Category: Knutpunkt 2018

Articles written as companion pieces to the larp conference Knutpunkt 2018.

The following tracks are represented in the articles:

Hearts – Designer and organiser reflections
Diamonds – Tools, tips and tricks for larp designers and organizers
Clubs – Tools, tips and tricks for players
Spades – Larp analysis, discussion and reflection
Joker – Discussions and reflections on the larp community

Published on

2018-02-13

in

Diamonds

Larp as Life

Written by
Yaraslau I. Kot
I have been a larper for over 20 years. Yet before I discovered the international larp community, I had no clue such experience was in demand. Thanks to that fateful meeting, people encouraged me to go farther with larp. I forever will be thankful to the team of edu center POST for opening those doors for me.

Now, as an internationally known larp scholar and the owner of a larp company, I would like to share some further encouragement. How larp can become part of your life without distracting from it.

Larp’s future looks brighter than ever. As larpers, we often do not want to stop larping. Many of us feel that, as larp adepts, we should “spread the gospel” and with that, hopefully, make everyone’s life better, easier, and more fun. A fascinating number of amazing projects and new forms of larp have blossomed throughout the world as a result. And larp as a business as well.

Having my own share of endeavors in this area, I considered that some of this accumulated experience could actually be of use to few other curious larp practitioners.((Most of this essay is based on lectures: “Faces of Larp” read at Palac Krobielowice in Poland on the 2nd of September at the Larp Design Conference 2016 and “Going Pro in Larp: how and where we can use it” read on Gniales 2016 “Passerelles” on the 30th of October that year in Paris.)) In Belarus, I own a larp company that has many ongoing projects. As a dedicated larper since 1996, it was only a dozen years ago when moral encouragement from J. Tuomas Harvianien prompted me to shove larp into every corner of my life. In time, I began to earn some money with it.

Here are some bits of lore I have accumulated as a professional larpwright and organizer.

Ethics

Going from being a regular larper to a professional larper, I had to change my approach toward larp design. In some larp cultures, these are normal everyday principles, but moving from larping with friends to larping with clientele reminds one of some basics. Our workers, the NPCs, need to know them too.

Respect: First and foremost, the cornerstone: respect. One should respect the clients and treat all accordingly. Lack of it demonstrates a lack of professionalism as much as disrespectful communication does.

Obligation and Responsibility: These two words should become part of your core. They should not be feared or avoided. They should be embraced and worked with. No one should go pro without as from now on you have obligation before you clientele and responsible for than at your event.

Pro-Growth: Never stop learning. Much of what we call “larp” actually borders many practical disciplines. Learning more about them is essential to evolve and get better. The world’s specialists in all fields never stop growing and changing –– why should larpers?

Distance: Keep a professional distance from your clients, the players. This is informed by many generations of professionals and their own introspection about their mistakes. It is important to present a clear message about the nature of your relations with others on a specific project in order to avoid misunderstandings in the future and frustration on all sides. All should be clear and explicit.

Subculture

In most cases, your own larp subculture should never be considered your primary or only market. The larp subculture is our family, where we were born and nurtured as future larp professionals, and we should treat it accordingly. In having business relationships with larpers, you should already be at a somewhat higher niveau in your work in a way that they cannot immediately compete with you. To put it simply: to transcend the subculture and go professional, you should already act as a professional out of the gate and be a tough pro larp organizer with which to compete. Larp society can form one source of income, but shouldn’t be the only one.

Here are some categories related to the subculture and pro larp profits.

Larpers

Larpers are the source of most of your value: specialists, partners, laborers, NPCs. Yet my own experience and those of other organizers from around the world tell me that larpers are very difficult to work with on a professional level.

Events

Any larper will gladly pay for high-quality events such as festivals, conventions, balls, tournaments, competitions, larps, etc. Such events are always in demand and may attract quite a crowd if appropriately packaged.

Products and Services

Owning a larp company, you might have your own products you could sell or rent such as crafts, costumes, scripts, scenography and other things. Your larp company might even gather specialists who would want to offer services to larpers and larp designers: classes in fencing, kung fu, dancing, acting, costume making and other fields, for example. One can make objects, costumes, and other artwork that then could be packaged and sold.

Entertainment

The most popular area where larpers are starting to go pro is the entertainment industry. Yet it is very different from doing larps for fellow larpers. Once you get the hang of it, there are different types of income with different approaches and demands in this industry.

Corporate

You are invited to sell your larp project to a company as entertainment. Well done, if that is the case! If you attract desirable clientele and do well, it might just get better and better from there. But if you do not do well, it might have consequences difficult to recover from. So before going this route, ask yourself if your larp company is mature enough to play in that league.

Regular

This means the regular events which you promote and to which you sell tickets. The principle is comparable to concerts in clubs or movie theaters. You need to find, groom, and manage your customer. The good thing is that it often can form a form of subculture community which, if you “feed the flames”, will guarantee you will not go out of demand.

Popular

If you become known and form good connections, you might get invited to a festival, convention, birthday party, concert or some other event where you will be one of the many activities. It also may be something you haven’t done before, so you will have to think of how to format your larp in a way that makes it quick and easy to get into. Such events are not only good for advertising and promoting your company, but, with a proper approach, could also be a good source of income.

Elite

In this category, I consider irregular events for which you prepare a long time. It could be a big larp, festival, convention and your main efforts are focused on maintaining a high quality to make your mark.

Education

From my perspective, education is the noblest area for larp. It is also the most demanding, and the sphere in which larp has been used for the longest time and has thus the most theory behind it. Working in edu-larp is not profitable, but it does grant us the tentative understanding of many powers and effects of larp.

Clientele

There are three systems I had to develop to describe difference in approaches required for specific larp projects. One system means dividing up the audience by target group, while the others are the target clientele and target educational goals.

While designing a larp, it is important to keep in mind who is this larp for:

Children

Larp business for children is one of the most high-demand areas and good for the professional growth of the larp company. But if you think dealing with children is an easy feat, think again. Cuddly, smiling, fun kids are also the most legally protected group in any country. If you cause any kind of harm to any of them, their legal guardians may eat you alive. All the more if you, for some reason, decide that documentation of procedures are unnecessary, safety measures are for “softies” and amateurs, and the quality of the larp may vary. Here, we need to understand that we are responsible for every single effect on children our larp has experienced as a result of the larp –– not only legally responsible, but as a decent human being. And if you are not willing to accept that level of responsibility –– both good and bad –– then perhaps the professional larp and edu-larp industry are not for you. Stay in your comfort zone, larping for and with friends.

Teenagers

In many legal respects, teenagers are similar to children. But on a larp level, one can do more complicated plots, expect higher quality from the larp, and go to more interesting property. With older teenagers, one can go further and deeper with storylines and communication, among other things.

College Students

Educational larp for students should have definite and specific goals they can “grasp” by the end. Such games can be more complex, challenging, and informative. But one also has to make lengthier and more thorough workshops and debriefs, as much of the lesson depends on those working well. Often such larps emphasize knowledge already acquired during lectures or through homework.

Adult

Adult educational larps I usually use when working with clientele such as parents of kids in school, seniors in business schools and during some business projects.

Special

Larps can also be made for people with special needs as the target audience. These larps pay the least perhaps, but yield the most moral satisfaction.

Among the target clientele inviting our company to do larp projects, the approaches differ among them.

Educational System

By this, I mean the educational establishment, part of institutionalized public educational system. In some countries, everything incorporated into the curriculum could be regulated by norms and rules of many sorts. It is best to have an official representative of the institution look through one’s larp plans to avoid undesirable misunderstandings.

Private Educational: Some education takes place outside of the establishment. Here, one has more freedom and it is less regulated.

Business Educational: What I mean by “business educational” is reminding oneself of the fact that, for business-oriented clients, a certain degree of slick packaging is preferable.

All larps, whether the organizers comprehend it or not, have many dimensions of personal development. For my own convenience, I have divided these into three emphasis areas:
- Moral: The social and moral education of values and psychological pursuits of self-consciousness and self-awareness is a sphere of development.
- Intellectual: Information and knowledge and mental skills can also be developed.
- Physical: Athletic and action learning are also potentially developed.
Psychology

As a practicing psychologist, I provide the following services through larp: Diagnostic, Therapy, Prevention, Correction, Development.

Corporate

Larp could be used within different companies, frequently proving effective at fulfilling company goals. Even within such serious institutions as the Investigative Committee of the Republic of Belarus, larp can be used. To acquire corporate clientele, or even work inside a company, one might want to look into following areas where I found larp very applicable: HR, Simulations, Skills, Knowledge, Athletics.

Theatre

Many useful skills for larpers and larp designers come from the infinite rich and beautiful world of theatre. Larp communities have lost so many to this world. They crossed to other side and, engulfed by the theatre world, could not cross back into larp. Many professionals one could not even imagine are found here, and they can bring your company, and perhaps the whole community, to a whole new level. Larp and theatre are different. However, theatre skills as stage fencing, acting, public speaking, playwriting, character development, actor management, stage management, deroling, etc. are there to enhance the arsenal of tools at your disposal.

Art

At some point, larp manifests the many creative impulses of all participating in it, and reaches the level of art. Admittedly, not right away. Admittedly, not with most larps. But when organizers and NPCs, like music conductors or movie directors, manage emotions and experiences in people, then it creates a certain picture and transfers experience. Many larp projects I have worked on are nowhere close to being called “art,” and I am aware the medium is still evolving. But I can vouch for the fact that going professional with one’s larp activities is the best way to get on the art track.

Research

Finally, one essential area for larp to develop is the preservation of all knowledge and theory accumulated. No other field preserves it beyond those who do larp research. Thanks to this field, I started my ascension into the professional larp world in the first place. One joins this conversation through Conferences (academic, gaming conventions, etc.), Publications (articles and periodicals mostly), and Projects (international and local research, etc.)

Thank you

and

Larp On

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

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

2018-02-12

in

Hearts

Immerton

Written by
Maury Brown

Immerton (Brown, Bowman, D, Jones, and Nativ 2017) is a four-day immersive larp held in Joshua Tree, California. The larp is designed to explore what it means to be a woman in a variety of contexts and intersectionalities, and to focus on woman’s ways of knowing, doing, being, and relating. Participation in the event is restricted to those who identify as a woman. A broad definition of woman is used, and organizers and participants welcomed and celebrated all expressions of womanhood. Twenty-three women took part in Immerton’s inaugural run in 2017.

Immerton is a place and a society entirely of women, existing outside of space and time yet with portals or connections to every world and point in time. Across history, women of all races and ethnicities, social classes, cultures, and universes experience a breakthrough and find their way to Immerton. There are no men there, and women may stay as long as they like or need. Immerton is intended to be akin to Themyscira from the Wonder Woman franchise, but with a more multi-faceted approach to womanhood than a society of warriors is. The goal of Immerton was to create a sanctuary for women players without the concerns that many women experience in spaces that include all genders. A socially conditioned behavior for most women is to perform for the male gaze (Mulvey 1975); being in the presence of men changes women’s behavior, as their concerns about their own safety and relative value move to front of their minds. Immerton is an experiment in feminist and woman-centered game design.

We were keenly aware of the issues surrounding the US run of the Nordic larp, Mad About the Boy (Edland, Raaum, Lindahl 2010), organized by Lizzie Stark in October 2012. The larp received a great deal of criticism for excluding men, and in particular for categorizing men chromosomally and the design element that annihilated all people with the Y chromosome. Immerton was deliberately designed with several key distinctions to Mad About the Boy.

First, the larp was not about being without men; it was instead about a complete society of women. This is important, because rather than being a larp about loss, about what is missing, it was a larp about the fullness of the society, of what was included: the multitude of women who chose to attend and whose characters were chosen to find Immerton. Second, we did not make a chromosomal distinction that defines men and women, thus being inclusive to women of any biological body and genetic typing. This separated gender from biological sex, and ensured we did not get into arguments (as had happened with Mad About the Boy) about the definition of woman and who could play. It also demonstrated a commitment to trans-inclusion and safe-space for genderqueer women. Giving people the opportunity to search themselves and determine if they fit an identity of woman was more liberating and accepting than an organizer-determined definition of woman. In addition, the all-woman design team included several feminist intersectionalities, which made it easier for women of many identities to feel included. Third, we openly declared that no man would be showing up in the game, which happens in Mad About the Boy. Men exist in characters’ pasts and futures, but during the larp they were off-stage, appearing only in memories, backstories, or narration.

Design and Playstyle

The concept and initial design of Immerton was created by Maury Brown, and expanded and brought to life by an all-woman team of organizers and designers. The team included Sarah Lynne Bowman, Quinn D, and Kat Jones who were writers, designers, and runtime organizers. Orli Nativ acted as Art Director for the game, creating masks and costuming, inspiration art, collages, and scenography for the event, as well as assisting with ritual design and runtime game-mastering. Tara Clapper and Caille Jensen assisted with character writing and world building, and Jess Comstock designed a set of sigils that were used for the different vocations that defined character groups.

Immerton’s design was sandbox-style, allowing participants to make choices about actions and topics to explore. Structuring this open design were scheduled rituals that took place each evening and in the final morning, representing the forces of four goddesses. The site – a remote retreat center in the high desert of southern California – was integral to the other-worldly feel for the game, and was replete with indoor and outdoor spaces for group and private play. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his son, Lloyd, the building was made of natural desert sandstone, and players’ rooms were adjacent to one another and surrounded by a central hall, where altars to the goddesses were assembled and players gathered for meals and other activities. The site also had a labyrinth, a warm and cool swimming pool, groves of cacti, joshua trees and other native plants, and several fountainscapes and water features. The event took place during the full moon, and bonfires were lit each night.

A design centerpiece was The Goddess Chamber, a converted bedroom suite adjacent to the large main gathering room. While not a true blackbox((Black Box. Nordic Larp Wiki. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Black_Box)) chamber as it contained furniture, The Goddess Chamber was a meta room((Meta Room. Nordic Larp Wiki. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Meta_Room)) where participants could spend time with other Immerton sisters and meet the goddesses. Players or organizers (who were also player-characters game-mastering from within the game) portrayed or “aspected”((Aspecting. https://moonlightmagick.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/a-is-for-aspecting/)) a particular goddess by donning her mask, and, at times, her robes. In the Goddess Chamber players could gegine and role-play a memory, dream, alternate choice, or future hope. They could call upon a goddess to guide, to encourage, support, chide, or convict, as needed. The design intentionally drew upon mask theory and altered consciousness as introduced by Keith Johnstone (1987) and advanced by Clayton D. Drinko (2013).

Play focused on personal journeys, relationships, and exploration of womanhood in a polytheistic goddess pantheon. The game used no numerical rules or combat mechanics, but unfolded through role-play, rituals, art and other media, and meta-techniques. The fictional world and the player community emphasized self-care and a celebration of autonomy in a Culture of Care and Trust (Brown 2016). The intention was to make Immerton a sanctuary for women both in and out of character. The game allowed players to choose their own pace of play and level of engagement, reduce feelings of FOMO((Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). (2017).Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out)) or Fear of Missing Out, and slow the frenzied feeling that many highly plot-driven larps can create. It was very possible to play a mostly internal game and have a transformative experience. That said, the larp had a central premise: Immerton had become tethered in space and time as a result of an anomaly, and players could determine the cause and whether or how it should be resolved. Some players identified with this plot element personally, with the idea of being “stuck” or unable to move forward resonating strongly with them. Participants’ collaborative solution involved returning a cast-out Trickster goddess to the pantheon and creating rituals to heal Immerton. Those elements, of being trapped and being cast away, combined with a reclamation of play and child-like qualities that are too-often left behind in adult womanhood, led to a lot of bleed and personal processing of emotions by participants (Jones 2017).

Characters and Bleed

The design team encouraged participants to portray characters that shared personality traits or portions of backstory with themselves. We deliberately wanted to make the alibi of character((Alibi. Nordic Larp Wiki. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Alibi)) thin, so that participants could explore shadow or repressed aspects of their lives or selves in the safety of the community and role-play. In this way, the game was designed to deliberately chase bleed (Bowman 2015) that would be empowering and revelatory for participants. The character creation team, led by Quinn and consisting of Sarah, Kat, Tara, and Caille, asked participants to complete a casting questionnaire that sought to inspire careful reflection on one’s own past, fears, blockages, hopes, and desires. Each participant had a primary character writer who discussed the character questionnaire with the participant, and together they created the character for Immerton. For example, one player wanted to explore her anger stemming from several recent events in her life. She and her character writer created a lone survivor from a planet that had recently been annihilated, with no home to return to outside of Immerton. The character’s defining trait was rage at this personal and societal destruction, which allowed the player to explore the emotion without reliving details of her own trauma.

