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Helicon: An Epic Larp about Love, Beauty, and Brutality

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2024-01-26

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Documentation

Helicon: An Epic Larp about Love, Beauty, and Brutality

Written by

Sarah Lynne Bowman

This article is the second in a series on Larping Intimacy and Relationships.

Content Advisory: Enslavement, oppression, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, addiction, dysfunctional relationships, plot spoilers

From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon, and dance on soft feet about the deep-blue spring and the altar of the almighty son of Cronos… — Hesiod’s Theogony

Helicon is a larp by Katrine Wind and Maria Pettersson. The first run was held January 5-7, 2024 in Broholm Castle, Denmark, with a second run scheduled for February 16-18. The larp focuses upon a group of artists, leaders, and scientists in the early twentieth century with various specialties who have discovered and enacted an occult ritual in their university years together. This ritual enables them to call forth the Muses of Greek antiquity, children of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory. The artists ensnare the Muses into servitude such that the Muses are spiritually bound into conferring their Inspiration to the artist who summoned them (their “Inspired”) and are not allowed to Inspire others without a direct order. They are also no longer free to leave the vicinity in which their Inspired has ordered them to stay; through the course of the larp, this vicinity was Helicon Manor, a far cry from the Mount Helicon of antiquity where they normally go for replenishment. Helicon deals explicitly with themes of artistic inspiration, addiction, emotional turmoil, power, restrictions on freedom, and dysfunctional relationship dynamics.

If you are planning to play a future run, please be mindful that this article will share spoilers about the details of the design and the ending.

Woman in white smiling looking up at a statue — Thalia, the Muse of Comedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Man in white and gold suit in front of a statue — Urania, the Muse of Philosophy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Physical and Spiritual Subjugation

And, when they have washed their tender bodies in Permessus or in the Horse’s Spring or Olmeius, make their fair, lovely dances upon highest Helicon and move with vigorous feet…

— Hesiod’s Theogony

In Helicon, each Muse has a specific theme that infuses their Inspiration and guides play: Comedy, Dance, Epic poetry, History, Love poetry, Music, Painting, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Sculpture, Song, Spiritual inspiration, and Tragedy. While the power dynamics within the dyads (and in one case, triad) are complex, the Muses are essentially enslaved to their Inspired. They can be drained dry of Inspiration, which the Inspired can use to fuel great deeds or waste as they wish. They can be separated from their siblings: the only beings who can truly understand their divine nature and the millennia of memories they share. They can be physically, emotionally, and spiritually abused by their captors. Even in the kindest of pairings, they must endure the renewal ritual of binding every year, witnessing all of their siblings undergo the process of losing their free will once more. Muses are required to wear only white and gold, with their clothing chosen by their Inspired.

A person in white with a flower crown seated as a person embraces them from behind. — Omorfia and Philip Frost, Muse and Inspired of Painting. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

The Muses can also exert influence over their human captors. When their captors experience their Inspiration, whether given consensually or forcibly taken by the Inspired, the experience is akin to being high on drugs and vulnerable to the Muse emotionally such that promises can be extracted. However, whether or not the Inspired chooses to honor those promises depends entirely on their own integrity: not a common trait written within these characters. While the Inspired have different attitudes toward the binding ritual and its problematic ethics, they still willingly or grudgingly participate in subjugating the Muses each year for their own gain.

This subjugation is particularly painful within the context of the epic setting. Because the Muses are forced to give Inspiration only to one (or two) humans, the rest of the world is starving and wasting away. For millennia, the Muses were deities that evoked worship and vulnerable surrender in order to receive their blessings. They could freely give Inspiration and leave at will as befits their nature; now, they were forced into servitude. At the center of this dynamic is the frailty of the human ego: how even the “best” in the world still struggle with needing to feel recognized and important, and how such insecurities lead people to cause brutal harm to others in order to extract their vital energy and love.

The larp is a mixture of the mundane and the extraordinary, with the interactions taking on a significance not only within these interpersonal dynamics, but upon the world stage and even within the realm of gods. For this reason, I classify the experience as epic play, not only because of the context of Greek epic poetry from which it emerges, but also due to the heightened significance of these actions and the strong emphasis on great artistic production arising out of pain. To subjugate a person in order to extract their vital energy is tragic; to subjugate the Muse of Tragedy is tragic on an epic level.

Melpomene (standing), Taylor Montgomery (left), and Thomas Montgomery (right), Muse and Inspired of Tragedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

The white and gold attire worn by the Muses gave them an ethereal, otherworldly quality that contrasted sharply with the Vintage Era clothing of the artists. The website describes the Vintage Era as encompassing “any time from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century” (Wind and Pettersson 2023). In contrast to this vaguely modern era, diegetically, the Muses have existed for millennia. Despite this eternal quality, however, the Muses tend to “live in the present.” This meant in practice that we may have fragments of memories from bygone eras of having inspiring historical or legendary mythic figures at will, but such memories would be less important than the present moment experience. For me, this awareness led to a strange contrast between being trapped in a mundane human experience of time and its day-to-day concerns, while also mentally leaping to other times and places, adding to the eerie and unnatural nature of the Muses’ servitude. Such elements added a sense of epicness to play.

The concept of epic play is not intended to reduce the importance of larps focusing on oppression, intimacy, and other dynamics occurring amongst “mere” humans, but rather to describe an aesthetic quality about the larp that sets it apart from larps about the mundane world. To be captured as a Muse meant we could not Inspire others, such that our lack of involvement due to our enslavement was creating ripples in reality not only inside Helicon Manor, but outside of it. The Inspired could trade or even gamble away the Muses’ Inspiration, which can be seen as a mixture of their vital essence and their labor the Muses no longer had liberty to use as they wished.

This epic aesthetic quality can also be ascribed to certain storylines within fantasy larps and themes in other games that feature a supernatural component. Epicness relies upon the ensemble of players committing to underscore the epic significance of the actions performed within play. I have had epic play experiences in other settings, such as at the Vampire: the Masquerade (1991) larp Convention of Thorns (2017) as well as within chamber larps and tabletop RPGs of various genres; indeed, this epic quality is likely what draws many people again and again to Dungeons & Dragons (1974-), which is still the most popular tabletop setting in the world.

What made Helicon exemplary in this respect was the care put into the communication, design, structure, and safety surrounding the experience such that this epic quality — and the tragic predicament within which these characters were ensnared — was emphasized. This article will focus on these design and implementation practices, providing theoretical context from my perspective as a player-researcher enacting a Muse character where appropriate.

Calliope and Edmund Wright, Inspired and Muse of Epic Poetry. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

A man writes in a book with a woman in white while sitting. — Lawrence Black and Erato, Inspired and Muse of Love Poetry. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Circles of Trust and Betrayal

Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice, praising…

— Hesiod’s Theogony

The larp designers fostered trust among the player base in a variety of ways. The website clearly communicated not only the themes of the larp, but also its structure and which sorts of experiences the players were encouraged and discouraged to enact. Players were not expected to demonstrate expertise in their respective arts or to perform during the larp, which lowered the perceived barrier to entry of performance anxiety. Despite the intimate nature of many of the relationships, the designers detailed that this larp is not intended to be an erotic larp in which public displays of sexuality are encouraged and are often a central design feature (Grasmo and Stenros 2022). While such larps can be experienced as liberating for participants (Juhana Pettersson 2021b), explicit sexuality can distract from the more subtle relationship dynamics and interactions that this larp sought to foster. Regardless of the chosen themes, expectation setting is important in creating a shared culture before signup even begins (Koljonen 2016a), provided of course that the players adhere to this established social contract.

Similarly, the website described the structure of scenes that would occur, which included a form of fateplay (Fatland 2000) of certain scenes framing each act. It described the pre-larp scene of the Muses attempting and failing at escape, only to be dragged back to Helicon Manor: in achingly strong contrast to the real Mount Helicon, where they would gather for connection and renewal as siblings before their enslavement.

Photo of a person in a black robe — Stella Wilson, Inspired of Spiritual Inspiration, led the rituals. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

The larp was framed with a beautifully epic theme song composed by Anni Tolvanen, which ushered us in and out of play. Tolvanen also curated a soundscape of dramatic music that echoed through the halls during the larp. The first Act began with a ritualized Punishment scene while standing in a circle, in which the Inspired enacted consequences on their Muses for their escape attempt, also forcing the Muses to punish each other. I have also utilized this technique of starting the larp by dropping characters directly into ritual space when co-designing Immerton (2017) and Epiphany (2018). I find it a particularly helpful practice to emphasize the core themes of the game, help players quickly get past the awkwardness of the first hour of the larp, and create intensely meaningful role-play moments from the beginning that can feed play later. (For further reading on these larps, see Jones 2017; Brown et al. 2018; Kim, Nuncio, and Wong 2018).

In our discussions after the larp, Wind referred to this design technique as part of a concept she calls frontloading, which she will further describe in an upcoming article. For Katrine, this term referred to the structure and pacing in terms of intensity, which puts a lot of structured and tense content earlier in the larp. This term also resonated with Maria, who described frontloading as designing extensive and complex character relations with focus on high playability in the larp itself, a common strategy in Finnish design. Wind explained:

This combination gives players something to immediately play on and react to that has specific relevance for their character and gives them “something to talk about immediately.” It also provides alibi to jump right into relations that might take a lot of time to ramp up and cause everything in the larp to culminate at the same time in the last few hours. . .

If there is one or more crescendos in the beginning of the larp itself, culminations and intensity [are] spread out over the whole playtime because you can be sure that some things will only culminate in the last hours of the larp anyway.

In the next group scene, we were then instructed to go to the dining hall. The multi-course dinners and lunches were catered and high quality. What made these dining scenes particularly epic were the statues and bas reliefs decorating the room that portrayed scenes from Greek mythology. The metatechnique that guided play in these scenes was dinner warfare, also featured in Wind’s larp Daemon (2021-). Unlike the intensely visible brutality in the Punishment ritual, we sat in circles masterminded by assigned seating to maximize drama. We pretended to be members of polite society while delivering passive aggressive verbal barbs, whether about art, the Muses’ confinement, class, or any number of other dynamics. (Gender, sexuality, and race/ethnic discrimination was explicitly forbidden in the larp, but class was very much embedded in the character design). This juxtaposition of high boiling intensity in the beginning directly to a low simmer punctuated the themes of the larp quite sharply: the epic alongside the banal, the fragility of human egos, the need to control in order to feel important, the subtle bids for freedom within enforced servitude, etc. According to the designers, traditions such as arranged seating were diegetically upheld as necessary, both due to affiliation to the Inspired’s prestigious university and the necessity to keep the ritual intact. Wind told me,

Alibi for the seats being like this was provided by the diegetic fact that the Inspired needed the repetition to make sure they could renew the Binding year after year, so they didn’t dare change the seating. It was simply, and naturally, a tradition. This meant that divorced couples and former friends were awkwardly seated close to each other for hours.

Danielle Lafontaine, Inspired of Dance, and Christian Schönburg, Inspired of Comedy, engaged in dinner warfare. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

The first Act ended for Muses with a touching final circle: a purification ritual. Diegetically, the Muses would return to Mount Helicon every 15 years to reconnect through this ritual; since we were not permitted to return to Mount Helicon or see one another at will for the last 15 years, we made do in the Manor with these stolen moments. We huddled for warmth in the dark attic, gently comforting one another through touch as we did throughout the larp. We each took water from a bowl and cleansing the Muse next to us, which felt like a ritual blessing. Then, we each shared a Secret — some revealed shameful feelings or actions, such as taking someone else’s Inspired as a lover or alerting one’s Inspired of the escape plans. While we all witnessed these admissions, the purification ritual added an element of forgiveness to the circle. At least for my character, the understanding that we were taking action under complicated situations of duress made it easy to let such admissions go, although others did hold resentments.

People standing around a circle as a robed woman holds a glass above her head. — The Inspired awaiting the arrival of the Muses in the first Binding, the beginning of Act 2. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen. Image has been cropped.

The second Act began with a flashback scene in which we enacted the initial binding ritual. This ritual also occurred in a circle within the same room, imbuing the physical space with a certain repeated significance. This scene was particularly effective because we already had the experience of being subjugated by these relationships the night before. We then began play with a brief experience of freedom, worship, and a pure desire to Inspire outside of such subjugation, only to be bound and betrayed. This worship was especially desired by the Muses because of its unusualness in the modern world, where few still prayed to the old gods; thus the pain of betrayal was manifold.

At the end of Act 2, the characters engaged in another important informal ritual called the Party, which was also upheld every year due to tradition. In the Party, the artists drained their Muses of all Inspiration in a moment of selfish gluttonous intoxication, doing absolutely nothing of worth with these gifts. The Muses were expected to participate in the Party as celebrants as well, which we interpreted in various ways. This sort of peer pressure to maintain appearances was present in all of the rituals, with Inspired and Muse characters alike having various degrees of internal and external conflict around these traditions.

Photo of a man in a suit holding a book and a woman in a white dress with a circlet on her head, both have a statue behind them — Henry Wilson and Clio, Inspired and Muse of History. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Close to the end of Act 3 was the yearly renewal of the binding ritual, with a twist: the ritual was disrupted afterward by a scroll that contained a sort of counter spell, in which the Muses were offered the opportunity to make a “Choice.” The Muses could choose to stay with their captors in servitude, or leave, which would entail them to become mortal, losing their supernatural abilities, and eventually dying. The design allowed for us to spend quite a bit of in-game time focused on this Choice and its ramifications. The power dynamics were suddenly flipped: the Muses could now decide to freely go (albeit with twisted ramifications and not at all prepared for human life), or stay within the dysfunctional dynamic of enslavement, lending to the air of tragedy.

I was cast as Clio, the Muse of History, who had a comparatively consensual dynamic with her Inspired, historian Henry Wilson, in part due to intense Stockholm Syndrome. Though Clio’s entrapment was relatively kind, she was appalled at the indignities forced upon her siblings. During the Choice, Henry wanted Clio to stay to help him uncover lost cities like Troy, which had earned him great fame with her Inspiration as an impetus. However, he had chosen to marry another human Inspired, which reinforced to Clio this sense of indignity.

The other dyads and triad had similarly complex interpersonal dynamics, which led to the Choice being difficult to make; certain characters, who experienced some of the worst oppression in the larp chose to remain enslaved. This choice mirrors human dysfunctional relationships, but was intensified by the epic quality of the larp; the Choice had far-reaching ramifications, not only to the characters present, but the world at large. In Henry and Clio’s case, they chose a third option, presented to them by Erato, the Muse of Love Poetry, and her Inspired: the artists would publicly release us from our binding, assert our independence to leave at will, and permit us to Inspire others. The questions then became: Would Clio return of her own free will to Inspire Henry, even though he was now engaged to a mortal woman? Could Henry retract this declaration at will, leaving her to be bound again? Thus, even this “easier” third option was still riddled with emotional complexity.

A group of people mostly in white seated with one standing — The Choice. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Circles of Safety and Calibration

Come thou, let us begin with the Muses who gladden the great spirit of their father Zeus in Olympus with their songs, telling of things that are and that shall be and that were aforetime with consenting voice…

— Hesiod’s Theogony

The larp featured a pre-game call a month before the larp and extensive workshopping before the game in which we were briefed on aspects of the world and practiced specific play techniques. Most of us signed up in pairs (or triads), meaning that we likely already had developed a certain degree of trust with our main co-player(s) in the Inspired/Muse dynamic. We were instructed that we must calibrate with these co-players at least before the game, and ideally also the other relations mentioned in our character sheets. We were also instructed to check-in with our dyad or triad players after the larp. These instructions emphasized the need for emotional care for co-players, acknowledging the intensity of the experience and making it part of the shared culture of the game to tend to one another. On the other hand, we were also reminded that we are responsible for our own experience, meaning we should communicate if needs arrive and do what is necessary to care for ourselves.

