Borrowed Skins

I get the desire to disappear into another life. Your actual existence feels constrained—job, habits, the same people expecting the same things from you. You want to be someone else. You want to feel like you’re fighting for something real.

This is the core of LARP. Thousands of people worldwide gather in forests and fields to become zombies, elves, warlords. Mermaids, orcs, assassins. Whatever. They build costumes, invent backstories, learn the rules of the world they’re about to inhabit.

Boris Leist documented this. He’s a photographer who studied sociology and literature, so he was naturally drawn to a subculture built on collective worldbuilding and identity rejection. He followed LARP communities for years, photographed them, made a book. The actors create characters that have the power to block out the modern world and create their own, he told me. Freed from social structures, rules, laws—they become themselves and move through strange universes together. Fantasy and creativity are the point. Everyone’s invited into this intense, often epic journey.

What happens in those moments is real, even if the world isn’t. You’re collaborating with strangers to maintain a fiction. You’re invested in it working. You care whether your character lives or dies in the game. You’re fully present in a way that ordinary life doesn’t often demand.

I don’t know if I’d ever actually LARP. But I understand the appeal completely. You get to be unrecognizable. You get to abandon the self that the world has boxed you into. For a weekend or an evening, that box doesn’t exist anymore.