Each character was connected to three others, a Pillar to provide support, a Crowbar to push for change, and another character-specific relationship. The Pillar and Crowbar design element was inspired by Simon Svensson’s Essence/Nihil relationship mechanic, which was also adapted as the Hope/Despair connections in The Quota by Simon Brind, Charlotte Ashby, Helly Dabill, Martine Svanevik, and Rob Williams (2018).

Items depicting or representing Innara, goddess of creation. Photo by Sarah Bowman.

Mythology and World-Building

Immerton exists in its own mythos, created by Maury Brown with the goddesses expanded by Sarah Lynne Bowman. This choice was made to avoid cultural and religious appropriation and to ensure the goddesses encompassed a multitude of bodies and identities. We were also seeking to move beyond the tropes of woman as defined by their physical beauty and body, and particularly by their reproductive cycles. Not all women have children, and not all women have wombs or vaginas. We chose to move away from the maiden, mother, crone archetypes and instead were inspired by Lasara Firefox Allen’s book, Jailbreaking the Goddess. Women in Immerton may be in the Child/Daughter, Siren, Amma, or Sage stages, which are not about reproduction but about states of mind or wisdom. They are also non-linear, as one can channel or return to any stage at any time.

The goddesses were created as a synthesis of many mythologies and share some traits of eastern, western, indigenous, and pagan cosmologies. The four goddesses are of four forces: creation, destruction, reclamation, and fortification, which are Innara, Ellishara, Tohtma, and Rahdira respectively. They represent four ways of experiencing the world and forces to invoke when confronted with challenges and opportunities. Each goddess is associated with a season, direction, element, gems, scents, colors, shadow and light aspects, rituals, and tarot suits. Thus, these new goddesses became connected to and evocative of goddesses from other traditions. Ellishara, for instance, has elements of Sekhmet, Kali, Durga, or Hel, but is her own entity. Every character has a primary Devotion, a particular goddess they are most drawn to, but they could also invoke or worship another goddess. One’s primary Devotion may also change throughout one’s life, and some players used a devotional change as a narrative arc for their character.

Vocations were created in order to break up what is often “woman’s work” and combine callings in interesting ways. Players could choose Warrior, Shaman, Seer, Mender, Tender, Keeper, or Vigilant as a primary vocation. These vocations categorized similar skills or impulses. For example, menders included welders, tailors, and healers, while Keepers include librarians, teachers, historians, or builders. Each Vocation was an impulse or a calling to leave a mark in a particular way, a diverse gathering of women who are driven by similar goals and ways of interacting in the world. The design goal was to break down stereotypes and tropes that can pigeonhole women and femininity by instead exploring a multitude of expressions and intersectionalities.

Multimedia Experiential Design

Immerton’s design engaged participants in individual and group-based physical and artistic activities. These included art, mask-making, journaling, hiking, meditation, swimming, dancing, kata practice, and cooking. These were used both as parts of everyday life in Immerton, but also as ways to explore characters and their relationships through more than verbal role-play. The various activities were opt-in and typically framed as “offerings” that a devotee shared with other acolytes. Participants also tattooed each other with the sigil of their vocation, braided each other’s hair, and traded massages as part of group bonding and reciprocal care.

Of course, larp has featured these activities since the beginning, but often they are ancillary or incidental activities rather than a central focus of the experience. For example, a tailor at a medieval larp might sew to heighten immersion. Such behavior isn’t typically about making clothes, but about appearing to be a tailor. The story at Immerton was told not only through words and actions, but also through artifacts created by participants. Each participant made a mask that they used in at least one ceremony, and participants collectively wrote a scroll that documented their experience. Some participants also wrote poems or journal entries, drew, painted, or created food together. Other artifacts were ephemeral, such as food, ritually made and shared together. Fire and water were used as physical transmutational elements in multiple rituals.

One participant noted that the art and artifact elements of Immerton, “emphasized creative and nurturing elements as central to play,” while another stated that they felt these design aspects “gave places for people to engage in valuable, alternative ways with themselves, each other, and their characters.” The boundary between player and character grew thin during these immersive activities (Bowman 2017), and occasionally off-game conversations between participants creeped in. These were valuable to community building and were intense moments for some participants in their own right, but were off-putting for others who wanted stronger immersion into character (Bowman 2017; Lukka 2014). One player stated, “This game was not about simple character immersion – it was about creating spaces to reflect, be introspective, and to examine myself and my issues through the lens of my character. The multimedia aspects gave me different tools and experiences that very much enhanced the experience.”

An acolyte contributes to the scroll, rewriting Immerton history. Photo by Sarah Bowman.

Woman-Only Space

Being in an all-woman space was profound for participants and organizers alike. Although the game was not explicitly about gender identity, many of us live and adjust to a society that treats people whom they label as “men” and “women” differently, with different expectations and burdens. Participants noted that the space of Immerton, since it was specifically all woman-identified, relieved participants of those expectations, or at least made them less important and influential. One participant said: “The space lightened a load I didn’t realize was so heavy; it was freeing, and it was safe. I think it is important to note that I know many wonderful people who are not women in life that I trust, that I feel free around; this isn’t about not-women being unsafe, it’s about the interplay between who is present, and the influence of society’s gender system on all of the participants. It’s about a pervasive system which has so much influence in our lives, and taking a time and a space to try to remove parts of it and see how that feels and develops. And it was powerfully different.”

Another participant said, “I usually play with wonderful men who are good at giving space to others and are sensitive to their privilege. But, there were conversations that I think just wouldn’t have happened in other spaces. Women were openly talking about their experiences with patriarchy, relationships, menopause, childrearing, trans issues, etc. in ways that I think were afforded by the female-only space. We could discuss these issues both in- and out-of-character and it felt like a supportive and understanding atmosphere, even when women had very different views on these things.” A third participant said, “having a community of women made the space feel much safer for some of the personal exploration that I did during the game,” including “the commonalities and differences in women’s experiences, opinions, etc.”

Participants ranged in age from 24 to 55 and showcased various expressions of womanhood and an appreciation for their beauty and diversity. They portrayed characters from across cultures and time periods, some of whom, such as Cleopatra and Emma Goldman, were women from history. One participant reflected, “There was freedom there to exist in whatever state you’re in, and a lot of support all around from fellow ‘sisters’ in a shockingly swift-developing community. It wasn’t an environment I can recall being in before, at least not for an extended duration, and I didn’t entirely recognize going in how powerful this would be.” Some participants discussed how their posture changed, how they stopped worrying as much about their personal appearance and body, how they felt they could go without a bra or other shapewear, how they felt they could sit and take up space in ways where they didn’t have to be conscious of whether they were conforming to “proper” or “ladylike” decorum.

The woman-only community was not without its conflicts. Women disagreed with each other in- and out-of-character, and personalities clashed over sharing space, language, tone, and actions. Since players participants played close-to-home (Piironen and Thurøe 2014), the alibi between player and character was sometimes very thin, and it was difficult to know whether a character or a player was upset — or both. However, one participant noted, “while power dynamics and differentials were unavoidable, it did not have the same character as when men are involved (for instance I never worried that conflicts would result in violence). I was constantly impressed at how we were able to work through or around these conflicts in a way that helped preserve the community.” Some of this was done in-character, other times through group out-of-character calibrations, and other times through one-one in/off-game consultations with organizers.

Immerton began as, and continues to be, an experiment. We will run a 4-hour exploratory version at several conventions in 2018, using The Goddess Chamber as the central portion of the experience and include an initiation and a closing ritual. Since conventions disallow single-gender games, these runs will be open to all gender identities, as long as players are willing to respectfully engage with the material and with the expectation that they will portray a woman. We are committed to keeping the destination experience for women only, believing that the all-woman space over the duration of the longer event creates many benefits for players. Immerton’s deliberate choice to remove men from the experience allows it to focus on being a woman in a community of women, and by creating a thin boundary between character and player, it provides a chance to explore the self. Immerton represents an uncommon or even unique opportunity for a woman-only larp space and community, one that has its heart in feminist design focusing on choice, collaboration, non-hierarchical spaces and relationships, empowerment, and communication. One of the takeaways was the power of the mask and of speaking as a divine force, speaking truth with force and authority. That central core of aspecting a Goddess will be brought into the convention larp version. Immerton will be re-run in 2018, and we will continue to tweak the design to allow for even better relationship play and exploration of the intersectionalities of woman.

References

Allen, Lasara Firefox. (2016). Jailbreaking the Goddess: A Radical Revisioning of Feminist Spirituality. Llewellyn Publications

Bowman, Sarah Lynne. (March 2, 2015). Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character. Nordiclarp.org. https://nordiclarp.org/2015/03/02/bleed-the-spillover-between-player-and-character/

Bowman, Sarah Lynne. (March 8, 2017). Immersion into Larp: Theories of Embodied Narrative Experience. First Person Scholar. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/immersion-into-larp/

Brind, Simon; Ashby, Charlotte; Dabill, Helly; Svanevik, Martine; and Rob Williams. (2017). The Quota Design Document. https://www.quota.cymru/

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

Brown, Maury; Bowman, Sarah Lynne; Jones, Kat; D, Quinn; and Orli Nativ. (2017). Immerton. Learn Larp LLC. www.immerton.com. Run: 2017, Joshua Tree, CA.

Drinko, Clayton D. (2013). Keith Johnstone: Spontaneity, Storytelling, Status, and Masks, Trance, Altered States. Theatrical Improvisation, Consciousness, and Cognition. Palgrave Pivot, New York. pp. 64-91.

Edland, Tor Kjetil, Raaum, Margrete and Trine Lise Lindahl. Mad About the Boy. 2010. Run: Connecticut, 2012.

Johnstone, Keith. (1987). Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. Routledge.

Jones, Kanane. (October 28, 2017). Immerton: A Fire in the Desert. https://nordiclarp.org/2017/10/28/immerton-fire-desert/

Koljonen, Johanna. (September, 2016). “Toolkit: the OK Check-In.” Participation Safety Blog. https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/toolkit-the-ok-check-in/

Koljonen, Johanna. (September, 2016). “Toolkit: The ‘See No Evil’ or Lookdown.” Participation Safety Blog. https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/toolkit-the-see-no-evil-or-lookdown/

Lukka, Lauri. (2014). The Psychology of Immersion: Individual Differences and Psychosocial Phenomena Relating to Immersion. The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp. Edited by Jon Back.

Mulvey, Laura. (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen.

Piironen, Helene Willer and Kristoffer Thurøe. (2014). An Introduction to the Nordic Player Culture. The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp. Edited by Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen and Jon Back.

Stark, Lizzie. (2012). Mad About the Techniques: Stealing Nordic methods for larp design. Wyrd Con Companion Book, Aaron Vanek & Sarah Lynne Bowman, ed. http://www.sarahlynnebowman.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/wyrdconcompanionbook2012.pdf

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

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

Cover photo: Devotees meet with the goddess of destruction, Ellishara, in the Goddess Chamber. Photo by Sarah Bowman.
Published on

2018-02-07

in

Joker

More Than a Seat at the Feasting Table

Written by
Jonaya Kemper

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

Mostly importantly though, “Where can you larp?”

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

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

There Were no Wardrobes for Children Like Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How We Can All Eat at the Feasting Table

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

Blackface is not a Homage

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

No.

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

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

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

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

Stop Asking for Free Labor and Start Encouraging Designers of Color

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

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

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

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

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

Truly Understand Oppression Play

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

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

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

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

Write for Your Own Communities

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

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

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

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

We are Not a Monolith

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

Listen

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

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

When People of Color Come to the Table We All Benefit

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover photo: Collage of larp character portraits, assembled by Jonaya Kemper.
Published on

2018-02-06

in

Diamonds

Scripted Larps and a Neo-Noir Experience

Written by
Daniel P. Espinosa

When designing Devil in our sins, I strived to create the experience of telling a profound group story through a key tool: player characters’ scripts.

It’s common in larps to prioritize players’ freedom to take decisions. However, in this larp I wanted to remove that freedom so players could enjoy being part of a film or a theater play as both protagonists and spectators. That way they could live the story’s meaning, plot, twists and emotions as imagined by the author. That way, players would become Ani Bezzerides or Rust Cohle, True Detective (Pizzolatto, Nic, 2014) TV series’ characters from season 1 and 2, and live inside them throughout all their chapters just as in the series. My intention was not only to respect the story as written but also to have players feel like both spectators and characters in a movie.

As this was a larp, I wanted my players to be able to take some decisions that would differ from the series original characters’ ones, but still maintaining the story that the script writer (Nic Pizzolatto in our True Detective example) created for them to enjoy. The satisfaction of this experience comes from players submerging in a simple yet transcendent emotion: becoming their novels and TV series heroes, as they could have wished when they started playing larps or reading books.

That’s what I humbly tried with my neo-Noir scripted chamber larp, and after three runs it seemed to result satisfactory for everyone.

Devil In Our Sins, a Neo-Noir style Scripted Larp

Devil in our sins is a neo-Noir larp about crimes and guilt. It tells the story of a serial killer that has been strangling victims for three years in Duluth, Minnesota, during long winter snow nights. But, more importantly, it tells the story of people that are trying to stop him while suffering the effects of their own pasts.

It’s a 3 hour scene-based and scripted chamber larp for 7 players, with preceding workshops about how to dramatically enact a scene and to represent physical violence (pretty much necessary for this larp). It has been run three times in Spain, always with highly emotional and positive feedback from players. Thematically, its inspiration comes from the TV series True Detective, Broadchurch (Chibnall, Chris, 2013) and Hannibal (Fuller, Bryan, 2013), and from the song and video Where the wild roses grow with Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave (1995).

Sergeant Joanne Keller (left) meets Rose (right) at her home. 2nd run. In-game photo by Daniel P. Espinosa.

But What Are Scripted Larps?

What I call here a “scripted larp” is a larp that uses a pre-defined script that must be followed by the players. It can have a more or less theatrical, TV series o filmic appearance, depending on the creator’s taste. The level of detail concerning music, staging etc. can vary, as can its length and structure, but the script should focus on a common story that is constructed through the combination of individual character stories.

The scene structure is defined by an overall script used by the organizer, who follows it to guide the scenes’ start and end and prepare the stage (furniture, lights, objects, etc.). To add, each player is provided with a character script that instructs her about the scene’s goal and her character’s own directions to follow, including suggestions on how to play them out. Devil in our sins also uses music and light in each scene to help set the mood.

In my scripted larps, only two or three characters are present in each scene. With more people present, the scene could become chaotic, so this helps to maintain focus on one conversation or one flow of events. With more people present, the scene could become chaotic. This also means that the rest of the players become an audience. The result is a theatrical experience in which the acting players are the protagonists.

Sergeant Joanne Keller with “Big Jacko” at his bar. Celebrating what shouldn’t be celebrated. 1st run. In-game photo by Daniel P. Espinosa.

The Origins: Scene-Based Larps.

But where did this interest for scripting larps come from? First, I am a professional novel writer and I love to tell deep and intense stories. This has been my obsession since I started as a larper and a tabletop RPG game master about 25 years ago. When I came to Nordic style for larping I felt that it offered me a way to express the kind of stories that standard chamber larping didn’t allow me to do. The experimental structures, the emotional approach… all of that was exciting, but there was still something missing. Then I discovered the scene-based larps, which gave me what a narrativist like myself was looking for. I was particularly inspired by the following authors.

Pablo Valcárcel was a finalist in the 2017 Berlin World of Darkness Convention with his The Other Voice at the Back of Your Head (Valcárcel, Pablo, 2017) vampire-themed larp. He introduced me to the scene-based larps, but also showed me how to masterfully mix music, colored lights and passion in their design. His larps combine emotional intensity with poetical scenes in fascinating sci-fi/fantasy/horror plots.

Nast Marrero gave me the purest view of how post-modern theater can be transformed into larp. Among other larps, he created really interesting adaptation of the Requiem for a Dream film (Aronofsky, Darren, 2000). It was run in Spain and also in 2015 at the Oslo chamber larp festival Grenselandet (Marrero, Nast, 2015). As a theater expert himself, Nast makes skillful use of several meta-technics that one could expect in a contemporary stage play.

Marina de Santiago experiments with personal stories in fantasy settings. Currently, she is heading a gigantic project based on the Nobilis tabletop RPG (Moran, Jenna K., 2002) involving dozens of people. In 2015 she ran a half-scripted larp called Ragnarok (de Santiago, Marina, 2015) full of Nordic myth, tragic stories, fated Gods and mortal Vikings in a theatrical style, and even made another run in an amphitheater. To me, her larps present a perfect mix of fantasy, tragedy and larping.

Fredrik Åkerlind’s beautiful, tough and intense jeepform scene-based larp The Journey (Åkerlind, Fredrik, 2010), inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s (2006) novel The Road, gave me the idea of player’s scripts. While this larp encourages playing each scene as chained monologues, the final intention is theatrical, as his author states in the director’s guide. The result: I loved the larp as much as I already loved the novel.

