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.
Initially launched on January 1st, 2025, Larpocracy sees seven world-leading partners in larp and larp-adjacent artwork, Uppsala University, Tampere University, University of Greenwich, LARPifers, ZU-UK, Chaos League, and Europe4Youth work towards the overarching goal of discovering if larp can be used to foster democracy.
Over the three-day Symposium, which ran from March 24th to 26th, the partners came together for the first time to launch Larpocracy and take part in several panels, presentations, discussions, work package planning meetings, and, most excitingly, demos of larps and adjacent activities.
What is Larpocracy?
Larpocracy's vision is to research best practices and create spaces for dialogue and democratic engagement through live-action role-playing (larp).
The project, funded by Horizon Europe, will study the use of larp as a method for creating inclusive and democratic social spaces, both online and offline.
Across the seven partners, eight work packages have been created, encouraging collaboration as we work towards the same goal, and they are:
WP1: Project Coordination
WP2: Effects of Larp-Based Interventions
WP3: Theory Informed Scenario Design
WP4: Lowering Barriers to Participation
WP5: Design of Spaces for Human Encounter
WP6: Domain Expert Panel
WP7: Policy Recommendations
WP8: Exploitation and Dissemination
Expected outcomes amongst others for the project include:
Recommendations on how to foster civic participation through a deep analysis of the use of spaces beyond classic democratic institutions, especially cultural and artistic spaces, as well as cyberspace and metaverses, for political expression.
Forward-looking policy recommendations to ensure that digital spaces (including metaverses and social networks) can, by design, have a positive impact on democratic life and limit potential threats to democracy.
Experimentation of solutions, methods and tools to support democratic behaviour and social well-being for the next generation of social media.
What took place at the Symposium?
Two panels took place on the first day, hosted by Johanna Koljonen from Tampere University.
Sarah Lynne Bowman from Uppsala University recounted the sessions: "In 'Introducing Larpocracy,' Larpocracy project lead Prof. Annika Waern offered a short talk making the case for why larp 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.”
Sarah continued: “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."
Barbara from Europe4Youth added on the launch: "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."
"My highlights of the pan-project Symposium," Jaakko Stenros from Tampere University shared, "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 other's works in an embodied fashion, but also strengthening connections through shared play.”
As the three-day event progressed, it helped shed light on how larp can help process what is happening in the world. 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 is filled with post-truth disabled 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…"
She posed the questions: "So how can we fix this mess? Where can we learn to make inclusive, deliberative spaces that can glue back together our broken pieces of almost-failed democracies?"
Reflections from the Symposium
Springboarded from findings at the Symposium, Jaakko added: "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 said: "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."
We end our first blog post with an inspiring passage from Elektra Diakolambrianou from LARPifers: "When I was younger, my answer to the million-dollar question, 'Can art change the world?' would be an easy 'yes'. Not only would I yell this 'yes' at the top of my lungs, but I would also come up with specific examples of art that had indeed changed the world. Larp, however, found me when I was older, and we know what that usually means: more tired, more disappointed, and less innocent.
So, although I recognised the transformative potential of larp since my first game, the answer to the new question 'Can larp change the world?' was not so easy to answer with one word. There was the diplomatic answer: 'Well, it depends how we define change.' There was the hesitant answer: 'Probably not change the world per se, but maybe it can plant a few seeds here and there.' And then there was the typical psychotherapist answer, 'Maybe, but the world needs to want to change.'
Years later, finding myself in Uppsala at the 1st Larpocracy symposium, among people who (each in their own unique way) are a source of inspiration, passion, and optimism... I have come closer than ever to finally answering loudly and clearly that 'YES, larp can change the world.'”