In a time marked by rising conservative politics and climate emergency, this conversation interrogates the political and pedagogical promise of role-play as an artistic practice with potential real-world(s) impact. Together with artists Áron Birtalan, Carina Erdmann, and OMSK Social Club, we map out their individual approaches to questions of agency, identity, and collectivity, as well as their situatedness within magick and mysticism, in order to circumscribe a terrain whose power and poetry draws from the blurry boundaries of reality and fiction, life and play—softening the edges of the possible.

BR: To what extent do you each feel it is possible to bridge the political and affective approaches to role-play praxis and is there real potential for it to impact politics? Carina, in your article “This is an Invitation to Conspire”,^{^[1]} you mention predecessors to LARP such as the Theatre of the Oppressed, developed by Augusto Boal as “rehearsals for revolution”. Additionally, your research has led you to engage with Yugoslav theorist of performance practice Ana Vujanović, who co-authored the book Towards a Transindividual Self with Bojana Cvejić. What would you say is your current position on the political efficacy of role-play as a method in the arts and beyond, what sort of politics is it uniquely suited to produce, and how would that align with your own current ideal political imaginary?

CE: I think there are many different ways to approach this. It also depends on when you start calling something political, because, of course, that would change the answer to your question. I am coming here straight from PAF,^{^[2]} an artist residency in France that is largely community-organized. What happens there is a lot of experimental thinking about how we could live differently, which is what to some extent also draws me to role-play. Not to imagine some fantastical other worlds but enact those that are already present, even though that can’t be fully realized because there is a hegemonic worldview imposed on us. There is a notion that multiple worlds can coexist simultaneously, and this may be true in theory, but once a world manifests, it embeds itself into our material reality—at the expense of another. You mentioned Towards a Transindividual Self. The idea of the individual is a good example of such a totalizing worldview that is propagated through cultural practices and reinforced through policy. Of course, if you zoom in or out, this idea of an autonomous self quickly reveals itself as fiction. On both ends, we make up and are made of multitudes. But this limited view of the world is a construction that has become naturalized, as the frame is taken for granted and mistaken for the world. Of course, this puts us in trouble all the time. We have to deal with structural issues on a personal level. But even if you want to conceive of yourself differently, it is still on the level of the individual that you will be addressed by others or by which you will be held accountable by the state. To disidentify from a certain perspective, it is therefore not enough to take our eye off the looking glass. You need to share this view with others. Role-play offers such a temporary community that in its suspension of disbelief can form another consensual reality.

The important part is that this goes beyond theory. How does it feel to actualize and enact other worlds, even if just for a moment? And then, of course, we must also understand that the utopian visions we may have for the world aren’t necessarily working. And that’s why I consider role-playing to be a form of research—because it talks back, the fiction or the idea talks back.

At PAF, we spoke about alternative models of cohabitation. There is of course the material reality and structural inequality of existing housing conditions and you will not role-play that away. But even if we can theorize a form of commons, how would we emotionally ready ourselves for it? I think this is what role-play can provide. It offers a possibility to test out our abilities in that sense, to extend our social muscles in various forms. So in that sense, I locate the “political” precisely in the affective quality of such engagements.

TP: In the mentioned text for Šum, you write about prefigurative play in relationship to prefigurative politics. Could you briefly describe what you mean by that?

CE: Prefigurative politics is an idea of political struggle and experimentation that attempts to enact and thereby bring about a new society in the shell of the old. “Prefigurative Play” is a practice that employs techniques of role-play and collective worlding with a similar intention. Don’t get me wrong—that doesn’t negate the need for larger structural change that obviously still needs to happen. I see it as a supplement to more strategic political activism and thinking. As a way of and pushing on existing structures from different sides. My friends recently told me a quote of Diane di Pima: “NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.” So while we look at the bigger picture, we are not going to wait; we are already rehearsing, and we are already performing or acting out the transformations that we want to see happen. Seeing how in the meetings of the Occupy Movement or other activist circles rules are employed to enable less hierarchical ways of conversing were some of the examples that helped me think through the affordances of role-play. But then again, there are ways to use role-play in analytical and strategic manner too, for example in economic simulation games. And I think there is actually a great potential in combining methods in that sense. In games you can shift between scales quite easily and move consciously back and forth between the abstract and the concrete. However, at the moment, I am focusing more on the affective, emotional, relational, social exploits of play.

