A note on terminology
Cultura Connector writes LARP as the capitalized acronym for Live Action Role-Playing. Academic publications and LARP communities often use the lowercase form larp. In recent years, “larping” has also spread as internet slang for supposedly faking an identity, expertise, lifestyle, or role.[1] We find that appropriation unfortunate because LARP is an established creative practice, international community, educational approach, and growing field of academic study. We use LARP to clearly identify the practice and field discussed in this article.
LARP as a practice
For someone who has never encountered it, LARP can be understood as a shared story that participants enter physically and help create together.
In a novel or film, an audience follows characters through a story. In a tabletop role-playing game, players usually sit together and describe what their characters say and do. In a LARP, participants physically portray their characters in a shared space. They interact, solve problems, and form relationships as those characters.
The story develops through those choices.
A LARP can involve either simple or elaborate environments, detailed costumes (or none at all), and range from 2 participants to hundreds. It can also happen in a classroom or outside. Costumes and props can enrich the experience, however many effective LARPs use very simple materials. The essential elements are the participants, the characters they temporarily portray, the shared fictional situation, and the structure for how they interact.
Modern LARP sits within the larger family of analog role-playing games, which also includes tabletop role-playing games. Researchers at Uppsala University describe transformative analog role-playing as an interdisciplinary field drawing on role-playing game studies, psychology, education, and other areas.[2]
What can a LARP actually look like?
Imagine a group of young people entering a fictional village. A storm has damaged the bridge connecting the village with a neighboring community. Supplies are running low, an important festival is approaching, and the villagers disagree about what should happen next.
Each participant takes on a character such as a builder or a healer… or inventor, community leader, etc. Characters can each have different abilities and information.
The facilitator introduces the situation and helps maintain the fictional world. The participants begin the gameplay by making decisions.
Someone might suggest repairing the bridge immediately while someone else believes the remaining materials should be used for shelter. Two characters could disagree. Another participant discovers information that changes the situation and a quieter member of the group realizes that their character has knowledge everyone needs. Yet another tries a solution that fails and has to adapt.
The participants are playing, and they are also practicing collaboration, creative problem-solving, perspective-taking, and many other important skills. Eventually, the fictional adventure ends.
In transformative LARP, the experience continues through reflection and debriefing.
A facilitator can ask:
- What happened when the group disagreed?
- When did you feel confident in your character?
- What helped the group solve the problem?
- Was there a moment when you tried something unfamiliar or felt uncomfortable?
- What did your character learn?
- Is there anything from the experience that feels useful outside the game?
Research and practice in transformative roleplaying place considerable emphasis on the structure around the game (often called “framing the game”). Preparation, consent, calibration, safety, debriefing, reflection, and integration are all elements of this frame and help participants make sense of what happened and decide what meaning the experience holds for them.[2][3]
Why can role-playing be powerful?
Roleplaying creates an unusual opportunity where a person can temporarily explore another way of being. For example, a person who is uncomfortable speaking in front of a group could find it easier to speak when their character has an important message to deliver. Or a young person who struggles when something goes wrong can experience a character making a mistake, adapting, and continuing the adventure. Participants can experiment many different skills sets inside a fictional situation. The character provides some psychological distance while the participant remains actively involved in the experience. The emotions, social interactions, and physical actions are being experienced by the participant, even though they occur within an imaginary story.
Transformative role-playing researchers describe games as potential transformational containers, which are spaces that can support experimentation with identity and ways of understanding the world.[2] These types of experiences can contribute to emotional processing and social connection.
However, the quality of the design and facilitation matters a great deal. The framing elements all influence what the participants experience. The field of transformative role-playing research gives each of these areas significant attention.[2][3]
A research foundation that reaches well beyond games
The ideas underlying therapeutic and transformative role-playing come from several well established fields.
Psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno developed psychodrama and sociodrama in the early twentieth century, using acted roles and group interaction as methods for psychological and social exploration. Role enactment later became part of many therapeutic traditions, including:
- drama therapy
- play therapy
- cognitive behavioral approaches
- experiential therapies
- narrative practices
- group work
In 2021, a systematic review of controlled clinical trials of psychodrama examined 15 studies involving 642 participants. The authors found promising evidence across psychological and social outcomes while also identifying limitations in the available studies and the need for additional rigorous research.[4]
Role-playing games have added a newer body of research to this foundation. A 2024 scoping review examined 51 publications concerning tabletop role-playing games as psychological interventions. The literature reported potential benefits involving cognitive and psychosocial skills, communication, stress, social anxiety, depressive symptoms, and work with autistic participants. The review also showed that the field remains relatively young because 35 of the 51 publications used exploratory approaches, while quantitative and mixed-method studies were less common. Research publication was also heavily concentrated in the United States, with comparatively little research from Asian contexts (at that time).[5]
That geographic imbalance is especially important for Cultura Connector because evidence developed primarily in Western settings cannot automatically tell us how the same methods will function in another culture. Local participation, cultural adaptation, and continued research are essential to establishing a global solution.
