Larp and/as Reenactment
Once an acronym for live-action role-play (LARP), now (like “radar” or “sonar”) a word in itself in many languages (Hofbauer, 2020; Holter et al., 2009), larp can be understood as the physical enactment of characters in a predefined setting to experience challenges and tell a shared story.
Larp is thus located between simulation (of another world or era, and especially of another person), gaming (agency, overcoming challenges, growing in power), and narrative play (acting, embodiment, plot). Unlike theater, larp usually has no formal audience. Each participant may be witness to the performance of other players, but everyone takes on a character in the game. Mainstream larp worldwide belongs to the sword-and-sorcery genre, inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. In the case of the world’s largest larp, the ConQuest of Mythodea in Germany (since 2004), over 8,000 participants come together once a year in a tent city encompassing several hectares. For roughly a week, they dress up as elves, orcs, knights, and other fantastic creatures, with personal histories and goals, to fight with padded foam weapons (“boffer”) against adversaries, engage in intrigue within their camps, seek to unravel the mysteries and puzzles provided by the organizers, or just immerse themselves into a pseudo-medieval everyday sprinkled with magic (and modern sanitary areas hidden behind trees). This is larp as a hobby and mostly for entertainment, where rules govern power levels like in video games and unbroken in-character performance is valued as much as elaborate costumes. The first season of the HBO television show Westworld offers an image of what a complex material-semiotic network such a larp event is, with main story arcs, individual sub-plots, elaborate in-game locations, off- game backstage areas, questions of player safety, and economic considerations—with the main difference being that players do not encounter sentient robot-hosts but so-called non-player characters (NPCs), participants who have received information and instructions from the organizers to advance the plot.2Recently, many new forms and formats have emerged, decoupling larp from its entertainment or paratelic frame,3 and in doing so, differentiating larp (lower-case) from the acronym LARP, divorcing it from expectations toward the latter’s compounds, e.g., that “action” necessarily means battles.
Instead of donning armor and fighting undead, for instance, players may come together for a weekend to experience intimacy and insanity in a mental institution through a nonlinear narrative (as in Delirium, Denmark 2010). Larps like the award-winning Halat Hisar (FinlandZPalestine, 2013, 2016), about living under occupation, seek to educate their participants in addition to providing memorable experiences. These so-called avant-garde, political, art or edu-larps share technical terms, such as immersion or in-characterZ out-of-character (ICZOOC), with their fantasy cousins, and also other elements, such as concern over detailed costuming—but not necessarily, as larps without game masters (GMs) (referees) or NPCs stand side-by-side five-minute freeform larps with no costumes and only minimal props (Lock, Stock & Barrel, 2016). A key feature of these forms of larp is preparatory workshops and post-play debriefings, which often take longer than actual play and are seen as paramount for any learning effect to be achieved (Kriz, 2010). In particular, larps dealing with extreme experiences and emotions make systematic de-rolling necessary, where players disengage from their characters and re-affirm their own subject positions (Brown, 2019, p. 366).If reenactment refers to performative practices “related to the past” (Agnew et al., 2020, p. 6) that seek to make this past affectively and (supposedly) directly experienceable (Van den Heede, 2020; Agnew, 2004), then most larps do not fall under this category, as they are exploring fantasy worlds, the future, alternate realities, or present-day societies. However, especially in the context of avant-garde and educational Nordic larps, a number of larps play in and with the past. Nordic larp refers to events designed in reference to discussions evolving from the annual Knutepunkt larp conference held in Scandinavia and Finland since 1997 (Stenros, 2014b). Using World War I and World War II as background and set in a fictional SwedishReenacting Japan’s Past That Never Was 149 concentration camp, Witches of Astad Farm (2016, 2017, 2018), for example, combines history with fantastical elements to ask about human rights in times of war and crisis.
The larp was about internment “for no crime other than what you were born as,” in this case a witch, to some degree working as a metaphor for queerness. Eschewing any fantasy elements was the larp 1942 (2000, 2017) about the human cost of war and romantic relationships between occupying German soldiers and Norwegian women in World War II. Over 5 days, 130 participants jointly created a story and generated experiences which resonated with them long afterward (Fatland, 2010, p. 93). Larps deal often with strong emotions and being shunned in-game for loving a Nazi infused heavy sensations on both sides, such as lingering shame out-of-game. With an eye on realism and accuracy similar to other forms of reenactment, such larps still take much fictional liberty and focus on experiences and situations that did not but could have happened.With equally period-accurate clothing as one would expect from other forms of historical reenactment (Schlunke, 2020), and involving past daily activities, such as catching fish (Fatland, 2010, p. 95), like in some living history projects (Dean, 2020), the line between such larps as 1942 and these sibling practices can be blurry. In alignment with Nordic larp discourse, I have come to understand the term “larp” less as referring to a stable epis- temic object, a singular, clearly defined practice, but more as a connector between practices of role-playing (Kamm, 2020, pp. 20-21): if people designate what they are doing as larp, they enter into a conversation with others who larp, borrow ideas, and exchange techniques. If practitioners understand what they are doing as something other than larp, then they do not larp—regardless of outward appearances or similarities. Reenactment can be larp and larp can be reenactment, but they are simply cousins in a family of constructed, simulative, immersive experiences (cf. family resemblance, Wittgenstein, 2009, p. 36e), and it is the awareness of participants that counts.
Looking at larp design manuals, such as the recent, simply but aptly titled Larp Design (Koljonen et al., 2019), two matters of concern emerge, which may connect most larp practices: narrativity and agency.
Larp events tell stories with a beginning and an end. Participants can make choices and take actions that alter the outcome of these stories. How much a story or its protagonists are pre-scripted, how much is improvised, how much players know before play begins, how co-creative the event is, and so forth, these questions are just the tip of the iceberg of choices a larpwright needs to consider (cf. “the Mixing Desk of Larp,” Stenros et al., 2016). Telic larps that go beyond merely having fun also need to define their purpose “after play.” The ninja larp in Iga was designed with the goal of the Iga-Ueno Tourist Association in mind to attract more fans and tourists to the city. This, however, is still before play. In line with the mission statement of the Ninja Council, of which Iga is a founding member, the larp also seeks to instill historically accurate knowledge about ninja into the participants.And this is why the tourist association considered offering a larp in the first place, at a time when awareness of larp is still limited in Japan (Kamm, 2019): the city and its museums work together with researchers from Mie University, and as it happened, one specialist in ninja literature came to know a game designer who has ties to Japanese larpers and thus proposed the larp idea to the association.The event described below can be considered an instance of “history larp,” that is, a larp set in a specific past time and place that draws on historiographic and archeological investigations to create its building blocks. Like other forms of historical reenactment, history larps have to deal with demands of historical accuracy and popular imagination of the subject matter. With its educational goal and in the attempt to spark curiosity from laypeople (Brauer and Lucke, 2020, p. 53), the ninja larp explored below is thus located at the crossroads between larp-as-entertainment and telic larp practices. This chapter surveys the two first runs of the larp in 2018 and 2019 in order to shed light on its design choices and challenges within the context of other practices and media dealing with Japan’s covert agents of the past. As larp knows no passive audience, I also actively played in the larp during my fieldwork: in 2018, I was one of six players (the others were members of the Mie University International Ninja Research Center in Iga and the local tourist association), and in 2019, one of five visitors to the Ninja festival who chose to participate in the larp. This fieldwork is augmented by visits to the Iga Ninja Museum, exchanges with the researchers of Mie University, and a literature review of recent historical studies in Japanese.