Sarah Lynne Bowman: LARP and Co-Created Reality

Charlie Melcher: 

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of The Future of StoryTelling. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to the FoST Podcast. If this is your first time listening, I’m so glad to have you with us. And if you’re someone who’s listened to and enjoyed the show before, thank you for your continued support. We’d appreciate if you’d consider leaving us a positive rating on your podcast platform of choice. 

Charlie Melcher: 

When most of us think of play, we think back to childhood when we were free and uninhibited, and our limitless imaginations transformed us into superheroes, magicians, and space explorers. As we grew older however, play was replaced with the responsibilities and pressures of adulthood. Stuck in our roles and patterns we became disconnected from the possibility of experimentation and growth. Experiences like live action role playing games, also known as LARPs, Dungeons and Dragons, and freeform immersive theater have seen tremendous growth in popularity in recent years, in part because they provide the safe place that we long for, where exploration, discovery, and even transformation are possible. 

Charlie Melcher: 

Our guest today, Dr. Sarah Lynne Bowman, is a world expert on role playing games. She’s an associate professor for the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University in Sweden, a respected writer, game designer, and organizer of gatherings like the Living Games Conference. I’m excited to have her with us today because I feel her insights and knowledge are relevant to any marketer or storyteller who’s looking to create meaningful experiences for their customers and fans. Please join me in welcoming Sarah Lynne Bowman to the FoST podcast. 

Charlie Melcher: 

Sarah, welcome to the Future of StoryTelling podcast. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. 

Charlie Melcher: 

So I’d love to hear you tell us a little bit about your background with live action role playing games and how this became something that you got involved in. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Sure. I started with online gaming actually, playing text-based Dungeons and Dragons essentially, with friends on the internet. And I didn’t go to my first LARP until I was 19. And I had taken an improv class, so I was really familiar and conversant in improv. And somebody was like, “Hey, we’re playing Vampires down at this university. Would you like to join?” And I was like, “Oh, it’s like improv? Great.” 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And so I just basically would go in improv and just ask people questions like, “Do you think Jesus was a vampire?” Just really kind of weird metaphysical questions. And I found out several sessions in that there was this character sheet, and all these rules, and people were throwing rock, paper, scissors at me. And I didn’t really understand any of that. I was really just more immersed in the character. That was my start. Vampire role playing is one of the most popular types of both tabletop and LARP out there. It came out in the early nineties. And so yeah, that was my first experience. 

Charlie Melcher: 

And was there a experience doing live action role playing that was really moving or super memorable for you? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

It’s really hard to pick one. People who LARP, it’s almost like your life is in technicolor are all of a sudden. You’re playing yourself, but you’re also playing this character who’s living this fictional world that you’re co-creating at the same time. So everything’s really focused and immersive, but it’s really vivid and really hyper real. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And so there’s several memories that come to mind as you’re talking. One that is coming to mind the most is when I met my husband, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas. Actually I’d known him for a while and we were playing. It was actually a Nordic style Vampire LARP. Fast forward several decades later, a couple decades later, and I’m in a Polish castle. And I’m dressed in this renaissance gown. And he and I are playing these characters that are lovers, but they haven’t seen each other for 50 years because it’s Vampire so everything’s super epic. And they’re in this, should we or shouldn’t we, dynamic? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And finally they see each other and they’re just captivated. And I could feel myself flinging against the wall just by pure eyesight, just looking at each other. And my purse fell to the ground, and all these people were coming up to us trying to interact with us. And we’re like, “no”. And we stayed in that moment. It was just so incredibly intense. It’s like king and queen of this twisted castle. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And those are kinds of moments where it’s almost like you see your soul kind of coming out in a way that we don’t often get invited to interact in daily life. And a lot of LARPers are chasing that experience over and over again, and hoping it will happen again. 

Charlie Melcher: 

Those who don’t know, what is a LARP, a live action role playing game? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Sure. So it’s basically spontaneous co-creative expression within a bounded playfulness. So we’re playing these fictional characters within this fictional setting. And we can improvise, we can co-create with each other. It’s very similar to theatrical improvisation where you maybe have a couple of prompts, but the rest of it is coming from you. But it tends to not have an audience and it tends to be pretty serious, even if it’s a fun LARP, you’re still playing for several hours often or even days. So you’re in that character and in that fiction for a long period of time. 