What are researchers finding?
Here are just a few recent studies that help illustrate why therapeutic role-playing is receiving increasing attention:
In an Australian study published in Games for Health Journal, 25 adults participated in eight weeks of Dungeons & Dragons. Researchers used repeated measures to examine mental health and self-concept and reported improvements in areas including depression, stress, anxiety, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. The small sample means the findings should be viewed as promising evidence for further study.[6]
Another 2024 study interviewed regular Dungeons & Dragons players about their experiences and mental health. Researchers identified five themes: exploration of self, creative expression, social support, routine, and escapism. The study helps explain some of the social and psychological processes that may make role-playing valuable in therapeutic settings.[7]
Research specifically examining therapeutic LARP is newer.
A 2024 peer-reviewed case study by Lennart Bartenstein integrated a structured LARP with cognitive behavioral psychotherapy for six young adults with mental health diagnoses. Participants established therapeutic goals, practiced relevant behaviors during the LARP, and reflected afterward on transferring those experiences into everyday life. The intervention was feasible, qualitative reports were positive, and several short-term measures improved. The small sample and longer-term findings prevented the researcher from drawing conclusions about clinical effectiveness.[8]
There is a solid interdisciplinary foundation supporting a wide range of LARP elements from role enactment and group process, to reflection and identity exploration. However, the empirical literature focused specifically on therapeutic LARP is still developing. Cultura Connector sees continued research as part of this work.
Transformative role-playing is becoming a field of study in its own right
In 2025, Uppsala University published the peer-reviewed, open-access textbook Transformative Role-playing Game Design. This pivotal book brings together scholarship and practice related to live action and tabletop role-playing and examines their therapeutic, educational, and transformative leisure applications. Its theoretical foundation includes psychology, counseling, immersion, ritual, and much more. The book also summarizes the evidence concerning cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects of role-playing games.[2][9]
Uppsala University immediately followed this in 2026 with Implementing Transformative Role-playing Games, a second peer-reviewed open textbook that focused on putting these practices into operation. It addresses facilitation and framing elements, accessibility and different populations, as well as therapeutic and educational contexts.[10]
Together with the growing body of peer-reviewed articles and research in adjacent therapeutic fields, these works provide a substantial foundation for designing and studying role-playing experiences intended to support human development and well-being.
How GRIT uses LARP
GRIT: Games for Resilience and Interactive Transformation.
Created by Cultura Connector, GRIT is a culturally led, trauma-informed program that uses LARP to strengthen resilience and connection in communities affected by crisis, displacement, and other significant challenges.[11]
GRIT uses LARP because this medium gives participants an opportunity to practice making choices during uncertainty, recover after setbacks, and communicate boundaries. These experiences occur through fictional characters and stories, giving participants space to explore difficult themes through metaphor… but personal disclosure remains optional. They can engage with ideas such as loss, trust, and belonging through the events happening to their character. This is particularly valuable when direct discussion of their emotions feels difficult or emotionally overwhelming.
What happens during a GRIT session?
A GRIT experience follows a structured process:
- Invitation sets the expectation. Participants are invited to get uncomfortable in the context of the game – because this is where growth (and healing) can happen. The objective of embracing discomfort is made clear up front so that participants aren’t surprised by any difficult feelings that might arise.
- Preparation provides the container. Facilitators establish the environment, consent practices, safety tools, characters, rules, and the fictional situation. Participants need to understand how to participate as well as how to communicate their boundaries. The goal is to embrace discomfort but not be overwhelmed by it.
- The LARP creates the experiential space. Participants enter a collaborative story designed around particular goals. Depending on the group, these might include resilience, social connection, or trust.
- Facilitated reflection follows the adventure. After the game, participants step out of character and talk about what happened. Facilitators help them identify their character’s choices and moments of growth.
- Integration connects the experience with life outside the game. Participants can consider which discoveries or ways of responding they want to carry with them. As well, the group is encouraged to support each other in this integration process so that the change they seek has a better chance of being sustained.
