Constructing of Group Identity During Live-Action Role-Playing Games

Abstract

A LARP, or live-action role-playing game, is an activity enabling participants to act out their fictional characters in a make-believe world. It has followers all over the world. Research for this article was conducted in Moscow and St. Petersburg LARP communities, establishing a database with over 600 cases of “going out of character” in 2012-13. Analysis suggests that in certain cases breaks of game frame can enrich a LARP for its participants rather than spoil it. The results can be useful for enhancing sociological and anthropological understanding, including in such approaches as interaction analysis, community building research, game studies, and ludology.

Notes

English copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text “Konstruirovanie gruppovoi identichnosti v protsesse rolevoi igry.” Author copyright. Ol'ga Vladimirovna Vorobyeva is a graduate student at the European University at St. Petersburg, Faculty of Anthropology. Translated by Stephan Lang. Translation reprinted from Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, vol. 54, no. 1. doi:10.1080/10611959.2015.1132094.

^1. “One hefty nerfling” [zdorovennyi iaz’]—an Internet meme that emerged from a video clip in which the fisherman Viktor Goncharenko expresses with great emotion his elation with regard to catching this fish. The clip acquired huge popularity in the autumn of 2011, provoking a wave of spinoff creativity. The clip can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = alFsJe8lOnE.

^2. The passage is cited from a self-recording [samozapisi] by a participant in the game who posted it on her blog, as a joke going around among players during the game.

^3. At first—in the 1990s—nicknames were taken primarily from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. In time the practice of “defending a name” even developed, when a member who had decided to take a “high-profile” name had to prove worthiness of it. For more detail about this practice see Barkova (2009). Currently a nickname can be of any origin, including a concrete form of an ordinary name. The practice of “defending a name” taken from a well-known work has receded into the past.