“Role-playing as Your Self: Designing a Live Action Role-playing Game for Trans Self-Expression, Exploration, and Embodiment”
Josephine Baird
Originally presented at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference, April 13, 2022.
Euphoria is a nightclub that exists in its own pocket of a reality, unconstrained by simple notions of time and space. It has its own rules of respect, acceptance, and magic. Walking through the door, the “real” world is left behind and you are offered your transformational raiment for the night. Will you choose one that reflects you as you came in, or as you wish to be, or just something you want to try for a spell? Whatever you choose, whichever the reason, you will be shapeshifted for yourself and everyone else in Euphoria for as long as you desire.
Based on digital, tabletop and live action role-playing (larp) games studies, theories of social role performativities, and my experience in role-playing and LGBTQ spaces, Baird present the larp that I have been designing for (trans) gender expression, exploration and embodiment. In socio-cultural contexts that require us to present normative selves in our everyday lives (Goffman 1956), it can be difficult and dangerous to publicly express LGBTQ identities. This can have an extremely detrimental effect on wellbeing (Jäggi et al 2018). Baird argues that larps potentially provide a safer space for identity expression, exploration and embodiment; because they give us the alibi and discrete container to engage with role-play in a way that we might not be able to in most other environments and in a co-creative way that could validate and reflect that experience back to us. Drawing from larp theory and design practice which emphasises the transformative potential of play (Bowman and Hugaas 2021), Baird outlines the design of a larp that hopes to facilitate the expression of diverse (trans) gender subjectivity in-game and the retention of that experience out of it.
Bio: Josephine Baird is a Lecturer at Uppsala University’s Department of Game Design and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Vienna. Her research and recent publications present the theoretical and methodological basis for her thesis that role-playing games might provide a potent opportunity for people to explore their gender subjectivity in safer environments. Her current research will conclude with the design of a live action role-playing game that puts this theoretical work into practice.