The Arts of LARP: Design, Literacy, Learning and Community in Live-Action Role Play

[M. Alan Thomas II]

A book entitled The Arts of LARP: Design, Literacy, Learning and Community in Live-Action Role Play (ISBN: 978-0786496013) came out yesterday. Someone with a better understanding of the approaches he is taking to the subject than I should should probably review it. The blurb is as follows:

This ethnography of a live-action role play (LARP) community examines the structure of play, how new participants are introduced and apprenticed into the culture, player expectations and motivations, and games as they are designed and as they are performed. The main focus is on LARP's affordance for learning across a variety of disciplines and interests. The book is intended for LARP participants, academics interested in play or in collaborative development, those interested in new uses of familiar learning environments, and game developers with an interest in creating games with highly interactive narratives and co-creative play experiences in which the role of designer and player is blurred.

The author is David Simkins, whose bio states that he is "an assistant professor of game design and development in the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is active in the assessment of learning in games, and is a founding member of the Learning and Educational Games (LEG) SIG of the IGDA and the Games, Learning and Society (GLS) group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He lives in Rochester, New York."

—Alan