TP: Honing in further on the political aspects, I’d like to touch on the question of transformative power of artistic role-play and, by extension, art. OMSK Social Club, one of the core questions driving your practice situated between two “lived worlds, one of life as we know it and the other of role-play”, as you describe it, seems to concern the questions of who has the authority to create reality and of the potential of play to become life. In your introductory lecture for the participants of the Worlds’ End Hackathon, you asked what might happen if a significant number of people chose an alternate reality over the existing one. It also reintroduces the notion of collectivity into art’s ambitions to transform the world—ambitions that, since art’s disappointment with avant-garde strategies, have become much more modest in scope. Today, if art dares to believe it has any transformative power, it tends to direct it towards the individual—their knowledge, experiences, values, beliefs, and so on. The individual, rather than the collective body, seems to be the privileged site and agent of change, as well as the terrain where the battle against the “crisis of imagination”—the inability to envision alternatives—is fought. Meanwhile, outside in the “real world”, large enough groups of people don’t seem to have a problem imagining and immersing themselves in alternative realities, such as conspiracy theories, alternative facts, and micro-political ideologies … forming online. What is the political weight of role-play as a fundamentally collective practice, and how do you respond in your work, which you describe as “post-political entertainment”, to the current political climate and the technologies that shape it?

OSC: That’s a great question. To feed off of what Carina mentioned earlier, I think it’s important to say that the reason OMSK exists as a vessel for the exploration of role-play is not because it necessarily knows the limits or the limitlessness of this medium. It’s also about the fascination. What I think role-play does is that it straddles many different nodes and points. I find the idea of political roles that could be potentially practiced within a site of role-play that you mentioned fascinating. In effect, we all play political roles right now. We all play the roles of the listener, we play the roles of the carer, we play the roles of the teacher, we play the roles of the institution, we play the roles of gender and class.

We are all playing roles that have been systematically taught to us and designed for us, which we enact without even thinking. So, what we are doing that’s necessarily different within the arts is creating roles that could begin to offer us an unmasking of the roles we enact as easily as we breathe. I think it’s fascinating to consider role-play through this lens because, I would say, it very well could and does seep into politics, most effectively right now, through the lens of the alt-right. For most people who first heard about LARP (live-action role-play), it was not through the Nordic scene that it has been going on for decades; instead, it was the Capitol Hill insurrection. Is this the moment where role-play or an alternative scenery is being sort of flexed, let’s say politically in the same way we have been using the medium since 2017—perhaps?

Not only do I feel a sense of fear about how easily this positioning of new material worlds can occur in political holographic lights, but I would also say that it doesn’t strike me as impossible that a new generation will decide to stop playing the reality that they have inherited and grown up inside. It doesn’t strike me as unusual to think that a new generation will become ungovernable by the authority of consensual reality as it stands. And that’s not to say that it will become automatically leftist if role-play is utilized and personalized and collectivized. It is extremely important to recognize that role-play is, as much as any technology, a tool that can be used for any narrative. Continuing this conversation, we’ll probably hear more about de-centering the game master in the role-plays that we are interested in as far as it is a medium. We end up in the roles because there are unseen game masters at play, but who agreed to play their game?

