(Role)playing soldier: LARP, simulated combat, and gender at war

ABSTRACT

This paper examines pleasure and combat in the context of North American East Coast boffer combat larp. Based on ethnographic research conducted in US East Coast larping communities, I investigate how live-action role-players (larpers) use larp to explore fictional violence and the experience of the imagined combatant. I demonstrate how, through collaborative play and performance, larpers explore not only the tragedy of war but the pleasures of teamwork, community, and individual self-worth. I further explore how women and underrepresented genders make spaces for themselves by challenging sexist notions of physical fitness, capacity for violence, and leadership. I show how these interactions foster networks of personal and communal pleasure that depend on a/n (re)imagining of warfare, strife, and death: combat, creativity, and collaborative play generate complex relationships between violence, community, and the imaginary world of fictionalised battle. However, within this discussion, I ultimately suggest that ‘(role)playing at war’ creates spaces of camaraderie while simultaneously normalising violence. I problematise larp violence as an activity that resists generalised definitions of violent play and pleasure.

KEYWORDS:

• Roleplaying games
• live-action roleplaying
• violence
• gender
• creative communities
• play

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to the larpers who shared their experiences and spaces with me. Additionally, Samantha Eddy, Scott LaTour, and Michael Mirabile provided supportive advice on the structure of this paper and offered feedback on my various analyses and conclusions. Finally, a considerable thanks to the reviewers and editors of this volume – your feedback made for a much more dynamic essay than I had ever anticipated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zoë Antoinette Eddy

Zoë Antoinette Eddy is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She received her PhD in both Social Anthropology and Archaeology from Harvard University. She specialises in Indigenous studies and creative communities. She has been studying live-action roleplaying for ten years. She has published on larping, including her article ‘Playing at the Margins: Colonizing Fictions in New England Larp’ in a special 2020 issues of Humanities and her chapter ‘The Day Angela Died: Imagining Violence and Reclaiming Indigeneity through Collaborative Performance’ in the edited volume Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community. Outside of her academic work, she is an activist and advocate for ending sexual violence affecting Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people.