The Assembly’s first official online run complete!

By Sarah Lynne Bowman

On December 4, 2025, the Larpocracy team conducted their first official online run of the larp The Assembly, open to the public. Based on theories in political science and transformative role-playing game design, The Assembly is a larp in which community members in a fictional version of Sweden participate in a deliberative event. As developing skills in democratic discourse in online spaces is one of the project's key goals, we were delighted to see that the larp has so far been effective at engaging participants both online and in person.

This method was also particularly effective at bringing together researchers and players from around the world for a single event. Not only were project members from Uppsala University and Campus Gotland able to coordinate, but Master’s thesis students in Transformative Game Design, enrolled in a fully online curriculum, were able to conduct observational research together from North America and Europe.

As with the runs at Stockholm Scenario Festival, led by another Master’s student in Human-Computer Interaction, Jingpeng Feng, we employed the current iteration of our Deliberative Civic Values Index Checklist. The checklist notes deliberative and non-deliberative behaviour while speaking and listening. We will describe the Checklist in more detail in a future blog.

Facilitator

Kjell Hedgard Hugaas (LARPifiers)

Observers

Jingpeng Feng, Meghan Gardner, Iléana Tismanariu, and Alexandra Ciubotaru (Uppsala University)

Designers of The Assembly

Sarah Lynne Bowman (UU), PerOla Öberg (UU), Josephine Rydberg (Domain Expert Panel), and Kjell Hedgard Hugaas (LARPifiers).

Designers of the Deliberative Civic Values Index Checklist (DCVIC)

Jingpeng Feng, Annika Waern, Jon Back, PerOla Öberg, Sarah Lynne Bowman (UU), Nikola Sekulic, and Elektra Diakolambrianou (LARPifiers) (based on the linked work by Jennstål and Öberg 2021).

For more information on The Assembly, click here.