When we talk about the question or idea of role-play having the ability to create a revolution, what I think is interesting is that in a certain sense, it’s not necessarily reasons that make revolutions. We have hundreds and hundreds of reasons why we should revolt right now. It’s bodies. And quite often role-play as a medium allows us to become more in touch with our body. It allows us to find an embodiment and to also understand how to find that embodiment within a group of other people. You can simply role-play by yourself as your ego wants, but unless other people are storytelling with you, it can become a rather chaotic affair in which you are simply pushing your agenda on others—this type of play doesn’t interest me, I’m more into the playing that’s akin to a primordial soup of narrators. How do you begin to build with other bodies? However, what is also very important here is that it is not only about building with other bodies. As somebody who is drawn to the radical left organizational trope, this notion of forgetting the individual, I think, is very dangerous. You, as an individual, are important as part of a collective. It’s not necessarily about removing the ego or removing the individual. It’s about understanding how you can work with your individual knowledge and your individual skill set together in order to begin to write ourselves out of this world and into the next.

Lastly, there is something that came to mind when you brought up these sets of questions and it is the latest book by The Invisible Committee, Now. In one part of the book, they basically say that the organized riot is capable of producing what society cannot create: lively and irreversible bonds. In a certain sense, in a riot there is the production, and there’s an affirmation of friendship, of radical friendship. And that’s what role-play has the potential to do.

BR: Fantastic! Áron, your position with regards to the critical and political potential of role-play has shifted since your early and continued engagement with fantasy camps which sprung up as liberatory zones in opposition to dictatorial political tendencies in Hungary. Could you map for us the trajectory that has led you to a more relational, extra-human mode of role-play design and thinking, and what consequences that may have for the agency of the individual?

ÁB: I’ll try, but I also kind of want to crawl into a corner after hearing the two of you and just nibble on your words. Anyway, here we go. The mentioned summer camps started in the 1930s Hungary as an illegal pedagogical experiment, allowing kids to play a big game where they role-play as citizens of their own country. The storyline of the game was completely unscripted and has been continuing from one camp to another ever since. So by now, it’s an eighty-something-year-old story, which is bananas to conceive. Hungary, like many countries in its neighborhood, lived under fascist and later communist rule for most of the 20^th century. What this meant is that even though the games these kids played were never meant as direct political statements, they nevertheless echoed in a reality where experiments in free creativity and self-governance inevitably brush up against major politics. As OMSK pointed out, this probably happens all the time, but I think it becomes much more apparent when living under an overt dictatorship that is too Chad (as in, too brave and brutish dude) to hide its agenda properly. The people who were running these fantasy camps had their licenses as pedagogues taken away, and the whole thing kind of survived in illegality. It’s an example where (role-)playing covertly becomes an attempt to seize the means of imagination and so brushes against the powers that be. But, as said, this happens all the time. It’s just that in certain contexts, these things can be revealed more directly.

The first time I tried to reflect on this history, as well as my own experience growing up in these camps, was in the zine The Critical Escape (2018), which I am currently rewriting. In the zine, I really doubled down on what we’ve discussed here—rehearsing different roles, scenarios, and subjectivities that we might not have the space to explore in everyday life and the frameworks that make this possible. Today I’m very sceptical about this, about a divide that contrasts the extraordinary to the everyday. I think it does more harm than good.

Another critique I couldn’t fully articulate at that time had to do with individual agency. Does this kind of framework, where you can act out quite specific roles, maximize or optimize individual selfhood? Does it challenge individuality or sovereignty in some way? Reflecting on what OMSK said, I don’t think the individual is necessarily erased in role-playing. But I think there’s something in moving from the politics of individual emancipation to seeing role-play and play more broadly as a practice of surrender or vital passivity. This is surrender different from the “play to lose”—a preference for existentially challenging or emotionally tragic scenarios, something many larpers swear by. To me, those LARPs are still concerned with tending to the sovereign individual, only now from an upside-down perspective, like topping from the bottom. What I’m rather interested in is a form of playing where you are not an interacting individual but a voice in a poem.