Two women in white with golden headdresses embrace. — Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry, and Thalia, Muse of Comedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Pre-game workshops are often quite awkward experiences, especially whenpreparing to play larps of this nature. Players often feel a certain degree of social anxiety about their own role-playing abilities and their skills at interpersonal interaction (Algayres 2019). They may feel worried about costuming, physical touch, their own attractiveness, or any other number of insecurities and uncertainties. To establish trust early on, we were instructed to sit closely with our dyad or triad and touch in some way during the briefing, such as a casual touch on the arm, cuddling, holding hands, etc. Physical touch can release oxytocin (Zak 2011) and provide an experience of trust between players, although it can also backfire for participants who feel hypervigilant or triggered when touched. The website communicated that players needed to be willing to experience casual touch: “A good baseline of what you should be okay with could be a stranger touching your arm, shouting at you, holding your hand or kissing you on the cheek” (Helicon website, n.d). We also workshopped eye gazing between Muses and Inspired, which deepened the connection and helped relieve a bit of the awkwardness. Eye gazing is a simple, yet quick and effective technique for people to see others beyond the masks each of us wear in social life, as well as to feel truly seen in a short amount of time.

We also had times within the workshop to calibrate with many of our written relationships, which from my perspective provided a solid groundwork of a “home base” between player-characters within play. In my view, creating time for such calibration is critical to the success of such larps. Many players do not have the time or inclination to reach out before the larp and find it difficult to remember names, faces, and the specifics of written dynamics during play. Creating contact before the game and encouraging players to discuss what each person wants (and doesn’t want) from the dynamic is very helpful.

Woman dancing around with a sash above her head, next to a man in white and gold on a chair — Danielle Lafontaine after draining Terpsichore at the Party (Inspired and Muse of Dancing). Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

We also workshopped a scene involving the drawing of Inspiration. The metatechnique involved a white and gold sash with the Muse’s name written upon it, which we would use in some way to signify giving Inspiration. The sash could be used in many ways ranging from gentle and consensual to violent and non-consensual. We were instructed to hand over one of our three precious Inspiration ribbons placed on our name tags and transfer them to the Inspired’s name tag. The ribbons were a non-diegetic way to communicate how full or empty of Inspiration each character was, as well as who had drawn Inspiration from whom, as each Muse had different colored ribbons. We could decide to act upon this extra-diegetic information as a form of steering (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015). The designers explained that they did not want Inspiration to turn into a statistic like in other role-playing games, but it still influenced play for some of the larpers.

Another workshop emphasized playing to lift (Vejdemo 2018), meaning we took turns boosting the importance of the other characters in terms of their personality or accomplishments using “Yes, And” to build upon what others were improvising. For example, a character could say, “My recent art work has received quite a lot of positive reviews…” which we would then reinforce with added comments. Since the larp also dealt with the fragility of artists’ egos, we also practiced playing each other down, which would be initiated by the person wanting that sort of play, for example, “Lately, I’ve really been struggling to get critics to care about my work…” The co-players would then “Yes, And” to make the character feel even worse about their artistic block or lack of public recognition. This metatechnique was particularly interesting as it provided an impetus for drawing Inspiration and seeking validation from others through dysfunctional means.

We were instructed to use “off-game” in order to quickly calibrate and negotiate consent during play or leave the space for more extensive discussion. We went off-game between acts and the default for sleeping quarters was off-game as well. Right before the larp began, we workshopped violence, including tapping out when we wanted a certain interaction to slow down or stop, as well as escalating slowly through bullet-time consent (Koljonen 2016b) to give other players a chance to opt-in or out. This practice ended up important for the first Punishment scene that we were soon to play.

A person embracing someone with a flower crown. — Omorfia and Philip Frost, Muse and Inspired of Painting in the first Binding. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Man bowing before a woman holding her hand. — Maximillian Stern worshipping Euterpe at the first Binding. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Man yelling and looming over at a woman. — Christian Schönburg binding Thalia, the Muse of Comedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Calibration was also emphasized in the workshops between acts in effective ways. We were given time for one-on-one discussions, but we also circled up with each player sharing a short sentence of what they would like to experience within this Act. Then, other players could raise their hand and volunteer to deliver that sort of play, which added an element of accountability to one another. Following Juhana Pettersson’s (2021a) assertion that players are engines of desire, being able to openly express one’s wishes in a group without shame is a powerful experience. For example, I tend to prefer subtle scenes and was drawn to the larp due to the emphasis on discussions of art and the creative process; through this process, I was able to ask others to approach me with those kinds of discussions if desired. It was remarkable to me the way a briefly stated request could redirect the flow of play for individual players, and thus the ensemble: a form of group steering.

Epic Dyadic Play as a Genre

Unwearying flows the sweet sound from their lips, and the house of their father Zeus the loud-thunderer is glad at the lily-like voice of the goddesses as it spreads abroad, and the peaks of snowy Olympus resound, and the homes of the immortals…

— Hesiod’s Theogony

At times in Helicon, I felt like I was experiencing something quite new, but I could not put my finger on why. Oppression dynamics and dysfunctional relationships are hardly new themes; indeed they are the bread and butter of many Nordic or Nordic-inspired larps. Epic storylines and supernatural abilities are hardly new either, as RPGs as a medium have featured those elements from their inception.

A woman in white standing behind a man playing the piano with her hand on his arm. — Euterpe and Maximillian Stern, Muse and Inspired of Music, attempting to compose. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

At one point, I looked around the room during dinner warfare, surveying the artists with their Muses, thinking, “Oh! We are in a really good Toreador larp” — the Toreador being the artistic clan in Vampire: the Masquerade. In Vampire, the undead take “retainers” who are bloodbound to them, meaning supernaturally addicted to their blood and compelled to obey. Retainers bound by Toreador are often highly talented in their own right, ensnared by the vampire’s wish to keep their retainer’s talents for themselves — an especially potent theme considering many vampires lose the potency of their own talents when turned to the undead. This larp was different in many ways, of course, especially considering the retainers were mystical eternal beings. The emphasis on artistic creation as an important theme of the larp led to a depth of discussion that I often craved as a long-time Toreador player, enhanced by the setting of the beautiful castle and its art.

Man in glasses and a suit talking to a woman in black with a hat and sunglasses. — The initial binding ritual was initiated by Henry Wilson, Inspired of History, and Stella Wilson, Inspired of Spiritual Inspiration. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

At another point, I saw characters huddled in corners trying to solve various plots related to the occult rituals: the Inspired were trying to figure out ways to stop the Muses from being able to flee, whereas the Muses were trying to figure out a way for the Escape ritual to work. I thought to myself, “Oh, we’re in a Call of Cthulhu larp and those are the occult researcher characters.” As with Cthulhu (1981), Helicon’s setting is clearly playing to lose on some level; whether freedom is attained or the Muses continue to be bound, loss is embedded. But the sense of supernatural horror that pervades Cthulhu was not the emphasis here; instead, we focused on the interpersonal dramas inherent to these characters being locked in this non-consensual pact. Indeed, the occult components felt like an aberration, while the “natural” state would be to let the Muses free to choose who to Inspire. The occult components did not seem to be a goal to attain or a puzzle to solve. Rather, they were elements calling to mind the Spiritualism of the early twentieth century, as well as storytelling devices providing alibi to engage in intense rituals, which tend to amplify play. From my perspective, these spells were more of a conceit than a quest, although I steered away from play involving them so cannot speak for other players.

People standing around a circle with sashes in front of them, looking at a woman reading from a book. — The final Binding ritual. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

I keep returning to this emphasis on dyadic (or triadic) play, which is also not new. The Nordic larp Delirium (2010), about oppression within a mental institution, relied on players signing up as couples and used dyadic play to explore themes of love and failed attempts at resistance (Pedersen 2010; Andreasen 2011). Personally, I have had particularly strong experiences playing Here is My Power Button (2017), an American freeform about users purchasing an android from a company as part of a scientific experiment. What made Power Button potent was a toggling back and forth between one-on-one user/android scenes in the same room and group scenes, in which all users would interact in one room and all androids in the other. Helicon had a similar structure: we had large group scenes that were also one-on-one scenes, giving a sense of collective experience along with intimacy. We also had activities such as the Muse ritual in which we were all together and able to share about our paired experience.

Woman in white crouched in front of a man in white. — Phren, Muse of Psychology, and Athanasia, Muse of Sculpture. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

This epic dyadic structure is also present in Linda Udby and Bjarke Pedersen’s PAN (2013-) and BAPHOMET (2015-), which feature occult storylines and supernatural content in the form of possession from godlike entities (Pedersen and Udby 2017; Nordic Larp Wiki 2019). Another dyadic larp is Wind’s Daemon (2021-), which is based upon Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000) series. In Daemon, characters have animal entities attached to them that represent their souls enacted by other players. I have not yet played Daemon, but have read many play accounts that have emphasized the powerful nature of this dyadic setup. In practice, the structure at Daemon meant that characters are instructed to stay physically close to one another at all times (Wind 2021): not exactly the same as our experience in Helicon, but was a clear inspiration.

A woman in white huddled next to a person in a suit. — Melpomene and Taylor Montgomery, Muse and Inspired of Tragedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

In reflecting upon the larp, I am now considering the combination of epic play and a dyadic (or triadic) structure as a particularly potent combination: perhaps an emerging genre of play as more and more larps are produced in this format. Helicon required a strong degree of trust between players in dyads (and triads), as well as a degree of commitment: we were expected to continue to role-play and check-in with our co-players and not abandon them, even if we wanted to steer the story into a new direction. Most characters had several other interesting and playable character relations, which helped interweave the larp into more of an ensemble (Tolvanen and MacDonald 2020), rather than incentivizing isolated play between groups of 2-3. While players may have differing experiences of the larp, my perception is that this dyadic epic play combined with emphasis on the ensemble led to a special magic of interconnectedness not always present at larps.

I finally settled on, “Oh, we’re in a Neil Gaiman larp,” at least thematically; we were epically-infused characters with all-to-human quirks engaged in interpersonally meaningful play tinged with sadness about humanity’s flaws. Gaiman’s (2018) words describe his work well:

A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope.

However, from discussions of the designers, “Calliope” was not a primary inspiration, so to speak, and the character relations were meant to be far more nuanced, which I definitely experienced. I look forward to seeing what larps are spawned as this type of design and experimentation continues to evolve.

A man in white observes a woman in white eating grapes. — Polyhymnia, Muse of Spiritual Inspiration, and Helica, Muse of Architecture (Wind). Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Acknowledgements

My deepest gratitude to Katrine Wind, Maria Pettersson, Elina Gouliou, Mo Holkar, and Mike Pohjola for giving feedback on this article.

Helicon

Designers: Katrine Wind and Maria Pettersson, Narrators, Inc.

Participation Fee: €630

Players: 29

First Run: January 5-7, 2024

Second Run: February 16-18, 2024 (upcoming)

Location: Broholm Castle, Gudme, Denmark

Music: Anni Tolvanen

Photography: Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen

Safety: Anna Werge Bønnelycke (Jan. 5-7) and Klara Rotvig (Feb. 16-18)

Website: Katrine Kavli

Graphics: Maria Manner

Sparring and Ideas: Emil Greve, Elina Gouliou, and Markus Montola

Character Writing Assistance: Søren Hjorth

Website Proofreading: Malk Williams

References

Algayres, Muriel. 2019. “Not Good Enough: On Larp and Systemic Anxiety – Muriel Algayres.” Nordic Larp Talks. YouTube, February 11.

Andreasen, Peter Schønnemann. 2011. “Fabricating Madness – Peter Schønnemann Andreasen.” Nordic Larp Talks. YouTube, March 1.

Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2016. “White Wolf’s Convention of Thorns – A Blockbuster Nordic Larp.” Nordiclarp.org, December 6.

Bowman, Sarah Lynne, Russell Murdock, and Rebecca Roycroft. 2017. “Epiphany Design Document version 3.0.” Google Docs.

Brown, Maury, Sarah Lynne Bowman, Quinn D, Kat Jones and Orli Nativ. 2018. “Immerton: A Society of Women.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 41-52. ETC Press.

Davis, G., et al., 1991. Vampire: the Masquerade. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf.

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Gaiman, Neil. 2018. “BRAND NEW! Second printing of Chris Riddell & Neil’s HOPE print! Limited edition.” Neverwear, September 23.

Grasmo, Hanne, and Jaakko Stenros. 2022. “Nordic Erotic Larp: Designing for Sexual Playfulness.” International Journal of Role-Playing 12: 62-105.

Gygax, Gary, and Dave Arneson. 1974. Dungeons & Dragons. TSR, Inc.

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Jones, Kanane. 2017. “Immerton: A Fire in the Desert.” Nordiclarp.org, October 28.

Koljonen, Johanna. 2016a. “Basics of Opt-In, Opt-Out Design Pt 3: What They Need to Know at Signup.” Participation Safety in Larp, July 5.

Koljonen, Johanna. 2016b. “Toolkit: The Tap-Out.” Participation Safety in Larp, September 11.

Kim, Yeonsoo Julian, Morgan Nuncio, and Jen Wong. 2018. “Epiphany – A Collaborative Mage: the Ascension Larp.” Nordiclarp.org, February 1.

Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta. 2015. “The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together.” Nordiclarp.org, March 29.

Nordic Larp Wiki. 2019. “Playing to Lose.” Nordic Larp Wiki, September 3.

Nordic Larp Wiki. 2019. “Pan.” Nordic Larp Wiki, April 2.

Pedersen, Bjarke. 2010. “Delirium: Insanity and Love Bleeding from Larp to Life.” In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 288-297.

Pedersen, Bjarke, and Linda Udby. 2017. “BAPHOMET – The Road to Damnation.” Nordiclarp.org, November 15.

Petersen, Sandy. 1981. Call of Cthulhu: Fantasy Role-Playing in the World of H.P. Lovecraft. Chaosium.

Pettersson, Juhana. 2021a. Engines of Desire: Larp as the Art of Experience. Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura ry.

Pettersson, Juhana. 2021b. “Terror and Warmth.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt.

Pullman, Philip. 2000. His Dark Materials Complete Trilogy. Ted Smart.

Tolvanen, Anni, and James Lórien MacDonald. 2020. “Ensemble Play.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, and Mia Makkonen. Helsinki: Solmukohta.

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Cover photo: Patrick and Phren, the Inspired and Muse of Psychology. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen. Image has been cropped.

Published on

2024-01-25

in

Documentation

Odysseus A Retrospective (2019)

Written by

James Bloodworth

Content Advisory: This article may contain plot spoilers for the larp Odysseus.

This is a slightly tweaked version of the original post I put on Facebook on Sunday July 21, 2019, regarding my thoughts on the second run of the Finnish larp, Odysseus, that ran over July 4-6 2019 in Helsinki.

“It’s not enough to survive, one has to be worthy of survival”.

