A Tale of Two Cities: Symbolic Capital and Larp Community Formation in Canada and Sweden
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Larp events are not isolated, but happen in a larger context of a community of larpingparticipants. Like all communities, members will share ideas about good and bad practices and behaviour and develop norms that tie the members together. Organizers can then use language to communicate which practices they emphasize as important, and what they consider good or bad practices for their event. Such norms can invoked for the purpose of legitimizing the larp in the community and can then be transformed into attributes of symbolic capital with a power of their own. In this way, the events build on, and generate, such symbolic attributes, which take on significance for community homogenization. Larpevents can thus be seen as an expression of established community practices.
 The purpose of this article is to locate common attributes of symbolic capital in the presentations of eight larps from two cities, Edmonton, Canada, and Stockholm, Sweden. The documents of the larps are analysed using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, which discusses how symbolic capital can structure social space, to identify common denominators and reveal central community values.
 The inquiry concludes that different symbols for proper larp have been adopted in the two cities, where the Edmonton community has a strong emphasis on rule-books and mechanics, while the Stockholm community is focusing more on the exploration of dramatic themes and authenticity. This indicates that the two communities can be thought of as different social spaces, distinctly separate from each other. The article also includes a discussion about the potential implications of authoritative symbols and their role as a homogenizing force within a larp community.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it