Our LARPs explore and test the local and global consequences of advanced technologies for human and more-than-human interests.
We have developed a specialism in the creation of Live Art Action Research Role Play (LAARRP) games for deep and rigorous research.
A Live Action Role-Play, or LARP, is a form of game where participants play characters who interact to pursue goals within a fictional setting. By crafting these into creatively-driven and rigorous modes of enquiry, we have developed a new deep research tool.
Our LAARRPs invite people into a carefully designed scenario, have them take on characters with key motivations, and problem solve within this framework. This leads to powerful group-driven discovery, rich research data, and potential real-world answers. Our approach brings emerging research to Nordic Larp’s model where, in contrast with the kind of role-play events associated with reenactment which prioritise historical accuracy, participants co-create alternative worlds in improvised immersive performances.
DECAL@Furtherfield LARPography
From new forms of transparency and accountability, identity profiling and runaway AI to environmental devastation, we are facing a range of new cultural and eco-social issues. Participants from all backgrounds and sectors join to investigate political, economic, social, legal and environmental issues created by the impact of new technologies on modes of more-than-human governance.
2020-25 The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is a 5-year event series played from more-than-human perspectives for the blooming of a bountiful biodiversity and interspecies political action.
2024 The Cosmic Arts Copyright Convention explores how a transformation of copyright law, might create more equitable systems for all beings.
2020 Fictional Focus Group providing insights into the uneven social consequences of radical transparency.
2020 Transcultural Data Pact exploring how personal and collective data practices and devices shape the attitudes and fortunes of societies.
2019 Now London is a City Farm… informing blockchain systems for multi-species food justice governed by a more-than-human citizenry.
2018 What Will It Be Like When We Buy An Island (On The Blockchain)? what will life be like on islands ruled by crypto billionaires acting without governmental constraints or tax laws?
2016 Role Play Your Way to Budgetary Blockchain Bliss, MoneyLab #3 players compete to benefit from super-automation and hyperconnectivity offered by the blockchain.
What people say about our LARPs
“The playful setting got participants seamlessly involved with their personifications, and exceptionally showed how a micro-cosmos of diversity manages to generate social relations, contract codes, and socio-technical arrangements involving blockchains and similar devices, in a mist of ethical debates, interest-driven governance, and solidarity.” – Pablo Velasco, Institute of Network Cultures on Role Play Your Way To Budgetary Blockchain Bliss.
“LARPing various scenarios and imagined futures inspired or propelled by the prospect of blockchain governance offers a semantic and physical framework through which to understand negotiate and challenge the potential impact of blockchain-based governance.” – Max Dovey, in Improvising Blockchains for State Machines (2019)
“I could get a bunch of people to sit together in a committee and list the sort of problems you could expect when you are suddenly confronted with a completely incompatible civilisation and needed to communicate with them and we would never have come up with the notes that I made in the game.” – Professor Arik Kershenbaum, Dept Zoology, Girshon College, Cambridge on Transcultural Data Pact, 2020
“By using improvisation and creative relational engagements we actually learned something in those relational connections that is much more than I would have learned by using my own head and experience to come at these issues today” – Kate Genevieve on Fictional Focus Group, 2020
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