Nordic Larp

Year: 2021

  • Creating Aura

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    Creating Aura

    By

    Thomas Munier

    This article, by Thomas Munier, was initially published in French on ElectroGN on February 8th, 2021. It was translated into English for publication here by JC, with the approval of the author and with the permission of ElectroGN.

    Introduction

    For alibi to really help the participant play their role freely, an aura of legitimacy needs to be built. In other words, a social, narrative and game system needs to be established that legitimizes the participant in their role. This aura reinforces alibi and allows them to play roles that are independent from their social constraints or individual capacities, while still feeling credible. The aura also validates to the group the participant’s legitimacy to play their chosen role. To this end, we propose a number of tools, ranging from larp design, to roleplaying, to an encouraging group attitude, to a global system supporting alibi from pre-larp briefing to post-larp debriefing.

    How do we build an aura?

    In the previous article, ‘It Wasn’t Me’, we established that the concept of alibi (“It’s not me, it’s my character”) is what allows larps to be wonderful spaces for expression and experiencing self and otherness. By allowing participants to let go, alibi allows them to meet their character, and temporarily free themselves of the place and limits society has assigned them.

    There are times when this implicit tool works perfectly. But alibi can sometimes be fragile. Alibi alone is sometimes not enough for participants to feel that they can legitimately play their role. Others sometimes use alibi as a pretext for abusive behavior. The group sometimes doesn’t respect our alibi. And we can never completely escape other people’s judgement.

    If we want to ensure that a participant can experience another perspective, they need to be able to give in to their alibi, and the group needs to give it legitimacy. In other words, the participant must feel empowered by an aura that makes them, if not credible, at least accepted or acceptable in their role.

    Building the aura is thus a conscious and explicit process that supports alibi, which is implicit. This involves the larp’s design, but also both the participant’s and the group’s attitude.

    Character Sheets

    Alibi must be written into character sheets. This goes both ways: if you are playing the Viking chief, your character description should mention that you are feared and respected, but the character descriptions of all Vikings (with perhaps one or two exceptions) should mention this too. These other character sheets participate in the inception of the chief’s aura of fear. Depending on the character relationships, love, hate, trust, etc. can also be mentioned.

    The character sheet’s literary quality is also important: it immerses the participant in their role, which they will then be able to play more confidently. The romanesque larp style uses character sheets that are often 30–80 pages long, so that all characters already know how fearsome the Viking chieftain is when they approach.

    But a long character sheet, written like a novella, can also make the message less clear. And the length can contribute to the cognitive overload mentioned in the previous article. In any case, long character sheets of this type are mainly suited to larps based on secrecy and revelations.

    Larp creators don’t all have to go that far.  However, it is always important to pay attention to one’s writing style to allow the participant to establish an emotional connection with their character, understand their relationships with other characters, and be ready to go before the larp starts. Even if one doesn’t write a novella for each character, it’s important to pay attention to supporting alibi, for example by describing relationships.

    Larp Design

    The way in which larps are designed plays a big role in the creation of aura and in the compensation of any human errors. Reinforcing a larp’s design is less risky than depending only on participants’ good will, because that good will might be lacking in certain larp cultures.

    As mentioned previously, character sheets are larp design tools. But other tools exist to be used when participants come together.

    Workshops

    Before the larp, workshops can help to build aura by encouraging participants to act in a way that is coherent with their role, and with the way their character feels about other characters.

    For example, gender expression workshops can be organized like this: the participant attempting to play a character of a gender other than their own will work on their physical and verbal expression, while others will practice talking about them, and discuss their vision for the character, using the character’s gender (not the participant’s gender).

    Circles are another, more usual example of workshops that work for most larps. Participants take turns standing in the center of the circle. Each person then states what their character thinks of the character of the person standing in the center of the circle. The participant can also answer questions from the circle about their character, or present their character to the circle.

    Briefing

    The briefing is another indispensable tool to remind everyone of specific roles, but also to encourage everyone to show understanding and avoid judging. I can, for example, imagine that in the briefing of a larp including characters expected to do artistic or acrobatic feats, it would be crucial to reassure participants who were going to do live performances. It’s important everyone understands it’s not a talent contest. Reminding participants to have fun rather than looking for the perfect performance seems like an important aspect of creating aura.

    Stats

    I would also like to rehabilitate a larp technique that has often been despised by “freeform” or “immersionist” larpers: character stats. A character that is capable of inflicting huge amounts of damage, another with an outstanding charisma or negotiation stat: these are simple tools for building aura.

    Photo by JD Hancock on Flickr
    Photo by JD Hancock on Flickr

    Freeform Techniques

    Other, more freeform, techniques can replace stats. For example, in a larp with a strong hierarchy, “inferior” characters can be directed to freeze in place and must await instructions as soon as a “superior” character touches them on the forehead.

    The larp Les Sentes goes further, with two rules: “Believe anything you’re told” and “Do anything you’re asked to.” This relieves participants of any pressure to be persuasive. Participants can further their character’s objectives by getting others involved in them, without the need for convincing role-playing.

    Artistic Direction

    Smart overall larp pacing can also ensure that character narratives don’t all peak at the same time, since this tends to create a cacophony where no one is interested in other characters’ grandiose or tragic destiny. For example, the Harry Potter-inspired short larp Seven Years in Poudlard is divided into acts, and the last act focuses on the crucial actions of two characters. Participants don’t know in advance who these two characters will be, but they know that the other characters will be of secondary importance. This formula works: when the two characters are identified and do their thing, all eyes are on them, with a definite aura effect. Other larps could learn from this example to give each participant their 15 minutes of fame. (In the context of heavily scripted larps, where lots of organizer input into the dramatic curves of each character.)

    That said, a larp’s dramatic climax does not necessarily need to happen publicly. It can also be “decentralized,” where each small group (or even each individual) gets a separate climax. This is frequent in “improv larps,” where the larger meta-plot often takes a back seat to people’s “little stories.”

    Hand and Verbal Signals

    Meta-techniques, such as hand signals, are a language that can grease the wheels of larp. For example, crossing your fingers means “It’s my character thinking/saying/doing this, not me,” allowing one to yell at another character while indicating it’s the character that is upset, not the participant. I also like the converse technique, where for example saying “really really” indicates that it’s the participant speaking, not the character.

    Paradoxically, the possibility to clearly differentiate between participant and character without fully breaking immersion allows one to use alibi more fully, since you can dissipate any ambiguity for others. This works even when you yourself are unable to totally separate participant and character, for example when trying to reassure another participant while experiencing intense bleed.

    Third Place and Magic Circle

    But the main role of larp design is larger: to establish a “third place” (not home, and not the workplace) where ordinary social conventions no longer apply. In the larp Le Lierre et La Vigne, polyamory is the norm. In the larp Les Sentes, everyone suffers from amnesia and identity is a very fluid concept. In the larp The Quota, participants play migrants. Ritualizing the act of entering and leaving the magic circle that marks the limits of this third place in time and space allows everyone to truly let themselves go to alibi, without social norms holding them back.

    Overall, meta-techniques can act as a substitute for the participant’s role-playing performance, making them credible in roles that society or their own capabilities would not allow. By organizing space and time, a virtuous larp design facilitates role-playing by limiting cognitive overload and creating an area of non-reality and new possibilities.

    The Participant’s Performance

    Does this mean that, with a good larp design, participants don’t need to make any role-playing efforts? Yes and no.

    Yes, because I believe reducing the stress associated with role-playing is one of the prerequisites for liberation. Larping is not theatre and participants are not competing for an acting prize.

    To larpers doubting their legitimacy, either because they are a beginner or because their character is far from their actual social status or comfort zone, I would recommend that they just go with the flow of events without aiming for theatrics or the group’s assent. This seems like a good way for them to have fun, feel part of the group, and meet their character.

    However, I would recommend the larper stay somewhat grounded in role-play. To meet your character, you have to take at least a step in their direction and find at least some convergence, be it through costume preparation, mannerism work, or memorising goals.

    If a participant wants to sing during the larp, rehearsing the song three or four times will surely help, especially if they want to sing without reading the lyrics off a piece of paper. But beyond this bare minimum, alibi takes over. Making more of an effort should only result from the participant’s desire to come closer to their character, not from social pressure. To clarify: social pressure can sometimes help a participant to push their limits, but it’s a source of stress for those who suffer from social anxiety. Therefore, design document statements such as “we expect your larping to be strongly motivated” or “we expect a high level of role-playing” are fine for some larps, but should not be considered as inclusive.

    It seems to me that the right balance to strike stems from self-knowledge. You can tell the other participants before the larp that you will be playing their leader but that you are not good at shouting. Or you can adapt your role-playing to your abilities by playing a cold type of leader rather than a shouty one. Aura will do the rest.

    Photo by LauriePinkham, public domain
    Photo by LauriePinkham, public domain

    The Mirror That Others Hold Up for You

    No larp design or participant effort will make your alibi legitimate if the others don’t do their part. They need to go beyond judging performance and fully participate in creating aura. This starts a virtuous circle that will enable all participants to fully live their role. The group’s mission is to create aura instead of judging.

    The Audience-Participant and the Performer-Participant

    We often hear that in RPG or larp the other participants are an audience. While useful in many ways, this idea is risky for two reasons: one is that participants may be discouraged from playing their character for fear of falling short of the audience’s expectations, and the other is that participants may become mere consumers of others’ role-playing.

    To avoid these two risks, we must deconstruct the idea of ourselves as an audience: in larp, we are not just an audience, but an engaged audience.

    When trying to impersonate someone else, the desire to do well can run into the impossibility to do well, either because we don’t know the other perspective well enough, or because we think we don’t. Take for example Alquen, a heterosexual cis-male. Even though he is open-minded about the characters he is willing to play, he is reluctant to play cis women or trans characters because he feels he doesn’t know enough and is afraid he will play them badly. I don’t think this type of reluctance can be overcome with a simple “it’s just another character with another gender.” The group needs to make the person feel legitimate and be indulgent, accepting that they will make mistakes or even be stereotypical. Workshops and debriefs can help the person to do better next time. With this indulgence, I think we are limiting people who, in good faith, are trying to be open to a greater variety of roles.

    Play to Lift

    We larp to encourage others in their performance and to respond to it, not to evaluate it or to profit from it.

    That is where play to lift comes in. This way of larping is different from “play to win” or “play to lose,” which are both centered on one’s own character. Play to lift means using one’s character to make others shine. In this context, the character is seen as a tool to provide an ideal antagonist or associate to another character, in order to make them look good. A few “play to lift” participants in a larp greatly increase the aura of the other characters. Furthermore, when a majority of participants play to lift, everyone becomes a support or  spotlight for everyone, which creates a constructive and harmonious larp dynamic.

    Play to Serve and Playing Impact

    In her blog JenesuispasMJmais (IamnotGMbut), Eugénie introduces two notions inherited from improv theatre that strongly contribute to aura: play to serve (my character is at the service of other participants and the plot) and playing impact (through my reactions, I show that other characters’ actions have an impact on bodies and minds).

    Eugénie also has a gesture that I would include in “playing impact”: making a heart-shape with your hands (other, more immersive equivalents exist, such as striking your heart with your fist) to signal to other participants that you enjoy what is going on. It’s important to turn as you are making the gesture, so that everyone can see it. This is exactly the type of validation that can make an alibi legitimate, as long as you accept the meta side of this technique. It seems that performances (including artistic ones) are objectively better when the audience gives the performer signs of approval. This same mechanic operates with the heart-shaped fingers: more than simply positive thoughts, it really has a positive impact on the quality and intensity of people’s role-playing.

    It seems to me that being a fan of the other characters and cultivating indulgence towards other participants, instead of considering we are here to “be a good role-player,” leads to a more fulfilling role-playing experience for everyone.

    • To go further:
      [Article] ‘Play to serve‘, by Eugénie, on the JenesuispasMJmais blog
      [Article] ‘Playing impact‘, by Eugénie, on the JenesuispasMJmais blog

    Maintaining Trust

    The Meta Prerequisite for Character Immersion

    The concept of playing to serve, described above, creates a meta paradox. For people to have confidence in their alibi, participants need to trust each other out-of-character. You need to be socially confident to be able to forget the participant and focus on the character. This brings us back to the importance of the “OK Check-in” mechanic, where you ask other participants if they are OK out of character with a hand signal, and ask them what you can do for them if they are not OK.

    Emotional Safety Techniques

    Emotional safety techniques protect both the participant’s emancipating alibi and psychological well-being by putting limits on alibi. One person’s alibi stops when it infringes on another person’s emotional comfort. Inside this limit, you are totally free and legitimate. Emotional safety techniques such as safewords help us to go beyond this limit and also to protect us from the most clumsy or toxic participants.

    • To go further:
      [Article] ‘Emotional safety‘, by Muriel Algayres, Marianne Caillous, Hoog & Skimy, on the Electro-GN blog

    Mid-Larp Debriefings

    As soon as a larp lasts longer than two hours (outside of briefing/debriefing), it seems interesting to me to add in intermediary debriefing phases. In the larp Les Sentes, we ask before the larp for one volunteer per group to represent said group in these out-of-character intermediary debriefings. This person explains how the participants in the group are doing, what is going well and what is going wrong. The volunteers then look for a solution together. In the “Nuclear Winter” session of the larp Les Sentes, these intermediary debriefings allowed participants to identify an issue: the Militia group wasn’t scary enough, which was a problem for all groups. Together, we reminded everyone of the leadership tools that the Militia had, and encouraged participants from other groups to increase their dealings with the Militia.

    • To go further:
      [Larp debriefing] ‘Nuclear Winter‘, by Thomas Munier

    Note that none of these tools is enough by itself to create the necessary aura. But they all help in creating the feeling of trust, where we see that we all want the same thing: that everyone can play their character to the fullest.

    It seems to me that we all face the same difficulties when trying to let alibi take over and express ourselves: we are afraid that others will think we are crazy, ridiculous, or boring. I think these fears can disappear once trust is established and maintained.

    Clarity of Information

    None of the prerequisites for aura creation seem possible to me without clarity on the social contract during pre-larp communication. Being clear on what to expect (and, even more importantly, on what not to expect) is key in letting alibi take over.

    Transparency techniques (i.e. giving participants information that their character doesn’t know about) can also help: it’s easier to play to serve if you know what is expected of you, and it’s easier to fully immerse in a scene when you know exactly what it is about.

    Transparency is not a sine qua non condition, but it does favor co-creation and trust, and also saves time. A larp based on secrecy will take more effort with regards to briefing and meta-techniques.

    The Importance of Gratitude

    “Thank you” seems like a good final contribution to building trust. “Thank you for taking part” is a great phrase during briefing and debriefing. It’s more a “Thank you for being here” than a “Thank you for your larping”: it’s the participant’s presence that is appreciated. We leave the characters alone: we are not here to judge them; they are part of the untouchable world of transgression. It seems to me that, in order for characters to keep their aura, we have to not expect too much from the participants, whatever happens. People want to perform most when performing is optional.

    Conclusion

    Yes, alibi offers a great pretext to experience and to experiment with oneself through a character. But it only works if the participant has an aura that makes them feel legitimate to themselves and to the other participants. This aura can be built through larp design, through a certain approach to role-playing, through a benevolent attitude by the group, and through a general atmosphere of trust. When all these factors are present, we get what kF calls creative de-responsibilisation, when the creative task in front of us seems just right: not too large, not too small, but just the right challenge to get us to jump into the unknown.

    Creating aura is part of attaining “alibi for all.” This makes aura a useful tool for anyone aiming to live or produce an immersive and inclusive experience.

    Ludography

    L’association Ludique des Gnistes Rennais. Harry Potter L’héritage: 7 ans à Poudlard. ALGR, 2019.

    Avalon Larp Studios & Broken Dreams. Le Quota. eXperience, 2019.

    Clairence, Lille. Le Lierre et la Vigne: retour à Intimatopia. eXperience, 2017.

    Munier, Thomas. Les Sentes. 2019.

    Cover illustration: Photo by Brian, on Flickr

  • A Plot to Bomb the Magic Circle: Chaos Magic in Urban Play

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    A Plot to Bomb the Magic Circle: Chaos Magic in Urban Play

    By

    Alex Brown

    [This article is also available in Spanish, at: http://vivologia.es/un-complot-para-bombardear-el-circulo-magico-la-magia-del-caos-en-el-juego-urbano/
    Thank you to Vivologia for translating it!]

    The magic circle is a metaphor for a mutually agreed space for play. By playing larps, we willingly enter into these contracts with boundaries of where, how and when play is permitted in consensually agreed terms or social frame (Järvelä 2019). Through urban and pervasive styles of play, I’m exploring the possibilities arising from disrupting the social frame of the magic circle, particularly through the practice of chaos magic.

    Psychogeography is often practiced as a pseudo-scientific study of the city, particularly in its early forms. Beginning in the 1950s from the Lettrist movement and in the following years with the Situationist movement, psychogeography is a ‘study’ or exploration of the range of emotions and behaviours that an urban landscape determines upon its inhabitants or participants. Considering the actively playful nature of urban landscapes as seen through the psychogeographic lens, it could be considered that a city’s inhabitants assume the role of participants, simply by taking part in everyday life. Psychogeography is characterised by the rejection of convenient forms of traversing a city in favour of more experimental forms of navigation, usually by walking to actively work against the intended purpose of urban design, as an act of playful resistance. It redefines the function of the architecture as tools for play, to be dissected and reassembled through the act of walking and reimagining what the city might be. The Situationist practice of blurring the boundaries between art and life is ever present in the form of a drift (in French: dérive) where a purposeless, playful interaction with the urban landscape through a journey creates possibility for chance encounters. The active participation of the drift, in contrast to passive consumption, creates the same levels of player agency desirable in most larp practices.

    Psychogeography is not without its challenges. As a documented practice it can lack inclusivity by getting lost in opaque language and esotericism (obscure forms of knowledge). However, the active participation of the body situated in the space means that it has to be experienced in order to be understood.

    Through encounters with cities in constant flux, moments of chance and serendipity are what I want to focus on, as well as the magic created through these experiences.

    Since the 1990s, British psychogeography practitioners have borrowed more and more from esoteric and occult practices, particularly in London and Glasgow. Chaos magic is an accessible introduction to this crossover with urban play, with or without larp. The term ’chaos magic’ is easier to understand as ‘success magic’ or ‘results magic’. I don’t want to explain it away, but as this is the purpose of this piece of writing, please forgive me as I do precisely this.

    Serendipity

    Serendipity is similar to luck or good fortune, but not the same. We can view serendipity as the process of allowing unlikely chance findings to happen and accepting that what is found is not necessarily what is being looked for. Chaos magic relies on serendipity as a salient feature, and, this is the important bit, it uses the psychology of only celebrating successful results. (If this sounds like cheating, that’s because it is cheating. But you must immediately forget that I have written this, and this section should be détourned or ripped out and eaten).

    Through the adventures of the city, you ordinarily encounter so much that is immediately forgotten. However, during a drift, you can become hyper attuned to your surroundings and pay attention to the brilliance of all details. Coming across buildings, signs, street furniture, and found objects that you might have ignored before offers infinite possibilities for play. It is these details which begin to build your magic. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon gives a name to the psychological effect of coming across something new and then encountering it again in quick succession. This effect is similar to what can happen through the process of a  drift. By paying attention to the details of the urban environment, it is inevitable that some will be more interconnected than others, even showing repeated motifs in the way the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon might make us believe we are encountering incredible repetition, yet it is the process of being more susceptible to your own motifs that will make them stand out. These connections are the moments of serendipity that will shape a narrative and look like they are made for you.

    Painted image of a crossing sign with person in green walking and the word "Flashing" above it

    Facilitating play

    In this context of psychogeographical chaos magic, urban play requires the practitioner to engage in a dialogue with the landscape. Reading the environment is similar to reading a tarot draft: it is an exercise of interpretation, of connecting ideas to create meaning. This allows you to approach the play with a problem that you want to solve or an unanswered question, either predetermined or found through the play itself. The process of being open to allowing events to happen is paramount, so don’t get too hung up on specific questions that do not bear fruit, and be prepared to give your playful journey enough time for symbols, clues, and answers to present themselves.

    If you make a few predictions or choose a few overlapping threads of narratives, the odds stack up in your favour. It’s always an experiment, and some questions will be answered through the magic; some questions, if you allow them to continue outside of the magic circle, will be left hanging like an unresolved cadence for years. And some will be complete wild goose chases that leave you wondering if, in fact, you are the goose. For me, this is definitely part of the appeal.

    Drift as larp as chaos magic?

    To introduce a drift in larp terms, we could imagine the urban environment as a freeform sandbox larp without a spatial border to the agreed area of play. We can still create a fictive setting, and a narrative arc such as a question or prompt to be answered on the journey.

    In Green Basilisk (2019), an environmental disaster takes place and time travellers from different eras come together to decide what happened through a collective drift. “Green Basilisk” refers to the disaster, the collective prompt for players is to interpret clues from the landscape, but without saying what actually happened. In the workshop, players create their characters who come from 3 fixed points in linear time and interact with real objects in the landscape as props for play in the fiction. The props (buildings, found objects) can be used diegetically or non-diegetically as the players feel appropriate. This contributes to a sense of being situated in the landscape at the same time as playing in the storyworld. When encountering a church, for example, players are permitted to use their own player knowledge of what the function of the building is, or they can create a new meaning for it, such as a spy headquarters or fallout shelter. Characters from different eras might have conflicting views on the function of buildings, which creates opportunities for play. The contradiction between eras, as well as moving between the ‘real’ and fictional interpretations of objects, creates a blurring of time boundaries. This allows players to experience a more fluid interpretation of the relationship between cause and effect of events through play. There is no set route in the larp, this is decided by players as they go, which is important for serendipitous activity to allow the process of a narrative to build through unexpected discoveries. In urban areas (and especially London, where this larp has been played), there are enough signifiers of consumer capitalism for the play to veer towards capitalism as theme and cause of the disaster but this setting could just as easily allow the players to take the narrative in other directions!

    Bomb the Magic Circle

    The magic circle as a boundary is not one that larp designers and players should give up on lightly. It expands possibilities by providing an alibi for the development of narrative and relationships, within a social contract which is predominantly safe for play. However, I want to encourage forms of urban play where the magic circle exists as a membrane, one which is permeable to the everyday world in both directions.Through this process, the blurring of “art” and “life” or play experiences with wider society, provides an opportunity to occupy space with play whilst maintaining a firmer connection with the everyday world. By taking up space for its own sake in the context of a city where privatised and monetised areas dominate, we can détourne the landscape to one that can be shaped by the imagination of the players. We can view it as an act of resistance and confrontation, it gives agency simultaneously in the play and the everyday, where players can imagine and prefigure hopeful futures for the city through the active reclamation of public space.

    In urban play, particularly with the temporal stretching of play in psychogeographical scenarios, in which case it can be restarted at short notice out of the everyday, it is helpful to us to think about the 2 worlds layered on top of each other, or co-existing. For larp to be accessible in the broadest sense this method allows a process that keeps an openness for porosity and for serendipitous moments. If the magic circle exists as sacred without allowing the porosity of worlds in both directions, it has the possibility to only work as a privileged space for the same people. At the risk of hyperbole, if you think that larp has an opportunity to change the world, then the porosity of worlds in urban play is where the magic happens.

