LARP Is Not a Game, It Is an Experience (And Our Language Should Catch Up)
Most of the confusion we fight in LARP culture starts with one innocent sentence.
“I play a LARP.”
It sounds harmless. It is also a little inaccurate in the same way it would be inaccurate to say, “I play a wedding,” instead of “I was at a wedding,” or “I gamed a nightclub,” instead of “I went dancing at a nightclub",” or “I play a haunted house,” instead of “I went to a haunted house.” You participate in those. You attend them. You experience them. You can be playful inside them, absolutely. But if you frame them like a traditional game, you quietly import a set of expectations that do not actually fit the thing you are about to do. If we are going to talk about expectations in LARP, we have to start by admitting we use the word “game” as a shortcut. It is convenient. It is familiar. It also does a lot of accidental damage.
In plain dictionary terms, a “game” is usually understood as an activity with rules where you can win or lose, or at least a structured contest for amusement. Merriam-Webster leans hard into that idea of competition conducted according to rules, often with participants in opposition. Oxford’s learner dictionary frames it as something you do for fun that often has rules and a win or lose outcome.
That is a useful definition, because it highlights what people bring with them when we tell them “this is a game.” They expect a reliable ruleset. They expect a fair playing field. They expect that if they learn the system and play well, the system will reward them. In a lot of traditional games, that expectation is not just reasonable, it is the point. That framing is useful because it gives players a contract. If you sit down to play chess, nobody has to explain what “good chess” looks like. The board is the board, the rules are the rules, and the objective is clear. Even when a game is messy, like a party game or a tabletop campaign, the expectation is still that the system is the backbone. The rules keep the experience legible. The contest can be cooperative or competitive, but the structure is the authority. Chess does not care about your backstory. Poker does not respect your character arc. Monopoly does not award bonus rent because you delivered a heartfelt monologue about generational trauma. The structure is the entertainment.
LARP does share some DNA with that. We have rules. We have safety systems. We have mechanics. We often have currency, items, crafting, damage, healing, character sheets, advancement, and all the crunchy comforts that make certain parts of our brains light up like a pinball machine. A lot of LARPs also include explicit challenges, from fighting monsters to surviving political pressure to solving mysteries on a clock. We even use game language naturally because, frankly, it is convenient. “Build,” “win,” “lose,” “optimize,” “meta,” “balance,” “patch.” If you have ever been in staff meetings long enough, you have absolutely heard someone say “economy” with the seriousness of a central banker. So yes, LARP can look like a game. Sometimes it even feels like one in the moment. LARP has rules or meta-systems, because rules make shared play possible. LARP has mechanics or tools, because mechanics provide constraints, risk, and momentum.
So why argue about the word “game”?
Because LARP breaks the core promises most people assume a “game” is making. A game is usually built to produce a measurable outcome. Even if it is not about winning, it is about resolving. You complete the mission. You defeat the boss. You finish the scenario. You earn the points. You are done. And because the outcome is measurable, the system can become the main thing you interact with. The rules are the interface. LARP does not behave that way, because the point is not resolution. The point is participation.
In LARP, the most meaningful “wins” are often intangible. You do not win because the system says so. You win because you had a scene that hit. You win because you made a choice you will still be thinking about on Tuesday. You win because you took a risk socially, emotionally, narratively, and it landed. You win because another player trusted you with their story, and you treated it like it mattered. You win because you showed up and helped build the world for other people, not because you extracted the most value from the mechanics.
If you have ever watched someone “lose” a fight in LARP and walk away smiling because it was the best scene of their month, you already understand the problem with calling LARP a game. If you have ever seen a player walk away frustrated because their “optimal” plan did not matter to the narrative, you also understand the problem. Because LARP is not primarily a rules contest. It is a live, collaborative experience and that collaboration changes everything. In most games, the system is impartial. It does not care about your feelings. It does not care about your character arc. It does not care about the vibe. Chess does not slow down because you had a rough week. Monopoly does not adjust because the table wants a more emotionally satisfying ending. Games can be social, yes, but the rules do not negotiate. The rules are the rules. LARP negotiates constantly, because humans are the engine. The quality of a LARP experience is not just what staff wrote, or what mechanics exist, or what props were built. It is how players treat one another. It is the culture of consent. It is how conflicts are handled. It is the unspoken agreement that we are here to make something together, not to squeeze the system until it squeaks.
