LARPing Made Me a Stronger Person. It Can Do the Same for You, Too

The point of no return was when I started the fire in the university parking lot.

I ripped a pile of reports out of a confused bureaucrat’s hands and ran as fast as I could. Once I was outside, I grabbed a lighter out of my pocket and ran it along the parchments’ edges, making sure flames caught on every inch of the documents. There was angry shouting behind me, the confused school administrator and several professors now spilling down the front stairs to see the mess, but it was too late. Parchment burns fast, it turns out.

Was this a scene out of my undergraduate studies? No—it was the climax of a live-action role-playing (LARP) game I did in Belgium called Myrddin Emrys College. Though it was “just a game,” it felt every bit as real as my regular life. I really did grab parchments from someone’s unsuspecting hands and decide to burn them in front of many shocked participants. It was one of the most rebellious acts of my life, in-game or out. My incendiary adventure is just one example of how LARPing can unlock facets of our personality we never knew existed and how our characters can make strides we never thought we’d take in life. As we act out the moments of a LARP in our own body, sometimes we surprise ourselves with proof of how strong we can be through the characters we play.

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LARPing can take lots of forms—it’s essentially any storytelling interaction where the participants act out the roles of their characters (role-playing) but are also the only audience present to witness the story the whole group creates together. There are as many kinds of LARP as there are genres of fiction, but put a group of people into a room, give them characters who are not themselves and a setting to play within, as well as some kind of goal, and you’ve got a LARP. If you’ve ever played one of those How to Host a Murder dinner party games that come in a box, then you’ve played one without ever knowing it. In her book Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role-Playing Games, journalist Lizzie Stark describes how “one or more directors … organize everyone, select the form of the performance, and decide whether the setting resembles, for example, Lord of the Rings, Hamlet, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer…. The outcome of every LARP remains in question, as the characters improvise all their lines…. Essentially, LARP is make-believe on steroids for adults.” The first LARPs may have been inspired by the rise in popularity of Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s. One such LARP was the first large Dagorhir Battle Game, which started near Washington, D.C., in 1977. Participants donned costumes, made fake weapons and took to the field to play out massive mock combats. Shortly after, in England, the Treasure Trap game took place in Peckforton Castle and seems to have developed independently. In the 1990s LARPing started to catch on in the Czech Republic and in some Scandinavian countries, where participants quickly developed their own scenes and styles. More recently, out of the pandemic, a new kind of LARP has grown in China: Jubensha. It’s brought tens of thousands of people into LARPing and is one of the most popular growing hobbies in the country. Today there are likely almost half a million live-action role-players across the world.

So why LARP? Aside from offering pure fun and the ability to live out fantasies that would be impossible in reality, LARP is a powerful tool to teach us things about ourselves that would be difficult to learn in everyday life. Think of it as a pressure cooker for your skills, personality and reactions to intense situations. It’s rare for most people to be shoved into crisis situations on a regular basis; few experience a field of combat, an escape from a hostile kingdom or the threat of a destroyed academic career regularly. When you are a LARPer, however, you routinely face situations such as these that test your reactions. There’s a reason why role-play is often used in training scenarios, psychological treatment and education—it works. I’ve seen people who want to work on their public speaking create characters who are charismatic leaders just so they can practice talking in front of audiences or people who have issues confronting others play antagonistic characters simply to get better at standing up for themselves. And beyond expanding your personality, the fact that you physically have to perform the skills your character possesses means that players will often learn new talents so their characters can use them during a story. I have personally learned rudimentary knitting, country dancing, foam crafting, sketching and sewing just because I wanted those skills for LARP.

Role-playing games can have a powerful effect on mental health. “I am struck by the similarities between LARP and psychodrama, a type of group therapy that focuses on the exploration of emotion, relationships and the human psyche through improvised dramatic performances,” says Nishanthi J. Anthonipillai, a clinical psychology graduate student at the City College of New York, who has studied LARPing. “The benefits of role-playing games such as LARP have been documented in research: studies suggest that those who engage in role-playing games exhibit greater motivation and self-efficacy [and] creativity, as well as empathy. Role-playing also promotes increased social connections and a sense of belonging, known protective factors reducing the likelihood of severe mental health disorders.”

Sometimes LARP is a chance to experience something new, but other times it’s a way to tackle situations a person may struggle with in their normal life. “I think LARP can serve as a paradoxical intervention: when issues within the game narrative are similar to those the player is working on in their own life, they can lean into their symptoms and issues while playing and find a different perspective,” Anthonipillai says. “Doing so in a semi-structured narrative, within a genuinely supportive community, with built-in safety protocols—both physical and psychological—while playing a character may allow some distance for a person to process their emotions in a less confrontational manner than direct therapy.”