Given these influences and merged with my own authorial vision, in the latest years I’ve being experimenting with my own larps using scenes, music, lights, stage building and, finally, scripts. For example, I’ve made an Ars Magica larp, Hades (Espinosa, Daniel P., 2015), I’ve co-written a gothic horror larp with Ana López Gómez, Our most fearful shadows (López Gómez, Ana, and Espinosa, Daniel P. 2015), and I’ve written Devil in our sins.

Now, let’s delve more deeply into scripted larps.

Therapy session with Rose (left) and psychiatrist Chrysalis Swann (right). 1st run. In-game photo by Enrique Esturillo Cano.

Spectators of Their Own Story

In scene-based scripted larps, when players are not present in a scene they become spectators and observe what’s happening in places where their own characters are not. They acquire information that their characters don’t know, something that is necessary for them to enjoy and understand the story as a whole.

But what happens if the killer’s identity is revealed but no one should know? Even if players don’t use that information in their scenes, knowing it could influence their behavior. Though we cannot completely avoid that influence to alter their acting, it should have a limited effect because their scripts tell them what their characters know or don’t know, what happened before, what they can do and can talk about… Thus, due to the script’s safeguarding, players can relax and enjoy spoilers.

You may think that just watching other players to act in a scene could be boring, but after three runs, and based on the aforementioned larps, experience said it’s not. One reason is that the scenes function as a meta-technique that forces players to think differently from the very instant the larp started. Immediately they found themselves trying to give the best of themselves in their scenes, and resting and enjoying watching during the other players’. Some even said they only missed popcorn.

Psychiatrist Chrysalis Swann (left) witnesses some disturbing events in a church. In-game photo by Daniel P. Espinosa.

Caged and Enjoyed

Definitely, in my experience a scripted larp experience is enjoyable in spite of players having their agency restricted. How do they enjoy it? Besides from acting it out and watching it, as stated, they can also find interesting to progressively discover a story written for them, with its carefully plotted webs that maintain coherence no matter what players do, and in becoming aware that they are truly part of it. Besides, though character scripts tell players what they have to do, they also give them freedom about how to do it. This is critical for the emotional development of characters.

The only thing the organizer must care about is to inform the players beforehand about this particularity—the tight scripting—to make sure they don’t feel disappointed for not having “freedom” to act during the larp. The organizer—and the players—must understand that this experience is not for everyone, just as theater is not for everyone. Before each run of Devil in our sins, I warned very clearly the interested players, so that those who signed up knew what they were in for. They were both curious or anxious to play a larp from a different mindset, one that was a mix of that of a larp player, a theater actor, and a spectator, but finally they loved the experience. It allowed them to focus on emotions and interpretation, without worrying about making wrong decisions or about shouldering the responsibility of the story’s final coherence.

Leo Deth (left) and priest Rowan Credence (middle) as bad things happen. 2nd run. In-game photo by Daniel P. Espinosa.

Anatomy and Life of a Script

In Devil in our sins, each player is given a small booklet with the name and location of every scene in the larp. It is only the ones in which the player participates that are detailed, each describing the current situation and posing several questions about how the character feels. This way, I as scriptwriter can guide the character’s mood while leaving the player a margin to decide how she is going to handle the scene emotionally. For example, after a big revelation the script may pose questions if the character would be sad or furious, and how the character would feel if the “enemy” appeared again.

In the “scripted” part of the scene, there is first a synopsis for the scene. For example: “Take revenge revealing what you did in the past”. This phrase is crucial because it enables the player to keep the scene’s goal in mind and maintain focus. It was an addition after early playtests, as players reported that it was difficult to remember the scene’s objective when on stage. It really helped in the third run.

After that, the script details actions step by step. For example: “Enter the apartment. Think about what you did. Wait for your lover to wake up. Talk with him/her. Reveal your dark past”.

An important constraint is that players are allowed to read their scripts only once the larp is started, and that they only read the scenes one by one—at most two by two. This is to avoid spoilers, since the gradual unfolding of the plot is an important part of the experience.

In addition, players are encouraged to act out only that which is scripted, contributing with their own vision of the character but being careful not to do something different to what is written. Since players are unaware of the scripted story, their improvisations could become inconsistent with later scenes.

Finally, if a scene is going out of control the organizer has the option to intervene, as a theater prompter. This allows her to discreetly—without interrupting the scene—tell the players what to do. Harsh as it sounds, this is better than creating a scene that invalidates the rest of the plot.

Forensic doctor Lawrence Freight examines a killer’s victim. 1st run. In-game photo by Enrique Esturillo Cano.

The Scripted and the Unexpected

There’s a lie in all this emphasis on scripting, in that some unscripted events DO exist. They present a point of interest for players, and allow the players to improvise and react like in a non-scripted larp.

When I decided to make closed stories, I also wanted to add a feeling from when we watch a film or read a book: the suspense, the unexpected. Consider the following example scene, where the police sergeant returns home to face her daughter, who is being threatened by a serial killer. The sergeant has a drinking problem, and regrets some immoral things she has done for years. The sergeant’s player script says: “Go back home. Take a bottle and decide if you drink or throw it to the trash. Have a discussion with your daughter. Strive for reconciliation. Perhaps forget all about the investigation”. And that’s what the player expects. However, when she enters stage and while she is struggling with the bottle, she will discover her daughter dying at her room, strangled by the killer. So here we have it; we have broken the player’s expectations, just as in a novel—or in real life.

Thus we can build an intensely emotional and scripted scene, but still surprise and gratify players with some improvisation that will delve even deeper into their emotions.

Of course, those scenes must be carefully crafted so that improvisation don’t break the whole story, using guidelines like “Don’t kill anybody in this scene”. Just in case.

Leo Deth (left) and Rose (right) during a funeral… and a nightmare. 1st run. In-game photo by Daniel P. Espinosa.

Action Scenes

A scripted larp allows players to represent action scenes in spectacular ways since these are guided. In Devil in our sins, there’s a scene when the sergeant and the detective have to chase down someone in a dark place, equipped with flashlights and guns. Every time I’ve run this scene, the result has been intensely cinematic. With lights off and the song Somewhat damaged from Nine Inch Nails (1999) playing loud, the suspect, chased, hides in an unknown room. Seconds later, the sergeant and the detective enter the building, guns in hand and looking for the suspect. The other players, as moving spectators, enter behind them to watch the scene from backstage.

This scene and similar scenes become spectacular through the way they can be choreographed. Just as a movie director, as the author you can tell the players if they must fight, be hurt, run, kill or be killed, etc., and provide details. You can control the scenography, the place, the lights, the music… Besides you can—and must—heighten characters’ passions in the script so that the action has a deep meaning for them.

Still, a scene like this can still be unpredictable, to make it enjoyable the players mustn’t know what exactly is going to happen. To keep the plot under control you need to use brief and precise instructions. For example: “You can be hurt but you won’t die during this scene”. Or: “Don’t run. Fight”. Or: “You will lose but don’t give up easily”. And, important, be clear about how each character must end their scene.

Detective Tom Reigh (left) and Sergeant Joanne Keller (right) in their epilogue. 1st tun. In-game photo by Enrique Esturillo Cano.

An Open Final

Despite being scripted, scripted larp leave can allow players to make plot-changing decisions. In Devil in our sins, each character has a scene in which she can decide how to conclude her story. These final scenes are designed in a plot-meaningful way, so that they bring together characters who have unresolved plots between them. The script tells the players it’s their final scene and that they have to make decisions to create a shared ending. They know they have nothing to lose and they are encouraged to take wild decisions. This is the time to die, flee, reveal and create a huge emotional climax. It’s time to make this their own story.

All Devil in our sins’ runs have ended differently. One was dramatic and dark. Other was emotive and sad. Another one yet was tough and ruthless. The best was that this was the players’ decision.

Detective Tom Reigh (left) and professor Leo Deth (right) meet at the campus to remember past and hard times. 2nd run. In-game photo by Daniel P. Espinosa.

Breaking Space, Time and Action

In scripted larps—and scene-based larps in general—you can use space and time as narrative tools.

Regarding space, playing out scenes allows to easily change location between them to tell wider stories. Time is easily changed also—not only with flashbacks or flashforwards, but moving action through different days or even years—without breaking the flow of action. Each scene could happen in a different time, for example.

Talking about action, it’s important that we involve all characters in our global story, and one easy way to do it is dividing that story into multiple ones. But for me there’s one key requirement: there must be only one action at a time during a scene. That way, spectators can focus on one thing and understand the whole story, and we can keep narrative tension and rhythm. After all, this is theater larp.

Therapy session with forensical doctor Lawrence Freight (right) and psychiatrist Chrysalis Swann (left). 2nd run. In-game photo by Daniel P. Espinosa.

Writing a Scripted Larp

A scripted larp like this requires careful writing, at least the way I see it. It took me several months to develop both story—with all the twists and crimes—and script for Devil in our sins. Much work went into maintaining a balance between all characters, so that everyone could be protagonist of their own story and have the same number of scenes.

After that, I had to write each scene in a concise and clear way. Each one must describe how the character got there, what has happened right before, what is the scene’s main aim for the character and when to leave or end it. It may also suggest ways to act out the scene and contain questions about emotions. The description still has to be brief, ideally one A5 page maximum.

Apart from that you have to work with the rhythm, interest and suspense within the scenes, and over the entire larp. Scenes must be interesting not only to be played but also to be watched. Finally you are writing an interactive novel. This is not a metaphor, because after the first run of Devil in our sins I decided to also write it as a novel that I’m finishing right now. Why not? I had already done all the preceding work: the plot, the mystery, the characters, the structure, etc. That’s how with these larps we can tell stories like they were novels or films.

Encounter between Rose Whiteday (left) and Professor Leo Deth (right). 1st run. In-game photo by Enrique Esturillo Cano.

Conclusions

With this article, I wanted to spread the word about scene-based larps and scripted larps, and give some insight into what is happening at the Spanish larping scene.

I have presented my personal vision of what scripts can do when you apply them to a larp to tell a story in a theatrical style. Of course, there are most likely other approaches that are more or less scripted or just scripted in a different way. I’d really love to know about them.

For me, the experience of designing and staging scripted scenarios have demonstrated that scripted larps can make their players enjoy every moment, make story-changing decisions and ask themselves about deep emotional subjects while enjoying a carefully crafted story.

Because we all love stories, and because we all also love to act and to be part of them.

Sergeant’s wedding rings, drown in alcohol. 1st run. In-game photo by Enrique Esturillo Cano.

References

Aronofsky, Darren, Requiem for a Dream (Thousand Words, 2000).

Cave, Nick & The Bad Seeds and Kylie Minogue, Where the wild roses grow (Mute Records, 1995).

Chibnall, Chris, Broadchurch TV series (BBC, 2013-2017).

Espinosa, Daniel P., Devil in our sins (Madrid, Spain: March 25, 2017; Madrid, Spain: June 30, 2017; Alicante, Spain: EntreReVs Larp Convention, November 11, 2017). http://entrerevs.wixsite.com/entrerevs/actividades-2017

Espinosa, Daniel P., Hades (Madrid, Spain: 2015; Málaga, Spain: Rolea Convention, November 2015).

Fuller, Bryan, Hannibal TV series (NBC, 2013–2015).

López Gómez, Ana and Daniel P. Espinosa, Our most fearful shadows/Nuestras más temibles sombras (Madrid, Spain: 2015; Málaga, Spain: Rolea Convention, November 2015; Murcia, Spain: EntreReVs Larp Convention, October, 2016. http://entrerevs.wixsite.com/entrerevs/activities-2016).

Marrero, Nast, Requiem for a Dream larp (Málaga, Spain: TdN Convention, August 7, 2015; Oslo, Norway: Grenselandet chamber larp convention, October, 2015. http://www.grenselandet.net/2015/09/requiem-for-dream-es-by-nast-marrero-is.html )

McCarthy, Cormac, The Road (Alfred A. Knopf ed., 2006).

Moran, Jenna K., Nobilis RPG 2nd edition (Hogshead Publishing, 2002).

Nine Inch Nails, Somewhat damaged (Nothing Records, 1999)

Pizzolatto, Nic, True Detective TV series (HBO, 2014-2015).

de Santiago, Marina, Ragnarok (Yebes-Valdeluz, Guadalajara: December 17, 2015). http://thebiggame.despertalia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Flyer-TBG-16-2.pdf

Valcárcel, Pablo, The Other Voice at the Back of Your Head (Madrid, Spain: April 7, 2017; Berlin, Germany: May 13, 2017). https://www.worldofdarkness.berlin/single-post/2017/05/13/Scenario-Competition-Finalists-Announced

Åkerlind, Fredrik, The Journey (Århus, Denmark: Fastaval 2010). http://jeepen.org/games/thejourney/

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

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

Cover photo: Sergeant Joanne Keller (left) and Detective Tom Reigh (right) wake up after sharing nightmares. 1st run. In-game photo by Enrique Esturillo Cano.
Published on

2018-02-05

in

Hearts

Freak Show, an Autopsy

Written by
Nina Mutik
Coroner

Nina Teerilahti, art director and main organizer

Body

Freak Show, a larp held in an abandoned amusement park in Finland. The larp told the story of the last freak show and explored otherness through a romantic gothic horror setting. The participants played a family of outcasts and freaks who struggled to survive in a hostile world. The story ended with the devil coming to take them all to perform for him forever.

Time of Death

2017-09-18 between 19:00 and 22:00.

Inception

We crawled through a small gap in the fence. Suddenly we were outside everything: law, society and all things normal. There was no one to define us, judge us or get offended by our existence. I saw the thrill and joy ignite in his eyes. It was freedom. We ran and laughed. The twilight in the run down, abandoned amusement park seeped with tragedy, magic and wonder. But the deeper we ventured between the forgotten, deteriorating buildings the sadder we felt. Laughter changed into a sense of longing and lost memories. It seemed like the place was telling us that the terrible price of true freedom is always abandonment. The moment moved me deeply. It resonated with a hidden truth, and I knew I had to share it.

Birth

So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein―more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Breaking into Wasalandia with my friend started the Freak Show larp project in November 2016. I felt a manic need to create a way to share the experience, a feverish drive that reminded me of Victor Frankenstein and his quest to create life.

After the initial spark the concept of the last freak show and a deal with the devil emerged over a few weeks. I contacted the owner of the ruins. He agreed to have an event at the site and gave me the conditions and a rough budget. In the end of the month I had nothing but an idea and nine months to make it happen. It was madness. I made rough project plans and budget sketches and decided it was worth a shot. I could not guarantee that my creation would not be a monster, a shadow to hunt me until all eternity, but if enough people wanted to take this chance with me, why not. Fearless ventures into the unknown are my specialty.

After the publication of the idea, the Freak Show larp raised discord in social media. The project was thought to be disrespectful and insulting because of its subject. The reaction was as if we were robbing graves and bringing dead bodies back to life, and I did feel as driven to follow this path as doctor Frankenstein did. My goal with the Freak Show, as with all my art projects, was to make the world just a tiny bit better, take away some fear and add some compassion.

Our ability to create the event without being insensitive or even hurtful was mistrusted. It was publicly demanded that our crew should have members of the minority about which we were creating a larp. As creators we were pressured to out our connection to being a freak and our experience of otherness to justify creating the story of Freak Show. Demanding organizers to lose their privacy is cruel. We did not agree.

It was also demanded that our representations of this minority should be realistic. Larps aren’t real or realistic. Reality doesn’t have a limited duration and safety rules. Believing that larps could give you a realistic experience is insulting towards the people who experience the real thing. The intent of the larp matters far more than the level of realism achieved.

Creating public pressure towards stories of minorities in larp will make the visibility and status of minorities worse. The fear of being offensive should not become crippling. It will end up pushing the already marginalised people even deeper into the margin.

Seeing how much fear just the idea of a freak show larp ignited, I think the project was important. Living through stories will increase understanding and compassion, and if we want to move the limits of normal into more humane positions, we need to tell stories of people that are outside normal. We can’t let fear or public pressure stop us. If I am wrong and my passion is insane, my creations will surely hunt me down, just like they did Frankenstein.

Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Aarni Korpela.

Brains

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

I gathered an international crew to create the Freak Show together with me by posting ads on larp forums on Facebook. The budget was tight, so I could only pick five people. Out of 13 applicants I chose Alessandro Giovannucci, Dominika Cembala, Martin Olsson, Morgan Kollin and Simon Brind based on what they wrote to me about their skills, motivation and experience. I included one inexperienced crew member as I always want to give someone the opportunity to learn and grow.

