Month: October 2019

Published on

2019-10-29

in

Theory

The Impact of Social Capital on Larp Safety

By
Muriel Algayres

Introduction

This article is partially a complement to the recent ”The Brave Space” opinion piece, but is more generally fueled by long standing discussions regarding status and social dynamics in larp communities, both at the local and wider international scale. It represents my opinion alone and does not mean to establish a universal truth regarding these issues. I will first present a definition of safety and expand it using the notion of zone of proximal development, an education theory proposed by Lev Vygotsky. I will then reintroduce the notion of social capital to argue why imbalances of power between participants should be taken into account while discussing safety and player negotiation of boundaries. I conclude with the idea that you can’t discuss a culture of trust without addressing social capital and the imbalances of power between all people involved.

The Ideal Purpose of Safety

Safety techniques as they exist at the time of this writing provide means to both opt-out of sensitive issues of scenes or to opt-in to certain types of play. Furthermore, communication around safety has become essential to establish the role and positioning of the larp organization on safety and inclusion of all players. We can admit that talk of safety mostly focuses on opting out mechanics, such as clear author statements with explicit trigger warnings, safewords, white zones, stating boundaries, etc. However, opt-in mechanics also exist, such as the signal light colors (red/yellow/green), okay check-in, pre-scene negotiations, opt-in color ribbons, and the more recent zoning, which creates opt-in spaces within the physical space of the larp. While the possibility to calibrate opt-out and opt-in is obviously central to giving participants the opportunity to experiment and step out of their comfort zone, each participant has different needs and boundaries in that regard.

Photo: Laflor for Getty Images/iStockphoto.

In education, Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (Harland 2003) is considered the ideal space to learn. The zone refers to the space between the comfort zone of what you already know and a yet unattainable zone where the difficulty would discourage or overwhelm you (see Figure 1). We can apply this frame to understand how players can develop skills in larp, such as speaking in public, brawling, handling sensitive issues or emotionally charged conflicts, and even intimacy or sexual scenes.

Let’s keep in mind that the zone of proximal development is unique to each individual, in the same way as triggers and boundaries are (Brown 2014). As in education, if a player stays too much in their comfort zone, they might miss the opportunity to grow, experiment, and learn. And in larp, some people explicitly prefer to stay within their comfort zone for a variety of reasons, such as escapism, socialization, or love of a certain genre, all of which are absolutely valid. Furthermore, pushing someone out of their zone of proximal development too quickly can be damaging to the players’ development by forcing them to engage with problems that they are not ready for or that could be triggering for them. Brown (2014) especially underlines how triggers exist on a wide spectrum, and how they can be detrimental to their player’s whole experience and impact the player’s agency.

Therefore, the core idea is that you need a solid comfort zone before you can expand it. The scope of your zone of proximal development is completely personal and calls for personalized handling. Another educational parallel can be drawn here with the notion of scaffolding in education, where progress is built through progressive steps, support from educators, and interactions with other learners. Applied to larp, in order for a person to feel brave and explore out of their comfort zone, they need to feel safe and supported by their environment, which is not a given in larp communities for many players.

Figure 1: The Zone of Proximal Development. Figure by Dcoetzee (CC0).

There is no denying that larp can provide powerful transformative experiences. Jonaya Kemper (2017) coined the term emancipatory bleed to reflect on the process of steering towards a specific type of play that would reflect one’s own life experience of oppression. Players should be allowed the opportunity to steer towards that kind of play, and designers can support emergent play along those lines. However, how can we support transformative play and exploration while still ensuring safety for those players who most need it? This question usually brings up issues of consent, pre-game or in-game negotiation, and personal boundaries.

We are Not Equal in Setting Boundaries and Tone

In the international larp community, we usually remind participants that the players are more important than the game, make sure that enthusiastic content is given and can be revoked at all times, and support negotiation and opt-in mechanisms. Our goal is to build a collective culture of trust. However, to build such a culture, we need to be able to negotiate it as equal participants. I don’t believe that every negotiation and every discussion is carried on an equal footing.