    Crossing lamp with green illuminated person walking and a building in the background
    Photo by cottonbro on Pexels. Image has been cropped.

    Suggestions for DIY Chaos Magic in Urban Play

    People: 1-6 players (3 is literally the magic number, as you tend to move as one unit). You don’t necessarily need characters for play, although fine to do so (they should relate to your problem as below).

    Time: 1.5-2 hours at least. If you’re inclined to stretch the limits of spatio-temporal boundaries confining to ‘play’ and ‘not play’, then 1.5-2 years.

    Prompts: Think of a collective problem you want to answer, or a prompt. This can be something based in reality: “How do we banish cars from city centres?,” something based in a fiction which still relates to the everyday world: “How do we escape the masked warriors?” or something more cryptic: “What happened to red?”

    Location/direction: There should be no set route decided in advance. I would recommend following signs or clues which relate to your prompt (it is fine to choose a direction, e.g. north, although this can be limiting). In general, you should follow the route that looks the most interesting. You can also set rules in advance for wayfinding such as rolling a die, though instinct is the best guidance. Pay attention to the surroundings, and the more ground you cover without rushing, the more you will see.

    Objects: Take cues from the surroundings in order to guide the journey. Use signs, symbols, words, buildings, street furniture, behaviour of people, or anything else you come across. Found objects are going to be particularly valuable.

    Chaos magic: Try to loosen the idea of cause and effect and disrupt a sense of linear time. This will make events connect easier and create more possibilities for play. Remember that chaos magic is a process through which you will not find answers straight away. The questions that you first thought of may become dead-ends, don’t be disheartened by this. Be open to new suggestions from the landscape as you come across them, it’s fine to follow multiple threads of clues at the same time. Try to be situated in both the fiction and reality and consider how they feed into each other, how the magic circle is permeated, or in fact, bombed.

    Bibliography

    Järvelä, Simo. 2019. “How Real is Larp?” In Larp Design: Creating Role Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen, 22. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.

    Cover photo: Jos van Ouwerkerk on Pexels. Photo has been cropped.

    This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Brown, Alex. “A Plot to Bomb the Magic Circle: Chaos Magic in Urban Play.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).

  • Through Someone Else’s Eyes: A Confession

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    Through Someone Else’s Eyes: A Confession

    By

    Stefano Kewan Lee

    [This article is also available in Spanish, at: http://vivologia.es/a-traves-de-los-ojos-de-otra-persona-una-confesion/
    Thank you to Vivologia for translating it!]

    Magician took me near the water, where the others were, put his hands on my shoulders while facing me and said: “you made me look at things in a different way before, and I’m thankful for that. So here’s my gift to you.” His voice and posture started to change, shifting effortlessly from a casual, conversational tone to a solemn, ritualistic one. “I will give you my own eyes”, he chanted as he put a blindfold on his face, “so you can look at the world from a different view, so you can see and take pictures that you would not see and take. I will be blind so you can see.” For about an hour, I went around and took pictures trying hard to imagine what Magician would see and react to.

    Blindfolded person touching another person's face on the beach
    Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee as the character Gaze in the larp La Sirena Varada (2017).

    Of course, I failed. This was only my second time taking pictures at a larp, and my very first time trying to do so in character. The larp was the third and final run of Somnia’s La Sirena Varada (2017), and I had the opportunity to play it as a photographer character who could take all his pictures in-game. Coming into the larp I was eager to try that experience and curious to see how it would work out. I usually play for immersion and, like many others, had quite a few deep and transformative experiences while inhabiting the mind and physical space of a fictional character. Getting to do that while also indulging in my newfound photography hobby seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up.

    During the larp itself though it became clear to me that things were not working out at all. I was constantly switching back and forth from “character mode”, where I would be actually immersed in Gaze (my photographer character), and “photographer mode”, where I would feel instantly pulled back to my usual self and took pictures in the best way I knew how, but without any thought of how would Gaze take them. As the larp progressed I felt increasingly frustrated by the fact that I was indeed failing to take full advantage of the opportunity that I was given. No wonder I couldn’t honour Magician’s gift. How could I see the world through his eyes when I couldn’t even see it through Gaze’s eyes?

    When I got back and developed the film, I had a very clear confirmation of what I experienced at the larp: as much as I loved taking them and printing them, those pictures were mine and reflected the way I as a player saw the larp while it had nothing to do with Gaze’s outlook and personality.

    Moreover, what I experienced was so clear and definitive that it felt inevitable to me: you can either immerse yourself in a character, or you can focus on the exacting job of taking pictures the best way you can. There can be no middle ground, and at the point a perfect synergy between the two mindsets, where you end up fully experiencing a character and at the same time producing pictures that fully reflected that character’s personality, that was borderline unthinkable for me.

    All the experiences I had in the following larps only strengthened my conclusion. I would usually just take pictures out of character, but was occasionally offered a NPC or a full fledged character to play with as I took pictures. And every time I would experience the very same back-and-forth between the two states of mind. After a while it was clear to me that this was how things worked (or rather, failed to work) for me. Others might be able to pull it off, but I was not among them, and I made my peace with it.

    Then SALT happened.

    The larp SALT (2018) focuses on a small group of civilians, normal people trying to find shelter and survive during a civil war that has ripped their country apart. In order to keep things as 360 as possible it’s not unusual for larp designers and organisers who want a photographic documentation of their larp to include, when the setting allows for it, one or more characters that will take pictures while not jeopardising immersion for everyone else. SALT had similar goals so I got offered a character that knew his way around a camera and was willing to use it.

    Experience told me that I should expect some variation of the journalist/reporter type that I usually get, but I was wrong. What a character Vincenzo was! A weirdo who would obsessively collect useless trinkets and give them human names, a loner who would rather write in his own diary rather than talk to the people around him. He was indeed a photographer by trade, but his job was to take pictures of dead people at the morgue. He took me by surprise, and forced me to really think about how I could approach not  just the usual elements of character interpretation and immersion (posture, voice, language, etc.) but also his photography. At that time I was still convinced that it was impossible for me to produce work while in character though, so the only thing I could do was to pack a longer lens than usual. I usually favour moderate wide to normal lenses; this time I chose a moderate telephoto lens, hoping it would at least change things up a little on a purely visual level.

    Playing cards on the floor next to a bare mattress
    Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee as the character Vincenzo in the larp SALT (2018).

    The larp itself was for me an excruciating exercise in isolation and incommunicability as it was almost too easy to slip into Vincenzo’s shoes. And when it came to taking pictures, the only deliberate thing I did was to avoid some of the most obvious shots I would normally take while looking for action, character and narrative. Instead I tried to let Vincenzo take the lead and guide my hand and eye. So I took pictures of objects, of empty rooms, and when I did include people, it was always from a place of distance, both physical and emotional. Because I almost never take still life pictures, and when I do they are always very bad, when the larp was over and I packed things up, I was not at all sure of what I actually got.

    It turns out I didn’t have much, as one of the rolls of film got jammed in the camera and was completely ruined. What I did manage to salvage was very surprising to me. Sure, I did remember taking those pictures of scattered playing cards, empty tin cans and empty rooms. But they were very different from my previous attempts at still life. They had a quality to it that really reflected Vincenzo’s personality and attitude, and that I wouldn’t know how to replicate by myself. It appeared that for once I did manage to be immersed in a character and at the same time produce work that actually reflected that character’s gaze, and not my own. I was not expecting that at all, and wondered if I had to revise my ideas on the matter. It didn’t take long for me to realize that SALT as a larp had a profound effect on me, and more importantly that Vincenzo was far removed from a simple documentarian character. He was so specific, and so far removed from my usual methods, that no wonder I was able to make something very different. “This is the exception that proves the rule,” I said to myself. “You’ll go back to the usual mindset switching with the next reporter character that you get.” There was no doubt about it in my mind.

    Two chairs with blankets on them next to two empty cans.
    Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee as the character Vincenzo in the larp SALT (2018).

    A few months later I took pictures at the international run of Desaparecidos (2019). The larp is set at a center of detention for political dissidents during Pinochet’s regime in Chile, and tells the dramatic stories of the people detained there. At first the organisers just wanted an out of game photographer, but a few days before the larp I was also asked to be an in-game reporter non-player-character (NPC) for a few hours. This was strictly for plot reasons and I did not have a full fledged character. My task as an NPC was to kiss the authorities’ asses while secretly trying to help the dissidents to get some messages out of there. Having done that, I would once again go out of character and be my usual “invisible” presence at the larp. Almost on a whim, I decided to bring my period appropriate film camera in addition to my digital one so I could look the part while taking pictures as an NPC. My expectation was to end up with essentially one big set of pictures, where some happened to be in colour, and some in black and white.

    What I was not expecting at all is that when I acted as a reporter and the players reacted to my presence, this NPC character who barely had a name started to take hold on me, and I felt genuinely concerned about the prisoners, and I was genuinely faking smiles while pretending to interview the colonels and dignitaries, and was genuinely worried that they might find out I was not just taking pictures of their boardrooms and dinner parties, but also of things I was not supposed to see, like the way the prisoners were treated, much less to document them.  All of that disappeared when I went out of character and the players stopped reacting to my presence, so while I was there it mostly felt like business as usual: switching back and forth between taking pictures and playing a character, keeping the two separate.

    Three people behind bars
    Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee as a NPC photographer in the larp Desaparecidos (2019).

    When I went home and started working on the pictures it became clear that I had two different sets in my hands. The colour set reflected my usual way of taking pictures at a larp, trying to communicate the mood and the narrative of the event while focusing on scenes as a whole, more than single character portraits. The black and white set that I mostly took in-character was… puzzling. It felt like I was looking at the work of someone who had been there with those people and was actually trying to document what he could so the world could know about them. Yes, the two sets clearly shared their style rooted in the documentary genre, but their visual language was also somewhat different. And it was not just the difference between colour and black and white. The set I took while in character had less action, but the action was more stark and direct, while the colour set was more dramatic and almost theatrical. The black and white set had way more portraits, and the people were looking directly in camera, while the colour set hardly had portraits and no one was ever looking in camera. More importantly, the in-character black and white set had a sense of empathy and urgency that the colour, out of character set simply lacked.  It was clear that the NPC reporter somehow took hold of me, forced me to immerse in his experience, and that I took pictures as someone other than myself without even realising it.

    I was supposed to take pictures in game as an NPC only on part the first day, while being out of game both at the beginning of the larp and for the whole second (and last) day. And of course this is what I did, but because I still had a few rolls of film to use, I decided to keep using both cameras while I was taking pictures. Imagine my surprise when I could still see that all the black and white photos belonged to the reporter, even those I thought I was taking while out of character! For some reason the simple act of raising to my eye the same camera that I used as a character was enough for me to unknowingly slip back in the mind of that reporter. What was going on? How was it possible that something that had mostly eluded me so far (with the exception of SALT, sure, but that didn’t count, right?) could suddenly sneak up on me like that, with a NPC reporter of all characters? I had to revise my ideas on taking pictures while larping! It was time to dig deeper, but I needed the right larp for that.

    Two people sitting at a table holding hands, with one leaning on the other's shoulder
    Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee as a NPC photographer in the larp Desaparecidos (2019).

    Walpurgis is heavily inspired by old witchcraft movies and the psychedelic ‘60s and ‘70s. It plays like a bad dream, where members of a coven create from themselves a surreal and nightmarish where being inconsistent and wrong is not just tolerated: it’s the name of the game. My character, named Marcello, was a controversial filmmaker known for his provocative yet striking visual style. Even more importantly, a key game technique was the Second Sight, where every character could see anything that was happening in front of them in a different way, one that suited their vision, worldview or intuition, and use that to create content and enrich interactions while playing. This combination of emphasis on the surreal aspects of vision and explicit permission to mess things up provided the perfect opportunity to explore this idea of producing work while being someone else in a more explicit, deliberate way without worrying too much about having to come up with something conventionally usable as a larp photography product. Of course, as I do for every larp that I take pictures at, I did my homework and studied the iconography and visual style and language of the sources of inspirations for the larp itself. During that process I came across the idea of using crystals and prisms in front of the lens in order to create kaleidoscopic, fragmented images. So I bought some of those and made a couple of tests at home, with lackluster results. As I left for the larp, with a bag full of stuff that I didn’t really know how to use and a head full of confused ideas on what I wanted to achieve, I felt as clueless and in over my head as I could possibly be. Given the nature of the larp, that was probably a good thing.

    Psychedelic image of figure in a red robe looms over a person in black kneeling before them, with people in the background in an outside location
    Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee as the character Marcello in the larp Walpurgis (2019).

    As I let Marcello take over and immersed myself in the world of Walpurgis, I would occasionally catch myself drifting out of the game and making decisions that made sense photographically but not necessarily for my character. “Hey, those witches look like they’re up to something interesting. Join them and take pics, even though you have no in game reason to,” and so Marcello did. “Hey, I know you really want to keep interacting directly with this scene, but you should really document it.” And so on, you get the picture.

    The final result reads to me like a collaboration between Marcello and myself. The most striking aspect of this collaboration is how the images where I used the crystals turned out just fine. I as a photographer never used them before, and certainly never touched them since. But I had decided that a fragmented, kaleidoscopic imagery was part of Marcello visual’s style, and it seems like he knew very well how to use them to full effect, in ways that I could not anticipate. With the flick of a wrist he could evoke a hallucinatory feeling, or ghostly presences, or even demonic, infernal flames. I promise I could not replicate those results if my life depended on it. Mission accomplished then? Not quite yet. As I hinted above, there was still the occasional drift out of character, and as much as many of the images are unquestionably Marcello’s, overall the choice of subject was still mine, so it felt like I failed to take the experience one step further. On the other hand, what I got was enough to make me further question my belief that being a character and taking pictures don’t mix, and I was looking forward to the next opportunity to go even deeper.

    Psychedelic photo in red of a shirtless person leaning backward and smiling
    Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee as the character Marcello in the larp Walpurgis (2019).

    Our Last Year is a larp loosely inspired by Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, and follows a year in the life of a group of survivalists as they prepare for an asteroid that may hit planet Earth and make its surface inhabitable for a generation.  Laurie, my character, had a terminal illness that made him think and act a little weird. He also had a strong drive to live life at its fullest, and to make meaningful, enriching connections with the people around him. Oh and of course, he was a hobbyist photographer. While the character in general was very clear to me, I was not sure how to approach my photography to the larp. The visual references for the larp didn’t really align with the character concept, so I have to admit that this time I did the least amount of research and preparation before packing for the event. I had this vague idea of trying to focus on the characters more this time, but that was it.

    It was only towards the end of the larp that I realised that… I never drifted out of character! I had allowed Laurie to take pictures in a way that made sense to him without me trying to go art director on him. And for better or worse, this was very much reflected in the resulting pictures.

    people laughing and playing with red balloons outside
    Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee as the character Laurie in the larp Our Last Year (2019).

    On one hand, I was disappointed. This was definitely not a very strong set of images. They mostly looked like snapshots from someone’s holiday, and I was hoping for a little more than that. On the other hand, these looked like snapshots from someone’s holidays! And that’s not my way of taking pictures ever, not even during my own holidays! The focus on the characters was even stronger than in Desaparecidos, and there was a feeling of simple, spontaneous intimacy that I never managed to evoke before. Even more surprisingly, when I showed the pictures some of the players commented that while they could see their faces in the photos, they didn’t see themselves at all, but only (and fully) their characters. This is one of the best compliments that I as a larp photographer could ever hope for, and I finally got it after allowing myself to take slightly crappy photos through someone else’s eyes.

    Was I done then? Had I cracked the code? Not by a long shot. Both before and after Our Last Year I took pictures at larps where I could not achieve that level of immersion, so I had to decide between playing a character and being a photographer, as usual. But the experience did finally show me that I had been wrong in my conclusions before, and that it is indeed possible and maybe sometimes even desirable to let your character take over and do the work in ways that you could not do by yourself. How to attain that state reliably? I still don’t know. But maybe being clueless about it is exactly what it takes. It’s not just a matter of focus and concentration. I need to let myself be open and to give up control in order for this kind of magic to happen.

    I can’t wait to hand over the camera to the next character, and see what happens.

    Photo credit: Stefano Kewan Lee as the character Laurie in the larp Our Last Year (2019).

    This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Lee, Stefano Kewan. “Through Someone Else’s Eyes: A Confession.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).

     

  • Dragonbane Memories

    Published on

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    Dragonbane Memories

    By

    Mike Pohjola

    Content Advisory: Statutory rape, sexual abuse, organizer negligence, manipulation

    A Finnish man is dragging his luggage behind him as we approach a subway station in Rome. We both have wheeled suitcases with long handles, and while I carry mine down to the station, he drags his along the stairs. Bump, whirrr, bump, whirrr, bump, whirrr, bump…

    “Aren’t you worried you’ll break your suitcase?” I ask him.

    “No,” T replies, “if it breaks, it was a bad suitcase. I don’t want a bad suitcase.”

    Little did I know, during the production of Dragonbane, I would become that suitcase.

    Two people with long hair next to a map of Sooma
    Heiko and Mike at Sooma. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    The First Meeting

    Fifteen years ago, Dragonbane was played in Sweden. I was in the three-person team who begat it all, three years prior. I was the second, and the one responsible for the story, setting, and name of the larp.

    The other two were Fýr Romu and T. My first book, the roleplaying book Myrskyn aika (“Age of the Tempest”) was about to be published when T came to the door of my studio apartment in Turku one day with a proposition. I have chosen not to use his full name.

    “I am going to make a larp about a mechanical dragon. I want to set it in the world of Myrskyn aika, and I want you as the creative lead on this larp.”

    (They might have used the word “main designer,” or “head writer,” but the meaning was the same.)

    I knew T from before, us both having taken part in each others’ larps since the mid 90s. He was not a close friend, but I dare say we knew each other quite well. And knowing him, I had my doubts about his leadership style. His earlier big projects, the Wanderer larps, were known for bad management and burnouts.

    “Yes. There were problems, but I have learned my lesson,” T told me in his deep voice. His deep, convincing voice.

    Then he showed me their plans. A Finnish forestry company has an experimental six-legged logging machine. Like a robotic ant the size of a truck. With the published book giving us a professional status, we would convince them to loan that machine for the larp. Before that, we would recruit Fýr to build an animatronic dragon around it, and we could have it walk around in the larp. The dragon would be able to turn its head, make facial expressions, and even breathe fire. T and Fýr were both interested in pyrotechnics.

    A mechanical contraption in the forest, alongside an image of a red dragon drawn over the image
    Prototype and concept art for the dragon. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    We did, indeed, soon recruit Fýr who, like me, was studying in Turku. He had a crooked smile and a ginger ponytail. I believe he would not object to me calling him a mad inventor. I did not know him then, but we are still connected now fifteen years later. I am still not sure if Fýr is younger or older than me.

    Myself, I was a young artist and writer struggling with burnout, depression, and tendonitis. I believed larp is an art form and a medium, and wanted to prove this to the world. My professional writing career was just getting started, Myrskyn aika being a major breakthrough since it was published by a proper book publisher and sold in book stores. I was young enough to still be looking for mentors, but experienced enough in the larp scene to be wanted as a mentor by others.

    Together, we set to work creating the coolest fantasy larp ever.

    Plans and Realities

    This was a time when the Nordic larp scene was still in its infancy. We had met foreign larpers at Knudepunkts, and taken part in some of their larps, but this was going to take all that to the next level. We would recruit an international team and create a mega-larp for 1200 players with pre-written characters. And the animatronic dragon.

    Now, we did not have the dragon yet. We had our eyes set on a prototype made by Plustech, a Finnish subsidiary of the multinational corporation John Deere which makes tractors and forestry machines. But, T convinced me, once they see our plans, they would be idiots to say no. After all, what a prototype needs most of all is visibility, and that we could promise them. Imagine going to a forestry trade show with a dragon!

    We had crazy plans. We would transform fantasy larp forever. We would have players from dozens of countries, making this by far the most international larp at the time. We would create the best larp in the world. Through pyrotechnics, magic would really work! The village would have bespoke wheat fields to reap, which would be sown months in advance. The budget would be one million euros. Every off-game item from cell phones to underwear would be forbidden. We would utilize experimental augmented reality technologies. Our trailer would feature Eddie Murphy and be shown in film theatres.

    We quickly started to recruit teams of builders, designers, writers, and producers. T made plans for getting us sponsors and backers, Fýr started drawing blueprints for the dragon, and I went to work on coming up with a concept for the larp.

    The recruiting process was a strange one to say the least. People found out they had been recruited when they started receiving messages from an e-mail list they had no idea they were on. Communication and leadership were chaotic, and I probably share some of the blame for that.

    My own notes on who is working in what capacity are odd reading now, eighteen years later. We very quickly recruited Christopher Sandberg into the production team since we knew him as the hotshot producer of the Hamlet larp. The next time his name is mentioned in my notes, he is running the writing team together with me. Eventually he replaced me as the creative lead.

    People in costuming with a blonde bearded person checking a cell phone
    Christopher Sandberg post-game. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    Mikko Rautalahti wrote in the Finnish Larppaaja magazine about how unflattering the project seemed from the outside. This rant was published in early 2004 so a long time before the larp actually happened:

    The organization behind the project was constantly in flux … Communication between the different teams didn’t work, so for example the costume team made their plans based on an already obsolete player count without checking with the people in charge of the plot. As a cherry on top, some French harebrain decided to post a good portion of the project’s inner discussions online for the whole world to see, which obviously created even more confusion among organizers as well as the public.

    …

    The project checked all so-called [T] boxes. Even though the creative lead of the project is Mike Pohjola who has written Myrskyn aika and is known for the groundbreaking inside:outside, and has often demanded for more emphasis in larp writing, the producer [T] kept doing his own thing, recognizable by stunningly ambitious plans and a completely haphazard execution.

    …

    On the other hand, [T] is also known as a man who spits in his hands, takes the scarily big bull by its horns, and wrestles that monster to the ground regardless of how many people are standing by, saying it can’t be done.

    …

    One can’t help asking, does the game really have to be this big? Is the content such that realizing the vision really needs more than a thousand players – or is the true reason for the size simply the need to seem important?

    Translated by myself for this essay.

    This sort of feedback simply made us more determined to prove this could be done.

    The Story

    I had written a Middle-Earth tabletop roleplaying scenario for the Finnish roleplaying magazine Magus (published in 2001 in the magazine’s 50th and last issue). It was about beornings and dragon worshippers journeying into the Grey Mountains to encounter a dragon, and then, perhaps attack it, or bargain with it, or betray the others to it. I had written plenty of history for the dragon worshippers, and even added a note saying the adventure could be turned into a larp.

    People in costume with a large mechanical dragon A dragon ritual in Cinderhill. In-game. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    That became the first seed for the story of Dragonbane. The first brief went like this:

    Two ancient peoples have been at war for longer than anyone can remember. It all began with a Dragon, god to some, enemy to others. Now, the dragon worshippers have almost won, and the last remnants of the once proud people have set a call for heroes: Who will slay the dragon?

