Author: Jonaya Kemper

  • Wyrding the Self

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    Wyrding the Self

    You’re weird.

    This common childhood insult comes in many languages and forms. The gist being that if you are not like the other children, and you do not fit in, then there must be something wrong with you. To be weird, is to be outside of what was expected of you. This may be something you are familiar with. The outsider is something we, as a collective part of humanity, have always tried to deal with. The notion that we are weird, and therefore somehow outside of society, and unwanted, is strong. If you do not fit in, then you must be fixed. This can be especially strong in collectivist cultures, where being outside the norm may even be considered selfish.

    However, what if the concept of weird, was not bad at all? What if the act of being weird, was actually a powerful and radical act of controlling one’s destiny? In this article, we will learn how to wyrd the self, that is, we will learn how to use basic tools to decolonize((Colonization is when a dominant group or system takes over culture and society from other groups. This may involve taking land, physical and mental violence, systemic injustice, and forcing people to only follow the colonizer’s way of life. When one decolonizes something, they are trying to undo the long lasting harm colonization has done. In this article, we are attempting to decolonize ourselves by rejecting a mythical norm. In this meaning decolonize means that we will learn how to press the proverbial restart button. What if we could be the being we truly want to be without the confines of society’s rigid interpretation of who we must be?)) the body and search for liberation from internalized oppression using navigational play. In simple terms, by learning to steer for liberation, and to engage in deep reflection after a larp, we may end up finding a version of ourselves who we want to be, rather than who society tells us we must be. This article is a condensed and rewritten take on my Master’s Degree thesis, Playing to Create Ourselves: Exploring Larp and Visual Autoethnographic Practice as a Tool of Self Liberation for Marginalized Identities (Kemper 2018).

    What is Wyrding?

    The word weird has its root in the Anglo Saxon word, wyrd, which roughly boils down to the action of controlling one’s fate. To be weird, is to control one’s fate, rather than let society determine your place and fate. To be weird, is to be outside the normal aspects of society, yes, but to also collectively decide who you would like to be, not based on societal pressure. It is my belief that larp affords us the actual ability to wyrd ourselves, that is to shape ourselves and our conceptions of self through play. In her book, The Functions of Role-Playing Games (2010), scholar Sarah Lynne Bowman speaks about role-playing’s ability to allow players to alter parts of their identity by trying on different acts of self hood:

    Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the process of role-playing lies in the ability to shift personality characteristics within the parameters of the game environment. Games and scenarios allow participants the opportunity to ”try on different hats” of selfhood, experimenting with the adoption of personality characteristics that either amplify or contradict aspects of their primary identities.

    Bowman 2010, 127

    What this essentially means is that when we role-play, we can completely shift who we are to fit the game. Each game allows us as players to explore the selves we could never be, or that we might have been, depending on how close to home we are playing. Larp then becomes a dressing room where we experiment with different selves that we can try on or take off as it suits us, and it is within this space we might find some of the characteristics we have always wanted to exhibit, but we have been closed off or discouraged from being. A large man may be allowed to be seen as soft and tearful, a woman of color may be able to be seen as smart without someone believing it is unbelievable, and someone who feels outside of the realm of attractiveness may be seen as a sex symbol. When you begin to alter yourself through this type of investigation and play it is taking fate into your own hands.

    When one does wyrd the self, they seek out emancipatory bleed, steer for liberation, and investigate themselves through the lens of play. What follows below, is a practical tool for using larp as an investigation tool, integrating those discoveries into your life, and a suggestion for the ethics of doing so.

    The Mythical Norm, Internalized Oppression, and Internalized Bias

    Before we go further, it is important to understand the concept of marginalized is larger than we have come to believe, and that these tools and theories are here to liberate all peoples, regardless of their station in life. While the word ‘marginalized’ may be commonly used to describe those populations who are often at the risk of the most oppression, it is important to understand that most people are both the oppressed and the oppressor. It is an uncomfortable thought to sit with, as it makes you aware that no matter how oppressed you may be, you still have the power to oppress others. Even people who face an extreme set of marginalizations (people of color/racialized populations and gender and sexual minorities) can still have the ability to oppress others.

    This can be best summed up by Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Friere, who explained what he believed the true goal of liberation in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Frieire writes:

    This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.

    Freire 1968/2014, 541

    Freire is saying that even though oppressors may do things that oppress others, they themselves are stuck in the same destructive cycles, and the only way to break them is to notice that we are all stuck inside of them. For example: A person who belongs in an ethnic minority may still have English as a first language, and can then take space of those who do not speak the language fluently. At home, this player is routinely oppressed by their government and culture. However, they are a native English speaker, and never have to worry about conveying what they want to say in a larp. The player realizes this, and attempts to remember this while playing, which leads them to being far more egalitarian in play. They must notice their behavior, and seek to change themselves.

    By freeing yourself, you free your oppressor and encourage them to break their social binding roles. Wyrding the self, is grounded in an intersectional theory of self, and so must sit with our messy definitions and recognitions of oppression. This tool is just as easy to use and accessible to a white, European, cis-gendered, hetreosexual man. Why? It is because it is my belief that society oppresses all individuals in ways that may be unseen, and if we want liberation, then we must also liberate those who oppress us because they are oppressed just like us, through the mythical norm.

    The concept of the mythical norm comes from intersectional theorist and poet, Audre Lorde, who defines it in her essay, “Age, Race, Class and Sex” when she states:

    Somewhere on the edge of consciousness, there is something I call the mythical norm. Which each one of in our hearts knows, “that is not me”. In America this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is within this norm that the trappings of power reside in this society.

    Lorde 2015, 116

    Identities like Western European, English speaking, cisgender, able bodied, and neurotypical are all things commonly seen as the mythical norm. In each of our societies, the norm goes even further, oppressing more and more people, and setting up those people to oppress others.

    Our primary identity is constructed and shaped by our culture and the mythic norm. When one lies outside that norm, they find that their primary identity is complex and intersectional. Sometimes you do not even need an outside oppressor to harm you, as your own thoughts and feelings can hold you back. You believe you cannot do something because you are not “the type” to do it. This is called internalized oppression. For example, if you do not go in for the sexy Goddess role because you believe you are too fat, and no one can believe a fat goddess, this is internalized oppression. Similarly, if you do not go for a leadership role because you think your English is not as good as others, and you’re worried no one will listen to you.

    With internalized oppression, we only see ourselves as not normal, as the other outside of the mythic norm, and we uphold that unconsciously. By continuing to stay in these roles, we uplift the very oppression that can pull us down.

    In addition to internalized oppression, we have internalized biases that stop us from playing as fully, and impacts our co-players as we are engaging in their oppression. Here are some examples: A woman who is playing a leader is never listened to by her war council, despite being cast as the most knowledgeable warrior who they are supposed to listen to. Someone in their 60s is considered too unattractive to be seductive, despite the fact that their character is seductive.

    If we hold ourselves captive to these internalized myths of who we can never be, how then do we break it? We can do this through consciously telling our own stories and creating our own selves. With larp, you have the power to live your own stories and put them to action in your body. In larp, we find yet another realization that stories have the power to liberate.

    Emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2016) is the feeling of liberation that comes from being able to fight back against or succeed against a systematic oppression, or allows you to notice those things that have held you back. For example, when a male player who was routinely bullied as a child for being emotional, plays a character who has the ability to freely share that emotion without being bullied for it. Or when a player notices that they are no longer afraid of speaking their mind at the office, or taking up space in public, after playing a person in charge at a larp.

    Capturing Story, Narrative, and Plot

    How can we capture what has happened during a larp? According to larp theorist Johanna Koljonen (2008), when a larp is over, it ceases to exist, and it is hard to pin down the narrative. In order to understand the importance of stories and narratives in relation to wyrding the self, we will be using the definition of story, plot, and narrative as defined by designer and scholar Simon Brind (2016). His definition of stories and narratives allows you to see how the fluidity and temporality of larp as well as how you may progress through it. Plot is the larpwrights plan for what is going to happen in the larp, Story is what is actually happening during runtime, and narrative is the events that have taken place and described after the fact.

    A larp follows an overall plot conceit (i.e. we are all in a forest in a magical land, we are all at wizard school, we are all at the dinner table) and then the players take the designer’s plot and structure, and turn it into a co-created story, which is ephemeral in nature, and becomes the narrative when it is all done.

    Since the narrative of the larp is only decided after the larp has taken place, it is fairly personal to each player. Therefore, each instance of play is a fleeting moment in time which can never be recreated exactly. The narrative of the larp lies in the mind of each player, and that narrative becomes their embodied experience. The story you create with your co-players evolves moment to moment with player interactions and choices, each person bringing themselves and the fiction to life. While the larpwrights may have ideas about how a larp ends, it is generally up to you as a player to get there, even if the larp ends in a specific conceit.