Commander Adama, Battlestar Galactica

This article discusses my experience of participating in the 2019 run of the Finnish larp Odysseus, which was organized by Laura Kröger, Sanna Hautala and Antti Kumpulainen (backed up by a huge crew). This was my first time at a larp of this nature (I’ve been playing and running larp’s since the early 1990s) but I should also mention I had lost my love of larp by this point due to some extremely negative experiences so it was with some trepidation I would eventually go to this game with a view to it being my swansong. I didn’t really know what to expect or how I should play it.

TL;DR, I had an amazing time at the very best larp I’ve ever been to.

What was Odysseus?

I’d been looking for a large European “mega-larp” (for lack of a better term) for a while but if I was going to spend roughly £500+ on a game, I wanted it to be something that was in my sphere of interest. A good friend of mine who had previously gone to Lotka-Volterra, sent me the link for this one and it seemed to tick all of the boxes that I was looking for. As I think the team behind Odysseus freely admitted, the game background was very much Battlestar Galactica with the serial numbers filed off. The background to the game was that a colony of humans who left Earth hundreds of years ago were wiped out in a surprise attack by sentient machines (so very much the beginning of Battlestar Galactica). The game was set in the immediate aftermath of that attack. We were on the ECS Odysseus, one of the last surviving battleships of the colonies. As players we would be playing members of the crew of that ship, as well as survivors who had been picked up either before the game started or would be as the game progressed.

mess hall of the space ship build in i Finnish school

Pre-game

The game was cast from pre-written characters, which meant that instead of writing up your own character’s backstory and fitting it in with the game universe, you filled out a questionnaire as to your preference of play styles and then the GM’s “cast” you into a role they thought lined up with your answers. The questions were such as how much you enjoy a certain play style, if you like having secrets, if you like romance plots, etc. For example, I remember one question asking which of the character groups I was interested in; I put down either Engineer, Scientist, or Bridge Officer.

Seemingly at odds with my wishes, I was cast as a Marine, a soldier. Between laser tag and larp, I have played an awful lot of military-type roles over the years and had been hoping for something different. It seemed I wasn’t alone in being unhappy with my given character and we were offered an alternative; we could put in for a swap and see what happened, and I very nearly did. In the end, however, I thought playing another soldier-type character after doing it so many times would actually be an aid to my roleplay as I would be going into relatively unfamiliar larp territory and having some idea how to play in a military manner might be beneficial.

We got the main character briefs in May 2019 and by that stage there was a touch of anxiety creeping in about the game in itself, to the degree that I put off properly reading it for a couple of weeks. I think what was bothering me was the fact that I was flying to another country to play a game with people I had never met before. It had been a while since I’d done anything like that and I guess it was the fear of the unknown getting to me. When I finally did open and read it, it all seemed relatively straightforward and nicely written, a rounded character with a few nuances I was fairly confident I would be able to pull off. I was able to condense key items into roughly half a page of bullet points. The only document I would need to refer to during the game was the universe timeline and that was mainly for dates.

I would be playing Kerrie Ray, Petty Officer 2nd Class, Alpha team Marine, ESS Odysseus. He was an orphan who had defied his adoptive parents’ wishes by enlisting in the Marine Corps as they had wanted him to be a doctor. He was training to be a combat medic as a nod to this. When I read the character, his true parentage was a mystery.

Making contact with the players of other characters mentioned in my character briefing was encouraged and I did my best to do just that. Some were mysterious (as I would learn before their briefing). I can’t thank our team leader enough for setting up an Alpha team Facebook chat group; that helped a lot with getting the team bonding.Truth be told I was incredibly happy at how well and quickly the team did bond once the game got going; it really did feel like we’d been serving together for months, both our team and the rest of the crew. I arrived in Helsinki the day before the game started. As you could stop by at the game site the night before the game, it was how we got our first glimpses into what only a few weeks ago had been a junior high school. Thursday brought a day of workshops where we figured out where we would be sleeping, got a more extensive tour of the “ship”, and an introduction to some of the tech/equipment we would be using. In addition we went through some off game rules of the game, the ideals behind it, etc. I was quite taken by the “play to lift” (Vejdemo 2018) and “empty chair” concepts, and I was also inspired to incorporate them into my own larps.

The game

Time In happened at around 18:00 on Thursday with the playing of the national anthem of the colonies (a specially commissioned piece by Hannu Sinerva and Helena Haaparanta) and when that finished, the larp started. A core element of the game to those who were part of the ship’s crew, was the shift system, divided into Solar and Lunar. Solar shift was 04:00 to 12:00 and then 16:00 to 20:00 and Lunar the inverse. Alpha team was on Solar and Beta on Lunar. You were encouraged to be mindful of your own welfare and to sleep/eat when you were meant to, and also to keep hydrated. The shift system meant that at least half of the ship’s crew would be awake at any one time although realistically it was more than that. I estimate that over the 48 hours duration of the larp I slept for maybe 5-6, if that. My team was roughly similar but the thing was (as I think we commented at one stage) we didn’t feel tired, probably due to the adrenaline (and copious amounts of coffee). Food was served around the clock and there was always lots of it.

One issue that arose was that nearly all of the officer stations were duplicated between shifts with a couple of exceptions, one of them being the chief of security (who was also in charge of the marines). At one stage he had been on his feet for so long that we finally got him to take a couple of hours rest in the brig (comfiest bed in the whole ship) where we could try and make sure he wasn’t disturbed. I’d have put in a nominated second and tried to ensure there was some kind of handover between shifts. As it was, agreed tasks got lost between shifts – like I said to him at one stage, “Next time you want us to arrest a senator, just leave a post-it on one of the monitors!”

As the marine team we had several duties to perform when on our shift:

Watch the security room and look for and investigate suspicious activity on the cameras
Guard the brig and ensure prisoner security/comfort
Patrol the ship
Defend the ship in case of any incursion (like that was never going to happen!)
Participate in Away Missions as required

That last part was one of the highlights of the game for me. As a marine team we got to go in the shuttle (a minibus where all the windows were blacked out) to somewhere in the Finnish woods looking for ancient beacons (these would take the form of locked metal boxes that the science team back on the ship would open and decipher). It was hoped that these would eventually lead us back to Earth. These ground missions were definitely something I was familiar with in terms of larp as I’ve run around a lot of woods in my time! On the missions we had one trooper with a custom vest/helmet with a GoPro camera mounted on the front so a live feed could be transmitted back to the Bridge. In addition, the feed was also shown on the huge projector screen in the mess hall back on the ship so everyone else could see what we were doing. This would turn out to be a double edged sword on our first mission.

Our first mission was to track down one of the aforementioned ancient beacons. We managed to find it, but to get to it we had to scale a loose shale hill in the rain, on which it was being guarded by some local inhabitants. My character wasn’t sure who they were, criminals, lost colonists, etc. Ultimately, whoever they were didn’t matter to us. They were overtly belligerent, they had something we needed and they were heavily armed. One of our team (Leone) had been attempting to flank their left side, which she did beautifully, but as she popped up ready to fire, the battery powered Nerf gun she was carrying failed. It started to spin up and then died, resulting in her being taken hostage.

Speaking of NERF, I wouldn’t have advocated using Laser-Tag indoors (although with the recent data refinements this might work now). Outdoors however, NERF-darts were being tossed in the wind so you needed to practically get to point blank, and the battery powered guns failed at more than one critical moment. Using something like Laser-Tag would have made that combat much more intense, but I can appreciate why we had what we had.

Looking back it was never going to end diplomatically as once we all got to the top and were trying to negotiate with them, they then started to make ever more outrageous demands in exchange for the beacon they had found that we wanted. Their primary demand seemed to be for food and medical supplies, so I said I had both. As I slowly opened my belt pouch with my gun lowered; their leader shouted something and opened fire, meaning that we then had to start shooting or engage them in hand to hand combat. Hunter (the team leader) would then be shown on live feed dispatching the fallen. Not a great look, and I was worried that would come back to haunt us so I gathered the team afterwards and made sure we had our stories straight in case it did. Ultimately nothing did happen and there were no consequences from this incident, was this a missed chance? Potentially, I’ve done court martials in larps before and they can be very intense for those involved, but there probably wouldn’t have been time within the game to allow for it.

This encounter was perhaps the first hint that the larp was built as a railroad scenario; we had to get the beacon to find out where to go next in order to progress, and this is something that would be repeated. The ship would jump, the duty marines would undertake a mission to retrieve the beacon, the science team would then decode it.

Both Alpha and Beta teams would engage in various land missions throughout the course of the larp. Sometimes they were short (where we just went to a cargo container/bunker) other times we would need to go out in anti-radiation gear and go for a long march in the Finnish forest. As alluded to earlier, going on missions into a forest is something I’ve done a lot of, so I was completely comfortable with this part of the game. It’s always thrilling and immersive walking through the trees, weapon in hand, trying to look in all directions for any potential threat.

Of course shipboard duties and land missions as a marine was only half of the game. I also had my actual character background to explore and resolve as well. Ultimately, through the course of the game when I wasn’t on duty, I would discover I was a Royal Bastard who had potentially the best claim to the currently empty throne. I told my best friend who then introduced me to her senator sister, who immediately suggested an alliance, then marriage, and then babies all in the space of about 15 minutes.

The marriage proposal came at the end of a whole series of revelations about my character which came as one hit after another to the extent I went off and hid in the engine room for a while (laying down next to a Jump Drive Reactor is surprisingly soothing). It also led to a state of decision paralysis which I’ve experienced a few times at larps. Now, to my mind this is where my character is presented with a choice but is hesitant to proceed in one direction or the other as the player is worried about the ramifications to other players. Basically, I was out of character worried that if I accepted the proposal I might be breaking someone else’s game. I have to thank a friend for his advice as he came over at one stage to check how things were going and after I told him what had happened, he gave me some advice in the form of three words: “Embrace the chaos”. I did.

In short, I got married, tried to assume my throne, only to have my claim (temporarily) thrown out. It felt just like the episode of Game of Thrones where Ned Stark was clutching Robert Baraetheon’s last will and testament only to have it thrown in his face by Cersei Lannister, an incredibly tense scene, well played by all involved. I’ve mentioned before how play-to-lift was emphasized during the initial workshops and this scene is one of my favorite moments, even though my character came out the other side broken. There was an intensity I’ve only encountered a few times, helped by the great costumes, the scenography and proppage and the previously mentioned sound and light effects, it’s times like this you really become the character in the situation.

That senate meeting, coupled with a few other things, meant that the character was at a low ebb when the red alert sounded followed by the announcement we were being boarded. I did what any marine would do: I shook myself down and got ready for combat. Getting to the armory there were no protective vests left, so I picked up a second gun and went looking for the enemy machines. We knew they were coming, but we had no idea where. For one of the few times during the game I reverted back to being me for a second and wondered: if I was doing this (I’ve both staged and helped to stage similar attacks in the past), where would I launch my attack?

Part of the transformation from the school to the spaceship involved blocking off thoroughfares and creating false walls. I think I figured it out a few seconds before I saw the red lights on the mesh grill on the ceiling. They were going to come from a corner of the mess hall. I dashed over there and stood ready on the staircase facing it, shouting at the civilians to get back. The false door opened and out they came. Now I had two Nerf guns, a springer and a battery powered. Typically the battery powered Nerf gun jammed on the second or third shot so I was left with the springer which I then used to dispatch one of the mechanical monstrosities, but I was peppered with their shots and fell dramatically to the floor.

The attack was repulsed and I then got dragged to med-bay and hauled onto the diagnostic table, where I was laying in the warm (fake) blood of the previous patient. The doctors got me patched up and I got moved onto a normal bed as there were a lot of customers that day.

It was quite hard to die in the game unless you wanted to and then you would talk to the GMs, who would organize it for you. Maybe that had been in the back of my mind when going to fight the machines, maybe I was volunteering to get shot, to go down in a blaze of glory. I did consider killing the character at that stage and it was still something I was considering.

I closed my eyes for a moment and then I heard a voice say, “I thought I told you not to die”. I looked up into the eyes of my new wife, and explained how I thought that my dying would have solved a few problems for people, including her. Whilst seeing my point of view she argued I would be much more use alive.

Re-invigorated I sat up and whilst talking to a doctor I saw Lee Savage (a fellow marine on Beta Team) laying on one of the beds. I asked how she was doing, and the doctor just shook his head. As I looked back, they were covering her body in a sheet and taking her away on a stretcher. Part of my character brief had been to break up Leone and Lee (who I thought had been stringing Leone along on false pretenses) and I had achieved this relatively early on. So when Lee died and they then found an engagement ring in her pocket, it just hit me like an emotional slice of lemon, wrapped around an atomic powered freight train. I have cried before at larps, but not for a while and not with this much power. I solidly lost it for a good few minutes.

I was trying to clean myself up when Abrankowitz (security chief and in charge of the Marines) came in and told me he needed all hands. The sleeve of my jacket was still wet from all the tears but I picked myself up, walked into security, grabbed a gun and asked where the situation was.

The finale

A long time ago I gave a presentation about larp on how as a writer/GM I structured my games, and one of the things I touched upon was that I considered a larp to often have a three-act structure (not unlike a lot of films) with each part as important as the other, the three parts I mean are:

The Setup (everything before the larp)
The Chase (The larp)
The Pay Off (The ending of the larp)

Players can have a great game but a rubbish ending and vice versa and how the game ends can color your memories of the game as a whole.

The game came to an end when an attempt at a diplomatic solution with the machines failed and a suicide mission was launched which took out the machine primary “nerve centre” with a large nuke, followed by one last jump. As players we had committed genocide in the name of self defence against another sentient species, albeit one that was trying to exterminate us first.

I know some players have taken issue with how we survived (e.g., Bergstresser 2022). Apparently there were three potential endings we could have achieved but all were mostly variations on a theme. I know some players aren’t happy that it seems diplomacy never had a chance, and I have seen Odysseus referred to as a “railroad larp”, meaning that we could take any number of decisions on the journey but we were always going to get to the same destination. There was some variance but it was always going to boil down to a decision no-one was going to want to make.

I’m genuinely torn on this. As a character, I was completely happy with the decision to wipe the machines out, as they’d tried to kill me and everyone else earlier in the day and wipe out our civilization. As a GM and writer of larps, I’m really very torn. I like giving my players choices, forcing them to debate the moral quandary over their actions before they have to make a decision. I’ve read some of the Facebook comments from the GM team about how the game was always driving us to make this ultimate choice. It seems there was no winning here, just degrees of losing. In effect, no “happy ending”. In a lot of ways this is completely in line with the Battlestar Galactica (2003) TV series that this game was inspired by.

I’ve since learned that the ending was apparently premature and we should have had a little longer to try and resolve any outstanding plot lines. For me though, personally speaking, this was a good place to end. I loved my last scene where I found myself unexpectedly with my “wife” and whilst I would have liked to try and resolve my royal plot line more it felt like it was still wide open should there ever be any opportunity to take that forward in the future.

Post game

After the game we broke down into small groups for a character debrief with a GM where we talked about both the positive and negative aspects of our characters and how we related to them. Once this was complete we then broke into our larger profession groups (for me this was the rest of the Marines and security team) and we then discussed aspects of each other’s characters that we had liked and respected.

This depth of retrospection so soon after a game was a first for me but it led to an overwhelming positive feeling that I’ve rarely experienced before, to the extent that we were one of the last groups to finish this exercise as we all had so much to say. We then had the after party (although alcohol free as we were still on school grounds) and it was great to finally talk to people as opposed to their characters.