This shift, in perspective, came with my involvement with somatics—creative movement practices that engage with and explore the understanding of the body (or bodies)—and through my engagement with theology, which has been the main conversation partner in my work for the past five or six years. There is always an otherness that we are participating in that negates our ability to fully own the experience. The individual might not disappear, but the sovereign definitely does. Playing reckons that being is always a being-with. There are bits of us that will always elude our grasp, but it’s still us and we are still participating in these things that elude us, and those things participate back in ourselves. To round up with one very practical example: the relationship between two persons is a third person. It’s a creature of its own. Brian Massumi pointed out how anyone who’s friends with a couple implicitly knows that the relationship is a being that has its own personality, one that’s irreducible to individuals involved. So, for me, it is much more interesting to start to think about play and role-play not as something that we do, but also as this creature that kind of flowers from us while it also exceeds us and feeds from us at the same time.

BR: Let’s now move the conversation in a direction regarding pedagogies of role-play. Carina, you’ve worked within arts academia to design and host conferences online and in person as well as workshops that both address and employ role-play practice, in addition to facilitating the 0ct0p0s platform^{^[3]} and community, and Au Jus project space and residency. Could you please share some reflections and insights with us from your experiences? Additionally, what do you see as the potential of role-play to transmit various forms of knowledge and to cultivate novel approaches to the reception and integration of that knowledge, both individually and transindividually?

CE: I think that right now we really need a more open-ended form of knowledge production—not only because we are all facing a somewhat crumbling understanding of consensual reality, but also because traditional pedagogy has mostly operated in a top-down manner, with knowledge simply given to us and we know now that this will no longer suffice. Obviously many people in pedagogy have been saying this for a long time. Paulo Freire’s notion of dialogue has been an important influence in this regard. I think role-play is one way to offer a more open-ended dialogue. In an encounter there’s the “I” and there’s the “you”—there’s either the “you” that becomes an object or the “you” that speaks back while the “I” listens. We don’t know exactly where it will lead, and there’s a risk in that, but we have some tools to help us along the way. The debrief after a role-play session is of course crucial here. What I am increasingly interested is to design iterative processes in which multiple cycles of free association and improvisation are followed by a collective debriefing in which we can look at what has emerged in play. And that can be quite confronting. Especially when there is little structure proposed, it can be shocking how quickly power dynamics develop and unconscious stereotypes rise to the surface. But if there is space to reflect this and calibrate the play, this can also be a place of learning.

It is quite a balancing act, especially in an educational context, to make and hold space but at the same time maintain that open-endedness. Actually, when I use role-play in an educational context, it’s mostly about transmitting the methods. I would be curious to see how they might be applied in, for example, a history class. You could work with speculative reenactments to fill the gaping holes in our history books that are still mostly written by the winners and make the information more relatable. It is much easier for our brains to retain emotional content.

TP: I wanted to circle back to Áron. You mentioned that you understand or develop an approach to role-play where playing emerges through the “haptic amongst”, as you call it in your text “You Ate Us; We Thought We Are You”. There, you discuss playing as a fellow creature that emerges as the haptic amongst, prehension of which, you write, “brings playing closer to a kind of sensitivity, rather than activity”. Could you speak to the meaning of “sensitivity” in your work, what could be its significance for reframing the question of the pedagogical potential of play towards embodied learning and creating different ways of engaging with the environment and non-human entities and states of being?

ÁB: The pedagogical aspect is a tricky one because, following Carina, I find it hard to think of role-play as something that relies on the facilitator having some kind of extraordinary knowledge and where role-play would be some kind of toolkit to smuggle this knowledge into its participants. I mean, I enjoy indoctrination as much as the next person, but it’s just a different kind of thing altogether. Personally, I like staying close to Fred Moten’s idea of “study”, in which he highlights how working, dancing, and suffering together have an incessant and irreversible intellectual quality without us injecting them with a specific intellectual agenda in advance. In role-playing terms, this means it’s not the players or the facilitator who has to be “in the know”—it’s up to their roles and the relationships, situations between them to be the smart ones.Staying with that has much to do with sensitivity, and maybe with how sensitivity can be a kind of negative pedagogy, or pedagogy of the negative. A pedagogy that starts with how being open to the world is not something we opt in and out of voluntarily. Tending to this is much more about taking away what we know about the world and ourselves, and running our fingers through our shifting boundaries, than accumulating knowledge.

