For 52 hours, Davide Orazi did not break his character. In this live-action role-playing game (Larp) called Conscience, based on HBO’s Westworld, he was assigned the role of a guest, the guy who manages to show off his power over the park’s host robots. ‘attractions, without any consequences.
Orazi eventually found a path of redemption for her black man, but an additional complication came in the form of a romance with another character within the plot, when both he and they were married to other people in life. real. “Which is problematic, because your brain doesn’t know it,” Orazi tells Guardian Australia. “Now my brain is full of endorphins and I’m basically falling in love with a person who doesn’t exist.”
These ethical dilemmas abound in Larp; in fact, themes are often designed to present “what if”. Conscience, which became another Stanford Prison experiment in its psychological exploration of the dynamics of power, questioned the nature of humanity. Orazi, a 20-year-old Larp veteran (since he realized a simple Dungeon and Dragons board couldn’t hold it) considers the experience one of his favorites.
Davide Orazi in Conscience. Photography: Picturetime
“In our daily lives we will never necessarily know if we are horrible beings or fantastic creatures,” he explains. “Being exposed to such radically different situations is quite annoying when you come back and therefore ask you to ask yourself questions.”
Orazi is a tenured professor of marketing at Monash University and co-author of a new academic paper, There and Back Again: Bleed from Extraordinary Experiences. Part of his job was to integrate into different Larp games. Its co-author, Dr Tom van Laer, an associate professor of narratology at the University of Sydney, had to stand firm in reality.
“The deal was, once that was done, I would go too,” Van Laer laughs.
Think of Larping and your mind might go to rubber elf ear enthusiasts wielding swords with duct tape, which didn’t help Paul Rudd’s 2008 film Role Models, in which the nerdy characters are a bit “off”. But, as Orazi explains, Larp is just a medium, like theater.
Some Larps are high-budget subjects, such as the Bunker 101 in Italy, set in 2057 after the global thermonuclear war and held in a real anti-impact shelter, and the Celestial Monitor in Sweden, with an underwater simulator replacing a spacecraft, which explored “cultural and personal conflict in the shadow of the destruction of humanity’s 12 colonies.” Consciousness was found in Tabernas, Spain, the western country of spaghetti.
Research tends to attract back five people who feel dissatisfied, says Van Laer, but also those who have intense work but miss out on fun. Many doctors and nurses reported that the Whitby Goth weekend role-playing game was a way to process their daily dealings with death. “There are also people who are very frustrated with the way the markets work; they are above all capitalist society ”.
Research tends to attract back five people who feel dissatisfied, says Van Laer, but also those who have intense work but miss out on fun. Photo: Matt Hudson / The Scy’kadia Team
Chris Price is a supervisor at a plastics treatment plant, but his hidden world is that of Scy’kadia, which he created in 2015. Up to 120 people attend the fortnightly games at the Rooty Hill Reservation in West Sydney (“from time to time there will be children playing cricket, but we affectionately call them ‘the ghosts of the field'”), and even more so at the biannual meetings of a scout camp, which allow a four-day dive . He made the decision to keep Scy’kadia generic for the fantasy genre, rather than focusing on a specific book or movie, to allow for a wide range of participants.
“If you’re a big fan of Aragorn, you can easily find a way to make a rustic mercenary live in the woods,” he says of the Lord of the Rings character, “and we have all the species D and D that everyone knows. We have a database where we keep track of the players and snippets of their background story that we can introduce into the plot. different writing so that when we go to “Bjorn”, 18 people don’t say “Yes?”.
Price says that the more time someone spends on the character, the more they begin to superimpose their personality, and it is possible to take advantage of those qualities. Undoubtedly, improvisation skills – for a safe and curious dialogue with other characters – can be useful to incorporate into the work environment.
“Sometimes you also see people learning the right ways to deal with trauma as a result of some of its darker sides,” he says.
But there is a tension when the Larpers return from their extraordinary life to their ordinary life. The person may feel only partially present, or emotional, or depressed. It is known in Larp terminology as “bleeding”.
There may also be a sentimental longing for a lost world; one that seems more utopian or augmented. Photo: Eleanor Webber / The Scy’kadia Team
“Most people achieve a positive transformation, but they underestimate that to get to this stage they first have to go through this much more complex space,” says Van Laer.
The violence of a fantasy world can unexpectedly trigger something that takes time to process in the ordinary world. There may also be a sentimental longing for a lost world; one that seems more utopian or augmented. There and Back Again is the example of the world of gender investment reversal of Demetra, held in Italy, set in “an unbalanced, unjust and sexist matriarchal society.” There, the “frames” of reality and fiction collided for a male participant, a German computer manager. Returning to his normal life, he and a woman stopped in front of a door, waiting for the other to keep it open.
“Some people, after dealing with bleeding, they change their relationships, they change jobs, they change the way they think about things and react to people,” Van Laer says. Use the example of “Theresa”, an Austrian web developer.
“She was very powerful in the Larp. She had a lot of agency and she realized she wasn’t in their relationship,” says Van Laer. In her interview with researchers, Theresa said, “The Larp and my bleeding triggered some processes that led me out of harmful and abusive structures a year later, into my real life.”
Most of us can relate to the difficulty of returning to normal life after an extraordinary experience. When I do these interviews, I am struggling to get back into the job rhythm after three weeks in Bali. There and Back Again gives the examples of Burning Man, Mardi Gras, Tough Mudda, ultrarunning and Harley Davidson rallies as extraordinary experiences. And then, of course, there is the life of confinement. In 2020, Van Laer was asked to appear in the investigation into the Australian government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and spoke of the “bleeding” effect in this context.
Larp Syc’kadia. Photo: Matt Hudson / The Scy’kadia Team
So how can we better adapt to reality after a deep experience? Orazi speaks from personal experience.
“It’s a river of excitement at first, so resistance is useless, as the nerds say. Then I try to integrate into what my daily life is like, ”he says. “I focus on work. It helps me hit a speedball in the gym, because exercise and repetitive sound make me go back. And I play music, which is my form of meditation. Overall, after a week, it’s a good memory again. “
Others feel the need to share their experience, either in forums or in person at smaller events; or simply immersing yourself in a movie or book, if that’s what the Larp was based on.
I mention to Orazi that this reintegration is very similar to the way experienced psychonauts will be unloaded after an intense psychedelic experience, with someone else who has shared knowledge. He agrees.
“It’s not really that different from a trip,” he says without hesitation. “Because you also see dragons in the Larps.”