    The last few days have seen the arrival of several chivalric orders, a handful of mysterious sorcerors, and many strange travellers from lands afar. Some are there to contest for the right to slay the dragon, others (like the dragon worshippers) are present to argue against the slaying. And, of course, many people are there just to take advantage of all the foreign dignitaries.

    …

    What secrets does each hero carry inside them? What is your dragon? When it comes down to an epic battle of Good and Evil, you must decide what you think is Good. And pray to your gods you got it right.

    That is where the project got the name Dragonbane from. (Later on, Christopher and I would try to change the name to the more appropriate Dragontide, but T deemed it too late.)

    As the story was developed further, we listened to feedback from different team members, most prominently the country coordinators and the writers. Christopher and I talked endlessly on the phone about how to tackle the different creative issues we would face with having a thousand players from very different larp cultures with no time to get to know each other beforehand. The idea to use Finnish style pre-written multi-page character descriptions was soon scrapped.

    The village of the dragon worshippers soon became Cinderhill. But it was not until later when Christopher was the main designer when we switched the approaching adventurers into the dragontamers and the witches. Those two groups, along with the dragon worshippers of Cinderhill, constituted the character mega-factions in the larp.

    My plan was that Cinderhill would not be the typical feudal-capitalistic pseudo-medieval village of fantasy larps, but something like a religious cult and a Soviet commune. One of our Estonian team members had grown up in a Soviet commune, and did not see this as a very positive thing, but I tried to convince her Cinderhill would be a utopian version of that.

    person in red costume sitting in a doorway One of the players just before the larp. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    Italy

    I, as a published author, was T’s trump card, and he took me to many meetings with sponsors and local authorities to show that he had a professional writer in the team. I would typically pitch the story of the larp to the potential partners, and then on the way home, write a letter we could send to our teams and the existing partners. In fact, much of my early work was writing these press releases instead of designing the larp.

    Here’s one such letter, written to invite fantasy larpers into the project:

    While larp is a fun hobby everywhere, there’s all the time more and more people saying it doesn’t have to be just fun, it can be an earth-shattering, world-changing miracle. Some larps in Northern Europe have made a stab at this. In the last few years, we’ve had larps like Europa, Panopticorp, inside:outside and Hamlet.

    …

    Until now, fantasy has been over-looked by the larp creators who wish to take the medium forward. Fantasy has long been stagnating into a tired collection of Tolkien clichés, but Dragonbane will reinvent fantasy for the 21st century.

    …

    We see larp as a medium very close to shamanism, magic and fantasy. With Dragonbane we aim to renew not only fantasy, but larping, as well.

    Quite soon after we had announced the project, we were already on the way to Italy to be guests at Lucca Comics & Games Fair. I am still not sure whether we were really guest of honor, or if the local larpers just told us that. The “other” guests of honor included Larry Elmore and Margaret Weis, and we were quite starstruck.

    We flew to Rome, T dragged his suitcase to the metro, and we took a train to Pisa, from where we were driven to Lucca. The local mayor cut an actual ribbon at the opening ceremonies of the convention.

    We had two talks Friday, one about Nordic larp (which was called larp in Northern Europe back then) and the other one about Dragonbane. Everything we say was translated into Italian so the audience could understand us. We wondered at how these people could larp fluently in English.

    In the evening I ran a small larp, I Shall Not Want, which was focused on subdued character immersion at murdered businessman’s wake. For many of the Italian participants this was their first non-fantasy larp, and the first one where the focus was on character immersion.

    We did our best to network with the local larpers, and T put me to work writing lots of material for Dragonbane.

    One morning at breakfast we noticed Larry Elmore was sitting alone at another table, eating his eggs. We knew him as the biggest fantasy artist of our childhoods, having made the cover of the Dungeons & Dragons red box we grew up with. T wanted to recruit him, I advised against it. Nevertheless, we went to his table, and introduced ourselves. Larry assumed we were random fans. He smiled politely and said hello.

    Without blinking an eye, T started an unsolicited pitch on Dragonbane with his very strong Finnish accent. “And we will actually have a real animatronic dragon! Now, do you think that’s pretty cool or what?” Larry kept nodding politely, but it was obvious he did not believe a word we were saying, and wanted to be left alone. T took this as his cue to ask him to create original dragon art for us. Larry said something vague like “Sounds real interesting,” and promised to get back at us. He did not, of course. We were just two European crazies who interrupted his breakfast.

    Later on, with a similar pitch, T did manage to attract the Argentinian dragon artist Ciruelo. The art on the poster was made by him.

    "Advertisement

    The Rabbit Hole Method

    Christopher Sandberg, a passionate Swedish larp designer and producer, delivered several long game design documents which included everything from the setting to costume design of the individual groups. We discussed the topics day after day, week after week, and finally came up with what we saw as a breakthrough: The Rabbit Hole Method.

    The larp would start with the players in their regular clothes, suffering complete amnesia. They would not know who or where they are. Walking around in the woods, they would find clothes that feel much more appropriate, and slowly start to remember that they are, in fact, a dragon worshipper from the village of Cinderhill, or a witch, or a dragontamer. They would change into their real clothes, i.e. the costume. They would remember their new name, and find friends and family that they know quite well but they are also meeting for the first time.

    This would take a few hours, and then they would arrive at the village or some other group location, where they would already be in character, and dream-like go about their business making paper or fetching water or starting fires. And then the larp would go on like a regular larp.

    The Rabbit Hole would solve so many issues, mainly the players not knowing each other beforehand, and being able to play in their own languages as well as whatever English they can muster. Nowadays we would have workshops instead of trying to solve these issues in-game.

    Unbeknownst to me at the time, Rabbit Hole is also a metaphor for taking hallucinogenic drugs. Some people did pick this up, and it again was a blow on the public image of the project.

    We felt this was an ingenious solution. But our Danish country coordinator who had promised us fifty Danish teenagers said this was way too experimental for them. The kids liked to beat orcs in the woods, not take part in strange ritual dramas. (I am sure many of those former kids are running full-blown ritual drama larps now.)

    Christopher and I felt we could convince the Danish teenagers, or forget about them. But T was worried about our player base. This was a thousand-person larp. We must have those teenagers! So, the Rabbit Hole was scratched, and we started to look for a more traditional approach.

    People in a large circle with people in the center wielding fire Fire magic was created by real fire. In-game. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    Estonian Bog

    We still did not have a location for the larp, but we did not want it to be in Finland. The neighboring countries Estonia and Sweden seemed good options.

    The team got in contact with Estonian larpers and a location scouting team left Finland on a ferry.

    T brought along his legendary Humvee which was known as “The Finnish Bar” in many Knutepunkts since he held unofficial parties there with lots of booze. I never went, but knowing he was later incarcerated for sex crimes, it is hard to know how much grooming happened at those parties.

    Nevertheless, the car came in handy driving to the Soomaa national park in south-western Estonia. Sometimes we would cross bridges that were only barely able to carry the car’s weight, and all the passengers would have to get out and walk.

    Local larpers took us to explore Soomaa on boats. It is a vast area of bogs, forests, and meandering rivers, where Estonian freedom fighters and bandits used to hide. The area that on the map had seemed suitable, proved to be completely impossible. It was a virtual jungle, and in the summer would be full of rapid animals and violent boars.

    Several people in two canoes on water
    The team exploring Soomaa. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    The evening was reserved for workshops. The production people including T and Mikko Pervilä held their own meeting in one part of the house we were using, while I talked with some of the writers. Fýr ran a third meeting for the Estonians who were present, and their job was to come up with a name for the dragon. I had no idea such a key element of the fiction was being crowdsourced, and when later that evening I was told she is called “Beautiful Death,” I simply thanked them for the input. This, obviously, got them quite irate, having just spent hours coming up with a good name. (And it was good.)

    I went to visit the production meeting and I discovered a very drunk T angrily explaining to Mikko Pervilä about how he does not understand the project like T himself does. And Mikko, exasperatedly trying to get some point across. The Estonians probably did not get a very good impression of us.

    The next day T took me to meet the director of the National Park. He was polite and interested, and promised to stay in touch. (He did.) He also suggested a different location, parts of which were on privately owned land, and could be built on.

    The new location was idyllic, you almost expected to find a hobbit village somewhere. The area was mostly plains or dried swamp, with small forested areas providing contrast. A beautiful river ran slowly through the plains, providing an interesting in-game obstacle for anyone needing to cross it. There was a ruined farm house with just the chimney remaining, and a wild orchard in the yard. Berry bushes and apple trees had started to spread in the nearby lands.

    We figured we could build our village right on the outskirts of the national park. T envisioned a grand main hall for the village that he could then use as his personal summer cabin after the larp. “And I’m sure some envious larpers will twist that around to sound like I’m only using free labor to build myself a huge cabin! But after a project as huge as this, I think I’m entitled to something for myself.” Another possibility would have been to testament the cabin to the whole team or to one of the organizations behind the larp, but these were not mentioned.

    For some reason, there was no room in the Humvee for me on the way back, so I had to take a series of Soviet-era buses to get to Tallinn and the ferry. This gave me time to do some of the writing tasks T had given me, including writing a letter about the successful Estonian scouting trip for our team and sponsors. Typing on a laptop in a bouncing bus, hands hunched like a vulture’s feet, was not good for my tendonitis.

    The bus-ride turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I later found out T’s Humvee had broken down on the country road he had been driving. I was not there, but I remembered his comments about the suitcase in Italy. “It broke down, so it was a bad car. I don’t want a bad car.”

    Humvee at Soomaa. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    Still struggling with stress, depression and the wrists, I was starting to suspect, if I would break down, too, before all this was over.

    After we had publicly announced that we had chosen Soomaa as the location, the Estonian authorities did, indeed, contact us again. They said we absolutely cannot use the National Park since many of the things we have planned are directly against the rules of the park and the laws governing it.

    T and I were both quite angry and disappointed at the Estonians. If someone had made sure of this a few months earlier, we would have saved hundreds of hours of labor, by skipping the whole trip. In retrospect, it was us, the main organizers, who should have made sure of that.

    Suspect Parties

    Many of the bigger project meetings took place at T’s home in the countryside between Turku and Helsinki. There were also several other people there, some from T’s larp organization, some his friends, others just people hanging around. Or maybe they were all involved in Dragonbane. I discovered Fýr was now employed by T’s company.

    The workshop weekends included meetings and commonly prepared meals, but also lots of extracurricular activities, including clearing the garden of dried shrubs. I did not take part in that. I was also a teetotaler at the time, so I could not fully participate in the other program which mostly consisted of drinking games in the sauna, drinking games in the pool, and drinking games wrapped in towels.

    There were always teenaged girls around, and these older men wanted to get them drunk. I did not know the girls, maybe they were involved with one of them, maybe they were just working on the project, maybe something more sinister was happening. It was hard to tell, and knowing what I now know, I should have spoken out more clearly. Today, I would characterize the atmosphere as toxic.

    We writers did have actual productive meetings, though, although sometimes they felt more like seance sessions, with us trying to decipher what Christopher was saying over a long-distance phone call on speakerphone.

    The rumors and the strange mood and the “use them until they break” style of management obviously led to many, many people burning out, quitting or just quietly disappearing. This meant we had to constantly find new people to take on those positions. People kept coming and going. Christopher as creative lead was replaced by others before the project was over.

    For Solmukohta 2004, Juhana Pettersson and I designed the art larp Luminescence, produced by Mikko Pervilä. It is known as “the flour larp,” since we had a room filled with 750 kilos of wheat flour. Plenty has been written of that larp in other articles, but cleaning up after the larp was quite a hassle.

    T wanted me to be in some Dragonbane meeting, while I was expected to be cleaning the room. “No problem,” he said, and ordered two teenaged volunteers to go clean the flour room while I took part in the meeting. Needless to say, the volunteers simply left the project, and I later got an angry call from the janitor.

    A person with an outstretched arm bathed in flour and green light, with another person watching and sitting on the ground
    Luminescence. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.

    At a later stage in the project, a larper woman I was dating told me T had asked her to join Dragonbane‘s music team. Having seen what was going on at those project workshops, I did not feel them to be a safe environment for someone I cared about. (Again, I should have worked harder to protect also those I did not know.) I asked her not to participate in the project, and she got mad at me at first, but then agreed.

    Since we were constantly struggling to recruit new people, and I as one of the key organizers had just worked against that goal, I finally started realizing I could not be involved in Dragonbane much longer.

    Everything Goes Wrong

    I was sitting in the audience at an ice hockey stadium listening to a pyramid scheme recruiting event. T was convinced we should have them as our financing partners, and had sent myself, and some of the production people to take part in the event, and then later on try to meet some of the key people in their dressing rooms.

    The whole thing was obviously a scam. Obvious to me, but others in our team were not as skeptical.

    We managed to get an audience with one of the speakers, and explain our case. Dragonbane could be officially branded by the pyramid scheme, and they would get lots of publicity for their business. They promised to think about this.

    When Mikko Pervilä heard about this, he said he would quit immediately, if Dragonbane went through with this. So, the cooperation was cancelled. I am grateful to Mikko for that. (He later quit anyway.)

    We had long since forgotten about getting Eddie Murphy for the trailer. Then we found out we would not get the Plustech forestry machine, either. How could we have Dragonbane the great dragon larp if we have no dragon?

    The project went through constant changes. The location was switched from Estonia to Sweden, the targeted player number was cut and cut again from 1200 to 400. Fýr’s dragon building crew were hard at work making plans on a new kind of dragon built on top of a truck, but without Plustech, they could not keep up with the schedule.

    Christopher and I realized there was no way for the larp to happen in 2005, and managed after long, painful debates to convince T to postpone it by a year. He opposed the change because once he promises to do something, he does it. But, we told him, his promise could not be kept in 2005, but it could be kept in 2006.

    Around that time, T decided he had to change his leadership style. This is how he comments on the topic in the documentation book Dragonbane: The Legacy:

    “As the project progressed, it became increasingly evident to all participants that the only viable decision making model was a military style one. The more idealistic version proposed early in the game just did not produce results and in a project of this size and with this little time it is not a good alternative. There are reasons why corporations and businesses do not operate on committee or democracy basis.

    A smaller, less international project could have succeeded with less dictatorial management, but with Dragonbane the more authoritative style should have been adopted even earlier. In hindsight, it is easy to see that the year we lacked could have been saved by choosing army style project management from day one.”

    I wanted out. I was very stressed and felt I would soon break like the suitcase and the car and so many other people in the team before me. But explaining this to a person who does not take no for an answer was not easy.

    I told T I needed to do some paying work since Dragonbane was taking up all my time. “How much do you need?” he asked. He proposed I come work for him. Having seen how Fýr was already in a position of T having economic power over him, and now with militaristic style, this was not what I wanted to hear.

    In the end I just had to tell him I could not work in the project under any circumstances. “Fine,” he said. “I hope you won’t turn against us and start badmouthing us.” I promised I would not. And I have not written or spoken about my experiences publicly, until now.

    After that I became a broken object, someone T did not want around.

    People working on a large animatronic dragon in the woods The dragon crew making sure their creation works. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    The Larp Happened

    A year later the larp was actually about to happen in the forests of Bumfuck, Sweden. (Actually Älvdalen in Dalarna County.) I could not take part in the larp as my mandatory civilian service would start immediately after and if I was late, I would be punished. Travel to and from Älvdalen took so long I could not risk it, but I wanted to be there at the start.

    I had read online about how the players who had arrived early had met angry organizers and been forced to work on building the village. The dragon’s neck had broken and it was being repaired at a vocational institute in Finland. Nothing was ready, and there was not enough food for the involuntary volunteers.

    Fundin, a Dragontamer player from Sweden had this to say:

    Mistakes were made, and I think the main one was not trusting that the players could fix things for themselves, less promises would have made a better game.

    Had we been told to bring tents, cooking gear, food and taming tools the game would have been better. There were few who couldn’t bring tents for example, no problem, then only a few tents would have had to be made = less work for the organisers.

    I asked about making taming tools and was told to go to Finland or southern Sweden for a workshop… I would have been able to make them at home if that had been cleared beforehand..But *No* was the general answer to any Idea, everything had to be specially made for DB, that was the big problem, and you were not allowed to make anything by yourself without an organiser or a workshop.

    Quoted from the book Dragonbane: The Legacy.
    Line of people in red costuming unloading food from a truck Players in costume stocking the kitchen before the larp. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    When I arrived, the mood among the organizers in “The Bootcamp” was, indeed, hostile. At the time I thought it was because I was seen as a traitor, having quit the project. Now I have found out the mood was hostile towards everyone so it could have simply been lack of sleep. That ten people who should have been there to help were repairing the dragon had taken its toll.

    It was clear everything was badly organized and there were not enough people to do everything that had to be done. And not enough cars to get people from the Bootcamp to the larp village to build it. On the other hand, there were a huge number of incredibly beautiful props, fabrics, and such.

    I did odd jobs. I cooked a hearty vegetarian meal for the people at the Bootcamp. I remember T being very happy that I took carnivores into account, not realizing the sauce was soy grit instead of minced meat. I helped dye scrolls with strong tea. I helped the players build the village. I held the opening brief for the players in the witch group.

    The players and volunteers I met were exhausted and almost delirious. One of them, Tonja Goldblatt, looked at me, unbelieving, when I arrived at the village. They had not eaten or rested properly, and had to work in the poorly organized work camp. When I had wanted Cinderhill to resemble a Soviet commune, this was not what I had in mind. It was certainly no utopia.

    Two people talking near a ladder
    Mike and Tonja in Cinderhill. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    Tonja later wrote:

    I wasn’t part of any main organizing team, but I ended up working my ass off for this project and I burned out. It was no small feat and it did manage amazing things, but Dragonbane broke me for years. For years it was really hard for me to talk about the whole project because of the bitterness. It was my first international larp and turned me away from Nordic Larping for years.

    I only caught rumors of the larp itself from the Bootcamp, and then I had to leave. As I was ready to depart, the dragon arrived. They had driven it to a ferry, sailed it to Sweden, and driven it from the ferry to Älvdalen. Its neck was still broken, but it could move.

    At the last moment T decided to replace the person who had prepared to play the voice of the dragon. He replaced him with himself. Even though the fancy software could turn everyone’s voice into the dragon’s voice, it could not change his very recognizable accent.

    Aftermath

    For the longest time I was ashamed of the project. I assumed almost everyone had a really bad time. And sure, many people did. Many burnt out. But for others this was every bit the magical experience we had set out to create. Friendships were forged and sense of wonder essential to fantasy created lasting memories.

    In the book Nordic Larp, Johanna Koljonen’s and Tiinaliisa T’s article on the larp starts with these atmospheric words:

    I heard the dragon give out a heart-rending shriek. The sky exploded, and pillars of fire shot up behind the temple. The Dragon died – and at that moment it became truly real. The odd angle of the head looked like the twisted position of one who has expired in pain. And its skin, when I rushed in, wailing, towards it, felt slightly warm to the touch.

    In the same book, an anonymous Cinderhillian player comments:

    We indeed had a working village! When we bakers found out we had bread and cheese, but nothing to slice the cheese with, one of the village smiths made us a perfectly good cheese-slicing tool!

    Charles Bo Nielsen recently reminisced on the group Larpers BFF:

    I would like too add that as someone who was 18 at that larp, it was an amazing experience, first major international larp for me. So heavily coloured from that perspective.

    There were some really interesting things about the larp. It was insanely ambitious, especially for the times, it had a really really big budget, due to being heavily funded, beyond the player tickets of 130 euroes, which back in 2006 was considered quite the sum for going to a larp.

    From my point of view it ended up really grumbling under its own hype, the organizers ended up promising everything and certainly not delivering everything.

    Person in long red costume and a dragon mask encircled by other costumed people
    A dragon priest telling the story of the dragon. In-game. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

    In Denmark spinoff larps were run, continuing the story of the dragontamers.

    The village that was built was robbed soon after the larp, and then left in the woods to decay. Later on, the local municipality burned it down.

    Essi Santala, who worked with Fýr on the dragon, wrote: “I would not be who I am today without Dragonbane. I know it was a devastating project for some people but for me it meant major friendships, togetherness, overcoming obstacles and a sense of awe over what we accomplished over the course of the project. I spent two years part of Dragonbane. It was awesome. Was it a good larp? The question, to me, is irrelevant.”

    I would still stay in contact with Christopher, and a year after Dragonbane we would found a company together. Fýr is studying filmmaking in Prague. Mikko has produced many other big events including Solmukohtas.

    In 2015, T was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for statutory rape and sexual abuse, and he quit the larp scene.

    It is bittersweet to think back on Dragonbane now. Thanks to those who worked for and took part in our visions. Apologies to those that were hurt or broken. I hope young organizers and designers of today are more aware of toxic environments and what to do about them.

    I would invite everyone who has memories or questions of Dragonbane to discuss the topic further with me and others.

    Cover photo: Much of the crew after the larp. © 2006 Dragonbane Team.

  • Larp as Magical Practice: Finding the Power-From-Within

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    Larp as Magical Practice: Finding the Power-From-Within

    By

    Axiel Cazeneuve

    And so the personal is political: the forces that shape our individual lives are the same forces that shape our collective life as a culture. — Starhawk((Starhawk. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (1997, p. 28).))

    We larpers are a weird bunch: we make up stories, create costumes, research tiny historical details or read boring philosophical essays just to be able to play a character that feels right, for a few hours. We try our best to step into another person’s shoes, sometimes coming home with a similar pair to wear in our everyday life. How odd; but how precious.

    Indeed, I will argue that larp has the potential to make meaningful change, by helping us expand our imagination and empowerment.

    When writing this paper, I first wanted to – as goes the saying – tell you about my character. It was a story of overcoming personal limitations, expanding the alibi, and finding support and acceptance from my co-players. But I’m sure you’ve heard the story: or, better yet, lived it.

    Instead, I want to tell you about the mental structures that lie beneath this. The way our brain got wired to meet the requirements of a society based on status inequality, isolation, and a belief in individual responsibility – radical free will, as opposed to the existence of social and material determinism and disparity of chances. I want to tell you about how larp can help us change these structures, dig out the roots of alienation, and find our second breath to create different mental and cultural structures. I want to tell you about magic.

    According to witch philosopher Starhawk, magic is about achieving a shift of consciousness: take a step outside of our previous (ordinary) way of looking at things, and manage a truly different vision of the world and ourselves. Rings a bell?

    In this essay, I will explain how Starhawk’s vision of magic allows us to gain a different perspective on what happens through larp and what can be achieved. Jonaya Kemper’s work on emancipation((Jonaya Kemper, “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity,” Nordiclarp.org, June 21, 2017)) will be instrumental to show how magic plays out, and to gain a deeper understanding of the world-changing potential of larping.

    Magic at Play

    Starhawk is an ecofeminism activist, philosopher and Neopagan witch. She uses magic to change the world, in a practical sense. Let’s see how it works.