    How can we contextualize our own experiences if they are hard to document and the narrative is not created until after everything has happened? You will need a set of reflexive tools to help you remember and contextualize your experience, and since the co-creation of the story ends up in many individual narratives, I believe that larp experience can be best suited to be investigated from the personal, which is why we use autoethnographic techniques.

    We know that the narrative of a larp is not the plot of the larp, nor is it the story. The story is what happens during the larp, and the narrative we can investigate is not apparent until the end. This means you must create a record of your stages of play and actions as a character. This is something you may already do after many games. You may write up what happened to you during the game, or give your character’s story an epilogue. This is often bundled into a narrative write up, which can then serve as an autoethnographic set of data we can investigate. A visual ethnography is a study of a people done in media, namely photographs, ephemera, and videos, and autoethnography is a self-study of a group you may be in. These two combined approaches may help you to explore your experiences.

    A visual autoethnography allows you to capture as much of your experience as possible, like ephemera and narrative epilogues or write ups, and then use those to reflect on who you played. You may already be taking pictures and documenting your ephemera, and you may even practice reflexive writing every time you share narratives of your game.

    When we write reflexively, we do not just look inside the magic circle with this approach, we look inside ourselves, inside the character, and inside the greater world. This reflexivity is what gives us the ability to see into ourselves. Social scientists, Tony Adams, Stacey Jones, and Carolyn Ellis (2014, 103) define reflexivity in Autoethnography Understanding Qualitative Research, “Reflexivity includes both acknowledging and critiquing our place and privilege in society and using the stories we tell to break long-held silences on power, relationships, cultural taboos, and forgotten and/or suppressed experiences.” By allowing ourselves to pin down the narrative and then look at it and compare it to our lives, we can potentially see where our fantasies lie within our realities.

    Navigational Play

    When we choose to wyrd the self, what we are actually doing is engaging in something I have termed, navigational play (Kemper 2018). The main purpose of navigational play is to try and see yourself outside the bounds of the mythic norm. Instead of constantly inhabiting your own oppressive world, you can use a self-exploratory, liberatory play style, that allows you to feel free of or investigate a particular marginalization. Navigational play is the act of steering yourself during the full process of a larp, to seek emancipatory bleed and consists of two components, steering for liberation and reflective writing.

    When you steer, you are making in-character decisions based on out of game reasons (Montola, Stenros, & Saitta 2015), and thus steering for liberation is the act of seeking liberatory experiences through steering. Reflective writing is the act of looking at and writing about how your experiences relate to fictional situations, in our case, our larp experiences. In order for us to reflect on our narrative, we have to remember what our larp experience was. Using ephemera, pre larp writing activities, and creating a narrative write up, will create an artifact that we can then explore reflexively.

    In order to steer for liberation and create an artifact we can then look at reflexively, we have to investigate what we want and need from the larp. By investigating your character and self, at various points of the larp stages you can identify similar oppressions and desires between the character and self. In the next section, we will explore ways to invoke pre-bleed, create ephemera, involve others such as co-players and organizers, as well as touch upon how to take field notes during a larp so you may write reflexively. Chart 1 roughly explains how each step may be achieved during various stages of a larp.

    Pre-Larp During Larp Post Larp
    Explore Character If characters are pre-written, and not created by you, attempt to find and ask for casting in relations to the themes of the larp you would like to explore. Look at alibi. What will the larp allow you to do that you otherwise cannot in the real world?Explore relationships the character has to others. What are the similarities and differences?

    How does this character connect to you? Think about their name and history, what can you add to it to make it personal? How are they different? Which of the larp’s themes feel most important to play on? Are there parts of yourself that you would like to think about and bring into play? Are there themes you would like to play on that the larp and the character explores?

    Investigate the character. Which proverbs, virtues and values, rituals, mentors, and artifacts mean the most to you? To them? What if anything is in common or dissimilar to your lived experience? To your latent or obvious fantasies? Visualize the self.

    What feels interesting to the character in the play space? Who would they be drawn to throughout their story? What rituals, social mores etc. are they seeking to break, embrace, or understand? What in the end were the similarities and differences to you and the character?Using your narrative write up, or field notes re-investigate the character and their narrative. Compare and contrast which proverbs, virtues and values, rituals, mentors, and artifacts mean the most to you after play.

    What means the most to the character?

    What if anything is in common or dissimilar to your lived experience?

    To your latent or obvious fantasies? Visualize the narrative self and the personal.

    Identify Themes and Exploration Identify similar themes and oppressions between the character and yourself if they are prewritten. If the character is self-written identify themes you may want to explore now that you have alibi.If the character is pre-written and feels unplayable ask for a new casting or write changes and ask for them to be implanted within reason.

    Asking that your character bring in their ethnic heritage in a larp about going to a barbecue is reasonable, asking your character to be changed to a Martian in a game about the Crusades is not. To break the fiction premise radically when that will harm others’ games can throw off other players who are seeking to explore their own oppression or simply play. This would be a critical breach of ingroup social mores and unethical.

    Steer for optimal play experience of the themes chosen. Notice any behaviors you are replicating for better or worse. Notice who you gravitate towards. Steer for relationships and situations you have the alibi for. Look for situations that uphold narrative cohesion and satisfy your steering goals. Attempt fearlessness. Attempt exploration. Remember Alibi.If you are engaging in oppression play, be aware of intersecting identities and that oppression does not occur in a vacuum. Respect safety mechanisms. Go through your write up and look for replicated behaviors that tie into your personal life. Evaluate your steering in comparison to what you looked for. What stopped you? What encouraged you?What relationships did you gravitate towards? What roles did you enact that either broke or upheld the oppressive behaviors you sought to dismiss? What roles or people did you gravitate towards in order to feel liberation?

    Were there mentors?

    Did anything unusual happen that you weren’t prepared for? Did you stop yourself from doing something you wanted, or engaged in behavior that you don’t enjoy?

    Writing/Recording Flesh out Character through fiction or poetry writing. If this is not possible, ask yourself questions about your character. Where are they from, what do they like? Seek to make them as whole as possible.If possible, explore co-writing with established relationships in the larp.

    Take pictures of your costume choices, create a Pinterest board, or organize thoughts and feelings with music or art.

    Take notes during the larp or shortly thereafter. Diegetic notes and diaries are preferable. Write or draw ephemera as much as you can. Save notes.If allowed, take photos of spaces and people that mean things to your character.

    Gain informed consent from the larp runners and other participants.

    Create a narrative write up that focuses and centers your player experience in character. When you are ready to investigate the larp from your personal non-character point of view, attempt to find common themes in how you played. Look for moments that felt particularly poignant. Instead of trying to capture the entire larp, seek to capture what was most important to the character in the moment.Write the narrative write up in any creative format that makes you feel the most comfortable. Use annotations and footnotes to add in self reflections.
    Ephemera Using the character concept, design and think about the costuming, props, notes, and other things that may be important to your character. If the larp is short and you cannot create props consider creating in-game ephemera. If you are playing close to home, explore using personal objects to immerse yourself. Pictures of family and friends, your own wardrobe, etc. Take photos, write letters, create props, collect important objects that are useful for your character and provoke a sense of missing. Ephemera created during the story period often has significant meanings. Take photos of all of the ephemera collected. Sort through character portraits and other in game ephemera. What ephemeral artifacts can you explore?Save official game documents given to you by the organizer. How did the structure of the larp help? Hinder? What does the ephemera mean to the character? Are there similarities between the ephemera you collected at the player and you collected as the character?

    Identifying Oppressions and Desires

    The first part of liberatory steering, is to think of what you want to accomplish or explore within the magic circle of the larp’s plot. Not every larp is useful for exploring yourself in this way, and you can save yourself a lot of trouble by looking at playstyle, length of time, tone, and overall larp culture. A larp that allows you to play a role that can challenge your perceptions of yourself and the world, is a good candidate, as is one where the larp culture allows you to make more choices about what happens to your character. You should avoid forcing yourself to play on themes that deeply distress you, are not in the spirit or theme of the larp, and would affect the play of your co-players to the detriment of the game.

    For example: A player has two options of larps. One is a larp about an unequal society that murders lower class people, and the coming revolution. The other is a larp about wealthy nobles and their servants in 1918. The player who is from a lower class background, would like to experience what it would be like to successfully rebel against the upper class, so they choose the first larp as it would provide more opportunity to rebel and succeed than the larp in which most of their play is in subservience to others.

    If the characters are prewritten, you can try to select a character that may allow you to achieve your desires by applying for characters, groups, or requesting certain themes be written heavily into the character. If the characters are created by yourself or tailored to you, then you may ask to play around certain themes and desires in a casting questionnaire. In the former example, you may ask specifically to play a rebel because you want to explore that dynamic. Then if you are cast as such, you can seek to explore how or why you are doing so. After you identify your desires and things that may hold you back, you should then look at the relations your characters have and talk to your fellow co-players.