Long distance work with a crew of varied backgrounds and nationalities was like sailing an unfamiliar ship in unexpected weather. At times it was hard to understand what works and what doesn’t, and why. For me, the biggest challenge to overcome was to get every crew member to communicate about their problems so that they could be solved. We had so many different working and communication cultures, that mixing them and building a new functional one was difficult, a process that continued throughout the project.

One of the best decisions I made was to have a video call meeting every week throughout the whole project. As we had such varied ideas about how to work together or create a larp and could never meet physically, this face to face contact was essential to run the project.

During the nine months of production there were miscommunications, surprising life events and lack of motivation. On the other hand, there was pure creative joy, enthusiasm and strength in combining varied skills and backgrounds. Whenever we had a crisis or a problem to solve, our diversity was a clear asset. Whenever we needed cumbersome things actually done in time, our lack of face to face contact was a problem. A multinational long distance crew is great for designing and not so great for actually getting the work done.

I set three design guidelines for the project:
- Does it create play or enhance immersion? If not, don’t do it.
- Does it give players tools to explore the themes? If not, don’t do it.
- Treat characters and the subject of being a freak with respect and dignity.
These guidelines helped us focus on the right things. In the end we were happy to notice that almost everything we created for the event actually came into play. What we did affected the player’s experience directly, there was no work done in vain.

Skin

His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black and owing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, … his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

The practicalities of the event were almost completely decided for us by the owner of the site. We had strict limitations and high costs. In many cases this meant that we had to do something badly or not do the event at all. For example we had to buy food from the owner and it had to be served at his hotel at certain times, not at the site, which was far from ideal.

The site itself was an actual ruin and under the bombardment of vandals, the current and the new owners and multinational companies connected to the deal that was negotiated in the meantime. Over half a year, large structures, furniture, windows, doors and even staircases disappeared, electricity and water became unavailable where they should’ve been and some areas got into far more rapid decay than anticipated. The site was out of control. We had to accept that, even though much of the extreme situations came as a surprise, such as one of the largest usable inside spaces being totally covered in a thick layer of soap, courtesy of vandals.

The ruin of Wasalandia would never be a safe game site by any standards, but this project was for sensible adults who could take responsibility for themselves. There were dangerous materials and places. In exchange, we had the freedom to rearrange and actually build things. The site was vast and filled with buildings and random items. It was overwhelming. In this larp real, actual exploration and building was a major part of the game and the players enjoyed it immensely.

From a player perspective the abandoned Wasalandia and the actual circus tent with its sound and lighting equipment were half the game. The players did actually build different usable spaces during the game and practised and performed in a real circus tent. The atmosphere of the site and tent was intense and the struggles to create a new home for the Freak Show and the joy of finding usable items and furniture were real.

The magical wonderland the players managed to create in the ruins during the game blew us all away. For example, the players got the wheel of fortune and lights working in a building that was supposed to not be usable, built a space with red lights and roses for intimate burlesque shows, found a full clown costume and built a cathedral in an old restaurant. Using the site in any way we could imagine was truly a unique opportunity and experience.

Muscles

“I was dependent on none and related to none. The path of my departure was free, and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.” ― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Our greatest success in the Freak Show was getting the players we had. They were very motivated, amazingly talented and created a beautiful story and experience. Getting great players was not pure coincidence.

We designed the application process to search for motivation and capability to create with us. We were not interested in any other qualities like age, gender, experience or country of origin. We knew that in the timeframe and resources we had, we could not create everything but were heavily dependant on players creating their own game for themselves. This game would be a sandbox, a chance to play what you create towards a fixed ending.

We designed a blind casting, where you applied to a certain character. The characters were described with a few inspirational sentences and the player was to develop the character further and send us a short text about it.

After the signup closed all crew members voted for each application and the highest scores got in. It was easy to pick the most creative and motivated sounding applications. Many of them moved us or made us inspired and excited. The applications were also a great starting point to develop the characters further with the players.

Heart

I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

In creating anything I find motivation the key factor. Everything else follows with more or less work, but without motivation nothing happens. In the Freak Show we focused on creating the players motivation to create an experience that would inspire and move them. This is why we chose to create characters together with players in a discussion.

The character creation video calls with players were one of the most amazing experiences in the project. At it’s best they were enthusiastic brainstorming, player and writer driving each other on and creating an amazing story and person together. With this discussion and letting the player affect everything each character became an amazing piece of art and far better than any writer could have created on their own. The player’s motivation to play the characters that had been handcrafted to fulfil their wishes was high, which of course affected the larp immensely. Motivated and enthusiastic players create magic.

Lungs

Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

The themes of Freak Show were otherness and being an outcast. They were born from that first moment of inspiration. As outcasts the freaks had magic and freedom, but the price was terrible and they were slowly perishing, just like the ruins of Wasalandia.

Every character was a freak or an outcast, some visibly, others in other ways. There was deformity, mental illness, physical and mental disability, unaccepted love and sexuality, passion or power and unforgivable crimes. Otherness was woven into all characters, all had a strong reason to choose the hard life of an outcast and all characters had different emotional responses and coping mechanisms. These together created a network of viewpoints to explore the themes inside the game.

The players who played on a very physical otherness, like the conjoined twins, and thus felt the otherness in a very concrete way, may have gotten the most intense experience. Some of the others had a harder time connecting to the themes, as the family of freaks was very accepting and this made them feel quite normal. Having more interaction with normal people who treated them as freaks and outcasts would have benefited the game.

Eyes

I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted. That cannot be.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

I feel that photos never truly capture a larp, they are pale shadows compared to the experience. Larps are mandalas, made as perfect as they can be with extreme effort and then suddenly gone forever. All larp reproductions are flawed and lack the original essence, the true beauty that made the experience remarkable.

At its best, larp photography gives us tools to remember. At its worst larp photography gives us tools to gather validation in social media on the expense of the actual experience. I did not want photos of the Freak Show for two reasons: because I wanted to protect our players from the social media outrage caused by the subject of the game and because I did not want the need for good photos to take away from the focus of playing.

We used a group of artists to document the Freak Show larp by drawing. The artists were woven into the world by making them a meta-technique to represent the feeling of the end of times. In the game world the artists were watcher spirits that came to document the events when all is ending. They had black shroud costumes that hid their features. Whenever a watcher spirit stopped to draw a player, the player felt the gaze of God or the Devil on them. The watcher spirits were present for the last eight hours of the larp.

The watcher spirits worked pretty well. The situation was very challenging for the artists and at times overwhelming for the players, but all in all it was a good experience for both. In my opinion the drawings captured the mood of the game in a beautiful way. Fleeting impressions with heavy interpretation fit the Freak Show better than photographs. The unusual documentation method also gave the players a feeling that the event was something very special and unique, which added to the magic of the experience.

Cause of Death

‘But soon’, he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ‘I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing ames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.’
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

We rented a circus tent from a real small Finnish circus for the Freak Show. The day before the game I was watching them erect it. An old carnie, the tent master, was having a smoke and chatting with me as the Moroccan brothers were setting up the support beams. “It feels funny to have real circus people around as we are just going to pretend to be a circus for a while.” I said. The tent master inhaled smoke and looked at me in the eyes suddenly very serious, almost moved. Something shined behind the old man’s grey eyes. “I don’t think it’s funny at all. You are not just playing.” I was confused, but moved. He struck a chord. The tent master looked at the slowly rising tent that he had travelled with for decades. “That the idea of circus has inspired you to do this, that is truly beautiful.” I held back tears. The old carnie smiled and took another drag.

I agree. What we did that weekend was truly beautiful. As all tragic, life-changing beauty, it also had to die to preserve its magic. The beauty of a larp dies as soon as it is born, leaving only echoes, vibrant after images that soon start to fade. It can’t exist in any other way.

Re-animation

The Freak Show gave birth to lasting friendships, deep realizations, life-changing experiences, amazing artwork and beauty. Four people took tattoos after the event to always remember it. Can I take credit for these achievements? No. I did not make them. Would all of this have happened without me? No.

As a larp creator I see myself as a person who makes things possible. With the Freak Show, I think I made important experiences possible for several people. To me that is worth all the work, stress, trouble, critique and even hate I received for doing this project. I am satisfied that I took the chance and leapt into the unknown.

Will the Freak Show be re-animated? Perhaps, in another time and country, in a different abandoned place seeping with tragedy. If you know just the place, have the needed tools to bring a beautiful monster to life and want to take this journey with me, I’m open to suggestions. My passion to create false lives is still burning.

Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Kaspar Tamsalu.

Links

Freak Show larp website: http://martinolsson.github.io/freakshowlarp

Freak Show documentation drawings: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6zJauE8ICngUk1pRHhFNWQ4aVE?usp=sharing

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

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

Cover image: Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Andrei Kedrin.
Published on

2018-01-31

in

Clubs

Playing Nasty Characters

Written by
Elin Dalstål
In this article, I will address some things to keep in mind when playing certain types of characters: villains, cruel bastards, heartless manipulators, unsympathetic types, mighty evil overlords or schoolyard bullies. For simplicity’s sake, I will just call them nasty characters. You might want to play such characters for various reasons, because the story needs an evil emperor as well as heroic rebels, or because you want to explore the psychology behind cruel actions. Or perhaps just because it’s a fun acting challenge.

Playing Nasty – Easy for Some, Hard for Others

Before writing this article, I asked around among online and among my friends about their insights into playing nasty characters. Something that came up is that people experience it very differently. For some people playing a nasty role was no different than playing any other type of role, for others it was an emotional struggle or downright impossible.

I can’t speak for those who find it a torment to play an evil character, because for me it comes easy. When I was five I jumped at the opportunity to play the evil knight Kato from Astrid Lindgren’s “Mio, my son” in the school play. I generally always enjoy playing a nasty character.

But I can say that it is common to be uncomfortable playing nasty characters. In some cases that doesn’t change no matter how much practice you get. If you notice that playing a villain isn’t for you, then there is no need for you to torment yourself. It is okay to not be comfortable playing nasty characters. But if you want to play a nasty character, here some of my best tips.

Actions and/or Personality

What defines a nasty character? Their actions or their personality? On the one hand, it is possible to play a charming and pleasant character that does horrible things. On the other hand, it’s just as possible to play a character with a personality as repulsive as a maggot-infested wound that still manages to do good things.

I regard both character types as nasty characters, at least for the purpose of this article, because they face similar challenges in how you as a player are meant to stir up negative emotions in other players without going overboard.

A character that is pleasant but does horrible thing tends to make others feel rage, hate, betrayal, disgust and fear when it becomes clear that the character does horrible things. Other characters may react with denial if their trust and liking of that character goes too deep. A character that seems nice but isn’t will often stir up lots of intense and personal emotions.

While an unsympathetic, mean, or repulsive character that does good things tends to have others first react with negative feelings, that might lessen over time or be mixed up with some sort of grudging respect as it becomes clear that the character, no matter how nasty they appear, does good things.

Yet, most nasty characters fall between these extremes. They seldom have a 100% repulsive personality, nor is every action they take pure evil. What differentiates them from more sympathetic characters is that their unsympathetic sides are more predominant compared to other characters.

How Nasty Can You Play?

So how horrible, unpleasant, cruel, violent or mean can you play during a larp? To get an answer to that question there are three perspectives to take into account: the organizers, other players and your own.

The first thing to figure out is what the different perspectives WANT. Ask them what sort of nastiness they want and would like. Ask yourself that too. That is the sweet spot you are looking for. After you figure out what people want, you can begin asking yourself and others what their limits are, what they would or wouldn’t be okay with. Aim for the wants and avoid the limits.

Before the larp read the game materials and get in touch with the organizers. Try to get a feel for what sorts and levels of nastiness they want for the game. Try to have concrete discussions, with concrete examples. For example: “Is systematic bullying something they want for their game? Is violence? How do you want it to be done? What safety techniques will be used? “ And so on.

If you have the opportunity you can talk with other players before the game and ask them what sort of interactions they want, and then if there are some things they would want you to avoid.

Try to sort out what you want and what your limits are too. Often it is easy to think that you want to try to take it as far as you can, but that often means that your character will be so extreme that you miss out on nuanced interactions.

No matter what sort of answers you get, keep in mind people might change their minds and have every right to do so. People might realize that they want something else, or that they are not okay with something they thought would be fine. This goes for the organizers, other players and yourself.

People might back out of scenes and relationships you planned together with them before the game. You need to be okay with that. Sometimes because the subject is uncomfortable, people will back out of it in weird ways, for example by hiding from you out of character. If you get a sense that someone is trying to avoid something you planned, you can try giving them a way to gracefully back out of it. For example, by out-of-character asking them if they want to take play in another direction than you planned. Or just by giving them the space to keep avoiding you.

Aim for giving yourself and others the level of nastiness they want, but always adjust your level of nastiness so that everyone involved is okay with it. One approach to this is to start low and then work up towards to the desired level.

No matter what people said before the game, you need to be very attentive to other player signals during the game. If you are unsure if someone is uncomfortable in or out of character, ease up and see how they react; or check in if they are okay out of character. If the game uses safety or calibration rules, use them.

Things to Avoid

There are a few things you should try to avoid when playing a nasty character, almost no matter what.
- Never attack out of character traits. For example, someone’s body shape, appearance, real-life disabilities etc.
- Don’t behave recklessly around children. No scene is so great that it is worth traumatizing a child.
- If your gut tells you something is wrong, don’t ignore it. Be on the safe side.
If you often play nasty character you might once in while fuck up. You won’t listen to your gut, you will say something that was hurtful out of character, and if you play around children you will realize the kids weren’t as far away as you thought during your evil scene. If that happens, go out of character, apologize and tell them it was out of line. You can do this right away, or wait a little while if it’s hard to do right away. Even if you make a mistake people will often be okay with it if you take responsibility and apologize.

Erica Kolppanen as a vampire. Photo by Emmielie Nordström, Lajvlabbet photoshoot 2014.

Aspects of the Character to Consider

When you play, create, or are given a nasty character there are some aspects to keep in mind. These aspects will affect how other players experience your character as well as your own experience. Consider how the behaviors used to portray your character may affect other players. Consider whether those behaviors may cause discomfort to players who have experienced similar behaviors before.

Close to Home or Not?

One of those aspects is how close or far from home the character is. By close to home I mean the type of character many of us have personal experiences of. Schoolyard bullies, abusive partners or parents for example. Far from home are characters you don’t have, and perhaps no one has, personal experiences of. For example, evil necromancers and murderous aliens.

When you play something far from home, let’s say an evil necromancer, it is unlikely that anyone will have personal painful memories and traumas related to necromancy. People expect an evil mage to say vile and nasty things and often take it less personally. As a rule of thumb people are less sensitive to far from home villains and their actions.

But if you play a character closer to home, let’s say a bully, it is likely that other players have out-of-character traumas relating to bullying. Because of this, you should be more watchful how your words and actions might be more painful due to real-life traumas.

One thing to watch out for is if you play a character that you didn’t consider close to home, but might be close to home for other players. Maybe you don’t have any experiences of gang-related violence, but it might be a subject that is close to home for other players. So please consider if anyone might have personal experience of the type of character you portray.

Enemy or Team Member?

Something to consider when you play a nasty character is whether you will be considered an enemy or a member of the group. This greatly affects how people will feel about your actions. If some enemy calls you “a useless piece of shit” it may not bother you, because you expect an enemy to insult you. But when someone on your side says the same thing it stings a lot worse.

When you play a nasty character, it is good to be aware of this dynamic. An unsympathetic friend, team or family member’s actions feels differently than those of an enemy. If you play in a game with rival factions you might do both: be a member of one group and the enemy of another.

The Social Situation

When playing a nasty character, the social context matters. We larp with others, and for your own gameplay’s sake it is important to consider the social situation your character will face. Talk, if possible, with your fellow players before the game about what sort of social dynamic you want. Here are some common examples of social situations that you can use.

Lonely: Unsympathetic bastards don’t make a lot of friends, so one of the common social situations for nasty characters is to end up in is being pretty lonely. Other characters might want to avoid you and you might end up spending much of the larp alone. Being loathed and lonely can be an awesome experience as well, but it doesn’t suit all players. If you don’t want to spend much of the larp alone you might consider other options.

With like-minded companions: Birds of a feather flock together. If you are a gang, or a few nasty characters, it can be natural for you to hang out together. It also turns you into a powerhouse of nastiness when there is a whole group of you. You can also support each other out of character. This is an option that I would recommend to newbies.

Part of the team or part of the family: Every family has their black sheep. If you play a nasty character that is a member of some kind of group that won’t kick you out at the first opportunity, you can have a very social larp even if you play a pain in the ass. Especially if you are in a position of power in the group. Group membership also creates a situation where you can play a nasty character in general but having a few genuine positive relationships in the group.