This overall structure closely reflects contemporary transformative role-playing research, which emphasizes the elements of framing as interconnected parts of the experience.[3][10] GRIT is also designed to include local trained facilitators and professionals who can provide appropriate consultation and program development.[11]
Culture is part of the design
Introducing LARP into a community where the practice is unfamiliar requires significantly more than just translating the instructions into another language. Stories carry cultural meaning… so do ideas about heroes, families, authority, grief, and much more. A fantasy story created in the United States or Northern Europe could easily contain assumptions that feel unfamiliar or inappropriate elsewhere. Even familiar symbols can carry very different meanings across communities. For example, the “thumbs up” that signals approval in the USA is an offensive gesture in parts of the middle east.
Robust transformative role-playing research gives considerable attention to culture and the involvement of people whose identities and experiences appear within a game.[2][3] As such, GRIT’s approach is culturally-led.
The people who know a community’s traditions and lived experience participate in shaping how the program works there. Local cultural advisors, facilitators, and health professionals, as well as the participants all have knowledge that needs to be considered.
For GRIT’s work with Ukrainian communities, for example, Cultura Connector is working with Ukrainian cultural advisors and local partners so that the program can reflect Ukrainian identity, language, and lived experience.[11] The underlying framework allows the program to travel when each community helps shape how that framework takes form.
Why play?
Humans learn through experience. We learn by trying things, watching what happens, adjusting, and trying again. Play gives us a space in which many of those processes can happen together. LARP adds a very specific advantage: We can practice possibilities before we feel fully ready to live them. Participants can reflect on the experience and decide what, if anything, they want to carry forward. For GRIT, the goal is to create carefully designed spaces where participants can experience agency and connection within a community that supports them. However, there is still much to learn about exactly how these processes work across populations and cultures. Because of this, GRIT is being developed through piloting and local collaboration with health experts and facilitator training. As well, the research will cover documentation and evaluation with an eye towards replication.
LARP gives people a place to imagine possibilities and experience themselves acting within them. GRIT explores how those experiences can help people build resilience and carry a greater sense of possibility into their lives.
Sources
[1] Natasha Hinde, “What Does Larp Mean? The Gen Z Gaming-Inspired Term Explained,” HuffPost UK, April 24, 2026. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/larp-meaning-slang_uk_69e9e50ee4b0fe81a527f47d
[2] Sarah Lynne Bowman, Elektra Diakolambrianou, Simon Brind, et al., Transformative Role-playing Game Design, Transformative Play Research Series 1, Uppsala University, 2025. Peer-reviewed and open access. https://books.uu.se/uup/catalog/book/35
[3] Sarah Lynne Bowman, Josefin Westborg, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, Elektra Diakolambrianou, and Josephine Baird, “Designing Transformative Analog Role-playing Games,” G|A|M|E: The Italian Journal of Game Studies, 2024. https://www.gamejournal.it/designing-transformative-analog-role-playing-games
[4] M. Angeles López-González, Pedro Morales-Landazábal, and Gabriela Topa, “Psychodrama Group Therapy for Social Issues: A Systematic Review of Controlled Clinical Trials,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 9 (2021): 4442.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8122755/
[5] Livia Yuliawati, Putri Ayu Puspieta Wardhani, and Joo Hou Ng, “A Scoping Review of Tabletop Role-Playing Game (TTRPG) as Psychological Intervention: Potential Benefits and Future Directions,” Psychology Research and Behavior Management 17 (2024).
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2147/PRBM.S466664
[6] Alyssia Merrick, Wendy Wen Li, and Dan J. Miller, “A Study on the Efficacy of the Tabletop Roleplaying Game Dungeons & Dragons for Improving Mental Health and Self-Concepts in a Community Sample,” Games for Health Journal 13, no. 2 (2024): 128–133.
https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/81119/
[7] Orla Walsh and Conor Linehan, “Roll for Insight: Understanding How the Experience of Playing Dungeons & Dragons Impacts the Mental Health of an Average Player,” International Journal of Role-Playing 15 (2024): 36–60. https://journals.uu.se/IJRP/article/view/321
[8] Lennart Bartenstein, “Live Action Role Playing (Larp) in Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy: A Case Study,” International Journal of Role-Playing 15 (2024): 92–126. https://journals.uu.se/IJRP/article/view/322
[9] Bowman et al., “Research in Transformative Game Design,” Chapter 7 of Transformative Role-playing Game Design, Uppsala University, 2025. https://books.uu.se/uup/catalog/book/35/chapter/47
[10] Sarah Lynne Bowman, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, and Simon Brind, eds., Implementing Transformative Role-playing Games, Transformative Play Research Series 2, Uppsala University, 2026. Peer-reviewed and open access. https://books.uu.se/uup/catalog/book/55
[11] Cultura Connector, GRIT: Games for Resilience and Interactive Transformation.
https://culturaconnector.com/more-about-grit