LARPs as a way to explore future societies

LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. It is a game format which takes role playing from the tabletop and allows more full immersion and participation by the players. What makes it live as opposed to other formats is that the participants physically act out the parts of their characters. They often dress in costume and theatrical elements are added. Sword play, physical challenges, and crafting may also be involved depending on the game. This allows for an atmosphere and engagement that can go further and challenge the player more than would otherwise be the case. It also allows for the potential of greater immersion since it has the player actually living out the events of the world.

Depending on how it is implemented Augmented Reality Games can fall into this category. The world around the players/users is altered by the game and their involvement in it. Everyone is on board with living in the world that has been created. Players can gain a great deal of knowledge of the world from this interaction and often have a greater level of interest and engagement as a result. So for the purposes of the ZS ARG it offers some tantalizing potential. Not only does it bring all the people together within the shared world it gives them an opportunity to affect and build that world through the actions of their characters.

Existing games have a great deal of variability in the characters ability to influence and build their world. How much depends specifically on the game. This is something that needs to be carefully considered. Amtgard allows each park to determine their own story and even universe with each successive monarch at the local kingdom and park level usually selecting a theme and building around that. This provides a very high level of flexibility and inventiveness for each park to explore and build on its own. It does make it difficult for wider stories across multiple kingdoms though. While there is nothing that limits or prevents such activities from happening (And large events that have people from multiple kingdoms often have self-contained stories for this reason) it makes it hard to form and operate a running narrative for the whole of the game of Amtgard. In fact the only thing that officially ties Amtgard together for gaming purposes is its consistent rule set but even that can be altered for specific local games or needs. This approach allows a great deal of flexibility and inventiveness by local players and game leaders. Almost anything goes that doesn't directly violate some very basic rule. Individual characters come in every flavor with costumes and races being essentially whatever a given player wants. A game like Alliance or Nero keeps track of characters much more closely and has its world more tightly connected. While each chapter has some flexibility in their specific region the world is held sufficiently consistent that players can, and frequently do, travel between parks with the same characters to participate. There is much more limitation on world however, as players are given strict set of races and classes which they must adhere to. These are limiting to the point of even defining character traits and motivations on a racial level.

A LARP or ARG that is designed to explore future worlds will probably want to the opt for the more open end of this range since we want to be able to fully imagine the possibilities that may exist and utilize individual perspective to inform the narrative. Everyone sees the future a little differently and allowing participants to use their own judgement and characters to build the story means that we end up with the diverse aspects that the future will likely produce in any case much like the various LARPs and the world in general.