When Donald Trump was a kid, his favorite wrestler was Antonino Rocca, though Trump called him Rocky Antonino, and when classmates tried to correct him he insisted that he was right. One can see why wrestling appealed to him—the crowd is everything, the rules mean nothing, and the referees are so feckless that they often get knocked out and everyone laughs. In the late eighties, Trump hosted WrestleMania IV and V at the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. The shows bombed, but Trump enjoyed himself. The wrestler Bret Hart remembered Trump almost falling out of his chair when Hart appeared to crack his face on a metal turnbuckle. “He believed it,” Hart told me. “He couldn’t believe I didn’t get killed.”

Appearance is reality

Vince fascinated Trump. “He’s a fantastic guy—one of the best ever,” Trump reflected recently. Once, there was a wrestling scene in which Vince’s limousine exploded on the air. It was obviously staged, but Trump reportedly called the office to check that Vince was O.K. In 2007, Vince cast Trump as a recurring character. Like the McMahons, he played a version of himself. Vince laid on the flattery. He wrote the Trump character as Mr. McMahon’s foil: the defender of the fans, who was even richer than Vince. Their ongoing feud was called the Battle of the Billionaires, even though it’s unclear if there was even one billionaire between them at the time. Each man staked a wrestler, and the winner would shave the loser’s hair. Trump was supposed to be the good guy, but, even after the W.W.E. arranged for money to fall from the rafters when he appeared, the fans were slow to take to him.

The fact that Trump apparently believed a WWE scene where Vince McMahon's limo exploded was real tells you everything you need to know about him being convinced by random AI-generated videos www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Yes!

Brilliant!

It is extremely cool to see academics like @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social and @friede.bsky.social and @jaakkostenros.bsky.social doing the work to establish larp as a crucial member of the wider games and role playing studies world.

But who is doing that for theatre and “fine” art?

Indeed! Larpocracy, but also pedagogical larp, Ada Palmer’s papal election larp, etc. Would love to get your thoughts at some point!

And I am very glad to say that there are more and more such scholars out there with better understanding and experience of “actually existing larp”.

A lot of the best parts of my book is built on their insights, where they explicitly compare older forms like medieval tournaments to larp.

I told someone last week that I didn’t think it’s worthwhile dragging Shakespeare scholars and people like Claire Bishop to larps.

Instead, I’m more interested in younger critics and scholars who’ve grown up with TTRPGs and video games, and how they can connect their areas of study to larp.

Another is that larps end up being embodied versions of video games, which can be fun but also limiting and, often, plain bad.

Then there’s the perception that games, and thus larp, should be competitive and rules-driven and deterministic with win states, etc. (I know, not all games!)

But there are risks with aligning larp too closely with games; shoe-horning in technology is one of them (not unrelatedly, @x13n.com and I would not have gotten an Immersive Arts grant for our Strandfall larp had it not centred technology).

Then there’s games, which inevitably centres around video games, because they make the most money and are most popular.

And here, I do see larp more welcomed, not least because video games are a young form and more receptive to newer things. Larp’s connection to D&D and RPGs is also crucial.

In the 90s, Richard Schechner railed at mainstream theatre having no time for participation, its ideas now flung to dinner theatre, re-enactments, murder mysteries, theme parks, and so on.

You could say immersive/interactive theatre proved him wrong, but I’m not so sure.

Though one can point to a rich history of embodied participation in 20th century art – Happenings, Fluxus, the situationists, environmental theatre, etc. – I don’t get the impression that larp would be welcome in the mainstream of biennales and such.

In terms of traditional art/theatre, despite some gestures here and there, larp remains on the outskirts, as Jana Romanova has observed – a part of satellite events, something fun for the public to do before the serious main attractions begin.

At Sublime Pretense, a symposium about art and larp, someone asked whether larp designers should pursue funding and prestige from the traditional art/gallery/theatre world, or from the games world.

Putting aside the third unspoken possibility (neither), it got me thinking…

Character names too complicated to remember? Stuck in a never ending larp-meeting? Didn't read the materials before the larp? Want to create drama but have no imagination? Zeitgeist Ltd is introducing Larpr Our voice controlled smartphone app Larpr™ uses state of the art Al, trained on hundreds of hours of indepth anecdotes of Mike Pohjalas characters to enchance your portrayal at any larp. Larpr™ analyzes the state of play in realtime, and can use haptic feedback to give you cues or even utilize our world leading speech synthesis to deliver your lines for you. Larping has never been easier! Available now on App Store and Google Play, for only a €4.99 monthly subscription* Sign up now and receive the free Soliloquy™ plugin that lets you recite complex monologues with ease in front of a captivated crowd of larpers!

THE ELEVATOR PITCH FOR YOUR NEXT NORDIC LARP BLOCKBUSTER

And two more!

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Title your own next Nordic Larp blockbuster using the initials of your name and "a larper you want to bang [at this conference]"

Full-res images of these adverts courtesy of designer Sebastian Utbult!

(The Solipsist Entertainment one really hits hard...)

From the janeausten community on Reddit: Now defunct £20,000+ Jane Austen Experience - Writeup on Austenland Explore this post and more from the janeausten community

It’s a good question! I would love to know. There is probably a significant degree of chicken-and-egg here where it’s hard for people to know whether they’d like it in advance.

Relatedly, my April Fool’s day piece was posted to r/janeausten (not by me!) as a serious review...

Aha, I’ll have to remember them!

Yep, I am sure a lot of Austen pilgrims to Bath like the experience they get just fine!

Though I do think that some kind of light on-rails role play experience - think “costumed ball+” - might work as a capper to a couple of days of more normal workshops.

I’m a little leery of November just because I know it’ll be cold, lol, and I’m a bit too lazy to sort out my own costume!

Hell yeah!

100%! Could do an at-home prologue with letter writing etc.

A team with more relevant experience should do it, not me, but I’d definitely buy a ticket myself and help out!

Janeites unite: Austen festival in Bath celebrates 250th anniversary of author’s birth The annual festival, now the largest and longest-running of its kind, first took place in 2001 and has since grown to a 10-day programme drawing thousands of visitors from around the world

Seriously, it’s an open goal! Fans already go to costumed balls, do the dances, learn the arts and crafts and music.

Onboarding workshops and lectures would be a genuine draw!

I have described the UK’s strategic advantage in immersive experiences as a surfeit of castles, manor houses, and people with English accidents, so…

Despite Austen tourism being enormous business - lots of people visit Bath to do cosplay, learn historical dance, etc. - there aren’t many regency larps in the UK as far as I can tell. Most are in Europe, and a few in America.

Huge opportunity IMO!!

The obvious choice is Atropos’ The Austen Experience, which was partly inspired by the movie.

It’s appropriately meta: you can choose to role play as one of the behind-the-scenes staff members or male performers expected to be romantic partners. People rate it very highly!

A projector showing the Austenland movie poster (a woman holding a t-shirt saying I love Mr Darcy) and me speaking next to it

I gave a half-silly, half-serious talk analysing the 2013 movie Austenland in terms of larp design, and you have no idea how many people came up to me afterwards saying they were going to buy the movie. I should get referral fees!

Now I’m “the Austenland guy” I feel obliged to do a regency larp…

It's this space for invention that makes it seem like there are no rules compared to modern football.

Nothing wrong with modern football, in moderation. But we need a lot less of it and a lot more local, community games.