Charlie Melcher: 

Are there certain types of LARPs? I know you mentioned Nordic LARPing for example. How does that differ from other countries? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

It’s very difficult to define Nordic LARP, and anytime we try other Nordic LARPers are like, “No, no, no, that’s not what that means.” But for the sake of simplicity, it tends to be very immersive experiences that don’t have a lot of mechanics. They tend to be focused on social realism. So oftentimes they’re very serious themes like being in a prison camp, or being an immigrant waiting to get into a country for asylum for example. Or playing out a certain period of history in a very, very socially realistic way. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Like 1942 is a Norwegian LARP where they basically played a weekend of occupied Norway. So some people are playing the Germans and some people are playing the Norwegians. And they’re just role-playing out what their grandfathers did. And they’re reading these old stories and they’re trying to faithfully recreate what life would’ve been like during that time. So it’s not necessarily a big dramatic story. It’s like smaller moments. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

There tends to be a strong social justice component, I would say to Nordic LARP, a strong emphasis on trying to understand things like oppression, and marginalization, and what’s at the core of democracy, and how do we foster that in people. 

Charlie Melcher: 

What would a person in the US have as one of their first examples of doing a LARP or something that they could reference? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Well, Nordic LARP is already a little bit on the avant guard, even for LARP in the Nordic countries, which is often fantasy based, playing in the woods or post-apocalyptic, that kind of thing. So actually quite similar as you would find in the US. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

US LARP in general tends to be a lot more mechanics heavy. So even if you’re both playing a fantasy LARP, if you’re in Sweden, it’s probably a lot more realistic fantasy, if that makes sense. You’re not calling out numbers when you’re hitting people with a foam sword. You’re kind of imagining what it’s like to be an elf, I guess. 

Charlie Melcher: 

And do most people really dress the part? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

It very much varies from LARP culture to LARP culture. The very first LARP I ever went to, I actually didn’t play in. I was 16 years old and it was a bunch of people out in the park just hitting each other with swords. And sometimes they might have a tabard on that’s made out of bedsheets. I mean very, very, very basic costuming. And that LARP is called Amtgard, and it’s a highly popular in several different countries all over the world sport. So it’s more like a sports LARP than it is being immersed in your character, and having these deep powerful experiences, and having the perfect costuming. The costuming is there to signal what side you’re on maybe. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

The issue with trying to make any sort of generalization is there’s always an exception to the rule. So there’s always going to be a group in the middle of New England that’s doing some really intense, amazing fantasy role playing with really, really high costuming requirements and really amazing props that maybe I don’t even know about. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

But certainly the stereotype of American LARP is that it tends to not be as high production values. And a lot of that is class-based. A lot of people who get drawn into these activities don’t necessarily have the resources for that. So there’s a sort of connotation around that, that they’re not doing real play. But honestly, the play is occurring in the mind. The costuming and all of that helps you to get into the character, but it’s not necessary. I’ve played incredibly intense games on my living room floor with no costuming whatsoever. So it varies. 

Charlie Melcher: 

And have you seen the popularity of LARPing grow? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

I definitely think it is. There’s a lot more media coverage of role-playing games in general, like Stranger Things. They have tabletop role-playing on that show. And so a lot of young people are getting exposed to role-playing in a way that’s not the Satanic panic like it was in the eighties when some of us were still alive, were alive back then, where there was a lot of stigma around it. It’s a little bit better now. And people aren’t necessarily having these connotations attached to it. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

LARP is absolutely exploding in China in the last few years since around 2015. In China, they have what’s called jubensha, which stands for script kill, which is a very… But it’s basically murder mysteries. They have 30,000 or more. It might be close to 65,000 studios right now that are doing these murder mystery style games or similar. Some of them are historical dramas. It just in the last few years has completely exploded and become a commercial medium in ways that in the West we haven’t really seen it yet take off. 

Charlie Melcher: 

What do you think people are getting out of participating in LARPs? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

I think that people feel really powerless in life. I think the way that the reality is set up, it’s a little bit brutal. It lacks consent a lot of the time. Even when we feel like we have a lot of choice, oftentimes our path has been set determined for us in very specific ways. Socioeconomic class, race, gender, where we grew up, who our parents were, what schools we went to, and what they taught us. And I’m an instructor, I teach at the university level. I’m part of that machine. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

The idea of being able to go to a wizard school and play a professor that is actually really bad at her job, or who can affect reality with a wand, that’s a very different kind of experience than even I experience in the classroom. And that’s really fascinating too. When somebody like me, who spends a bunch of money to go pretend to be a professor in a wizard college, what’s that about? I could do that at home maybe. But I would say analog role playing games give the most creative agency out of all of the types of games and even stories out there. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Fiction writing can give a lot of agency, but it doesn’t have the co-creative element so much. Fan fiction’s interesting because people create and then they respond to each other’s creations. And sometimes they’ll create in response, but it’s not usually at the same time. And that is a very exciting kind of state to be in, I would say. 

