Embodied fiction has an annoying habit of taking on a life of its own. Real events in larp surge into fictional constructs like waves on a beach, altering its surface. Why then do we need to separate fiction and reality in our larp theory? Larp has been re-framed a number of times since its proper inception in the early 1980s: as a medium of pure escapism, as an artform, as a powerful means of immersion, as a form of interaction design. My goal here is to re-frame it yet again, this time in terms of a theory that combines narrative and play, in-game and out-of-game experiences.
Despite decades of talking about tensions between larp narratives and larp experiences, we remain dissatisfied with our theory on the topic. Larpwright Juhana Pettersson (2017) recently posed the question: “What do we mean when we talk about story in larp? … [The] concepts we have for talking about the experience of story are weak” (83-84). The aesthetic framework for us to address what designers and players witness as the “experience of story” requires further articulation, which this essay provides. Specifically, it dwells on three ritualistic concepts: emergence, iteration, and reincorporation.((Almost immediately, one is prompted to think of studies of religious rituals. Indeed, there is a productive framework to be found in larps as rites of passage. Victor Turner, referring to Arnold van Gennep, talks of rites of passage as being divided into “separation, transition, and incorporation.” There is not space here to delve into ritual theory, but this author confesses that, indeed, a pregnant relation between narrative, ritual, and larp does indeed persist.))
Theorists and practitioners of role-play often use the verb “emerge” to describe what happens to both narrative and player activity during a game: that the larp design elements and player embodiment enable the emergence (McGonigal 2003) of a thing both not wholly unexpected and nevertheless intensely engaging. Yet this basic synthesis itself remains underexamined. We use the verb “emerge” and the adjective “emergent” as though these were natural processes, rather than carefully cultivated within the design. Furthermore, the spontaneity of emergence in larp remains in dialogue with its counterpart: iteration, or the rhythmic repetition and slight variation of the same element throughout a game. Iteration permits the emergent content to interact productively with the intended themes of the larp. Finally, one can attribute much of the emotional impact of a given game or campaign when an emergent or iterative element from a previous part of a larp returns in a transformed state at a much later point, what I call reincorporation. Together, these three processes form a basis on which we might aesthetically appraise a larp: How did its design facilitate the production of new, unpredictable, thematically appropriate content? What story and/or embodied elements built upon each other to reinforce the themes or content of the larp? How was a component of the larp reincorporated in a narratively satisfying way?
Some Examples
Rather than get too esoteric too quickly, I would like to invoke a few play examples for reference. The first example involves a pervasive game of Steve Jackson’s Killer (1982), known to some as Assassin, which I ran in early 2000 in Iowa City, IA, USA for a group of 12 high-school students. Each player had the thinnest of characters: a terrorist cell and an Interpol squad trying to stop them. Every day, the terrorist cell had to drop off fake bomb components at a location, and every day, Interpol agents would follow me, as the gamemaster, to the spot for the handoff. The game correspondingly led to actual car chases, trespassing, and several close-calls with the law and authorities, although none of the above were intended. The second example involves a 2001 Vampire: The Masquerade larp of an auction among vampires of a living statue. Halfway through the runtime, a player got bored and ran off with the primary artifact in question. Early accusations regarding who stole it faded into player consternation about what had happened to the bored player and, indeed, why they had chosen to ruin many larpers’ evening, concluding in the scapegoating of the bored player’s character for most of the ills troubling that particular vampire community. The third example involves the 7th run of magic school larp New World Magischola (2017) in Williamsburg, VA, USA. One of the wizard professors unleashed, as a plot device, so-called “murder furniture,” including a “murder chair” that attacked people. NPCs quickly took a liking to the idea, and the plotline got so far as a player dressed up as a “murder lamp” being a character’s date to the closing ball. The fourth example involves the first 2015 run of international Nordic larp Inside Hamlet, in which my character Colonel Perdue, leader of the Stormguard –– the castle peacock regiment –– was killed by the head of the Companions –– the castle courtesans –– for choosing to stay and guard the castle but not King Claudius… and not run away with her. She in turn was killed by a fellow Stormguard member as revenge for being slighted earlier, which my character had misunderstood in his final gasping moments as showing loyalty to him. Each example above demonstrates relatively simple instances of player and character outcomes being affected by not entirely predicted paths of play. The rest of this essay is devoted to finding a language to apprehend those outcomes.
