“Emotion can be the feeling of being lost in something. You know, being entirely in a bubble, in elsewhere, in another time, another space and everything co-operates to create this idea in your participant. So it’s about believing, it’s about not bursting the bubble, while interaction is the mutual action and reaction between people, between objects, between stories.”
Alessandro Giovanucci is an Italian award-winning LARP designer and theorist. He co-founded Chaos League which specializes in large-scale, multi-day LARP events.
LARP is an acronym for Live Action Role Play, a very specific type of immersive experience where participants take on the role of characters within a world and get to role play within the space provided. Chaos League specializes in huge LARP experiences and in this talk, you can listen to Alessandro talk about the four pillars behind successful, immersive LARP. This includes, for example, a meaningful sense of consequence; that what participants do actually matters to the experience of themselves and other participants. This requires a group of actors who are ready to react to anything!
He mentions a range of previous production examples, including one that take place in the Sahara Desert (Sahara Expedition) and a gothic university in Poland that specializes in the supernatural (Miskatonic University). He also talks about smaller scale LARPs such as The 90s Room and First They Came For, which displays Chaos Leagues ability to design fully immersive experiences at all types of scale – as long as they follow the same four pillars.
Ultimately, Alessandro expresses his desire for these experiences to be fully immersive and allow participants to engage meaningfully with the world around them.
This talk was recorded at the Immersive Experience Network’s Live Immersive Design Symposium in October 2023, and is supported by Arts Council England and our industry partners Illusion Design & Construct, Mance Communications, White Light, Unlocked Vision, Clockwork Dog, d&b audiotechnik, Scene2, Little Lion Entertainment, Entourage, and Vista Insurance.