TP: Building from the political and pedagogical aspects and potentialities of role-play we have addressed, perhaps you could all speak about the scalability of your methodologies when it comes to engaging or impacting a wider audience—be it in the pedagogical, political, or artistic sphere. Additionally, I am wondering about the importance of curtailing the scope or reach of the world of play and its “spillover” or “bleed” into life. How important is containment as the back side of facilitation of immersive experiences?

OSC: So, regarding your question about how we approach bleed or a line between life and play, we should understand that there is no line. And this is why OMSK situates itself within the art world because there is no line in the arts either. Let’s zoom out a bit here … It is very difficult to map and to mark, specifically on timelines, how the arts have created structural change, how the arts have informed political navigation. Maybe that’s why we’re so underfunded in the arts: because we can’t actually show how we change the world in such a linear way. However, I think that there is change through exchange and through being inspired. Some of the most incredible artworks are artworks that you can never forget and very often change the way you look at the world. Role-play tries to lean into these textures and possibilities by utilizing participatory responsive architectures and intelligent environments designed to create unforgettable experiences for those present. And it doesn’t stop there. The gossip of those that are present becomes a story, which becomes narration, which becomes possibility, which potentially becomes technology, which potentially becomes change, social or structural. But what I think also occurs are emotional experiences. And we tend to forget how intelligent emotion is.

When you encounter a story, whether it‘s a story that you hear firsthand, or you hear on the news, or you read in a book, or it can be a factual account, or an autofiction, or an idle conversation in a pub late at night, it actually allows you to see a brokering of other space that you personally haven’t experienced, but it becomes important to the way that you continue to live your life. I think this is also what makes it very complicated to utilize role-play as a medium in art. Because it’s kind of messy; there are no really good ways to document it, there is no really good way to translate it. How can you translate something that develops among 22 people in play for 82 hours? That’s a huge number of stories, narratives, viewpoints, and insignia. How do you then broker that into an artistic transaction? I don’t know the answers to this at all. I think that’s also what’s extremely fascinating and what many of my peers working with this medium are trying to broker. In a certain sense, these artistic artefacts are in a way their relics from this world that potentially crosses the bleed line or this artistic line. They’re memes, so to speak.

BR: Within role-play there’s so much meaning created between the participants, but how important would you say it is for that meaning to transcend the group and be relevant to the general public when presenting the artefacts as art?

OSC: Then we get into this—is it important for the audience to understand the origin story, right? Is that what you mean?

BR: Yes, in a way. How can it add meaning to someone’s world who wasn’t a part of your world during the creation of it? I mean, it doesn’t necessarily have to be important …

OSC: Really good question. I’m trying to put myself into the position of a viewer—when I go to see something at a gallery and I have zero idea what I’m looking at, do I find that irritating and less important? Not usually, but sometimes I do. I guess it’s all about what you want to happen with the work. Do you want to create a space that runs a speculative simulation of, let’s say, a near future to bring data and information that can then be a potential space for discussion? In that case, I think it’s essential for each viewer, audience, and person who participates in it to understand what they are testing fully. Is it about creating just a model of sorts where you show how easy it is to create this kind of educational drama where everybody sort of co-signs into living in a different world, and then you see the fragility of how much we co-sign into living in this world and how easily it’s sort of penetrated or broken. In this case, you probably don’t need to fully understand more than that it’s a role-play, not a documentary. So, my weak answer would be: it depends on what you’re trying to …

BR: Convey?

