Nordic Larp

Author: Evan Torner

  • Emergence, Iteration, and Reincorporation in Larp

    Published on

    in

    Emergence, Iteration, and Reincorporation in Larp

    Written by

    Embodied fiction has an annoying habit of taking on a life of its own. Real events in larp surge into fictional constructs like waves on a beach, altering its surface. Why then do we need to separate fiction and reality in our larp theory? Larp has been re-framed a number of times since its proper inception in the early 1980s: as a medium of pure escapism, as an artform, as a powerful means of immersion, as a form of interaction design. My goal here is to re-frame it yet again, this time in terms of a theory that combines narrative and play, in-game and out-of-game experiences.

    Despite decades of talking about tensions between larp narratives and larp experiences, we remain dissatisfied with our theory on the topic. Larpwright Juhana Pettersson (2017) recently posed the question: “What do we mean when we talk about story in larp? … [The] concepts we have for talking about the experience of story are weak” (83-84). The aesthetic framework for us to address what designers and players witness as the “experience of story” requires further articulation, which this essay provides. Specifically, it dwells on three ritualistic concepts: emergence, iteration, and reincorporation.((Almost immediately, one is prompted to think of studies of religious rituals. Indeed, there is a productive framework to be found in larps as rites of passage. Victor Turner, referring to Arnold van Gennep, talks of rites of passage as being divided into “separation, transition, and incorporation.” There is not space here to delve into ritual theory, but this author confesses that, indeed, a pregnant relation between narrative, ritual, and larp does indeed persist.))

    Theorists and practitioners of role-play often use the verb “emerge” to describe what happens to both narrative and player activity during a game: that the larp design elements and player embodiment enable the emergence (McGonigal 2003) of a thing both not wholly unexpected and nevertheless intensely engaging. Yet this basic synthesis itself remains underexamined. We use the verb “emerge” and the adjective “emergent” as though these were natural processes, rather than carefully cultivated within the design. Furthermore, the spontaneity of emergence in larp remains in dialogue with its counterpart: iteration, or the rhythmic repetition and slight variation of the same element throughout a game. Iteration permits the emergent content to interact productively with the intended themes of the larp. Finally, one can attribute much of the emotional impact of a given game or campaign when an emergent or iterative element from a previous part of a larp returns in a transformed state at a much later point, what I call reincorporation. Together, these three processes form a basis on which we might aesthetically appraise a larp: How did its design facilitate the production of new, unpredictable, thematically appropriate content? What story and/or embodied elements built upon each other to reinforce the themes or content of the larp? How was a component of the larp reincorporated in a narratively satisfying way?

    Some Examples

    Rather than get too esoteric too quickly, I would like to invoke a few play examples for reference. The first example involves a pervasive game of Steve Jackson’s Killer (1982), known to some as Assassin, which I ran in early 2000 in Iowa City, IA, USA for a group of 12 high-school students. Each player had the thinnest of characters: a terrorist cell and an Interpol squad trying to stop them. Every day, the terrorist cell had to drop off fake bomb components at a location, and every day, Interpol agents would follow me, as the gamemaster, to the spot for the handoff. The game correspondingly led to actual car chases, trespassing, and several close-calls with the law and authorities, although none of the above were intended. The second example involves a 2001 Vampire: The Masquerade larp of an auction among vampires of a living statue. Halfway through the runtime, a player got bored and ran off with the primary artifact in question. Early accusations regarding who stole it faded into player consternation about what had happened to the bored player and, indeed, why they had chosen to ruin many larpers’ evening, concluding in the scapegoating of the bored player’s character for most of the ills troubling that particular vampire community. The third example involves the 7th run of magic school larp New World Magischola (2017) in Williamsburg, VA, USA. One of the wizard professors unleashed, as a plot device, so-called “murder furniture,” including a “murder chair” that attacked people. NPCs quickly took a liking to the idea, and the plotline got so far as a player dressed up as a “murder lamp” being a character’s date to the closing ball. The fourth example involves the first 2015 run of international Nordic larp Inside Hamlet, in which my character Colonel Perdue, leader of the Stormguard –– the castle peacock regiment –– was killed by the head of the Companions –– the castle courtesans –– for choosing to stay and guard the castle but not King Claudius… and not run away with her. She in turn was killed by a fellow Stormguard member as revenge for being slighted earlier, which my character had misunderstood in his final gasping moments as showing loyalty to him. Each example above demonstrates relatively simple instances of player and character outcomes being affected by not entirely predicted paths of play. The rest of this essay is devoted to finding a language to apprehend those outcomes.

    Emergence

    Larp design incentivizes human behavior to produce some level of story out of the inherent messiness of human interaction and information distribution. To many, it looks like chaos. As Andrew Rilstone (1994) reminds us, however, “from this chaos, a more or less well realized story emerges” (11). The verb “to emerge” means to move out or away from something else. In the case of larp, embodied play of characters in a fictional reality produces a constantly shifting field of dynamics that move the game in countless directions away from not only the initial game state, but also within and beyond the scope of designer intention. In fact, the main way we can appraise emergent play is by seeing if it is both unexpected yet fits the design and themes of the game as implicitly agreed upon between the players and the organizers, but does not escalate into dangerous physical, mental, or legal territory.  My taxonomy poses the following four questions of each distinct moment of embodied larp play as the game unfolds:

    • Does the emergent play directly coincide with the themes, tropes, and even design intentions of the larp while staying within bounds of player safety?Cultivated emergence is emergent play delivering what is promised and expected within the game’s design.
    • Does the emergent play generally fit the themes & tropes of the larp but doesn’t stem directly from the design? Uncultivated emergence is unexpected by all parties involved, frequently including the players themselves. It prioritizes the impact of free play over the design itself, while still holding to the agreed-upon themes of the game.
    • Does the emergent play distract and diverge from the themes & tropes of the larp while not endangering anyone?Divergent emergence divorces itself from much of the intended content of the larp, often as the result of overt player action.
    • Does the emergent play, regardless of fitting the design and themes, actively escalate potential real-life dangers to the players? Unleashed emergence is the classic depiction of play getting “out of hand,” from the Hollywood-spun delusions of Mazes and Monsters (1982) to the in-game bullying that escalates to actual bullying.

    Players constantly negotiate the results of their own play with respect to the design of the larp. The fictional alibi of terrorists and Interpol in the Killer example led to parents real-life scolding their children and said children hiding from the police. This is unleashed emergence: incentives of the game escalated its stakes beyond designer intention and player safety to the detriment of all involved.((Although not necessarily outside the established themes of the larp. Indeed, real stakes heighten the sense of risk already inherent in the fictional scenario. What is endangered, of course, are players’ physical bodies and records with the law.)) The Vampire: the Masquerade example is a banal instance of divergent emergence: when an event produces story and player effects that do not align with any of the themes or intentions of the larp, for good or for ill. The NWM example could be construed as uncultivated emergence: murder furniture taking on a life and plotline of their own fits within the valence of Harry Potter-esque fictional tropes and provides play opportunities and adversity for larpers present.  Inside Hamlet delivers what one might even call cultivated emergence: the larp was specifically designed for characters to kill each other in the final Act –– and not before –– thanks to tragic misunderstandings and doomed choices made during play beforehand.

    This emergence model is agnostic as to whether or not events are diegetic or non-diegetic –– there are only events –– or whether one is talking about an individual character’s story or the whole story of the larp, as everything is presumed to feed into everything else. A larp’s events do not so much demarcate diachronic passage through time (as with coming-of-age rituals, weddings, funerals, etc.) than create spaces of synchronic play that offer commentary on the game and players. Within a delineated 10-day period, as in Killer, players engage themselves in an elaborate cat-and-mouse game of murder, and then their in-game and out-of-game actions are consigned to a murky, inaccessible past. My character’s epic Act III death in Inside Hamlet re-framed my player memory of a lackluster Act I to be actually prefiguring later player-character experiences. Events in a larp fit into complex systems–– systems that are “unpredictable but non-random” (Montola 2004) –– that then produce fuzzy narrative, physical, play, and social outcomes. But whereas Montola (2004) frames role-playing as oscillating between order and chaos –– integrative and dissipative –– I see emergence as a pragmatic aesthetic phenomenon concerned with designer vision and the affordances and safety of a specific larp design. Events emerge from a larp during runtime, and players steer (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015) their play in their encounters with a mixture of diegetic and non-diegetic material, between interpretations of the design rules and personal whims.