    Talking to Co-Players and Playing to Lift

    After casting, but before playing the larp, reaching out to co-players and actually expressing your needs and wants for the game is a challenging but necessary step. You can divulge what themes you are thinking of playing on more heavily, and ask your co-player if there are any themes they might want to play on. Asking questions of your co-players, even quickly, can help you both steer for the type of game you both would like to achieve. When you seek to share responsibility like this, you are also engaging in what designer and theorist Susanne Vejdemo (2018) calls, playing to lift. Vejdemo defines this as by saying, “Play to Lift means that the responsibility for your drama and your character also rests on all your co-players. You have to lift each other.” By talking to your co-players you can work to create a game that allows you to steer towards your desires together, and seek to help them in creating drama and interesting play that will lift them as well as yourself.

    Depending on the length of the larp, you can also go on to create connections with your co-players that can be as easy as choosing to be siblings who support each other to many pages of back stories with intricate details. This is done in larps that have or allow pre-play, which is the act of writing or engaging with players in character before the larp. This type of relationship building can lead to something called pre-bleed (Svanevik and Brind 2016), which is very useful for getting into character. Pre-bleed is usually conceived of as an activity between two or more players, but it does not necessarily require a co-player.

    Larps may set up chat groups where in character dialogue may happen, players may write stories between their connected characters that happen before the larp, and various other methods which deepen character connection.

    Here are some ways to invoke pre-bleed:

    • Writing a series of short fiction pieces with another player or a group of players that flesh out the world of the larp before the larp happens.
    • Writing a short story for yourself about your character’s relation to a key theme of the larp.
    • Creating a piece of ephemera that you will use heavily during the larp, such as a personalized handkerchief or other item.
    • Exploring the topic of the larp through research.
    • Creating a playlist of songs to listen to that reminds you of your character.
    • Creating a mood board that captures the character’s home, wants, and desires.

    Actions You Can Take Inside of the Larp

    By carefully choosing your larp based on what experiences, tone, and theme you will embody, you can set yourself up for better results. Look out for opportunities to experience things you may never get to do so in your daily life. If, for example, you never got the experience of finishing your studies, you could choose to play a high achieving and successful student in a school larp. Even if you did not overcome what stopped you from finishing in your actual courses, you may feel as if you overcame them within the larp.

    Here are some examples of actions to take during play:

    • If an action is prohibited for someone of your social rank, do it.
    • If an activity is something you wouldn’t be expected to do, do it.
    • If a style is something you have been prohibited from wearing because people like you are not allowed, wear it.
    • If your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation usually prohibits you from owning something, buy it.

    Creating Ephemera and Reflexive Writing

    When a larp ends, what do you have left as a participant? Perhaps some photos, your costume, a vague narrative you remember, lots of ephemera and…not much else. It is hard to be reflexive about your experience if you do not have a memory of what happened. How then, as a player can you investigate your experience after it is over? One way is by creating and writing about ephemera, things that are primarily used for a larp and typically discarded or recycled.

    Larps may produce a surprising amount of ephemera. Ephemera are generally objects that have limited use, like concert tickets, or a show program. However, within larp’s ephemeral nature, ephemera becomes a unique way to bond player to character.

    Within an autoethnography of larp participation, a player who carefully chooses, creates, documents, and uses reflection in regard to their ephemera may be able to immerse themselves deeper into their character, use ephemera in liberational steering, and document an otherwise transitory medium.

    Here are a few examples of ephemera you can keep and later investigate:

    • A letter sent to your character from another character that is important to you both.
    • A prop that your character always carried or used frequently during the larp.
    • A homework assignment, poem, or plan drawn up by your character or others.
    • Costume pieces like identifying badges, sweaters, and any other piece that firmly reminds you of an experience.
    • Photos taken in character by an in character photographer.

    After the larp is over, you can begin to look at each ephemera and write down your reactions to them and what they mean to you as the character and/or the player. This connects the character to the self. Interrogate and reflect on how the character and the self connect:

    • Why is this object important to the character or myself?
    • What do I feel when I touch it?
    • Why did I keep it?
    • Have I ever owned anything like it? Why or why not?
    • Have I continued to use it out of character?
    • Have I used it for multiple characters?
    • Where does it live when I’m not this character?

    By answering these questions you may begin to see the connections between yourself and the character. For example, perhaps you choose to explore a series of notes passed in class by your player, and realize that you were too nervous to pass notes when you were in school yourself. Passing notes made you feel daring, and you particularly enjoyed it in the larp, because you never got the opportunity to do so before.

    When you write this down, you may develop a sense of why you play the way you do, or whether you actually explored the desires and oppressions you wanted to. However, this reflexive insight must still be put in context of the narrative.

    Taking Field Notes at Larps

    For our purposes, field notes within larp are observations by players about their larp experience as it is happening and is collected into a field journal. There is no one way to write a narrative field journal, but having one if a larp allows it, can provide a valuable tool in searching for the transformation of self through immersion and examining bleed. A diegetic journal is also an ephemeral artifact that allows the player to connect to the character’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. You can use this journal to write a summation of your narrative write up, which you can then look at reflexively. Those who write them often turn their larp experience into pleasurable reading and a document of play.

    Here are some tips for taking practical field notes during larps:

    • Focus not on other’s experience, but your own. Avoid writing what you wish happened, and stay truthful to your own experience and your co-players actions.
    • Just as a character might take a diary, and note what happened, try and write what happened during the day.
    • Note who your most important relationships are, what is occurring around you, and how your character is reacting to it.
    • If you are in a short larp or are not able to write much, consider writing up your character’s feelings in a letter to yourself while the larp is still fresh.
    • Do not spend too much time trying to remember everything that has happened, but the key experiences, beliefs, issues, and rituals the character engaged in.
    • Do not stop other’s play in order to record a conversation. Feel free to go out of play to a separate space to record important moments immediately, if you fear forgetting.
    • Do not write more than you play.

    When you are done writing, you can then begin to be reflexive. Give yourself time and space before looking at what you wrote. When you are ready, use the following questions as a sample guide to begin investigating your experience while rereading:

    • Are there memories that remind you of your actual self?
    • Did you associate with characters or players that you you, yourself would or that you wished you could interact with?
    • Did you avoid people your character wouldn’t have? Why do you think so?
    • Is there something you overcame?
    • Was there something you felt stopping you from playing as you would have liked? Was it yourself? Design? Your co-players?
    • Did you notice moments of internalized bias towards yourself or others? If you did, what did you do about it?
    • Do you recognize habits that you do as yourself that you did in character?
    • Do you recognize any habits you always wished you had? Did you end up taking home any of these habits? Have you retained them?
    • Do you have any regrets about what you did or didn’t do? Why?

    Retyping your narrative in a word processor and then placing your reflective writing answers as footnotes can be particularly helpful to seeing the separation between self and character. You may begin to see clear threads about your own desires and oppressions, and notice patterns in your play style over time. This can help you choose which larps you may enjoy, and which larps you can steer away from, as well as what you may take away. For example like this:

    Field Note:
    After the battle meeting, I realized that the power I channeled during a previous ritual had been inside me all along.

    Footnote to the Field Note:
    After the larp I realized that I was more assertive at work than I normally am. I’ve been speaking up at a lot more meetings now then I used to, and I think it comes from this moment. I should really pick more larps where I have a leading role.

    Ethics

    While you should absolutely be using larp and a navigational play style in order to seek emancipatory bleed and investigate our own relationships to trauma and internalized oppressions, we cannot do this in a vacuum. Larp is a co-created medium, and while we may want to use it for our own liberation, our liberation cannot come at the cost of others. While our narratives in a larp are individual, our stories are not so easily cut off. Much like our actual lives, your co-players do play a role. Anthropologist Heewon Chang (2008) in her book Autoethnography as Method reminds us that we must be aware of the role of others in our research and outlines some practices I believe are also important when thinking of a larp autoethnography:

    Strangers can be connected to self through group membership or common experiences, if not through personal contacts. In autoethnography, self and others may be positioned in different ways. You can consider three possibilities. First, you can investigate yourself as a main character and others as supporting actors in your life story. Second, you can include others as co-participants or co-informants in your study. Third, you can study others as the primary focus, yet also as an entry to your world.

    Chang 2008, 65

    It is preferred to position yourself as the main character and your co-players as supporting characters in your own personal narrative. You must be aware though, that your narrative in no way is the only narrative of the larp, and even your closest co-player may have had a radically different experience. We must consider how we involve our co-players in the practice of our write ups and our play. We must take care to not misrepresent them, even though it may make for better fiction. The goal is liberation for yourself, not at the expense of others. In the cases of autoethnographies that are published for ingroup pleasure as well ones published for player-researcher means, I argue the following two approaches based on Chang’s above suggestions:

    First, focus only about your character’s experience of the world, making sure to keep all of your co-players anonymous as possible. In this way, you center your own experience over others’ in the write up, but not in play. In play, you should strive to be as generous as you would if you were not steering for emancipatory bleed. Your liberation should not come at the expense of others’ play.