Games going through reruns and several iterations can sometimes be played more violently or intensely from one session to another. Framing the game experience with hard limits or requirements for consent negotiations in such a way that it sets up cohesive boundaries for the whole experience remains an organizers’ prerogative. However, I would contend that the collective level of intensity is also influenced by the players through their collective interactions. Since we tend to take cues and ideas from other players, I believe that participants are unequal in influencing the tone and intensity. Outspoken participants with a wider comfort zone can influence the game atmosphere more, sometimes for the better, by inspiring others and creating unexpected interactions.

On the other hand, a single or small group of participants who decide to play for their own agency and to disregard the collective buildup of the game can just as easily derail the tone and cohesion for the whole larp. These are rare occurrences where the domino effect can negatively impact the experience of many players (Bowman 2017). My previous article (2019) on the depiction of rape scenes in larps showed how the introduction of scenes featuring sexual violence used to be the province of a dominant group who used it for power play. Only the introduction of restrictions and safety regulations enabled the minority group — women players in this instance — to refuse playing these scenes if they were not negotiated. Further down the line, we found women participants were willing to play rape scenes for dramatic purposes or to support intense narratives because they feel empowered to choose to do so. This empowerment, though, was entirely contingent upon a corrective intervention upon the social imbalance that had originally prevented these players from voicing their discontent. Thus, safety culture was the crucial thing that allowed these women to feel comfortable to play this content.

Social Capital in Larp

Social capital is a notion popularized among others by Pierre Bourdieu as the product of resources conferred due to integration into a certain network and the capacity to act in society (Siisiainen 2003). The chart below illustrates social capital as an aggregate of these resources that allows an individual access to favors or greater resources.

Figure 2: A synthetic representation of social capital (Algayres 2019).

Since larp groups or organizations are part of society, they are also prone to the same biases that affect us in daily life. Although efforts have been made to support the integration of minority or marginalized groups in larps, some players still accrue social capital by virtue of being or passing for white, straight, cis-, or because of their class and education level. Another major point in the international context is their mastery of English, which will confer advantages to native English speakers and players from countries where English proficiency is especially high, as well as highly educated and internationally-integrated professionals. Finally, social capital as we will discuss it is also dependent on larp-specific criteria: being geographically anchored as Nordic, clout as an organizer and/or larp theorist, visibility on social media, participation at international larp conferences and conventions, playing high status characters, and involvement in high-profile games with a lot of hype.

I would claim that larpers with higher social capital are in a position to influence their co-players’ choices or leverage their own desires when boundaries are negotiated. Has anyone ever been accidentally pushed out of their comfort zone for fear of missing out certain parts of the game or the opportunity to hang out with this cool larper they’d read a lot about? Could peer pressure and “hardcore larp culture” ever push some people to willfully step out of their zone of proximal development because that’s what a “good larper” would do? I would contend that this can happen, and that it is very easy to be blind to your own social capital, as it can intersect with other forms of oppression. For example, as a woman, I have to contend with sexism and have even been the subject of sexual violence. However, since I hit almost every other marker of status, I have often been in situations where I benefited from my higher social capital and I was sometimes blind to it to my own detriment. I believe it is important for us to acknowledge our own degree of social capital and how it may influence our relative abilities to push play in our desired direction. It is also important for us to listen to people with lower social capital when they request greater safety culture around sensitive topics.

Regarding the Creation of Safe Spaces and Trust Culture

I think that safety must be used both as a way to opt-out and opt-in of specific themes and scenes. However, safety also has been used to protect minority groups and players with specific triggers and limits from play that would be oppressive to them, and is especially beneficial to players with lower social capital (Kemper 2017). In larp scenes where safety was introduced more recently, resistance to safety techniques usually comes from the more dominant and entitled groups of players. These groups sometimes feel that safety techniques are not necessary because they feel safe enough not to need them. They may have sufficient trust and familiarity within their local communities of play to feel safe without negotiation, which is a form of privilege that is not afforded to many in the international larp community, who may enter larps without the benefits of established group trust. Only active communication by the organizers compensates for this imbalance of power between groups that feel confident to play without safety rules and those who need to be sure of the implementation of safety structures before they will even sign up for the larp. In other words, players with this social capital privilege may not realize that lack of safety culture in a larp may be actively dissuading players from marginalized backgrounds from ever signing up, which further contributes to issues of inclusion in the international larp community.

