Roleplaying the Future of Surveillance

This paper examines the use of live-action role-playing (larp) as both a research method and a means of public engagement with the ethics of machine vision and surveillance technologies. Its central case is Sivilisasjonens venterom ("The Waiting Room of Civilization"), a larp that debuted at the University Museum of Bergen, Norway, in November 2021. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic city-state governed by an AI "Intelligence," where citizenship depends on making oneself legible to pervasive video surveillance, facial recognition, and emotion recognition systems, all of which were integrated into the game's interfaces and mechanics. The authors frame the design as an attempt to cultivate phronesis, or practical ethical judgment, by placing players in situations requiring real choices about compliance, resistance, and exploitation of the system.

The work draws on the tradition of Nordic larp, particularly its emphasis on collaboration, unobtrusive rules, and heavy themes, as well as on the "Performance-as-Research" approach proposed by Emma Leigh Waldron. It builds on the authors' earlier research larp The Asylum Seekers and on concepts such as "bleed" and "play-external seriousness," which describe how play experiences shape players' thinking about issues outside the game. The event involved forty players in roles as refugee applicants and evaluators, developed with experienced larp designers and informed by previous refugee-themed games.

Methodologically, the study combines self-reflexive analysis of the design process, drawn from the authors' multiple roles as organizers, designers, participants, and observers, with ethnographic observation of the event and post-game discussions among participants. The authors position this mixed approach as a way to assess what data larps can yield for researchers and what they can communicate to players, with particular attention to how participants varied in their responses to the scenario. The paper is presented as an exploratory evaluation of larping's potential in human and social science research on surveillance, rather than as a generalizable empirical study.