    2. Involve your co-players in the writing and steering process. Making a collaborative larp autoethnography would be an excellent way to involve all of your players and help each other to dissect facets of the character you might have missed. Imagine if an entire faction took turns writing mission reports that served as a diary for that group during game.

    We must never put our liberation over co-player’s experience, and that means we must not steer ourselves in the play space to disrupt a larp when it would negatively impact others who may play. We must take into context the ethics of consequence (Etherington 2007) and the benefit of self. If you are writing something solely for your own discovery, this is less cumbersome as no one else outside of the group will see or read it. If, however, you chose to use it in your own research, then you must practice process consent (Ellis 2007) namely, you must check in with those who you have played and who appear in the work to see if they are still willing to take part. If the answer is no, then you must keep your narrative to the ingroup community or to yourself.

    An autoethnography that is kept purely for the discovery of self and never shared is still as valuable as anything that may be published. It is the act of reflection, not the publishing where liberation lies. Here are some things you can do with a finished autoethnographic larp write up:

    • You can share it with your co-players.
    • You can look over it with a trained mental health professional.
    • You can keep it for yourself, and reread it comparing it to other write ups and finding clear patterns in how and why you play the way you do.

    Conclusion

    Wyrding the self is the sustained effort to decolonize your body from the mythical norm, and begin the process of identity alteration. This alteration can be a direct result of experiencing emancipatory bleed that you may be able to achieve through navigational play which involves the acts of reflexive writing and steering for liberation.

    The ability to wyrd the self lies in a player’s desire to do the reflective work that is necessary for decolonization. It is not easy, and requires pre-planning and commitment to co-create narratives collectively with your co-players while seeking liberation. While this tool has been created with those who face systematic marginalization in mind, the ability to investigate how you played the larp, and it’s relation to your own life has been immensely helpful to larpers who are interested in playing for transformative purposes. Recording your actions during a larp, transcribing it, and then investigating your play by comparing it to some of the questions you may ask yourself, can allow you to see internalized biases or oppressions that can hold you back in your day to day life. As long as you do not push your narrative and experience to be more important than your co-players, I believe this too can be used to see and cultivate a community of transformative larp practice. When you seek to wyrd the self, you create a more resilient self by seeing yourself as truly want to be, not what you have been molded to be by a mythical norm.

    Bibliography

    Simon Brind (2017): Response to Ian Andrews. Knutpunkt. Once Upon a Nordic Larp: Twenty Years of Playing Stories, edited by Martine Svanevik et al.

    Sarah Lynne Bowman (2010): The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. Jefferson: McFarland.

    Heewon Chang (2016): Autoethnography as Method. Routledge.

    Paulo Freire (1968/2014): Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Bloomsbury Publishing.

    Jonaya Kemper (2017): The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity, Nordic Larp, 21 June 2017.

    Jonaya Kemper (2018): Playing to Create Ourselves: Exploring Larp and Visual Autoethnographic Practice as a Tool of Self Liberation for Marginalized Identities (Unpublished Master’s Thesis). New York University, Gallatin Graduate School.

    Johanna Koljonen (2008): The Dragon Was the Least of It: Dragonbane and LARP as Ephemera and Ruin. Ropecon ry. Montola & Stenros (eds): Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games.

    Linn, Holman Jones Stacy, et al. (2016): Handbook of Autoethnography. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

    Audre Lorde (2015): Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press

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

    Martine Svanevik, and Simon Brind (2016): Pre-Bleed Is Totally a Thing. Ropecon Ry. Larp Realia – Analysis, Design, and Discussions of Nordic Larp.

    Susanne Vejdemo (2018): Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose Nordic Larp, 21 Feb. 2018

  • More Than a Seat at the Feasting Table

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    More Than a Seat at the Feasting Table

    After finishing a short introduction to my thesis during a graduate forum at New York University Gallatin, curious students and bystanders surrounded me. I got asked the same barrage of questions I hear from people of color often. Where can they larp? How can they larp? Is larping for them? Is it just fantasy stuff? How much is it? Can you larp as anything you want?

    Mostly importantly though, “Where can you larp?”

    I had answers for some of those questions, but not all.  Answering these questions require me to think intersectionally, especially within a US concept. The history of colonialism, means that race, gender, and class are linked together in a way that one cannot think of one without the other. In recommending larps to people of color, I must think of cost and location in addition to interest. For instance, I hesitate to send people of color into all White spaces. Many boffer larps can be notoriously problematic, with their sects, “races”, and factions which routinely perpetuate racial stereotypes in coded language. In addition to this, in the US, race and wealth are intrinsically linked together. This means some forms of larp are more accessible than others. Parlor larps, freeform, jeepform, and Intercon styled larps are all far more accessible than a big budget international larp, but even in those styles, there is a distinct lack of writers, players and spaces which are helmed by people of color. In short: As is stands, larp is very White, and if it is to go truly international, to reach communities the world over and back, it’s going to need to be more inclusive of non-Western, non-European, and non-White people.((This assumption is backed up by Christopher Amherst’s findings in his 2016 Solmukohta article about the 2014 larp census. “Therefore within our cohort population the “default” is a White male between the ages of 20-34, who participates as cast/crew in live combat fantasy campaigns…”)) This means, it’s not enough to put the few larpers of color on your brochures, we must encourage, support, and nourish larpers of color and encourage them not only to play, but to create. In encouraging more diverse involvement at all levels of larp, larp’s international appeal will not only reside in a few select areas, but spread far enough so the benefits of larp can be extended to those who are systematically oppressed.

    My own (Jonaya Kemper's) character for Dying Kingdoms: A’isha Elvenhart. A’isha is a direct outcome of me being able to create the character I always wanted to see in a fantasy novel. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.
    My own (Jonaya Kemper’s) character for Dying Kingdoms: A’isha Elvenhart. A’isha is a direct outcome of me being able to create the character I always wanted to see in a fantasy novel. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.

    There Were no Wardrobes for Children Like Us

    If I close my eyes I can still see myself pedalling my purple 10 speed bicycle, my clunky scuffed sneakers caught in the rhythmic cycle of going forward. On Saturdays, I escaped to the “good park”, past the “bad park” where broken glass and drug dealers clumped together among 200-year-old trees and a ripped-out gazebo whose wires still stick up like metal snakes. The good park is where most of the wealthier (and ostensibly, White) kids lived, and since I was 14, I could go all by myself, so I can be weird in peace.((I should note that in this case, weird is not a derogatory term. Indeed, the word itself comes from the Anglo Saxon wyrd, meaning someone who control’s their own fate. I intended to control mine.)) I carried a large leather bag with a Portuguese roll (papa secos) with thick fresh butter and honey that I will dub “journey bread”, some cheap chocolate, and a can of ginger ale I will say is ale. Inside that bag was also a journal. A complicated thing written in pseudo-medieval fantasy code, so that later, it will be indecipherable to anyone except myself. I pedal hard and fast, and dream myself on a horse riding through the countryside. But I have never seen a countryside. Nor have I been on a horse. I dream of swords, ball gowns, castles, pyramids, tricksters, and fairies. I rewrote everything I read so I could find myself. I wrote stories of girls who looked like me, or my cousins, or my friends. I put us at the center of the universe, and found something that gnawed ever at my heart.

    This fantasy was not made for me. The feasting table where heroes came to from adventures did not include me. It was reinforced with every book cover, with every fantasy race described as “beautifully pale with flaxen hair”. I wanted so badly to be among the heroes laughing and feasting together, but I quickly found out that I was not invited to play in these fantastic worlds, simply because I did not exist in them.

    In most of the books I read, which are the basis for much of the fantasy genre, people of color were either nonexistent or portrayed as evil. White children found Narnia. White children fell through tree knots, found secret keys, and became royalty in unknown lands. They were the chosen ones who inherited magic powers, danced with the Fae during the full moon, and were called to perform wild serenades to powers eldritch… There were no magical Kingdoms for children who looked like me, and it went even further than erasure from fiction.

    Our faces were not only blocked from the very stuff of imagination, they were erased from actual history. The tales of Africa, Asia, and South America were all left out of our instruction, or only spoken of in terms of colonialism. This effectively curtailed large swathes of my own imagination. I could no more imagine a free Black woman in 18th century England as I could imagine a Black Lucy shooting arrows. The former was as fantastical and improbable as the latter.

    “What if though,” I thought, “What if could just make up my own stories?”

    And so I did. Under that tree in the park, I wrote myself the stories I wish I could play and see. I wrote the characters of color I so desperately needed, and eventually I began to wonder. What if people could play dress up and actually become their own stories? I brushed this notion off as a dream, another strange fantasy. It took almost fifteen years before I heard the term, “Larp.”

