appendix 6: acute and chronic ill-health LARPs

(See the Death LARP appendix, too, which currently has a more complete treatment.)

Below are group scenarios or personal thought experiments.

Note: I have literally never participated in a LARP or even a TTRPG. I used to play MTG and online MUDs, though, for what it's worth. At the time of this writing, I haven't tried these yet, so I don't have a good sense of who or when things below might be useful or what the psychological risk-reward-cost ratios are like. The "Pocket Guide to American Freeform" (see below) and many, many other resources may have suggestions for safety and other decision criteria. Maybe especially read a discussion of the idea of "bleed," and possibly lots of other things!

The general use case for these is that poor health is generally "tucked away" in modern society, until a friend, family member, or yourself gets really sick or suffers other misfortune. [...]

LARP = Live Action Role-playing

See:

  • Stark, Lizzie. Leaving Mundania: Inside the transformative world of live action role-playing games. Chicago Review Press, 2012.
  • Kapitany, Rohan, Tomas Hampejs, and Thalia R. Goldstein. "Pretensive Shared Reality: From childhood pretense to adult imaginative play." Frontiers in Psychology (2022): 614.
  • Stark, Lizzie. Pocket Guide to American Freeform.

todo

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