I Play Roles, Therefore I Am: Placing Larp in a Borader Cultural Perspective

The attention paid to live-action role-playing and other forms of leisure role-playing has exploded over the past few years, both due to the fact that the role-playing community continues to attract a lot of new members, the fact that role-playing as a creative, self-organizing and self-reflecting activity is getting an increasingly growing attention from the media, and the fact that educators, teachers, and development consultants have discovered the potential inherent in role-playing, both as an idea and a strategy. In this essay, we place leisure role-playing in a broader perspective, not only in relation to actual phenomena in mediatized popular culture (such as computer games) or to storytelling in organizations, but also in relation to role-playing as a tradition and theoretical consideration within education, theatre, and the social sciences. The points and discussions are based on our book Rollespil - i æstetisk, pædagogisk og kulturel sammenhæng (2006), which is the first Danish academic anthology on role-playing as an aesthetic, educational, and cultural phenomenon.