Well liked and total bastard: Then there is the final option, which is really hard to pull off. To be well liked and nasty at the same time. For this to work, you really need to be able to do it, because even if you ask other players to play to lift and play up that your character is both charismatic and unsympathetic as hell, it tends to fall at and just feel like the other characters are just sucking up.

You need to make players and characters alike both love and hate the character. But if you can make it work it is amazing. It takes a bit of daring to try to pull it off, and it won’t always work. You might end up being passionately hated instead, or not coming off as vile as you wanted. This means you might end up playing a different character in a different social situation than you hoped for, which might still give you a great experience. But it is worth trying if you are okay with the risk of it failing.

Nasty Towards A few Targets or the Whole Larp?

Will your character be nasty to a large portion of the characters, or single out just a few? It will make a huge difference emotionally; both for the targets of the nastiness and for yourself.

If you are nasty to just a few characters it means that you can have a lot of positive relationships towards other characters too. On the other hand, people often find it a lot crueler, and feel more vulnerable, when a nasty character singles out a few targets. You also have to make sure it is not experienced as off-game bullying.

While if you are a bastard towards everyone you will have no or very few positive relationships to other characters; and because everyone has negative interactions with you, other characters will take the things your character does less personally.

Bleed and Aftercare

When you play an unsympathetic character bleed and aftercare are important topics to consider.

After the larp, players of characters who spent the whole time fearing, hating and loathing your character might have some lingering negative bleed towards you. That bleed doesn’t entitle them to behave badly towards you, but you should respect that it might be there. After the game, be nice, go and talk to players who had negative interactions with your character. Check in with them to see if they are okay, talk to them about the scenes, and give them a chance to get an out-of-character impression of you. Changing your look also helps others get over that bleed. Put on some other clothes, change your hair and makeup, wear a silly hat… The less you look like your character, the better. Tell them that you are actually nice, but that you totally understand if they are still feeling some negative bleed.

Then there is your own bleed and aftercare to deal with. Some people experience guilt after playing a nasty character. Some people who spent the larp being emotionally detached will feel a need to emotionally connect, be part of the group and hear that they did a great job. Some people will feel a need to apologize. Others want to get a distance from the character by fooling around and making fun of their own character.

Often playing a perpetrator is emotionally harder than playing a victim. Do whatever self-care you feel that you need, as long as it doesn’t affect others badly.

You might after the larp have to remind other players that even if you played a nasty character, you have the same aftercare needs as everyone else. It might be that you need to feel that you are part of the group out of character, you might feel a need to talk about the larp and be listened to, or need just as many hugs as everyone else. It is easy for other players to forget that, after you have been playing their enemy. It is okay to remind them.

Don’t Defend the Cruel Things Your Character Did as Right

There is one more thing that is important after the larp. Don’t defend the nasty things your character did toward other characters. Bullying is a horrible thing to do to another person. Torture is even more so. And so on. While you on some level might need to empathize with your character to understand why they took that kind of action, that doesn’t change what they did. Out of character you have a responsibility to acknowledge that fact. Own it. Admit it. Don’t defend shitty things your character did to other characters. Maybe they did so because they were emotionally fucked up, forced to do it or were socialized into thinking it was right. Maybe your character did some nice things too. That doesn’t matter.

In many cases, it will be important for your fellow players to hear you acknowledge what your character did to theirs, without you trying to justify and defend it. Be clear that your character did things that caused harm, and while you might understand why the character did so, that doesn’t change anything. By acknowledging that your character caused harm, other players will feel more secure around you when you play unsympathetic characters.

In Conclusion

There are many ways to play a nasty character, and I hope that this article has given you some tips on what to keep in mind when playing them. By now you have probably noted that this article didn’t give you any concrete tips on exactly what to do, what to say, how to push people around and so on. That is because there is too much diversity. I can’t give advice that would work both for an orc war leader, and a jealous snobby ex-partner. This aim of the article is to give you categories to consider and keep in mind when you are playing a nasty character.

If you have questions or want to discuss the article please get in touch with me on social media or send me an email.

The author Elin Dalstål playing the nasty character Agnes. Photo by Emmelie Nordström, På Gott och Ont photoshoot 2016.

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

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

Cover photo: Näcken. Photo by Emmelie Nordström, På Gott och Ont photoshoot 2017.
Published on

2018-01-30

in

Diamonds

The Death of Hamlet – Deconstructing the Character in Enlightenment in Blood

Written by
Juhana Pettersson
Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, is one of the most famous fictional characters of all time. He’s the protagonist of a play by William Shakespeare, conveniently also titled Hamlet. The play has been made into a movie over twenty times. There’s also a well-regarded larp version called Inside Hamlet in which the story is transposed onto the decadent court of a mid-19th century fascist Denmark.

In Inside Hamlet (Pedersen et al 2017), one of the characters is Hamlet himself. If you play that character, you’re larping a role that has been defined by centuries of artistic practice. Hamlet casts a long shadow, and your interpretation is but one of many takes on the same character.

In short, Hamlet is a role. You can make an interesting Hamlet, a boring Hamlet, a conventional Hamlet or an idiosyncratic Hamlet. Your Hamlet is always in dialogue with every other Hamlet, whether you like it or not.

Although Hamlet is an iconic example, pre-written larp characters often follow the same idea: the writer of the character has a vision, and the player must ful l that vision in the larp. The role exists independent of the player.

In the larp Enlightenment in Blood, we set out to create a new way of making larp characters. The first step on that road is to murder Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark.

Access to Fiction

What’s the purpose of a character? Why do you need a character to play in a larp? When we started designing Enlightenment in Blood, our answer to this question was that the character is a tool the player uses to access the fiction of the larp.

The larp presents a fictional environment, and the player needs something to be part of that environment. Without that something, they’re just a non-player: someone without agency inside the fiction.

Note that in this conception of character, this something can be extremely slight. For example, I worked on a larp series called Baltic Warriors, where the larp events were also public events where anybody could walk in and sit down to listen. In the design of the larp, these people were automatically granted characters: They were to play members of the public who’d dropped by to listen to the debate.

In this example, the character consists of only two things:
1. A rudimentary identity: You play yourself, but in a fictional context.
2. A simple interaction code: Act like you’d act listening to a real political debate. Sit silently, or maybe ask a question.
A character can consist of many things, and there’s no list of mandatory character elements that must be present in all larps. The requirements a larp’s design places on character depend entirely on the creative vision of the larp.

This means that when designing characters for a larp, it’s necessary to consider what the player needs to properly access the fiction of the larp, and then provide these elements to the participants.

The main theme of the larp was revolution, but we sought to provide opportunities for quiet scenes as well. Photo: Suvi Korhonen, in-game.

Cut Up the Body

In the Finnish larp tradition I come from, the organizers typically write characters for all participants and cast the players as well. In Finnish larps based on Vampire, I’ve seen both purely organizer-created characters and characters developed together with the organizer and the player. The same method is used in Nordic-style larps such as College of Wizardry and Inside Hamlet, although College of Wizardry allows the players significant leeway in how to use or discard the written material. When I talk about larps with pre-written characters, I mean it in this context.

In larps with pre-written characters, the role is conceived as a unified whole, a complete concept, but you can break it into the pieces that a player needs to access the fiction. Although no character element is mandatory for a larp to work, many of the components that make up the role of Hamlet are typical of the elements used to construct larp characters. For example, Hamlet has a background, a personality, a motivation, a social role, and connections to other characters.

Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark. He has a clearly defined social position in the milieu of the play: he’s the son of the murdered king, a royal scion of a distinguished family. His perhaps most famous trait is indecisiveness. We know that he studied in Wittenberg and he’s motivated to find out whether his uncle Claudius killed his father.

If we see Hamlet as a collection of elements instead of a sacred whole, we can start playing around with them. We can change an element or two and see what happens. Perhaps he’s not indecisive but cruel, waiting for others to debase themselves before making his move. Maybe his background is not academic but military. Once we give up on the integrity of the role, we start to notice that while some character elements are structurally necessary for the larp (this could be Hamlet’s social role), others can be changed with no broad consequences to how the larp works (Hamlet’s personality and background). As always, which elements are necessary and which can be arbitrary depends on the larp.

The player usually absorbs the character as a written text with all the character elements laid out. In traditional written characters, the writer sets these out to fulfil their vision: this is what Hamlet is like, expressed in words trait by trait. This is the character’s background, personality, and so on.

But what if the larp’s writer didn’t make the choice of how to combine character elements? What if the player made these choices instead?

An Internet Personality Test

Enlightenment in Blood was a larp based on Vampire: The Masquerade about the revolution that brought down the Prince of the city. Because of its size of approximately 200 participants, it was conceived as a simulation of a supernatural city during the night of an insurrection. Some characters were central to the revolution, while others were more on the periphery, pursuing their own stories. It had multiple locations in the Friedrichshain area of Berlin.

In Enlightenment in Blood, our players assembled their own characters using a software tool called Larpweaver (created by the Texan company Incognito Limited). They got an email inviting them into the system, logged on, and started making choices. Our inspiration for this was the endless array of internet personality tests: you answer questions and the test tells you whether you’re a Gryffindor or a Ravenclaw, an Autobot or a Decepticon.

We wanted to build that same breeziness, the fun of making little choices about who you want to play, into a part of the experience of character creation.

Key goals of pre-written characters created by the organizers are to allow a cohesive vision of the larp, and to make sure that characters are connected to each other thematically, in groups and through personal connections. This same goal is also behind the motivation to use Larpweaver instead of allowing people to create their own characters from scratch.

The core design element of Enlightenment in Blood is the group. All characters belonged to three groups, and you could select which groups you wanted to be part of during character creation. The most important of these groups, and the defining choice of using the character creation system, was the primary group. This represented the principal social context of the character. It determined the character’s starting location, allegiance, and who the character hung out with.

Examples of primary groups in Enlightenment in Blood are the Stirner Group, comprised of old school anarchist vampires, and the White Eyes, who are junkie werewolves. In both cases, the group also provides the broad outlines of a character concept.

Because the primary groups formed the superstructure of the larp, most of them were limited to ten members. We decided to make the primary groups the main design structure instead of the supernatural Clans and Tribes traditionally used in World of Darkness larps for this purpose. This way, you could choose your supernatural type more freely. In the system, many of the possible categories of supernatural creatures didn’t have an upper limit. Theoretically, there could have been a 100 vampires from the Toreador Clan in the larp.

For those interested, the most popular vampire Clans in the larp were Brujah, Toreador, and Malkavian, although the Tremere and the Ventrue were only available to characters from certain primary groups such as the philosophically- minded Shadow Enlightenment.

The third group in character creation was called the secondary group. The idea was that while the primary group represented the character’s main allegiance, the secondary group would be a secret club to which the character belonged. The idea was to make allegiances more complicated and mix up the larp’s social structures. However, based on player comments and feedback, this feature of the larp’s design largely failed to play out in practice. My understanding is that this outcome came down to the way we misjudged the pace of the larp, as well as difficulties players had locating and recognizing members of their secondary groups in a geographically scattered game.

In terms of pacing, our chief worry was always that the revolution of the larp would lack energy. Because of this, we encouraged people to play fast and hard. This happened to such a degree that more nuanced elements such as the secondary groups were lost in the general riot.

A Little Piece of You

Enlightenment in Blood was a commercial project, part of the larger World of Darkness Berlin event. The larp was organized on a model where some of the work is done by organizers who get paid for their work, and some by volunteers. One of our key goals when we created the character creation system was to make the writing work less daunting and to increase the scalability of the larp.

The method of larp organizing where each participant is provided with a written character is a lot of work, especially in big larps. It also makes the larp very hard to scale up. If you want to add ten new players, you need to write ten new characters and connect them to other characters through individually created relations.

On the organizer side, the benefit of a Larpweaver-based system such as the one described here is to make the work of writing a larp more efficient and streamlined by exploiting the fact that many characters can share common elements. Once the basic infrastructure of character generation has been built, it also makes it possible to scale up the larp quickly. For example, Enlightenment in Blood experienced a surge of sign ups in the months leading up to the larp, ultimately almost doubling its size. It would have been impossible to write new individual characters for these players, but writing new material for Larpweaver to expand its options for new players required much less effort.

However, we felt that the system has to offer something to the player too. While it’s useful for the organizer, that fact by itself doesn’t improve the player’s experience. This is why we focused on player choice. Using the system, the player could customize the character to suit their needs. A similar effect could be achieved by asking players to write their characters themselves from scratch, but Larpweaver has the advantage of maintaining thematic coherence in the larp because all the material is written by the organizers even though the combinations of elements are chosen by the players.

This follows from our general idea that each Vampire: The Masquerade larp we make uses bespoke game mechanics and a design specific to that larp, instead of a larp design template that would be shared across multiple larps in the style of The Mind’s Eye Theatre. Following our general philosophy for making a Vampire larp, the organizers had minimal presence during the larp itself. Instead, we attempted to load everything into it at character creation and during workshops, and then let it run with only minimal interference.

In Enlightenment in Blood, we felt that although all characters were assembled from pieces provided by the system, each also needed a unique element. This was the character seed: a short concept based on the primary group. So for example, after you’d chosen the Stirner Group, you could choose a veteran Anarch vampire who was a student of Max Stirner in life or the junior member of the group, a scholar of anarchist philosophy.

As text, the seeds were usually no longer than one paragraph of text, because everything beyond the core idea was provided by other parts of the character creation system. The system was focused on providing the elements necessary for the larp to function in a coherent fashion, but other parts of the character were left with more detail for the player to ll out. The most important of these was personal history. Although the combination of a character seed and group affiliations suggests a lot of history, the player had a lot of space to create more detail in the way players in Vampire larps do in many countries.

Unique Personalities

The most complicated part of the Larpweaver system was related to character personality. For this part of the process, we created a questionnaire asking different questions about what kind of a character the participant wanted to play. Based on the answers, the system assigned personality elements to the character.

An example of a question is: “What sort of themes do you wish your conflict to be built around?” Response options included “I’m interested in fate and how to change it” and “I’m interested in questions of control.”

In the case of this particular question, our character personalities were built around the idea of conflicting traits, so that the essential dynamic of the character would be formed out of a discrepancy in the character’s personality. For example, the character could be cheerfully unhappy, someone who is comforted by the fact that everything sucks. The idea behind this is to force the player to make interpretations instead of playing a character as written. It also creates the necessary space for rewarding internal play when the player can balance different conflicting impulses to determine the way to act.

The questionnaire also provided elements of the character’s history that were relevant to the theme of the larp. Enlightenment in Blood was about the revolution of the abandoned vampire underclass against their Camarilla masters. The Camarilla is a vampire organization in Vampire: The Masquerade, the role-playing game on which Enlightenment in Blood was based.

To make the revolution personal, the system gave every character a specific trauma related to the Camarilla, chosen based on the player’s answers when they used Larpweaver. For example, the character might have been tortured by the Camarilla, or maybe the Camarilla arranged for the character’s friends to be executed.

This is a good example of the way Larpweaver encourages thinking about characters in a systemic fashion. If a theme should be present in all characters, it can be built straight into the mechanism the player will use to build their character.

Other Choices

Apart from these choices, we also included a couple of specific elements in the character creation system to help players access the larp. One familiar to Vampire larpers is the Disciplines or superpowers that are part of the original role-playing game. We simplified them to make them work better in a larp like this, and gave the players the choice of which ones they wanted to have.

This is a good example of a choice that can be totally free, with no limits on how many characters have this or that power. Because in the case of this particular larp the powers characters had didn’t affect the overall design structure (although naturally it affected the play of individual players), the choice could be free of the kind of quotas we needed to use for the primary groups. Game balance was less of an issue in general because the game mechanics we used for vampire powers made them much less powerful than in most other interpretations of Vampire.

In addition to the revolution, another of the themes of the larp was enlightenment, especially from a vampire perspective. We wanted the larp also to have space for reflection and even ideological debate. To support this, we articulated a number of different possible ideologies for the characters, which could then be chosen during character creation. For example, a character could be a materialist who didn’t really believe in the great vampire myths of Caine and the Antediluvians.

This element in the character would then allow the player to access this particular subject matter inside the larp, in the form of conversations with other characters or just personal reflection.

Early Adopters

The way we deconstructed characters and arranged the pieces into a set of choices in Enlightenment in Blood is just one way of doing it. Every larp has its own demands, and therefore, even if the software tool or the basic principles of character deconstruction are the same, the implementation of the character creation system can be very different.

In Enlightenment in Blood, much of the action was physical. You could dance, move from location to location, play out fight scenes (these were first resolved using our simple mechanic and then mimed out), make out with someone on a sofa, or be part of a roaring crowd of rebels. Because of this, much of the design in Larpweaver was about organizing the players into the various parts of the larp.