    Iteration

    The design of a larp does not stop at emergence, however. Simply instigating and being surprised by both diegetic and non-diegetic events does not lend structure to a larp. That’s what iteration does. The repetition of a process or utterance, iteration takes emergent diegetic and non-diegetic facts and continues to bring them back in slightly different forms, so that player-characters can begin to narratively structure and even analyze emergent content. Players need reliable touchpoints and benchmarks to make sense of their play, with rituals and their variation critical to the flow and processing of information (Harviainen and Lieberoth 2011). Iteration from both the design and the players provides these touchpoints. Here, Eleanor Saitta’s (2012) temporality models of expansion, compression, and periodicity are useful: the rhythms of the larp design involve accentuating certain moments, shortening time in others, and “the manipulation of time that evokes the rhythms of everyday life, allows them to build, and then highlights how those rhythms change or break down.” (126) Iteration means such temporal repetition and manipulation become fine-tuned by both the designers and players over the course of the larp, with the latter often seeking the sort of variance to produce suspense and plot turning points, the former often seeking repetition as a maintenance of the larp’s core rhythms. Killer featured varied bomb-drop points, but the ritual of the drop-off remained refreshingly similar: a public space, an ambiguous package, a quietly watching terrorist player. Variations on the space and whether or not an Interpol player had also been following the drop-off became the main points of iteration on the emergent narrative. Sometimes the drop-off was quiet, introspective, and on a sunny day; other times leading to an intense gun battle at the drop of a hat. NWM iterated on the murder furniture, introducing it as an element and antagonist again and again until it became a central node in many players’ plotline. In each case, the reintroduction of the element or ritualization of a routine allowed player perspectives to form and in-game character strategies to coalesce.

    At its aesthetic core, iteration must maintain a delicate balance. Elements such as scenes, tropes, or characters can be repeated with variation, but too many times will instantiate the elements as an in-joke, rather than a weighty narrative component. Iterate too few times, however, and the elements in question do appear to be merely at the whim and caprice of the players and scenario, not the core experience of the larp. Iterating with little variation produces the effect of routine and ritual, whereas iterating with much variation produces outcomes of exception and arbitrariness. Good iteration allows designers and players alike to play with the themes of the larp without letting such thematic exploration deviate from a core, planned experience. Emergence with well-thought-out iterative mechanisms––act structures, daily routines, regular meta-scenes, recurring character motifs––gives the player space to chart their path through the story as it unfolds. But even themes and variation won’t clinch a narrative for a player without a sense of resolution.

    Reincorporation

    Reincorporation, or making something part of something else once more, remains one of the simplest and least appreciated aspects of role-playing aesthetics. As I’ve recently argued with respect to the literary-inspired PC game Planescape: Torment (Torner, forthcoming), reincorporation brings prior player actions and diegetic facts into meaningful dialogue with such actions and facts much later in the game’s runtime. Players feel as though they have had an impact on the narrative; that their decisions mattered. To reincorporate material from earlier in a larp into a later section is to create an arc that bridges over the chaos of emergence. Actual play could have been as messy and repetitive as one might expect, but the re-appearance of a disappeared letter, the familiar line from the beginning of the game delivered in different context, the fulfillment of a prophecy –– these tropes help structure and fulfill certain “promises” delivered earlier in the larp. Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979) remains a core reference regarding reincorporation:((See: http://story-games.com/forums/discussion/6122/games-that-actively-support-reincorporation)) improv actors regularly find common ground with role-players in creating meaning amidst the chaos of human collaborative creativity by taking statements or details from earlier and citing or re-casting them at the end.

    Larp reincorporation can appear in a plethora of forms, In Killer, reincorporation happened when two players of the game knew of each other’s secret identity from the very beginning of the game, but chose not to reveal what they knew until they were the very last two characters alive. A fact known to the players and game masters alike was then redeemed by a satisfying fake public gun battle. Vampire: the Masquerade could provide no satisfying reincorporation: there was to be an auction, and then emergent events decreed that there was none. We struggled to give the experience meaning as a result. NWM saw the murder lamp as a date to the school dance, a redemption of the complexity of the murder furniture, thought to be merely lethal mundane objects. Inside Hamlet took the slighted soldier’s anger from Act 2 and channeled it into a murder that would have ripple effects during the final hours of Elsinore. Each larp mentioned had to engage with the simple logic of whether or not objects and events from early on would then appear in the final stages of the larp.

    Conclusion

    The model proposed above allows participants and designers to analyze their narrative progression in a larp, whilst also being able to pass aesthetic judgments on the overall experience. Emergence tracks against the flexibility of any given larp design, iteration and the rhythms thereof pin down emergent properties through routinizing and varying them, and reincorporation parses the stories told by reintroducing the familiar into a dramatically different game state of a given larp. Without having to distinguish reality from fiction, play from boredom, in-character events from out-of-character events, this model sees larp as a complex information system, “code that runs on humans” (Steele, 2016), and seeks nevertheless to give players the tools to make aesthetic sense of their experiences. The different forms of emergence allow game masters to calibrate the experience for the players, and players are aware that repeating and then sometimes varying an activity allows them to give form to the chaos that is larp. In order for us to expand upon and improve larp as a medium, it is high time that we use our aesthetic judgment to evaluate as many relevant characteristics of what we consider to be a larp’s “story,” and the tools offered here are but one way to spark that judgment. Other models exist and new ones are welcome to emerge, but the story architecture of a given larp event lends itself to so many diverse readings that there is merit in pinning down the basics for posterity.

    References

    Harviainen, J. Tuomas and Andreas Lieberoth (2011). “Similarity of Social Information Processes in Games and Rituals: Magical Interfaces.” Simulation & Gaming 43 (4): 528–49. doi:10.1177/1046878110392703.

    Johnstone, Keith (1979). Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Faber & Faber.

    McGonigal, Jane (2003). “‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play.” Melbourne DAC. https://janemcgonigal.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/mcgonigal-jane-this-is-not-a-game.pdf

    Montola, Markus (2004). “Chaotic Role-Playing. Applying the Chaos Model of Organisations for Role-Playing.” Beyond Role and Play, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. Helsinki: Solmukohta: 157-173.

    Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta (2015). “The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together.” The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted. Copenhagen, Denmark: Rollespilsakademiet: 106-117.

    Pettersson, Juhana (2017). “Hamlet, Vampires, and the Italian Alps.” Once Upon a Nordic Larp… 20 Years of Playing Stories, edited by Martine Svanevik, et al. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt: 79-84.

    Rilstone, Andrew (1994). “Role-Playing Games: An Oveview.” Inter*Action 1: 10-15.

    Saitta, Eleanor (2012). “It’s About Time.” States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Helsinki: Solmukohta: 124-128.

    Steele, Samara Hayley (2016). “The Reality Code: Interpreting Aggregate Larp Rules as Code that Runs on Humans.” International Journal of Role-Playing 7: 30-35.

    Torner, Evan (forthcoming). “Planescape: Torment Immersion.” How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina Huntemann and Matthew Payne. New York: New York University Press.

    Turner, Victor (1982). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications.

    This article is part of Re-Shuffling the Deck, the companion journal for Knutepunkt 2018.

    All articles from the companion can be found on the Knutpunkt 2018 category.

  • Just a Little Lovin’ USA 2017

    Published on

    in

    Just a Little Lovin’ USA 2017

    Written by

    On August 7-12, 2017 in Whitewater State Park, Minnesota, USA, 50 larpers and volunteers from five different countries took part in the sixth run of Just a Little Lovin’ (JaLL, 2011). This meant that Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo’s esteemed larp about friendship, desire, and fear of death at the dawn of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, finally found its way to the country of its diegesis: The United States. The run was the culmination of over two years of organizing and many hours of volunteer labor by a diverse team of Nordic and American larpers. It does not even count as hyperbole to say the larp exceeded all of our expectations: it absolutely did. The combination of ground crew, organizers, and excellent players allowed us to create a logistically tight yet deeply human collective experience. Below is an attempt to document one of the already most heavily discussed Nordic larps, albeit in a different fashion: from an organizer perspective, specifically that of the US team.

    A game. JaLL is a game, but seems hardly one at all. Does it even remotely belong in the same category as table tennis, Pac-Man (1980), and Dungeons & Dragons (1974)? Indeed, when talking about the larp on an LGBTQ radio show in Minneapolis, we skirted around the term “game” and used the word “experience.” In the US, HIV/AIDS is certainly not considered a topic about which one could create a game, titles such as That Dragon, Cancer (2016) notwithstanding. In addition, the epidemic itself has not really been properly processed in the American public consciousness. Larry Kramer (1983) screamed “plague” to save tens of thousands of lives in the mid-1980s, but even his early pleas to the gay community now seem distant and historical. Yet as HIV activist Andrew Schuster noted at our JaLL post-game workshop, HIV/AIDS still poses an ongoing threat to many communities, and AIDS awareness could not be more pertinent to the coming generations, despite advances in medical treatments and cures. We were larpers, but somehow we were also involved with a form of activism. Or maybe we were just having a US-based conversation that, characteristically, few of us actually have had among themselves.

    Site

    Perhaps we should start from the beginning. In July 2015, a handful of North American larpers, myself included (Torner 2015), took part in the second Danish run of JaLL. We found the larp so transformative that we vowed to bring it to the USA in the coming 1-2 years. Many locations were thrown around: Saratoga Springs in upstate New York (where the game is actually set), Austin, San Francisco, New Jersey. But the site bid that won was submitted by Jon Cole, a seasoned freeform organizer from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul representing the group Larp House. Jon had assembled a solid ground team, and had found the perfect modern group site at Whitewater, far from civilization and surrounded by natural beauty. Alexander Sandrén, a Swedish player who has been at many runs of the game, remarked that the site was, by far, the closest to what he eined the fictional Saratoga Group Center looked like. I silently noted this as a major victory. Jon’s bid for Whitewater was detailed, precise to a fault, and above all affordable; the US run had to be non-profit, and an inexpensive site with a good group of committed volunteers would alleviate financial and personnel pressures. We decided that, yes, JaLL USA 2017 would be in Minnesota. And so, the planning began in late 2015.