    According to her, magic is “the art of changing consciousness at will.”((Starhawk. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (1997, p. 13).)) Magic takes its roots in a paradox: “Consciousness shapes reality. Reality shapes consciousness.”((Ibid.)) Our mental structures, beliefs, intellectual and spiritual patterns, states of mind… and the things outside ourselves – the culture, places, people, myths… – are interdependent. We are both a product of the world that surrounds us and producing it in turn. Because we exist within reality, our actions influence it; but we also derive most of our “consciousness”, our awareness of the things within and without our mind, from the preexisting reality.

    Magic is finding the path to change our own consciousness. It can be done through very practical things, such as activism, or more esoteric ones, such as mindfulness. Whichever path you take, one single truth remains: magic is about finding what Starhawk calls the power-from-within: the power that derives from what we ourselves can do and achieve, as opposed to power-over.

    Power-over is power derived from hierarchy, constraint, or imposing on people by force, manipulation, or persuasion. Laws (secular or religious) rely on power-over: the threat of enforcement causes people to abide, not ultimately because they think it’s the right thing to do (though they may come to believe it), but because they are (symbolically or physically) coerced to do so. On the contrary, power-from-within is not about making people do stuff, nor is it about acting the way people want us to: it is about our own agency and capability.

    Once you find your power-from-within and manage the shift, Starhawk is positive that you will act on it. Shift your consciousness and the world around you will change, because you’ll make choices to induce change – helping reality itself evolve to a different balance.

    Now back to larp: I’ll argue that a successful larp is one in which we achieve that shift of consciousness. And that it is, in fact, the greatest thing larp can hope to achieve.

    person in black clothes in room with art on the walls
    Caprice, a character I’d wanted to tell you about. She’s dressed in black shorts, suspenders and unbuttoned hoodie, her breasts flattened with black tape. She wears red lipstick and strange, scar-like make-up. Red words figuring scarifications can be seen on her thighs. She’s talking passionately to an unseen crowd in a room with white walls on which hang black-and-white pictures of well-dressed artists. Larp: OSIRIS, 2019. Photo by Lille Clairence.

     

    Othering Oneself

    The alibi is often at the core of the social contract in larp. It can be defined as “The things that enable a person to (role-)play and to do things they would never do in everyday life while in character.”((“Glossary,” in Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences (2019).)) It says: “By entering the game, we pledge to separate the character’s speeches and actions from the player’s.”

    Without that insurance, we can’t play roles, because we can’t step out of our ordinary selves.

    Oh, the alibi is a flimsy thing: mundane elements such as performance anxiety, an unsafe environment, the difficulty to differentiate the player’s and the character’s emotions from an external viewpoint, or internalised bias (ours or our co-players’),((Kemper, Jonaya, Eleanor Saitta, and Johanna Koljonen. “Steering for Survival.” In What Do We Do When We Play? Solmukohta (2020).)) put it in jeopardy. It doesn’t always live up to the task: more often than not, perhaps, we leave a larp having not dared enough, under-played our character, or even held a grudge (or had a crush) on a player after in-character interactions. Still: the alibi, albeit imperfect, is the key ingredient that clearly distinguishes larp from other types of play (we need alibi in table-top RPG too, but the embodiment required by larp takes it one definite step further).

    Whether it works or not, the alibi as a social contract sustains an effort to perceive friends as elves, strangers as companions, or oneself as an artist. It is an attempt at a shift of consciousness.

    Of course, famously called willful suspension of disbelief, the attitude a reader adopts to engage with a piece of fiction (withdrawing judgement on the veracity or realness of events taking place within the fiction) covers some of the same ground, and has been used and expanded in relation to larp:((Schrier, Karen, Evan Torner, and Jessica Hammer. “Worldbuilding in Role-Playing Games.” In Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach (2018, p. 349-363).)) but then again, embodiment and player agency in larps take that dimension further, to a place more intimate and more active. In addition, the strong collective component of larp goes far beyond the individual attitude towards fiction: we can only sustain our mindset, our attitude towards the game, if the others play along. In larp, we need others to achieve what we mean to achieve: there can be no individual success or failure. It’s all co-creation and collaboration towards the same goal: to create a meaningful, engaging story, in which we can let ourselves be caught.

    So, larp is a kind of magic. Using our will to participate in larp, we engage emotionally and meaningfully in a character and relationships. When we interact with people, or with the larp design, we create a space for this to happen. In that space, things and behaviours are redefined, reinterpreted. The most mundane of elements can convey vastly different things: in this, we make art. We create meaning. This wooden door is a gate to the underworld. This young woman is the old queen of an older kingdom. This person whom I never met is my long-lost love.

    We say these things and we believe them. We make that shift of consciousness. Magic happens.

    So what? Permeating the Real World

    The most common association with magic in regard to play is that of pioneer game scholar Johan Huizinga: the magic circle. According to the Larp Design Glossary, the magic circle is a “[m]etaphor for the separate space of playing.”((“Glossary,” 2019.)) It marks the game space, both physical and virtual (mindspace, belief system, gameworld, etc.), as separate, as distinct from the paramount reality.((A term used by sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, it designates what we call “reality,” our ordinary life and most commonly shared world, as opposed to “provinces of meaning,” which are like “pockets” of alternate reality (such as fiction, play or religion). Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1968).))

    Huizinga’s theory has been widely criticised, as the separation between play and reality is often impossible to trace (and their definitions elusive). According to Stenros,((Jaakko Stenros, “In Defence of a Magic Circle: The Social, Mental and Cultural Boundaries of Play,” in Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, (2014)) the notion of a magic circle would actually be plural, expressing different “boundaries of play” – the player’s state of mind, the social contract, and the game space. Those boundaries remain porous: the magic circle can be endangered by external events, and the players are able to navigate between different “layers,” zooming in and out of character during larps.((Hilda Levin. “Metareflection,” in What Do We Do When We Play? (2020).))

    Despite this criticism, and following its redefinitions, the term “magic circle” remains widely used to designate the elements sheltering a game from reality, and vice versa. “Play” and “reality” must remain separate, and by entering the game, we cast a spell to make it so.

    But if we are to believe Starhawk, Huizinga was wrong all along: magic is not what makes the game impermeable. It’s what makes it porous. Magic is that shift of consciousness, temporary perhaps but with long-lasting repercussions, that allows larp to influence the bigger, outer world.

    Magic is the reason why so many larpers report they became more comfortable talking in public, or wearing “eccentric” clothes, or exploring gender fluidity. It’s the reason we created bonds so strong with people we spent barely a handful of days with, why we were sometimes able to create a community of trust out of diverse people. Magic is seen through all the things in larps that allowed us to grow.

    But careful: magic is not guaranteed to happen. Sometimes, we become more comfortable with things through larp just because we’ve had the opportunity to practice, when we couldn’t otherwise try them out. We might not need a deep change in mindset to become more at-ease talking in public when it’s the fifth larp this year in which we’ve had to deliver an inspirational speech. It may just be a matter of habit, of practice. Similarly, learning to impersonate a character doesn’t mean they’ve shaken us to our core, mingling with our sense of identity, throwing us out in the world with new perspectives.

    A shift of consciousness is something more profound than that. It’s not pretense, or shallow belief.

    Magic is demanding that we dive deep and redefine our core beliefs. And that’s gonna take us some work.

    Building Our Power

    Larp is a dense, demanding hobby, which tends to generate a tightly-knit social fabric. As such, it can be a truly powerful tool for community building. But the “community” thus made is no stranger to power dynamics,((Axiel Cazeneuve, “The Paradox of Inclusivity,” In What Do We Do When We Play? (2020).)) status inequalities,((Muriel Algayres, “The Impact of Social Capital on Larp Safety,” Nordiclarp.org. Accessed March 28, 2020)) and discriminations in access to games, hype, speech, etc.((Kemper, Eleanor, and Koljonen, 2020).)) These are all manifestations of internalized power-over – we have a hard time rejecting the script society hammered us with.

    In her paper “Wyrding the Self,”((Jonaya Kemper, “Wyrding the Self,” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta, 2020.)) larp scholar and activist Jonaya Kemper brings into focus something many may find disturbing: that we’re all the oppressor and the oppressed. Even the most marginalized person in regard to society standards can still inflict power-over. Even the most privileged can be subjected to power.

    Collective Liberation

    “Wyrding,” Kemper explains, means to embrace being weird as opposed to being determined by society. “To be weird is to be outside of the normal aspects of society, yes, but to also collectively decide who you would like to be, not based on societal pressure.”((Ibid.)) The way I see it, wyrding is a way to increase our power-from-within: let go of social expectations and focus on what we can do and be.

    If embracing weirdness is how we can achieve liberation, then larp sure is the place to do it. In fact, even if all larps do not make great magic, the habit of taking on different roles and perceiving others doing so is still an exercise at shifting consciousness at will.

    Kemper’s now-famous concept of emancipatory bleed((Jonaya Kemper, “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity,” Nordiclarp.org, June 21, 2017.)) has thrown light on how we can use larp to overcome our own internalized limitations. According to Kemper, “bleed” (the transfer of emotions between character and player) “can be steered and used for emancipatory purposes by players who live with complex marginalizations.” Through careful calibration, players can navigate towards experiences they want to deal with or overcome in the safe environment larp provides (on the need to feel safe to larp.((Cf. Anneli Friedner, “The Brave Space: Some Thoughts on Safety in Larps,” Nordiclarp.org, October 7).))

    Kemper’s proposition may seem individualistic, as it emphasizes on the player’s own empowerment. Likewise, magic as essentially a state of mind could feel self-centered at first. But as Starhawk points out in the quote I chose as an introduction to this essay, “the forces that shape our individual lives are the same forces that shape our collective life as a culture.”((Starhawk, 1997, p. 28.)) In acting on the things that determine us, that make us that way, we also induce change on a broader level – albeit in an often imperceptible manner. The converse is also true: we can only change ourselves to the extent that we make the world to allow that change.

    Indeed, Kemper writes, “If we want liberation, then we must also liberate those who oppress us because they’re oppressed just like us.”((Kemper, 2020, p. 212).)) There is nothing like individual liberation – the social and the personal are deeply intertwined. And both Kemper and Starhawk agree that communities are where shit is gonna happen.

    All limitations considered, let us nonetheless posit that larp is magical practice. A collective endeavour to achieve a shift of consciousness, an art of changing the way we see the world and the critters in it. Such practice would have to liberate us, to make us freer from social norms, more eager to act against them. If, and only if we could shake off the same old power structure we’ve been bathing in from an early age.

    To hell with power-over; it’s time to find our Power-From-Within.

    Two people bathed in blue light, one behind the other with mouth close to their neck, while the other is blindfolded
    Caprice (the author) and Claude Giger (Lille Clairence) singing “Les Tuileries” together. They learned and practiced the song two hours prior and are now performing at dinner in front of all the players. Giger holds blind-folded Caprice closely against his chest, a technique used by the players to keep Caprice’s player from shaking with stress and coordinate their breathing. The light is blue, dim. OSIRIS, 2019. Photo by the organizers.

    Ethics of Larping

    The way we ordinarily imagine magic has everything to do with speech acts, or what we call language performativity.((After linguist John Austin’s theory of speech acts, though he didn’t use that exact phrase himself. John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962).)) It designates occurrences when saying actually does something. The most common example of this is when a priest or a mayor pronounces two people wed: they don’t only say it, as you and I might, they effectively make it happen, through the power granted to them by whichever institution backs them up. In our imagination, we figure magic works like that: a great wizard called fire upon them, and fire came.

    This is power-over. It’s why we laugh at magic, cause we don’t understand how it could really work. It’s not like we could really summon demons or receive healing magic from gods, right?

    But true magic is about the power you have, not that which is granted or appropriated. It’s no gift, nor curse. It’s inner strength, capacity, determination to act. And so we must act in accordance to our words, not merely expect our words to have effect on their own.

    I propose we apply what Starhawk calls the ethics of integrity to larp. In her words, “[i]ntegrity means consistency: we act in accordance with our thoughts, our images, our speeches.”((Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics, 1997).)) It’s a basic principle that if we really do make the shift, if we manage to change consciousness at will, then our actions will follow.

    Conversely, if we aim to take action – or inspire people to take action – through larp, we must wonder how we can try to reach the necessary shift of consciousness. In my master’s thesis,((Axiel Cazeneuve, Éthique et politique du jeu. Jeu de rôle grandeur nature et engagement politique en Finlande. Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 2019).)) I argued that what makes larpers more inclined to supporting progressive politics is that larp is largely non-hierarchical, non-competitive, non-productive, and non-profit.((The ethnographic study was conducted in Finland, with back-up from “experimental” (inspired by Nordic larp, often using its toolbox) larp scenes in France, and cannot account for all larping cultures. However, I believe that where analogous conditions are met, the same conclusion can reasonably be drawn.)) These are not individual traits, but structural features. In my opinion, they’re essential to a socially powerful and ethical larp culture.

    Larp is discordant. Disturbing. It disproves many of society’s strongly established beliefs: that adults can’t play. That play can’t be serious. That people only work for money. That people don’t typically cooperate, or collaborate without some kind of management or coercion.

    The shape of larp, albeit imperfect, supports a whole different structure and a distinct mindset compared to the general society. And it is this structure that we must cherish and sustain, for it is that which can reach us and move us and lead us to achieve a shift of consciousness.

    Through larping, we make social magic. It allows each of us to grow and change, and our discordant consciousnesses help change the world in turn.

    Conclusion

    Using Starhawk, this paper aimed at bridging magical practice and activism with larp, to show how art, politics, and personal liberation articulate. It follows Jonaya Kemper’s work, which focuses on what each of us can do to use larp for emancipation purposes, by offering a different reading grid – magic – on those phenomena and emphasizing on the importance of the collective in achieving liberation.

    There is a lot larp can do: but saying this is not enough. We must be wary of this assumption. We can be tempted to assume a larp tackling difficult social issues, for example, will succeed in raising awareness or leading people to have different opinions: but how we do things is at least as important as what we do. As Eirik Fatland demonstrated in a keynote held at the State of the Larp conference,((Eirik Fatland, “Larp for Manipulation or Liberation,” Oslo, 2018)) larps about specific, real-life issues have mostly no impact on the beliefs of the players, but can on the contrary reinforce stereotypes and preconceptions.

    This focus on discourse, as opposed to structure, is a common flaw of progressive politics, especially among large political organisations such as parties or NGOs. They often make the mistake of believing in their own efficiency and effectiveness, regardless of the social and material reality they – and we, in spite of ourselves – exist in. So does larp, when it doesn’t examine its own structure with a critical enough eye.

    Starhawk’s vision of magic provides us with an alternative framework, less concerned with discourse and more in touch with the material reality we live in – that which shapes us, and gets shaped in turn. As larpers, we learn to be flexible and to think differently about the world, both social and material: it’s a gift we can use and enhance to make true magic – change consciousness to take meaningful actions.

    It’s only possible if we stay vigilant: the structure of the society we mean to change is pervasive. Resisting it is a constant struggle: but larp, like magic, might be just what we need to do so.

    References

    Algayres, Muriel. “The Impact of Social Capital on Larp Safety.” Nordic Larp, March 28, 2020.

    Berger, Peter, and Thomas L Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor, 1967.

    Cazeneuve, Axiel. “The Paradox of Inclusivity.” In What Do We Do When We Play? Solmukohta 2020, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Makkonen Mia, Männistö Pauliina, Serup Grove Anne, and Johanna Koljonen, 244–53. Helsinki: Solmukohta 2020, 2020.

    Cazeneuve, Axiel. “Éthique et politique du jeu. Jeu de rôle grandeur nature et engagement politique en Finlande.” Directed by Laurent Gabail. Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 2019.

    Fatland, Eirik. “Larp for Manipulation or Liberation.” Oslo, 2018.

    Friedner, Anneli. “The Brave Space: Some Thoughts on Safety in Larps.” Nordic Larp, October 7, 2019.

    Kemper, Jonaya. “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity.” Nordic Larp, June 2021, 2017.

    Kemper, Jonaya, Saitta, Eleanor & Koljonen, Johanna. “Steering for Survival”. In What Do We Do When We Play? Solmukohta 2020., edited by Eleanor Saitta, Makkonen Mia, Männistö Pauliina, Serup Grove Anne, and Johanna Koljonen, 49-52. Helsinki: Solmukohta 2020, 2020.

    Levin, Hilda. “Metareflection”. In What Do We Do When We Play? Solmukohta 2020., edited by Eleanor Saitta, Makkonen Mia, Männistö Pauliina, Serup Grove Anne, and Johanna Koljonen, 62-74. Helsinki: Solmukohta 2020, 2020.

    Schrier, Karen, Torner, Evan & Hammer, Jessica. “Worldbuiling in Role-Playing Games.” In Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach, edited by Zagal, José P. and Deterding, Sebastian, 349-363. New York: Routledge, 2018.

    Starhawk. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997 (1982).

    Stenros, Jaakko. “In Defence of a Magic Circle: The Social, Mental and Cultural Boundaries of Play.” Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 2014.

    Seregina, Usva. “On the Commodification of Larp.” Nordic Larp, December 17, 2019.

    Cover photo: Caprice, a character that made me understand magic, at the larp OSIRIS in 2019. She’s standing blindfolded with loud music in her ears on a narrow wall in the cold February wind as part as an impromptu performance. She wears a long red cocktail dress laced at the back that reveals her bare tattooed back. She stands with her arms half-risen in a powerful pose. The background is a thickly clouded sky over a dry heath. Photo by Lille Clairence as Caprice’s partner, Claude Giger.

    This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Cazeneuve, Axiel. “Larp as Magical Practice: Finding the Power-From-Within.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).

     

  • In Defence of Selfishness: And the Beauty of a No

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    In Defence of Selfishness: And the Beauty of a No

    By

    Mia Kyhn

    Imagine this: It’s the afterparty of a larp, and you run up to a co-player who facilitated a scene that was the highlight of your larp to rave about how cool it was, and they just shrug and say, “Well that’s great, I just wanted to make sure you all had fun.” Doesn’t that kind of suck? Wouldn’t you rather have them go, “I know, right? It was SO cool when we all pooled our powers to get that MacGuffin.” Players shouldn’t just create things solely for the sake of other players. Such an approach is for organisers; I want players to be selfish creatures who take care of their own experience first and foremost. That will lead to better play for everyone.

    And yes, there are exceptions and caveats and all those things. Do I want players to steamroll each other in a sort of ego-driven cage fight? No, of course not. I still think we should be considerate, open, and generous as players, but we can be all those things while still keeping our own wants and needs in mind. I sometimes hear players proudly state that they’re mainly at a larp to create play for others, or that the plot they created was mostly for the sake of other people’s enjoyment. Honestly, I think it’s bad form for players to approach plot in that way. It’s a hollow feeling to know the people you had a wonderful time with weren’t really enjoying themselves that much. I don’t want to play with those people; I want to play with people who are enthusiastic about it and loving the experience as much as I am. If I’m a part of a player-created plot I want all players to enjoy it, including the creators.

    It is of course great to be considerate of your co-players while playing or planning, but make sure to create an experience that you will enjoy yourself too. If you want to be the hero, you absolutely should get that opportunity; just make room for other people to be heroes along with you. I think the best plots are the ones everyone is excited for, and so I think we should shift our focus when creating play from “making cool things for other people” to “making cool things for myself with room for other people.” Excitement can be felt, and it rubs off on other people. The best things I have done in larps have often been things I did chiefly for my own benefit and then dragged other players into. The passion and the enthusiasm for some play you truly want to have yourself too: that’s what makes co-creation come to life; that’s where the magic happens. Taking responsibility for other people’s fun is for organisers; as players we need to take responsibility for ourselves. I want my co-players to trust that I know what I want, and I extend that same trust to them. To butcher an old cliche: Create a cool scene for a new player, they have one cool scene. Help a new player create their own cool scene, all their larps will be cool (and you can get to enjoy their work as well).

    The art of saying no covers some of the same territory. I want to play with people who want to play with me. When I approach people I never think to myself, “I really hope they say yes”; I think, “I really hope they want this.” It’s a subtle difference, but it is a difference, and too often we fall into the pitfall of saying yes just to be polite or inclusive. “No” is a very difficult word, but I really think we need to practice both saying and receiving nos. A no doesn’t have to be a closed door, you can still come up with compromises and alternatives. It could be,  “I’m not up for romance, but I would love to be old friends” or “Saving the world isn’t really my jam, but I’ll totally be there for interrogating the bad guy” or whatever weird thing you have going on. A “no” should, in many cases, be an invitation to work out a solution together. “No, but” is just as powerful for creating play as the famous “yes, and.” We should talk more about that. It’s easy to say yes to someone just because you don’t want to hurt them, but ultimately a mismatch in engagement and enthusiasm can hurt even more.

    Co-creation is such a beautiful aspect of larp. All of us are creating something together, for all of us, but that means everyone has to be creating for themselves too. It demands openness and flexibility, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your own fun. I believe that the best thing you can do for other people’s fun is to have fun yourself. In most larps we’re all adults; we can take care of ourselves. Trust your coplayers to build great experiences for themselves and others, and do the same for yourself, then everyone will have great experiences!

    Cover photo: Image by Kulbir on Pexels. Photo has been cropped.

    This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Kyhn, Mia. “In Defence of Selfishness: And the Beauty of a No.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).

  • Immersion through Diegetic Writing in Character

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    Immersion through Diegetic Writing in Character

    By

    Siri Sandquist

    Background

    I wrote my first poem when I was seven or eight years old. It was during a late dinner, I had just seen Carmen at the opera and was bored during dinner with my mother and my grandfather. On a napkin I scribbled a short poem. Thinking back, I don’t believe it was a coincidence that the creation of this first poem happened in close relationship to a very strong theatrical experience. Of course I had been in love with language long before that. Making up poems before I could even write, enjoying the feeling of stringing words together, making something beautiful. That this first actual written creation happened after my child self had experienced a very strong artistic performance made sense. I was filled with emotions I hardly understood, that needed to be expressed, and in that vacuum, poetry happened.

    As I grew older I would write poetry based on my own strong emotional experiences, a way of process perhaps? I would change my creative outlet from poetry to larp creation. Sometimes letting years go without writing a single poem. But it was always there as a way to gather my thoughts in moments of emotional turmoil, and strong emotional dissonance.

    Thankfully my life is not that filled with traumatic emotional experience these days, so my poetry writing has become much more rare. The most drama I experience these days is as a character at larps. However, I missed writing, and so I started experimenting with playing characters that expressed themselves through poetry. I quickly noticed that this was not only an excellent way to fuel my creativity, it also made my voice different. I might be the same person, but my style of poetry is not the same style as that of my characters, even if some similarities are unavoidable.

    Even more interesting, writing as a character, in-game meant I could sit alone in a room with a notebook, completely immersed in my character. Finally, I understood Finnish immersion closets; all I needed was some paper and a pen!

    I started to wonder, what happened there, in the meeting between me as a creator and the character? Could the written text change and influence play, but maybe more interestingly, could my character influence my own writing and creativity? Was this something more than I had experienced?

    In this little essay I will both use examples of my own writing, case studies of characters I played and how the diegetic poetry influenced the larp, but also of how the character influenced the writing style. I have also collected testimonies from other writing larpers or larping writers, since I wanted to know if this was more than a personal experience, asking them to reflect around their own diegetic writing experiences.