The second larp where characters were created in Larpweaver was Parliament of Shadows, organized by many of the same people who worked on Enlightenment in Blood. In Parliament of Shadows, we already chose to do some things differently than in the previous larp because of the different subject matter and priorities of the larp.

Because Parliament of Shadows was a much smaller game in which players were expected to be able to generate play out of discussions with the same few people they interacted with, we made the character seeds much more detailed and focused on giving more personality options. The themes of the larp called for the characters to have personal relationships with local Camarilla history as well as recent EU legislative fights, so we included options where you chose a particular historical event you’d been part of and a specific EU law you’d worked on. (The characters were Camarilla ghouls lobbying the EU on behalf of their undead masters).

It is my belief that this way of approaching characters can work very well especially when making bigger larps, but I also suspect that the larp we make now with these tools will seem primitive, even simplistic once we develop our understanding of this approach further. Hamlet has been carved up, but we’re still experimenting on how to best arrange the body parts.

Enlightenment in Blood

Participation Fee: €90
Players: approximately 200
Date: May 12, 2017
Location: Berlin, Germany
Production: White Wolf Publishing and Participation Design Agency
Lead designer and writer: Juhana Pettersson
Designer: Bjarke Pedersen
Writers: Sarah Lynne Bowman, Mika Loponen, and Jesper Kristiansen with David Pusch & Daniel Thikötter
Producers: Bjarke Pedersen & Johanna Koljonen
Producer (locations): Zora Hädrich
Werewolf ritual design: René Kragh Pedersen
Character creation design: Bjarke Pedersen, Juhana Pettersson & Matthew Webb
Character creation tool (Larpweaver): Matthew Webb, Samuel Phelps & Riley Seaman / Incognita Limited
Social Media tool (Undernet): Kin software developed by Thomas Mertz, Per Sikker Hansen, Alena Košinárová, Richard Wetzel, and Daniel Sundström
Workshop design: Johanna Koljonen & Bjarke Pedersen
Runtime lead: Johanna Koljonen
Runtime organizing and NPC coordination: David Pusch
Runtime organizing and location coordination: Daniel Thikötter
Runtime organizing: Monica Traxl & Bjarke Pedersen
Creative consulting: René Kragh Pedersen, Maiju Ruusunen & Sarah Lynne Bowman
Documentation lead: Brody Condon
Documentation: Keren Chernizon & Tuomas Hakkarainen
White Wolf: Karim Muammar & Martin Ericsson

© 2016 Participation | Design | Agency AB. World of Darkness®, Vampire: The Masquerade®, Werewolf: The Apocalypse®, Mage: The Ascension®, Wraith: The Oblivion®, Changeling: The Dreaming®, Copyright© 2017 White Wolf Publishing AB All rights reserved.

References

Bowman, Sarah Lynne. “Enlightenment in Blood: A Pervasive World of Darkness Nordic Larp.” Nordiclarp.org. Accessed December 11, 2017. https://nordiclarp.org/2017/05/29/enlightenment-blood-pervasive-world-darkness-nordic-larp/

Fatland, Eirik. “Interaction Codes – Understanding and Establishing Patterns in Player Improvisation.” In Role, Play, Art, edited by Thorbiörn Fritzon and Tobias Wrigstad, 17-34. Stockholm: Föreningen Knutpunkt, 2006.

Koljonen, Johanna. “‘I Could a Tale Unfold Whose Lightest Word Would Harrow up thy Soul.’ Lessons from Hamlet.” In Beyond Role and Play, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, 191-202. Helsinki: Ropecon ry, 2004.

Pedersen, Bjarke, Johanna Koljonen, Simon Svensson, Kasper Sjøgren, and Nina Runa Essendrop (2017). Inside Hamlet. https://www.insidehamlet.com/ Run: Helsingør, Denmark, 2017.

Pettersson, Juhana. (2017). Enlightenment in Blood. https://www.worldofdarkness.berlin/ (Accessed December 11, 2017) Run: Berlin, Germany, 2017

Pettersson, Maria, Juhana Pettersson and Bjarke Pedersen. (2017). Parliament of Shadows. http://parliamentofshadows.com/ Run: Brussels, Belgium, 2017

Pohjola, Mike. (2015-2016). Baltic Warriors. http://www.balticwarriors.net/ A tour of eight larps in Helsinki, Finland; Tallinn, Estonia; St. Petersburg, Russia; Sopot, Poland; Kiel, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark and Stockholm, Sweden.

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

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

Cover photo: We assumed that simplistic combat rules would discourage fighting. Instead the opposite happened: Simple combat meant more combat. Photo: Tuomas Hakkarainen, in-game.
Published on

2018-01-29

in

Hearts

Keeping the Candles Lit, When the Light Has Gone Out

Written by
Shoshana Kessock

Eclipses are funny things. They stop the world, and we all look up together, watching that constant sun slowly disappear before our very eyes. And together, we wonder, for just a moment, if the light will ever come back.

This year the world marvelled at an unbelievable eclipse. Across the United States, people bought protective glasses to witness the astronomical phenomenon together. That Monday, I stood outside my hotel in Indianapolis, packing up my truck to head home from GenCon, the largest gaming convention in the United States. My team and I had run a very successful Dresden Files larp only two days before. In my bag, I had the IGDN Award won by War Birds, an anthology put together by Unruly Designs. The book brought together the stories of women who contributed to war: forgotten stories pushed aside by the incorrect narrative that women remained passive during conflicts and didn’t contribute actively. I contributed with a game called Keeping the Candles Lit, about the experiences of Jewish women fighting as partisans during World War II.

As the only member of the War Birds team present at the IGDN Awards, I stood up to collect the award, stumbling over my words. During my impromptu speech, I thanked the team and everyone who supported the book. But most importantly I thanked the women who inspired the game I wrote: my grandmother, Nora Stern, and my mother, Esther Kessock. After accepting the award, I texted my mother as my friends and I celebrated back in our room. “War Birds just won an award, and my part of this is because of you.”

As I looked up at the eclipse only a few days later, my phone rang. It was my father back in New York.

“Come home as fast as you can,” he said. “The doctors say she’s very bad.”

My friends and I packed up the car and drove sixteen hours straight to get back. By the next morning at ten a.m., only half an hour before I reached the hospital, my mother was dead. I will never know if she saw the text I sent. I like to think she did.

Inspiration for Keeping The Candles Lit, Esther Kessock.

I wrote Keeping the Candles Lit as a tribute game more than a freelance project. When Moyra Turkington approached me to contribute to the anthology, I was interested. While I’ve written a number of fan-tribute games for intellectual properties like Battlestar Galactica, My Little Pony, or Dragon Age, my smaller larps are motivated by my interest in creating deeply personal, emotional, intimate experiences. The chance to create a game based on true historical stories to small groups of people at a time seemed right up my alley. The question really came down to what story to choose. The answer almost chose itself.

In my experience, there is an absence of Jewish stories in the media, and this is even more true in the larp world. When Jews do appear in media, their stories are usually framed by unfortunate stereotypes or fixated on specific historical narratives. The most familiar of these are the Christian stories about Jews in the time of Jesus, Hanukkah and Rosh Hashanah, the Americanized and secularized Jewish experience of Woody Allen or Jerry Seinfeld, or the ‘mysterious’ and often maligned ultra-orthodox narratives. And of course, the Holocaust, an ever-looming specter over any war story involving Jews. From Schindler’s List to Inglourious Basterds, it seems no one can have a conversation about World War II and Jews without immediately framing the narrative around concentration camps, gas chambers, and pictures of atrocities beyond measure. It’s easy to fall into these tropes when creating a game about Jews during World War II. But easy wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to make a game that was difficult, that challenged the narrative of the passive Jews, victims of the barbarity of the Nazi genocide machine. In the stories about the partisans of Europe, I found my inspiration.

The tagline of War Birds is “we have always fought,” the ‘we’ meaning women. But the truth is, Jews also had narratives of oppression brought down on them by political powers going back into antiquity. In my research, I discovered the stories of so many Jews who escaped the Nazis to join resistance cells across Europe, hiding in forests to survive and strike against German forces as partisans. In my eyes, these stories gave us the backdrop for a larp with agency and drive, beyond the tight confines of prison camp walls and the Nazi stranglehold. It provided a new lens for the Jewish experience. Within that framework however, there was an added layer worth exploring: the story of the woman’s experience during a time of crisis.

For most non-Jews, the interior lives of religious Jews and especially Jewish women is largely a mystery. Cultural and religious practices are hardly explored publicly or in media, and as a minority group often seen as impenetrable, the importance of these practices to Jewish identity might be difficult to understand. Yet to someone like me, who grew up Orthodox Jewish, I was raised with an innate understanding of the depth and meaning of religious practice in Jewish life. Tradition isn’t just a song from Fiddler On The Roof, but the cornerstone connecting generations of Jews in the global diaspora. Travel the world and you will meet another Jew whose practices are much like your own, no matter the language they speak or the place they call home. Jewish practice binds us, and never so much as the traditions connecting women. Passed down from mother to daughter, Jewish women are taught they are not only the keepers of the home, but the ones to teach their children the importance of their heritage. They are not just homemakers, of course, but aishet chayil – women of valor – who serve as the bedrock of cultural transmission. This is how it was passed down to me, from my own mother and grandmother, and from my female relatives. While the men might be more visible in their religious garb, their prayers, and their practices, we women almost had our own language, passed around between one another, connecting mothers and daughters back in a chain through centuries.

This was the story I wanted to tell when I sat down to write Keeping The Candles Lit. Not the story of war and the devastating effects on Jews across Europe. Instead, I wanted to focus on a story close to my heart, peeling back the layers of mystery about Jewish belief and practice and letting non-Jews, if even for one moment, see what this living, breathing tradition looks like from the inside. But more than anything, I wanted them to see what happened when war tried to tear those important bonds to pieces.

[space]

My grandmother, Nora Stern, came to the United States as a refugee. She was born in a tiny town in Hungary which no longer exists on the maps; it was razed to the ground by Nazis after they took her and her entire family away. Of her massive, twenty-five-member family, only my grandmother survived. She languished in a recovery camp in Sweden for months, gaining back her health after being liberated from Auschwitz. There, she met my grandfather Zev, who had lost his wife and daughter, and the two married. In the United States, they opened up a sandwich shop and struggled every day to make ends meet. They had my mother, Esther, in 1949, and my uncle Mitch not long after. My grandfather developed cancer, leaving my grandmother to tend to his health and raise my mom and uncle alone. By the time my mother turned sixteen my grandfather was gone, and together the women of my family kept food on the table and a roof over their heads. So when I was born, both were already aishet chayil, those women of valor, who spent their time steadfast in their beliefs, bonded by equal struggle and religious ties passed down from mother to daughter. And soon, passed down to me.

My grandmother never talked about the war to me. I spent most of my childhood at her house after school, since my parents both had to work, and she never spoke more than two sentences at a time about her experiences. Later, when I was twelve or thirteen, she visited my house in the evenings. She would sit at the kitchen table and my mother would type out long stories on an old typewriter. When I offered to do the job on a computer, the two threw me out of the room. I later found out my grandmother was telling her story – all of it – for the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. I was never allowed to read the accounts, but I know they haunted my mother years after. When my grandmother’s health began to decline, I’d hear her crying out at night when I stayed over to look after her. She’d cry for her friend Chaya, who she claimed was hiding “under the bed.” When I asked my mother about it, she only shook her head. Chaya died in the war, and that’s all they’d ever tell me. These were the stories I heard, the half-kept secrets, the looming knowledge of half a family gone, of roots being replanted in salted earth.

Working on Keeping the Candles Lit, I knew these were stories I could tell. I could frame the story of mothers and daughters coming together to rebuild life in the ashes of destruction. But that narrative was well-trodden, and didn’t reflect the women of iron I knew existed during the war. Instead, I considered the bond between my mother and grandmother, the religious practices they shared and passed on to me, and wondered what it would look like to try and pass down those beliefs, to keep those religious practices, while being hunted. Jewish culture in Eastern Europe during the early twentieth century reflected generations of insular cultural development and deeply structured life. What would happen to those understood places in society, that structured life, for those people on the run for their lives? More than anything, what would happen to the bonds between mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters, in the light of a new world? The small-town life of Eastern Europe was upturned, burnt down, destroyed forever. Before these women was a future of new countries, new families, and maybe even the death of everything they loved. To many, it might mean the death of belief in a God that could let the Nazis destroy their very world.

This cultural disruption was the heart of the story I wanted to tell. And it all came from my own personal, inexplicable guilt.

Shoshana and Esther Kessock, CUNY Brooklyn College graduation 2010.

Structurally, I had the tentpoles of Keeping the Candles Lit before I even realized why I truly wanted to tell the story. I knew I wanted to show the partisans fighting, the difficulties of women keeping their religious practices, and the connections between three generations of women as they struggled to survive. It wasn’t until much later that I realized why I personally wanted to capture the importance of these traditions for the rest of the world to see. I discovered it when I finally sat down to write the damn game after weeks of complete and total writer’s block, as I tried to find a way to encompass an entire culture’s meaning in a few pages. I procrastinated. I worried I would do a bad job and misrepresent Judaism, or worse, not get my point across. I wondered how you could crystalize generations of significance and beauty into a few thousand words. I couldn’t imagine how I could pass that weight on to players who might not even know a single Jew in their lives, or only knew the bagels and cream cheese and ‘oy vey’ Jewish experience of secular media.

It took peeling back the layers of my own childhood, of the years spent in Jewish school and at my grandmother’s kitchen table, in synagogue with my father, or being held high on my uncle’s shoulders at a Jewish wedding as a child, for me to understand the moments, the tiny precious breaths between rhetoric, dogma, and rote. In designing the game, I had to find the places where agency for play existed in concert with a litany of beliefs the players might not completely understand, but could tie in with their own backgrounds and cultures. While someone might not understand the rituals of the Sabbath completely, they could potentially connect to the experience of sharing a peaceful moment in front of holiday candles with their relatives. They could understand the importance of eating food rich with the memories of their ancestors, made for special holidays, shared together as religious or familial practice. They could understand the tensions of a family trying to transmit their culture down to the next generation in a rapidly changing world. These were the hooks I needed to connect, to distill the feeling of personal connection, rather than religious significance.

In the end, I found myself emotionally unprepared for the project. I forced myself to delve into meaning behind religious ritual I’d had a tempestuous relationship with all my life, to rediscover the beauty and importance in the Sabbath rituals, the modesty of dress and living so wholly important to Jewish life, practices I’d often questioned from a “progress” feminist position. Yet Keeping the Candles Lit forced me to face my feelings and rediscover much of what I’d left behind. When I finished writing the game, I didn’t want to look at it or play-test it. Instead, I handed it off to my roommate to run. I didn’t want to look at the damn thing ever again. It took months for me to understand that writing the game had ripped off a bandage about my culture, about our history, and about the transmission of tradition in my own family. Keeping The Candles Lit tore open old wounds about my relationships with my mother and grandmother, about my guilt at no longer being religious, and about my feelings of failing them both. It reminded me of years of fights, of disagreements and arguments about the importance of history, culture, of our practices and their importance. And it made me realize I’d written Keeping the Candles Lit as much as a tribute to the things I’d left behind, as for the rest of the world to see the Jewish world I deep down cherish so much.

My grandmother died when I was sixteen. She never got a chance to see the woman I am today. I often think she might have liked me now, though she would probably have (metaphorically) kicked me in the head over the years for things I’d done. Looking back, some of the greatest moments of my life were spent in the hours before the Sabbath, cooking her special chocolate roll cakes and listening to Yiddish songs on the radio. I will never forget lighting Sabbath candles with my mother, listening to her say the blessing, and waiting for my father to come back from synagogue while we talked the way only mothers and daughters only can, in the comfort of our own kitchen at home. This shared language of mothers and daughters came from our connection, which I’d left so far behind, severed just as much as it might have been in the heart of war.

The role of the daughter in Keeping the Candles Lit will always be me, the seeker for a new future in the face of change. And that’s why I’ll never run or play my own game. I don’t need to, and I don’t think I ever could.

In the end, I don’t know if my mother ever saw the text message about winning the IGDN Award for War Birds. The award plaque rests on my shelf, and I have a hard time looking at it. I have a hard time even looking at the War Birds anthology, even though I’m proud of my contribution. There’s just too much of my family, and too much of me in the game.

But before leaving for the convention, I hugged and kissed my mother, and she wished me well. I told her if she wanted me to stay home, she just needed to ask. She gave that universal Jewish mother shrug and said, “What would it matter what I said? You’ll only do what you want anyway. You always do.” And she was right. But even though the words sounded so harsh, I knew she meant them with a certain sense of pride. Her last words to me were, “I’ll talk to you when you get back,” although maybe the last words we shared with one another were in a text about how much she inspired a game shared throughout the larp world. I know my mother backed the Kickstarter for the book, even though she’d never larped in her life, and she read the game. And that’s got to be enough, for me.