    Securing the site itself was, of course, already a problem. A beautiful campsite such as this one was in high demand and heavily booked. One had to call the Whitewater park office at precisely 8 am on particular mornings to book the site for exactly one year later. Several frustrated attempts at reserving our slot led to us finally landing our fifth choice of dates: the week before GenCon. August in Minnesota would mean heat and mosquitos (from which we were fortunately spared in the actual run). Yet we were relieved to at least have the site secured. We blithely posted the Save-The-Date announcement in August 2016 for the following year on social media in celebration.

    A leather harness hanging on a bench in Whitewater State Park. Photo by l.p. lade.
    A leather harness hanging on a bench in Whitewater State Park. Photo by l.p. lade.

    Controversy

    Then the Internet hit us like a ton of bricks. Or a train. Or a train made of bricks. Given the emboldening of far-right hate groups in 2016, one would think our main critics would have been anti-gay evangelical Christians and neo-Nazis. This wasn’t the case at all: it was, in fact, the progressive left that went into a social media frenzy over the game. Individuals directly affected by the AIDS crisis were ringing our phones in outrage against the ostensible insensitivity of running such a larp. We were called out as being unethical and patrolled for any language suggesting that we might make light of the topic.  We were told that the Norwegians, even gay Norwegians, had no right to this shared history, and that this was a “gay larp for straight people,” implying a kind of shameful blackface-level mimicry of a certain vulnerable community at work. The reaction came through closed circles, without even major press coverage of any kind.

    Even this private, contained negative backlash left many of us emotionally drained. We had answers for these American social media challenges, many of which had already been raised in the 2011 debate about JaLL in the Swedish newspaper Expressen (Gerge 2012). After all, the larp takes its subject matter seriously, has queer creators, and has, in fact, given queer players their own larp to cherish and in which to feel at home. Nevertheless, much of August 2016 was spent in social media damage control and creating a massive FAQ((https://jall.us/faq/ (Accessed January 2018))) explaining every facet of the larp to potential participants, as well as its detractors. We also withdrew plans to crowdfund the game and locked down major public releases of information about it, tapping JaLL allies such as Nicole Winchester and Morgan Nuncio to run interference on any discussions of the game that might come up so as to shield the organizers from further flak. Needless to say, organizing a game about which we had been proud suddenly became a curiously furtive endeavor. None of us wanted to be caught as the “leader” of the project, out of fear that we would be left holding the bag full of hate mail and death threats if a Vice or Geek and Sundry article was written about us and a social media storm erupted.

    Adaptation

    Meanwhile, the larp itself had to undergo its own transformation for the North American context. JaLL may have some of the best storytelling mechanics and complex characters seen in a larp (Waern 2012), but it was also a game that traditionally had white European players portray an almost homogeneously white American group of characters, with the exception of four Puerto Ricans. As admitted by Tor Kjetil and Hanne, this simply did not represent the racial and ethnic diversity of early 1980s New York City. Compounding this fact were developments in language around trans* individuals since the early 1980s: in the historical setting, trans* women and men would call themselves “gay” because there wasn’t yet a better term, and pronoun shifts and non-binary designations were many years to come. How would we balance avoiding the erasure of the non-white experience of the period, letting players of color to calibrate their level of comfort with respect to playing on racism, playing on and celebrating ethnic nuance, and not appropriating or unintentionally mocking any given gender expression, race, ethnicity, and culture? None of us assumed we knew the answers, so we reached out to trans*-folx and people of color to determine what larp solutions would theoretically make them feel comfortable and welcome, crediting them as consultants on the final version of the larp. Not everyone had the same response either. Kat Jones and Moyra Turkington spearheaded efforts to sort through these interviews and come up with an appropriate strategy. They chose to incorporate race and ethnicity into every character sheet, as well as to run an additional “Playing Difference at JaLL” pre-game workshop that helped calibrate player behavior with regard to class, race and ethnicity, including opt-out rules for even subtle play on racism. Such work will continue to be necessary in larps to come, we surmise, as the medium continues to grow up.

    Simon of the band Urban Renaissance performs. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.
    Simon of the band Urban Renaissance performs. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.

    Although many US players purported to be playing in the “Nordic style” thanks to franchises such as the magic-school larp New World Magischola (2016) or runs of the sensuous vampire party larp End of the Line (2016), much player calibration remained necessary. Many of the players had never done a blackbox meta-scene or used sex/intimacy mechanics before. In addition, the US impulse to figure out how to “generate plot” or “resolve storylines” sometimes came in conflict with the overall design of the larp: characters launched unrealistically successful campaigns against HIV/AIDS and talked loudly in-character during scenes that had previously been played silently in Nordic runs. Nevertheless, such conflicts constituted part of the intercultural experience and were mostly resolved when they came up. Incorporation of the OK Check-in safety technique from End of the Line (Koljonen 2016) and the lookdown technique from New World Magischola (Brown 2016) helped players from all backgrounds adjust to the safety norms of the JaLL community.

    Even pinning down the group of JaLL USA players proved challenging. As a non-profit, the game was relatively cheap: each ticket cost $300 to merely cover the operating costs of running a 5-day event. Multiple scholarships funded by generous outside donors helped some players from diverse or impoverished backgrounds get in at a free or reduced rate. Sign-ups were done based on a casting system, with a lottery prepared in case of too many players for the limited 70 slots. And it turned out we never had too many players. It was a nail-biter for us to see if we would get enough players. The length of time-off required for this larp––6 days minimum––accompanied by the relative secrecy of the advertising, as well as the usual scheduling conflicts and illnesses all but depleted our potential player base. Over 1/3 of all committed players dropped before the game began, many of whom had even responded “No” to the question “Do you foresee any circumstances that might prevent you from attending JaLL?” Faced with the infamous JaLL player drop-off that Tor Kjetil and Hanne had warned us about, we ran the larp with the absolute minimum number of players required to play, removing numerous social groups from the larp: a BDSM triad, the youth counselors, the Hi-NRG music triad, and the polyamorous co-op house were all initially not present in the run, with some only re-introduced after the death of other characters. The Casting Committee went from a team of matchmakers to a team of larp triage nurses, swapping around character configurations even up until a week before the larp to accommodate for drops and late additions.

    Success

    Nevertheless, the players owned the resultant game. They brought electrifying energy to both the larp itself, as well as the preparation and clean-up afterward. About four out of five in this player base lay somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum, and they felt seen and appreciated in the larp space. Jonaya Kemper and l.p. lade played in-character photographers who took thousands of high-quality photos for posterity. Most important to us as organizers was the glut of testimony to the power of this larp and this particular run. One of the players was part of the NYC gay scene and said how accurately the feeling of the larp captured the spirit of the times. He commented how much we, as young and middle-aged larpers, reminded him of those in the community he belonged to, which moved many of us to tears. “Thank you so much for bringing this game to the US for all of us to play.” wrote another player in their post-game survey. “It was a life-altering experience.” The positive energy among the participants poured out in their comments:

    This larp ran beautifully. The organization was impressive. Doing this for the first time and having such a good handle on both the in game and logistical elements was a real feat. I felt the game handled very sensitive issues well, and that the organizers were also sensitive to the needs of the players and of issues relating to translating it to a USA context. … I am so grateful to the players for taking on such a challenge and being so loving toward one another throughout the game.

    JaLL is amazing. Plain and simple. The organizers worked very hard, and I just want to let you know that it was noticed. I will rank JaLL as one of the best games I have ever participated in, and it is solely because of your hard work and dedication to the players. Thank you!

    Hearing such words after two years of intensive organization brought us all back to the raw emotional core of the larp. The trials had been worth it, and the community we had helped build was real and resilient. People took care of each other through the post-game bleed and larp blues. Many of the participants got on the bus from Whitewater and later wound up at a Minneapolis drag show. New relationships blossomed, players came out or announced transitioning genders, and vows were made: JaLL USA needs to happen again. Just maybe not right away. Bids for a 2019 run remain in the works, despite our country’s steady and unfortunate turn toward radical right-wing and self-immolatory politics. We nevertheless look forward to lighting up the disco ball one more time and commemorate this precious chapter of our gay history with a masterpiece 1980s larp that celebrates friendship and desire in the shadow of hardship and death.

    Thanks to everyone who made this run the success we always hoped it would be.

    References

    Brown, Maury. 2016. “Creating a Culture of Trust through Safety and Calibration Larp Mechanics.” https://nordiclarp.org/2016/09/09/creating-culture-trust-safety-calibration-larp-mechanics/

    Edland, Tor Kjetil and Hanne Grasmo. 2011. Just a Little Lovin’. [Larp] Run 6: Whitewater, Minnesota, USA 2017.