I don’t believe we can discuss expanding our boundaries, reducing the need for scene negotiations, or exploring out of our comfort zones without taking into account imbalances of social capital, influence, and power. Discussion around opt-out safety was once framed around the protection and benefit of marginalized groups and players most in need of it. I would therefore wish for discussions around trust culture to be built around this issue: how can we build a trust culture that will above all benefit players with the lowest social capital and the greatest need for it?

I hope that we will develop tools that can enable players to explore and expand their comfort zone. However, when we develop these tools, we should measure their value on how much they actually empower those with the lowest social capital and facilitate a sense of psychological safety. I believe that our capacity to build a collective sense of trust will only be as big as our capacity to compensate for these imbalances and support all players to feel safe doing so.

References

Algayres, Muriel. 2019. “The Evolution of Rape Depiction in Larp.” Nordiclarp.org. Last modified on May 20, 2019.

Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2018. “The Larp Domino Effect.” Nordiclarp.org. Last modified on February 14, 2018.

Brown, Maury Elizabeth. 2014. “Pulling the Trigger on Player Agency.” In The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2014, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman. 96-111.

Kemper, Jonaya. 2017. “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity.” Nordiclarp.org. Last modified June 21, 2017.

Harland, Tony. 2003. “Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and Problem-based Learning: Linking a Theoretical Concept with Practice through Action Research.” Teaching in Higher Education 8, no. 2: 263-272.

Siisiainen, Martti. 2003. “Two Concepts of Social Capital: Bourdieu vs. Putnam.” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 40, no. 2: 183-204.

Cover photo: FreeImages.com. For illustrative purposes.

Content editing: Elina Gouliou
Published on

2019-10-07

in

Opinion

The Brave Space: Some Thoughts on Safety in Larps

By
Anneli Friedner

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.

I think of safety work in larp as having two different aspects. One is safety from unpleasant or triggering experiences. But, for larp to be this transformative, amazing, brilliant artform we know it as, another aspect is just as important. As players we also need safety to lean in, to be brave, and to get the play we crave.
So a safe space is not enough. For larp to be amazing, we also need to create brave spaces.

Safety From Culture and Why It Is Not Enough

I am dead scared of rollercoasters. I have never actually gone on one, but my mother has kept me safe from them my entire upbringing by telling me that they are hideously scary and that I really do not have to try them. I had a similar experience when I met the safety from discourse at full scale at a larp for the first time. And it baffled me.

So, I had opted in by signing up to a challenging larp. I was scared and uncomfortable, but I wanted to do it. But even if I want to do something ever so badly, I will probably get intimidated if the safety workshops preparing me for it are all focused on the right to opt out; to not take risks or challenge myself. After a day of workshops and safety talks, I was more scared than I had ever been of a larp before.

This is an inherent risk with the safety from discourse. I define it as an approach to safety where the focus is to create a safe space by saving players from triggering experiences. It may contain policies like “no touching without consent in advance” or “all play on intimacy or violence should be pre-negotiated before the game.” Other parts of it are thinking about safewords as something used only to break play, sometimes completed with the idea that one should never have to tell why one safewords or withdraws from the game; and safety rooms where players can get away from the game and talk with a third-party safety host. Another common feature is a flag system to prevent predators and unsafe players from participating in games. Maury Brown’s (2017a, 2017b) articles on community safety here at Nordiclarp.org contains a good example of this discourse.

Person jumping across a gap (Photo, Lennart Wittstock)

We need safety from unsafe experiences at larps. However, without the feeling that we all lean in, create a good experience together, and care about each other, I will feel insecure and hold back a lot. Knowing that my mother will keep me safe from the rollercoaster is nice, but it will not make me dare to ride. And knowing that I can seek out a safety host if I need it will not make me trust my co-players and be brave enough to get the play I signed up for.

Creating a Brave Space

The idea of the brave space is pretty simple. It is a space where the players feel safe enough to lean in and get the play we really crave. It is an environment where players dare to open up and be vulnerable. This requires trust and a sense of caring for each other, both during the game and after it.
Creating a brave space cannot come from above, with a code of conduct or a set of safety mechanics. As Mo Turkington and Troels Ken Pedersen (2015) point out in this article, the most important thing with those is to signal to the participants that here we take care of each other.

