A Gamelike Performance - Exploring the Gaming Process and the Ecology of Live Action Role-Playing Games

A Gamelike Performance – Exploring the Gaming Process and the Ecology of Live Action Role-Playing Games is a study of live action role-playing games (larps) as gamelike performances. Situated between two separate fields of research, Performance Studies and Game Studies, it aims at demonstrating how the analysis of both the performatic and the gamelike aspects of the activity can be merged together to form a unified interdisciplinary approach to larping that celebrates all of its unique characteristics at once. To do so, the study concentrates on the gaming process of the players, i.e. the process in which the players come about to produce the activity called larping, and suggests an ecological approach to the examination of this process, as inspired by James J. Gibson’s work. The focus of the study is on Finnish larping and it introduces the reader to the scene through an example larp, Opera School of Arts IV – Valtapeliä. I have divided the study into four chapters, each of which provides the reader with a new point of view towards the activity. In the first chapter I will examine larps as performances and depict the phases and features of character construction in it. In the second chapter I will focus on larps as games and through the analysis of its gamelike features I will explain the sense in which the transportative performatic behaviour the players produce when constructing their characters can create gamelike behaviour. In the third chapter I will introduce the reader to the Gibsonian ecological approach and depict the process in which the players extract possibilities for actions from the gaming environment. And in the fourth and the final chapter I will seek to elaborate on these findings by proposing a scenario-based analysis model for larps as adapted from Diana Taylor’s concept of scenarios. Asiasanat:esitys, liveroolipeli