    Diana Leonard as Wallad Mustakfa, a warrior poet and ambassador based on Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, a 11th century Andalusian poet. Diana was integral to drawing me into the story, and encouraging me. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.
    Diana Leonard as Wallad Mustakfa, a warrior poet and ambassador based on Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, a 11th century Andalusian poet. Diana was integral to drawing me into the story, and encouraging me. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.

    The first larp I attended was an American Boffer larp based in Southern California, known as Dying Kingdoms. Indeed, the number one way my friends convinced me to go, was by saying I wouldn’t be alone as the only PoC. It is a universal truth that when entering an unfamiliar space, a person of color (PoC) hopes to not be the singular person of color in attendance. PoC have been taught that when you place your body in a space where you are the only PoC, you are potentially opening yourself up to discrimination, harassment, tokenism, and possible injury.

    This internal knowing can be described as having multiple consciousnesses. These multiple consciousnesses were first talked about by critical race theorist W.E.B Dubois who coined the term double consciousness, which refers to the inability of Black Americans to be seen in the singular, rather each individual must carry the history of their oppression and what others view them as. (DuBois, 1994) This theory was made an international theory when another critical race theorist, Frantz Fanon explored the concept in other countries. Fanon posited that people of color carried not only themselves this way in their own countries of birth, but wherever they went in the world. (Fanon, 1968)  PoC are not truly allowed to live by just their nationalities, they can never be just an American, Norwegian, or Briton. To Western hegemonic society, PoC telegraph our otherness, and that otherness lives in a seemingly unescapable narrative of Western colonialism and White Supremacy.  To live and survive, we must follow unspoken rules, which include giving up playing pretend, and any hobbies left outside of what the mainstream prescribes for.

    For PoC who remain locked into the small boxes placed upon our bodies, playing outside of normative boundaries and seeking joy in the face of overwhelming oppression is a revolutionary act. It is my belief that larp is not only play, but also a method. It is a tool to discover and explore different roles and selves. For PoC this is vital, and the combination of systemic oppression, media misrepresentation or complete lack of representation allows larpers of color to take on those roles they would never ordinarily be allowed to take on. Creating a narrative of liberation for oneself is a revolutionary act. Larp as a medium is not a luxury to be discarded, it is a tool for self-liberation. It is among the ever-growing proudly geeky hobbies of PoC, all of whom are striving for recognition in the world we share.

    Encouraging all people of color to see themselves outside of the confines of what they are told they must be, rather than what they individually are according to the dominant narrative, is very important, and drives many new areas of scholarship within popular culture. This includes Afrofuturism.

    Afrofuturism is a movement that seeks to redefine Blackness for the future ever looking forward and backward in history for inspiration. As art curator and Afrofuturist Ingrid La Fleur said in her TedTalk Visual Aesthetics of Afrofuturism, “I see Afrofuturism as a way to encourage experimentation reimagine identities, and activate liberation.” (LaFleur, 2011) I believe that larp can absolutely fit this description. Larp provides what Sarah Lynne Bowman calls “trying on different hats” of self-hood. (Bowman, 2010) She states, “Role-playing environments provide a safe atmosphere and experience for people to collectively enact new modes of self-expression and experience a sense of ego permeability while still maintaining their primary identity in the ‘real world.’” The ability to not give up ones’ inherent identity as a person of color, while still being able to explore different modes of self is a direct pushback to a society that says you only have one sense of self.  Larp brings exploration and joy, and allows us to recreate ourselves and communities.

    How We Can All Eat at the Feasting Table

    If larp can be a tool for investigating self and breaking out of the confines of the hegemonic dominance of White Supremacy placed on players of color, how then do we invite more potential larpers of color to the table? How do we make larping an activity that is welcoming and exploratory for all? We have seen larp media become slowly more diverse, but the larps themselves, the organizers, the variety of larps, and who is playing them needs to be further considered. Below, are my suggestions for making larp more accessible to PoC.

    Blackface is not a Homage

    Let’s start at the thorniest of problems. One of the most frequently asked questions and debates when it concerns people of color and larp has to do with painting one’s skin to be perceived as other. There have been arguments made that painting oneself in Mehron burnt sienna is fine because the White player in question wanted to “authentically” play a Black person, or an Arab person. To this we say something simple.

    No.

    The history of painting one’s skin in cork or paint to stereotype and lampoon people of color is not just an American problem, and no matter how many times large swathes of PoC explain that it is not remotely okay to do so, inevitably someone pushes back and says, “But it’s a homage!”

    It is not a homage. If you would like to welcome players of color, the first thing one should do is make them feel safe and welcome, which means avoiding race facing.

    Race facing, the act of changing one’s skin tone or facial characteristics to play a different race is unacceptable as it draws upon a legacy of ridicule, subjugation, and racism. If you are painting yourself brown to play an Arab, you are in the process of being ignorant. PoC come in all shades, including shades that include White people. By painting yourself you aren’t being more authentic, you are at best being insensitive, and at worse being racist. So, put down the dreadlock wig and the brown greasepaint.

    A game or gaming culture that encourages face painting to portray the “other” is one that is unwelcoming to PoC.

    Stop Asking for Free Labor and Start Encouraging Designers of Color

    By the time you’ve read this article, at least one White person has signed up to a Larpers of Color group to ask the question, “Hey can someone check my game out and tell me if it’s racist?”

    PoC, whether they are larpers or not, tend to continually do this type of free labor. We will pour over scripts, manuals, art, and all game material to make sure there is one less accidentally or intentionally racist game in the world. Larpers of color want other PoC to larp, so very often no matter if we are busy, working on our own projects, tired, out of resources or just plain broke, we are checking and rechecking people’s work all for a simple, “Thanks for the Help.” Meanwhile the game receives some invisible shield, (“Hey, a POC said I could do it!”) and the person of color barely gets a nod in the margins of the creation.

    If we want to truly write expansive and diverse stories, then we must stop expecting people of color to do free backend labor and start inviting them to the planning in the first place. If you are going to write about radical werewolves from Mexico, maybe ask around and see if there’s a Mexican larper who has had that idea and wants to collaborate and then pay them if you can. Or even better, do that and offer to mentor larp designers of color so we can create more expansive worlds. Instead of writing about PoC, provide a community which invites PoC to write about themselves.

    Case in point, Abrihette Yawa’s Intercon styled larp, The Droid Auction is based on the Afrofuturist mythology created by singer and actress Janelle Monae. Set in Monae’s world of Metropolis, the players, many of whom were PoC, were charged with dealing with the death of Cindy Mayweather, a charismatic droid leader. The various factions played against and with each other using the dance, music, and a created mythos which included people of color. This game alone, brought me to Intercon, a larp convention that has been running for in the Northeast for the last 25 years. By its very existence and the creator behind it, I thought that the larp would be welcoming to me, and it was.

    Once there, I found greater connections to other players of color who are now collaborators and friends. I felt so confident after the larp that the jacket I wore as a part of the Electro-Phi Betas (my faction) was the jacket I wore to Knutepunkt. That piece of ephemera gave me confidence to enter a space I was unfamiliar with.

    Truly Understand Oppression Play

    In Mo Holkar’s excellent 2016 Solmukohta article Larp and Prejudice: Expressing, Erasing, and Exploring the Fun Tax, Holkar explains, “Larp designers who choose a real-world setting – historical or contemporary- are faced, whether they realize it or not, with a set of decisions about how to portray the social prejudices (based on gender, race, sexuality, class, age, etc.) of that setting.” (Holkar, 2016) I agree with Holkar when he speaks later of the notion that players for whom these are actual marginalities in their real life may have some bleeding in when these are portrayed. This type of bleed is not fundamentally a problem. Writers however need to inform players beforehand and give them consent, and do their due diligence to actually understand how fundamental oppression is in PoC’s daily lives.

    Oppression play is not something to be engaged in lightly, especially if you plan to open larp to international audiences and invite PoC. You cannot just invent factions that call for racist stereotypes, and then say, “These aren’t racist, we just wanted to introduce oppression play.”  One can’t simply write a larp about the Western expansion in America and then conveniently tell players that people of color are available to play without understanding what oppression play around that entails. Trying to escape it by handwaving away racism, ends up erasing PoC and their histories as well.

    If one is seeking to include oppression play that deals with racism against a group, it would behoove you to understand that oppression is never just on the surface, inside and outside of game. Oppression is physical and mental. It is all encompassing and suffocating. It is deadly even when it seems benign. Instead of trying to write about an oppression that you cannot grasp, instead ask a player of color to the table when you design.

    For an example of this, see Kat Jones’ excellent work when rewriting characters for the American run of Just a Little Loving (Edland & Grasmo, 2017). In reflecting the more diverse cast of the American run, Jones allowed players to play on their own race within the game which did not detract, but enhanced the setting and reflected the realities of living as a person of color in New York during the early aids crisis.

