A Look Back from the Future

For two years in the early 1990s, I did larp onstage for a paying audience. In this article, I present an autoethnographic look into the production and address how it relates to analog games, particularly to live action role-play. I will describe the system of the production—including preparatory work, rehearsal play, scenelists, and performance improv—and have a look at similar techniques used in some genres of living games, specifically Nordic larp, black box, and jeepform. I argue that the presence of an audience creates a radical reorientation in contrast to the larp environment, and explore how play changes when goals shift from the experiential to the outwardly performative.