The Heart of LRG Nation

Marya Patrice Sherron

LRG Player & Contributor, Jaymes Lanoye

LRG Nation: Stories of Courage, Growth, & Belonging in Live Reality Games is a celebration of people within this landscape.

The ones who created games. The ones who played them. The ones whose names are familiar, and the ones who are unfamiliar. This book holds space for the many kinds of people who make up the world of LRGs… the players, creators, volunteers, storytellers, supporters, and community members who have stepped into these spaces and been shaped by what they found there.

Deliberate attention was given to diversity. Age. Ability. Culture. Faith. Gender. Sexuality. Neurodiversity… and the multitude of intersectional positions we have. 

In our richly diverse and ever-growing community, we each have our own preferences on what we read. Diving into LRG Nation with an understanding of what it is matters. It is not a history of LRGs (though it does include a fabulous historical account written by our very own Stephen Stewart). It is not a record of seasons, formats, winners, or strategy. It does not attempt to explain this world from the outside.

LRG Nation is a remarkable collection of human portraits woven together by a tapestry of words.

Each chapter looks closely at a person within the LRG landscape and asks what lives beneath the surface of their experience. What drew them in? What did the space reveal? What did it challenge? What did they carry with them after the moment itself was over?

That is where the story lives.

For those who have been part of this community, there is already an understanding that does not need to be explained. You know the rhythm of it… the anticipation, the immersion, the intensity, the connection. You know what it feels like to enter something that asks more of you than you expected, and to leave with something you did not anticipate.

What this book offers is a way of seeing those experiences more clearly. Witnessing patterns ascend. 

Across dozens of conversations, one truth continued to surface. The reasons people come into these spaces rarely remain simple. What begins as curiosity, competition, or interest often deepens into something far more personal. Meaning shifts. Identity is tested. Connection takes on weight. Moments that once felt contained begin to extend beyond the boundaries of the game itself.

There is a deeper current moving through it.

Erin O’Mara Kunz speaks to this with a perspective shaped by years of studying human behavior. The focus moves away from what is happening on the surface and toward what is driving it underneath. The pull toward these spaces is rooted in something fundamental… the need for belonging, the search for purpose, the desire to understand oneself more fully in the presence of others.

That recognition changes the way these experiences are seen.

What once looked like a contained event begins to feel like something more expansive. A place where people encounter themselves in new ways. A place where relationships form, fracture, and deepen. A place where growth does not always arrive cleanly, but arrives nonetheless.

LRG Nation lingers in that space.

There is also something important to understand about how LRG Nation exists alongside the broader work unfolding around it. Through KI Productions, a documentary centered on this same community is in development. The two projects are connected in heart by the desire to celebrate the LRG community… yet they are two entirely distinct projects in form and in how they move.

Both matter.

Together, they offer different ways of understanding the same landscape… one through movement and immediacy, the other through reflection and depth.

LRG Nation was written with care for the stories that do not always take center stage.

The quiet ones.The complex ones.The ones that take time to unfold.

The ones that remain.

I am honored, humbled, and grateful for those that shared so willingly with me.  Without question, those who take the time to journey into your stories will experience a range of emotions.  

I have laughed, cried, cheered, yelled, hugged, and held throughout this two-year process.  

...And I am better as a result of these 32 remarkable human beings. 

This book simply holds those stories up… and offers them back.