Analysis

I had heard this game referred to as a “Clockwork larp”, roughly translating as multiple individual parts, moving independently on a loop to drive the larger machine forward. This is probably as good a description as I could give. I never thought 360 degree immersion was possible in a larp, let alone in a sci-fi setting, but the level of immersion was just astounding.

So many different facets from set construction, make up, sound, lighting, all worked together in a synchronicity I’ve only ever seen in professional productions costing much more than this did. The project management on this was incredible but it felt flawless; if this was clockwork larp, then it was supported by a clockwork crew.

The technical achievements were many and varied:

A functional Bridge set (with view screens, controls, maps, etc.
Laptops liberally sprinkled around the ship with access to a news/mail system so you could send other characters messages
Engine room systems based on a NASA software framework
Integrated lighting, you knew when it was Yellow/Red/Jump alert
RFID tags on the walls and on the props that could be scanned by smartphones running a custom app with which you could do tasks
The aforementioned helmet cam that went on the away missions
The soundscape that changed in different areas of the ship and through jumps

As a friend said to me, any one of these systems would have been noteworthy in a game, but to have all of them integrated in the way that they were is still an achievement I’m in awe of. There was the occasional glitch but it all worked! I work in IT professionally, and know how much tech they must have had to drive all of this and then some.

Then there was the crew, roughly the same number as the players (over 100) and yet always where they needed to be, when they needed to be, with absolute precision. I’ve often equated running a larp with being akin to keeping plates spinning on sticks, but over 100 players were effectively and efficiently herded and I have problems doing that with 20 players.

They also had a 24 hour safety team and a time-out room where you could go if the game was getting too much for you. There was so much emotion in the game: we had tears and laughter, joy and pain, comedy and drama, we ran the full spectrum. The intensity of the collaboration between players was something I’ve rarely encountered but hope to again.

What did Odysseus mean to me?

A new love of larp, which was something I thought I’d lost.

New friendships made with people I hope to see/larp with again in the future.

A new appreciation for the Finnish/Nordic style of larp. I’ve read a lot about it but this was probably my first proper exposure. In particular the concept of “Play to Lift” (Vejdemo 2018) and “empty chair” (this is where at any gathering you make sure there is at least one empty chair so a newcomer can join in).

A drive to try another larp, maybe on a pirate ship, maybe a magic school, maybe something else, but I want to do more on this scale.

Final thoughts

Odysseus was bold in vision and execution and (for me) delivered on every single one of its promises and then some. I was changing into my outdoor boots before an away mission and one of the GM’s asked me how the game was going and I responded; “This isn’t a game, it’s a f****** experience” and I still hold to that.

We didn’t play Odysseus, we lived it.

So thanks for reading, if indeed, you still are.

the auther with the people he played closely together with

Odysseus 2019

Name of the larp: Odysseus
Dates: Run 1 (Finnish), June 27-30 2019, run 2 (English) July 4-7 2019, run 3 (English) July 9-12 2019
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Organizers: Laura Kröger, Sanna Hautala and Antti Kumpulainen (backed up by a huge crew)
Price: €200-€300 (some characters also had additional costume rental €20-€40)
Website: https://www.odysseuslarp.com/

References

Bergstresser, Chris. 2022. “The Ethics of Storytelling — Chris Bergstresser.” Nordic Larp Talks. YouTube, Sept. 11.

“Odysseus Theme (2019)” (theme music/national anthem for the larp). 2019. Soundcloud. Composed by Hannu Niemi & Helena Haaparanta, lyrics by Hannu Niemi & Mia Makkonen, vocals by Helena Haaparanta: https://soundcloud.com/hannusinerva/odysseus-theme

Vejdemo, Susanne. 2018. “Play to Lift, not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutepunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143-146. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.

Cover photo: Picture of the larp scenography, the Bridge. Photo by James Bloodworth.

Listen 2 Your Heart Season 8: An Unexpectedly Bleedy Experiment

Published on

2023-11-20

in

Documentation

Listen 2 Your Heart Season 8: An Unexpectedly Bleedy Experiment

Written by

Sarah Lynne Bowman

This article is first in a series on Larping Intimacy and Relationships.

From October 28-29, 2023, I participated in Listen 2 Your Heart Season 8 (L2YH), an online larp (or LAOG, Reininghaus 2019) based on the Netflix show Love is Blind (2020-). The game was organized by JD Lade and took place on Discord between Saturday evening and Sunday evening, with enforced off-game sleep hours. We played 8 characters, plus the robot-voiced “Production” who gave us instructions at each stage of the larp.

The following article describes the reality show genre within which this adaptation was placed, addressing its fascinating but also problematic nature, as well as its similarities and differences with larp. I then discuss the potency of playing romantic relationships as vulnerable and potentially transformative experiences, as well as the pitfalls that can arise. I briefly discuss Oliver Nøglebæk’s (2016, 2023) “4 Cs of Larping Love”: context, consent, communication, and chemistry. Finally, I explore how a larp’s design can impact player experiences of romance, situating Listen to Your Heart’s game design and my play experience as a case study. I discuss the surprise twist of this particular run and consider it with regard to safety and consent.

Is Love Really Blind?

As a binge-watcher of many shows related to intimacy, relationships and marriage, Love is Blind is one of my favorite concepts. Single people are invited to take part in an experiment to see if love truly is blind. An equal number of cis-het men and women who all ostensibly are ready to get married are grouped in living quarters according to gender. Then, they take turns dating each person from the other group with a twist: they cannot see each other and can only communicate through a thin partition between them. They spend hours on end in these rooms called “pods” and they can choose to share or not share aspects of their physicality to the person on the other end. However, most avoid such talk, as the premise of the show is to date people without judging them immediately based on looks alone. Of course, some of the cast are there to get on TV and get famous, but some earnestly want to find a life partner through the show.

If one of the cast proposes to another — always heterosexual pairings, with usually the cis man proposing in the traditional fashion — and the woman accepts, they prepare for The Reveal. The two are placed on opposite sides of a room with the partitions slowly rising. The anticipation is intense — will they be attracted to this person who they only knew by voice, and vice versa? After they propose, they rush to the center of the room, where they embrace, and if he still wants to propose, the man drops to a knee and asks again.

They are then thrown into a honeymoon with the other newly engaged couples, which can be intensely romantic or disastrous depending on the couple’s compatibility and each partner’s ability to handle insecurities or shallow habits, such as focusing overmuch on physical traits that are not their usual “type.” If they make it past the honeymoon, they have three weeks to live together back in the “real world,” then have a wedding with their friends and family watching. At the altar, they find out if the other person will actually marry them, which makes for high-stakes and intense television. A year later, they come back to the show for the reunion, sharing how life has unfolded for them since they made this big decision.

Emotional Extreme Sports and Consent

I have seen many seasons of the show, as well as its spiritual predecessor, Married at First Sight (2014-), which is made by the same production company. In Married at First Sight, the cast members are matchmade by experts (a sexologist, a pastor, and a sociologist) and are subject to extensive questionnaires and interviews before, during, and after meeting their spouse at the altar. The experiment in this show is to see if love can grow over time. At times, these experts intervene in times of conflict, which is viewed as inevitable, and guide the couples through marriage counseling. The experiment is predicated on research developed at the Gottman Institute (2023), where psychologists have studied the formula for long-lasting relationships. The show emphasizes how love can grow through moments of intimacy and connection, even if attraction is not present, as attraction can fade, while intimacy needs tending over time. In this way, Married at First Sight is educational, and my view is these counselors deeply want these couples to be happy and have healthy marriages.

The Love is Blind experience has little to none of that concern. No one intervenes on camera, although occasionally the fourth wall breaks and you can see a producer or camera person trying to persuade the person to stay in the relationship. Cast members have recently revealed shocking filming conditions, including being abandoned with no food, sleep-deprived, and forced to stay on set for 20 hours straight at a time (Hogg 2022). As a larper, this makes total sense to me: of course you would deprive people of their basic needs in order to push for intense emotional reactions (Leonard and Thurman 2018) — and many larpers willingly push these limits regardless of the game’s design, and some larps consider such deprivation a feature, not a bug. Larpers who enjoy this type of intense experience or even edge play (Poremba 2007; Montola 2010) often refer to their play activities as emotional extreme sports. Furthermore, such extreme experiences, especially when paired with romantic play, often do lead to romantic feelings between players, as they experience the catalytic container of the liminal space of the larp and the altered, paradoxical state of being themselves-yet-a-character.

However, although these cast members signed a contract and receive the benefits of being on the show, such as instant fame, they clearly are not privy to the kind of consent and safety mechanics we encourage in the international larp community. That contract also states that they must stay legally married for one year and can only get divorced after the reunion is filmed, which is a surefire way to ensure psychological damage if the relationship is dysfunctional. They risk the humiliation of being turned down at the altar not only in front of their friends and family, but the world. It’s exploitative, problematic, hetero-, mono-normative, although not necessarily more so than other Hollywood products sadly.

Nonetheless, I can’t help watching and being fascinated by the human struggle to relate to one another playing out in all these different dynamics. What is remarkable about these shows is the way in which cast members open their relationships to be inspected and consumed by millions of people. Relationships are the places in which our deepest insecurities can be revealed, including any prior wounds or attachment trauma, such as a tendency to fear abandonment (anxious attachment) or engulfment (avoidant attachment) (Levine and Heller 2011). As the show airs, fans around the world watch every (edited) moment of their relationships at their ecstatic best and excruciating worst. Furthermore, the edits they receive tell a narrative that is more of what the producers want to portray, which may not accurately reflect the actual dynamics and happenings between the participants. Many have difficulties dating non semi-famous people after the show airs, instead dating other people from the show or from other reality TV shows, especially if fame was indeed their objective. However, it’s clear that being on the show changes their lives forever; one cast member recently claimed he has been turned down for jobs in his profession due to his participation on Love is Blind, although other cast members have found these claims dubious (Brathwaite 2023).

I think what fascinates me most about this show in particular is the idea of only knowing someone by voice and spending many hours with them, learning all about them, without the distraction of examining their physicality or the anxiety of them examining yours. When I think about concepts that would be appealing to larp, a Love is Blind-themed game was on the top of my list. Could “the experiment” be replicated in a serious way in larp form, or would it devolve into the familiar (and safe) realm of satire, as in The Upgrade (2004) a jeepform larp by Tobias Wrigstad, Thorbiörn Fritzon, and Olle Jonsson about couples deciding whether or not to “trade up” for a different partner? Would players experience emotional bleed (Montola 2010; Bowman 2015) or relationship bleed (Harder 2018) they find triggering or exposing? Or perhaps have a breakthrough as a result of playing out a trial relationship under these circumstances? As a result of this fascination, when JD Lade posted in Larpers BFF that late spots were open to Listen 2 Your Heart Season 8, I jumped right into playing that evening.

Romantic Play and Personal Development

One of the things that interests me most about romantic play is the way it can open opportunities for players to explore relationship dynamics that are unfamiliar, but might reveal parts of themselves, their desires, and their patterns that were less clear to them before. They can experience hypercolor moments of relationship intensity that they may never have felt safe, worthy, or brave enough to try to achieve before. They can play characters that are more sexually or romantically confident and experience what that feels like; alternatively, they can play deeply insecure people who employ manipulative tactics in order to gain power over one another. They can watch in horror as their character takes their own attachment trauma into dysfunctional extremes, or practice playing out a more healthy relationship dynamic. They can experience what true love is — for their characters, at least. What happens to the relationship between the players and any lingering feelings afterward, i.e. the larp crush (Harder 2018), is an often taboo, but necessary topic to openly discuss within larp circles and between players. Ultimately, such experiences can be spaces for healing, learning, personal, and interpersonal growth if handled with care (Baird, Bowman, and Hugaas 2022).

Aware of the vulnerable space that romantic play can open, I am always curious how larps will handle issues of attraction, consent negotiations, storylines, and relationship dynamics. A tendency in role-playing game design in general and romantic games specifically is to design for conflict and tension — the more explosive, the better, especially in communities like Nordic larp that emphasize playing to lose or playing for drama. I am often dubious and even bored of such dynamics — beginning play at the height of conflict means next to nothing if there was no relationship developed between the characters beforehand, no embodied sense of what being “in love” with that person might feel like. For that reason, I have often favored preparatory scenes (Holkar 2021), also called backstory play, in which the basic dynamics of the relationship, including the excitement, the tenderness, and the passion can be experienced, therefore making any drama that unfolds meaningful.

Furthermore, the idea of trying to play out functional relationship dynamics can be equally fascinating, as conflict often arises in human interaction whether we pre-plan it or not. Being asked by the larp’s design or by organizers to overperform drama in order to keep things exciting for other players has often annoyed me, as sometimes the best play in my view is in the quiet, gentle moments of subtle intimacy. I am also careful about bleed, as I am aware that angry or shaming words said in-character when in such a vulnerable state can often reach us as players, especially if the dynamics we are exploring are relatable to our own lives.

The Four C’s: Context, Consent, Communication, and Chemistry

Of particular sensitivity are matters of chemistry and attraction. According to Oliver Nøglebæk (2016; 2023), “four Cs” are important to consider when larping romance (and, arguably, when engaging in relationships in general):

Context: Considering the context of the larp as a whole, its themes, and the experiences of other players when approaching romantic play;
Consent: Making sure all players enthusiastically consent to play within stated boundaries;
Communication: Directly, openly, and regularly communicating what types of experiences each player would like to have;
Chemistry: The inexplicable spark of connection that can be instantaneous or cultivated over time.

Regarding this last point of chemistry, many larpers will understandably lean more into in-game relationships with people to whom they are emotionally, intellectually, physically, or spiritually attracted; that sort of bleed can be experienced as pleasurable and may even lead to relationships with the other player in daily life (Bowman 2013). Chemistry from this perspective need not be rooted in sexual desire. On the other hand, if one only plays for chemistry, one might end up rejecting play from others, which can emotionally impact other players, especially if they consider themselves outside the bounds of conventional attractiveness, or as Karijn van der Heij (2021) calls it, appearance-based prejudice. Rejecting such connections can also negatively impact the larp, e.g., in larps with a strongly narrativist structure like Fortune & Felicity (Harder 2017; Kemper 2017), where a specific arc is meant to be played out over time with one’s assigned co-players. However, when considering the importance of consent, we arrive at a conundrum: should we force players to engage with one another in romantic play at all if they are not enthusiastically consenting? When considering the ethics of larp, this sort of peer pressure to perform romance can be a bit murky. In such cases, trying to find mutually satisfying ways to adjust the narrative through larp hacking might be kinder for everyone involved. Larp hacking involves subverting the game’s parameters such that it is more playable or enjoyable for participants but does not “break the game” completely (Svanevik and Brind 2020).

Nøglebæk’s (2016, 2023) view on chemistry is “You can’t force it. But you can grow it, if both of you are willing to open up – it takes a little work and communication to build up mutual trust and connection.” This philosophy is quite similar to the stance taken by the Gottman Institute and, by extension, Married at First Sight and Love is Blind. Laura Wood (2022) has given a Nordic Larp Talk on the topic, advising much the same, discussing the way larpers can cultivate chemistry through “emotional bids,” as Gottman describes. It is certainly possible to foster such connection in a startlingly short amount of time in larp through workshop activities such as eye gazing; ars amandi, a technique developed by Eliot Wieslander for playing out sexuality through touching arms (Nordic Larp Wiki); or asking each other 36 Questions intended to help you fall in love (Aron et al. 1997).

