LARPing the new normal: commoning peer-to-peer care in the temporal expansion of pervasive games

This is a braided presentation that explores two LARPs (Live Action Role-Playing Games) through the frame of temporally expanded pervasive games—2050 Fugitive Planning, part of the Hologram project and Lilies on the Water, part of ReUnion Network. Both of these LARPs were conducted as part of larger projects that were committed to exploring forms of peer-to-peer care and decentralised health systems. I will explore how the collaborative play that occurs in each of these LARPs interrupts and co-opts the rhythms in everyday lives, in their experiments with negotiating and enacting new forms of networks and relationalities between peers. These LARPs subvert Huizinga’s notion of the contractual ‘magic circle’ of play, by expanding, distending and blurring the temporal, spatial and social boundaries, and in some ways each of these become experiments in turning ordinary life into a pervasive game, in its establishment of new rhythms and redistributing networks of peer-to-peer care in everyday lives.