Not Only Larp brings governance simulation to the European Parliament
The Italian design studio ran a three-day political LARP inside the European Parliament, with MEPs and citizens role-playing a planetary governance crisis. The event drew attention to experiential methods for democratic innovation.
Not Only Larp’s latest project may be their most ambitious: a full-scale governance simulation held within the actual chambers of the European Parliament in Brussels. Over three days, 120 participants — including sitting MEPs, civil society representatives, and randomly selected citizens — inhabited roles within a fictional planetary governance body responding to cascading ecological and social crises.
The design drew on Not Only Larp’s decade of experience creating political LARPs, but added a layer of institutional realism that previous projects lacked. Participants negotiated using modified parliamentary procedures, with game mechanics that surfaced the tensions between national interest, planetary commons, and future generations.
Post-event surveys showed that 87% of participants reported a shift in how they understood multi-level governance challenges. Several MEPs have since advocated for integrating simulation-based methods into the EU’s deliberative democracy toolkit.
For The Garden, this event validates a core hypothesis: that governance systems become comprehensible — and improvable — when people experience them from the inside.