    Gerge, Tova. 2012. “Larp and Aesthetic Responsibility: When Just a LittleLovin’ Became an Art Debate.” States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World. Juhana Pettersson, ed. Solmukohta, pp. 42-47.

    Koljonen, Johanna. 2016. “Toolkit: The OK Check-In.”         https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/toolkit-the-ok-check-in/

    Kramer, Larry. 1983. “1,112 and Counting.” New York Native. March 14.

    Torner, Evan. 2015. Losing Friends and the Stories We Tell Ourselves: Just a Little Lovin’ Denmark 2015. https://guyintheblackhat.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/losing-friends-and-the-stories-we-tell-ourselves-just-a-little-lovin-denmark-2015/

    Waern, Annika. 2012. “Just a Little Lovin’, and Techniques for Telling Stories in Larp.” https://annikawaern.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/just-a-little-lovin-and-techniques-for-telling-stories-in-larp/

    This article is part of Re-Shuffling the Deck, the companion journal for Knutepunkt 2018.

    All articles from the companion can be found on the Knutpunkt 2018 category.

    Cover photo: A group shot of all JaLL USA players and organizers. Photo by l.p. lade.

  • Tensions between Transmedia Fandom and Live-Action Role-Play

    Published on

    in

    Tensions between Transmedia Fandom and Live-Action Role-Play

    Written by

    Larp is a medium that helps us co-create intricate shared fictions through subjective understandings of the story world around us. Meanwhile, large story franchises – the Marvel Universe, the Potterverse, the Star Wars Expanded Universe, etc. – both steadily add content to their story universes and also canonize (and copyright) this content. Larping in a franchise or adjacent to a franchise means that players can rapidly build competence and familiarity with the material. Yet franchises encourage fans to establish canons and traditions that occasionally contradict the flexibility of the larp medium. This essay addresses tensions related to larps that aspire to create larger story universes and/or draw on the fandom related to larger franchises. I argue that larp organizers and designers must attend to how their events interact with fandom behaviors, especially the impulse to 1) canonize specific practices, characters, and events, and 2) manufacture second-order knowledge and products related to the game. Both fan practices, while in many cases beneficial to the larp, have the potential to unintentionally supplant designer principles and goals. It will be helpful for us to figure out how to wield this double-edged sword of mass culture for larps in the future.

    Transmedia and Franchises

    In our current socio-historical moment, immersive story worlds connected to billion-dollar global franchises such as the Potterverse let us live and breathe the fiction thanks to those dollars purchasing ubiquity and high-quality design. By “ubiquity,” I mean that it becomes hard to avoid knowing at least something about a particular franchise, given that the material is everywhere and being discussed by a critical mass of people. By “high-quality design,” I mean that the money involved has given the universe an undeniable “look” that becomes part and parcel to its brand and affordances. Design has re-asserted its authority in the corporate world (Rhodes, 2015), as franchises abide by the truism that Harry Potter isn’t the same without robes and wands or Star Wars isn’t the same without lightsabers and Death Stars. Merchandising then ensures such objects can be purchased on the open market. These franchises engage us precisely because they catch our attention, provide an easily accessible basis of the premise (i.e., Harry Potter is about wizards trying to get through school while also investigating Voldemort’s potential return), and can be found everywhere. The last point would deem them “transmedia.”

    cover of a book with an iPod on it
    Cover of Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins (2008).

    Transmedia, or the instantiation and narration of events in a story world across multiple media platforms, pervade today’s globalized society. Coined by Henry Jenkins in his widely cited book Convergence Culture (2006), “transmedia” describes a climate of media production in which franchises seed fan participation: “The circulation of media content––across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders––depends heavily on consumers’ active participation” (Jenkins 3). These consumers, or “fans,” are prompted to seek more information about and connect the dots between the content of a G.I. Joe movie, a G.I. Joe comic book, and a G.I. Joe action figure. The business model is simple: get a niche audience to emotionally invest in your content on at least one platform, and then support these devoted fans as they promote this fictional universe and consume related products. Much as we would like to dismiss transmedia as purely cynical, however, the fan practices of promotion and consumption cultivated by the business model (and transmedia’s ease of accessibility) affect our storytelling practices in fundamental ways.

    Arran Gare (2016) has argued recently that most of our societal rewards now stem from a “dematerialized economy,” and that our habitus, our whole way of life, encourages us to divorce ourselves from reality as much as possible. Fans spend huge portions of their lives laboring on behalf of immersive story worlds, largely uncompensated for their efforts (De Kosnik, 2013). Fans write fan fiction (“fanfic”) about their favorite characters, much of which is readable for free on http://archiveofourown.org or Tumblr. They crowdsource and maintain Wikis and “story bibles” that are then referenced by the producers of the content, who are in turn pressured to keep continuity with previous “facts” in the story worlds. Pierre Lévy observes that this “circuit” formed between authors, readers, spectators, producers, creators and interpreters blurs the distinction between them all, as they each work to support the others (Lévy, quoted in Jenkins, 2006, 95). In the end, genre fiction and transmedia story worlds guide us to a pleasurable divorce from reality: they give us clear characters to follow, a language to communicate, and a pre-established set of expectations about the world that give us easy entry into a complex fictional world. When transmedia spreads to larp as a platform, however, the complexity of that world, its corresponding fandom, and the practices that fandom engenders all strain against the possibilities that larp affords.

    Larp is above all an ephemeral medium, heavily reliant on the narrative and social emergence that happens when you get actual humans together in a space (Montola, 2012). The first-person audience (Sandberg, 2004) of the form ensures that each player experience within a larp is radically subjective, may not correspond with agreed-upon “facts” about the world, and is not readily reproducible. Yet we also have within us the impulse to make larp a canonical medium, i.e. one that builds worlds with their own intricate history and weight. Although the 360° illusion so popular in larp theory is but a myth – “a complete environment alone does not generate better role-playing” (Koljonen, 2007) – the guiding principle that one should larp in a well-conceived, deeply structured aesthetic world is endemic to most larp cultures.

    photo of a man in vintage military coat and hat
    Photo of the author in his Inside Hamlet Stormguard costume as Colonel Perdue.

    We have a couple of practices that we regularly use to establish “world facts” in our ephemeral medium. We articulate them in large PDFs and books, writing dozens or even hundreds of pages of text normally not readily available during role-play that we hope some people have committed to memory. We create visual media, physical artifacts, fictional maps, acoustic environments – anything to give players a foothold on what the fictional world would look, feel, and sound like. We also form small groups on social media and strategize. In Inside Hamlet (Ericsson, Pedersen and Koljonen, 2015), for example, I was given the character of Colonel Perdue, commander of the Stormguard. Given that we wanted to make them “seem real,” we had a four-person Facebook group in which we co-created fictional aspects of the Stormguard that were to come up during play, including our own insignia patches and musical anthem. These aspects formed part of what Moyra Turkington calls our “socket” (Turkington, 2006), or the “place where people plug themselves into a game and give and take their focus and energy to and from.” We invested, and received returns on that investment. We gladly invented this ephemera to secure our character immersion and help others with theirs, but we also did not expect for this material to survive the run: it was for the Stormguard’s use in Run 1, and we let the Stormguard in Run 2 come up with its own material. We assumed that none of our own world building should impose any further on other runs as a matter of etiquette, that our fictional “facts” would remain an artifact of our play, rather than as aspects of the game that future players must attend to.

    The act of “attending to” anything in a larp is not neutral. As J Li and Jason Morningstar (2016) recently argue it costs player energy and cognitive load to keep the fiction in focus. “Players need their working memory to fictionalize,” they write. “Structure plot so that each person only has 4-5 things to keep track of” (19). The same could be said of a story world. If I need to know off the top of my head that engineers are categorically unable to revive the ship’s computer, or even the name of that one CoW House with the unspeakable drinks (Sendivogius), then I am often committing working memory to internalize that information. If a fact about a game is recorded on some Facebook thread or some fan Wiki and I cannot readily access it in character, there is a question as to whether or not that ephemera will even exist in the duration of the larp. Transmedia from major franchises actually help us secure more fiction in our brains, as we have engaged with that story universe before and have more of its nuances stored in our long-term memory. Yet much of that readily-available fiction vanishes when creating even a re-skinned version of a franchise: new words must be remembered, new fictional events attended to, and new casts of characters with their own personalities met and judged. If a larper has to keep a “story bible” in their head as they try to navigate to find food in a place unfamiliar to the player while also navigating their complex relationship with a half-hydra, chances are that the story universe information will be forgotten.

    The Case of the Wizardry-verse and the Magimundi

    In 2014, the wildly successful Polish-Danish blockbuster larp College of Wizardry (CoW, Nielsen, Dembinski and Raasted et al. 2014) took the larp community by storm with its high concept and low bar for entry: players get to play wizards in a Harry Potter-esque school for several days in Czocha Castle, co-creating immersive fiction as they compete for the coveted House Cup. The “-esque” suffix in “Harry Potter-esque” is important. The organizers had to attend to Warner Brothers’ request to separate their story universe from that of the famous wizard school series due to copyright following the first 3 runs (CoW1-3). The transition from the Potterverse to the College of Wizardry-verse for CoW4 and on (or, for that matter, the Magimundi for the American adaptation New World Magischola (NWM, Brown and Morrow, 2016) proved a model lesson in filing the serial numbers off of a well-known franchise. “Muggles” became “mundanes,” Hogwarts was wiped off the map, and suddenly necromancy took on an increasingly central role as a story device.