    Write for Your Own Communities

    Over the summer, I got the truly heart wrenching experience of playing Troels Ken Pedersen’s Gargantuan (Pedersen, 2016). The work on the surface looks like a fun romp that combines steampunk and fantasy with Elves and Goblins at each other’s throats. However, this is a roleplaying scenario that is much more. As you play, the racism and horror of this world begins to wash over you, and the strict game mastering drives you to the dark places of complacent racism that makes you see things in new ways.

    The Game was not written for me, even though I played it with a certain fatalistic glee. The Game was ostensibly written for those well-meaning White people who do not truly get how deep and horrifying racism can be. As a scenario, it exists to me as one of the best ways White people can write within their own communities. In this Pedersen is not seeking to liberate PoC, but rather speak to his own community about the insidiousness of racism.

    In designing larps meant for social justice, well-meaning White designers will write what they think is apt social commentary that includes PoC and seeks to liberate them. To this notion, I will put forth an activist saying that has been said by writers and actvists of color from Audre Lorde to Augusto Boal: Liberate yourself.

    Write games that explore racism within Whiteness. Write Games that explore prejudice within Whiteness. I would rather see a million games about White feminism and its lack of intersectionality than see another fantasy parable about racism that is directed toward “freeing” people of color and “seeing the other side”. How can you see the other side when you haven’t investigated your own yet?

    We are Not a Monolith

    People of Color are not one massive group that agrees on everything. In fact, I hope some disagree with me, as surely I have disagreed with them. People of Color are not a monolith. It is impossible to get a rubber stamp of “not racist” on any of your games even if you consult a PoC. Latinx, Black, Middle Eastern, Indigenous, and Asian diasporas are massive, and though some may overlap, they can’t wholly speak for each other. I cite my Blackness, but that Blackness itself is specific to a context of the Black diaspora and to the Black American diaspora. It can inform generally about the struggles of PoC, but it cannot be used to rubber stamp your portrayal of Chinese people in the Western expansion.

    Listen

    Let’s try and assume the best intentions, and listen. If PoC can continually try to see missteps as non-malicious, then the folks who make those missteps can at least listen. Being informed that something you’ve done is racist is not actually the worst thing that can happen to you. Having someone say, “Hey, this thing you designed is racist,” is not the worst thing that could happen. Refusing to listen and becoming defensive is much worse, and even then, one can come back from this by listening and understanding. If someone is talking to you about cultural appropriation, it is not actually going to help you by talking about how people dress up as Scandinavians. Theoretically there were PoC in Viking dress, as the Vikings were a people who traveled widely and intermingled with others. That’s plausible. You needing to put on greasepaint in a Wild West larp for “accuracy” is not.

    Listen to PoC when they tell you that something is not okay. Listen to PoC when they tell you they are uncomfortable. Reach out hands to players of color. The moment you stop listening, larp stops growing.

    When People of Color Come to the Table We All Benefit

    Imagine a larp written based on Chinese Wuxia films and steampunk aesthetics set in San Francisco in 1910. Imagine a larp based on the Nautch girls in Lucknow, India who fought against the British Raj by creating a matriarchal system that bypasses inheritance laws. Imagine a larp created by PoC that explores the heights and joys of being alive and living with freedom. These are not far flung ideas.

    As larp grows we need to realize that we are at a turning point. If we design intersectionally, and are inclusive and supportive of people of color, we can truly allow larp to grow beyond a hobby for some, and blossom into strong liberational and exploratory tool for all. Encourage players of color to come to larps, encourage them to write. If you are a PoC, reach out to other players and designers, and do not be afraid to speak up when you see injustice. We deserve to create ourselves just as much as anyone, and it is a necessary and revolutionary act to do so.

    When people of color are invited to the table we are bringing vast amounts of new thoughts, ideas, and growth. To go global, to be international, we must realize that people of color exist and are here to play. We deserve to find the doors to Narnia, to duel at dawn in Regency garb, to bash back with foam shields as Elves, to bring Bruja magic to your wizarding schools, to see ourselves as whole and valued members of an ever-growing international community. When you invite us to the table, you are inviting the world to play. To this we say from the table that we can all share, “Skål!”

    Naui Ocelotl. Aswahi Warrior, played by Ruben Garcia in Dying Kingdoms. Due to the way Dying Kingdoms allows players to co-create “cultures”, players of color are supported and often feel welcomed when playing within their own culture and others. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.
    Naui Ocelotl. Aswahi Warrior, played by Ruben Garcia in Dying Kingdoms. Due to the way Dying Kingdoms allows players to co-create “cultures”, players of color are supported and often feel welcomed when playing within their own culture and others. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.

    References

    Amherst, C. (2016). Representation and Social Capital: What the Larp Census Reveals About Community. In M. L. Jukka Särkijärvi, Larp Realia: Analysis, Design, and Discussions of Nordic Larp (pp. 120-124). Ropecon ry.

    Bowman, S. L. (2010). Role-Playing as Alteration of Identity. In S. L. Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity (pp. 127-154). McFarland & Co.

    DuBois, W. E. (1994). The Souls of Black Folk. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

    Edland, T. K., & Grasmo, H. Just a Little Lovin’. [Larp] https://jall.us/ (Accessed 12/18/17) Run: Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: 2017

    Fanon, F. (1968). Black Skin White Masks. New York : Grove Press.

    Heinig, Jesse, Shippey Adam, Huggins William, and Fox, Edward. Dying Kingdoms. [Larp] http://dyingkingdoms.com/ (Accessed 12/18/17) Run: Los Angeles, CA USA: 2007-

    Holkar, M. (2016). Larp and Predjudice: Expressing, Erasing, Exploring, and the Fun Tax. In M. L. Jukka Särkijärvi, Larp Realia: Analysis, Design, and Discussions of Nordic Larp. Ropecon ry.

    LaFleur, I. (2011, September 25). TEDx Fort Greene Salon: Visual Aesthetics of Afrofuturism. Fort Greene, New York, USA. Retrieved from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7bCaSzk9Zc

    Pedersen, T. K. (2016) Gargantuan. [Scenario] Run: USA 2017

    Yawa, A. (2017) The Droid Auction. [Larp] Rhode Island, USA: 2017


    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: Collage of larp character portraits, assembled by Jonaya Kemper.

  • The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity

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    The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity

    Early Spring: Primrose Park, 1800s

    We are all at war, and I fear that only I am hard enough to know it. We send out our children as troops into battle, and they fight for land, money and affection. They murder hearts, minds, and bodies.

    Do these dancing masters even understand? They fill our children with frippery, and we dress for battle. Ostrich feathers, silk, shined boots…uniforms for war. Cannons shoot words, and dances are formations.

    Even greenery is battle.

    We were instructed to bring greenery to the spring monument, and young ladies carried flowers and hope. Things I’ve long left behind.

    General Whiteford, who was serious as sin, carried a nettle. When I remarked that he even held his flower seriously, he responded with perhaps the most intense gaze I have ever received. “It is a nettle, Madam.”

    And so it was…perhaps he has the right idea. Nettles. Greenery that fights back.

    a fan, book, and Fortune & Felicity poster
    Dorothy’s game ephemera.

    I was eight years old when I first read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I stole my older sister’s copy and brought it to school, stealthily placing it inside the easy reader the rest of the class was supposed to be looking at. I was thoroughly engrossed in the romance and the social dynamics of it all. I was advanced for my age by quite a bit, but our failing school system didn’t really want to give up a gifted child.

    So I sat with the book, and was eventually caught by my teacher who thought it a comic. She was shocked that I not only was reading it and comprehending it, but that I was enjoying myself. I was left alone to consume Austen, while the other children moved on with more age-appropriate books.

    This is a fundamental moment in my childhood, one I have told many times at many parties. Indeed, Austen’s work and world has intrigued not only me but millions over generations. It is no wonder why I in particular wanted to attend Fortune & Felicity, a truly spectacularly produced 360 degree illusion larp set during the Regency time period and inspired by all of Austen’s works.

    The game itself was billed as a way for players to live in their very own Austen novel, with carefully crafted meta techniques that push gameplay and intensify emotions. Romance, fortune, emotions, and a truly spectacular setting were combined with an intensely detailed system to make sure each person was given a role in the game that not only connected to other players, but to the world.

    For me, Fortune & Felicity seemed a perfect opportunity to not only immerse myself in a unique world with which I had been enamored since I was a child, but to explore my academic interests and add to my fieldwork. Currently, I am embarking on a visual autoethnography studying larp and the phenomenon of emancipatory bleed at New York University’s Gallatin School. In slightly less academic terms, I am using myself and my experiences in a community I am a part of to study the idea that bleed can be steered and used for emancipatory purposes by players who live with complex marginalizations. I believe that players who live with a double consciousness or a fractured identity due to other marginalizations can use larp and the resulting bleed to mitigate the negative aspects if steered with pre-game measures, in-game steering and post-game evaluation.