OSC: Yes, exactly. What do you want the conclusion to be, I’d say. Some of the people I’ve worked and played with over the years have such incredible imaginations; they just blow your mind. You can create such beautiful narrative arcs. What is also fascinating to me personally is the experience on the first morning I wake up in a new world—I’m there. Nothing from the old world can touch me. And it’s such a crazy feeling to suddenly realize that a whole world has just dropped out of your existence. How do you convey that? How long do viewers typically spend at group exhibitions, an hour? How many minutes do viewers normally spend at your work at group exhibitions? Three and a half. How do you convey that experience?

CE: When it comes to scaling role-play and my interest in creating tools, I’d say my desire, in a way, is to make myself unnecessary. When I create a work, I’m always thinking about how to end up with something I can pass on—something that doesn’t rely on me. I’m interested in making tools that create literacy around “how the cake is made”, so to speak. That’s also why, at the moment, I’m interested in games that incorporate game design in the gameplay itself. There is another thing I was reminded of when you mentioned scale—the phenomena of the Jubensha games that has been booming in China over the past few years. I have not put a lot of research into it yet, since I just recently learned of it, but it is a bit like an escape room meets murder mystery live action role-play with a game master. What I find interesting is the sheer scale at which young people engage in these activities. It’s a huge market. And I wonder if there’s something here—could the political potential of role-play lie in its ability to become commodifiable? This thought runs counter to a common sentiment in role-play communities, which uphold its status as a hobby and view its long durations as a form of resistance to the rhythms of consumer culture and a means of reclaiming social time. But then, there’s also the question of accessibility, which is a deeply political issue. Who actually gets to play these games? The idea of creating more palatable situations is what drew me a bit outside the art world and more into game design. I’m interested in these somewhat mainstream experiences. Not that I have figured it out; I think I still make very convoluted, complex games that aren’t accessible at all. But it is something that interests me. And yet, I agree that role-play does not choose the ideology it supports. Neither does the term “revolution”, by the way. Penny mentioned how LARP has stormed the scene of politics with events like Capitol Hill. I also had to think of the youth festival “Camp Hobbit”, where Italian fascism was repackaged as Tolkien-inspired fantasy lore. Of course, it still depends on the user how a tool is used and to what end.

ÁB: When it comes to scale, I find it interesting to look at how other practices outside the role-playing community approach scaling. I’m especially inspired by movement practices and how people who teach them think about scalability. There’s a fascinating transferability there. Movement practices, from restorative therapy to standard fitness stuff, can often scale a single movement or exercise, from elite athletes to 80-year-olds with very limited mobility. Do you lose a lot in that scaling? A hundred times, yes. But there’s something beautiful about discovering this hidden essence of a specific movement as you see it being transferred across a spectrum of bodies. On the one hand, role-playing—especially role-playing in art—is a kind of subculture within a subculture, and there’s this unspoken “you had to be there” vibe. But that’s true in any subculture. You had to be there to see The Radical Weasel (a band that in fact does not exist—later edit) play its basement show for two people. How could I possibly convey that magical night to you? It’s all these people oozing stories about legendary New York performances from the eighties. There’s always a bit of flex around it, like, yeah, whatever, sure, lucky you. On the other hand, I can’t completely blame this worship of the IRL. Just look at people trying to document LARPs. Let’s be honest, role-playing looks like bad acting 99% of the time when it’s filmed. Sure, there’s that rare 1% that’s amazing, but the rest is just … hard to watch. It’s like having a friend explain their favorite sci-fi universe during a long train ride, with their improv class friends in the background. What I’m trying to do is maybe something to offer you, the person who missed out on the event, a sense of direction—just a way to help you tap into a web of sensitivity in which other, future events and experiences might also live, some hopefully involving you. This kind of documentation is more about setting up conditions for possibilities rather than handing you evidence of the past from A to Z. I think it is much more interesting if we look for inspiration in practices because practices do have that flexibility of transference in them. They know how to do intro classes, deep dives, that kind of thing. So maybe there’s something there.

