When you think of LARP, or Live-Action Role-Playing, you probably think of people in armour running around a field hitting each other with foam swords. But not everyone LARPS that way. Some people take the basic concept and run very far away with it, to the point where they’re basically LARPing as...Mad Men.
This is a documentary about Panopticorp, a Nordic-style LARP where everyone pretended to be employees at an ad agency. There were creatives, suits, the works. The game comes from the fact they’d continually get new “briefs” they had to work through.
Nordic-style LARPS are different from your typical fare by being incredibly accessible; you don’t need to know spells, or stats, or even many rules, you can just turn up and pretend to be someone else, in a game that could be about anything.
It sounds dull as hell, but as you can see, they get super into it, and in doing so show us that role-playing can be more about just taking on the persona of somebody who kills things.
The video above is actually an excerpt, from a longer, feature-length documentary being put together by Cosmic Joke called Treasure Trapped. It’s all about “what happens when games get too big for the board”. It looks awesome, so I’ve included its trailer below.
15 Minutes of Panopticorp; ‘An Advertisement Agency from Hell’ Larp [Larping]
PanoptiCorp Mini Documentary 2013 [YouTube]