    Emancipatory Bleed

    The theory of double consciousness was coined by Black American scholar and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois believed that due to the severe history of slavery and constant oppression, Black Americans live with not one self, but many. In his turn of the 20th century ethnography The Souls of Black Folk, he says,

    It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.

    W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 2015)

    It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.

    W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 2015)

    To be a Black American means that one separates their identity to both protect themselves and to nurture themselves, but these two selves remain divided. Everyday choices become about survival, and any interaction is flavored with historical context. It is a near invisible and quite heavy load to carry, and one I believe can be lessened and enhanced through the use of larp and the resulting bleed.

    The Process

    As an autoethnographer, my own experience within the larp community is used as research. This means I must create a set of strict techniques that will allow me to both record my experience, steer in the way I think will provide the liberation, and allow myself to analyze it later. My technique in encouraging this type of bleed involves elaborate character development, and immersive steering. Before attending, I would create a playlist of songs to build ideas about the character, create a costume that was heavily tied to the character, and keep diaries to form a thought process that was unique to the character, fleshing out their mental space and state. During the game, I would keep thorough diaries from the character’s perspective, retain ephemera collected — letters given, tokens found etc. — and steer towards those themes from which I wanted to receive bleed while trying to be as deeply immersed as possible. Afterwards, I would complete a thorough living document including visuals and catalogue the physical objects to be later used in a final thesis exhibit.

    But Why Begin With Fortune & Felicity?

    Mrs. Long (Aina Skjønsfjell Lakou) and Mrs. Smith (Jonaya Kemper). Photo by Aina Skjønsfjell Lakou.

    As a child and young adult, I very much wished to have a hero much like Elizabeth Bennet represent me. I wanted to see myself in that world of quips, balls, and intrigue. Her heroines seemed smart, witty, and uniquely feminist in ways I found empowering. However, as a Black woman, I always felt slightly disjointed from the fiction, as most people are unaware that Austen’s work includes at least one woman of color.1

    Though Fortune & Felicity did not include or play on race in any way, I myself knew incoming that intrinsically most larp characters I play are an extension of self. Others did not need to see my character Mrs. Smith as a Black woman during the larp, as her race was not significant to the game, but my race was significant to me as a person. Playing in Fortune & Felicity allowed me to give myself the representation my sister and I did not have as children. Though historically people of color were not only around England in the period, but around and wealthy, one does not see them represented in any media outside of narratives involving slavery. Fortune & Felicity seemed to promise a light and airy experience in which I could explore themes of love, class, and romance in a period where my face is seldom seen.

    Except the experience was less like consuming a light and fragile macaroon at the refreshment table of a ball, and more like Battenburg cake at 3pm in the muggy afternoon heat while you prepare for an intense emotional war.

    Both are enjoyable, but I simply wasn’t expecting the latter.

    Playing the Cards You’re Dealt

    During the casting process, which I was not exactly a part of since I signed up for the waitlist, you could list where to play young or old. I did not particularly care about playing either as I just wanted to experience the larp and see how I could steer myself towards emancipatory bleed. I figured that every character would be dealing with the same themes as everyone else anyway, so it did not matter whether I played young or old.

    I received a last minute drop-out spot, and discovered I would be playing the part of Mrs. Dorothy Smith: a poor, very recent widow, with two grown children in need of spouses.  While I was still upsettingly excited for the larp, this casting sent me into a slight panic. Reading the character description, I was unsure if the organizers knew just how oppressive the experience of a Regency-era widow was let alone a Regency-era poor widow with a wealthy sister. How was I supposed to play a light breezy larp about romance and family when my character seemed to be on the very outskirts of the society into which she was born? In addition to this, she was written to be charming, filled with folly, and ridiculously cheerful at all times while having to quickly find matches for her children with a Sword of Damocles hanging over her head.

    Many of the characters had been written to be directly inspired from Austen’s works. I, a deep-cut Austen fan, could not find my character in a single book I read. When I was told who she was, I realized I didn’t even remember her being in a book. As such, this gave me even more of a desire to give her a fuller richer life, rather than a supporting role.

    Despite my nervousness with the character, I did not decline the spot. For one, I trusted the organizers and their track record with impunity. Secondly, I took a look at the cast list, and found that I would be playing with some people who were good friends at this point and others who I was looking forward to knowing better. Thirdly, it was an experience you couldn’t really pass up if you love Jane Austen. The venue is like living in the book. If I was going to be oppressed by accident, by George, I would do it in style with good company.

    With this in mind, I shifted what I wanted from the larp. This was a perfect excuse to explore the feminist undertones in Austen’s era. I myself dealt with several of the issues Dorothy Smith was having. Though I was not a mother originally born to wealth, I did have to deal with expectations of feminine roles in a strict community, I am aging in a society that idolizes youth, and I know very well what it is like to have to keep up appearances while being rather poor. If I steered her into a narrative about living her best life, could I free myself from the fractured parts of me?

    I wasn’t sure, but I was willing to try.

    fan and book
    Dorothy’s poetry journal, written in pen and ink. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.

    When Good Intentions Go Awry

    In my opinion, Fortune & Felicity is an expertly designed larp that was hamstrung by our current society. Due to a gender imbalance and bleed-in regarding romance, I believe Fortune & Felicity was not as strong in a few places as it was in others. As far as I can tell, the designers did not intend to create a larp in which older characters would be playing a radically different larp than younger players. The pre-larp workshops were lovingly crafted with dancing, gender roles, and relations to society done in Romance and Family groups, but players portraying older characters were not given specialized tools.

    In our Family groups, we talked and discussed our role to our Families and what kind of play we might need. It was here that we created a family identity and each person fleshed out their role collaboratively.  The families seemed to be a solid bond that moved well together despite age differences. Here is where Dorothy first changed from what was written. The family required a fixer in addition to the strong matriarch, and Dorothy just fell into the role.

    It was when Romance was added that we began to see cracks.  As a young character, you of course dealt with social pressures and issues, but game mechanics were skewed heavily in your favor. You were simply able to do more.  This lead to the older players in my romance group to wonder why we were in fact called a romance group. The gender lines were: two men, one of them married, to seven women, two of whom had characters as young as players in the young romance groups. Within twenty minutes of our first workshop, several of us expressed the fact that we felt left out, and like we were NPCs there to move the younger players’ stories along without any story of our own. Many of our characters were not written with romance in mind at all, which was expected from some and came as a disappointment to others.

    In a larp that stressed heteronormativity and the perfection of the Regency era, it was uncomfortable to go through mechanics of intimacy when your group was largely made up of players playing your family. Also, it is hard to practice gender rules when there are only two male characters. I, as a player who was trying to immerse myself as Dorothy, found that the character had to fundamentally change. Frequently, I subbed in for the male roles in dancing, talking, and intimacy exercises. This meant that the character I was playing felt far more bold. This worked out to my advantage, but I can easily see how someone who wanted to play upon stereotypically femininity might feel left out.

    Once play began in earnest, the disparities between age, wealth, and gender only became deeper as we all wore name badges that told everyone our marital status and income. Wearing your worth on your chest for a weekend, is heavier than one might think.

    It’s All in the Dance

    Spring Ball: Primrose, 1800s

    Balls were not nearly so boring when I was a girl. I imagine that I never sat down for more than a minute. My reputation for dancing and conversation was impeccable. Now I look at us in our silks and feathers or, in my case, lawns and pearls. Here we are, surveying the floor in an illusion of choice.

    If it weren’t for the company of Mrs. Long, I would have been utterly likely to have left the children with Frances and spent my evening with a book. Her good cheer and good friendship is the only thing that stops me from constantly screaming.

    If it were up to me, I would show these young girls how free they are. I was weighed down in twice what they wear, in corsets that pinched into my flesh, and large enough skirts that I could have hidden several people under them.

    And the shoes. Oh, those pinching satin mules that clopped everywhere so that we all resembled a military parade.

    Here they are in their satin and silk and flat-bottomed slippers. Try a dance in my youthful shoes and see if you still smirk as you pass the line of widows, my dear.

    We know more about your future than you do. You are just a pawn in this delightful campaign. We are your commanding officers. Lady Creamhill can deny you anything with a smirk. Frances can do the same. Even I, with my limited standing, need only whisper and you will be destroyed.

    Monstrous.

    Husbands may wear the titles, but it is the wives and the widows who wage the real domestic war. And these children don’t even know. They just continue their dance, continue their love.

    The poor fools.

    Lines of dancing characters in Regency attire.
    Opening Ball at Primrose. Photo by Anders Hultman.

    Dancing was a major point in Fortune & Felicity. The larp started and ended with dance. There were not enough partners of mixed genders for everyone to be able to enter the larp with the dance, which is a true shame as I cite it as one of its most defining moments. Fortune & Felicity simply did not have enough men — whether they identified as men or willing to crossplay as such — to fit their mechanics. This issue led to what could have been a slight jostling oppression to be a heavy locked-in feeling for both player and character.