Charlie Melcher: 

I would put forth that I think LARPing’s going to become very big in part because this intense shift that we are living through from unidirectional media where everything used to be one way and we had no choice but to passively consume it, to an age now with the internet and games where people expect to have a role to play and are just actually coming into their own with that sense of comfort in being able to co-create and have that agency. Maybe now you get attention for posting a good social media video. Eventually, I believe very strongly that people will gain social status for being really good at improv acting. 

Charlie Melcher: 

So I really see LARPing as the vanguard of this new era that we’re entering of the people formally known as the audience becoming the actors, that we’re going to really start to celebrate not just celebrities who are in movies that are fixed, but our fellow players who are able to really bring unbelievable creativity, and imagination, and depth of their character and their souls to the games, to the stories that they’re going to live with others. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

I hope that’s true. I have so many things to say about what you just said. It’s beautiful. One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is this idea of consensus reality that is, like I said, it’s called consensus, but it’s not really consensual. A lot of it was predetermined for us. Keith Johnstone in the book Impro talks about this, how he had to train actors out of acting in order to improvise. He had to train them how to un-atrophy these muscles of creativity because they’ve been beaten out of them. So even though they’re technically playing, they’re not really playing, they’re actually doing this very studied, rehearsed, structured activity that is high stakes. If they get it wrong, then they lose their job. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And I think society tends to force our creativity into these very narrow parameters. And I think you’re right that we are in this age where people can create in all different kinds of ways and put it out there and actually get feedback in response from others. But I still think there’s this distrust around the not real. And I’m not sure that everybody is willing to go to the not real place. I think a lot of people are very either suspicious or afraid of what might happen there, who they might be. Often, I don’t know how I would… What if I embarrass myself? What if I don’t know how to do it? What if? Because we always want to be so capable and show ourselves as socially capable. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And part of what we’re talking about here is that threshold of where somebody is willing to surrender and take a risk. And just relying on strangers and allowing yourself to just be different, be outside of your social role. Some people, they get to that threshold and they’re not ready to surrender. And maybe they never will. And then there are other people, in psychology we would call this openness to experience. It’s one of the big five personality traits. I would say that people are drawn to all of these sort of activities on the spectrum, probably have a tendency towards having that high openness to experience trait, where it’s like, “Huh, yeah, I’ll try that.” And then oftentimes they’ll try a related subculture and another group where there’s slightly askew from the social reality that we call the “real world” for whatever reason. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

But oftentimes there’ll be these overlapping subcultures. And often there’s, I think that common element of being curious about ways that reality could be slightly different, and testing those boundaries. Some people are deeply uncomfortable with that idea and much prefer to stay within the lane that they were given. I don’t know if that’s an orientation or if it’s… I know it’s socially conditioned, but I do think there’s an orientation element to it. 

Charlie Melcher: 

One of the things that I think about when I think of, and have done some role playing is that it leaves me realizing that the role that I consider to be my primary identity is also constructed, that it gives me that opportunity to have a mirror to what I think of as Charlie as a day-to-day. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Just put it in quotes right, “Charlie”. 

Charlie Melcher: 

Air quotes “Charlie,” and realize that for whatever reason, that is a role also, even though until you play another one, you might not think about that. I wonder if that’s one of the things that’s a reward for people in doing these things, is it gets them to question or see other decisions and other parts of personality that are constructed. And just like a decision you make, you make a decision, like I’m going to be a faithful husband. I’m going to be a responsible business person. I’m not somebody who, whatever. You’re making decisions and playing a role, and some people make other decisions and play other roles. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

It’s like in the Matrix when Neo wakes up and he’s like, “Fuck this.” Right? Like, “What’s this?” I think there’s an assumption that if we wake up to who we really are that it’s going to be awesome. But sometimes that’s terrifying. It might have been easier to be asleep. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

I think that anybody who’s willing to step out of a prescribed social reality is brave, but you don’t have to push yourself to the edge in order to have that. And your edge is going to look different from my edge. It’s about your relationship to your own being in the world. And that moment of deciding when you come back, that’s agency. And even if it’s deciding to go back to your previous social role, at least it was a decision. It wasn’t something that you were forced into. It’s something that you had that choice point, you had that moment. And you had things that you were afraid to lose. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And that’s fine. I can’t fully let go in LARPs because of my status. I don’t feel like I can fully release. I don’t feel like I can fully show the range of what’s in me because people look to me with a certain expectation of the authority that I carry. And if I’m too surrendered, if I’m not completely or even slightly in control of myself, I might say or do something that actually really harms someone, or dispels an important projection that they have on me that is something that they carry with them that helps them decide to go to academia for example. That’s a lot of weight to carry when you’re a community leader. So I just want to again acknowledge that you even putting yourself in that situation, and being in the inquiry of, “How far do I want to go?” That’s a powerful state. 