Even when a LARP has strong mechanics, those mechanics are rarely the final authority in the way a board game’s rules are. They are a toolset. They are a language. They are scaffolding. Their job is to create opportunities for meaningful play, not to declare winners. That is why LARP is closer to “play” than “game.” And “play,” in the broader cultural sense, is bigger than contests. Play is a mode. It is how humans explore identity, power, danger, trust, status, grief, joy, fear, desire, loyalty, betrayal, hope, and all the other things we pretend we do not need until we are wearing costuming in the woods arguing about a fictional government.
Someone joins expecting a balanced economy they can master, like a strategy game. Someone else joins expecting a story-first experience where mechanics exist to support scenes. Both people think they are being reasonable, because both are using the same word: game. But they are describing two very different contracts. LARP is not a single contract. It is a spectrum of experience design choices. Some events are more game-shaped. Some are more theater-shaped. Some are more community-shaped. Some are more adventure-shaped. Some are built around combat. Some are built around politics. Some are built around horror. Some are built around production systems. None of these are inherently superior, but they are not interchangeable. The expectations need to match the experience, or everybody has a bad weekend for no good reason.
One of the most common failure points in live action roleplay is the belief that deeper mechanical engagement automatically improves the experience. It does not. In practice, an increasing focus on systems, builds, optimization, and efficiency often comes directly at the expense of immersion, tone, and shared narrative play. The result is not a “better” LARP. It is a thinner one. Mechanical language is efficient. Saying “I want to learn X skill” or “this ability does Y points” is clean, fast, and unambiguous. That efficiency is exactly why it works so well in board games, tabletop systems, and competitive environments. The problem is that efficiency is not a core value of experiential play. Presence is. LARP functions because people commit to the fiction, not because they process information quickly. When mechanical shorthand becomes the dominant mode of interaction, it replaces lived experience with transaction.
This is especially damaging in social spaces. LARP scenes are not just containers for information exchange. They are environments built through tone, pacing, body language, and emotional buy-in. A character running a tea shop, a clinic, a chapel, or a back-room operation is not there to facilitate system mastery. They are there to create a space that feels like part of the world. When that space is overtaken by optimization talk, the fiction collapses. The scene stops being a place and becomes a forum. This is not a matter of preference. It is a structural reality of immersive play. Mechanics-first conversations pull attention away from character and redirect it toward abstraction. That shift does not just affect the person speaking. It affects everyone in earshot. Immersion is not an individual activity. It is a shared agreement, and it only holds if people continue to act as if the world matters more than the system describing it.
If you use the language of the system, instead of using the language of the world, you are not “in the world”. You are someone standing outside of the liminal space talking about playing instead of being someone in the experience. There is also a persistent misconception that mechanics talk is neutral. It is not. Introducing efficiency-focused discussion into an experiential scene actively reshapes the social contract of that space. It signals that system performance is the primary value being rewarded. Over time, that signal trains communities to prioritize optimization over interaction and certainty over risk. The end result is a culture where the loudest voices are the ones most fluent in the rules, not the ones most invested in the story. This is where the damage compounds. Players who come to LARP for immersion, atmosphere, and character-driven play find themselves sidelined. Their contributions are harder to quantify, so they carry less perceived value. Meanwhile, those who treat the system as the main interface are reinforced, because their engagement produces measurable outputs. That is how experiential spaces slowly turn into help desks, and why some players leave feeling like they were background dressing in someone else’s strategy session.
So if we want healthier communities and fewer recurring arguments that go nowhere, we need to start treating language like part of the design. Not later. Not as an afterthought. Not as marketing fluff. Language is the first ruleset your players interact with. And if we describe an experience like it is a game, we should not be surprised when some players show up trying to “play the system” like it is a board game, a CCG, or a spreadsheet simulator with costumes. They are not wrong for wanting that. They are wrong only if the event was never built to deliver it, and nobody told them clearly.
That is where this is going next. If LARP is an experience first, then transparency is not just a nice community value. It is a practical tool that reduces frustration, protects culture, and helps the right players find the right events. The next step is looking at what language we should stop using, what we should replace it with, and how to communicate expectations without sounding like a corporate terms of service document. We will get there. For now, keep this frame in your pocket: A game is a structured contest with rules and outcomes. A LARP can borrow those tools, but it runs on people. It runs on culture. It runs on shared imagination. That is not just a game you play. That is an experience you build.
