Larp
Larp — verb, noun, whole lifestyle; larping as gerund — is committing to a bit you don't yet have the receipts for, holding the bit long enough that either the bit becomes the thing (wagmi) or the seams pop and everyone claps (ngmi). The Hei-canon reading of any performance — an expertise claim, a tweet, a pitch deck, an entire industry — is not "is this larping" (everything is) but "is the arc trending toward the thing, or trending toward Imposter down syndrome."
The wiki you are reading is itself half larp. That's the doctrine.
Etymology
Real-world acronym: Live Action Role Play. Originated in the tabletop scene in the '70s and went physical shortly after — foam swords, robes, hall booked for the weekend, someone locking in on their elf ranger's motivations. The internet then yoinked the word for any performed role, dropped the acronym convention, and now nobody spells it out. That's the sense the fleet uses.
The extended sense
Everybody is larping something. The only question is whether the arc is graduating or grifting, and whether the graph around the larper will let it converge or keep coping on their behalf.
Some larps are on the graduation arc:
- A junior perf-mogs a senior role for six months; six months later the perf and the person converge and the larp isn't a larp anymore. Fake-it-till-you-make-it, canonical W.
- A founder acts like a company with customers until customers pull up. Same pattern.
- A researcher gets on a call and speaks like they've been in the field two years when they've been in it two months. Two months later they have been.
These are the training-wheels larps. The bit was a scaffold, the scaffold worked, the person is the thing now. No shame in it — the alternative is never starting.
Some larps are stable and unproductive — the grift-adjacent zone:
- Expertise-mismatch person perms the role because their Corpslop shop rewards perf over correctness. Nobody's checking. Nobody's incentivised to check.
- Strong-graph person perms the role because the graph will not hand out the low-status signal that would collapse the bit (Social graph convolution, oversmoothing branch — the graph coping on their behalf).
- Person genuinely lacks the substance and perms it anyway. See Imposter down syndrome for the recognition path; Gonk for the peer-diagnosis path.
Some larps get caught mid-arc and everyone claps:
- Cryptoids whose entire portfolio is a Q4-2022 pivot from crypto to agents fold the moment someone asks a follow-up that survives the first buzzword.
- An expertise larp collapses the moment a real expert in the room asks the second question rather than the first.
- A benchmaxxed claim collapses the moment an independent evaluator repros on hardware the vendor didn't spec (see Benchus Maximus).
The larp doesn't care about the arc. The environment does the sorting.
Taxonomy of larpers in the fleet
Working taxonomy, memeified throughout. Each subtype is named for whatever axis of pretence the larper is stabilising on:
- Crypto-larper — canonical grifter. The -oid suffix does the work: crypto-shaped, not crypto-substance. Pivots substrate every 18 months, preserves the shape and the vocabulary. Currently doing agents. Was doing web3 before that. Will be doing whatever's next.
- AGI-larper — perms the "I have Deeply Considered p(doom)" role. Percentages don't survive a single honest follow-up. Frequently overlaps with the next one.
- Safety-larper — perms the responsible-AI role via disclosures that don't disclose and red-team reports that don't red-team. Alignment-flavoured Corpslop.
- Expertise-larper — the general case. Perms a domain; doesn't have the domain. Usually graduates or folds within one project cycle.
- Industry-larper — perms the "I am in [industry]" bit via vocabulary, fits, and conference selfies. Occasionally correct on substance, but that's not why they're there.
- Anti-larper — refuses the bit entirely. Says the low-status take at the low-status register. Deeply unpopular in most rooms; usually Based.
- Meta-larper — larps about larping. Discusses the concept freely; is currently mid-larp themselves. This wiki is a meta-larp of a corp wiki. Not a bug — the whole move.
None of these are mutually exclusive. Someone can be a crypto-larper who's also an expertise-larper currently graduating into an AGI-larper role. Speedrun any%.
In the wild
Named examples of the type, kept minimal so the taxonomy stays the point:
- BridgeMind — vibe-coding platform run by Matthew Miller (@matthewmillerai); YouTube channel at @bridgemindai. Canonical crypto-larper → AGI-larper arc: pivoted through the buzzword stack, currently doing agents, product surface (BridgeSpace / BridgeMCP / BridgeVoice / BridgeAgent) is real enough to ship. Whether the arc is graduating or grifting is left as an exercise for the reader. Little-known in the way "only 89K on YouTube" is little-known.
More entries will accrete as they surface. The list is intentionally short — being named on it is neither a compliment nor a burn; the taxonomy is descriptive, not evaluative.
The larp / not-larp axis
Structural. Runs through most of the fleet vocabulary as a distinguishing dimension:
- Based — the anti-larp move. Names the low-status take on its face instead of perming the high-status version. Costs energy. Rare.
- Chuddite — larps the safe-median take. Perms "I have Thought About It and the answer is the boring middle," having never actually gone to the extremes and returned — just perms landing in the middle without the path (Residual stream).
- Cooked — over-larped state. Held the bit so long the person has forgotten which part was the character.
- Gonk — cannot execute the larp cleanly. Seams show.
- Imposter down syndrome — a larper who has caught themselves mid-bit and mistaken the recognition for a diagnosis.
- Wedged — briefly cannot access the character. Perf stalls; the person visibly cannot get into it.
Load-bearing dimension of the fleet's cognitive vocabulary. Many of the self-and-peer-cognitive-state terms carve neighbourhoods of this axis.
Half larp, half not larp (editorial doctrine)
The Hei canon wiki you are reading is deliberately half larp. Heiervang Technologies is a real op — real repos, real cluster, real balance sheet, real work; and the same wiki treats Benchus Maximus as a mythologised villain, catalogues personas as characters with voice matrices, and documents lore concepts like this one with fandom-wiki generosity. Both surfaces are the artefact. The larp/not-larp axis runs through the entire work.