BR: Let’s now tackle the shared interest you have in magick and mysticism. OMSK Social Club and Carina, ceremonial magick is a common reference in your work, and its techniques and format have a significant overlap with role-play practice. Where would you say your practices converge and diverge from magickal practice historically, and would you say that traditional approaches to magick are evolving in new and less individualistic directions, or would be capable of such evolution?

OSC: Magick is a communal tool that is close to the core practitioners of OMSK Social Club, just as with other aesthetic and cultural insignia that are carried over to the otherside—the fictional world—it is part of the practice because it is codified into the cognitive blood of the core narrators. And maybe to be more specific, I want to draw on Austin Osman Spare’s sigil magic—and I want to think of it as the first open-source magic tooling. Spare’s approach to magic rejected traditional occult hierarchies and dogma. He believed that magic should be accessible to everyone, regardless of background or experience. In fact, most of his most powerful magic can be done with a pen or pencil, paper, and your mind—in a way, I think Real Game Play aims to provide the same simple structures for manifesting change to all.

CE: Crowley says when speaking about magick that “it is theoretically possible to cause in any object any change of which that object is capable by nature”. This is similar to the way that a practice of worlding might approach the world. In theory at least, we can change all that is not bound by laws of physics or nature. But there are different approaches to this. There is a difference between the manipulation or domination of the magician and the practice of receptivity of the mystic. I believe in belief. Placebo is the best scientifically documented proof of belief’s capacity at self-healing. Whether it is in prayer, affirmation, reality shifting, or the creation of an imaginary friend, through setting an intention we manifest things. Imagination changes our perception of the world on a neurological level. Role-play may offer a non-religious setting to explore those ancient techniques of mind, although that can also quickly become quite culty, actually. I generally try to avoid that, but it is not in my control. As Áron has already said, the relationship between two people is already a beast of its own, and a group then is truly a monster in this regard. That is a bit frightening and also quite exciting.

TP: Áron, while the shared world in the fantasy summer camps you attended and facilitated is populated also with magical characters and objects such as wizards and grimoires, your current art practice is informed especially by your research in mystical theology. Your works engage art and mysticism as practices for communing with the unknown and unknowable. How does mysticism, differently from magick, as a framework for understanding play, influence the way we conceive of agency and the political?

ÁB: The difference between the practices of magic and mysticism is a tricky one—partly because of how historically these two things were often mixed in the people and communities that practiced them. There are also some ghosts from twentieth-century anthropology that haunt these words, ghosts who we should really exorcise. But if we just take how magic and mysticism can inspire frameworks for modes of playing, we can maybe draw a difference between the two modes of intention and operation. So the difference would be not in looks or vibes, but between intending to treat “playing as a means towards a result and calibrating things on the fly depending on how far or close we are to our goal” (magic) vs “playing as a space for and a way of showing up to a relationship or relationships regardless of the result” (mysticism). Again, this is a very specific framing that equates magic to a craft of “extraordinary powers and experiments” and mysticism to a more long-term study of “how it is to practice being in relationship with the unknowable”. In reality, the intentions of the practitioner and the materiality of these practices are much messier for us to keep these as two discrete categories, but maybe it’s a start.

TP & BR: Last but not least, we’d like to discuss some of the concerns that have influenced ARIA’s conceptual framework over the past two years, namely the potentials and limits of role-play for facilitating ecological thinking and creating conditions to tune our sensibilities toward more-than-human ecologies and planetary processes—of which we are merely a small and transitory part. Could you envision role-play expanding our ecological awareness and facilitating less human-centered experiences that would embody a post-Anthropocenic politics, engaging with the environment and non-human entities and states of being? And if so, how would such an experience unfold?