Listen 2 Your Heart: Salem Edition

The run I experienced of Listen 2 Your Heart was called Season 8 diegetically and was the eighth iteration of the larp non-diegetically. The title of the larp refers to the Roxette song by the same name; the Glee (2009-2015) version of the song (2015) was played at the beginning of the larp, ostensibly as the theme song for the show. The setting was realistic in principle: all characters were given their own apartment and were communicating through chat rooms, audio, and video conferencing. This practice made it easier to immerse through the interface, which can be challenging in online larps. Furthermore, the online format took any anxieties around physical touch or intimacy off the table, which was a nice change of pace from physically embodied larp.

By this point in the larp’s evolution, certain rules were in place in order to try to avoid the pitfalls of larp romance described above, which was a pleasant surprise. I am particularly sensitive to issues of chemistry; people’s feelings can get hurt if romantic gestures are not reciprocated or they can feel violated if forced to play out relationship dynamics without the option of opting out. Such issues can lead to larp ghosting, in which players drop their pre-arranged relations to seek out more fulfilling play.

Listen 2 Your Heart dealt with this conundrum in several ways. Most importantly, it broke with the cis hetero-normative formula endemic to many of these mainstream shows. The setting document states, “All characters are some flavor of bisexual / pansexual. They may have preferences, but none of the characters are to be played as straight or homosexual with only one gender preference” (“L2YH Schedule and Rules”). This rule tries to solve issues that can emerge in larps, such as queer players being forced to play straight romances (Paisley 2015; Stenros and Sihvonen 2019; Wood and D 2021), players steering away from players that their off-game self would not normally consider “their type,” etc. However, the rules also explicitly state that this world is mono-normative and that the dilemmas inherent to dating in groups cannot be solved through polyamory or dating outside of the pods. Such solutions break the premise of the game. In addition, the setting document states that all characters want to be on television and consented to the possibility of marrying someone.

I played Melaina, a young adult Fantasy author who believed she could do magic. The last part was a tweak I added to the original pre-written character concept when I started noticing the twist (see below). The in-game experience toggled between playing in the pods in a series of dates with members of the other group (audio only), in my case, Group B, then communicating with one’s group about what unfolded (audio and video), in my case, Group A. Though the larp was fairly long for the online format at approximately 13-14 hours of play over a 28 hour period, the pacing was such that while we were asked to interact with co-players through these “pod dates” played out in a series of Discord channels with camera off, we were not interacting with any one person for more than 20-30 minutes at a time. This kept the pace going and the format allowed for players to make any choice with regard to their character’s romantic storyline, although they were not allowed to unalive themselves, as that kind of choice can negatively hijack the narrative for everyone.

Group meetings featured different stimuli in addition to talking, such as prompts for us to go to the “confessional camera,” prompts to vote on characters in specific ways, e.g., “Most Likely to Receive the ‘Hero Edit’,” “Least Favorite Date.” This input was gathered in practice in Google Forms, then the larp adjusted in some way. For example, characters could request all the confessional quotes from a particular character, or were given anonymous confessional quotes to decipher. Votes were tabulated and winners (even in “losing” categories), were sometimes invited to choose the next series of dates, including to benefit themselves and either thwart or assist others. This practice kept us always on our toes and the game flowing nicely. Consistently shifting between interactions ensured that even if the setting was mono-normative, the play was more a collective negotiation.

Many larps these days have rules against larping rejection of someone based on personal appearance for the reasons van der Heij (2021) described. L2YH had a particularly interesting approach to this rule, stating: “Don’t play negatively on someone’s OFF-GAME looks / age / etc. Everybody is hot, that’s the fun of the show, right? Somebody might not be your character’s type, but they are still objectively hot (“L2YH Schedule and Rules”). In practice, this was quite lovely after Reveal scenes, in which each of us were sent on dates where the camera suddenly came on, like the barrier lifting in Love is Blind. Cast members on Love is Blind often comment on how jarring it is to finally connect this new face with the voice they fell in love with and the physicality they imagined, which I found to be true as well, but still a pleasant surprise. In fact, these scenes were even more potent for me perhaps than the several of the other players, who seemed to play the larp together often I presume as new characters each time; I only know one of the players previously so I had an authentic experience of curiosity and surprise.

When Group A would reconvene to gossip after these Reveals, we would play to lift (Vejdemo 2018) the other players, talking about how hot they were and how confusing it made everything, which we would then also sometimes reveal to characters in Group B. This practice can potentially lead to positive experiences of bleed that might counteract feelings of insecurity present in the player.

The game encouraged players to amp up the interpersonal drama, which I sometimes struggle with being forced to do considering my preferred playstyle of keeping intensity growing at a slow boil rather than exploding for the sake of narrative drama. However, off-game calibration with other players in terms of boundaries and the direction of storylines was strongly encouraged. In practice, this worked quite well, especially when communicating with experienced larpers who are conscientious of other player’s experience.

However, from my perspective, a major issue with such calibration occurred due to in-game secrets embedded in this particular run of the larp. While most runs focus on the traditional relationship trajectory storyline, this run of L2YH had a twist due to its proximity to Halloween: all the characters in Group B were actually vampires. Furthermore, it was revealed through play that if anyone in Group A does not choose to get married, they will be hunted and killed on the vampire television network on which the show now airs. Furthermore, they would then be forced to become a vampire themselves or die, thus becoming the monster themselves, now implying an additional meaning to the word “bleed.” This plot was hinted at in our briefing, in which the facilitator alluded to spooky things being afoot due to the game running close to Halloween and placed in Salem, Massachusetts, the location of the famous witch trials in colonial America that were unfortunately all too common in Europe.

In terms of a plot, it was intriguing and my character figured out some of what was going on fairly early, but the secrecy of the game led to some cognitive dissonance around genre. On Love is Blind, you might end up with someone with narcissistic or abusive tendencies, but on this show, you would most certainly end up with a serial murderer, which is a steep escalation. Players in Group B were instructed to try not to reveal the secret until the Reveal, ostensibly to stir up the aforementioned drama. However, as it leaked early, I had to make a choice as a player: I could lean into the premise as horror or as the aforementioned satire/mockumentary style of play, similar to What We Do in the Shadows (2014, 2019-). I ended up doing what my characters often try to do when playing romance in larp: attempting to redeem or save the “troubled, misguided” abuser. My storyline started off fairly seriously, as I wanted my character to be earnestly looking for her life partner, as befits the genre of the show, but ended up in a dysfunctional love triangle between murderous psychopaths in order to amp up the drama for the finale. Furthermore, as Vampire fiction is often considered a metaphor for sexual violence, this twist did not entirely line up with the rule, “Do not play upon child- / sexual abuse / non consensual sexual encounters” (“L2YH Schedule and Rules”).

I decided to lean into the absurdity and still had a good experience. However, this example illustrates the problems with secrecy in larps in terms of player consent (Torner 2013), as I may have declined playing upon such themes or negotiated a less severe storyline through calibration if I had known ahead of time. My understanding is that the next runs of this larp will revert to the typical Love is Blind format and will therefore likely not have such issues.

A further hiccup revolved around the opt-out mechanic, a semi in-game phrase, “I’d rather not…” We were instructed to say or chat the phrase and use the X-arms to the camera if we wanted to take the scene in a different direction. “I’d rather not…” could also be used to indicate a desire to change the topic of conversation, similar to an X-card (Stavropoulos n.d.), meaning that topic was off-limits. In practice, remembering such phrases during play can be quite difficult, as can remembering to signal, or remembering to check the chat to see if someone had sent an off-game message. These issues are ongoing with regard to safety. Cues can be missed whether in-person or virtual play, and in-game phrases meant to be immersive can sometimes be missed. In future runs, I would recommend workshopping such techniques to make sure all players had some embodied experience with them before play rather than only receiving them in the rules document and having them explained at a briefing.

A Successful Experiment

Despite this narrative twist at the end, overall Listen to Your Heart Season 8 provided an authentic-feeling experience that strikes me as similar to what it might feel like to be in the pods of Love is Blind. I very much enjoyed being able to focus only on the voice as a means of communicating, whether the topics were flirtatious or deeply metaphysical, which is where my play tends to go. The experience of listening to the character’s voice on headphones strikes me as particularly intimate, as well as the pressure of attuning to every nuance the person was communicating explicitly or implicitly in order to ascertain in a short amount of time whether or not the relationship would work. Overall, I think the designer made smart choices in terms of the parameters of the larp.

References

Aron, et al. 1997. “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23, no. 4: 363-377.

Baird, Josephine, Sarah Lynne Bowman, and Kjell Hedgard Hugaas. 2022. “Liminal Intimacy: Role-playing Games as Catalysts for Interpersonal Growth and Relating.” In The Magic of Games, edited by Nikolaus Koenig, Natalie Denk, Alexander Pfeiffer, and Thomas Wernbacher, 169-171. Edition Donau-Universität Krems.

Brathwaite, Lester Fabian. 2023. “Love Is Blind star Nick Thompson says he’s applied for 400 jobs, is Two Months Away from Losing Home.” Entertainment Weekly, August 2.

Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2013. “Social Conflict in Role-playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study.” International Journal of Role-Playing 4: 17-18. https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi4.183

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

Gottman Institute, The. “The Gottman Institute: A Research-Based Approach to Relationships.” Gottman.com.

Harder, Sanne. 2017. “Fortune & Felicity: When Larp Grows Up.” Nordiclarp.org, June 13.

Harder, Sanne. 2018. “Larp Crush: The What, When and How.” Nordiclarp.org, March 28.

Hogg, Ryan. 2022. “‘Love is Blind’ Contestant Sues Netflix After Being Forced to Work ‘Inhumane’ 20-hour Days without Enough Food or Sleep.” Business Insider, July 17.

Holkar, Mo. 2021. “Larping Before the Larp: The Magic of Preparatory Scenes.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.

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

Lade, JD. 2023. “Schedule and Rules.” Listen 2 Your Heart, Google Docs.

Leonard, Diana J., and Tessa Thurman. 2018. “Bleed-out on the Brain: The Neuroscience of Character-to-Player.” International Journal of Role-Playing 9: 9-15.

Levine, Amir, and Rachel Heller. 2011. Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — and Keep — Love. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2011.

Montola, Markus. 2010. “The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-playing.” In Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players. Stockholm, Sweden, August 16.

Nøglebæk, Oliver. 2016. “The 4 Cs of Larping Love.” Olivers tegninger om rollespil, August 18.

Nøglebæk, Oliver. 2023. “The 4 Cs of Larping Love.” Nordiclarp.org, November 14.

Nordic Larp Wiki. 2013. “Ars Amandi.” July 11.

Nordic Larp Wiki. 2014. “Jeepform.” May 29.

Paisley, Erik Winther, 2015. “Play the Gay Away: Confessions of a Queer Larper.” In Larp Politics: Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi, 170-177. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta 2016, Ropecon ry.

Poremba, Cindy. 2007. “Critical Potential on the Brink of the Magic Circle.” In DiGRA ’07 – Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play Volume 4. Tokyo: The University of Tokyo.

Reininghaus, Gerrit. 2019. “A Manifesto for LAOGs – Live Action Online Games.” Nordiclarp.org, June 14.

Roxette. 2015. “Listen to Your Heart.” Perf. Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff. Glee.

Sedillo, Joaquin, dir. 2015. “S6.E11. We Built This Glee Club.” Glee, May 13.

Stavropoulos, John. N.d. “X-Card: Safety Tools for Simulations and Role-Playing Games by John Stavropoulos.” Google Docs, accessed January 13, 2019. http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg

Stenros, Jaakko, and Tanja Sihvonen. 2019. “Queer While Larping: Community, Identity, and Affective Labor in Nordic Live Action Role-Playing.” Analog Game Studies: 2019 Role-Playing Game Summit (December 23).

Svanevik, Martine, and Simon Brind. 2020. “Larp Hacking.” Nordiclarp.org, February 2.

Torner, Evan. 2013. “Transparency and Safety in Role-playing Games.” In The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, 14-17. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2013.

van der Heij, Karijn. 2021. “We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps.” Nordiclarp.org, June 14.

Vejdemo, Susanne. 2018. “Play to Lift, not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143-146. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.

Wood, Laura. 2022. “Larp Chemistry – Laura Wood.” Nordiclarp.org, September 11.

Wood, Laura, and Quinn D. 2021. “Sex, Romance and Attraction: Applying the Split Attraction Model to Larps.” Nordiclarp.org, February 22.

Wrigstad, Tobias, Thorbiörn Fritzon, and Olle Jonsson. 2004. The Upgrade. Jeepen.org.

Photo by Efe Kurnaz on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.

Published on

2023-11-01

in

Documentation

Bringing Larp to the Larpers

Written by

Mo Holkar

Katrine Wind has worked with local producers to re-run her larp Daemon in different countries. The reasons to do so are many! Sustainability, accessibility, and co-creation. In this presentation she shares her experiences from the US, UK, Denmark, and Belgium together with some of the collaborators: Sandy Bailly who is the producer of the Belgian run and Mo Holkar who is the safety person. Mo has also brought larps abroad from his local scene, and provides insights from those experiences. The aim is to hopefully inspire people to bring larps to other communities. It is easier than you think, and we should re-run more larps!

Cover Photo: screenshot from the video. Photo by KP SK on YouTube.

Published on

2023-10-26

in

Documentation

A Trip Beyond the House of Craving

Written by

Simon Brind

(Originally written July 10, 2019).

PLUS ONE, n. (+) The drug is quite certainly active. The chronology can be determined with some accuracy, but the nature of the drug’s effects are not yet apparent.((Shulgin and Shulgin 1990.))

For some larps it is easy to write about the experience in a way that will make sense to those who were not there. I can describe the events of the larp as a narrative, perhaps focussing on some of the significant set piece moments of the experience, and this will enable others to get a sense of what happened because of a shared context and shared experiences. Even for non-larpers we can explain some of the things that happened in a way that will persuade them to say, ‘That sounds amazing!’ Of course the experience is subjective. Of the various people I know who have played the various runs of Odysseus (2019) over the last week, for example, despite playing ostensibly the same larp, with some overlap, their narratives will be similar, but their reactions to it will be personal. Just as it is with people who have played College of Wizardry, or Inside Hamlet, or any larp that has been re-run. For my UK friends who are unfamiliar with this concept, it is when you run the same larp – usually with the same characters (but different players) – multiple times. It is not a campaign, but literally the same game being repeated. You can play the same larp multiple times, but with very different outcomes.

But I played House of Craving and it was different, and yet I am struggling to articulate how it was different and why. And so this is neither a review, nor a critical summary, but rather a gonzoid attempt to make sense of what the fuck just happened.

A recently widowed man discovers that his wife owned the house where she grew up and that she has left it to him in her will. He decides to spend the summer there – with his extended family and friends – in order to try to come to terms with her death. The characters are all broken in different ways: Some of them aren’t terribly pleasant, others are self-absorbed, others still are so damaged that they would be better suited to be anywhere but in close proximity to these others. Of course this terrible potential for conflict is what powers the engine of larp. But the house is beautiful, the cooking staff are geniuses, and there is a pool, and plenty of champagne, so what could possibly go wrong?