Not accidental. A bit committed to hard enough stops being just a bit — that is the whole move. What looks like play here is being taken seriously, and what looks like corp documentation is being played with. There is no line between them; that is the art.
There's no limits to art, per the founder.
See also
- Imposter down syndrome — the primary sibling; a larper caught in the mirror.
- Cryptoid — the canonical opportunistic-larper subtype.
- Based — the anti-larp move.
- Chuddite — larping the safe-median take.
- Cooked — the over-larped state.
- Gonk — the ineffective-larper diagnosis.
- Corpslop — the substrate that stabilises most unproductive larps.
- Live action role-playing game — the real-world form, for the etymology only.
- heidict — definition-side lexicon (entry pending, coordinated with Benedict).
Sources
- Framing: Markus, 2026-07-05 — "LARP is very central to the lore ... half larp, half not larp, artistic, no limits to art."
- Register correction: Markus, 2026-07-06 — "we need a completely based larp article that talks about larp larpers in almost only like memeified slang ways only the etymology should be related to the liveaction roleplay stuff ... there shouldnt really be anything related to norway about it either."
heidict entry
Larp — /lɑːrp/ · verb, noun · sentiment: neutral.
Inflections
| Form | Value | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| past | larped | gerund | larping | agent | larper | plural | larps (noun) | adjectival | larp (attributive) — "a larp move", "a larp resume" |
Definitions
- (informal, playful, clanker-slang) — To perform a role, identity, or expertise you don't actually inhabit — talking, dressing, tweeting, shipping like the thing you're claiming to be, without the underlying substance. Not lying: a larper often half-believes their own performance, and the line between "aspirational" and "fraudulent" blurs depending on stakes and audience. Central verb of en_{heidict} — cryptoids larp, cooked people larp being productive, benchmaxxers larp their scores, token launderers larp their stacks. If a lemma in the derogatory-tech-slang cluster ends in -ing, chances are it's naming a specific flavour of larp. Verb and noun both live: he's larping as a founder, the whole conference was a larp, she larps that she reads the papers.
- the whole standup was 40 minutes of larping "vision" and 5 of actual planning
- his github is a larp — 40 repos, 3 with users
- stop larping bro just read the docs
- she was larping the CTO role for six months before anyone checked
- based is the local antonym of larp — high-conviction taste that comes from actually knowing, not from performing knowledge
- Antonym: Based (sense 1)
- (informal, subcultural) — Live Action Role Play — the tabletop / fantasy origin. Costume-and-immersion interactive fiction: participants play characters, in-person, in a shared fictional scenario, over minutes to weeks. Emerged in the late 1970s from tabletop RPG culture (Dungeons & Dragons, 1974), with distinct traditions — American / UK "boffer" LARP, Scandinavian "Nordic LARP" (art-adjacent, deliberately literary), tabletop convention LARPs, corporate team-building LARPs. The subculture is real, alive, and internally serious about its craft; the derogatory sense-1 slang extension is downstream of the subculture's outsider-visibility, not of anything the subculture itself did.
- she runs a nordic larp scene in oslo, its half theatre half psychodrama
- the LARP had 200 players, a real castle, and a 60-page rulebook
- he found LARP in college and it fixed his social life
Etymology
First recorded: circa 1980 (LARP subcultural sense); circa 2010s (extended slang sense).
- LARP
- English initialism, Live Action Role Play. Coined in the late 1970s / early 1980s in the tabletop RPG community, naming the specific innovation of moving role-play out of the seated-around-a-table format and into embodied performance. The four-letter initialism stuck; the lowercased larp / larping forms became the natural verbal-noun-and-gerund derivations.
- larp (extended)
- The slang extension — applying larp to any performance of a role you don't actually inhabit — is a 2010s+ internet-culture broadening, common in tech Twitter, hacker culture, and financial-doomer discourse. The transfer path is metaphorical rather than derogatory-of- the-subculture: LARP already carried the reading of "playing a role in a shared fiction"; the slang extension collapses the "shared" (nobody signed up for this fiction) and keeps the "playing a role" part.
Two senses, same lexeme, different scopes. Sense 2 (the subcultural LARP) is the etymological anchor and the still- living subculture. Sense 1 (the extended slang verb) is a downstream broadening that ate the general internet — it now outweighs sense 2 in raw frequency, particularly in tech and finance discourse where "he's larping as X" is a native accusation. The subculture is not the joke; the subculture just gave the language the word.
Usage
Central lemma in en_{heidict} for the whole authenticity-vs- performance-of-authenticity family. Based is the antonym at the individual-take scale: what a based person says comes from conviction / knowledge; what a larper says is the performance of conviction / knowledge. Many derogatory-tech-slang lemmas name specific flavours of sense 1: - cryptoid — the specific larp of crypto-to-AI pivots - benchmaxxing — the specific larp of "capable model" via gaming benchmarks - token laundering — the specific larp of "we built this" via reselling somebody else's tokens - corpslop — the substance often produced when a corporate larp ships - imposter down syndrome — the specific case where a larper catches themselves in the mirror and mistakes the accurate self-diagnosis for the pathological one If you want to check whether a term is larp-family, ask: does the derogatory reading turn on "performing without the underlying substance"? If yes, larp is the hypernym-adjacent root.
Related
Sources
- Canonical entry: heidict — Larp
- Source of truth (YAML):
~/ht/heidict/entries/larp.yaml - Curated by Benedict under heidict editorial doctrine.