    On the one hand, a player from CoW1 in the fan-expanded Potterverse reported that having all the names, creatures, places, and events already established in the world as canon “[made] it possible to play almost without preparation and without having to remember background text, if only you knew your HP.” On the other hand, players of the post-Potterverse CoW and NWM runs remarked how much space had been established for them. Peter Svensson writes that “the emphasis on diversity and acceptance is something where NWM [and CoW] shone. I’m a gay man. The Harry Potter books could only hint at the existence of people like me. But NWM firmly established that this is a world where I exist. Where people like me are and have been part of the historical record.” The framing of our fictional lives matters. Content and expectations around the immersive story world let players know what is and isn’t possible to see happen during play.

    Nevertheless, fan culture also sets expectations, with CoW and NWM taking center stage as larps adapted from the propositions of the larger Potterverse. One fandom expectation example is the concept of the OTP (One True Pairing), a term from fanfic meaning one’s emotional commitment to two franchise characters being destined to be together. In Harry Potter, for example, popular OTPs include Sirius Black and Prof. Snape, Harry and Hermione, and so forth. This is fine in fanfic, but becomes an issue when one as a player wishes to have an OTP-type experience in a larp. At the end of CoW and NWM, there is a dance that involves characters showing up in pairs or groups. Players who privately reported expecting something resembling a OTP experience were often sorely disappointed that the relationship did not go the way they (as a player) had imagined it, and were unable to fateplay((http://fate.laiv.org/fate/en_fate_ef.htm)) or “play to lose”((https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Playing_to_Lose)) as a means of controlling the situation. Larps promise living out one’s fantasies, but the expectations that come with those fantasies must be managed around the natural emergence within the game. Fandom does not necessarily prepare us for this.

    a wizard in a rob, flying hat, and sunglasses
    DJ Dizzywands at New World Magischola 1. Photo by Sarah Lynne Bowman for Learn Larp, LLC.

    Another example from CoW and NWM involved canonization. During a pre-game video call with NPCs from a previous run who would participate in my run of NWM, I mentioned in passing that I might be able to step in and do some music at the dance, in keeping with organizer expectations for us to use the affordances of the playspace. One former NPC was shocked: “But… but… DJ Dizzywands!” they stammered, thinking it inconceivable that anyone but the designated NPC whom they enjoyed from a previous run could possibly help run the dance. Although DJ Dizzywands –– played by Austin Shepard in a smashing wizard’s cloak –– did not exist in any of the game materials, he had become canonized as part of the NWM experience.

    Finally, both CoW and NWM are exploring the marketing of merchandise, as one does with a franchise: control of one’s product across platforms creates multiple financial outlets for fans to show their support. The problem arises when the making and marketing of merchandise confuses relevant information about the game with fandom. A NWM player lamented to me about the constant upselling of the game through products such as T-shirts, wands, and supplemental world materials, such that one of their friends dropped out of the game “when the ‘game’ became no longer apparent amidst a marketing machine.” Second-order products, such as fan art or homemade merchandise, suddenly fall into the gray area of having to be “endorsed” or not by the larp, and can help further canonization of specific aspects of the game that may or may not remotely resemble someone else’s first-person audience experience. While larp is a means of expression and a catalyst for other forms of expression, expressing oneself through material means about a larp also has transmedia fan assumptions underlying it.

    Responses to Transmedia

    Larp communities have been responding to franchises for decades, and in various ways inventing interesting strategies to the dilemmas around fandom. To escape the tyrannical ubiquity of J.R.R. Tolkien-esque fantasy worlds, for example, Mike Pohjola created what he calls “folk fantasy” to re-localize and re-nationalize globalized transmedia products. “Could we retell our own myths and say something relevant to our time?” he asks (Pohjola 51). Täällä Kirjokannen alla (2011) was a larp derived from specifically Finnish folk legends, which ultimately served as a means of reinvigorating a local storytelling culture. In this capacity, neither overt, garish nationalism nor fandom serves as a proper response to the material: larpers had to negotiate their own national myths and the fact that deep, immersive story universes ultimately came from somewhere, while also being cautious against the exclusionary idea that these folk legends are “superior” to others. The larp embraced specificity over ubiquity, and emergent qualities of these narratives rather than relying on fandom and franchise familiarity to drive play. Eliot Wieslander’s Mellan himmel och hav (2002) and the Danish team behind Totem (Schønnemann Andreasen and thurøe et al., 2007) both heavily relied on workshops and co-present co-creation((i.e., players actually in the space working through their characters, rather than on social media)) to formulate ways to make science-fiction stories and stories of indigenous societies respectively neither cliché nor too abstract for the players to grasp.

    One can also turn to rules and regulation as part of the design. The common practice of using social media groups to structure in-game relations can also prompt player-characters to start play via post and even prompt the organizers to moderate or intervene such play. Having a clear policy about pre-game play and the in-game larp consequences allows organizers to not have to attend to every piece of fanfic or “what-if” scenario created by the players. Establishing that no single player has rights over a specific character in the fiction is also important: these characters are roles, not canonical figures, unless designed that way. Merchandise should above all serve play or memories of play, and memes and merchandise that point to specific moments in-game should generally have the run title (NWM2, CoW4, Inside Hamlet Run 2, etc.) somehow associated with it, so as not to create the impression that this is an eternal moment of the “classic” version of the game. Better still, organizers can connect multiple images of the same character or comparable situation across multiple runs, so as to engage with the dynamic of cosplay, in which one celebrates the labor of performance across multiple different representations of emergence (Scott, 2015). Such strategies assist prospective players in imagining themselves into their roles, rather than championing and canonizing the ephemeral acts of the past players.

    Conclusion

    Although franchise story worlds function through ubiquity and high-quality design, most larps do not. Our internal fictions, however cool, largely dissipate beyond war stories and actual-play reports. Few know our larp worlds, and fewer still keep track of all their details. This is fine, for it removes the pressure to establish anything we’ve done beyond the ephemerality of play. However, as we lay down track in our story worlds, we should be mindful of our impulses to canonize the configuration and results of our play across multiple runs of a game not designated a campaign. Canonization creates more laws, facts, and general overhead for other players to deal with later on, and it serves to cheapen future experiences by according social capital only to those who played the “classic” earlier runs. Especially in a climate in which Kickstarters and global simultaneous ticket release dates determine who gets into which larps, the players who had the benefit of a fast Internet connection should not get to pre-determine storyworld aspects of the game for other runs beyond what the organizers and designers have already established. Each larp run in a non-campaign larp benefits from its “reset” switch. Furthermore, fan-created ephemera about the game can comment on it and its world, but should not be confused with the material of the larp itself, which remains yet-to-be-determined.

    Inside Hamlet 2017 promotional photo. Photo courtesy of Participation Design Agency.

    As larp moves into becoming a platform for well-worn fan properties – albeit re-invented without the burden of their original franchise – we must now figure out the contradictory balance between being a good fan and a good larper. A good fan knows the story world inside and out, perhaps contributing their own small portion of it in keeping with the general spirit of the fiction. A good larper knows that the rules, design, objects, and setting of a larp are but playthings for their imagination and the co-creative space of their fellow players. They understand the intent and spirit of a component, and use it for emergent play as it develops. A good fan, however, also speculates and chooses favorites from among the various fictional options available. A good larper, at least for the time being, leaves much up to chance encounters in play, leading sometimes to bittersweet results after months of preparation. Pre-playing as the good fan can sabotage the good larper; the vast storyworld overhead becoming instead a ballast as pre-game role-playing and the established canon of previous runs take on more importance than an individual run itself. Moreover, seeing certain players as the only ones able to inhabit the “classic” versions of characters inhibits the emergent properties of a larp’s design in favor of establishing a rarefied high court of “key” larpers and their social politics. Merchandising of franchise-related materials pulls in much-needed revenue, but also puts fetish objects at the center of organizer attention, the proverbial act of “selling the T-shirt” perhaps overtaking the event itself.

    Now: much of this argumentation could constitute my overly precious attempt to preserve some particular larp aesthetic in the face of imminent commercialization, such as through Disney’s impending licensed Star Wars larp attractions or expansions of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, but I find the corporation cooptation of the larp artform much less a threat than the colonization of our minds by fandom. Larp is a medium through which we can say anything we want, provided negotiation with the design, the organizers, and one’s co-players. We must therefore be agentic and proactive with respect to our designs, adopting Bjarke Pedersen’s (2016) ethos that not only is design everything, but that what we call “tradition” is its opposite. When we unintentionally encourage players to use fandom interests to patrol other players, then that is, indeed, the fandom tradition sneaking into our larp design. Whatever Jedi Knights or their analogues happen to do or be in our larps, they must follow the design of the larp first and the dictates of the franchise second. Whatever strict adaptation one wants to make of the Doctor Who universe, the larp should include the points of departure in its initial write-up, lest competing fandoms overtake the preparation and implementation of the game. Whatever character you thought you played well in one run of the larp, the next person will have an entirely different interpretation and that will be perfectly fine. As we calibrate our play with each other, let us know that our impulses to create fan Wikis, fanfic, speculation about what characters will and won’t do, fan-favorite actors and portrayals, and second-order merchandise have an overall effect on the larp in question and larp culture in general. Worldbuilding is an act we can undertake together, but let us recognize our fellow players first before the franchise.

