Documenting Larp as an Art of Experience

Jason Cox's paper argues that documentation of live-action role-playing games (larps) should foreground player experience rather than the designers' narrative. Larps are embodied, co-creative, subjective, and ephemeral, which makes conventional written testimony and linear video documentation inadequate, since these tend to convey what a larp looked like or what "happened" rather than what it felt like. Cox proposes that player-created artifacts such as props, costumes, planning notes, and reflective works can form an assemblage of documentation that better approximates the experience. He frames these objects as social objects that surround an experience from multiple perspectives, drawing on concepts of praxis, poiesis, and aisthesis to link the artifacts to acts of making, the experience of creation, and sensory encounter.

To test this approach, Cox built The Magischola Museum, a website housing player-made artifacts from Learn Larp LLC's New World Magischola series. Artifacts are organized into four categories (wands, apparel, accessories, and ephemera), with entries combining in-game history, out-of-game history, and personal meaning supplied by contributing players. Cox acknowledges that the site gives him excessive curatorial control and offers limited community engagement, and he suggests future iterations include a comments section. He also draws on prior autoethnographic and arts-based research, including Jonaya Kemper's curated collections and his own dissertation work with educators, to illustrate related practices.

The paper's central claim is that artifact-based documentation better captures the relational, sensory, and interpretive dimensions of larp, and it situates this approach within museum theory, notably Nina Simon's participatory model and Falk and Dierking's interactive experience model. Cox's evidence is primarily conceptual and based on a single prototype site rather than systematic testing, so the paper's contribution is best understood as a proposed framework and an exploratory case study.