What's up with the divide between the non-player character and the player character? Why would we say that someone is "not playing"? What we seem to mean, actually, is that one of these is a valued larp customer, and another is a service provider - a relationship that directly contradicts principles of co-creation and enables dehumanisation, othering, and larping as desire fulfilment without consequence.
At the same time, we can be aware of more nuance in the NPC realm. There are interactive actors, instructed players, players whose characters have an oversized amount of decision-making power in-game and thus have a reason to keep their play aligned with the larp as a whole, and many others. I was an actor before I was a larper, and I've been a player who answers to the organisers: instructed characters, directed characters, characters with responsibilities in-game, characters who are destined to die halfway through, characters played whilst also being an organiser. It's never sat right with me that these characters aren't fully "larping", or that you can't get all up in your feelings even if you have a secret plot bomb you have to do on the second day. I'd like to take some lessons from theatre and performance to come up with a better framing for how we can steal moments of "real" larp even when we play on behalf of the larp, and extend this framing for all players and organisers. This presentation was also given at Knutpunkt 2026 and is a conversation in development, so expect about 30 minutes of lecture and 15 minutes for questions and discussion.