    Every evening ended in a massive ball with live music after we had a sit down dinner. We learned how to dance and convey emotion with the barest ability to touch. Dancing was a way to show interest and allow yourself to be immersed as fully as you can. Our workshops were pleasant and intense. They included live music, and plenty of in-depth instruction. However, when we got to the final workshop, we found that we were not going to be allowed to dance with the same gender. This meant that if you were older and a woman, your opportunities to do anything other than talk at the balls were limited. You could not ask anyone to dance. You were essentially relegated to the sidelines unless a relative asked you, or you had enough status to bully a young man into standing up with you. I had neither youth nor fortune, and as such spent a large part of that evening with a co-player being surprisingly bored until we took play into our own hands.

    Ageism and Romance

    Primrose: Summer, 1800s

    Never had such eyes been set upon me in the dark.

    The lights of the teahouse illuminated his fine form, his dark face. General Whiteford is a dangerous man, and yet… I am now sure I am unafraid of hm or anything else.

    We have shared jests about battle plans and we both agree that Primrose is a War in which we both command troops. He respects me. I know this in the way he looks at me across the young bodies who beg and plead for love and fortune. We have already done this, he and I. We have survived triumphantly, and now I believe we are trying to decide whether we shall enter the fray once more.

    But I think we shall.

    It has been a long time since I looked for anyone in a ballroom, and a longer time since anyone has looked for me. Standing across from him, I realized that everything had fallen away. The strains of the hornpipe seemed distant and I was unsure whether I heard the same strains as I did the first time I was at Primrose, glutted on youth.

    I found myself short of breath, but the dance had not begun. His face was not his usual scowl; he looked pleased. I was stuck for words, and his face disarmed me further. “Why General Whiteford, you look almost pleased.”

    I could have died for my own foolish volley.

    But he not only smiled, her nearly clicked his heels. The young man next to him looked terrified.  “Me, Madame?” He could make the term Madame seem as personal as my own God given name despite it’s crisp clipped tone.  “I’m positively jolly.

    And then we were off.

    The familiar steps leading us through bodies we never paid attention to. I remembered easily what it was like to float through a world of being seen and wanted.

    No one batted an eye at our fingertips touching. Why pay attention to us? We are but ghosts in these living halls. But as we moved down the line, I felt our bones reconnect, and by the time we had his hand in mind gently leading me to the last set, I felt full of flesh.

    He has defeated me with a dance, and never have I been happier to lose.

    Man in Regency-era military uniform
    General Norman Whiteford (Simon Brind) sitting alone. Photo by Kalle Lantz & Frida Selvén.

    The fact that my character had a romance was a fluke, and yet I charge it and her female friendships along with her family play to be the reason why the larp was such a smashing success for me. Most romances written in Fortune & Felicity gave you the option of two partners within your group, but it was not implied or encouraged by all gamemasters to make play outside of that. Many people felt obligated to play out the story rather than forging their own path.

    The game structure was very rigid, with each day starting with church and ending in a ball. In between, there were workshops in structured groups, and several choices for meta games. The schedule provided us with hours of constant activity, but for adults, it meant a flurry of activity with no time for ourselves. As a player, I felt like I had to follow the arc of the larp even though the larp wasn’t necessarily following mine. In the first act, we were all speaking of romantic perfection; in the second, we were supposed to have reality smash down upon us; and in the third act, we were supposed to find some sort of redemption. This was to be spread over a course of days.

    The second day workshops made it clear that as an older person, we were not exactly having the same game opportunities. We talked to our personal gamemasters, and it was all discussed amongst staff. I cannot say enough that they tried very hard to listen and respond immediately to the feedback from players who were playing older characters. Some of these responses worked better — such as making sure older characters got more dancing — than others — such as wearing a red ribbon on your name badge, which made attractive widows accidental pariahs. Only when a few of us banded together to follow our character’s agency and really steer did I feel like I was truly immersed at Primrose.

    And that’s when the magic of the mechanics; the unintentional intense social, gendered, and classist oppression; and meta techniques really shined. For me, character agency was the missing puzzle piece.

    Once I, as a player, felt like I could have true agency to choose my own path rather than what was prewritten, I was not only deeply immersed; I was having one of the best larp experiences of my life. Instead of focusing only on romance, I could follow up with a rewarding relationship with my character’s older sister, support my character’s children, and foster a deep meaningful friendship with a newfound female friend. Those supportive relationships we created on site together were the best moments of my game. Dorothy didn’t become a character on page 222 that you easily forgot. She became the star of her own novel, while showing up in others to share richer game play, provide pressure, and bring Primrose to life.

    Just Because It’s Oppressive Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Fun

    Late Autumn: 1800s

    They did not know what they asked.

    Family never does.

    I have never asked much from life and it seems the least life could do was allow me to live in love. I have sacrificed everything for my family. I have humbled myself, I have groveled, I have gone hungry, and I have smiled when all I wanted to do was break into a million peices. I have held the line.

    And now they ask me to go to war with Norman just to prove that I can still be loyal. That I can still fix everything. So I dueled the one man at Primrose who never misses.

    He knew it would come, I think. Perhaps it was his last chance to escape redemption.

    Either way, we sat across from each other, our eyes never leaving the other’s face. Our masks were savage and beautiful, a lifetime of practice. I was vaguely aware of Judith behind me, and I squared my shoulders. She is strength, and so am I.

    “You cannot disinherit your sons, my dear.”

    “But I have set them free, Madame.”

    I understood what he meant. They were free from the very tethers that wrapped me to this chair in this sweltering salon with perfectly sliced battenburg cake in front of me. I kept his gaze while moving a particularly large tray of sweets that separated us and let violence drip on my tongue, “It’s heavy…”

    I let the threat linger, knowing he’d understand.

    I was not his first wife, but I would certainly be his last.

    “Shall we do battle over tea, my dear?”

    If I knew better, I think he nearly smiled.

    For me as a player, exploring oppression through play is a pleasure. If done within the confines of a safe game environment with people you trust, you can explore yourself and have an excellent time. As an academic, Fortune & Felicity’s light oppression mechanics and unintentional deep oppression path for older women provided exactly the type of experience I needed to reach a sense of emancipatory bleed.

    The character fought societal pressure, familial pressure, sexism, ageism and class identity in order to find her way in the world. She overcame every obstacle, and ended up being the exact type of heroine I wanted to read about as a child. The bleed from Dorothy has been overwhelmingly positive, not because she succeeded in love, but because she succeeded in finding herself. Dorothy stepped out of an Austen novel, and into her own universe. Through her own liberation, I felt some semblance of my own. Liberation through larp.

    After Fortune & Felicity, I found that I was more confident, less worried about my own mortality and more likely to stand up for myself. Even the way I looked at my own body positivity changed for the better. All direct outcomes from the deep immersion I felt while playing Dorothy.

    gloves, ball dress, and booklet
    Dorothy’s ball attire. Photo by Jonaya Kemper.

    Late Autumn: The Last Service at Primrose

    The couples have filled the church to bursting. There are so many that the pews seem empty. I see our children standing among the the crowd, happily engaged and waiting to be blessed by God.

    I see no reason for us to stand among them, the casualties of war. Let their parents preen over them and their ceremony.

    We sit with Judith, who is too good and true for this space. Her love has yet to be found at Primrose, but it is only because her worth is more than her fortune.

    And of course Norman and I sit with each other, as close as wool and bonnets allow in the Lord’s house. I pretend to follow the Vicar, but the truth is that I have never followed the Vicar. Percy is a Vicar and I’ve never followed him either.

    Instead of being a good Christian woman, I let the feeling of the nettles in my bare right hand and the feeling of Norman’s hand on my left pin me to the moment.

    I smile at him like a cat with a bowl of cream, and we recite the vows the Vicar instructs everyone to abide by.

    The season is over, but the war isn’t.  As a family we shall head to other battlefields, in other places in other times. We will win, and we will lose, but we shall always serve together.

    Fortune & Felicity was an incredibly immersive experience that taught me a lot about myself as a larper, and as an academic studying larp. My theory about emancipatory bleed and the ability to steer immersion towards healing self-identified issues will continue to be honed and crafted as I continue my studies. Due the initial design setbacks, I learned how to ask for the play I want instead of sacrificing myself, and I learned how to work in a cohesive group to create amazing deeply emotional play for others in wide varieties.

    By steering for emancipatory bleed, Dorothy Elizabeth Whiteford truly became the heroine I dreamed of all those years when I hid a battered copy of Pride and Prejudice in an early reader. I can only hope the larp is run again so that others can find their own personal Austen as well.

    Cover photo: Mrs. Long (Aina Skjønsfjell Lakou) and Mrs. Smith (Jonaya Kemper) became best friends who were a force to be reckoned with. Photo by Kalle Lantz & Frida Selvén.

    1. Miss Lambe can be found in an unfinished novel called Sanditon. ↩︎