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

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

Cover photo: Sabbath Candles, a cornerstone of Jewish practice.
Published on

2018-01-24

in

Diamonds

Safety and Calibration Design Tools and Their Uses

Written by
Maury Brown
Safety & Calibration techniques are important design tools that help diverse players access your larp and create stories together. They are fundamental to building Cultures of Care and Trust, which are essential for encouraging community members to take the risks and vulnerabilities inherent in role-play. Care and Trust allow players to be open to the epiphanies and intense emotions that lead to transformative experiences.

While Safety & Calibration techniques are an essential design consideration, no single set of tools works for every larp, nor should any tool be used in a larp without consideration for its unique design goals and community norms. This is the fundamental principle of bespoke design, where every larp design should be customized for its players and the experience you want to provide.

Careful implementation of Safety & Calibration techniques allows designers to accommodate a diverse player group and establish a baseline Culture of Care and Trust that then allows each participant to exercise their own autonomy and boundaries.

The Culture of Care and Trust through Safety & Calibration Tools

Overall, Safety & Calibration tools help create Cultures of Care and Trust by overtly signifying that participants take priority over the event. They model the expectations for how community members should behave toward one another. Safety and calibration mechanics actualize formerly implicit norms and empower players to make their own choices about what to participate in. Because they provide a method for quick player-player calibration, their use leads to more satisfying and safer role-play. A participant who feels safe, seen, and acknowledged feels more trust toward other participants and more willingness to engage in the shared experience.

Safety & Calibration techniques (Koljonen 2016) allow participants to advocate for their own self-care by setting the expectation that one should speak up about one’s needs, lowering the burden of asking for help from others. They also establish an expectation for how players will treat each other in the community — with respect, compassion, and recognition. For example, encouraging players to check-in on each other and commit to using correct pronouns demonstrates care for other players. These tools flatten the community hierarchy and help new, inexperienced, or unconnected players feel less isolated and unsupported, making it easier for them to become a part of the group. They help prevent participants from becoming emotionally overwhelmed and encourage others to aid those who require support. As a result, they help players feel safer and more connected.

This article offers three Safety & Calibration Tools that have been in use since June 2016 and are now used internationally in a variety of larps, conventions, and even in some workplace and social situations. This article will examine the origins, practicality, and benefits of the OK Check-In, the Lookdown, and the Pronoun Correction tools. These tools can be adapted for various contexts, and are useful and flexible elements for larp or convention organization or design.

The OK Check-In Safety Tool

Origin: Early iterations: 2010-2015 in various US larps. Current standardized mechanic: 2016, Maury Brown for New World Magischola (Brown & Morrow, 2016), as part of system of safety mechanics designed by Maury Brown, Sarah Lynne Bowman, and Harrison Greene.

Using the OK gesture to check with a fellow participant emerged spontaneously in several US larp groups between 2010-2015. In this early format, a player made the OK symbol at chest height to see if a fellow player was all right. The Player would return the OK sign if all was well. It was particularly used in boffer combat after a tough hit, and among subgroups within a larp community who were looking out for each other. Some larps that included this early version include Melodramatic Mysteries organized by Aaron Vanek and Kirsten Hageleit, larps organized around 2010 by Rob McDiarmid, and boffer larps in the New England area.

The difference between these early iterations of the OK Check-In and the mechanic presented here and being adopted in many larps is four-fold: 1) this mechanic is systematized as a formal game and community rule, modeled and expected of all participants; 2) it has been standardized with a three-tier response that requires active reflection; 3) it includes specific responses that players should use when they receive the “not okay” response; and 4) it is created purposefully to promote a culture of care and inclusion. The name of the tool evokes the skill check nomenclature of tabletop gaming, of “checking” and also “checking in”: the informal usage (typically in the US) meaning to brie y talk with someone to determine progress or obtain new information.

How to Perform the OK Check-In

Like its use in SCUBA, the OK Check-In is a “demand-response signal”, meaning that the other person needs to give a response; the lack of a response indicates trouble or distress. Since some physical role-play is extremely convincing, this is a useful tool to separate role-play from reality in situations such as acting out drunkenness, a physical injury, or a seizure. The technique is used when a person notices another person who appears distressed, sad, upset, lonely, etc. Person 1 may be unsure whether Person 2 needs assistance, or whether their distress is role-play or real. Person 1 uses the Check-In to determine if assistance is needed and to show that they care about the other person’s well-being.

The technique itself is a call and response comprised of the discreet gesture of establishing eye-contact and directing the “OK” symbol toward another player. The gesture asks the question: “Are you okay?” The other player then considers how they are doing, and responds in one of three ways: thumbs up, thumbs down, or a wavy flat hand. Thumbs-up means “Doing fine, no need for follow-up;” Thumbs-down means “I am not okay.” Wavy Flat hand means “I am not sure.” If the response is anything other than a thumbs-up (i.e. no response, thumbs-down, or wavy hand), Person 1 responds by dropping character and offering assistance in the preferred method for the specific larp/ event, e.g. “Can I take you to the off-game room?” An important part of this technique is that the individual event must make known what the person should do in the case of a negative response. For further explanation of the mechanic, see Creating Cultures of Trust through Safety & Calibration Mechanics, the Imagine Nation description, and Johanna Koljonen’s Toolkit: The OK Check-In.

Larp issues this tool addresses / How it is Useful
1. Knowing whether a co-player is role-playing or in distress (physically or emotionally).
2. Alleviating anxiety and uncertainty about whether a fellow player needs help.
3. Deliberating about whether to interrupt a person if you are concerned.
4. Clarifying whether someone is/was feeling alienated, upset, or in need.
5. Alleviating the anxiety of not knowing if something applies to a player or their character.
6. Modeling a go-to script to help players connect in times of need.
7. Contributing to actual safety as players who are hurt emotionally or physically are quickly attended to.
8. Crowdsourcing and dispersing emotional care and safety (especially useful in larger larps).
9. Requiring players to periodically self-assess their own needs and well-being.
10. Reducing incidences of players becoming overwhelmed as they reffect and self-monitor.
Updates and Adaptations of the Mechanic

Enthusiastic Thumbs-Up: This adaptation was created by Johanna Koljonen to use at End of the Line (Pedersen, Pettersson, & Ericsson 2016) in New Orleans. Proactively using the thumbs-up sign during a scene became a subtle calibration tool that could be ashed to another player, indicating that the player is not only comfortable with, but enjoying the intensity level of the scene. Akin to the calibration mechanic “Harder”, the enthusiastic thumbs-up tells a co-player they can intensify the scene without requiring a verbal utterance.

Proactive OK. This adaptation resulted from a player wanting to pre-empt a check-in. A player who recognizes that their behavior or demeanor may cause concern for fellow players proactively ashes the “thumbs-up” signal to indicate they do not need assistance.

Proactive Not-OK/Thumbs Down. Some players began using thumbs-down as a nonverbal way to ask for assistance, rather than waiting for another player to check-in with them. Some people have difficulty articulating when they are angered or upset, especially those who are neurodiverse.

Concerns

These gestures are not universal across the world, and if you are using them in a larp context, you will need to consider your audience. It is perfectly fine to state that you are aware the symbol is offensive in some places, but that in the context of your larp, it will mean something different. For example, the “OK” symbol is offensive in Brazil, Germany, Russia, and other countries around the world, because it is used to depict a private bodily orifice. In Australia, Greece, or the Middle East, the thumbs-up gesture means essentially “Up yours!” or “Sit on this!” and is considered offensive.

Graceful Exits and Calibration using “Lookdown”

The “Lookdown” technique is a “bow-out” mechanic that allows a participant to disengage, leave a scene, or indicate a lack of interest in interaction. Adding the tool to your game increases player comfort with choosing what scenes they want to be a part of. In turn, this helps players calibrate the type and intensity level of play they desire.

The Lookdown gives players an alibi to leave a scene without requiring an in-game or off-game explanation. Most importantly, the technique gives players a way to set a boundary and take care of themselves without making a disturbance, interrupting a scene, or requiring that others get involved. This tool empowers players to choose their own experiences, and makes opt-in/opt-out design more tangible.

The Lookdown enacts a model of continuous consent for players. A player may consent to a scene that they regret or their consent may change as a result of emergent play. The Lookdown provides a tool to exercise that change of consent, no questions asked. It also allows players to more quickly get off-game to tend to their needs (vs. trying to find a good opening to make an announced exit), and it helps players take care of themselves by signalling that they do not want to be stopped by others. Finally, Lookdown ensures a player will not receive any in-game repercussions due to an off-game reason, more clearly separating player and character.

Origin: The “Lookdown” technique was invented in spring 2016 in a bar in Oslo, Norway during a conversation between Johanna Koljonen and Trine Lise Lindahl, who suggested the gesture. At the Living Games Conference in May 2016, Koljonen mentioned the technique in her keynote. The Lookdown was piloted in New World Magischola in June 2016 and has since been picked up by other games, including End of the Line, where it was known as See No Evil.

How to Perform the Lookdown

The Lookdown is a Calibration Technique for exiting a scene or conversation without causing disruption. It consists of placing one’s open hand across one’s forehead, as if shading one’s eyes from the sun, then stepping back and walking away. An important part of the technique that makes it a safety and calibration tool is how other players react when someone uses the Lookdown. Since it is used by the player for off-game reasons to exit a scene, there should be no questions asked, no explanation needed or demanded, and no consequences given — in-game or off — for using the tool. This helps the player feel that their needs and choices are valid and valued, and allows them to choose their level of experience and engagement.

To perform the Lookdown: Person 1 shields their eyes and walks away. Person 2 (and all other people in the scene or immediate area) ignore Person 1’s exit and continue as usual.

Larp issues this tool addresses / How it is useful:
1. Player realization that the topic or scene isn’t going in the direction they want and they want or need to opt-out safely.
2. When making up a reason to exit a scene is too difficult (e.g. because the player is too distressed or triggered) or would be too disruptive (e.g. would break up the ow of the scene and point the attention to the person attempting to leave).
3. Exercising self-care when a sudden trauma trigger overwhelms or distresses a player.
4. When a player’s biological or personal needs require them to leave, but the player doesn’t want to explain or disclose them.
5. Moving from one place to another without being stopped by another player; quickly signals that a player does not wish to be interacted with.
6. When staying in or “pushing through” a scene makes a player uncomfortable, and increases the risk of becoming overwhelmed or distressed.
7. Alleviating feelings of anxiety or FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) for wanting to make a different choice but not knowing how to extricate oneself from a scene or space.
8. Preventing feeling trapped in a situation, scene, or space.
9. Assisting neurodiverse players, who more often than neurotypical players have difficulty voicing plausible reasons to leave a scene.
10. Signaling the difference between a character leaving a scene (which invites commentary from other characters) and a player leaving a scene (which should go unnoticed).
Pronoun Markers and Pronoun Correction

Pronouns matter. A continually misgendered player experiences immersion breaks in their role-play at best and gender dysphoria at worst. Assuming pronouns for a player or a character can lead to trouble. To avoid pronoun assumption, the triggering effects of misgendering, and the sometimes difficult process of correcting a misused pronoun, the pronoun markers and correction mechanics were developed. They have been in use in certain larps and communities since 2016.

Origin: Created in 2016 for New World Magischola by Maury Brown, Sarah Lynne Bowman, and Harrison Greene, with help from Sara Williamson and Liz Gorinsky, co-authors of the larp See Me Now, which explores queer identities. Brodie Atwater contributed to later workshop adaptations.

Pronouns on Display: Two Methods

There are two main procedures regarding using pronouns on name badges at larps or conventions. The first approach displays pronouns on all name badges as an expectation or norm; and the second allows participants to add their pronouns to their badges (or wear a separate badge or patch) if they choose. In both cases, players determine their own pronouns, and upon seeing the displayed pronoun, other members of the community are expected to make every effort to refer to each person by the pronoun they have displayed. Read more about how the two methods work in Larp Tools: Pronoun Markers and Correction Mechanics.

Pronoun Correction Procedure

All players should assume that their co-players are making their best efforts to use the correct pronouns. All players should also know that the expectation of the community is that those who use the incorrect pronouns will be corrected, and that the responsibility for correcting is shared across the community. The overriding principle for the pronoun correction procedure is: “If you make a mistake and use the wrong pronoun in spite of your good intentions, the best response is to acknowledge the mistake, correct, and continue the conversation.” Over-apologizing and making a big deal out of the mistake derails role-play, making both the person who was misgendered and the person who did the misgendering uncomfortable. This situation can lead the person who was misgendered to feel compelled to reassure the player who made the mistake, which can heighten feelings of dysphoria or alienation. Thus, a simple “thank you” after a correction is considered preferred etiquette and is least anxiety-producing for everyone involved.

If a misgendering occurs, participants are asked to use a quick, non-judgmental pronoun correction mechanic. This technique is used for both in-game and off-game interactions:
1. Person 1 uses the incorrect pronoun to refer to someone. The person who was misgendered can be the person you are speaking to or someone you are speaking about.
2. Person 2 notices the incorrect pronoun and says the word “Pronouns” and shows the P hand signal. This can be one of two signals: the British sign language symbol for the letter P (which requires two hands) or the American Sign Language symbol for P (right hand only). If the player does not have one or both hands available, or chooses to, they can simply use the verbal cue “Pronouns”.
3. Person 2 follows the verbal cue and/or hand signal with the correct pronoun Player 1 should use. e.g. “Pronouns. They.”
4. Person 1 repeats the correct pronoun and says “Thank you” for the reminder. Play or conversation resumes.
This procedure can be repeated as often as necessary if the misgendering continues. Sometimes, it is genuinely difficult to change one’s speech habits and use a different pronoun, especially when one is already under the cognitive load of role-play. A person may need several reminders. The expectation is that one is corrected each time, both to help someone pay attention to their language use, and to encourage not letting a misgendering pass without correction. In each case, the response is the same. The person correcting uses the mechanic and simply states the correct pronoun; the person being corrected acknowledges with “thank you.” Needing several reminders can be frustrating for everyone, but repetition is often needed as people learn new habits. If it appears that someone is intentionally misgendering or refusing to abide by stated pronouns, an organizer or member of the safety team should become involved.

What the Pronoun Correction Mechanic Does / How it is Useful:
1. Sends a clear message that your community is inclusive to people of all genders.
2. Formalizes how pronouns are handled in your community.
3. Reduces the amount of misgendering that occurs for players and characters.
4. Gives a simple and quick correction procedure that is expected and minimally intrusive.
5. Opens community members’ eyes to perspectives beyond a gender binary.
6. Teaches participants how to get better at recognizing and using different pronouns.
7. Helps trans and nonbinary participants feel more respected and safer.
8. Allows role-play to continue quickly after a correction, rather than allowing a conversation to derail into obsequies and discomfort.
9. Shares the responsibility for ensuring that people are called by their proper pronouns to everyone in the community, not just those who use non-gender-binary pronouns.
10. Opens larps to multiple gender expressions.
Conclusion

Because there is a more mobile and international larp community attending games outside of local larp groups, these design tools and mechanics are cross-populating into other larp cultures more readily than before. In some cases, a critical mass of players can introduce a mechanic into a game that the designers or organizers did not officially add to their design. This can be both good and bad. It’s good in that the players found the technique to be useful in solving one or more of the common larp issues it is intended to address and they want to add it to their game to experience those benefits. It can be bad if they do not have the support of the game organizers, who may view the mechanic with suspicion or even derision. Adding a mechanic informally can fracture a larping community into those who use or support it, and those who do not. This division can create community strife and call for a ruling from the organizers about whether to officially adopt the mechanic, which would change the play-style and/or community norms.

No design tool is universal for every larp, and the same goes with safety and calibration techniques. Larp designers need to evaluate their design goals, their community, and their players to decide which tools will work well for them and that specific larp. A basis of a culture of care and trust is needed to a certain extent for role-play to happen and to be welcoming to a variety of players. Safety and Calibration tools help to establish that culture of care and trust, making for more meaningful and intense role-play. No tool will be one hundred percent perfect one hundred percent of the time for one hundred percent of your players, but designers need to consider the good that the tools do on balance with the annoyance or resistance to change they may encounter. The OK Check-In, Lookdown, and Pronoun Correction tools are useful together or alone in many larp situations, especially ones that bring together diverse players. They are an important addition to the larp designer’s toolbox and can be used when they help you solve the problems in your community or meet your design goals.