Over time it becomes apparent that these twelve people are not alone. The ghosts of the house object to this family’s presence and, as the day progresses they will influence, manipulate, and then finally control the living family to play out a cycle of tragedy and abuse. Eventually the family will be absorbed by the house, and as the old ghosts move on – into the darkness – they replace their ghosts to become the ghosts for the next family to arrive. And then the cycle will repeat itself. Again and again.

PLUS TWO, n. (++) Both the chronology and the nature of the action of a drug are unmistakably apparent. But you still have some choice as to whether you will accept the adventure, or rather just continue with your ordinary day’s plans (if you are an experienced researcher, that is). The effects can be allowed a predominant role, or they may be repressible and made secondary to other chosen activities.

The stories of this larp – and those who played it – are interlinked and overlapping. A story written in an earlier run may persist as an artifact to be discovered by those who came after. A drawing or a photograph of Jacob may affect a different Jacob when he comes across it in a future run. A short story written by Monica in run 3 could be read aloud by Monica in run 5, but she has no memory of having written it.((Metalepsis, again.)) There are other echoes too, like a twisted game of Chinese Whispers, some stories are retold as remembered or as experienced by the players. Those of us playing run 5 do not know what happened in run 1, but some of that narrative surely became plot to drive our own story. Who are the authors of our fates? Those who played as ghosts in run 1? The others? Ourselves? I cannot say.

This larp is a horror story, it unravels as a descent into madness and death. From the player’s perspective, we think we will have an (un)easy revenge on the next set of family players; but we do not, because the true horror, and the fear is yet to come, as we discover what happens to our ghosts and the approaching darkness that will devour them. And worse still the human’s play back at you. After all this is larp not some Punchdrunk loop. Their agency is real.

House of Craving is an immensely physical larp. You play it with your whole body in a way that I find terrifying; there is little abstraction, and more touch in this larp than I have experienced before; largely because of the proximity and influence of the ghosts. But as ever you retain autonomy, the option to tap out or to invite escalation exists.((I tap out once during the larp. I have one quiet regret for not tapping out a second time. I attempted to escalate but the mechanic – lightly scratching a co-player – does not work for those who bite their fingernails!)) Despite the ability of ghosts to eventually control humans, as players we remain responsible and accountable for ourselves and our own experience. We are instructed to steer for our own play, rather than to focus on the experiences of others. It is a bold undertaking, and a risky one if the players are not all on the same page. But for our run, we are all on the same page! We had an evening together before the larp: our players met for dinner in Odense and then had some self-guided workshops (with wine) at the venue. Here is the point I knew it would work. So much of what we do as larpers is subliminal. If you know your fellow players already it helps, but sometimes a group or an individual just does not gel. Our core-group of four players whose plots and backstory were intertwined clicked. Understanding that this group were all looking for similarly intense experiences really helped; we know even before the larp starts that we’ll be able to cooperatively play ourselves deep into the madness that is to follow. The word often used is chemistry, but perhaps it is more reasonably alchemy.((Or possibly pharmacology.))

The first morning consists of a series of workshops; these are designed to teach you how to play the larp. This is not simply an explanation of meta-techniques and an info dump of rules, but rather a set of subroutines that reprogramme the players to conform to the new social norms of the story world. We, the new players, are slightly nervous and slightly hungover, watching the players who had been the family the previous day. It is interesting. They smile, they hold eye contact for longer, they are unafraid, have no concept of personal space, and carry with them a nervous joy that permeates the black and white checked ballroom, empty but for a candelabra and a few chairs. I want to opt out of at least one of the proffered workshops, but force myself to take part; I am so far beyond my comfort zone that it becomes Brechtian. The sessions are physical; I am strong, used to fighting back; part of the exercise here is to give up control. The ghosts always win. Pushed to the floor with ghosts whispering in my ear I take a deep breath and relax, becoming one with the checked tiles beneath my cheek and I am not afraid anymore.

The larp starts with a nap. The characters have fallen asleep before lunch and all awake in different parts of the house. They amuse themselves for an hour before lunch – Jacob and Wilhelm do “masculine things” in the garden, the homoeroticism of wrapping someone’s hands before putting on boxing gloves is lost in front of an audience sipping champagne – and then at lunchtime, things start to get weird. At six thirty the humans are utterly under the control of the ghosts, and by midnight they are destroyed and devoured by the house. The whole experience is ten to twelve hours of intense play but the following day the cycle repeats except the human players of the previous day are now their own ghosts and a new set of humans come in – as the same characters – to repeat the day. All except for the first run, where the ghosts are NPCs, and the last run, where the family players do not get to play ghosts. I played the penultimate run.

PLUS THREE, n. (+++) Not only are the chronology and the nature of a drug’s action quite clear, but ignoring its action is no longer an option. The subject is totally engaged in the experience, for better or worse.

But when it comes down to it, I can’t begin to describe what happened. Individual events and scenes taken out of context may sound challenging, confusing, or simply make no sense, and the contexts are subjective. Instead I am going to have to resort to the obvious analogy. Larp is sometimes thought of as a consensual hallucination, and this one was more hallucinogenic than most.

The Shulgin scale – quoted throughout this piece – looks at the experience of a chemical over time, and describes the physical and mental effects of the experience on a positive scale of plus one to four (Shulgin and Shulgin 1990). As I am typing this, another player on a backchannel chat is describing the mental state of the players, four days after the larp, as like a comedown after 48 hours of MDMA. Their description is valid. Except there is no crushing bleakness for me. I am still on a high. I am mainly frightened that it will wear off and what it will feel like when it does. Other players have described this process already. Perhaps this is a part of the horror of this game, having to look in the mirror and realise that the larp is over and the magic circle is no more?

House of Craving was a solid plus three for me. It is important to note that this is not a rating scale. A high number is not objectively the goal of larp, or the best thing. One cannot argue that any larp that fails to achieve it is a failure – because most larps don’t, indeed hardly any larps do, nor do they intend to. House of Craving was a horror larp, but there were no moments of blind terror or jump scares and it did not feel dangerous. The fear was the slow realisation of creeping entropy juxtaposed with beauty, and this juxtaposition made the fear feel much worse. My run produced two of the most beautiful larp moments of the 34 years I have been larping, including one which was so eye-wateringly incredible that it makes me gasp to think about it. I am not going to tell you what they were. It would be like describing the effects of 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine((DOC, a hallucinogenic amphetamine first synthesised in Canada in 1972 (Shulgin and Shulgin 1990).)) to someone who had not taken it. I can’t offer you details, only impressions.

I played towards not some sort of death, but towards oblivion. My character’s ending was a ceding of control to the unknown by a character who was willfully in control of himself and his environment up to that point. He did not allow himself to feel physical fear or pain, he kept it inside, until – at the end – only fear remained. The only thing that scared him was the loss of his wife. His litany “without you, I am nothing” became the poem that ended the larp, as he slipped away from her and the lights went out. (Here I literally move away from my fellow players and end the larp alone in the darkness, I feel their hands reach out to find me, but I am gone.) “Without you I am nothing. Without you I am nothing. I am nothing. Nothing. (nothing).”

The patterns and the layers of the piece is what made it work; the ultimate form of intertextuality, stories tied into intricate and beautiful knots, held tight against willing skin. As a piece of ontological design which constructs a narrative and performative space – a larp if you like – House of Craving is a masterpiece of the form. It is a dramatically and personally profound piece of capital A-Art. Given the right players, a little bit of larp magic, and a prevailing wind, it can be life changing. It is certainly life affirming, sexy as hell, and really rather scary.

PLUS FOUR, n. (++++) A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a “peak experience,” a “religious experience,” “divine transformation,” a “state of Samadhi” and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug’s intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug.

There is a point on the Shulgin Scale above plus three. Plus four, however, is a state of being which is profound by definition and by effect, but it can also be terrifying and dangerous. The experience of playing House of Craving was a powerful one yet it remained safe. But the fall out is even more fascinating. I feel fantastic; as though the loved-up effect of MDMA has persisted long after the chemical has worn off. My body image issues, whilst probably not gone for good, are certainly in abeyance; I went into the larp as someone who would describe himself as “old” “fat” “bald” “ugly” ”haggard”; I have come out of it with a healthy dose of “fuck that.” Do you know that we are all beautiful – all of us – and that is the truth, everything that tells you different is merely advertising? I have no religious conviction that this state of affairs will persist, but the larp has produced a profound effect on how I perceive who I am, and this is plus four, and it is wonderful.

If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end, of the human experiment.

— Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (pp. 963–965).

References

Shulgin, Alexander “Sasha,” and Ann Shulgen. 1990. “#64 DOC.” PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Transform Books. Available at Erowid.org: https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal064.shtml

—. 1990. PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Transform Books. Available at Erowid.org: https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal064.shtml

Cover Photo: Promotional photo from House of Craving. Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.

Published on

2023-10-11

in

Documentation

The Immortal Legacy

Written by

Juhana Pettersson

In high school, I had a phase where I was really into the Romantic poets. I read about Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular and was struck by his “The Masque of Anarchy,” a rabble-rousing political poem:

And many more Destructions played

In this ghastly masquerade,

All disguised, even to the eyes,

Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the most famous poets of the Romantic period. I found the world of the Romantics fascinating. In the biography Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes I read about his personal life, which even as a high schooler I understood to be a truly amazing trainwreck.

Gothic is a 2023 larp by Avalon Larp Studios inspired by the Ken Russell movie of the same name, featuring the Romantic poets in a story of gothic horror. I signed up and got lucky, playing first Percy Bysshe Shelley and then the servant William Fletcher.

This was because Gothic was based on an unusual production model pioneered by another intimate horror larp, House of Craving. There are five overlapping runs of the event. Played in a mansion in the Danish countryside, the larp runs continuously as a repeating one-day instance which each player experiences twice, first as a poet and then as a servant.

When I was playing Percy, the person who had played Percy yesterday was now my manservant. The next day, I was the servant and a new player was portraying Percy.

Image of a red and white candle and a white mask between them — Photo by Simon Brind.

Horror Stories

At any given time, Gothic only has five poet characters and five servant characters. The ensemble is small and tight. The division between the social positions of the characters meant that the focus of play is on the five players who arrive together each day. When I was Percy Bysshe Shelley, my primary focus was on my co-players who played Mary Shelley and the others, and when I was Fletcher, I interacted most with my fellow servants.

This allowed for nuanced, interesting social and internal play. The schedule keeps things moving with events such as afternoon tea, a séance and dinner but there is space to explore ideas and build scenes together.

The fact that they share a design structure made me initially compare Gothic to House to Craving, a larp known for its extravagant, depraved madness. During play, I realized that Gothic was quite a different experience, more focused on the depth of the themes, characters and the setting than the visceral, bodily experience of House of Craving. The Romantic poets allowed for an unusually thorough examination of the various ideas connected to the larp because the characters themselves were quite capable of both discussing and implementing them.

The poets were intellectually ambitious, and that meant we as players could explore things like the difference between an ideal and reality, or conversely the problems caused by strict, heedless application of ideals to reality.

In the fiction, the larp was set in Villa Diodati where Lord Byron famously stayed in the summer of 1816, spending three days together with Dr. John Polidori, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Claire Claremont. The time spent by the poets at Villa Diodati is famous for Lord Byron’s challenge that each should come up with a horror story. It is this prompt that gave Mary Shelley the push to come up with her idea for Frankenstein, a landmark work of horror literature.

Our group of poets approached this task diligently, each of us coming up with a story. This meant that not only was gothic horror the genre of the larp, we as characters were also telling each other horror stories in the dimly lit, creaking mansion in the middle of the night. There were layers upon layers of horror, building to an escalating level of unreality as the night progressed.

The themes of artistic legacy and creative immortality influenced my play strongly. There was an unusual space for playing on the complex real-life legacy of the characters because the design facilitated it, key details brought into focus in the excellent character writing. To prepare for the larp, I’d read Miranda Seymour’s excellent biography Mary Shelley and was surprised how directly applicable it was, especially in the surreal late night scenes where talking about the future was as sensible as talking about the past. I’d done extracurricular reading beyond what was suggested by the organizers because I enjoy it, but it paid off.

There was an interesting creative tension between the themes of poetic and creative immortality for the characters, a group of legendary artists, and larp as an artform. Larp is ephemeral by its very nature. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein lives on although she and even the society she came from have disappeared.

A larp lives on in the memories of its players, and shadows persist in documentation such as photos and this essay. Otherwise, it’s lost the moment it ends. Yet what larp loses in the pursuit of immortality it gains in the immediacy of the experience.

Image of old photographs, books, and opera gloves on a desk — Photo by Simon Brind.

Noises in the Dark

When you go to international larps, you end up staying at a lot of mansions available for rent in different countries across Europe. They’ve been built to the specifications of a certain culture of servants and masters. The living quarters of the family in residence are separate from the discreet, narrow staircases and attic rooms of the servants needed to keep the household functioning.

Playing Gothic was the first time I experienced an old mansion through the social context it was actually made for. Since the larp had a number of partially overlapping runs, the players of each run had to arrive discreetly so as not to disturb ongoing play. Thus, a taxi left me and several other players outside the grounds of the Danish country manor where the larp took place and an organizer came to fetch us, guiding us discreetly to a servant’s entrance. This way, we’d be as invisible as possible to the players who were at that moment gazing forlornly out the windows as the poets.

We spent the evening doing workshops and then retired for the night, all on the basement floor of the expansive building. The next day, we had more workshops before we’d start play at 14:00 as the poets.

Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were both aristocrats. As the poets, we’d be sleeping in the magnificent first floor bedrooms so before play started, we bundled up our linens and carried them up the stairs to where we’d sleep the second night, in grand style. We moved from the servant side to the public facing side.

Our third day onsite, our second day of play, it was our turn to play the servants. Thus, we bundled up the linens from our beds again. Most of the servant’s rooms were in the attic. We shifted back to the servant side both inside the fiction and physically inside the mansion.

At night, the mansion was extremely atmospheric. Waking up to go to the bathroom, I was walking the corridors alone, listening to the strange sounds of the building, pitch black doorways and creaking windows looming over me.

It’s a common human experience that when you wake up, your brain misconstrues something you see in the dark. The shape of a coat hanging from a doorframe looks like the silhouette of a human. For one reason or another, I’m very prone to this. It happens all the time and I don’t really get an emotional reaction from it anymore. Seeing something looming in the dark just after waking up, I know it’s just my brain being stupid again. The vision goes away when I turn on the lights.

I was sleeping in my room the third night, on my side cradling a pillow with my left arm, my hand resting against my face.

As I woke up, I saw a hand holding my hand.

Turns out, I wasn’t quite as blasé as I’d thought. It took a while to fall asleep again after I’d frantically grabbed for my cellphone light.

Who Is Remembered

One of the key moments of the larp is a séance involving prophetic statements about the futures of the poets. The themes of who gets remembered and who’ll have a legacy are brought into the open.

As players we knew the statements were true and we knew which applied to which character. This meant that the unfairness of how these people’s lives proceeded was integral to the experience, both in terms of character history and future fate.

The Romantic poets are long dead and the versions we play are fictional, calibrated to the questions we are interested in exploring. From the biographies I knew the larp’s take on history was surprisingly faithful. Perhaps the poets had led such dramatic lives that it was easier to adapt them to the purposes of the larp’s design. Still, I also knew the versions we played were romanticized and exaggerated to make the larp function.

A sitting room in a mansion bathed in red light — Photo by Simon Brind.