    Lastly I will talk a bit about larping through text, and how – if at all – using the writing medium changes the way we can interact, and the importance of writing style in our play.

    Feather quill in a gold pot near glass and metal containers
    Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.

    Three Examples from My Own Larping Career

    Below I will give three examples of larp characters I played and poetry they created. My focus will be on how creating these poems:

    • Felt in the moment
    • Changed the projection or story line of my character
    • Differed from my ordinary writing style

    I will also ask:

    • Did the larp experience change my normal writing?
    • Did design choices affect my use of writing in the larp?

    The Princess

    At Harem Son Saat (2017), I played the princess Samara. The larp designed by Muriel Algayres in itself did encourage writing. As a part of the larp all players got a small diary in which we were told to write either as our characters, or make small off game notes if needed. For me playing the sheltered young princess of the Harem, poetry became a natural way of self expression within the frames of female culture portrayed in the Harem of 1913.

    Harem Son Saat is a larp of the Romanesque tradition mixed with techniques from nordic larp. The romanesque larp style is much more narrative in its design elements, Muriel explains:

    [In] the French romanesque tradition . . . characters are quite frequently given as subjective diaries (and almost always written in the first person). This is in keeping with the literary origins and inspirations of this specific scene (tapping a lot in serialized novels of the XIXth century and Victorian melodrama), and also presents the characters through their subjective views, which allows for misunderstandings, play on prejudice, different readings of situations, etc.((Nast Marrero. 2016. “The Last Hours of the Harem.” Medium, June 26.))

    As a part of the design the players received a small diary for their character. It both contained subjective notes prewritten by the organizers but did also contain empty pages for the players to fill out in character during the larp. It was also to be saved afterwards as memorabilia of the larp experience if you wished.

    That we were given this physical artefact that encouraged us to do diegetic diary entries made it an easy choice for me to also start to write poetry in it, since poetry was one of the acceptable ways for my character to self express in a more or less safe way. The art of poetry became an alibi for her to speak her mind.

    Calligraphy pen writing in cursive on a page
    Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.

    Preparing for the larp I also read a lot of Rumi, a famous mystical Turkish poet from the 13th century, to try and get some of the flavour of Turkish and Ottoman poetry, a style very far from my own personal writing. I also wrote poems in advance, marking important situations in her backstory.

    As the story of the princess born into a Harem longing for modernized western society progressed the poetry she wrote started to tell her story in it’s own way. Pivotal scenes documented in-game by her poetry. As a woman in the Harem she had limited possibility to communicate with men, even her father. She did however have the possibility to declare poetry or sing a song after dinner. This she did, as a way to communicate with her father and brothers.

    These are some examples:

    I am but a tool in my fathers hand
    Please God make me sharp and strong
    I am but the fruit of my fathers land
    Please God keep me sweet and young
    My heart is a sparrow small
    It flutters when I hear his call
    I step with care on burning coal
    Please grant me peace within my soul
    Purge my yearning, purge my dreams
    Drench this restlessness in my fathers streams

    Samara (A poem written earlier the same evening after a serious talk with her grandmother about Samara’s impending marriage, read out loud to her father the night of the 19th)

    A daughter’s duty is a rock in the ocean
    I will not be carried on the waves
    Your mightiness will overflow me
    Your current guides my night and days

    Samara (trying very hard to write a nice poem to her father for the competition 20th of June)

    But sometimes when the moon shines
    A lost ray will wander and shed some light,
    Reminding the rock that time
    will surely return it too the world

    Inayat, played by Jean-Damien Mottott (Answering by finishing Samara’s poem for her. She carried that close to her heart afterwards.)

    In this example Samara tries to make amends after some arguments about her future with her father, by writing this poem to declare to him during a poetry competition. Her secret lover Inayat, touched by her feeling of hopelessness, continued the poem with a verse of his own which he smuggled to her. A lot of this love story took its place in smuggled poetry and hidden glances.

    To sit and write the love poems, or the poems to my father in character helped me channel my character. It was a truly immersive experience helped along by the game design in itself that encouraged this type of diegetic writing.

    Old desk with pen and feather quill in a pot
    Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash.

    The Runaway Mother

    Another example of a larp were writing poetry in character had a huge impact both on my way of understanding my character, my characters self expression and my immersion is The Quota that ran in the UK in 2018, organised by Avalon Larp Studios and Broken Dreams larp. The larp takes place in a dystopian future where refugees try to get from England into Wales. It is set at the holding facility for refugees seeking asylum in Wales.

    In The Book of The Quota: A Larp about Refugees,((Elina Gouliou, ed. 2020. The Book of The Quota: A Larp about Refugees. Avalon.)) you can read more about the projects as well as several texts written by players both in and off game. There you can find all poems I wrote in character as the political poet, alcoholic Amanda Marks. Signing up for the larp, you got to choose between different archetypes, then one I got was “The Poet.” In preparation for the larp I knew I wanted her to try and leave England in the dystopian future the larp portrayed because she had written political poems, so I did create a couple beforehand. However the bulk of the poems were written ingame, drawing inspiration from what I saw and experienced there. I noticed how sneaking out for a smoke by myself (a moment that usually brings me off game and makes me reflect on the experience) became deeply immersive as what I saw while smoking would inspire poems I then would hurry in to write.

    The poetry also became acts of rebellion, creating play for others. I would hang them on the walls of the venue, and others would read them and get emotional. At one point I even delivered a poem to the overseer of the holding facility who responded with an intense scene of physical and emotional violence. Still most of the poetry was written for me. I would spend down time in the larp (which there was a lot of since it circled a lot around waiting and feeling powerless) writing and expressing myself through my poetry. At those moments I could become even more immersed than in actual scenes were I played with other larpers.

    I count the days until judgment
    Knowing the odds are against me
    There must be a better way out he said,
    Fresh eyes, hopeful smiles
    The key to survival is to survive the boredom
    and when you cannot wait anymore find a quick death
    Not too messy, think of the cleaners
    You can count many things in a prison
    Your friends, your enemies, your sleepless nights
    your pointless fights
    And when you run out of counting
    spread your wings and fly into a grey sunset
    without regret

    The silent scream is the loudest
    The yawn of desperation
    “You are not a good mother” they said
    Well you are not a good motherland
    I mean not to offend, but you need to amend
    Your view on humanity
    Bring back a little sanity
    A little decency, a little love
    I am not fooled by your rethorics
    I know your true nature mother England
    You eat your children, I only left mine

    Amanda’s poetry was a way for her to process her experience and after the larp I felt very little need for debrief writing, something I often do otherwise during an intense larp experience. I believe this was because I had already been processing the experience through words as it happened.

    The language also is a bit harder than in the case of Princess Samara. The subject is quite similar, both characters were women confined in space, by circumstances outside their control, and both characters had a rebellious streak, using poetry to not conform. Still Samara operated with her poetry within the confines of her situation, and it is in a way seen in the way her poetry is more bound by rhymes and rhythm, where Amanda’s poetry is more like spoken word, and flow rather than a set form.

    The Waiting Woman

    Feather quill in a pot on a desk with wooden drawers behind
    Photo by Chris Chow on Unsplash.

    When Covid-19 made larping in real life impossible this year, I started up a letter larp called My Dearest Friend (2020), running from the 1st of April to the 30th of November 2020. The setting and the idea was simple. Taking place in the middle of the First World War it centered around a boarding school for girls, and the men in their close acquaintance, many of them off at war of course. The parallels between the feeling among people during the beginning of 2020 and the characters in 1916 were deliberate. There was a feeling of life being thrown upside down. A new strange normalcy, the eager following of the news for updates. The feeling of being separated from loved ones as we practiced social distancing. For many participants the letters sent became something to look forward to in the dull normalcy of self isolation, much in the same way they would have been for the characters. In this larp I play several different characters but one of them, Millicent Struthers, writes poetry. This was something that I started on a whim, but as the larp has progressed the poems of Millicent have been a great way for me to process intense feelings of bleed in character.

    Though the format is low intensity, since you only are in character in your head while writing the letters it has for many become an intense experience where the borders between character and player easily get muddled due to the longevity of the larp. On top of that, many of the players, including myself, have introduced chat play as a part of the larp experience. It is not unheard of that I play my character on low intensity in these chats for weeks on end, without much break. This means that the immersion into character, although low in realism, becomes very emotional. By writing a poem when my character has a strong emotional response to a letter she received, or a situation in a chat, I can sort of debrief continuously while still in character.

    The style of Millicent’s poetry is romantic, on verse, and a bit naive just as her character is. One example is “I Have to Try and Go Alone,” written as an homage to her twin brother missing in action.

    Where are you; my brother now?
    In foreign land an unmarked grave
    In mud and rain and twilight gloom
    Where only foreign flowers bloom
    They cannot whisper any tales
    Of dear old britain’s glens and dales
    Where is that little daisy pray
    I gifted you to make you stay?
    Where is your smile, your beating heart?
    Your liquid tongue always so smart?
    Why were we so torn apart?

    My darling where are all your jokes?
    Your teasing and your ruthless mind?
    Where is that soft and tender side
    That so sorely hurt your pride?
    How am I to now be strong and bold?
    To laugh and live and then grow old?
    How am I to learn anew
    to be a person without you?
    I hear your voice as you scold me
    You are alive, you are set free!
    I am wherever you will be!

    But darling brother, life is hard
    When every step you ever walked
    Was hand in hand with you so dear
    Together always brave no fear
    Those unsaid words that still you knew
    Those dreams you wanted to come true
    Your reckless way of always running
    You complete lack of thought or cunning
    Your way that made me feel allowed
    To be strong, and clever and proud
    To stand tall and be unbowed

    I know you want for me to smile
    To live and love for both of us
    I try to find my heart again
    A tender voice a loving friend
    I listen to your voice these days
    You scold me in familiar ways
    And wild grass grows above your head
    And all the words we left unsaid..
    Your dear beloved smile is gone
    I have to try and go alone
    I have to try and go alone

    These poems were very different from my personal writing style, and much more dramatic and filled with adjectives.

    In the larp the poetry has been a good way to address hard subjects without saying things straight out, subtlety being much harder in a larp only taking place as a written media. The poem about the dead brother was for example sent to another character whose brother was missing in action, in an attempt to get him to open up about his grief.

    Summary of my Experiences

    In all three examples above gathered from my own larping experience there are some common threads. The writing was all influenced by the character and the setting when it came to both style and quality.

    The moments I wrote diegetically made immersion stronger, sometimes creating a feeling of flow more pure than while larping with other people. At times I felt like I was more channelling the character’s voice more than anything else, and seldom did I have to consciously alter my writing style to fit the setting or the character’s voice.

    I do believe that the diegetic writing has in all instances influenced the narrative of my larp, albeit not changed it completely. With Samara the ways she could communicate through poetry with her father and her love interest definitely steered the overall narrative arc in a certain direction. With Amanda her poems being put up on the walls of the prison became a way to rally the other detained refugees, but also created a sub plot of conflict between her and the management that created an even stronger tension and friction between her and the confines she was living under. I don’t believe the poetry has been as strong an influence in the letter larp with Millicent. Perhaps because it is hard to see what effects a choice like sending a poem has with your co-player’s story when you don’t see them react to it. Instead it becomes more like all the other letters sent out into the void, a way of communicating equal to any other mean used.

    I don’t think in-game writing influences my off-game writing much except for being an inspiration to write more. As a way of processing emotions created by bleed, or as a way to use the allegory of the larp to process my own emotions in real life. However I do believe it does make me a better writer, as the skill to intuitively change voice in your writing is very useful.

    How a larp is designed can also of course influence how useful ingame writing is in developing narrative or deepening the relationships between characters.

    In Harem Son Saat, not only were we given diaries and encouraged to use them, but the way female and male characters were separated and forbidden to communicate with each other that then in very structured ways meant that the use of poetry as secret communication was a natural development. Having a prompt to make the character creative, such as the archetype Poet that was given in The Quota also makes it a natural choice to make the character creative.

    However I was interested in finding out if other larpers who write diegetically had the same experience or if this was just me.

    Pot of ink with a swan decoration and feather quill
    Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash.

    Other Testimonies

    Preparing to write this article about diegetic writing and its power for immersion I asked any larper that wanted to send in their answers and reflections around my basic questions of reflection as well as these four questions:

    1. In what way do you write creatively as yourself?
    2. How many larps have you on purpose incorporated your writing into your character?
    3. Did writing diegetically change how you immersed into your character?
    4. Did your style of writing change in regard to the type of character you portrayed?

    My real question was of course, does writing diegetically change your larping experience, and does your larping change your written expression? It seemed like this was the case. Out of the ten people that replied some common denominators could be found.

    All but one stated they wrote different kinds of lyric or fiction outside the larp realm as well, many in a professional capacity as poets, authors or journalists. It makes sense after all, that people who already express themselves through writing would feel inclined to use that medium to bot process and create emotional intense experiences in-game.

    Writing is how I as a player process my feelings and observations, so writing in-character brings me closer to my character. Writing in-character fosters a more introverted style of playing, as otherwise I might pour my feelings more outward; it produces a less extroverted character interpretation.

    Elli Leppä

    For others it wasn’t so much the writing in itself that contributed to the larp experience but more the act of embodying a writer with the added alibi for interaction that gave ingame:

    Did writing diegetically change how you immersed into your character?

    Not, I think, so much the writing as much as being the writer, whose driving force in both instances became a) meeting the deadline and b) finding the next thing to report. Interviewing people for colour pieces was good for engaging with new people and the newspaper was good for disseminating information of major events to people who weren’t there.

    Jukka Särkijärvi

    How often was more varying, some had only consciously done it once, others had a hard time remembering the amount of larps where diegetic writing had been a prominent part of their experience. Sometimes this had been designed into the characters, and helped propelling the plot. At other times it was a private decision. In some instances it is actively used as a tool for deeper immersion into the character:

    I find it easier to immerse through the written word, so the act of writing as my character diegetically – particularly as an introspective act – helps to cement who they are within the diegesis.

    Simon Brind

    I found that sitting with my notebook made me feel more comfortable sitting alone and also made it easier to sit near people and join the conversations. Writing lullabies for rain – her dead and then returned daughter made the grief and longing and the need to believe in her being there far more real and immersive.

    Laura Wood

    [I]t makes it seem [a] bit more ‘real’ if you write a report, a ritual, a letter a story, song, poem etc as your character.

    Woody J. Bevan

    I felt that having this extra dimension of immersion into the character was very effective. When writing as them, I could think as them and feel as them, perhaps more powerfully than I could have done without it.

    Mo Holkar

    This was not true for everyone though. Toril Mjelva Saatvedt said that the writing in character didn’t change the way she immersed herself. However the act of writing, and the product of that writing added to the character embodiment and became a tangible part of who they were. It was something that could be performed in character, or something that could be shown to other players, a way of portraying the character’s thoughts and feelings.

    Another part of diegetic writing is when the larp in itself takes place through a written medium.. In some larp communities pre-larp in text chat is implemented. Another example of larp performed in the written medium is letter larping, a genre that is quite common and has had an upswing during the Covid-crisis when physical larps have had to be cancelled or postponed. Chris Hartford talked about the impact of pre larp in order to get a stronger connection to characters and plot:

    I think writing helps to embed the character in yourself — you get a feel for their reactions and limits – as well as providing an emotional connection, both for myself and co-players. Often there is an off-game chat alongside the text RP, and on more than one occasion I’ve had co-players say those scenes solidified the game and concepts. For example, at one [College of Wizardry (2014-)] a co-player said, ‘and if you wondered, that was the point [the character] thought it could work” and before Odysseus, a short (600 word) preplay scene turned a dry on-and-off-relationship into a living and breathing (but challenging) romance.

    Chris Hartford

    However it is an important distinction here. Preplay is not diegetic writing. It is written in a meta space, where you describe actions and conversations in written form. It is not written from the headspace of the character. The resulting text is not a prop that can be used ingame. Letter larps on the other hand is a larp solely played out through diegetic writing. Where the words filtered through the characters is the only means of communication between characters and therefore play. In this format the diegetic writing becomes the playing, and the creations of poetry or diary notes outside of the letters might be a way to develop your own emotional connection to the character. Especially since the letters written diegetically might not always be as honest as a conversation, since the character has time to filter through what will be said, and how it will be said.

    In the interviews Lolv Pelegrin addressed a very important question when it comes to diegetical writing on the international larp scene. When discussing if the writing style changed in regard to the type of character they played, they reflected that it did, but that the change was bigger if they wrote in their native language. However, with English being their third language meant that the nuances in the writing were less prominent. This is an interesting point that is important to note. In our international community, fluency of language does create an invisible barrier between player and immersion. Not only in diegetic writing, but in larping in general. If you are not comfortable with the English language the fluidity of immersion will always be hindered as the player will need to struggle to formulate themself in a foreign language. Diegetic writing will therefore naturally not be as beneficial for immersion as it would be for someone fluent in the language.

    Calligraphy pen next to pink flowers
    Photo by John Jennings on Unsplash.

    Conclusion

    Writing diegetically at larps seems to be a way to enhance immersion and get closer to the characters inner feelings for most of the people who have done so. Most likely this would not be true for players who aren’t naturally inclined to write in their everyday as well. It takes a predisposition to express oneself through the writing medium for this to be a seamless action that enhances play. However, for those that already use the written language to process emotions and thoughts, writing as a character will often not only immerse the player on a deep level but also inspire the player to create in a different way than normally. In many instances the act of writing in itself can create meaningful moments for the player, even without the input of other players in that moment. It also is useful as a way to communicate a character’s emotion openly even when the setting or the character traits means that such displays of strong emotion are inappropriate. Diegetic writing can also when done as an active choice and displayed to the other players as in Jukka’s journalist that gave him an alibi to interact with other players, or in my own examples described above, influence the larp on a bigger level. Creating moments of emotional connection, and meetings between characters who might not have communicated in that way with each other without the written text.

    Even though diegetic writing is something you as a player easily can implement in almost any setting, there are things that will make this choice more natural. Characters that are already written as prone to creative writing is of course a motivator to take that route. Perhaps more so is when the organizers themself press upon the written medium as a way to communicate and self reflect continuously through the larp experience such as the diaries and the poetry competition at Harem Son Saat.

    When it comes to larp that singularly takes place through the written medium, such as letter larps, this creative writing might be a good supplement to process emotions within the character that cannot be expressed in letters addressed to others. It might help in immersion and in processing emotions diegetically although letter larps by nature have low levels of immersion due to the format.

    The skill of larping in your own head, the finnish immersion closet is hard for many players that need the input from others in order to completely let go of their off-game meta reflections. By forcing oneself to write in character you engage your character’s thoughts and feelings in a lonely environment. It’s a tool that can help you get to grip with what the character really is feeling and thinking that can enrich both your own larp experience and by extension, in spreading the written text, the larp experience of others.

    As a writer, or someone who enjoys writing in their everyday life it can also act like a motivator to explore different formats and styles of writing. By channeling the character’s voice you push yourself to experiment with tone, format and voice. It is a playful act in and of itself, in stretching your creative muscles. The writing itself becomes its own kind of documentation of the larp experience, and a memorabilia of an experience that often is hard to capture by other means. Although pictures are a good way of capturing the larp from the inside. The written text becomes a documentation of the larp from the inside, and can be saved and relished for a long time afterwards as you as a player look back at the larp experience.

    However it is a tool that is not easily accessible to all players. It depends a lot both on the aptitude for writing in the player as well as their comfort level with the language used at the larp; something you might want to keep in mind if you want to try it out yourself.

    References

    Gouliou, Elina, ed. 2020. The Book of The Quota: A Larp about Refugees. Avalon.

    Marrero, Nast. 2016. The Last Hours of the Harem. Medium, June 26.

    Cover photo: Image by Digital Content Writers India on Unsplash. Photo has been cropped.

    This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Sandquist, Siri. Immersion through Diegetic Writing in Character. In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).

  • Gendered Magic

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    Gendered Magic

    By

    Marie Møller

    In the summer of 2018, I signed up for a feminist spinoff of College of Wizardry (CoW, 2014) called Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft (HAW). Since CoW usually aspires towards a gender-neutral setting, I was interested in seeing what a specifically feminist and female-focussed version of the larp and the magic college might look like. How would the concept of magic academia be changed if we were to imagine it as developed mostly by and for women? Would magic itself become something different? What would gendered magic look like? And importantly, would there be room for magic expressions outside of the gender binary?

    Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft was the brainchild of Agata Świstak and Marta Szyndler, and it was described as a “world where feminine means strong, powerful and unyielding’ and a “safe haven where witches can study magic without the risk of being burned at the stake.” The spinoff larp was marketed for “women, for non-binary pals, for anyone with a feminine experience, and for men who want to try something new.” ((College of Wizardry. “Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft”. Facebook video. 22 June 2018. Accessed 31 August 2020.))

    Having played as a professor at CoW before, I immediately knew that I wanted to teach again at HAW. Especially the new subjects of Moon Magic and Blood Magic sparked creative visions in my head of witches gathering in a circle under the full Moon to celebrate their womanhood. (Since I identify as a queer feminist, a witch and a cis woman, ideas for magic rituals centred on and celebrating female empowerment come easily to me). However, I was aware that I needed to make anything I did accessible to characters and players of all gender expressions and identities – and this honestly seemed quite the challenge. For instance, if Blood Magic or Moon Magic connotes a focus on “the female cycle” and menstruation, how would I include female bodies that don’t menstruate, non-female bodies that do, cis-gendered male bodies and people who might feel dysphoric about the subject? Is it possible to separate menstruation from the notion of a female biology? In general, how do we celebrate female power and magic in any larp setting without simultaneously reproducing binary gender thinking? How do we avoid cis-hexism?

    The special feminist run of CoW was eventually cancelled, but it left me with a lot of unresolved speculation about uplifting the stories of women through elements of female power and magic while striving to make room for all players, including trans*((In this text, I will use trans* as a signifier for all non-cis people (such as transgender, non-binary or genderfluid people, etc.). In other words, I will use trans* for brevity as a signifier for anyone who identifies (always or sometimes) outside of the gender they were assigned at birth. This is a common practice in writing about trans* experiences that I first came across in Ruska Kevätkoski’s work in the 2016 Solmukohta Book (Kevätkoski, 2016).)) players and characters. My goal here is not to provide the perfect answers (I don’t have them), but to share my thoughts and hopefully inspire others to gender their magic systems with awareness and intention.

    The Social Construction of Binary Gender

    Let’s have a quick talk about the gender binary and how our implicit biases about gender might influence larp design. The gender binary is the historical and current notion (particularly in Western culture) that there are two – and only two – distinct and separate genders. Biological sex is often invoked as a reason for upholding the gender binary, with proponents arguing that individual gender expressions spring ‘naturally’ from inherent biology – a view that is sometimes called essentialist. An alternative view (and the one I hold) is that the binary division of gender is a social construct, i.e. a socially constructed and culturally fluent set of expressions and behaviours that are implicitly taught, learned and sustained.((See e.g. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Vintage Books, 2011. Originally Le Deuxième Sexe. First ed. 1949; Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990, Tandon Neeru. Feminism: A Paradigm Shift. Atlantic, 2008. Accessed 23 September 2020.)) In the following, I will presuppose that gender categories are fluent, malleable and socially constructed – and that it is therefore possible to bend, break and rebuild them in larps and other fictional settings.