References

Bowman, Sarah. “A Matter of Trust: Larp and Consent Culture.” Feb. 3, 2017, https://nordiclarp.org/2017/02/03/matter-trust-larp-consent-culture/

Brown, Maury. “Creating a Culture of Trust through Safety and Calibration Larp Mechanics” September 9, 2016. https://nordiclarp.org/2016/09/09/creating-culture-trust-safety-calibration-larp-mechanics/

Brown, Maury. “Pronoun Markers and Correction in Larps.” December 1, 2017. https://nordiclarp.org/2017/12/01/larp-tools-pronoun-markers-correction-mechanics/

Brown, Maury. “Player-Centered Design,” Keynote at Living Games Conference 2016, YouTube, last accessed June 10, 2016, https://youtu.be/oZY9wLUMCPY

Brown, Maury. “Pulling the Trigger on Player Agency: How Psychological Intrusions in Larps Affect Game Play,” Wyrd Con Companion Book 2014 (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con), https://www.dropbox.com/s/3yq12w0ygfhj5h9/2014%20Wyrd%20Academic%20Book.pdf?dl=0

Brown, Maury, and Ben Morrow. 2016-2017. New World Magischola. Larp. Richmond, VA. https://newworld.magischola.com/

Imagination Nation, LLC. “OK Check-In System”. http://www.imaginenationcollective.com/okcheckin/

Koljonen, Johanna. “Opt In/Opt Out Safety System,” Keynote at Living Games Conference 2016. YouTube, last modi ed June 10, 2016, https://youtu.be/7bFdrV3nJA8

Koljonen, Johanna. “Toolkit: The OK Check-In.” September 9, 2016. https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/toolkit-the-ok-check-in/

Koljonen, Johanna. “Toolkit: The “See No Evil” or Lookdown.” September 18, 2016. https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/toolkit-the-see-no-evil-or-lookdown/

Koljonen, Johanna. “The Two-Meaning Lookdown & Forcing Your play-style Preference On Others.” September 18, 2016. https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/the-two-meaning-lookdown-forcing-your-playstyle-preference-on-others/

Pedersen, Bjarke, Pettersson, Juhana, and Martin Ericsson. 2016. End of the Line. New Orleans, 2017. https://www.participation.design/end-of-the-line

Stark, Lizzie. “A Primer on Safety in Roleplaying Games.” Feb. 27, 2014. http://leavingmundania.com/2014/02/27/primer-safety-in-role-playing-games/

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

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

Cover photo: Participants at New World Magischola workshop safety mechanics. Photo courtesy of Learn Larp LLC.
Published on

2018-01-23

in

Hearts

Lobbying for the Dead – Vampire larp at the European Parliament

Written by
Juhana Pettersson
Organizing the first ever larp played partially at the European Parliament gave the opportunity to explore design concepts such as indexical larp, where the fiction of the larp corresponds to actual reality as closely as possible.

On 24th November 2017, the actual elected real-life Members of the European Parliament Miapetra Kumpula-Natri and Julia Reda sat in a meeting room at the European Parliament in Brussels and listened to arguments from lobbying organizations such as the European Security Forum and the Eichel Group. The subject of the day was a proposed piece of EU legislation called ETIAS, The European Travel Information and Authorisation System.

It’s a similar mechanism to the U.S. ESTA, and requires travelers to the EU to register in advance so that their information can be checked against multiple databases.

While the MEPs and the law were real, the lobbyists were not: They were participating in a larp called Parliament of Shadows, based on the tabletop roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade. The MEPs played themselves in a larp seeking to bring reality and fiction as close as possible in the world of vampire lobbying.

The Aesthetics of Reality

The World of Darkness is a fictional setting shared by roleplaying games such as Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. The core idea is that the World of Darkness is much like our world, except vampires, werewolves and other beings skulk in the shadows unbeknownst to us. The concept that the fictional world and the real world strongly resemble each other is built into the setting.

For Parliament of Shadows, we chose a corner of this world rarely visited in any of the previously published World of Darkness material: High level EU politics. All player characters were professional lobbyists, and the larp started with them doing what lobbyists do: Going to the European Parliament, pitching ideas, sitting in meetings.

One member of our core team, Maria Pettersson, works at the European Parliament as a political advisor. She designed and ran the segment of the larp that took place inside the Parliament building. This segment involved two actual MEPs, half a dozen NPC players, and assistants recruited among people who work at the Parliament. At maximum complexity, it involved six simultaneous scenes ranging from the tunnels under the Parliament building to the Plenary Hall (the space they use for full sessions of the Parliament).

The Parliament segment also presented new challenges to larp organizing because of the highly bureaucratic environment. In some cases, issues such as whether a door could be open or closed required extensive negotiation.

In Vampire: The Masquerade, ancient and powerful vampires seek to influence the mortal world and shape it to their purposes. The current owners of the franchise, the Swedish company White Wolf Entertainment, have favored an explicitly political understanding of these genre elements. The vision of our larp was in line with this policy, and allowed us to link actual, real policies and goals into the supernatural setting of the World of Darkness in a natural way. This way, our ancient vampires were not only seeking to control the fate of humanity in the abstract, but also on the level of concrete, actual policy.

Indexical

“360 degrees” is a common aesthetic idea in Nordic larp. It’s defined as larp where the visual surface matches that of the fiction. So if the larp is set in a spaceship, the venue is made to look like a spaceship. Ideally, you could turn around 360 degrees (hence the name) and not see anything that would break the illusion. From this perspective, what we did in Parliament of Shadows goes beyond 360 aesthetics and into an unusual level of larp fidelity.

The characters are lobbyists working to influence European politics, so one of our venues is the actual European Parliament. The characters are working to influence a real law and actual MEPs participate as supporting characters, playing themselves. When the characters go for cocktails, the venue is one that hosts parties held by real lobbying companies all the time.

The larp doesn’t only seek to imitate the fiction on the level of visual surface, but to replace it with reality whenever possible. One player commented that this was the first larp he’d ever been to that required security clearance for all participants. It was necessary to get the players into the Parliament building.

We call this style indexical larp, where the world of the fiction and the real milieu of the larp correspond indexically, that is one to one, as much as possible.

The two earlier World of Darkness larps organized by the same production company responsible for Parliament of Shadows, Participation Design Agency, also attempted to be as indexical as possible, although in a less dramatic way. The vampire techno party larp End of the Line always took place in the same venue in-game and off-game, whether in Helsinki, New Orleans or Berlin.

In the Berlin urban larp Enlightenment in Blood, all venues were similarly the same in-game and off-game. The nightclub was the same nightclub, just with vampires.

However, the indexicality of End of the Line and Enlightenment in Blood was more a question of convenience than a central aesthetic tenet. In those larps, it was easier to keep things real. In Parliament of Shadows, we used indexicality to an aggressive degree, including the use of real EU legal text and real Parliament workers to complement the physical surroundings.

A participant who works at the Parliament and played herself in the larp. Photo: Tuomas Puikkonen, in-game.

Into the Breach

The concept of indexicality also came into play in our collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux. The Cultural Institute is an official organization tasked with facilitating Finnish culture in the Benelux countries. They agreed to support us in an unorthodox way: By lending their facilities and personnel to us for a scene.

All the player characters were blood-addicted mortals who served distant, ancient vampires. We wanted to build a strong contrast between the daytime world of lobbying and politics and the nighttime world of blood and terror inhabited by the vampires. To this end, we created a Brussels vampire scene with supporting players. They held a perpetual, degenerate party at an extravagant hotel suite the player characters could visit.

The idea behind Brussels vampire society was that this was the city where ancient vampires sent their progeny to learn politics. So basically, the local vampires were all ultra-privileged scions of the high and mighty. We called these wastrel vampires, powerful fools who spent their time playing cruel games with each other, and whoever happened to walk through the door.

One of these characters had decided to continue his mortal career in the arts by making a film that would also reveal the existence of the vampires to humanity. One of the tasks of a lobbying group called the European Cultural Council was to look after the Masquerade, the rule that keeps vampires hidden. They gained information that suggested that the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux was funding a movie that would expose vampire secrets.

Armed with this information, the characters went to the actual, real Cultural Institute to meet with the people who in real life also made this type of funding decisions and attempted to dissuade them from the project.

In addition to creating cool scenes, these parts of the larp had an additional goal of showcasing larp to people who didn’t have experience with it. Since larp is best understood by trying, we felt that it was a good idea to create an opportunity for people who work in cultural institutions to experience it from the inside.

Involve the People

There’s an activist slogan that goes “Nothing about us without us”. This can also function as a larp design idea. Simply put, what happens when you involve the people larp is about in the creation of the larp?

In the case of the Parliament of Shadows, our milieu is the world of politics and lobbying in the European Union. This world was also part of our organizing team. We had people who worked at the European Parliament and people who worked as lobbyists.

The idea here is twofold. First, involving the people brings a higher level of fidelity and realism to the project. Second, it means that in some way, you have to face the people the larp is about. This is not the same as taking an uncritical stance. It just means that whatever you say, you’re going to say directly to those you’re talking about. It brings accountability to the process of larp design.

In the case of Parliament of Shadows, this method of involving the people wasn’t used in a particularly dramatic manner. It came naturally from the idea of indexical larp. In the case of this larp, involving the people made our take on EU politics infinitely more nuanced than it otherwise could have been. It also directly gave us the option to organize the larp at all, since it was dependent on the access provided by Maria Pettersson.

However, in others larps, this same method has been used in a more political way. Two of the organizers of Parliament of Shadows also worked on the Palestinian-Finnish larp Halat hisar. In Halat hisar, the larp was about the Palestinian political situation transposed onto Finnish alternative history. The team making the larp had Finnish and Palestinian members. Making that larp, we felt it was important that the Palestinian experience be represented in the process from the start of the design to the larp itself.

Playing with Somebody Else’s Toys

Working with an established setting like the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Masquerade has advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage is informational. The players can be assumed to know the basics of the setting already, so they don’t need to be explained in as much detail as they otherwise would. Since the amount of information players can digest is limited, this means that informational real estate is freed up for other purposes.

Not all of our players were familiar with the World of Darkness and for some, this was their first larp. Their lack of World of Darkness experience didn’t hinder their play, but the fact that most participants had it provided the larp with a collective informational advantage.

Disadvantages arise especially when the larp attempts to develop the setting in a new direction or create something that’s not in the style of previous works. Since the player already knows the setting, they assume that everything follows that template. If the larp seeks to do something unusual, these deviations need to be worked through with the players. In the case of Parliament of Shadows, we provided all players with information on how we’d be using the World of Darkness, so that they could adjust their vision of it accordingly.

However, problems can arise when there’s an informational discrepancy between players. If all players encounter our take on the ghouls, for example, they accept that ghouls are now like this. However, as was the case, if the player doesn’t encounter our version of Pentex (an evil corporation) but instead only hears about, they’ll picture it in their minds according to the standard template. This is natural: The whole point of using an established setting is to have that standard template in the head of the player.

This means that the Pentex of those characters who participated in the Pentex scenes fit with our interpretation and our larger framework of the larp. We chose to use Pentex as an element in the larp because they provided us with an agenda that would be interesting from the standpoint of political lobbying.

The majority of the players were not present in the initial Pentex scenes. This meant that when they heard that Pentex was present in the larp, their mental imagery came from the sources they knew: Vampire’s sister roleplaying game Werewolf: the Apocalyse. This led to a confusing situation where players who met Pentex were happy with it, and players who didn’t were unhappy, because they felt Pentex was tonally inconsistent with the rest of the larp.

This is a problem created by using a pre-existing setting in a specific way. In many larps, the larp is the only source of setting information available, so the organizers can assume that they control what’s true in the larp’s world and what isn’t. In a larp based on a shared setting this is not the case: Players have pre-existing ideas. These ideas can be used effectively, but they can also lead to problems, especially in a larp where it’s important to set a specific tone.

Lobbyists for European intelligence agencies hiding under the table of a translator’s booth to eavesdrop on a meeting. Photo: Tuomas Puikkonen, in-game.

A Tight Agenda

The indexical approach to larp informed the way Parliament of Shadows was structured. When a real-life lobbyist comes to Brussels, they book meetings, attend cocktail parties, go to dinners. Their schedule is packed.

Taking the real-life template of a lobbyist’s schedule, we organized the larp around a similarly tight masterplan built around pre-arranged events the characters had on their planners. This way, we knew where the players were going to be at any given time, and could move things along quickly. Although we had a very large number of locations in Brussels, many of them existed only for an hour or two before the characters moved on to the next venue.

This method also allowed us to splinter the larp into small groups experiencing their individual scenes at the same time in different locations. Bjarke Pedersen from our core team compared Parliament of Shadows to the Danish concept of 700% larp. In a 700% larp, one or two players experience a highly choreographed rollercoaster of an urban larp which often involved dozens of supporting players. Although our larp had 20 players, its structural concept was similar to 700% because of its predictability and reliance on pre-planned scenes.

Another structural predecessor was the final larp of the Baltic Warriors tour organized in the summer of 2015. All the previous Baltic Warriors larps consisted of a single location, but the finale was an urban game in which politicians, lobbyists and activists worked on issues of eutrophication in the Baltic Sea.

Here are some examples of the types of scenes characters could go through in Parliament of Shadows:
- Hide under the table in a translator’s booth in a meeting hall at the Parliament to eavesdrop on a secret meeting.
- Meet the vampire Prince of Brussels in a suite in the art nouveau style Hotel Metropole.
- Embrace the Spiral worshiped by the Black Spiral Dancer tribe of werewolves in a dank Brussels forest as a prerequisite to a lobbying deal for the Pentex corporation.
- Look over the city from the top of the Arc de Triomphe.
- Imbibe vampire blood from a suspect ziplock bag in a dirty bar toilet.
Indeed, the larp’s schedule was so packed that allowing the players enough time for socializing became a concern at one point of the design process.

Claimed by Larp

After 2017, the Plenary Hall of the European Parliament is now a place where larp has happened. One of the goals of Parliament of Shadows was very consciously to take larp into places it has never been before, both physically, conceptually and socially. For many of the politicians and Parliament workers, it was their first experience with larp as an artform. (It was also the first time my mother tried larp, in a small supporting role.)

Our hope is that it can be used to bring new legitimacy to larp as an artform. After all, every day the Members of Parliament bring cultural events such as concerts and film screenings to the European Parliament. It was high time that one of these events was a larp.

Parliament of Shadows

The larp was produced by Participation Design Agency in collaboration with Oneiros and White Wolf Entertainment.

Date: 23-25 November 2017
Location: Multiple venues in Brussels, Belgium, including the European Parliament and Arc de Triomphe
Number of players: 20
Overall number of participants: 30
Designer, writer and producer: Maria Pettersson, Juhana Pettersson & Bjarke Pedersen
Executive Producer (Participation Design Agency): Johanna Koljonen
Executive Producer (Oneiros): Tom Boeckx
Producer (Brussels): Anne Marchadier & Wim Peeters
Runtime organizer: Tonja Goldblatt
Documentation: Tuomas Puikkonen

References

AbdulKarim, Fatima; Arouri, Faris; Kangas, Kaisa; Pettersson, Maria; Pettersson, Juhana; Mustafa, Riad and Rabah, Mohamad. (2013 and 2016). Halat hisar. http://www.nordicrpg.fi/halathisar/ (Accessed December 27, 2017) Run: Otava, Finland, 2016

Bridges, Bill et al. Werewolf: The Apocalypse 2nd Edition. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf, 1994.

Ericsson, Martin; Pedersen, Bjarke and Pettersson, Juhana. (2016-2017). End of the Line. https://www.participation.design/end-of-the-line (Accessed December 27, 2017) Run: Helsinki, Finland, 2016

Pettersson, Juhana. “Baltic Warriors: Helsinki – Saving the Environment with Zombies.” In The Nordic Larp Yearbook, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted, 8-15. Copenhagen: Rollespilsakademiet, 2014.

Pettersson, Juhana. (2017). Enlightenment in Blood. https://www.worldofdarkness.berlin/ (Accessed December 11, 2017) Run: Berlin, Germany, 2017

Pettersson, Maria; Pettersson, Juhana and Pedersen, Bjarke. (2017). Parliament of Shadows. http://parliamentofshadows.com/ Run: Brussels, Belgium, 2017

Pohjola, Mike. (2015-2016). Baltic Warriors. http://www.balticwarriors.net/ A tour of eight larps in Helsinki, Finland; Tallinn, Estonia; St. Petersburg, Russia; Sopot, Poland; Kiel, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark and Stockholm, Sweden.

Rein•Hagen, Mark et al. Vampire: The Masquerade 2nd Edition. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf, 1992.

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

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

Cover photo: The last scene of the larp was played in a cultural center called Beursshouwburg, recently the location of the Feminist Curse Night event. Photo: Tuomas Puikkonen, in-game. Other photos by Tuomas Puikkonen.