Charlie Melcher: 

It sounds amazing. It sounds all of a sudden, as you said, that I felt the weight of so many years of, “Charlie be the good boy. This is what you’re supposed to do. This is how you’re supposed to be in the world. This is what you do to be successful.” And you don’t make those conscious choices even really, right? As you say, it’s kind of programmed in from school, from society. And then what happens when you can say, “Hey, I can let go of all of that.” And what would it mean to start from scratch, or how different would you be? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And you can still be the good boy when you’re doing that. It’s just that you have a different set of agreements, social agreements now where you’re allowed to be the bad boy or whatever it is you’re exploring. And I’m stuck in my good girl right now, big time. Because I feel all of this weight of my station, especially now that I’m stepping into a new job and I’m in a really old and traditioned university that has all this weight behind it. And I feel like I have to uphold that somehow. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And yet I’m being asked to talk about play. And I don’t really have space for play in my life at all right now. So even as we’re talking and I’m remembering, and I’m trying to really be in what it felt like to be these characters, I’m like, “Why don’t I do that more often? Why am I talking about it in that abstracted way?” I think you and I are a lot alike actually. We’re the observers often. And we’re trying to make sense of it. 

Charlie Melcher: 

How transformative have these LARPs been for people? Do you see people show up, play a role that’s completely different than their own, and then leave changed? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

There are plenty of people who role play that don’t feel transformed at all by it, and that’s totally valid. I don’t want to in any way negate their experience. There are people that don’t want to have a transformative experience. They want to have fun, they want to let off steam, they want to forget about reality for a while, that escapism. Which I don’t care for that word. But some people will claim it. They’ll be like, “I love to escape.” It’s like, okay, great. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

But I kind of take Tolkien’s side in this. It’s like, what are you escaping to? What are you finding there? What are you redeeming in yourself from these experiences? And that’s the gold that I really want. It’s less about the experience itself and more what happens after. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

So for example, probably the most profound experience I ever had was in a LARP called Just a Little Lovin’. And this is a LARP about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. And you play three days of three years in the early eighties where they didn’t know anything about the virus. And it’s this very permissive kind of environment where everybody’s role playing out, hooking up and having these experimental psychedelic, for example, experiences or tantra, or I should say neo tantra, homoerotic experiences, et cetera. And then they experience loss, and grief, and community healing. And then they do it again and do it again. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

I’ve played this LARP three times now and I’ve always played the same character. And the first time I played her, I was playing the neo tantra guide, a straight woman, one of the only straight characters in the LARP. Of course that that becomes very nebulous very quickly in that game. The starting point is straight. But like we said, that’s all a construct. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

But what I found in that character, what I was wanting to find in that character was spiritual peace. I have a tremendous amount of anxiety. And that is very difficult to manage. And I think it’s getting worse as I get older, actually. And so yet I played this character who had answers. And she had states that weren’t anxious. It didn’t mean she didn’t have her issues. In a lot of ways, she was probably more naive than me. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

But I played that character and I was in this totally blissed out state at the end of the LARP where… And this is going to sound weird, but I was ready to die. My character, we have to walk up this hill and you’re kind of facing your own mortality. And she was totally peaced out. She was praying to the goddess and saying, “Okay, onto the next incarnation.” 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And then we broke the LARP and they made us de-roll right away. And I lost it. All of my anxiety started crashing in. All of that quote unquote “Sarah” ness, that construct of me that I didn’t even know I was holding at bay. And I was like, oh, that’s what I’m holding all the time. And so that’s why I keep playing that character. And then I do the practices and I try to figure out, okay, what state was she able to attain. Because that happened in my body so I clearly can go there. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And each time I played her, it became easier and easier. And I think that it’s that practicing different states of being. So it’s not just experiencing them once, but actually entraining in your body, what it’s like to be more brave, or to be a leader, or to be vulnerable, or whatever it is, feel more inner peace. I think that is really the transformative power of these kinds of games. 