    It is crucial to understand that just because something is a construct, this does not mean that it doesn’t exist. National borders are a social construct, but they are enforced by laws and sometimes maintained with violent force. Currency is a construct, but the numbers typed on a piece of paper or inside a computer still represent influence and agency in society. The male/female division of colours such as blue and pink or the idea that only women may wear skirts is obviously culturally constructed, but the negative consequences for transgressing outside the expectations of your assigned gender category can be substantial. Even when we resign ourselves to the restrictions of whatever gender category we were assigned at birth, there is still implicitly trained internalised and externalised social policing in place to ensure that we perform((“Perform” here not in the sense of “playacting” but meaning to present yourself through a set of implicitly trained and socially acceptable gendered behaviours.)) whatever behaviours have been designated as sufficiently “feminine” or “masculine” by our culture. This is true for both of the binary gender categories, because although white, straight cis-men are often viewed as a dominant group and as the “norm” (compared to whoever is being “othered” through normative discourse), their potential for self-expression is equally restricted by the rules of the gender binary. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains:

    We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves…

    Although the binary categories of “male” and “female” are constructs, they have tangible and material effects on our lives. We live within and around these identities and categories every day. Many people perform their expected gendered behaviours without even thinking twice about it. Our assigned gender roles are implicit and systemic, and therefore they become the norm. Anyone who exists outside of this norm, either because they resist binary thinking, or simply because they don’t fit easily within the two established categories, often risk being shunned, oppressed or overlooked. The consequences of not “fulfilling” your assigned gender role can be harmful. Exclusion from communities or being marked as “other” have very long histories as forms of social punishment intended (consciously or subconsciously) to correct behaviour back towards the culturally normative expectation.((See e.g. Munt, Sally R. Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (p. 32). Ashgate Publishing, 2007.))

    When we understand the mechanisms behind gendering and othering, and when we recognise the binary gender categories and their associated expressions as constructs, we are better able to anticipate and play with these concepts in larps during world building and in the development of gendered or ungendered((Since the gendering of people, expressions and behaviours is the accepted norm, the decision to omit gender altogether also become a gender-conscious choice.)) magic systems.

    Drawing of a witchard raising a wand with arcane symbols surrounding them evoking multiple genders
    Illustration by Marie Møller

    Gendering Magic

    When we create worlds and settings for larps, we are deconstructing and reconstructing reality. Most larps, however abstract (with a few exceptions), still tell the stories of connected or disconnected human beings and their communities. Nothing comes from nothing, and the stories we tell are reflections of the human experience.

    When it comes to gender, this means that we might unwittingly be reproducing binary stereotypes. That is why gender awareness matters, and why it is important to make conscious decisions about gender and to include trans* characters and narratives. Because of the historical erasure of trans* narratives, examples of trans* historical figures are not easy to find,((Sharma, Ayesha. “Transgender People Are Not Included In Mainstream History.” Everyday Feminism, 2018. Accessed 24 September 2020.)) and it takes deliberate effort to search them out and include them((Preferably without ascribing trans* identities onto historical figures whose personal gender identities can’t be ascertained.)) or to create fictional historical trans* characters for players to portray.

    Likewise, when we create magic systems that celebrate female power (or any gendered magic), we must take care not to conflate magic and biology, thereby insinuating that e.g. femininity and female magic spring from a “female biology”((I.e. a female gender assigned at birth based on physical characteristics.)) rather than from the female cultural experience. If we create a system which states that female magic comes from such a “female biology” (i.e. from having a womb or from something more abstractly female but concretely connected to the physical), we are reproducing the essentialist idea that gender is biological. If gender is a construct, then gendered magic is also a construct. This is true for the actual construction of gendered magic systems when we create them out of game, and that must be true inside the diegetic reality of the larp as well.

    The great thing about this is that if gendered magic (such as a female witch’s potential connection to the Moon) is a social construct, then this gendered border within magic can be explored and transgressed just as the boundaries of gender can be explored and transgressed in real life. We can (and should) embrace and empower the female minority exactly because it is a minority((“Minority” here not signifying a numerical minority but rather any social group that is subordinate to a dominant group with more power and/or privilege regardless of group size, see e.g. https://www.britannica.com/topic/minority.)) – but we can do that and also make space for other minorities. We can do it without doing unto others what has been done to women for so long.

    Gentlemen Magicians and Wild Witches

    There is so much potential for stories about gendered magic, so let me offer an improvised example: Imagine a world historically reminiscent of our own where men go to school and learn magic while women are denied access to both magic and learning. In this world, girls are taught magic in secret by their grandmothers in the woods. Their magic grows wild and intuitive while the boys are taught structured and formulaic spells – both branches of magic equally effective, but each with their restraints and specialities. In this world, the cultural division between boys and girls has created a gender binary. It has also created two separate forms of magic according to gender – not because only two genders exist but because only two genders have been allowed to exist.

    Now in this world, there are male magicians who will never learn (or even want to learn) what the wild witches know. But there are some among them who yearn for the magic of the Moon and the forests and who turn out to excel in intuitive magic. There are those who were told they were girls, but who now live as boys to attend classes and surpass their peers in every way. And there are those who can master both branches of the craft and combine them into new kinds of magic.

    Of course, several things could happen next within this world when people break the social expectations. I would love to see a story where combined or gender-transverse magic is celebrated to empower trans* characters and where it begins to dissolve the gender binary. Alternatively, backlash, banishments or cover-ups of all non-binary magic could mirror the transphobia, ostracism and the erasure of trans* narratives in the real world. This is where it is especially important to consider the purpose of the gendered player experience you are shaping and to remember your trans* players. While I firmly believe there must be room in larp for people to explore lives and identities outside of their own, and while some trans* people will appreciate seeing cis players struggle with the same institutionalised challenges they face every day, others might find it hard to watch someone else live out their most difficult real life moments.

    With no direct experience in larp development, I don’t claim to be an expert, but I have made note of some good advice and best practices: Make it very clear in your scenario description if your gendered magic system will lead to play involving gender discrimination and/or trans* discrimination. Create trans* or ungendered characters to make space for all players interested in playing trans* narratives. Acknowledge the existence of your trans* players in advance. Don’t wait for them to initiate the conversation, but make it clear from the start that you anticipate what you can and are ready to listen.

    When it comes to magic in a historical setting, it is interesting to imagine how the two (culturally constructed and segregated, but very real) genders might perform magic differently. But it is not enough simply to declare that there is male and female magic. We need to know why that is and what it entails. Stories of gender segregation have value when they investigate the gender binary in order either to teach us something about the lived experience of all genders at that time and place or to explore and transgress the gender boundaries they establish.

    Gender-Neutral Witchards and Agender Fae

    At College of Wizardry, it has become custom to call witches and wizards by the universal gender-neutral portmanteau “witchards.” No one seems to recall the exact origin of the word (a reflection of the largely community-sourced gameplay), but the term functions well to support the gender-inclusive tone that the larp aims for. In the player handbook for CoW, there is a passage on equality and inclusivity which reads:

    Witchard Society is different though: magical ability can surface in anyone, and that makes everyone equal regardless of their looks, body, sexuality, gender, beliefs or ethnicity […] and genderqueer and transgender individuals are common and wholly accepted.((College of Wizardry. Player Handbook. Company P, 2019. Version 3.0, ed. Laura Sirola and Christopher Sandberg. Accessed 23 September 2020.))

    I imagine this rule stated clearly and directly (and repeated in pre-larp workshops) makes a difference for many players, although I can’t speak for them. I can say that it means a lot to me when portraying a female professor of age and authority, and it matters in the gameplay I have sought to create for other players. At CoW, there are also pronoun badges for players to show clearly whether their characters identify as they/them, she/her or he/him. This enables me to use the right pronouns for the characters I meet (something I very much appreciate), and then promptly ignore their gender because at CoW, gender doesn’t matter – but it matters a great deal that gender explicitly doesn’t matter, because this stands in such clear contrast to the importance implicitly placed on gender in the real world.

    In-game photo of the author in a wizard's hat in a castle surrounded by students
    In-game: The author teaching magic through music at College of Wizardry 22. Photo by Przemysław Jendroska, Horseradish Studio.

    The upcoming larp A Harvest Dance((A Harvest Dance, set for October 2021.)) by Lotta Bjick and the team at Poltergeist LARP features another kind of magical creature that has transcended (or rather never had) the need for gender. The site describes: “Fae society is not human and the concept of gender is bewildering and strange to them, therefore all characters will be written and played without gender.” The vision is that all players will portray genderless fae characters and use they/them pronouns about each other at all times. As fae, the participants will be able to play with – or rather completely disregard – gender in fashion and demeanour because the fae are bewildered by the silly human mortals’ constructed gender binary.

    Of course, although characters might be written as unbiased or genderless, it doesn’t mean that players are able to enter into the fiction and immediately abandon their subconscious biases. It takes effort, and that effort takes awareness and intention – and even then, we might still slip up. (For instance, in spite of best efforts, I have personally experienced both sexism and sexual harassment at CoW.) But it matters that we get to try, and that we get to enter into a world where concepts such as gender-equality or the total lack of gender is explicitly stated as the norm and the expectation.

    The organisers of A Harvest Dance are aware that players bring their trained normative behaviours with them into the event whether they want to or not. The act of using they/them pronouns for everyone around you is a new experience and a social exercise. It is stated clearly on the website that players should avoid gendered pronouns and not use words such as “man” or “woman.” But, the organisers say, “We are aware that this is not what most of us are used to in off-game real life and we might mess up. That is ok!” (A Harvest Dance).

    Although our ingrown biases are hard to shed, larps give us the option to try. The trying is important in itself because it shows us that the established social norms of the real world are transmutable and replaceable constructs and are not the only ways to exist and interact. Even when we try and fail, we learn something about ourselves and the pervasive condition of our subconscious preconceptions. Through the narrative device of magic (and the actual magic of larping), we are able to construct, inhabit and investigate alternate realities that can show us a glimpse of what a truly unbiased community might look like, or experience what a genderless society feels like. The creators of A Harvest Dance say that they “are excited to see what characters we all can create together without the boundaries of gender!” And so am I.

    Menstruation Magic

    I would be remiss if I didn’t at least attempt to include a discussion on magic and menstruation. After all, it was the notion of Moon Magic and Blood Magic as magic school subjects that set my thoughts in motion exactly because they made me think of menstruation rituals and the potential for accidental gender-based exclusion. Menstruation is historically and implicitly connected to womanhood, but it is not something all women experience, and it is not something only women experience.

    Menstruation is connected to womanhood because it has historically been associated with the physical characteristics ascribed to ‘female biology’. Not only that, but menstruation has been marked as something unclean or impure by the patriarchy and is still abused as a reason to subjugate and disfranchise the female minority and keep women subdued.((UNFPA. “Menstruation and Human Rights.” UNFPA, 2020. Accessed September 27, 2020)). Women have been called hysterical (from the Greek “hystera,” meaning womb or uterus), and the menstrual cycle is continually cited as a reason why women should not hold positions of power.((See e.g. Robbins, Mel. “Hillary Clinton and the clueless hormone argument.” CNN, 2015. Accessed 24 September 2020.)) In some cultures and traditions, women are kept separate from their communities during menstruation, and they must undergo cleansing rituals before re-entering society. The loss of dignity and agency that women face through the stigma of menstruation is exactly why it is an important act of resistance for women to celebrate it. Menstruation celebrations and rituals can and should be used as a tool to empower the female minority and break this age-old taboo.

    However, as I said above, not all women menstruate, and not only women menstruate. Some women are post-menopausal, some have medical conditions that disrupt or prevent menstruation, some have reasons and medical means to opt out, and some women don’t have a uterus. Some trans* people menstruate but do not identify as women, including a number of men. And some people are dysphoric about their menstruation (or lack thereof) because it doesn’t correspond with the (socially constructed) physical expectations of their gender identity. So how do we celebrate menstruation through magic without risking the exclusion of bodies that don’t fit neatly into binary gender categories?

    I’m sad to say I don’t have the answer. To be honest, I thought about not including this segment at all because I have more questions than answers. But in the end, I believe the question merits being asked. My ultimate intention is not to provide a ready-made solution but to inspire further contemplation in others. Two brains are smarter than one, and larps are the perfect playgrounds to ask the “what ifs” together and experiment with subversions of social norms. But I do have one final thought to share on the matter.

    While womanhood and menstruation are historically related issues, they are not actually the same thing. When we look beyond the conflation that patriarchal history has made of women and menstruation, we see that the connection is yet another social construct. Some bodies menstruate. Some of these bodies belong to people who identify as women. Some of them do not. Menstruation is a thing that some bodies do – not a thing that just women do. So maybe it’s possible to separate the two.

    Perhaps in the right story and the right setting, rituals celebrating menstruation could be something different and apart from rituals celebrating womanhood. The great thing about magical world-building is that we are not limited by mundane maxims. We are free to imagine and inhabit alternate realities that are partially or wholly different from our own. We can create worlds where menstruation is celebrated in all bodies regardless of gender, or where menstruation talk is commonplace and not taboo, or where menstruation represents something else altogether.

    As I said, there is good reason to celebrate menstruation specifically in order to re-empower a female minority that has been disfranchised directly through menstruation stigma. That can and should be done in larps that focus on the gender binary and the concomitant limits it places on everyone – larps that hopefully also consider the injustices done towards trans* people through the same social system.

    The Power of Gendered Magic

    Whether you believe in magic or not, gendered magic will always be a social construct because gender is a social construct. When we create worlds and social settings for larps, we are either reconstructing or deconstructing the gender binary. Once we realise that genders are social categories that have been culturally constructed over time, it becomes easier to reframe and reimagine them, which we can then do with intention and awareness of the ramifications it will have for players and characters of all genders, including trans* players and characters. We should not accept an implicitly essentialist approach to gender simply because it is the norm of the real world.

    Larping – and especially larping in fantastical settings – gives us the power to decide to try something new, or to question the status quo by reproducing it for the purpose of closer scrutiny. We get to imagine worlds not only where “feminine means strong,”((College of Wizardry. “Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft.” Facebook video. 22 June 2018. Accessed 31 August 2020. )) but where masculine means being sensitive to the needs of others and expressive about your emotions. We get to break the cages and the restrictions placed on all of us through the binary construct of gender. Whatever choice we make about gender categories in our world-building and magic systems, it should be done with intention and for good reason because it has the power to change someone’s frame of mind.

    Gendered magic has the power not just to include but to uplift gender minorities. With Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft, the idea was to reframe and celebrate women and female magic in exact opposition to the historical persecution of female witches.((Even though men were also persecuted for witchcraft, and although there are examples of countries where more men than women were executed, women were the main target of witch-hunts and executions in Europe and Scandinavia. (Guillou, Jan. Heksenes forsvarere: en historisk reportage. Modtryk, 2012. Orinally Häxornas försvarere – ett historiskt reportage. First ed. 2002).)) At A Harvest Dance, there will be an absence of gender, which is in itself a gender-aware choice and a social construction, and it will probably teach the participants something about their own perspective on and relation to gender. In my own example above about boys schooled in magic and girls learning magic in secret (where gender segregation has resulted in two different types of magic), we can imagine how characters that are able to combine the two gendered forms of magic might become revered for the very fact that they see through and transgress the implicitly binary system.

    In larps, we get to do the telling – but narrative power also means responsibility. When it comes to creating space for trans* narratives in larp, cis people still hold the most power. By stepping up and making sure to include trans* characters in our stories, and by asking the right questions when we create gendered worlds and gendered magic systems, we begin to counteract historic and current trans* erasure. When we create realistic or historically inspired settings, we need to work towards including those stories that are too often erased, overlooked and forgotten. When we write alternate, fantastical and imaginary worlds and settings, we are free to reimagine gender, or its absence, for everyone.

    Although I don’t have all the answers, I hope that sharing my thoughts and speculations on this issue might have inspired some further play with gender, magic and gendered magic in larps. There are already a number of larps with rich explorative ideas about gender (e.g. Brudpris, Sigridsdotter and Mellan himmel och hav), and I hope to see even more larps in the future with a deliberate focus on gender in their world-building in order either to investigate or remedy the gendered injustices of the real world. I especially dream of more larps where gendered magic – or the explicit absence of gender in magic – is applied as an allegorical device to illustrate and illuminate the fundamentally constructed condition of the binary gender categories of the real world in order to uplift and celebrate gender minorities. To me, this would be true magic.

    Bibliography

    Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “We Should All Be Feminists.” TEDxEuston, 2012. Accessed 16 October 2020.

    Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Vintage Books, 2011. (Org. “Le Deuxième Sexe”. First ed. 1949.)

    Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990.

    College of Wizardry. “Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft.” Facebook video. 22 June 2018. Accessed 31 August 2020.

    College of Wizardry. Player Handbook. Company P, 2019 (version 3.0, ed. Laura Sirola and Christopher Sandberg). Accessed 23 September 2020.

    Guillou, Jan. Heksenes forsvarere: en historisk reportage. Modtryk, 2012. (Org. Häxornas försvarere – ett historiskt reportage. First ed. 2002).

    Kevätkoski, Ruska (formerly N. Koski). “Not a Real Man?” Ropecon ry, 2016. Accessed 30 August 2020.

    Munt, Sally R. Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (p. 32). Ashgate Publishing, 2007.

    Robbins, Mel. “Hillary Clinton and the Clueless Hormone Argument.” CNN, 2015. Accessed 24 September 2020.

    Sharma, Ayesha. “Transgender People Are Not Included In Mainstream History.” Everyday Feminism, 2018. Accessed 24 September 2020.

    Tandon Neeru. Feminism: A Paradigm Shift. Atlantic, 2008. Accessed 23 September 2020.

    UNFPA. “Menstruation and Human Rights.” UNFPA, 2020. Accessed September 27, 2020.

    Cover photo: Image by Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay.

    This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Møller, Marie. “Gendered Magic.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).

  • We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps

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    We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps

    By

    Karijn van der Heij

    [This article is also available in Spanish, at: http://vivologia.es/compartimos-este-cuerpo-herramientas-para-combatir-los-prejuicios-basados-en-la-apariencia-en-el-rol-en-vivo/
    Thank you to Vivologia for translating it!]

    Disclaimer: In this text, the word “relationship” never purely alludes to romance. It could be any connection between characters: from co-workers to soldiers and commanding officers to siblings or bitter enemies. This article compiles discussions with dozens of people spanning hundreds of hours in total. It is very possible that I quote something verbatim and not even remember that you gave me that idea. No harm is intended in any way.

    I was at a beautiful international larp. A big, raucous party was in full swing. People were flirting, drinking and fighting. And somehow, no matter how hard I tried, I could not find a way into the play. My attempts at provocation were brushed off, and my attempts at flirting fared even worse. My character was supposed to be powerful, but I certainly did not manage to evoke that feeling.

    After a while, I noticed that several other people were also drinking wine in chairs in the corner, all by themselves. Most of them seemed, like me, otherwise outgoing participants who had seen most of their relations fall flat. The one thing I had in common with my fellow wallflowers was that all of us were either older, overweight, or both. It is possible this was a coincidence. It did not feel like it.

    Later, at the 2017 Knutepunkt, I was dragged into a large conversation about casting and in-game status, and how those things are often determined by the way the participants look, either consciously or subconsciously. This discussion resonated with me, and, during that event, I asked many people about their personal experiences with their real life appearance influencing how they were treated at larps.

    The year after that, I hosted a programme item about appearance-based prejudice with a very diverse panel. This panel received a lot more attention than I had expected, and I kept getting approached about it during that Knutepunkt and long after. There were tears and powerless anger, loss of faith in co-participants and in the community, and so many stories. Once the stories started coming out, they never stopped. And I realized that discrimination based on physical appearance was even more commonplace than I thought. I also realised that we do not speak about it often enough.

    Larp usually strives to create settings, situations and relations, often involving total strangers, that feel completely real on an emotional level from the moment the larp starts. Most people will tap heavily into lived experiences and emotions to achieve this. That also means that unless the participant is very good at keeping themselves separate from their character, bleed((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character,” Nordiclarp.org, March 2, 2015.)) will happen and those same instincts, preconceptions and frameworks that we use for fast immersion are also applied to our co-participants and our perceptions of them.

    In itself, this is not a problem, but it can turn ugly very fast when those perceptions are built on negative biases. Gender, ethnicity, age, able-bodiedness, body type and many more aspects of our co-participants influence how we interact with them at larps. Most people are hardly, if at all, aware of these biases, as they are often unconscious.((Much has been written about this, but Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald’s “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People” (2013) is an accessible read. You can test your own implicit biases at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html)) For example, we may associate middle-aged people with being less active, overweight people with being less smart, or people with mobility issues with being frail, and adjust our interactions based on that. The good news is that once we are aware of our biases, we can train ourselves to actively work against them.

    This piece is mainly written to put a spotlight on a problem that many of us are only too familiar with from personal experience, so that it becomes something we can keep addressing as a community. I have mainly spoken to people who have experienced fatphobia, ageism, and rejection based on perceived attractiveness, and have personally experienced the same. Most of my examples will thus be based in those types of prejudice.

    Of course, many other biases exist. PoC and queer writers have been writing about appearance-based discrimination for years, for example in last year’s KP-book with Jonaya Kemper’s excellent “Wyrding the Self” and Kemper, Saitta, and Koljonen’s “Steering for Survival” in the same volume.

    What Forms Does Appearance-Based Prejudice Take?

    The people I have spoken to over the years mainly report the following behaviors of other participants based on their out-of-game looks:

    1. (Aspects of) their characters not being taken seriously, reactions being different from how the character should be treated, for example when playing leaders, soldiers or famous people.
    2. Rejection from in-game relationships, especially romantic ones.
    3. Not being involved in the plot or other aspects of the larp. This is for example often the case with older or less able-bodied participants when the plot involves action.

    These behaviours allow us to discern several forms of rejection.

    Rejection Surrounding Desirability

    This mainly happens with romantic relationships, but can also pertain to certain types of characters, for example being the ingenue at a party that everyone wants to be around according to the game material.

    Rejection Surrounding Status and Fame

    This mainly happens with people portraying celebrities, heroes or people of importance to a setting, when they are not treated as such by their co-players.

    Rejection Surrounding Authority and Power

    Shorter participants for example are often not taken seriously in commanding positions and have to work harder to be listened to, as do younger and/or female-presenting participants.

    Rejection Surrounding Expertise

    Skills that are not taken seriously, for example with older participants portraying hackers.

    Rejection Surrounding Athleticism

    Less able bodied or heavier participants may be given a hard time when portraying athletes or soldiers.

    Of course, we can never know why certain play did not happen for a certain participant. Maybe there was something else going on: it is always best to assume that people do not operate from bad faith. But for quite a lot of participants, the problems they encounter are too systemic to dismiss as bad luck.

