The Horror of Horrors

Live Action Roleplaying, or LARPing as it is more commonly known, is never acceptable. No matter how much football one watches and how carefully one chooses his aftershave, spending a weekend above a pub in Reading pretending to be an elf mage defies even the loosest definition of normality. Though Magic the Gathering, Wizards of the Coast and even Dungeons and Dragons may be passable, it is only so if kept locked away in the privacy of your own home. Once a man steps out into the world dressed as an orc and clad in green body paint, he has crossed a line that it is hard to get back on the right side of.

To see the problem with LARPing let us consider a bastardization of Kant’s publicity test. Essentially, an action must be unacceptable if you would be unhappy with everyone knowing you were doing it. Though this is far from a perfect moral guide, it has simple charm to it and should act as a restraint to most Acceptable Geeks. Unless you’d be happy for all and sundry to know you spend your weekends rolling D20 to determine the results of your social interactions, you probably shouldn’t do it. And if you are happy with this, you are probably a nerd. Fortunately, though the age of criminal responsibility in the UK currently stands at 10, we would support a rise to 18 in the cases of crimes against geekdom. With the correct retelling, nerdish actions committed as a minor can become charming self-deprecating humour. So there is hope for the LARPer – as long as he stops now.

Though the Acceptable Geek Club holds the above as gospel, there is a different interpretation of LARPing which awards it much greater credit. Interacting Arts (http://interactingarts.org/data/ia-international-05.pdf), a Stolkholm-based group of art theorists, see role playing as a significant, post-modern art form. Differing from traditional spectator-based arts, roleplaying is seen as a participatory art in which players are engaged in a communal process of creativity. If the artist is the ultimate expression of Western individualism, then roleplaying ‘reclaim[s] creativity for Everyone (sic)’ and allows participants to achieve the highest human’s can strive for. It also strips art of elitism and makes it something for the masses.


The Acceptable Geek Club shares Interacting Arts distain for the snobbishness of artistic communities and generally supports the democratization of the arts. All too often great works that geeks love are dismissed as “genre pieces” and not afforded the same worth as art-house cinema though their messages are as sobering and their techniques as seminal. Though new technologies are moving many arts (most noticeable video) away from the establishment and into the hands of the many, much art, particularly that associated with “high culture”, remains accessible only to those with the right education, tastes and, unfortunately, accents. Should we, therefore, reassess and celebrate LARPing? We think not. Though it may be a form of art, art is not a virtue in itself. Art can be good and it can be bad, and LARPing is bad. Art should also have standards, and those these will remain to subjective and fluid they are key to allowing any kind of debate about what counts as art. What these would be in LARPing is wholly unclear. Finally, above all, art must be creative. Though everyone has influences we lambast and, if is obvious enough, punish plagiarism. LARPing is often little more than derivative Tolkien-fetishism and this stifles, rather than promotes creativity.