The digital age has seen an unprecedented proliferation of literary content across different media, involving different audiences. As a consequence of this, scholars are directing their attention to how literature lives on beyond the book. While much of this research focuses on forms of intermediality, less attention has been given to embodied, participatory and interactive practices where literature is used in a variety of ways. In this chapter, we will discuss what happens to literature when it is used in physical, collaborative gameplay, focusing on live action role playing (larp), specifically larps in the Nordic tradition.

Since larp is located at the intersection of a number of different cultural expressions, we draw on scholarly work on gaming, performance, adaptation and participatory culture to discuss how literary material is used in three different larps, at which we have carried out fieldwork. Fortune and Felicity (2017) engaged with all of Jane Austen’s work, taking place over five days in period costume and setting. Located at the actual Elsinore Castle, Inside Hamlet (2017) adapted Shakespeare’s play to a revolutionary, decadent context. Using Thomas Vinterberg’s film The Celebration as the frame story, A Nice Evening With the Family (2018) thematised bourgeois family trauma through the use of a number of nineteenth-century Scandinavian plays, like Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

Although thematically diverse, these larps raise common questions: What happens when a literary storyworld is materialised in embodied practices such as live action role playing? How can the unfolding story be understood collectively and individually and what storytelling mechanisms are used? What does it feel like to embody characters and actions from a work of fiction? By addressing these questions, this chapter highlights the intricate relation between literature and its collective embodiment in larp.

Live-action role-playing (larp) is characterized by participants’ physical and mental immersion in a storyworld, played out in a specific location during a fixed period of time. Most of the immersion is realized during the live event itself, where a collective story is acted out in physical space in real time. However, contemporary larping also usually entails significant interaction and communication between players, and between players and organisers, before and after the event itself, through digital media. In this article, we explore the social media afterlife of one of the most significant Nordic larp events in recent years, Fortune and Felicity (2017). Using an affordance framework, we discuss what happens to the “liveness” of the larp when it is extended into social media. Through the affordances of persistence, visibility, editability and associability, we analyse material from the Facebook group connected to Fortune and Felicity, used by players and organisers to prepare for the larp and, afterwards, to continue the gameplay and to de-brief. In social media, the continuum of time and space, which is characteristic of the larp event itself, is changed into asynchronous and physically separate player action. Thus, the affordances of social media, we argue, enable player interaction and collaborative storytelling in ways that change the narrative, interactive and immersive dynamics of the larp.