Larping for Democracy

Last week, my Larpocracy colleagues have been facing reality in two different contexts: the EduLarp conference and Knutepunkt. Both are long-standing semi-academic events directed (primarily) at larp designers and artists, the former with a strong educational focus and the latter more widely scoped. They are also run on yearly basis in the Nordic countries, and hence, both have a strong focus on the larp tradition that’s called ‘Nordic Larp’. I was not able to attend myself, but I have been catching up with them afterwards.

It is fair to say that the project raises a lot of interest, but also many critical questions. This post is an attempt at summarizing those questions and start thinking about how Larpocracy might be able to address them.

“But this is something we ALREADY do - and we are not part of the project! You are missing out on our expertise!"

Oh, I wish we could involve everyone! Throughout my academic career, larp designers have ranked among the most intelligent, skilled, creative, and resourceful people i know. (They are also fun to party with.) They outrank many scholars, professional designers in other fields, and artists that I have met.

But a project is just a project - it needs to have a limited set of organisations and people working their asses off towards set goals. The partners were selected firstly on their profile and background, but secondly on their ability to do precisely that. The project will organise several events, including larp festivals, where we will actively seek collaboration with designers, artists and organisers outside the project. This might be a less influential role, but at least you do not have to write time and expense reports for the EU commission.

“You are just tapping our knowledge and understanding."

This is a version of the critizism above and yes, in the initial phase of the project we are scouting what’s already out there. We are interviewing designers and organizers about their own take on larp that foster democratic engagement, and we are asking them about how they currently design for this. We do not want to reinvent the wheel and we want to be respectful of the knowledge that designers and organizers already have, be it tacit or already documented and taught.

Having said so, there is actually very little research on what works, and when it works. While we do think that larp are good tools to train democratic skills and support community building, we have no hard data to support this. Neither do we know if, and when, larp are good at changing people’s attitude towards democratic values. Larpocracy is about taking the current, practical and experience-based understanding among designers a step further, to find out what works and what does not work.

“What do you mean by democratic engagement anyways?"

While we are meeting with a host of designers that all claim that their larp are fostering democratic engagement, there is very little agreement on what this actually means. An early step in the coming months is to figure out the goals that these larps actually strive for, mapping out landscape of design goals that designers already have in their designs for democratic engagement.

But Larpocracy also has its own take on this. Part of the project is focussed on particular skills and values that we know we want to work with: skills associated with deliberation and value sets that we know are associated with the willingness to engage in deliberation.

What, then, is deliberation? Oxford dictionary has it down as the “long and careful consideration and discussion”. Another way to describe it is as the “willingness and ability to both express the own position, and listen to that of others”. Deliberation has received a lot of attention in political science over the last ten years or so. It lies at the core of recent research on citizen assemblies, consisting ordinary people recruited to discuss difficult and dividing issues and come up with potential solutions (With my background as a design researcher, I find it particularly interesting that these panels are not just about talking and listening, but also about finding new paths towards solutions. Citizen assemblies resemble long-standing work on participatory design, and they seem to create similar opportunities and issues.)

Deliberation is just one piece of the puzzle, and it is not the only perspective on democratic engagement that we are studying in Larpocracy. (I will get back to other perspectives in future posts.) Furthermore, deliberation can become a very intellectual perspective. There is a real risk that participants that are highly trained in intellectual argumentation have an advantage. Larpocracy works with the assumption that there is something to learn from the citizen assembly approach in larp design, but also, that assemblies have something to gain from incorporating more of the affective, experiential and embodied ways in which Larps address difficult topics.

REFERENCES

Carpini, Michael X. Delli, Fay Lomax Cook, and Lawrence R. Jacobs. "Public deliberation, discursive participation, and citizen engagement: A review of the empirical literature." Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 7.1 (2004): 315-344.

Schuler, Douglas, and Aki Namioka, eds. Participatory design: Principles and practices. CRC press, 1993.