Ecological Approach to the Performance of Larping

Lampo's paper proposes an ecological framework for understanding the performance of live action role-playing games (larps), drawing on Gibson's ecological perception, Kershaw's theatre ecology, and Ingold's notion of knots and lines. Its central argument is that larp performance is a form of cultural improvisation in which individual player actions interweave into an interdependent texture, so that the larp is best understood as an ecology rather than a collection of isolated acts. Because larps are unscripted and transient, the author contends they can only be partially captured through documentation, and Taylor's concept of scenarios is offered as a means of grasping their structure.

The analytical core is a four-step model of player performance: information pickup, extraction of possibilities, choice-making, and embodiment. Information is gathered through a "berrypicking" process drawing on diegetic, extradiegetic, and pre-game sources. Possibilities are extracted as affordances, which the author classifies into six levels along the axes of in-game versus off-game, conventional versus unconventional, and dynamic versus static. These processes are shaped by culturally bound larp norms, players' embodied traditions, rational reasoning guided by rules and goals, and emotions and somatic markers drawn from Damasio's work. Bodily repertoires, including bleed effects from everyday life, become part of the larp's texture.

The paper is primarily a conceptual framework rather than an empirical study; it offers no quantitative data and presents no field-based findings. Its scope is theoretical and centers on the performance of larping as a practice within the broader fields of role-playing, performance studies, and affordance theory, with its conclusions resting on the idea that improvisation blends existing cultural and bodily repertoires with the spontaneity of the moment.