The question of who is remembered and how was explored both explicitly and implicitly. It was an ongoing topic of conversation for our characters who operated on what they knew at that moment: Lord Byron was famous, while the others were unknowns, although Percy Bysshe Shelley had written poems that could go somewhere. Other works, like Frankenstein, were still in the future.

Our characters didn’t know that in terms of popular impact, Mary Shelley would in time be the most enduring of the writers present. Although Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley both continue to be read, it’s no exaggeration to say that Frankenstein is in a completely different category. As players we knew this and were able to play on it, even as it remained outside the frame of the fiction.

From her biography, I knew that Mary Shelley’s relationship with success was complicated. Her creative career was overshadowed by the difficult fact that her biggest hit was her first book. She wrote many others but never managed to capture lightning again.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was never particularly popular during his lifetime. His poems became iconic only after his death, and one person who put a lot of work into making that happen was Mary Shelley. You could almost say that the idea of Percy Bysshe Shelley as the archetypal ethereal elf-poet was created by Mary as she curated and contextualized his work.

A play based on Mary’s Frankenstein made her novel a pop culture phenomenon already during her lifetime and accelerated sales of the book. After Percy’s death, she exercised significant control over how his legacy should be remembered. In all this, although she suffered many indignities and setbacks made worse by 19th century gender discrimination and the travails of being a professional writer, she also exercised power of her own. She was an active participant in the shaping of literary memory.

Of the poet characters in Gothic, I find the most tragic to be Claire Clairmont and Dr. Polidori. The latter was the only one alongside Mary who actually completed the story he came up with during those fateful days at Villa Diodati, called The Vampyre, a progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. Although not as famous as Frankenstein, it too has remained in the canon of horror literature.

Dr. Polidori based the vampire of his story on Lord Byron and when he got it published, the publisher decided to attribute it to Byron instead of its true author. Although Byron himself demanded that his name be removed, this and other setbacks eventually depressed Polidori so much that he took his own life at the age of 25.

picture of the author in costume as the servant Fletcher taken in a bathroom mirror — The author as the servant Flecher. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.

Working people barely get remembered at all. The servant characters were also based on real people at least to some degree, but the problem is that records about their lives are limited. The servant I played, William Fletcher, was probably the one of whom the most complete picture is available from historical sources because he stayed with Byron for such a long time and enjoyed a very close relationship with him.

As each day of play ended, we received letters informing us of the future fates of our characters. Percy’s letter didn’t have a significant effect on me because I already knew his fate. Reading Fletcher’s letter was a much more emotional experience. Although he might have felt an inkling of power and control amidst the terror-infused chaos of midnight at Villa Diodati, in the end he was just a poor man living in an age that wasn’t very kind to those without money, title and connections.

In the end, all the famous people around him failed to take care of him.

This was the fate of Claire Clairmont too, a lover of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley who ended up betrayed by both and having to make her own way in a cold, uncaring world. Still, some of her perspective remains. Even before the larp, I’d already become familiar with her voice because her writings were used extensively as source material in the Mary Shelley biography.

Living Words

Playing a famous poet is intimidating for those of us not capable of writing great poetry on demand and Gothic had a clever solution for this problem: The off-game room had a stack of poems and you could grab one and just decide that it was something your poet had just created.

As a player, you had what you needed to make a scene work.

That was my experience of the larp in general. The production model of overlapping small runs used in Gothic is difficult to pull off and requires that everything runs smoothly. This was the case and if there were any hiccups backstage, you didn’t really see them.

Similarly, I was blessed with a cohesive group of co-players who shared similar priorities for what we wanted to do. You could sign up for the larp either as an individual or a group. The run I played in was the only one composed of individual sign ups while the other runs were groups who had signed up together. Due to luck or good casting, I felt our group shared a similar level of interest in exploring the mythology of the Romantic poets and their legacies.

Emotionally, the heaviest scenes were all when I was playing Percy Bysshe Shelley. I got confronted with my failures as a man, a poet, a husband, a lover and a radical, but all that is much easier to deal with when you’ve spent the day as a poet of immortal genius.

The most meaningful scene I played was at the culmination of a game of hide and seek instigated fairly late at night. I ran after Mary, thinking that we could hide together, but the hiding place she chose in the servant’s quarters was for one person only. Realizing I needed a place of my own, I used the same hiding place that had worked for me the last time I’d played hide and seek, probably thirty years ago: Behind the door.

Lord Byron’s hired companion Tita rushed into the room with a baying crowd and noticed Mary. Someone even banged on the door I was hiding behind, but they didn’t notice me and eventually left the servant’s quarters altogether, leaving behind Mary and her maid.

I revealed myself and Mary, supported by the maid Elise, let me have it, all the poison in our relationship, everything that was wrong, pouring out in one powerful, eloquent torrent. I was staggered by it and needed a moment to take it all in. At that point, Elise left, leaving me and Mary alone. I sat on the bed and the conversation continued, slowly shifting gears until it’d moved from the emotional fireworks of gothic horror into a more realistic emotional register.

My key to playing a Romantic poet was that they were very young, precocious teenagers given agency by status and wealth. Lord Byron came across as an elder statesman and he was just four years older than Percy Bysshe Shelley. How come the poets were so irresponsible, so extra? Well, they were barely adults!

When I had my Percy Bysshe Shelley phase, I was at an arts high school where you had a lot of peer support if you wanted to be dramatic. The first time I got drunk in my life, it was with absinthe smuggled from Portugal by my grandmother. (It was illegal in Finland at that time.) We did the whole ceremony with a friend and I got so wasted, I couldn’t take the bus home in the morning without puking on the sidewalk.

Who knows, if I’d had the wealth and fortune of a Percy Bysshe Shelley or a Lord Byron, what heights of folly I would have managed at that age?

Image of stairs in a mansion — Photo by Simon Brind.

Gothic

Gothic was produced by the Avalon Larp Studio collective.

Main organizers: Simon Brind, Halfdan Keller Justesen, Laurie Penny, Martine Svanevik, and Sagalinn Tangen.

Content writers: Aina S. Lakou and Charlie Ashby.

Website feedback and proofreading: Alexis Moisand, Alma Elofsson Edgar, Esperanza Montero, Eva Wei, Andreas Markehed, and Siri Sandquist.

Location Scouts: Julie Streit Pilegaard (main location), Ragnhild Hutchinson, Tidvis (playtest one) and Laurie Penny (playtest two).

Food Design: Anna Katrine Bønnelycke and Maria Østerby Elleby.

Playtesters: Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde, Jørn Norum Slemdal, Frida Sofie, Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, Aina S. Lakou, Ingrid G. Storrø, Kerstin Örtberg, Halfdan Keller Justesen, Kol Ford, Emmer Felber, Rebel Rehbinder, James De Worde, Dominika Kovacova, Jorg Rødsjø, Martine Svanevik, and Charlie Ashby.

Onsite Crew: Maria Kolseth Jensen, Sascha Stans, and Søren Werge.

For additional acknowledgements see the larp website.

Cover photo: The larp location. Photo by Simon Brind.

Adding Larp to a Drama Teacher’s Curriculum – Year 1

Published on

2023-05-24

in

Documentation

Adding Larp to a Drama Teacher’s Curriculum – Year 1

Written by

Lindsay Wolgel

Lindsay Wolgel is a professional actor and edu-larp enthusiast. She is currently the middle school drama teacher at a charter school in NYC. Learn about the ways she incorporated larp into her curriculum this past year, via in-class parties, a classroom podcast, creative writing prompts and more!

Here’s a pdf of the slides: 1-Year-As-a-Drama-Teacher-Slideshow

Published on

2023-01-21

in

Documentation

The Spirit of Christmas

Written by

Juhana Pettersson

My mother has always believed in having a big family Christmas. The director of a circus by profession, she brought that same organizational and creative energy into the way we celebrated the holidays. The way I remember Christmas from my childhood, it was really quite the perfect family occasion, thanks to significant collective effort.

I come from a secular family of Finnish socialists and the Christian connotations of Christmas were foreign to me when I was growing up. In Finnish, Christmas is “joulu”, a word with no inherent religious meaning. When we decorated our Christmas tree, the pride of place at the top went to the red star of communism.

Our Christmas consisted of a series of rituals. Going to the Christmas tree market with my stepfather and siblings and carrying the tree home. Bringing out the box of decorations and hanging them on the tree. The traditional Christmas breakfast, rice porridge. If you found the almond, you got to make a wish. One year my mother decided to cut down on sibling infighting by putting in enough almonds for all four of us.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. Photo has been cropped.

In Finland, we open the presents on Christmas Eve. That’s also when the most significant family dinner takes place. Nobody in our family played the role of Santa. Instead, my Mom would pretend that she’d seen Santa fly across the sky with the reindeer from a window in the furthest room in our apartment.

We ran over to look.

As we did this, my parents quickly took the giant burlap sack of Christmas presents into the hallway outside our apartment and silently closed the door. As we returned, my Mom would knock on the underside of the dinner table and say: “Did you hear that? It must be Santa at the door!”

We ran to the front door, opened it, and sure enough the presents were there!

As I grew older, my mother remarried and our group of siblings grew. I switched teams, helping my stepdad carry the sack of presents outside while my youngest siblings rushed to see Santa from the window.

The relationship I have with Christmas is positive and is not complicated at all, thanks to all the work my mother and the rest of the family put into it over the years.

The Training Center

In December of 2022, I played in the long-delayed Helsinki run of the larp Midwinter Revisited, with Anni Tolvanen as the project lead. The original Midwinter was created by Avalon Larp Studios and played in the U.K. in 2020, led by Martine Svanevik. Revisited was mainly created as a Finnish international production, expanded to twice the size of the original with new, redesigned and broadened content.

Midwinter Revisited is set in Santa’s Workshop. The characters are elves and Christmas is just around the corner, with everyone making sure the last gifts are produced so children everywhere will be happy and full of joy. The elves love their work and throw themselves at their long shifts with jolliness in their hearts.

Or put another way, the Workshop is a sweatshop where a workforce of elves is forced to endure long hours of tedious work while having to pretend they’re happy. Smiling is mandatory and those who are insufficiently jolly will be punished. Santa Claus isn’t really present in the daily lives of the elves and the Workshop is instead run by the Krampus.

The character I played was a part of this somewhat anomalous group in the larp’s structure. The word Krampus denoted an individual character, the principal villain of the larp. It also meant the collective group of characters working under her, of which I was part of. Finally, it acquired an emergent meaning as the physical location where we took recalcitrant elves for retraining. Officially called The Training Center, it was often also called just The Krampus.

The elves all dressed in Christmas gear: Lots of reds, browns and greens. The Krampus were dressed all in black, creating a striking visual contrast. Collectively, we were a cross between the wealthy family depicted in the TV show Succession and the staff of a torture facility.

There were severe class distinctions between the different elf families in Midwinter Revisited. They were made concrete by the living arrangements, with the physical location of the family’s domicile showing how wealthy they were. Still, for me as a Krampus character these distinctions were less visible because the design placed us above all of it.

The core themes of Midwinter Revisited were Christmas and capitalism. What is the meaning of Christmas? What does work mean under the demands of capitalist production? In the cosmology of the larp, the production of gifts created magical power which was hoarded by the Krampus and used to maintain control over the entire operation.

Sincerity

The simple genius of Midwinter Revisited lies in the way it treats Christmas with the utmost seriousness, while also leaving space to be playful. Christmas-themed movies and songs are often schmaltz or parody but this time, you as a player are really invited to consider what Christmas means for you. And not just from a political perspective, but in emotional and cultural terms as well.

What does the spirit of Christmas mean for me?

Sincerity is always difficult to pull off because it’s so close to cringe. Yet when it works, it’s very powerful. It was nice to be able to reflect on Christmas in a context that’s not saccharine, schmaltzy, or a parody, yet not without a critical edge either. What is this thing that permeates our society every year?

The way schmaltz was incorporated into Midwinter Revisited was particularly ingenious. All the tackiness of Christmas was right there, in songs, physical props, costumes and even the language we used. However, the critique of capitalism inherent in the larp’s design positioned the schmaltz for critical appraisal while also allowing us to play with it. A rare case where you manage to have your cake and eat it too.

Each of the characters belonged to a family, a work group, a club and a secret society, with the exception of the Krampus whose family was the same as the work group. This is classic larp design of course, making sure each character has a variety of social contexts.

One of the groups was dedicated to spiritual exploration of the meaning of Christmas. Every time I walked past the group and their collective gatherings, I felt a deep sense of larp envy. It looked so warm and communal! I considered joining in but felt that their play might be damaged by one more Krampus character.

The last hours of the larp were a chaotic, magical time. The revolt against the sweatshop capitalism of The Workshop Inc. had started but a new order was yet to form. Some were afraid, others freed by disorder. A crown of light seeming to represent the spirit of Christmas moved in the crowd creating a repeating scene of wonder and magic that felt surprisingly genuine. I had a moment with it too but I’d played a cynical Krampus character too long to be able to immediately shift gears convincingly. I felt sad afterwards because I wanted to explore that part of the larp’s emotional range more fully and didn’t entirely succeed.

When the signal for the last work shift of the larp sounded, most of the workers were on strike. Managers had to go down to the workshop to make toys, creating one of the most eerie sights of the entire larp. They were too few, too shocked, stooped under the harsh lights trying to keep the workshop running when the power they represented had already failed.

O Christmas Tree

Christmas is celebrated in many different countries but these celebrations are not uniform in style. What’s normal in one country is strange in the next. Midwinter Revisited was an international larp, meaning that players came from many different cultures and brought their own assumptions with them.

The variety of Christmas customs wasn’t to the detriment of the larp. Each of the three acts started with the song O Christmas Tree, the English version based on the German original, called O Tannenbaum. I felt the song worked wonderfully as an anthem for the whole larp despite the fact that it had never been part of my own Christmas tradition.

The song shares the same tune as “The Red Flag,” the U.K.’s Labour Party’s anthem, which will become relevant later.

The concept of jollity was central to a lot of the larp’s rhetoric. The elves were constantly exhorted to be jolly, to be happy and enjoy their work. This was a key part of the larp’s critique of modern capitalism. It wasn’t enough that you had to work. You had to enjoy it, and if someone didn’t seem to be jolly enough, that was reason to punish them. There was a department called Jollity Assurance tasked with ensuring requisite levels of jollity at all times.

I can make the connection between jollity and Christmas in the context of Anglo-American Christmas culture but not really in my own. Finnish Christmas traditions have a somber quality, meaning that in the context of our Christmas you can be happy or sad.

One of our most famous sad Christmas songs is called “Varpunen jouluaamuna,” which tells of a little bird flying, hungrily looking for food in the frozen snow fields of the Christmas morning. A little girl gives the bird a seed, only to discover that the bird is her dead brother.

Adapting to the larp’s version of Christmas wasn’t as simple as adapting to the Anglo-American version of the holiday because it had more cultural depth and variety than that. It felt like we as players from different countries were looking for a Christmas shared across our particular cultural boundaries.

The larp’s soundtrack came with an interesting twist. It wasn’t limited to English language Christmas songs but also included a Finnish song and other non-Anglo ones. When I first heard a Finnish Christmas song on the soundtrack, I experienced a moment of cultural confusion, like I was shifting from one Christmas paradigm to another.

