What Does “IC / OOC” Mean?

IC means in character and OOC means out of character: the two states a LARP participant moves between during an event.

Part of speech

adjectives, usually written as initialisms

Category

LARP terminology

Meaning in context

The pair is a switch with two positions, and it governs more than who is talking. IC covers what the fiction contains and what a character is allowed to notice: the sealed letter, the row in the doorway, the mud. OOC is the rest of the same field, which never goes away while the game runs: the keys in your pocket, the person you are about to betray having driven you here. One British club’s glossary puts the line at what characters can perceive, which is a better place for it than speech, since most trouble is informational. Holding something OOC and letting your character act on it is metagaming.

Live play reverses the habit of a session at a table. Seated, you are yourself by default and drop into your character for a line. At an event anybody you meet is taken to be their character until they indicate otherwise, so the weight lands on marking OOC clearly. The same club’s answer is a raised hand: anyone still IC treats it as invisible. Elsewhere it is a word, a gesture, a taped-off corner by the kitchen. Ask before a first LARP which signal that game uses. Safety calls sit outside the fiction too, and they outrank whatever scene they interrupt.

Feelings cross the line in both directions, which is what bleed names. The phrase also has a second life away from events: in drama and fandom, calling something out of character is a verdict that a character behaved unlike themselves, a claim about consistency rather than a report of which state somebody is in.

Where it comes from

Both phrases come from stage language: in character means playing the character instead of yourself, with out of character as its opposite. The abbreviations are nothing cleverer than the initials, and who shortened either one first is not recorded. One dictionary entry carries a usage example of OOC from 2000, which says the abbreviation was in circulation by then and nothing about where it began; for IC there is no first recorded use to cite at all. That gap fits a hobby with no single point of origin, worked out separately by groups in North America, Europe and Australia.

Examples

• Take the argument about the lift rota OOC, please, we are supposedly in the middle of a siege.
• Everything in the chapel is IC, including the notes pinned to the door, so read them as your character and not as yourself.
• He put a hand up halfway along the corridor, and the two guards chasing him stopped seeing him mid-stride.

How it connects to larpmaxxing

What larpmaxxing does not inherit is the raised hand. An event hands everyone the same way to step outside the fiction and be believed. A persona on a feed has no agreed signal, so whatever stands in for OOC is whatever the poster builds: the bio, the tone, a caption that lets the audience in. Kayfabe is the other trade that answered this by never signalling at all. The line worth naming is not about breaking character, it is about who is left with no way to tell. A bit played to people meant to work it out is entertainment. The same fiction aimed at one person with money riding on believing it is not a performance any more.

More from the dictionary

This entry is part of the LARP dictionary, which covers the vocabulary of live-action role-play and the internet slang that grew up around it. The two pillar pages are what LARP is and what larpmaxxing means.