    As said before, most people are simply unaware of the many cognitive biases they have. So when we engage with complex and stressful social situations like larp, it only makes sense that those biases partially take over. But not being deliberate does not make discrimination any less of a problem.

    Why This is Everyone’s Problem

    Lifting the characters in a larp is a collective responsibility, because the quality of the larp depends on it. Lifting the participants should also be a collective responsibility, because the quality of our communities depends on it.

    People who larp are vulnerable. We open up to other participants in many ways, and we have expectations of the experience that are often directly tied to aspects of our out-of-game personality.

    This close connection can make in-game rejection, mockery, or being left out of parts of the larp very hurtful, even more when the rejections are based on aspects of the participant’s appearance that are also a struggle or sometimes even a source of trauma in real life. This can create very bad bleed situations or triggers that may cause people to drop out of a larp (or even out of the community altogether) and perceive it in a very negative light afterwards.

    The loss of confidence can be long-term. For example, it took me years to regain the confidence to play a severely underprivileged character again after being mocked for “certainly not looking hungry” over and over again during a larp.

    This downward spiral will lead those rejected participants to be skeptical towards others attempting to engage with them, and to approach any new in-game relationship very warily. Consequently, they can come across as closed-off, resulting in even more rejection from the other participants for seeming passive. Internalised oppression is powerful, and negative feedback loops are easily entered. Many people I have encountered see themselves as a “lost cause” for certain types of play, for example playing on romance or leadership, and they will self-cast themselves away from it, even when they would find it interesting. It will take conscious effort and support from the community to undo that.

    Apart from the personal pain, basing in-game reactions to certain characters on the way the participant looks, as opposed to what would make sense for the character, will often hurt the larp as a whole.

    This has to do with the responsibility to play to lift.((Susanne Vejdemo, “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press, 2017.)) When we do not treat our co-participants in a way that makes sense for their characters, we are not lifting. Not only that, but the human tendency to copy social behavior will mean that others may follow suit, and eventually everyone is rolling their eyes as soon as the Duchess gives an order – no matter how competent and powerful she is established as being in the fiction. Sidelining character agency in this way undermines the plot and setting for all participants.

    Rejected relationships can be equally damaging to a larp, especially if the relationship is very central to the plot: if nobody wants to marry the king’s eligible bachelorette daughter, a lot of the tension will drop for the whole story, and not just for the participants involved.

    Counterpoints

    A counterpoint that has some merit to it is that you cannot force people to play with certain co-participants. First and foremost: you should of course never have to play with participants who make you uncomfortable, for example romantic play with a significant age gap, or participants you have a bad history with.

    However, if you are likely to refuse certain types of play due to out-of-game preferences, it is best to not rank those types of play as high priorities on a casting form – because you’re choosing not to play the pre-scripted relationships may threaten not just the experience of your co-participant but the structure of the whole larp. It doesn’t mean that you have to renounce (for example) playing romances, as it is usually possible to create that type of connection with someone you feel comfortable with during the larp itself, but you will avoid being cast in a huge dramatic romance with someone you will end up ignoring.

    That being said: try not to let yourself get away with your biases. As with everything in life, it is important to acknowledge our prejudices in larp and actively try to work against them. We should take a chance on playing with someone we do not immediately feel drawn to every now and then. They usually turn out to be awesome.

    Another good point is that chemistry is elusive and cannot be forced. Of course chemistry is real and valid, and a wish to play on that chemistry equally so. But chemistry is a somewhat vague concept, and we often decide too soon that it is absent. I think part of the reason for that is that chemistry is often confused with attraction, especially physical attraction, and players may decide there is none based on that. Chemistry is definitely something that can be built on and created to some extent. A famous example of “artificially” created chemistry are the “36 Questions” that will cause people to fall in love.((Arthur Aron, et al., “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (1997): 363-377.))

    For individual larpers, it can be a delicate task to balance the need to play with somebody with whom they feel chemistry with giving all co-participants a fair chance at the interactions they need to play their character. Like with many things in larp, being conscious of why we play in a certain way is half the battle: when we favour play with someone we know we have chemistry with instead of working to build that chemistry with a newcomer (or someone that we might not feel immediately drawn to), this should be a conscious decision.

    Many larpers have told me over the years that it is immersion-breaking for them when people look different from how they would expect their character to look. The key here is, of course, in the word “expectations.” Expectations are learned and cultural, and very much a product of the other stories we consume through media. And because they are learned they can also be unlearned, and adjusted in the fictional worlds we create so that larps can be more inclusive and empowering.

    But even in cases where there is an objective physical disconnect between participant and character, such as older participants portraying teenage characters and the other way around: people are always more important than larp. Nobody wants to be limited by their body and only be allowed to play certain characters because of it. It is sometimes telling how the same people who easily accept that someone with green paint on their face is a goblin struggle to treat the 50 year old participant as a young princess.

    Another Way of Thinking: Individual Participant Responsibility

    I believe that larp is full of unwritten social contracts. As a community, we should keep stressing that in-game relationships are an example of such a contract, whether written by ourselves in pre-play or by the larpwrights.

    Doing our best to approach other participants based on their character’s attributes instead of their real life attributes is also a social contract.

    People can be very dependent on their co-participants for enabling their play, and we are all at least partially responsible for each other’s larp. If we abandon a relationship during the runtime, or if we ignore the behaviors we should embody towards a character, there will usually be very little opportunity for that person to replace it. In other words, their larp will suffer immensely from our rejection or passivity.

    So my opinion is that when we create larps as well as when we play, we should keep in mind that:

    1. You owe it to your fellow participant to at least try to play the relationships as designed, of course barring safety issues.
    2. You owe it to them to communicate clearly and early if you really cannot play on the relationship as designed any further for whatever reason, so they do not waste their precious playtime needlessly pursuing it.
    3. You owe it to them to try to play something with them. If it turns out there is no way to be a loving, caring father-figure to them, is there anything else they could use? Could the relationship turn harsh and bitter? Could you become an ideological advisor in their political career? This way you at least spend some of your play-energy on co-creating their experience, which is part of what the relationship is about.
    4. You owe it to them to take them and their characters seriously.

    Managing the way participants interact, and finding solutions when something goes wrong, is a shared responsibility between the individual participant, the co-participants and the organizers. If one of these three does not do their part, the problem will persist.

    Of course all these things also apply to lifting others’ play in general and not just to people struggling due to the biases of co-participants. But if we all try to make it cool to play on the character instead of the participant, those biases will get way less of a foothold.

    Now that we have outlined the issue, let’s look at what we can actively do to improve our larps and behaviour. The following sections are a compilation of advice and ideas gathered over the years, both for organizers and for participants.

    Tips for Organizers: How to Limit Physical Discrimination at Your Larps

    Design and Casting

    • When designing a larp, think about the form that concepts like being important, being in charge, and being desirable take in your fiction, and how that may be expressed. It is very possible that this form will roughly be the same as in current Western society (youth is beautiful, being loud is being powerful, etc.) but it should not be an automatic choice.

    Maybe being quiet is seen as being thoughtful and thus important in your setting. Maybe age is attractive because it shows experience as a lover.

    If you have ideals about making the larp empowering for everyone, changing some of these expectations may be a tool to achieve that. It then must become an integral part of the design: if this is not clearly communicated before the larp and in the characters, and the active expressions related to it are not workshopped, participants will probably default to what they know.

    • When casting for a larp, take a chance on certain participants. It is tempting to cast people who seem like a perfect fit appearance-wise, but try to focus on who really wants to play on the character’s attributes. This precaution won’t help the people who have grown too afraid to even ask for certain types of play, but it is a step towards being more inclusive. If you find it hard to keep biases out of the picture, consider enlisting help to blind-cast based purely on participant motivations. When the organizers ignore participant appearance in casting, this will stress that inclusivity is a value of the larp and the participants are more likely to follow suit. Your casting has the power to be hugely empowering for participants, not in the least because it will provide the alibi they may need to take a leap of faith and play a challenging character.
    • The promotional materials should reflect the desired situation. If all photographs from previous runs that are picked for the website only show conventionally attractive participants, the idea that the larp is mainly meant for them will settle in the minds of the participants and make the larp harder for those that do not look like that.
    • Organizers should make it explicit in all aspects of the design that participants are expected to lift each other. Luckily, it is increasingly common to include a clause against discrimination based on out-of-game features, or texts like on the Inside Hamlet (2014-) website:((Participation Design Agency, “Is this Larp For Me?” Inside Hamlet, last accessed January 20, 2021.)) “All genders, sexualities and bodies are invited to act wicked and be beautiful at this larp.”

    However, a single written mention is not enough. Consider: are you also bringing attention to this issue in the workshops? Do people know if it is something they can contact the organizers about, and how? In short, how is the ideal “enforced” during the larp itself?

    Remember that most of the time, participants’ behavior is way more subtle than outright discrimination, and is often not a conscious decision. As an organiser, you have the power to raise your participant’s awareness by reminding them that the group expects fair, non-discriminatory play, and that they ought to keep an open mind.

    • Keep in mind that certain play cultures can greatly value “realism” in looks. When creating a larp with participants from many different cultures, this may influence their attitude towards other participants right from the beginning of the larp. It then becomes even more crucial to manage expectations and clearly communicate your values, especially when the designers’ own play culture is more aimed at inclusivity, which can lead to unspoken norms.
    • Make sure to also (or mainly) design platonic relationships. If romance and desire are not central to the themes and story of the larp, do not make it the central vector of the relationships you write.
    • Another tool for larpwrights, if workable with the design, is to refrain from defining the relationship too precisely. A way to do this is to stress what the characters do together instead of what they are to each other, and let them fill in the blanks: is the relationship romantic or a different form of closeness and intimacy?

    This freedom makes it much easier to make the relationship work. This method has been successfully used at larps like the Androids trilogy.((Do Androids Dream? (2017), When Androids Pray (2017), and Where Androids Die (2018) by Atropos Studios.))

    • Make sure to write multiple relationships with enough variation in their nature, both so participants have sturdy fallbacks when facing potential rejection, and so that the participants have examples of other types of relationships that do work for them, and that they can possibly turn the one that is not working out towards.
    • Communicate to the participants that playing a type of relationship (romance, for example), can take many forms. Romance doesn’t necessarily mean physically close or overly affectionate, and can always be shaped in a way all participants are comfortable with.

    Workshops and Preplay

    Good workshops are essential, especially if a larp is strongly based on pre-written relationships. Line-up workshops can help to make participants alert that for example character age does not always match participant age. If your larp involves a lot of authority relationships, practice how to play those. Even if romance is not central to the larp, it is still a good idea to create workshops around romance and, if applicable, touch.

    This will give people a chance to get to know their co-participants and get comfortable with each other. It is an opportunity to discover chemistry with strangers and to discuss expectations. If people are more relaxed with each other, they are more likely to try to make the larp better for those co-participants.

    If you really cannot integrate those types of workshops, at the very least make certain that there is sufficient time before the larp to get to know each other, and encourage your participants to talk to each other about their expectations.

    Whether it is an informal conversation or part of a workshop, explicit discussion among co-participants on what they expect and want to play creates confidence and makes it easier to hold each other accountable.

    • Chemistry is definitely something that can be workshopped. There are many workshops in use to build levels of comfort and understanding for larp, though not all of them well-documented. WILT (2019)((WILT (2019) by Karete Jacobsen Meland and Mads Jøns Frausig.)) is a larp with good examples of these workshops and is available online.

    If you want to invite your participants to develop physical chemistry, you can workshop around finding beauty in one another: for example to take one thing they find attractive about the other person and focus on that. Including these types of workshops stresses the fact that chemistry and play compatibility are to some extent malleable, and giving the participants ample time to find that connection increases the chance it will work out.

    On the Styx,((On the Styx (2019-) by Evolution Events.)) a relationship-heavy larp, is another example of a game with a set of workshop-exercises specifically dedicated to creating chemistry between the participants of characters in intense relationships. They involve a combination of extended eye contact, physical touch, and looking at and appreciating things about the other, and participants have reported a lot of benefit from those.

    If you want to invite your participants to develop general chemistry, you can workshop around what makes the characters fond of each other. For instance, as someone taught me, you can create a workshop to develop character relationships based on statements such as “you like/love me because…” (i.e. “You love me because I always remember to buy you a present after a business trip”). This is a technique that I now personally use in my own larps.

    I found that it neatly works around the physical because participants are the ones making decisions about their own characters’ desirable traits, which ultimately makes it easier for them to steer the focus away from their looks.

    •  If your larp is more of a sandbox, be aware that your participants are likely to be more nervous to step out of their typecast due to lack of alibi, and that many, if not most, will revert to personal preferences when picking co-participants for relationships and allegiances.

    Unfortunately there is no perfect way to create inclusive relations: having pre-written relationships means there is a chance for lack of chemistry or outright rejection that can hurt a lot, and letting participants make relationships during the workshops or preplay will make for more comfortable play but usually favor the well-connected and conventionally attractive participants.

    Keep these things in mind when designing and running team- and relationship-building workshops or other pre-larp activities. Try to take steps to mitigate this effect and address it directly, multiple times if needed: ‘it makes sense to write your character with your friends in mind, but please keep an open mind and involve participants you do not yet know as well. Do not underestimate the power of explicitly communicating values such as openness and personal responsibility to your participants.

    • Using badges, ribbons or other markers to opt in or out of play types has become somewhat commonplace over the years.

    Consider also using physical signifiers for characters to visibly convey meta-information about for example desirability or fame, so the participants are less likely to fall back on their own opinions instead of those of their character.((For example in Dangerous Liaisons (Muriel Algayres, 2019), where a ribbon signified physical attractiveness. For added fairness, the participants were unaware which characters had the physical attractiveness trait when choosing them.))

    • Be available to mediate if needed. Participants should know that being ignored by their relationships is something the organizers and/or safety persons are here to help with. Making sure there is a culture of trust on your larp is always important, but because voicing these types of concerns feels incredibly vulnerable, it will be tougher for them to trust you with this. By actively checking in with participants and asking them how it is going and how the relationships are working out, you can make it much easier for them to talk about difficult play rejections.

    Try to find a sweet spot between helping people change relationships that do not work for them, and making sure they give it a fair chance.

    Tips for Participants: How to Be a Decent Co-participant to Everybody

    Once the larp starts, the responsibility mostly switches to the participants. Here are some tips on creating positive and inclusive play.

    During Runtime

    • Keep calibrating and communicating with your co-participants. By expressing that a situation makes you nervous, should it be because you are afraid you will not be cool, smart, or pretty enough to do it justice, you can make people more alert and supportive. Give them a chance to help you.
    •  If you do get rejected, take a step back and get support from your co-participants or organizers. Try to not let the feeling fester, and focus on the fact that the rejection says more about them than about you, even if it often doesn’t feel like it: try to actively bring to mind larps in which a similar relationship went well for you.

    Then get help from the organizers to find the play aspects you needed from that person in another participant (for instance respect, someone to bully in-game, someone who admires you, etc.), or go to a trusted friend. If you wait until after the larp, it is too late to turn the experience towards the positive again.

    • Co-participants: be on the lookout for ways to be a fallback for what others drop. I am a big fan of the article “Do You Want To Play Ball” by Josefin Westborg and Carl Nordblom (2017), and even though this framework mostly addresses narrative play propagation, it is applied to characters as well.

    When looking for someone to swindle during the soiree it makes sense to immediately go to the charismatic boisterous man in the centre of attention, but is there also someone more in the fringes and does their name tag peg them as a wealthy industrialist? Not immediately going for the easy option is also a skill that can be trained. You can make someone’s larp and who knows, maybe you will discover your new favorite co-participant?

    • If bad chemistry persists, it can be a good choice to just play the relationship as written anyway, of course depending on the larp specifics and how much it will negatively influence your own larp. Sometimes, making a relation more performative and less intimate can work: the relation can be publically played out, which will lift your co-participant without putting you in a setting that might make you uncomfortable. You might be able to trick your mind and discover that, through performing the relation, you can actually develop an emotion or chemistry, even if it is not entirely based on the other person.
    • Remember that it is alright if some things just don’t fully work out, as long as you give everybody a chance to have enough good play. We sometimes put so much stock in building that overwhelming, highly immersive experience, that we forget that it doesn’t have to be perfect.
    • What if the participant of, for example, your very important boss, simply can not pull it off? It is important to still give them the appropriate reaction and lift them as far as is needed for their character to work. If you were really looking for a certain type of play from the relation, for example having an authority figure to look up to, you can then seek some of that play with other characters, rather than undermining your predesigned relation by counterplaying. If we are never given a chance to play something, we are never given a chance to grow and learn.
    • Depending on play culture, immersion can be valued over co-creation, or the other way around. And when different play cultures come together, misunderstandings arise. Do not assume that the other character understands you are, for example, ignoring them because your character is depressed and you want to immerse in that. It is better to have an extra out-of-character check-in than to have them wonder if your in-game lack of enthusiasm has to do with one of their perceived out-of-game qualities. This can also be a good moment to check how you can help them find other play, which is in this case even more a shared responsibility.
    • In a panel discussion, one of the participants suggested workshopping a non-intrusive phrase, similar to how we use and workshop safety- or escalation phrases. This phrase should communicate to a co-participant that they seem to be interacting based on the participant’s attributes instead of the character’s, or that they are ignoring an aspect they should lift. Their suggestion was to interject with the sentence “Don’t you know me/them, I am/they are…”, and remind them of the attribute they are ignoring. For example, “Don’t you know me? I am the commanding officer of this unit!” This, or a similar phrase, can be a way to make people aware of their behaviour without interrupting the larp
    • In larps that use a physical messageboard of sorts to request certain types of play, that board can be made explicitly available for asking people to adjust their attitude towards your character.

    It is not always easy to differentiate between what people would like (“I would like to have more torture scenes”) and what they need to be able to play their character (“people need to stop disobeying my orders or I can’t play the general”). However, it is essential to train that skill and stress the difference during workshops: the first is a soft offer that can be negated by, for example, the oppressor participants being out of energy, while the second is quite essential to the larp and should not just be dismissed.

    After the Larp

    Like with many other aspects of the larp, debriefings are important. Talking after successful in-game relationships in terms of what worked for you and why, can change future larp relationships for the better. You can use this information to get valuable insights in how you personally create chemistry with your co-participants and how you can turn the play around when you are struggling. As part of your individual after-larp process, try to reflect on what made it easy or hard to respect certain roles in terms of status and expertise. Be honest with yourself if that was (partially) to do with how the participant looked.

    In Conclusion

    Recently, the discourse about larp seems to shift from being very design theory-focused to putting more thought towards participant skills and what happens when we play. I think that is for the better for multiple reasons, not in the least because it stresses that a good larp is a shared responsibility between participants and designers.

    To find appropriate tools to approach a complex subject such as participant exclusion, we need to keep talking. We need to keep talking as participants, so that the fear and experience of being excluded can be something that is openly discussed, and so that we can watch out for each other. And we need to keep talking as designers, and make the existence of appearance-based prejudice one of the parameters when making design choices for our larps.

    By communicating clearly about desired behavior and values, we can work to truly make our larps as welcoming and empowering as we always hoped they were.

    Bibliography

    Aron, Arthur, et al. “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (1997): 363-377.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character.” Nordiclarp.org, March 2, 2015.

    Banaji, Mahzarin R., and Anthony G. Greenwald. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Delacorte Press, 2013.

    Kemper, Jonaya. “Wyrding the Self.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta, 2020.

    Kemper, Jonaya, Eleanor Saitta, and Johanna Koljonen. “Steering for Survival.”  In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta, 2020.

    Meland, Karete Jacobse, and Mads Jøns Frausig. 2019. “WILT.” Google Drive, last accessed April 24, 2021.

    Participation Design Agency. “Is this Larp For Me?” Inside Hamlet, last accessed January 20, 2021.

    Vejdemo, Susanne. 2017. “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.

    Westborg, Josefin, and Carl Nordblom. “Do You Want To Play Ball?” In Once Upon a Nordic Larp, edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand, 130-142. 2017.

    Cover photo: Image by johnhain on Pixabay.

    This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    van de Heij, Karijn. “We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps for Participants and Organizers.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).

  • Rules are Magic: What Larp can Learn From Narrative RPGs

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    Rules are Magic: What Larp can Learn From Narrative RPGs

    By

    Johan Dahlberg

    Introduction

    Rules for larps have traditionally been framed as having two purposes; safety and simulation. It is time to move beyond that. Rules are magic.

    In this essay, we argue that rules are an essential design element that can be used to fuel player experience rather than define its limits. We will do this by analyzing the design of pen and paper role-playing games (RPGs) that put story rather than simulation at their core, and exemplify how these games frame in-game interactions in terms of rules. We will explore how RPGs use rules to drive particular narratives, and promote specific emotional experiences, and compare and contrast this to how similar effects are achieved in classical larp design.

    We conclude that the application of simple rules, such as those found in narrative RPGs, can be used to create the emergent narratives and the emotional experiences many seek in larp. Finally, we propose a design tool for creating larp rules with this focus.

    The Narrative Revolution

    Traditionally in RPGs, the game master invents a story to lead the players through. They will adapt underway to respond to player actions but, in essence, a so-called ‘adventure’ is planned out ahead of time. This way of thinking about narratives is challenged by RPGs emerging from the American indie scene, such as the ones we will highlight below: Apocalypse World,((Baker, D. Vincent, and Meguey Baker. 2016. Apocalypse World 2nd Edition. Lumpley Games.)) My Life with Master,((Czege, Paul. 2003. My Life with Master. Half Meme Press.)) and Ten Candles.((Dewey, Stephen. 2015. Ten Candles. Cavalry Games.)) These games shine a light on the way rules can be used to support and create narratives. Collectively we will call them narrative RPGs.

    The traditions of RPGs and larps have developed side by side, and we believe that by studying narrative RPGs, we can gain insights into how to design experience-centric rules and meta techniques for Nordic larp, where the rules themselves are fundamental in forming the player experience. Narrative RPGs furthermore form a lens through which rules may be more easily studied: firstly, the rules are written down and explained in a way that a person previously unfamiliar with the game can understand. Secondly, since the designer is, in general, not present to explain how the game is played, they lean less on culture and more on the written rules themselves; in laying the groundwork for the experiences they aim to create.

    What is a Rule?

    We need rules in order to find beauty in playing together, as “they provide a framework for moments of delight to emerge.”((Stenros, Jaakko, and James Lórien MacDonald. 2020. “Beauty in Larp.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by In Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, and Mia Makkonen, 296–307. Solmukohta.)) Stenros and MacDonald make the analogy of football. The rules of football do not call for specific acts of athleticism, but they provide the context in which those acts can occur. In the same way, rules structure play in larp, to a degree where without explicit or implicit rules, play would not be possible.

    We need rules for a number of reasons. One, is to know what the boundaries of play are, rules for physical, emotional, or psychological safety. A typical rule of physical safety is that you are not allowed to hit your co-player in the head with your boffer sword. These types of rules will not be discussed in this essay. The second type of rules forms the foundation for how we play together. They can often be boiled down to statements of, when A, then do B. For example, when you have been hit two times with a boffer then act as if you are injured or dying. Or, when you touch hands with someone in front of the face, then interpret the action as kissing. Making conscious decisions about these types of rules are crucial to a good larp design.