    Bibliography

    De Kosnik, Abigail. “Fandom as Free Labor.” Digital Labor. Edited by Trebor Scholz. New York,US: Routledge, 2013. Pg 98-111.

    Gare, Arran. “Beyond Modernism and Postmodernism: The Grand Narrative of the Age of Re- Embodiments.” Edited by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer, Vito De Lucia, and Sian Sullivan. New York,US: Routledge, 2016. Pg 27-46.

    Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York,US: New York University Press, 2006.

    Koljonen, Johanna. “Eye-Witness to the Illusion: An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role- Playing.” Lifelike. Edited by Jesper Donnis, Line Thorup, and Morten Gade. Copenhagen,DK: Projektgruppen KP07. 175-187.

    Montola, Markus. On the Edge of the Magic Circle. Ph.D. Dissertation. Tampere: University of Tampere, 2012.

    Morningstar, Jason and J Li. Pattern Language for Larp Design.  2016. http://www.larppatterns.org/

    Pedersen, Bjarke. “Game Design Tools for Intense Experiences.” Living Games Conference. May 19-22, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYAZupokjEw

    Pohjola, Mike. “Folk Fantasy: Escaping Tolkien.” States of Play. Edited by Juhana Petersson. Helsinki: Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura, 2012. 48-53.

    Rhodes, Margaret. “Take It From An Expert: Design Is More Important Than Ever.” WIRED. 17/03-2015. https://www.wired.com/2015/03/take-expert-design-important-ever/

    Sandberg, Christopher. “Genesi. Larp Art, Basic Theories.” Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination. Edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. Helsinki: Ropecon, 2004. Pg 264-288.

    Scott, Suzanne. “‘Cosplay is Serious Business’: Gendering Material Fan Labor on Heroes of Cosplay.” Cinema Journal 54.3 (Spring 2015): 146-155.

    Turkington, Moyra. “Covering the Bases.” Sin Aesthetics. 13/11-2006. http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/34

    Ludography

    Björk, Katarina and Eliot Wieslander. Mellan himmel och hav. Denmark. 2003.

    Brown, Maury Elizabeth, and Benjamin A. Morrow. New World Magischola. US: Learn Larp. 2016.

    Ericsson, Martin, Bjarke Pedersen and Johanna Koljonen. Inside Hamlet. Copenhagen,DK: Odyssé. 2015.

    Nielsen, Charles Bo, Dracan Dembinski and Claus Raasted Herløvsen et al. College of Wizardry. Poland: Liveform(PL) and Rollespillsfabrikken(DK). 2014.

    Pohjola, Mike, et al. Täällä Kirjokannen alla. Helsinki. 2011.

    Schønnemann Andreasen, Peter, Kristoffer Thurøe, Mathias Kromann, Peter Munthe-Kaas and Rasmus Høgdall. Totem. Denmark. 2007.

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories which was edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand and released as part of documentation for the Knutepunkt 2017 conference.

    Cover photo: The heads of New World Magischola, Nibelungen, and College of Wizardry speak before those assembled at The Challenge. Photos by Made by Iulian Dinu, Nicky Sochor and Brent Rombouts for Dziobak. Photo has been cropped.

  • Literary and Performative Imaginaries – Where Characters Come From

    Published on

    in

    Literary and Performative Imaginaries – Where Characters Come From

    Written by

    Dungeon Crawl Classics: Where Characters Are Made to DIE. Photo by Evan Torner. Dungeon Crawl Classics: Where Characters Are Made to DIE. Photo by Evan Torner.

    Character creation and character sheets are a favorite topic of mine. Hang around me long enough and you’ll hear me utter the phrase “Character creation is 50% of the role-playing experience.” I mean this statement in several senses. We underestimate how much enjoyment we get out of the simple pleasure of assembling a thinking being whom we will then inhabit. Furthermore, we are actually already playing the (or at least a) game when we create a character. Finally, we often underestimate exactly how much actual time and energy we must invest in each character (unless you’re playing a horde larp or Dungeon Crawl Classics, with its infamous “funnel” of death). We are imbuing inanimate words with life itself; of course there are complications! They represent significant creative investments.

    Character sheet from 10 Bad Larps, by Alleged Entertainment. Photo by Evan Torner. Character sheet from 10 Bad Larps, by Alleged Entertainment. Photo by Evan Torner.
    Character sheet as promotional material for Knights of Badassdom (2013). Photo by Evan Torner. Character sheet as promotional material for Knights of Badassdom (2013). Photo by Evan Torner.

    Character sheets are the textual evidence of this investment and, if you think about it, constitute just as much of a role-playing game’s “text” as the session itself. In this respect, we can consider Eirik Fatland’s important observation that we use the same word “character” to describe both what’s on the sheet and its actual embodiment,((See Fatland, “What makes a character playable?”)) as well as J. Tuomas Harviainen’s assertion that the act of role-playing generates numerous “texts” in the form of meaningful actions that players then subject to their own individual form of hermeneutic analysis.((Harviainen 66–67.))

    Role-playing Games as a Medium

    But it turns out that this fluidity between written and performed character text is, in fact, specific to role-playing games as a medium. Here I’d like to discuss the media-specific propositional quality of pre-generated character sheets to show that so-called “new media” – which larp is, to some extent – are where old media such as literature go to live an undead afterlife. We are still subjects shaped by the written page.

    I argue that medium-specific assumptions about where “character” comes from underlie specific modes of character presentation which I have, for the sake of argument, subdivided into three different categories:

    • The Literary Mode
    • The Procedural-Performative Mode
    • The Explicitly Emergent Mode

    The Literary Mode consists of providing an extensive character backstory. The Procedural-Performative Mode involves explicit commands given to the player. The Explicitly Emergent Mode relies on the player to supply significant content to “fill in” the character as described. Each of these modes carries with it a corresponding imaginary, which I define as the set of values it promotes, and of propositions made that we accept as “given.” What we consider to be “character” is contingent on both design principles as well as the epistemologies – theories of how we know what we know – that shape them. The character sheet determines in part what we can or cannot know about a specific larp.

    A character from Lives, Births, Deaths by Martin Brodén & Tobias Wrigstad. Photo by Evan Torner. A character from Lives, Births, Deaths by Martin Brodén & Tobias Wrigstad. Photo by Evan Torner.

    “A ‘character’,” writes Markus Montola, “may indicate a group of quantitative attributes within the formal ruleset, a representation of the player in the game world or a fictitious person in the game world.”((Montola 32.)) How we present this fluid construct necessarily represents what we might see as our own specific system of knowledge creation.

    My analysis here primarily focuses on what Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman call the “formal level” of a game: “the game considered as a set of rules … not the experience of the game [itself],”((Salen & Zimmerman 120.)) which would be what they call the “phenomenological level.” It would be interesting to see correspondences with my model in actual play, but that’s for others to attempt.

    As a media scholar, I approach role-playing games as media, such that the games themselves mediate the cultural act of role-playing. What do I mean by this? Role-playing games frame our attention in specific ways, and construct subjectivities of “ideal” users much like newspapers or television. They have their own aesthetics, cultural authority, and political economy. They generate texts, and are texts themselves. Newspapers, for example, imply that the world’s events can be subdivided into digestible text morsels interspersed with glossy ads. The logics of television imply that content is irrelevant so long as it flows along. Role-playing games imply that a player is in a tense, co-dependent relationship with the rules of a given system, and only through the liberal interpretation of these rules can one appropriately explore alternative realities with one’s friends.

    RPGs are structured not around the willing suspension of disbelief but the “willing activation of pretense,” as Michael Saler put it.((Saler 28.)) One creates – or is presented with – a character and then plays it within the diegetic world, bounded by certain rules which the players may have co-designed.

    A slide from Eirik Fatland's talk. Photo by Evan Torner. A slide from Eirik Fatland’s talk. Photo by Evan Torner.

    At a (particularly good) presentation at Solmukohta 2012, Eirik Fatland called larp design “predicting player behavior,” but also notes how openness to player interpretation is, in fact, a primary design feature of good larp characters.

    This poses us with a paradox familiar to most game designers: how do we predict and incentivize player behavior without sacrificing the very unpredictability of the larp experience, especially when the players are relying on the designer/organizers to provide a predictably unpredictable experience?

    To deal with this inherent struggle within the larp medium, we must conceive of high-quality larp as both well-defined, immersive and immanent as well as fluid and elusive. If we frame larps as what Christoph Bode calls “nodal situations,”((Bode 1.)) then there is a predictable forking path of notable decision trees like in Interactive Fiction or a Choose Your Own Adventure novel that are predictable and actionable. In the world of larp, for example, Alleged Entertainment’s Garden of Forking Paths frames a series of nodal situations (see below).

