Go to an expensive restaurant, order the cheapest thing on the menu, take a picture, and leave. Buy fake designer shoes, purses, and watches. Rent a Maybach for the weekend. Take mirror selfies while trying on fancy clothes in a dressing room, but don’t purchase anything. Open your laptop screen and pretend you’re working at the job you want. These are real tips users on TikTok are sharing if you want to live-action role-play, or LARP, being rich. And if you fake it well enough to convince even yourself, you’ll make it—or so they say.
“LARPing will get you your dream life. If you want to be a millionaire, if you want to be a billionaire, and you start acting like you already are before you are, how will you not?” says a user who goes by DiMaggio Voss in a TikTok with nearly half a million views. “You will make it, bro.”
In decades past, LARP conjured up images of people dressed as knights in shining armor or role-playing a mage, a rogue, or a bard. Traditional LARPers still congregate in convention ballrooms and state parks, sometimes for days at a time, to engage in immersive, high-fantasy games. They’re in character for the duration of the event, before ultimately returning to their regular lives.
On social media over the past year, however, the term “LARP” has taken on a whole new meaning. Now it’s closely associated with hustle culture, luxury fashion, and Instagram-worthy vacations. Most people can’t afford a Rolex or a private jet, but through lifestyle LARPing, the goal is to manifest a reality in which you don’t have to tote around empty designer shopping bags to flex but can actually spend a lot of money in the stores where you used to just pose for pictures.
There are also less commercial, more casual examples of how the term has slipped into everyday usage on TikTok. Some people LARP by pretending to feel sad about a romantic partner so they don’t get bored while riding the subway. Others LARP goofily with their friends, pretending they’re the type to stage grand gestures as gentlemen of another era, and some people LARP their way through studying at the library instead of actually studying. Some people just use LARPing to refer to the viral trend it has become.
“The word ‘LARP’ generally refers to doing an activity of shared co-creative fiction where you’re embodying a character and you’re co-creating a world together, and you’re doing so in this more physical way than perhaps sitting around a table or playing online,” says Sarah Lynne Bowman, an associate professor in game design at Uppsala University and a leading LARP expert.
What TikTokers are calling LARPing isn’t accurate at all, Bowman tells Teen Vogue, but she can see some relation to the idea of playing a part in society: “In a way, people are realizing the degree to which we are often playing roles in life.”
She says further, “I have a feeling that people who are influencers, for example, on TikTok, already have that understanding. There’s a difference between the person they are when they get off camera from when they’re on camera.”
In another TikTok, this one with two million views, a user who goes by the name Humandisc has claimed that “LARPing actually works” because of the psychology of positive self-perception. Ideas like manifestation and pretending you’re already the person you want to become have grown increasingly popular online.
But according to Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University, this type of thinking can actually be a trap that sets you back. “We find that the more people fantasize and daydream about the future, kind of indulging these body fantasies and things, they do worse,” says Oettingen, who has been studying goal setting and disengagement for more than 20 years. “They feel they’ve already achieved them, and what do you do if you’ve achieved something? You relax, because now you’re done.”
She continues, “And that’s exactly what we find. The blood pressure goes down. The [self] reports about how energized they feel to fulfill their wishes goes down, and that then translates into lower effort and lower success.”
Dismissing your dreams isn’t the answer, Oettingen says, and just identifying your goals isn’t enough. You also have to identify the obstacles in your path and plan to overcome them: “What this mental contrasting of the positive future with the obstacle of reality does is, it helps [a person] set priorities, to go for those things that are really dear to the heart, that [a person] also can reach,” she explains, adding, though “probably not a Lamborghini and probably not a Hermès bag.”
Of course, this more realistic forward thinking doesn’t register as very impressive on short-form social media platforms where attention spans are short and content needs to be flashy. You’ll get more likes on ultra-luxury goods and services than on sensible shoes and the used car you saved up for. Even those less commercial, more casual LARPing TikToks can have an inverse effect, says Oettingen, like the videos of fantasizing about studying without actually putting in the work, which can have a disadvantageous impact on your grades.
And there’s another, more revenue-generating twist to some of the LARPing content that has gone viral. Going back to Voss, who has encouraged his followers to manifest billionaire status, he also offers them courses to start making money through multiple e-commerce operations, or MEO (think dropshipping, which enables users to sell inventory without actually handling products). Voss has posted many videos about LARPing, which drive more eyeballs to his own income streams. It’s a new spin on the age-old social media practice of enticing followers into supporting your lifestyle through aspirational content that tells them they can achieve it too.
This use of LARPing has also become a part of “bro” culture and various manosphere pipelines, including by controversial, misogynistic creators like Andrew Tate and the looksmaxxing influencer Braden Peters, known online as Clavicular. The latter recently offered advice to his viewers about how to LARP successfully, saying, “You don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver.”
While some of the appropriated uses of the term “LARPing” have been used to refer to less-than-savory behaviors, the original game of LARP continues to be a worthwhile, community-oriented exercise for its participants—like Dr. Bowman. She hopes that if the LARPing trend on TikTok leads to something more positive, it will be that more people get involved in the kind of live-action role-play she’s been doing since she was 19. “Our characters sometimes can give us empowerment that we might not feel we have in the outside world,” she says, “and that can maybe help us feel more confident.”
Of course, Bowman adds, you won’t become a millionaire overnight just because you LARP as one. “Feeling like, ‘Yes, I can actually do things in the world and the world will respond to me,’ we call this self-efficacy…. But we have to acknowledge that there are lots of structural reasons”—socioeconomic and political factors, for instance—“why certain folks are probably never going to attain that kind of status.”