LARP Politics and Hyperreality

Did not expect this to also include Guy Fawkes/Anonymous mask tie-ins although it’s of course relevant to the thesis of the essay as one of the more well known LARPs in modern times.

> LARP refers to “live action roleplaying”, a genre of roleplaying game where a fictitious world with its own lore and internal logic is mutually agreed upon by multiple players. Each of these players acts out a character within this world and, through their characters, engages in dialogue with one another. Perhaps the archetypal example of LARPing describes the sorts of historical re-enactments one would find at a mediaeval fair, but the term has been used with increasing frequency to describe people’s relationships to extreme political alignments. This essay is an inquiry into why LARP has become so resonant for understanding the aesthetics of specific political and cultural phenomena in the 21st century.

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> Hyperreality describes an ambiguity between image and reality. However, the dialectic between the two still remains culturally understood, and some things are perceived to belong to one camp over the other. I argue that in the hyperreal world of the 21st century, ‘image’ and ‘reality’ have become analogues to ‘online’ and ‘offline’. We have other synonyms that reinforce this dialectic such as ‘virtual reality’, ‘metaverse’, and ‘cyberspace’, compared to ‘IRL’, ‘meatspace’, and ‘physical’. Online phenomena are regarded as belonging to the order of the image by virtue of requiring screens to interact with them. Offline phenomena are regarded as belonging to the order of the real as interactions with them are physical and tactile. Of course, this distinction is artificial; much of the work done by affect theorists over the past thirty years demonstrates how interactions with images can elicit visceral and palpable physiological responses. Additionally, and of course, central to Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, our experience of the offline world is also understood via the mediation of images.

> Much like the distinction between LARP and reality, the cultural distinction between online and offline is also a function of hyperreality that masks the absence of the real. As described earlier in this piece, the political context of the 21st century is that politics are structured and understood according to their aesthetic features and affective value. For politics to be adopted as, and reduced to, personal style makes sense in the hyperreal world: the political subject is a consumer of images. LARP politics, in addition to describing a political engagement that can be turned on and off like a tap, describes an aesthetic quality of belonging to the internet. Because the online image-world is resolutely understood in opposition to the offline real-world, LARP politics are regarded as bizarre and out of place when they rupture into the real. Like any simulation, though, a rupture into the real is inevitable, and I argue is vital for the emergence of the declaration ‘LARP comes after farce’.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240506211313/https://donotrese...

https://archive.is/oqNOx