    Alleged Entertainment’s Garden of Forking Paths. Photo by Evan Torner. Alleged Entertainment’s Garden of Forking Paths. Photo by Evan Torner.

    But if we frame larps as mere frameworks for social alibi with no central narratives, as Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros have,((Montola and Stenros 10.)) then these “nodal” decision trees dissolve under the inherent complexity of human interaction within the medium. Larp is often too complex to be summarized in binary decision trees and other techniques.

    Character Sheets Shaping the Medium

    I conceive larp as a medium. As such, one can look at character sheets as an integral device in shaping its concept, much as the screenplay shapes a resultant film. Several recent perspectives on the character sheet have raised concerns about what exactly its role is in play. Daniel M. Perez sees the character sheet as a map,((See Perez.)) in that you can both use it as a reference to collect information about the game in one central place, and as a guide to what the game itself actually will prioritize during play. Reinforcing this point is Lars Konzack, whose article “Characterology in Tabletop Role-Playing Games” argues for the centrality of the character sheet in determining player experience (and here I quote him at length):

    It is the central document from which the player relates to role-playing a character as regards to rules, setting, situation, and performance. In this view, the character sheet transgresses the boundaries of role-playing textuality. The text becomes vital to the role-playing experience as a textual machine in working progress.((Konzack 87.))

    Konzack’s point is in direct response to David Jara’s argument that character sheets constitute paratexts, in the vein of Gérard Genette’s literary theory.((See Jara.)) Here I side with Konzack, in that I see Jara overemphasizing actual play as the real text, with all other texts being relegated to secondary and tertiary status. But Konzack’s analysis itself primarily focuses on semiotics – that is, how a character sheet signals a system’s priorities – and exclusively on tabletop games, which often have more thoughtfully laid-out character sheets. This is where I’d like to intervene as a larpwright and media scholar, so as to interrogate the medial significance of the larp character sheet.

    What Are Character Sheets?

    What are character sheets? Documents that make numerous propositions. In my mind, they are often non-diegetic texts that exist to preserve the diegesis by helping a player perform as a character within it. They do so by providing select information about the character and make deliberate emotional propositions to pull the player into the role.

    Character sheets are documents that seek instantiation and/or confirmation in the actual play. They often provide a combination of naming/binding the character, his/her approximate physical appearance, a short backstory – written in the 2nd or 3rd person – relationship to other characters in the larp, and mechanical leverage of certain abilities.

    The actual utility of a character sheet in a larp is to identify a character and telegraph how other characters should respond to him/her, provide character impetus for story engagement, abilities for advancing the story, and imply costumes. But these sheets presumably also offer the player a vision of character “interiority,” or a rich inner life with conflicted thoughts and emotions. This interiority proves somewhat crucial in one of the larp medium’s requirements: the act of becoming a “first-person audience,” as Christopher Sandberg describes it.((Sandberg 274–279.)) Once the player is “activated” by the character sheet, they will then undergo the hermeneutic process of responding to events and characters in the larp through the lens of a complex persona construct.

    Our main theoretical and design question remains: how do we form this interiority with a piece of paper? The general solutions the larp medium has offered include: having the players read some literature about the character and interpret him/her based on literary analysis; just telling the players what they should be thinking or feeling; or doing away with the data on the sheet and creating a character through workshops, masks, or whatever else. The rest of my article will address these three modes.

    The Literary Mode

    The only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature.

    Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1970 Nobel Prize speech

    The first is the literary mode, in which the larpwright often writes 2–10 pages of fiction resembling fanfic about the character which contains information the player is intended to internalize as their backstory. These are usually told in the second-person or third-person mode of address, depending on whether or not the larpwrights are signaling that the player immediately immerse themselves in their character. The point of such texts is for the larp organizers to start in media res with the player already knowing that which is known about the character within the diegesis.

    I call it “fanfic” because these texts are either generated by a larpwright passionate about this character set, or occasionally by the player him/herself in order to establish the character. (Based on past experience, having the player write the backstory is more effective, but usually produces characters less linked into social circles in the larp.) In addition, we as players are scarcely permitted to evaluate the text’s aesthetic values as fiction. (It’s sort of a bonus when larp fiction is good.) Now, seeing as these texts are, again, non-diegetic, the player is asked to do literary analysis to extract the necessary data. Kathleen Singles has noted that we take such analysis of the printed page as “natural and non-significant.”((Singles 217.)) I wish to demonstrate, however, that we have many Freudian assumptions underpinning our character assimilation process.

     

    Madam Dragon. Character sheet provided by Sarah Lynne Bowman. Madam Dragon. Character sheet provided by Sarah Lynne Bowman.

    Here’s an example character sheet: Madam Dragon. We can see her abilities as in-game affordances at the top: Breath Weapon, Tough Skin, Claws… notably before any other data, such as what these figures even mean. Then we get to the part marked ‘Your Story’ which goes on for 4 pages. The narrative ostensibly is there to replicate Madam Dragon’s traumatic childhood, going into detail about numerous traumatic episodes, looking at the various nodal moments (of agency and choice) in her backstory that might suggest how the character might behave in the future. These also overload the player with pre-generated genre fiction that is then to be submerged in the player’s consciousness, only to manifest itself in later actions.

    Here, the character sheet is like a corked bottle of champagne, ready to burst forth through the player, who is meanwhile stuck with the task of memorizing a large pile of data, while also parsing it for actionable goals and character relationships. Such literary character sheets also operate on an act of faith that the fictions of each character sheet all align well with each other (so that play becomes “interactive literature”) and that the player is literate in the right way to retain the data so that their play can continue what the fiction started. Needless to say, this form of character sheet presumes genre fiction as the basis for all larp.

    The Performative-procedural Mode

    The second mode is the performative-procedural, in which the game organizers give a brief text about the character in question and explicit instructions to the players as to what they should do. Lizzie Stark and Alessandro Canossa have articulated many of the different ways this can be done. In this model, it is the responsibility of the players to follow the instructions given them by the gamemasters, with the key signifier being the “if-then” statement. It is particularly typical of so-called “horde” larps, with just a few PCs and many NPCs.

    Character descriptions from Babysteps by Tobias Wrigstad. Photo by Evan Torner. Character descriptions from Babysteps by Tobias Wrigstad. Photo by Evan Torner.

    Fatland has called this “fateplay,” in which players exchange agency over their characters’ every action for heightened dramatic stakes and what Greg Costikyan calls the “semiotic uncertainty” of the game.((Costikyan 102.)) So rather than writing down an extensive backstory and providing characters with abilities to act on that backstory, designers working in the procedural mode break the “character” into tasks achievable during the larp and command the player to act on them. The player’s options are constrained, their larp experience boiled down to a series of “if-then” statements.

    A character sheet from All In by Chris Hall. Photo by Evan Torner. A character sheet from All In by Chris Hall. Photo by Evan Torner.
    Part of Akala’s objectives for Voyage to Venus, Planet of Death by Kat Jones & Evan Torner. Photo by Evan Torner. Part of Akala’s objectives for Voyage to Venus, Planet of Death by Kat Jones & Evan Torner. Photo by Evan Torner.

    Such play might be seen by some as disempowering, and also would in theory sacrifice the interiority created by the literary fiction of the first model.((In practice, however, perhaps not.)) Whereas such fiction is somewhat Freudian – giving your character a past history of trauma and so forth – the procedural methodology is decidedly Brechtian. Bertolt Brecht commanded all his proletarian actors to enact certain social gestes, gestures that would signify the alienating class structures of society. Larp does this apolitically, removing the agency of a player so that they then have the alibi that the alienating “system” forced them to do whatever it is that they did in the larp. I theorize this using an alchemical blend of Brechtian theory and Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric, which is probably familiar to most of you.

    Here’s a quote from Brecht collaborator Ernst Ottwalt: “It is not the duty of our literature to stabilize the reader’s consciousness but to alter it.”((Ottwalt 22.)) Again, the model presented indicates that the actor carrying out these commands will somehow experience an interior change, but Ottwalt is implying it to be at the level of the consumer/user. Ian Bogost says about procedural rhetoric: “It’s a theory or a design philosophy. It’s a way of making things. A way of thinking about the process of translating systems in the world into representations of those systems in the computer… It gives you a framework through which to ask questions about what a particular situation might demand.”((See Bogost, “Procedural Rhetoric.”)) Procedure can lead to character interiority, but such procedures also can directly enact specific ideologies through the characters too.

    The Explicitly Emergent Mode

    The third mode of character creation is to dispense with sheets entirely and just “workshop” a character, or perhaps build a character through a single sound uttered while wearing a trance mask. These techniques help build character interiority by relying primarily on the player’s own social and physical assets, which are then directly interfaced with a group. Importantly, these characters without character sheets would be dismissed by many larpers as part of a mere theater exercise. This mode has become popular within the blackbox movement, notably in games such as White Death.

    White Death at Blackbox CPH. Photo by Nina Runa Essendrop. White Death at Blackbox CPH. Photo by Nina Runa Essendrop.

