Playing to Experience Marginalization: Benefits and Drawbacks of "Dark Tourism" in Larp

Larp (live action role-playing) offers players a chance to inhabit marginalized characters, and this paper argues that such play can generate real empathy and psychological growth while also carrying risks analogous to those raised in critiques of dark tourism. These risks include the commodification of trauma, the exploitation of others' lived experiences, and the reinforcement of stereotypes. Drawing on the Threefold Model, the authors map three motivations for engaging with marginalized experience, namely learning, catharsis, and immersion in the "Other," onto player types, while stressing that these motivations overlap and that players' intersecting identities shape how they experience such play.

The authors find that perspective-taking can reduce prejudice and build empathy, but only under specific conditions. Benefits depend on character portrayals that avoid reinforcing stereotypes and on designers and organizers who actively manage interpersonal dynamics and emotional bleed. Without such safeguards, marginalized players may bear heavy emotional labor, face microaggressions, or leave the hobby altogether because of a chilly climate. Evidence from studies using immersive modalities suggests prosocial outcomes such as greater altruism, though the strength of these effects varies with the immersion modality, the specific role played, and the player's narrative engagement and control.

The paper is candid about the limits of current evidence. Most existing research is brief and laboratory-based, so the long-term effects of perspective-taking through larp remain largely untested, and collective benefits such as reduced healthcare disparities are plausible but not strongly supported directly. Cross-cultural generalizability is similarly unestablished. The authors apply consequentialist and deontological frameworks to argue that designers and players should check their motivations and biases, since creator bias can amplify discrimination, and they call for shifting dark tourism in larp away from consumption and toward collaborative, marginalized-controlled education grounded in inclusive pedagogy.