consider creative ways that democratic skills could be trained using the fictional format of a larp.
Members of this work package also planned the timeline for several academic articles in progress at various stages, including two that have been submitted for publication, and at least one based on the workshops. The results of this work will inform the Theory Informed Scenario Design work package, which focused on adapting best practices from deliberative events and larp to create scenarios that train deliberative skills. Planning for this work package also began at the Symposium.