CE: Well, I think that role-play can have a deep and lasting impact on us. And I do see it as a tool for transforming our relationship to ourselves and our environment. This happens on the level of attunement, of shifting focus, of what we value and how we find pleasure. For example, if we think we need a race car or it’s cool to bike, how we think about our pets or the planet as a whole … these are all held beliefs that if you wanted, you could access through role-play. Where I see a limitation is the possibility to actually gain any true insight about more-than-human lifeforms. I think here we need some humility. I have seen an increasing number of role-plays cast with partially or exclusively non-human actors. I do understand the appeal of projecting one’s mind into another form of being and have had a good time playing as a cancer tumor for example in Deep Nation by OMSK Social Club. But I would be cautious about setting too high expectations regarding the level of awareness these experiences should generate. There is a quite common notion of role-play as an “empathy machine”. I don’t buy into that. Generally that just means that people transfer their own emotional landscape onto their environment. Empathy is seen as a recognition of oneself in the other. But this reduces the other. As Donna Haraway says about her dog: “If you take anybody seriously, one of the things you learn is not knowing.”

ÁB: I agree with Carina and would like to add a thought on role-playing’s wider utopian promise. Not too long ago, I had a conversation with someone who’s working on an idea to develop an AI bot that can advise activist groups on how to plan and organize their fight against capitalism, environmental destruction, etc. When I asked them what would happen if this AI suggested that their own activist group is a part of the problem and they should just stop with everything and change their ways radically, the person quickly suggested that in such a case the AI should be shut down as it’s not helpful in the way they intended it to be. They wanted the AI to challenge them, but not too much. I feel this is demonstrative of both the lengths to which people put their faith in technologies and techniques, and at once their reluctance to be ready to surrender their own ideas of what their utopias look like. I see this with the utopian promises ascribed to role-playing as well. Partly because it’s being framed as a technology or technique to reconfigure reality based on politics or ethics that are already decided on and smuggled in by the organizers. I don’t think this is helpful, even if people are convinced their agendas mean well. I’m afraid of how in a wounded world, we easily expect therapeutic effects from shiny and cool things like LARP. It’s a pressure that squashes role-playing’s real power, which is to hold complex relationships through aesthetic inquiries and joy. I feel this mistaking role-playing for planned political or ecological action has to do with how there are many things we can do and we know we should do to make the world a better place, yet we don’t do it. I’m less concerned about the ability of LARP to challenge our perspectives and more about whether we are ready to be challenged in our core. Mark Fisher might have echoed how it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, but I feel in the art and LARP world, the problem is that it’s easier to expect larping to smash capitalism/human exceptionalism than for us to practice kindness to our neighbors (human or not). With that said, 25 years of role-playing has no doubt taught me to feel safer in being kind to the world and myself. In a LARP, we are all our own main characters, yet we can only participate in and through each other. A good LARP can make one feel supported in that, but other things can too. Some of our wounds can be tended to in simpler ways, through social and environmental action or by giving up certain conveniences for good. Repairing things together, singing at a demo, tending to the sick, spending time with animals outdoors, or the ability to retreat from work and family from time to time. I feel that first, we should work on making activities like these much more accessible! Then it will be easier to think of LARP not as a silver bullet but as one option on a spectrum of activities, and a very fun one too.

Áron Birtalan (https://aronbirtalan.net) is an artist, musician, and student of theology, working with relationships and sense perception as artistic material which manifests in their guided games and hybrid publications. Their practice has blossomed in tandem with their parallel role as a facilitator for an experimental role-play camp for children for over 20 years.

Carina Erdmann (0ct0p0s.net) engages role-play as collective research, developing a practice in both artistic and educational contexts, within academia as well collectively and self-organized spaces, in meatspace (Au JUS) and online.

OMSK Social Club (https://omsksocial.club) is a sprawling collective of participatory storytelling that roots itself in a medium called Real Game Play, utilizing role-playing to focus on potentially lived fictions and emerging speculative realities.