The Post-Game Foodmob: Labor and Leisure in LARPing

Drawing on participant observation, a member survey, and interviews, this study examines the MIT Assassins' Guild, a non-commercial American live-action role-playing (LARP) group, to ask how the distinction between Game Masters (GMs) and players maps onto the producer/consumer and labor/leisure dichotomies. Although members overwhelmingly regard participation as leisure and no money changes hands, the analysis contends that GM-player relations still carry traces of the commercial model that members both reject and draw upon. The work situates itself within existing scholarship on narrative power in LARP and cautions that the Guild, with its distinctive history, is not representative of mainstream American LARP traditions.

The central finding concerns narrative power. Although survey respondents perceived a roughly even split in creative control, estimating that GMs shape about 75 percent of the game world and players about 25 percent, GMs hold greater narrative authority in practice. Their labor is also substantially heavier: GMs often spend 40 to 100 hours preparing a four-hour game, and respondents described GMing as more stressful and demanding than playing. Nonetheless, most members still classify GMing as leisure, a framing that obscures the work involved.

The labor relationship is further illuminated by emotional and material exchange. GMs frequently perform customer-service-like emotional labor, attending to player enjoyment even at personal cost, despite the absence of payment. Players reciprocate through volunteered cleanup, prop provision, and the customary post-game "foodmob," in which players pay for the GM's meal. These practices place the Guild between a commercial economy and a co-creative gift economy.

The authors conclude that capitalist norms governing labor and leisure persist after their economic foundation has been removed, yet the community actively reshapes these norms into more egalitarian arrangements.