This wasn’t to the detriment of the larp at all. Rather, I experienced it as a moment of reflection on what the larp meant for me. What did it mean to navigate the different conventions of my own culture and that of Anglo-American cultural imperialism? What did that mean in the specific context of Christmas, with tram stops all over Helsinki decorated with ads celebrating Coca-Cola Christmas?

The Torture Queue

Oppression play has a long history in Nordic larp. Systems of oppression create action and emotion, making for powerful and dynamic larp. If you’ve ever organized a larp with a significant element of oppression you’ve probably found out that it’s hard work. People don’t oppress themselves! You have to put in the work to really make an oppressive system run.

One facet of this is when you create a system where a police force (The Reindeer Guard in this larp) arrest people and drag them to a punishment center. This can be a torture chamber, a prison, an interrogation or what have you, depending on the larp.

Running one of these centers in a larp is an art unto its own. There are many difficulties to consider. Experienced Nordic larpers often regard being interrogated or tortured as interesting larp content. Many steer their play purposefully towards it. In some larps, this has resulted in what is colloquially known as the “torture queue”. Because torture capacity is limited, characters and players have to wait before they can be tortured.

This is just simple logistics. If there are two torturers and a single torture scene lasts for an hour, this means that the larp can only accommodate torture scenes for two players every hour. If the larp has 100 players, this creates a significant bottleneck. Some players will miss out on the torture.

To resolve this issue, Midwinter Revisited’s design gave us in the Krampus our own space, the Training Center, a big classroom-like area with chairs and desks as well as a raised platform where we had our own luxurious Christmas tree, piles of presents and a table full of interesting knickknacks. The idea was that the Krampus characters were the only ones to be able to enjoy a luxurious family Christmas, and the elves being re-educated had to watch.

The point of the classroom setting was to do big oppression scenes, where one Krampus player could handle as many as six or even ten characters simultaneously. This way, the torture queue would not happen because scenes could roll all continuously, for as many characters as needed.

In practice, it didn’t really work out like this. For much of the larp, the Training Center wasn’t training anyone. We had the opposite problem from the torture queue: Often it was difficult to get people to come in at all.

I figured there were a few different reasons why this was. There were a lot of first time players at the larp and maybe it wasn’t obvious to them that playing oppression scenes is fun. That’s more of an experienced Nordic larper thing. Some players and characters may have tried to avoid getting tortured, as amazing as that sounds.

Some may have wanted an intimate one-on-one torture scene, and when that wasn’t in the cards, lost interest.

It was very difficult for us in the Krampus to draw victims in. The process involved tasking the Reindeer Guard with arresting individual elves and bringing them to us. Because we wanted to make larger scenes of oppression, the arrest lists we drew up often had five or six names.

The problems this situation created were many. Because the Krampus was somewhat separate from the rest of the larp, we often simply didn’t know what was happening. Because of this, it was often difficult to know who needed to be arrested.

It was very difficult for the Reindeer Guard to arrest multiple characters quickly. I’ve seen this issue in other larps as well. Going around the larp with a list of names and trying to find the right people takes time and often fails entirely due to larp chaos. Thus, I ended up giving the Reindeer Guard tasks that were either very difficult or actually impossible for them to fulfill.

The logistical problems of oppression play are absolutely not unique to Midwinter Revisited and many great scenes were played. The structural idea of scaling up the machinery of oppression was a good one.

Red Christmas

In the larp’s third and final act, it was clear the revolution was upon us. The question was which way would it go. Will the old status quo be restored, will a paternal figure like Santa Claus (or a maternal figure like the Krampus) emerge or will the revolution lead to a workers’ paradise?

For my character, this was rather anxiety-inducing as I was part of the machinery of oppression. My character was a medical doctor of sorts and I spent much of the larp dispensing and withholding Jollity Pills, an all-purpose drug that could be amphetamines, antibiotics or a miracle cure. As a medical torturer, at first glance it didn’t look like I’d fare very well under the new worker-led regime.

I had a scene with another Krampus character where we talked about our worries for the future and the line we held onto was this one: “No matter who ends up in power, they’ll always need people like us.” Of course, the fiction of the larp ends when the larp ends, so the future of our characters remains unknowable, as it should be.

Midwinter Revisited had a mechanism where players could mark which Christmas ideology their character subscribed to at the end. White for a corporate option where Christmas is controlled by a company or a foundation run by the elves. Green for a religious or royalist wish to see a figure like Santa Claus or the Krampus returned to the top. Red for a Christmas not controlled by any one entity, but instead owned collectively.

White would have been the obvious choice for me but I decided late in the larp that I needed a bit of character development to keep things interesting. I felt that my character was a born lackey so in a situation where the old order was crumbling, the green option was the most promising one. It still suggested that there would be power to serve.

The way it would work was that the central visual motif of the larp, the grand Christmas tree, would be lit one of the three colors, depending on which way the larp went. The moment when the song O Christmas Tree played, only to suddenly switch to The Red Flag as the tree was bathed in red light was very powerful. The musical switch was rather elegant because the songs shared the same tune. And of course, the red Christmas was familiar to me from my childhood already.

As a player, it was the ending I wished for, despite my character’s royalist hopes. A Christmas we can all believe in!

Credits

Midwinter Revisited is a redesigned and extended edition of the larp Midwinter, originally run by by Avalon Larp Studio in Birmingham, UK, in January 2020. The original design was envisioned and directed by Martine Svanevik.

Midwinter Revisited is an independent piece based on the original work.

The Workshop, Inc. Helsinki Division

Production and design lead, sound design: Anni Tolvanen

Narrative and character design: Simon Brind

Narrative and runtime design: Johana Koljonen

Character design, production coordination: Irrette Melakoski

Scenography: Katie Ballinger, Mikko Asunta, Tina Aspiala

Lighting: Eleanor Saitta

Kitchen: Paula Susitaival, Kristiina Prauda

Player support: Juha Hurme

Photography: Tuomas Puikkonen

Writing and runtime facilitation: Kol Ford, William Hagstedt, Char Holdway, Torgrim Husvik, Jamie MacDonald, Maria Pettersson, Rebel Rehbinder, Jørn Slemdal, Kaya Toft Thejls

Cover photo: Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. Photo has been cropped.

Published on

2022-11-03

in

Documentation

Healing

Written by

Wanja Neite

Your pulse is racing. Your hands are shaking. This is your last chance:

HEALING

The most glamorous entertainment show in the world.

For some it’s a new beginning. For some it’s the end.

Image of a black hallway with shapes on the wall leading to a glowing door

Make yourself at home. Just be yourself! We, Falcon Eye, will be watching every step you take.

Image of a device

That was exciting! That was moving! That was magical! Those are real emotions!

Once more it is time for the part of the show we all adore the most: the scoring round! We love scores. You and I, all of us – we live for the scores!

Image of empty beds on the ground

Rags to rags? Not in The Nation. Let’s have some fun fun fun and get you back in shape.

We have seen you give your all. But you can do better, sm_741.

Your scores are consistent. …consistently worse. That’s -30 points in resilience. And -40 in sociability and responsibility. Not long and you will end up in the Farewell.

The Larp

A bunker in an undefined future called Healing Facility-A13 is the place-to-be / last resort for beings who fell out of the middle of society by having a too low LIS-Score (Social Score). As longtime clients in a game show called Healing destiny now is in their own hands, again. Can they impress the “The Tribunal” (online players playing in a specially designed 2D world interconnected with audio and video in real time with the bunker) to lift their LIS-Score and go back in the heart of “The Nation” (society) or do they finally have to go to “Farewell”…

Creation

Summer 2021. An international team of role-players, performers, scenographers, activists, hackers, and creative coders tries to create a larp about a technocratic fascist world inside a bunker. Outside a not-so-fictional but appallingly similar world is waiting: Schweinfurt in Bavaria, Germany. The city is flooded with bored cops and their civil minions. So the team from the network denialofservice.fail holes up even deeper to the bunker to create a unique hybrid game.

Healing was played online and offline at the same time. Beings from all over the world played online with beings located in a World War II era bunker in Germany. The larp was played six times, open to the public, took 10 hours of your time and was designed for beings without any larp experience, with accessibility in mind and ran solely on open source software.

More Information

Check out denialofservice.fail or visit healing.dos.fail on the net to get more information about what happened to the clients in Healing Facility A13.

QR code — All photos © Simon Salem Müller VG Bild-Kunst Bonn denialofservice.fail

Cover photo: All photos by Simon Salem Müller VG Bild-Kunst Bonn / denialofservice.fail. Cover photo has been cropped.

This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

Neite, Wanja. 2022. “Healing.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 124-128. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

Published on

2022-10-31

in

Documentation

The Chinese Hotpot of Larp

Written by

Shuo Xiong

After the explosive growth of the last five years, China now has the biggest larp business in the world.

The emergence of pervasive games in China, the largest game market all over the world, was very fast and drastic. The most popular examples, escape rooms (ERs), and murder mystery games (MMG) called jubensha (剧本杀, script murder) quickly conquered China’s urban youth.

The Short History of Chinese Murder Mysteries

Chinese crime genres like gong’an have entertained their readers with horror, suspense, and mystery solving for a long time and created the conditions for murder mystery games in China. Some sources say that deductive games like Werewolf were already part of the Chinese underground gamer scene when escape rooms entered China around 2012.

Then in 2013, a murder mystery boardgame named Death Wear White was imported into China, which some see as the origin of jubensha. Soon, a steady stream of original Chinese ‘script murders’ (e.g., the excellent The Magnificent Ambersons series) were produced. But they did not drawn mainstream attention until 2016, when Mango TV released a variety program named Who’s The Murderer, a South Korean reality TV import. Watching celebrities play jubensha became the coolest thing for Chinese youth.

During the pandemic of Covid-19, online jubensha applications became a popular form of social interaction and entertainment. Not restricted by time and space, it was a very convenient and efficient way to kill time and solve loneliness during quarantine periods.

Meanwhile, the booming escape room industry started to fuse jubensha with immersive spaces. During its first decade, Chinese escape rooms became more interactive and technologically enhanced, adding large-scale and high production value environments, narrative elements, player roles, and professional supporting characters to the mix, while allowing the players to influence the story and its ending. As a result, live-action jubenshas became very similar to North American and North European blockbuster larps, and an important link in the Chinese entertainment industry chain.

image of Chinese players in period clothing in a decorative setting — There’s a wide variety of commercial larp venues in China. Photo by Shuo Xiong.

Jubensha 101

Online and offline jubenshas have a very similar process. You can buy tabletop murder mystery games to play at home.

Most of the scripts are about a murder, but other genres like espionage, survival, and rom-com are slowly gaining ground. The players choose (or are assigned) a character with a detailed background. The studios and the app’s AR features usually provide authentic costumes. A Game Master facilitates the experience.

A jubensha usually involves three player roles: suspects, detectives and real murderers, with possible accomplices. Some complex scripts even have a mastermind behind the plot.

➔ Innocent suspects need to clear themselves and complete their own side quests;

➔ Detectives must investigate the case and find the murderer;

➔ Murderers must find a scapegoat and plant suspicion to escape the detectives.

The game usually contains two rounds of detecting. Players can search the crime scenes looking for hidden clues, then exchange information and discuss the mystery during a roundtable meeting. Finally, they vote on who is the murderer and conclude the game.

	2016	2019	2021
Number of studios	2000+	12000+	30000+
Industry	?	1.5+ billion USD	2.5+ billion USD

The jubensha industry supports 2000+ script writers.

Image of players in the dark around a table lit by electric candles — Atmospheric candles. Photo by Jingyu.

Advanced Form

A quite complex, larp-like jubensha that Ruoyu Wen experienced in Wuhan was themed after Dying Light, a famous video game about post-apocalyptic survival. The game site was set into a two-storey mini town, where every player character had different main storyline missions.

During “daytime,” players could walk around the town and get quests from supporting characters who would give water and food in return. These resources were recorded on smartphones and without them your character would die. During “nighttime,” players had to hide in houses to avoid zombies.

Just like in other open-world games, the players could chat freely and interact with each other and the NPCs. The immersive environment (uniforms, sound effect, supporting character actors, and scenery) made it a high-fidelity game experience.

From “Acquaintance” to “Stranger Entertainment”

On the surface, jubenshas are task-oriented. Solving the case is the core experience of the game. However, many play murder mystery games for social purposes.

Socialization in China was traditionally limited to acquaintances. Stranger socialization also relied on mutual acquaintances. However, social attitudes are changing among China’s youth. Anonymous social apps like TanTan (Chinese Tinder) made online stranger socialization more acceptable, and this had a profound effect on pervasive games.

Ten years ago, people only played escape rooms with their friends. They had to invite 6-8 of them to play. It was an obstacle. Today, apps and organizers bring together prospective players who don’t know each other. Pervasive games are an efficient and unembarrassing way for young people to meet, socialize and find common topics. The temporary set of social relationships and the dark and scary atmosphere helps to create trust between strangers, meanwhile the alibi provided by playing a character allows for safe ways to experiment with your behavior.

A Recipe

Immerse the following ingredients in a simmering pot of Chinese culture for a few years:

➔ Gong’an (or other Chinese crime genres)

➔ Death Wears White (or other murder mystery boardgames)

➔ Period dramas

➔ Werewolf (or other social deduction games)

➔ Escape rooms

➔ Hanfu fashion

➔ TV reality shows

➔ Role-playing

Image of Chinese players in period costumes — There’s a wide variety of commercial larp venues in China. Photo by Shuo Xiong.

Larp In China

➔ Xiong’s previous survey of 292 players showed a balanced gender ratio and 83.3% of Bachelor’s degrees or above.

➔ The quality of scripts on the market is quite uneven, and intellectual property rights are often ignored.

➔ Some designers theorize that the majority of players still prefer simple murder mystery games and escape rooms to complex jubenshas because most people feel safe knowing that there is an answer and a disclosure. Freeform roleplaying is too social and too uncertain.

➔ Chinese companies started to use pervasive games not just for teambuilding, but for HR assessment and leadership development purposes.

➔ In 2022, state regulations on content of scripts appeared.

➔ Ruoyu predicts a renewed interest in pervasive games when AR/VR technologies and metaverses reach the next technological level.

Image of players around a table raising cups toward a skeleton prop on the wall — Toasting the dead. Photo by Jingyu.

Cover photo: The cast of a Chinese larp. Photo by Shuo Xiong. Image has been cropped.

This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

Xiong Shuo, Wen Ruoyu, and Mátyás Hartyándi. 2022. “The Chinese Hotpot of Larp.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 86-89. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

Category: Documentation

Physical and Spiritual Subjugation

Circles of Trust and Betrayal

Circles of Safety and Calibration

Epic Dyadic Play as a Genre

Acknowledgements

Helicon

References

What was Odysseus?

Pre-game

The game

The finale

Post game

Analysis

What did Odysseus mean to me?

Final thoughts

Odysseus 2019

References

Is Love Really Blind?

Emotional Extreme Sports and Consent

Romantic Play and Personal Development

The Four C’s: Context, Consent, Communication, and Chemistry

Listen 2 Your Heart: Salem Edition

A Successful Experiment

References

References

Horror Stories

Noises in the Dark

Who Is Remembered

Living Words

Gothic

The Training Center

Sincerity

O Christmas Tree

The Torture Queue

Red Christmas

Credits

The Workshop, Inc. Helsinki Division

The Larp

Creation

More Information

The Short History of Chinese Murder Mysteries

Jubensha 101

Advanced Form

From “Acquaintance” to “Stranger Entertainment”

Larp In China