Charlie Melcher: 

Yeah. I love that. I keep wanting to compare this now back to some of the classic understanding of StoryTelling where people have learned from other characters. Like you read about a character in a book, and you have insight into how they see the world, or you watch a different character on a movie and you learn something about the world through their eyes. But it’s very different than actually living in that character. Watching the character and learning something versus embodying the character and feeling something. 

Charlie Melcher: 

And so I guess that seems to me to be also why role playing games and LARPing has such incredible opportunities for us to not just learn about different parts of ourselves, but perhaps also all sorts of other therapeutic or almost health related outcomes. And also perhaps in a whole category of empathy, of just all of a sudden trying to really have access to understanding how someone very different from you sees and shows up in the world. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And then the challenge is, how do I go back to myself and the life that I was leading after having that insight, after taking that perspective and gleaning what I gleaned, which was probably quite overwhelming, if you’re going that deep. Then who am I? And so what I’m really interested in is the integration pieces. Like yes, the LARP is interesting, but what do we take with us? I think that’s the key right there. What am I distilling? What am I taking with me. And what is it like to instantiate not just in my cognition but in my body, like you’re talking about? What does it feel like to have that embodied cognition of inner peace as this person? That’s a much harder question. And how do I keep that state that I experienced there or some version of it? How do I keep returning to it without that frame that got me there? Because I never got there before. So some people leave it bounded in that space and they think they need to LARP in order to feel that. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

I started going to these weekend workshops where we just basically profoundly fuck with the idea of self, where we’re just like, okay, “Let’s completely rewrite our scripts of who we are and see what happens. What if you were operating from a completely different set of precepts about the world?” Like let’s say I have this core belief that reality is dangerous, which I do. I feel that way all the time. Just even being in this room, I could potentially bump into something and hurt myself. That’s kind of my story about the world. But what if all of a sudden that wasn’t the principle that I’m operating from? What would open up for me? And I think that’s one of the places that LARP can get you, but it’s not the only place you can go. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And it’s not the only place where you can find that. It’s just one of these many windows into these altered states of consciousness that I’m really interested in. And these transformational communities that hold space for those kinds of experiences, like, “Oh, we’re all going to get into a circle and decide we’re going to change ourselves today.” That’s amazing. What’s going to happen? This is fascinating. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

I don’t want to put LARP on this pedestal like it’s the only way to get to these deep insights. It’s one medium of many. It just happens to be the one that I’ve been studying for a very long time. And I have a lot of experience in my body of being in hundreds of different characters over the years, and different fictional… Most people don’t get to even get outside their one self, or maybe they have multiples, they don’t necessarily acknowledge that. But they have very set parameters. You’re holding these two precepts at the same time. You’re holding the you-ness and you’re holding the character. And that’s just a fascinating space to operate in. 

Charlie Melcher: 

Is there some hope that you have for the future of LARPing and how it might impact society? 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Yes. It’s not so much about LARPing, but it’s about learning the skills to co-create reality and to consciously create ourselves. I think it’s very clear that the world we’ve set up is unsustainable, that the structures that we’ve built are at their… They’re being challenged in some pretty significant ways. And we make it to a point… Well, I’d say we’re already at a point where we have to really make a choice about the world that we want to create out here. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

And a lot of people don’t feel like they have the capability to do that. And what I think is profound about LARP, going back to that agency, is realizing, oh wow, I spilled that secret and then the next day all of this happened. Realizing just the tiniest little action can actually have tremendous impact. I’m not going to say LARP will save the world, because I don’t know if the world can be saved, quite frankly. I don’t mean to end this on a downer, but I think that we can redeem ourselves in who we choose to be in any given moment and how we choose to show up for this world that we’ve created. 

Charlie Melcher: 

And we have the power to recreate it in our image, and the way we want it to be. So that’s a beautiful message. I can’t wait to do some LARPing together. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Yes, let’s make it happen. 

Charlie Melcher: 

Let’s make it happen. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Let’s not get too stuck in the good girl and good boy that we don’t indulge that inner child that didn’t get to fully express themselves. 

Charlie Melcher: 

Sarah, thank you so much for sharing with us today. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you. 

Sarah Lynne Bowman: 

Absolutely. And you as well. Thank you for sharing so vulnerably with me. 

Charlie Melcher: 

Warm thanks to Sarah Lynn Bowman for being on today’s podcast. To learn more about her research, please visit the links in the episode’s description. 

Charlie Melcher: 

And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can stay updated on new episodes and become part of the Future of StoryTelling family by signing up for our free monthly newsletter at FoST.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner Charts & Leisure. 

Charlie Melcher: 

I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of story telling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.