Beyond personal development, LARP has made me a more empathetic person. It’s given me a chance to walk in someone else’s shoes, whether it’s a character living in a different economic situation, branching into a new stage of life, struggling with addiction or learning about a new religion. When LARP is done respectfully, it can open players’ eyes to so many different, difficult facets of the world.

And I have watched LARP help more than one person realize a truth within themselves. Many transgender people found LARP to be their first opportunity to safely explore their real gender. It was a chance to try on a body and gender expression that felt truer for them without making an immediate, life-changing decision. Others have used LARP to try gender fluidity and different sexualities to see if they felt more comfortable before embracing their identities publicly. LARP gives you a sandbox for experimentation where co-players are supportive, respectful and willing to celebrate whatever story you want to tell.

Several years ago I played a prefectlike character at the New World Magischola, a U.S.-based LARP with a setting akin to a magical British boarding school. I was Quinevere Radcliff-Forsythe, scion of a powerful family. I knew we had several young LARPers at the school, and they all looked up to me, as the senior student in charge of their house, to be not just a mentor but also a guide through this new world. My character spent her time organizing her chaotic house, getting young students ready for classes and protectively stepping up to fight when outside threats arrived at the school. Quinevere, or Quin, embodied many aspects of my own organizing, caring personality but with far more self-confidence and none of my fears of authority figures. She often spoke forcefully with professors and never backed down when she had justified worries about her students. In short, Quin was a badass. After playing her that summer, I came back to a work meeting where we had gotten into the weeds—debating small details and losing sight of the big picture we’d all sat down to discuss. Normally, I’d have kept to my corner, silently taken notes and let everyone else debate—I didn’t like confrontations, much less with senior members of my team. But after having Quin in my head for days, I took a breath, adopted her courage and dared to speak. I made a proposal, laying out the details and the justification in an organized way. Everyone looked stunned. Their meek administrator had just solved half an hour of debating in five minutes. I started to realize I could use my voice to change things for the better if I just believed in it when I spoke up.

The summer after that, I traveled to Belgium for the Myrrdin Emrys College LARP. I decided to challenge myself to play a character so loud and confident that she could not be ignored: Simone. “High-femme, angry, punk” might be the best way to describe her, although she’d hate anyone putting labels on her. Simone was angry at the world, with every right to be. In the narrative of the game, she stood up in front of all her professors and got herself kicked out of school because she couldn’t stand by while students were abused there. She spoke up in a way I’d never had the courage to. And on her way out, she ripped some school evaluation paperwork out of a bureaucrat’s hands and set it on fire in the parking lot. Her actions inspired students to stand up against the cruelty at the school. One of the last scenes I remember is the entire school standing in that parking lot, telling the teachers they wouldn’t come back inside unless things changed. Simone was so proud.

I played many badasses after her: Audi, a biker gal in a LARP called Dystopia Rising Virginia, who taught me that the best way to leave a bad decision in the dust is on the back of a bike while giving it the middle finger; Bathshira Themis, from a game called The Jaw of Victory, who never backed down from a duel, including one against the best fighter in the universe; Halvdana Naglisdottir from the Dammerung LARP, who stood fighting with her people to the literal end of their world. All of them helped turn me into who I am today.

That person isn’t who I was expected to be. I grew up in a place where women were meant to be seen but not heard. As a bigger girl who enjoyed being loudly dramatic from a young age, I was told that I was “too much.” I needed to put on a pretty dress, keep my head down and not speak when anyone more important than me was talking. If I performed traditional femininity quietly in a corner, maybe I could be as pretty as the tiny, shy girls who already seemed to be what the world wanted. But I was wrong. Girls like me also deserve to be heard, and every one of our bodies is a beautiful statement of rebellion against a world that wants to keep us contained. It took walking in the shoes of all these badass women to teach me I could be one, too. After all, everything I was doing was still happening in my body—they were still me.

Yes, these were only games. But these LARPs gave me one of the most important lessons of my life, one that I’m still processing years later: sometimes anger inspires change. If people won’t listen to you talk, then scream. Taking those feelings back home has taught me to stand up in situations where previously I’d have been silent. Simone made me a badass. And although I might never change the world, she’s helped me change parts of mine for the better.