    White Death has no character sheets, but rather a physical condition and a core prejudice your character has. Such abandonment of the character sheet makes for an RPG text divorced from the written page, seeking instead emergence of character, storyline, and the world through emergent player interaction. Other games such as Helene Willer Piironen and Maria Ljung’s Stereo Hearts create characters from music playlists. This mode is possibly the least well-understood mode of character presentation, and one that is rapidly evolving as our medium develops.

    But I stress the primacy of a medial understanding of larp here: role-playing games mediate the cultural act of role-playing. I don’t really want to get into the argument of then “what constitutes a game” here, but I would say that my cursory analysis also reinforces Emily Care Boss’ recent point that the “crunch/fluff” dichotomy in games – where we attempt to separate mechanical leverage in games (this is what my stats say I can do) from fictional positioning (this is what the situation dictates) – makes little sense.((Boss 50–54.)) There is equally little substance in stats as there is in backstory as there is in arbitrary orders as there is in on-the-spot social fictions.

    In short: When you write a long backstory for a character, you are asking the player to perform literary analysis in order to understand the character. When you write out procedures and objectives for the character, the player has clear activities to engage in, but may be in some ways ensconced in ideological logics of power and control. When you provide no character sheet whatsoever, the design itself is likely relying on emergence to form the characters. There are so many ways for us to present characters to players; I encourage us to start reflecting on how we do so, and what are the hidden motives behind said designs.

    Works Cited

    • Bode, Christoph. Future Narratives: Theory, poetics, and media-historical moment. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.
    • Bogost, Ian. “Procedural Rhetoric.” Media Systems 7. 23 September 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFaqguc_uNk
    • Boss, Emily Care. “Skin Deep.” WyrdCon Companion Book 2012: 50–54.
    • Carlson, Marvin. Theories of the Theatre. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984.
    • Costikyan, Greg. Uncertainty in Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
    • Fatland, Eirik. “What makes a character playable?” 2013.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqGVD0W5dhM
    • Harviainen, J. Tuomas. “A Hermeneutical Approach to Role-Playing Analysis.” International Journal of Role-Playing 1 (2009): 66–78.
    • Jara, David. “A Closer Look at the (Rule-) Books: Framings and Paratexts in Tabletop Role-playing Games.” International Journal of Role-Playing 4 (2013): 39–54.
    • Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York UP, 2006.
    • Konzack, Lars. “Characterology in Tabletop Role-Playing Games: A Textual Analysis of Character Sheets.” WyrdCon Companion Book 2013. Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, eds. Orange, CA: Wyrd Con, 2013: 86-93.
    • Montola, Markus. “The Invisible Rules of Role-Playing. The Social Framework of Role Playing Process.” International Journal of Role-Playing 1 (2009): 22–36.
    • ––– and Jaakko Stenros. Nordic Larp. Stockholm: Fea Livia, 2010.
    • Ottwalt, Ernst. “‘Tatsachenroman’ und Formexperiment: Eine Entgegnung an Georg Lukács.” Die Linkskurve 4.10 (October 1932): 22.
    • Perez, Daniel M. “A Character Sheet Is a Map.” 5 April, 2011. http://dmperez.com/2011/04/05/a-character-sheet-is-a-map/
    • Sandberg, Christopher. “Genesi. Larp Art, Basic Theories.” Beyond Role and Play. Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination. Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, eds. Helsinki: Ropecon ry, 2004.
    • Salen, Katie & Eric Zimmerman. The Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
    • Singles, Kathleen. Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.

    Cover photo: White Death, at Blackbox CPH (photo by Nina Runa Essendrop).

  • The Golden Cobra Challenge: Amateur-Friendly Pervasive Freeform Design

    Published on

    in

    The Golden Cobra Challenge: Amateur-Friendly Pervasive Freeform Design

    Written by

    I. The Birth of the Golden Snake

    Once upon a time – actually, at GenCon 2014 in Indianapolis, USA – several of us discovered a design problem for live freeform games. For the last five years, the independent role-playing game scene here in North America has run an expanding series of crowdsourced events under the banner of Games on Demand. Players show up shortly before the convention slot, choose an available game from a menu, and then sit down with the event facilitator to play. This year, we introduced Larps on Demand, a branch of Games on Demand with its own room at Origins and GenCon, and that is where we encountered our problem.

    The problem is as follows: GenCon and Origins are both massive conventions full of interesting things and people to see. As such, few attendees want to make intensive four-hour time commitments in this context, and thus we watched as the two-hour Larps on Demand events filled up, while the four-hour events did not and were cancelled. In response, facilitators began to split their four-hour events in two, and running larps in public spaces to attract visibility.

    In our post-GenCon debrief, we decided that established live freeform games that lasted two hours such as J. Tuomas Harviainen’s The Tribunal required too many players, whereas a flexible game like Håken Lid and Ole Peder Giæver’s The Hirelings required too much time, and Lizzie Stark’s The Curse required intimate space that was at a premium in a large convention setting. What were we to do?

    Thus the Golden Cobra Challenge for October 2014 was born. We would solve this live freeform problem by considering it as a set of design constraints in itself. Scrappy pervasive freeforms were what we needed. Therefore, the game submissions had to:

    • Be playable from start to finish in two hours or less, facilitated by people who were not the designer him/herself.
    • Be playable by a variable but small number of participants, ideally a wide range like 2–8.
    • Be playable in a public space, like an open lounge in a busy hallway.
    • Optional: Use the ingredients Chord, Light, Solution, Bear and Minute.

    We advertised it as a “friendly contest open to anyone interested in writing and playing freeform games,” and even provided a much-utilized mentor program for freeform designers who wanted to bounce their ideas off a partner. We would award prizes in categories corresponding with our design needs: Most Convention- Ready, Most Appealing to Newcomers, Cleverest Design, and Game We’re Most Eager to Play. That being said, the prize for each category was that the game would be run at least once at Metatopia in November 2014.

    II. The Baddest-Ass Snakes in the Jungle

    What came of it? Over 50 freeform submissions poured in from around the world, addressing the design constraints with verve and creativity. Designers and theorists once again debated definitions of “freeform”, while others saw fit to troll the contest with unmarked submissions (e.g. Vampire Death Party by A. Nohn Knee-Mus). As the judges volunteering our time, we could only scramble to keep up with the breadth of entries submitted by experienced and novice designers alike. In fact, the contest itself served as a sort of “permission and validation engine” for people who did not consider themselves designers – even for those beset with imposter syndrome – to create live freeforms.

    New designers were most welcome. As Wendy Gorman, co-designer (with David Hertz and Heather Silsbee) of Still Life, commented:

    I was shocked and delighted [by winning a Golden Cobra], and could not have been more pleased to see something of mine played by people who are well respected in the field of game design, especially since I am not a game designer, and have never considered that I could become one.

    Two hours, a public space, and a flexible player number meant that a short set of easy-to-communicate rules proved the best design strategy. Because few veteran designers had much experience in addressing the constraints, the playing field proved more level than in other RPG design contests. After all, we preferred to cultivate a broad community that would produce more games, rather than promoting exclusivity and competition among creators. Mentoring during the contest and rewarding the winning designs with actual play appeared the best ways to nurture such a community of play.

    The hard-selected winners of the contest came from a pool of the weird, wacky and dramatic. Some entries in this pool included Active Shooter by Tim Hutchings, a serious freeform dealing with the school shooter phenomenon; Snow by Agata Lubańska, about an explosive family situation in a snowed-in car; Keymaster by J Li, a ritual of creating fictional identities; and If I Were President by James Stuart, which enacts a surreal presidential debate in the far future. Contest winners often adhered closest to the given constraints. Still Life, a game about relationships between rocks, positions players as inanimate objects being moved around by elemental forces in a public space.

    Group Date by Sara Williamson embraces chaos, with the same date between two people being played out simultaneously by multiple groups. Glitch Iteration by Jackson Tegu explores fragmented computer memory and has players directly experience their surroundings as unstable simulations. Finally, Unheroes by Joanna Piancastelli deals with a group of superheroes who have altered reality to cover up a terrible mistake and must now make a critical decision. Many of the games would perform well in busy GenCon hallways in Indianapolis, as they did in the Metatopia hall.

    III. The Golden Cobra Hand Signal

    Live freeform in the United States has a history of being behind closed doors and opaque for newcomers. The Golden Cobra Challenge sought to amend that culture and, at the very least, create a stable of new games to try out at Games on Demand in GenCon 2015 and other conventions. But what it also produced – besides innovative new sets of rules and role-playing scenarios – was a quasi-new social phenomenon: role-players out in public playing games designed for public interference. Emerging from Metatopia, the Golden Cobra Hand Signal – putting one’s elbow in one’s hand and forming a snake face with the other hand – lets others know that, while you may be out in a park or hallway, you are actually also in the middle of playing a game and a role.

    Games like Still Life encourage outsiders to affect and interact with these players, but the outside world may still not necessarily understand what they are doing. As these drop-in-friendly live freeforms spread and mutate, we hope to see more of these arcane gestures coming to a convention near you.

    This article was initially published in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.