    This is especially true because, not only do rules dictate what should happen when a particular event occurs, they also make these things happen by forming affordances for interaction. That is, guiding the players into which actions are possible, and expected to be taken within the game. Rules may be diegetic or non-diegetic, the consequences of which have previously been explored by e.g. Nordgren((Nordgren, Andie. 2008. “High Resolution Larping: Enabling Subtlety at Totem and Beyond.” In Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 91–101. Ropecon ry.)) and Dahlberg.((Dahlberg, Johan. 2019. “High Resolution Larp Revisited.” August 28, 2019. https://nordiclarp.org/2019/08/28/high-resolution-larp-revisited/))

    In this essay we focus on rules that are intended to create particular narratives and promote emotional experiences. Rules have been discussed in the context of larp before, but under different headlines. A snapshot of the current understanding of rules from a larp design perspective is gleaned in Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences.((Koljonen, Johanna, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, eds. 2019. Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost.)) Two chapters in this book are of particular interest: “Designing the Mechanics You Need”((Wilson, Danny. 2019. “Designing the Mechanics You Need.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen. Landsforeningen Bifrost.)) and “Meta-Techniques.”((Westerling, Anna, and Anders Hultman. 2019. “Meta-Techniques.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, 262–68. Landsforeningen Bifrost.)) Both these texts take a practical perspective on rules, and see rules as a part of the design. We are interested in how rules can form the core of the design. “Being a game designer is painting with rules and with causality to limit the possible choices that the players and their characters can make.”((Koljonen, Johanna. 2011. “On Games: Painting Life With Rules.” Nordic Larp Talks Copenhagen. March 1, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOVf06NCBGQ.)) This quote by Johanna Koljonen goes to the heart of the scope of rules as we explore them in this essay. Following Koljonen’s painting metaphor we might say that we are interested in how motifs emerge depending on the colors and tools used by the painter.

    We do not aim to provide a definitive definition or theory of rules as they apply to larp. Rather, we will explore the topic and conclude with a method of rule design that can be used as part of the larp designers’ toolbox.

    Rules and Meta-techniques

    To a large extent, the foundation of rules as they are used in larps can be found in RPGs. These, in turn, emerged from strategy games simulating military combat. The goal of this type of rule set is to simulate a set of circumstances (to a degree deemed pleasurable by the designer). This provides a form of ‘physics engine’ for the fictional world. In a larp context, rules initially served roughly the same purpose: to simulate that which was not possible to be fully enacted by the players, in particular, combat. From there, they have evolved to serve a wide number of functions.

    Historically, many larps in the Nordic tradition have opted for a rules-light approach, relying on a shared cultural understanding of ‘the way the game is played’ to dictate the activities possible within the game. There are however exceptions to this; in particular, games based on the popular RPG Vampire: the Masquerade((Rein•Hagen, Mark, Guy Davis, Jason Felix, and Leif Jones. 1998. Vampire: The Masquerade. White Wolf Game Studio.)) and its derivatives, have (at least in a Swedish context) integrated RPG-like character sheets with attributes, skills and powers marked down.

    In this essay we will consider rules as a term both for what has traditionally been presented as rules (e.g. combat rules), and what Nordic larp calls meta-techniques. The difference between the two is mostly one of context.

    The term meta-techniques was introduced around 2007.((“Nordic Larp Wiki – Meta-Technique.” n.d. Nordiclarp.org. Accessed August 28, 2020. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Meta-technique.)) There is no generally agreed upon definition, in the Nordic larp community, of what a meta-technique is. In general, it refers to any action in a game that is not fully present inside the diegesis. The widespread adoption of meta-techniques leads to an understanding in the larp community that this type of construct could be an essential design element. Much of the innovation of rules as a vehicle of narrative has happened in this space.

    One reason that the term meta-technique gained such popularity, over the more general term rule, might be that it felt less “gamey.” This allowed larps with higher artistic ambitions to set themselves apart from their lowbrow cousins in both larp and RPG. Thus, the term rule has mostly been reserved for things like combat simulation. The presentation of certain types of rules in conjunction with the presentation of the larp, for example, the presence of meta-techniques or extensive combat rules, sends a strong cultural signal of what type of larp is being presented and consequently which players it tries to attract.

    Building Narratives through Rules

    Many different types of stories can be told in both larps and RPGs. While these narratives can emerge from pre-game materials, active runtime game-mastering, and player actions; rules in themselves can be made to shape the character actions and thereby create the narratives.

    Apocalypse World (AW) is a narrative RPG that takes place in a largely undefined post-apocalyptic setting, leaning on the player’s shared understanding of post-apocalyptic tropes to set the scene. It is a world inhabited by characters such as the Angel, the Hardholder, and the Gunlugger. The general feeling conveyed by the game is that of high octane post-apocalyptic drama in the vein of Mad Max.

    Rules Directing Fiction

    The rule set of AW is centered around the concept of “moves.” These are made by the game master (GM) as well as the players. Moves are rules that are triggered when certain narrative conditions are met. They focus on fictional outcomes, as opposed to the simulation of the success or failure of a particular action. An example of what a move might look like is: if you meet the wasteland prophet, they will tell you an uncomfortable truth about you or someone you love.

    Person in Apocalyptic gear with a facemask with the names of D. Vincent Baker & Meguey Baker and Apocalypse World
    Cover of Apocalypse World 2nd Edition. Photo courtesy of D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker.

    The role-playing conversation thus flows back and forth between the players and the GM, mediated by the rules. The type of narratives that emerge from this conversation comes from the players’ shared understanding of the tropes of the genre, as well as from the way the rules are written. An example of a player move that steers the fiction is the one associated with the character archetype “the battlebabe” and is called “visions of death.” The rules state that, when they enter battle they have to roll the dice, and, on a success, they get to name one non-player character who will live and one non-player character who will die. Note that this rule puts constraints on the fiction: the player that has rolled successfully does not get to choose to not have someone die, nor can the GM overrule the decision on who lives and who dies. When the battlebabe fights, there is always a risk that people will die. In this way, the rules show us that in the fiction of AW, life is cheap.

    In current Nordic larp design, rules are sometimes used to direct narratives, or enact a particular storyline. The most direct way being to use a script; having a specific set of scenes that are played out, one after the other. Another way of achieving this, meanwhile hiding the script from the player, is through the concept of Fate.((“Nordic Larp Wiki – Fate.” n.d. Nordiclarp.org. Accessed August 19, 2020. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Fate.)) The fate mechanic involves providing players with instructions for what their characters should do at certain points in the fiction, for example, “when you meet your arch-enemy, you will challenge them to a duel.” These fates can be interconnected into a fate web, where one fate depends on the previous activation of a fate, in an effort to shape a specific storyline.

    A similar effect is found in the larp A Nice Evening with the Family (2007), in which a number of theater plays are re-interpreted in larp form. Here, players read the play’s manuscript before the game starts, and decide together on how to play out the story. However, no explicit rules are in place here other than the instruction to interpret the original play: the larp leans on the players’ shared improvisation to ensure that the story is enacted in the spirit of the original play. How far from the original manuscript this deviates is up to the player’s decisions prior to, and during, the game.

    The reason why it is interesting to compare the fate mechanic, A Nice Evening with the Family, and AW, is because of their different approaches to the concept of story. Fate mechanics try to steer play in a particular direction without revealing the big picture to the players beforehand. In A Nice Evening with the Family the narrative is firmly directed by the scripts, in such a way that players can roughly know beforehand what will happen, and can help each other steer in that direction. In AW, neither players, nor the GM, knows beforehand what the story will be. Still, the rules allow the player to make some probable assessments of what components the narrative will contain.

    Co-Creation through Rules

    In fact, AW goes beyond the moves detailed in the previous section, when it comes to not planning a particular storyline. The game master is specifically instructed not to plan neither a world nor a storyline, but to let it emerge from the characters’ in-game actions, and from the rules. A core concept of the game is presented as part of the GMs “agenda,” and that is to “play to find out what happens.” This tenet of the game separates it from many other RPGs, and indeed also from many larps, as it expressly states not to use the game as a way of telling a set story, but to let the narrative emerge from playing the game.

    One way this agenda is enacted is through game rules. Part of these rules are the GM “principles”, including things such as:

    • “Barf forth apocalyptica”
    • “Name everyone, make everyone human”
    • “Look through the cross-hairs”

    These rules have different functions. For example “barf forth apocalyptica”, is an aesthetic instruction formulated not as a suggestion, but as a rule. The game should be filled with the stuff of apocalyptic imagination. Barren landscapes, grotesque cults, and broken souls.

    Other rules take a more direct role in shaping the narratives. Let’s for example consider the interplay of “name everyone, make everyone human” and “look through the cross-hairs. The first rule instructs the GM that every NPC should be a human of flesh and blood, with motivations of their own and a name. The second instructs the GM that nothing is permanent in the world of AW. Places and people should perish, and the GM should be liberal with letting them go down in flames. These two rules, together, create narratives where there is a real sense of loss when the characters eventually lose those that they desperately try to hold on to. Note again that these are presented as rules. This way, decisions are transferred from the GM to the rules. It pushes the GM clearly into a certain narrative style, while still allowing them to “play to find out what happens.” This way, the rules even out the co-creative balance between players and GM.

    In larp, co-creation outside of the actions of the characters has mostly been seen either in allowing players to create their own characters or factions within the game world, or by directed workshops prior to the game. The first approach is common in sandbox larps, where the designer only aims to provide a canvas for the players to fill with their own ideas. This is for example the case in the Swedish madmaxian post-apocalyptic larp campaign Blodsband Reloaded.((Blodsband (2014-).)) The second approach has been used by games such as Turings Fråga (2013-) (eng. Turing’s Question), a game about what it means to be human, centered around the exercise of distinguishing humans from artificial intelligence proposed by Alan Turing.((Turing, A. M. 1950. “I.—Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind: a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy LIX (236): 433–60.))

    Some close larp-cousins to the principles of AW, where narrative co-creation is framed in a rule-like manner, can be found in general play-style instructions such as play to lose((Piironen, Willer, and Kristoffer Thurøe. 2014. “An Introduction to the Nordic Player Culture.” In The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen, and Jon Back, 33–36. Knutpunkt.)) and play to lift.((Vejdemo, Susanne. 2017. “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.)) While sometimes these are explicitly presented as part of the instructions provided to players prior to a larp, they are often taken more as an implicit part of Nordic larp culture.

    This approach to stories in narrative RPGs questions the GMs role as the main director of the game. Instead, it encourages all participants (GM and players alike) to be equal contributors to the activity. A similar view does exist in larp: the designers may set the implicit and explicit boundaries of the game, but the players themselves are equally important – if not more- informing the actual experience.

    By understanding the role rules play in forming fiction, we can both turn players into more active co-creators within the narrative framework, and form a bridge between ‘anything goes style’ sandbox games and the more tightly controlled “scripted” larps. The affordances provided by explicit rules make the narrative direction of the game clearer, and might be a way to fulfil the agenda of “play to find out what happens” in the context of larp design.

    Rules Deconstructing Genre

    Image of a person in a prison with a monstrous person on the outside of the cage with the words My Life with Master: a role-playing game by Paul Czege
    Cover of My Life with Master. Photo courtesy of Paul Czege.

    One way of understanding the role of the RPG or larp designer is as an interpreter of genre. By deconstructing the type of narrative they want to create, they may use this understanding to make rules from which the desired type of stories emerge.

    In the RPG My Life With Master,((Czege, Paul. 2003. My Life with Master. Half Meme Press.)) the players take on the roles of minions to an evil mastermind, in a Victorian horror setting. The game is intended to play out as a story of gothic horror, as understood by the movie genre.((Costikyan, Greg. 2003. “My Life with Master.” Internet Archive. September 22, 2003. https://web.archive.org/web/20120716191105/http://costik.com/weblog/2003_09_01_blogchive.html#106427832498370748)) The minions live a life of fear and self-loathing, and because of that instill fear in the town folk, until one day they, through their love for the people in town, find the courage to overthrow and kill their master.

    Instead of using the rules to simulate a realistic world, the attributes and rules are based around a literary deconstruction and understanding of gothic horror narratives. Each game begins by creating the “master,” an evil mastermind that everybody fears.((Darlington, Steve. 2003. “Review of My Life with Master – RPGnet RPG Game Index.” September 8, 2003. https://www.RPG.net/reviews/archive/9/9681.phtml)) The master is created through a step-by-step system, and once the master is created, the player characters and local townspeople can be created in a similar fashion and in relation to the master.

    The player characters are torn between their fear for their master, and their love of the townspeople. This is mirrored in game, through the main character attributes: the only attribute of the master is the ‘fear’ they cause, while the townspeople are represented by the single attribute of “reason.” Meanwhile, the players use the three attributes of “self-loathing,” “weariness,” and “love” in different combinations, depending on whether they try to resist their master, follow through on their commands, or seek out the love of someone in town. These attributes fluctuate during the game depending on successful or failed dice rolls, naturally climbing towards a situation where the player’s character can finally dare to oppose and kill their master, thereby ending the game. The game attributes thus become a representation for the feelings of the player’s character, and the rules work to naturally create a narrative that follows the genre format.

    While it is common for larps to replicate literary or movie genres (e.g. Fortune & Felicity (2017), College of Wizardry (2014-)), this is usually accomplished through written larp visions, descriptions of the inspiring genre, and suggested inspirational reading and movies. This can often lead to a lot of reading for the players, while still risking to be ambiguous in how the players interpret the material. Even though it is often non-explicit, and arguably often non-intentional, these suggestions are mirrored in the game through rules, with different degrees of success. One successful example can be seen in how the deliberately short healing time and impossibility to die in the post-apocalyptic Blodsband Reloaded.((Blodsband (2014-).)) leads to fast and fierce pulp-battles where it’s easy to choose the violent solution.

    A more explicit deconstruction of literature, and reinterpretation as rules can be found in Inside Hamlet (2014-), where the game wanted to recreate a classic revenge-tragedy, beginning slowly but where a majority of players die at the end. The rule system for making this happen was quite simple: The game was separated into three acts, where different levels of violence were acceptable. In the first act guns could not be drawn, and violence would not happen in public. In the second act guns could be drawn but not fired, and violence would lead to injury but not death. In the third act all conflict needed to end in at least one death. This explanation through rules leads to an understanding of risk for all players, and also to an understanding of the intended pacing of the game. Even if you would not pick up on the intentions, the rules forced all players into pacing their life-death choices according to the designers’ intention.

    While the examples above discussed re-implementations of older rules, a new rule system can open up completely new forms of play, sometimes echoing well beyond their original use case. While not explicated as rules, the development of Ars Amandi((Wieslander, Emma. 2004. “Rules of Engagement.” In Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, edited by Markus Montala and Jaakko Stenros, 181–86. Ropecon ry.)) for the larp Mellan Himmel och Hav (2003) was an important part in opening up the game to romantic and sexual narratives. Previously, these types of scenes had been performed mainly as off game discussions or awkward semi-out-of-character roleplaying. In making and presenting a rule system for romantic touch and sex in a way that could be agreed on beforehand by all players, the game made it possible to use this as a central theme of the larp. In this way, a rule created the possibility to play in genres such as explorations of gender roles and Jane Austine romance, and also opening up the larp design discussion more broadly to topics such as romance, sexuality, and gender.

    Emotional Experiences through Rules

    Both RPGs and larps aim to create powerful emotional experiences. There is no silver bullet to achieve this, but rules can form a crucial part in enabling these experiences. While the rules themselves do not create the experiences, they can actively set the stage to coax them forth.

    Rules that create a feeling of tension are found in most RPGs, where the outcome of a dice-roll can determine if the dragon is slain or not. What about rules that conjure up other emotions? One example of a rule set that in itself creates a sense of tragedy, horror, and hopelessness is found in the narrative RPG Ten Candles.

    Image of people in a dark place with flashlights with monsters lurking
    Cover of Ten Candles. Photo courtesy of Stephen Dewey.

    Ten Candles is a tragic horror RPG meant to be played in one session in a dark room around ten tea candles lit by the players at the beginning of the session.((Dewey, Stephen. 2015. Ten Candles. Cavalry Games.)) The world has been bereft of light, and some time ago “they” arrived out of the darkness. This is a game without any hope of survival.

    A simple dice mechanic determines the outcome of challenging and oppositional situations. Anytime a dice-roll is failed, one of the candles are darkened, and the game moves on to the next scene. Additionally, if a candle is darkened accidentally, the scene also ends. This continues until there is only one candle left and the characters meet their final fate. At character creation, players write down traits associated with the characters on index cards. These are then literally burned in order to allow for the re-rolling of dice. At that point, the trait in question is to be played out in the scene, for good or ill.

    This connection between dice-roll mechanics and the physical manifestation of the encroaching darkness serves to create a very strong feeling of tragedy and horror. The random element creates a sense of agency for the player, even if the odds are stacked against them in the long run. Establishing this sense of control over the situation is crucial in building to the final end of the mechanic, namely gradually removing agency as the situation becomes more grim.

    In larp, an example of coupling a randomness mechanic to an activity with the potential for great emotional impact is the “lottery of death mechanic” used in Just a Little Lovin’ (2011-).((Waern, Annika. 2012. “Just a Little Lovin’, and Techniques for Telling Stories in Larp.” June 12, 2012. https://annikawaern.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/just-a-little-lovin-and-techniques-for-telling-stories-in-larp/)) This larp builds its narrative around the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic  in the 1980’s New York LGBTQ+ community. In the lottery of death players get to pick a number of tickets to place into the lottery based on the sexual risk taking of their characters. The more risk they perceive that their character has taken, the more tickets. Waern (2012) describes the meta-scenes in which the lottery takes place as “among the most emotional in the game.”

    Why is the emotional impact of this scene so great? From a rules point of view, the agency of the players (deciding how many tickets to pick) coupled with the chance element in who lives and who dies creates a strong emotional engagement in the scene. Had the outcome been pre-planned, it is possible that it would have been easier for the players to anticipate it and prepare for it emotionally, thus limiting its emotional impact.

    A game using similar rules when it comes to character creation as those seen in Ten Candles, and that couples this to a gradual loss of humanity in crisis, is The South Will Rise Again (2018). This is a larp based on the tropes of zombie-survival; the characters struggle with each other, putting them at peril to the outside zombie threat. In this larp, the characters are created by writing down things like the names of friends, things you love, and your connections to other players on index cards. In the rules, the players are instructed how to write this down in a way that imbues each thing with backstory and emotions. Throughout the game, these are then used as betting chips to win conflicts and survive the zombie threat. The player(s) with the most cards wins the conflict, but all betted cards are lost. In a meta-scene, each lost card is read, and in quiet contemplation, dropped to the floor. That way, all characters gradually lose their humanity in order to survive, and the rules drive the feeling of loss in the game.

    These examples highlight how rules can be used to elicit specific emotional responses. The excitement that randomness mechanics elicit is one that we see in many RPGs. The quintessential moment of, “will we slay the dragon or not?” But the examples above show how other emotions, such as sorrow, horror or loss of one’s humanity can also be targeted. Where the rules guide play towards inevitable defeat but create emotionally resonant narratives along the way. A stronger understanding of how rules and emotions interact should prove a worthwhile effort for the entire larp community.

    A Design Tool for Narrative Rules

    In this essay we have discussed how rules go beyond simulation and safety in Nordic larp. They can direct narratives and enable emotional experiences. We have done so through the lens of three narrative RPGs, with which we have exemplified different aspects of this topic. We have shown how the rules of Apocalypse World direct the game towards particular types of narratives. With the example of My Life With Master we have explored how its rules deconstruct genre and provide a framework for the construction of novel emergent narratives of the same type. Finally, we have demonstrated how the rules of Ten Candles give rise to specific emotional experiences of horror and tragedy.

    We believe this understanding of rules as a narrative device can be useful for making larps. One suggestion for how to design larp rules is the following method:

    1. Decide on the type of story you wish to tell with your larp. Then deconstruct it into its basic elements. Focus on how and why things happen, not on where and when: avoid thinking in terms of set scenes that should occur during the course of the game.
    2. For every element of the deconstruction, make sure to connect it to at least one rule. Try to make the basic assumptions of how the game is played explicitly instead of leaning on a shared cultural understanding.
    3. Iterate, polish and minimize the rule set to only contain that which actually drives the narrative. While at the same time taking care not to place an unnecessary cognitive load on the players in remembering and following the rules.

    Let us apply this method to a small example. Let us say that we want to make a two-person game about a background checker interviewing a political candidate to find out if they have any skeletons in the closet (which of course they have). We want to create a sense of tension and a feeling of playing a game of cat and mouse.

    The elements that we find in deconstructing this situation are:

    1. an increasingly tense conversation
    2. Secrets being laid bare, one by one
    3. An emotionally escalating situation for both parties: for the interviewer a sense of revelation, for the interviewee shame and a fear of being found out

    What rules may we construct that connect to the things we describe above? We may decide to set the following rules. Which element they connect to is denoted in parenthesis.

    • The game is played sitting on opposite sides of a table, and takes place as a conversation. (A)
    • Before the start of the game, decide who is the interviewer and the interviewee. The interviewee decides on three secrets for their character. They write them down on index cards, and place them face down on the table. (B)
    • Anytime your character lies during the game, you must cross your fingers in a way clearly visible to the other player. (B)
    • When you lock eyes, a staring contest is initiated (C). Whoever looks away first loses. If the interviewer wins, a card is revealed (B). If the interviewee wins, a card is torn, and the secret will consequently not be revealed.
    • The game ends when every secret has been revealed or torn.

    Our intention here is not to give you a fully playable game, but to illustrate the method described above. Using this method, and the example, we encourage you to experiment with larp rules and invent your own methods for creating them!

    Rules, Rituals, and Magic

    While rules can certainly constitute almost the entire design of a game, of course, there are many other factors that also play a part. For the sake of argument, in this text we strip things down to their base components. In reality, a complete and enjoyable game, most often, needs more than rules.

    When Stenros and MacDonald discuss beauty in larp, they highlight that the larp as played is “emergent play” arising in the present, and how “larp magic” often arises from serendipitous moments. This magic cannot be decided on in advance. In fact, we argue that it is counterproductive to do so. The role of the designer is more akin to that of a gardener than that of a playwright. A key part of growing the garden of larp is putting its rules into place. Can you walk on the lawns of this garden? Are you allowed to eat the fruit? Is it mandatory to take your shoes off and walk in the stream?

    Conjuring up larp magic is not an easy task. Like a ritual, it requires the chalk circles to be drawn just right. The right words need to be spoken precisely at the stroke of midnight. If you follow those rules, then, finally, you might just get a glimpse of it.

    Acknowledgements

    The authors would like to thank our editor Nadja Lipsyc for her helpful feedback in the development of this text, and Sara Engström for reading early and late versions of the manuscript and suggesting improvements.

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    Cover photo: Photo by Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay.

    This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Dahlberg, Johan, and Jon Back. 2021. “Rules are Magic: What Larp can Learn From Narrative RPGs.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).