As a game master or larp designer you can do wonders by creating an environment where the participants dare to lean in and be brave and vulnerable. Make sure your players get to meet. Create opportunities for them to start talking with and caring about each other. But the big job is our shared responsibility as players. We are the player culture, and we are responsible for giving each other a good experience.

Yes Means Yes

I want to borrow some feminist terminology here and say that a brave space requires a consent culture. This means that to play together we need enthusiastic consent. No means no. And “err… maybe later?” generally also means no. Always give your participants the possibility to opt out of play they do not want.

But also remember that yes means yes. Make it easy for your players to opt in, and to help each other get the play they crave even if it does not come easily to them. Normalize the scary things and set the tone. If you treat your challenging content as normal and expected, the players are more likely to do so as well. And workshopping content like oppression or sex mechanics is not just to make the participants know how to use them, but also a way to let them try with guidance, and discover that they dare doing so.

For yes-means-yes reasons, I really like check-in words like the traffic light as a complement to safewords. This mechanic uses the colours of a traffic light to calibrate consent during play, and I specifically like it for the opportunity to signal what you want to do (e.g. hold a bucket of water as if you were to throw it over a co-player), ask “green?” and if you get a “green!” back, go ahead and do it. The OK check-in is a similar mechanic.

Traffic lights (Photo, Jos van Ouwerkerk)

If you are unsure if a co-player wants to do something, it is better to check in and get that enthusiastic consent, than to just-to-be-sure refrain from doing it.

The Pre-negotiation Problem

Informed consent is a tricky one at larps though. It is easier to feel secure when you know in advance what you are signing up for. Some designers talk about expectation management – when we know that a larp will handle challenging themes, we can give informed consent to play them (Svanevik & Brind 2018).

Designers can use ingredients lists or make explicit rules against content they do not want in a larp. But they can not control what the players bring into the game, and therefore we can not expect consent in larp to work with pre-negotiation only.

Larp is like sex in this regard. Most people would call it impossible to pre-negotiate everything we want to do in a sex scene. The same applies to larp. Often we are not aware of all our limits in advance. Something might seem like a thing you would never do, but when you try, you end up loving it. Something might be fun for a little while, but not what you want to spend the entire night on. And some things seem like amazing play in advance but end up awkward or horrible. Consent is dynamic and can be given or taken back at any time. There are many mechanics to make this work during runtime: for example, Johanna Koljonen’s Safety in larp blog (2016) is a veritable goldmine of these.

The risk with the idea of pre-negotiating so that uncomfortable or triggering things should never happen in the first place is that players get ill-prepared for actually calibrating and finding their limits during play. And then we risk players holding back and not getting the play they crave, because there is too little space to calibrate and check in for consent.

Finding One’s Limits

This leads me to another key aspect of the brave space. It is easier to achieve it when we practise to actually find our limits – soft and hard ones – and know how to set them.

Rock climbers (Photo, Joshua Tree National Park Licensing)

In this context, I find it very useful to separate between different kinds of limits. There are hard limits that should not be crossed. And then there are soft limits that we can push when we feel brave and comfortable enough to get new and exciting experiences. Many of my best larps are those where I have learned new things about myself, love, or life by stepping out of my comfort zone. Those where I have been able to let go, embrace the uncertain, and let other people affect me. The ones where I have felt safe enough to push my limits and see where I end up.

When one is playing with pushing limits, one always risks hitting them. And this is good. The goal is not to never have to use a safeword, but to know that you are able to. And what happens after you safeword or get safeworded at, and that it is gonna be okay.

I actually consider fake safeword workshops a harmful feature in larps. It is very common in pre-game workshops for players to be told to practise using safewords in an artificial setting where no-one is actually close to their limits. This teaches players to lie with safewords, but not to recognize their boundaries and experience how to actually use them.

In contrast, I learned a really good safeword workshop technique at the Atropos game Reborn (2018). There, we were told to practise the sex mechanic of the game and to escalate it until we felt a need to say “this is comfortable but don’t go further,” – or to use the safeword “off-game” followed by the information we wanted the co-player to have, e.g. “off-game, no touching my face please.” This was a chance to actually feel where our limits were, to experience authentically using safewords, and to get a good experience when they were respected.

Hurting and Aftercare

The last part of the brave space that I will explain here is what to do when we hurt someone. This is important, because the key to make players safe enough to be brave is making them care about each other. I will only dare to push my limits and to do amazing transformative things at a larp if I trust my co-players to care for me when it hurts. And it will.

If someone ever promised that they would never hurt you, they lied. Because one cannot know that. Sometimes we hurt each other. And an important part of building consent culture is realising that not only Bad and Unsafe people do this.

When we allow larp to affect us, and get emotionally vulnerable together, we sometimes make other players uncomfortable. We fail to communicate, we transgress boundaries, or we do not realize until afterwards that someone else has transgressed our own. But that is a natural part of life. The important thing is what happens afterwards. If I hurt someone during a larp, I have a responsibility to try to help them feel okay again.

Cliff jumping (Photo, Jacub Gomez

This is where I start worrying when I hear thoughts like “you never have to explain why you safeworded” and when this responsibility between players gets replaced with flagging systems and third-party safety hosts. I have spoken with too many players who fear that they will make someone feel unsafe at a larp and will not get to know about it until the harm is already done, someone is hurt, and they are red-flagged from further activities. I have also seen too many players become defensive and claim to have done nothing wrong because only Bad and Unsafe people do that. And when a safety discourse makes players react with defensiveness and mistrust, feeling that the threat of being labelled a Bad Person is too great for them to admit to their mistakes, it does not build safety. It destroys it.

I honestly think that a responsibility we have as players is to make amends and try to correct our mistakes. We cannot promise to never hurt a co-player, but we can promise to do our best to help them feel okay again. Sometimes, they do not want that help, and the best thing can be to give a little space before we try to solve something. But in order to not leave conflicts hanging, we must get to know what has gone wrong and take responsibility for it. I think a third-party safety host can be a great asset here to help solve conflicts between players or between players and organizers. But I find it important that the safety host is a support and not a shield. Solutions like red-flagging or letting a safety host remove a player from a larp are there for when the trust between the players is irreversibly broken – but when creating a brave space, it is important to not let them replace communication between players before that happens.

For larp to actually be safe, we need to be safe with each other instead of away from each other.
We need to build spaces where we as players can grow together, learn together, and have intense, emotional, vulnerable, and unexpected experiences. We need to talk about how to make mistakes and then correct them. How to lose trust, but also how to regain it. How to feel bad after a larp and how to care for each other in it. How to lean in, explore difficult topics, and learn to fly.

References

Bowman, Sarah Lynne, Maury Brown, and Johanna Koljonen. 2017. “Safety & Calibration Tools in Larps.” Knutepunkt 2017.
https://www.nordiclarp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Safety-Calibration-in-Larps-Knutepunkt-2017.pdf

Svanevik, Martine and Simon Brind. 2018. “Playing Safe?” Nordic Larp. https://nordiclarp.org/2018/01/22/playing-safe/

Brown, Maury. 2017a. “Safety Coordinators For Communities, Why What and How?” Nordic Larp. https://nordiclarp.org/2017/04/17/safety-coordinators-for-communities-why-what-and-how/

Brown, Maury. 2017b. “The Consent and Community Safety Manifesto.” Nordic Larp.
https://nordiclarp.org/2017/03/24/the-consent-and-community-safety-manifesto/

Friedner, Anneli. 2013. “Gränsdragningar och gråzoner, ett utvecklingsforum om lajvetik.” Jeu de rôles. http://jeu-de-roles.blogspot.com/2013/03/gransdragningar-och-grazoner-ett.html#more

Koljonen, Johanna. 2016. “Safety in Larp. Understanding Participation and Designing For Trust.” Safety Participation.
https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/

Pedersen, Troels Ken. 2015. “Your Larp’s Only as Safe as its Safety Culture,” Leaving Mundania. http://leavingmundania.com/2015/08/04/your-larps-only-as-safe-as-its-safety-culture/

Cover photo: Backlit couple floating (photo, Isabella Mariana).

Content editing: Elina Gouliou