Emergence
Larp design incentivizes human behavior to produce some level of story out of the inherent messiness of human interaction and information distribution. To many, it looks like chaos. As Andrew Rilstone (1994) reminds us, however, “from this chaos, a more or less well realized story emerges” (11). The verb “to emerge” means to move out or away from something else. In the case of larp, embodied play of characters in a fictional reality produces a constantly shifting field of dynamics that move the game in countless directions away from not only the initial game state, but also within and beyond the scope of designer intention. In fact, the main way we can appraise emergent play is by seeing if it is both unexpected yet fits the design and themes of the game as implicitly agreed upon between the players and the organizers, but does not escalate into dangerous physical, mental, or legal territory. My taxonomy poses the following four questions of each distinct moment of embodied larp play as the game unfolds:
Does the emergent play directly coincide with the themes, tropes, and even design intentions of the larp while staying within bounds of player safety?Cultivated emergence is emergent play delivering what is promised and expected within the game’s design.
Does the emergent play generally fit the themes & tropes of the larp but doesn’t stem directly from the design? Uncultivated emergence is unexpected by all parties involved, frequently including the players themselves. It prioritizes the impact of free play over the design itself, while still holding to the agreed-upon themes of the game.
Does the emergent play distract and diverge from the themes & tropes of the larp while not endangering anyone?Divergent emergence divorces itself from much of the intended content of the larp, often as the result of overt player action.
Does the emergent play, regardless of fitting the design and themes, actively escalate potential real-life dangers to the players? Unleashed emergence is the classic depiction of play getting “out of hand,” from the Hollywood-spun delusions of Mazes and Monsters (1982) to the in-game bullying that escalates to actual bullying.
Players constantly negotiate the results of their own play with respect to the design of the larp. The fictional alibi of terrorists and Interpol in the Killer example led to parents real-life scolding their children and said children hiding from the police. This is unleashed emergence: incentives of the game escalated its stakes beyond designer intention and player safety to the detriment of all involved.((Although not necessarily outside the established themes of the larp. Indeed, real stakes heighten the sense of risk already inherent in the fictional scenario. What is endangered, of course, are players’ physical bodies and records with the law.)) The Vampire: the Masquerade example is a banal instance of divergent emergence: when an event produces story and player effects that do not align with any of the themes or intentions of the larp, for good or for ill. The NWM example could be construed as uncultivated emergence: murder furniture taking on a life and plotline of their own fits within the valence of Harry Potter-esque fictional tropes and provides play opportunities and adversity for larpers present. Inside Hamlet delivers what one might even call cultivated emergence: the larp was specifically designed for characters to kill each other in the final Act –– and not before –– thanks to tragic misunderstandings and doomed choices made during play beforehand.
This emergence model is agnostic as to whether or not events are diegetic or non-diegetic –– there are only events –– or whether one is talking about an individual character’s story or the whole story of the larp, as everything is presumed to feed into everything else. A larp’s events do not so much demarcate diachronic passage through time (as with coming-of-age rituals, weddings, funerals, etc.) than create spaces of synchronic play that offer commentary on the game and players. Within a delineated 10-day period, as in Killer, players engage themselves in an elaborate cat-and-mouse game of murder, and then their in-game and out-of-game actions are consigned to a murky, inaccessible past. My character’s epic Act III death in Inside Hamlet re-framed my player memory of a lackluster Act I to be actually prefiguring later player-character experiences. Events in a larp fit into complex systems–– systems that are “unpredictable but non-random” (Montola 2004) –– that then produce fuzzy narrative, physical, play, and social outcomes. But whereas Montola (2004) frames role-playing as oscillating between order and chaos –– integrative and dissipative –– I see emergence as a pragmatic aesthetic phenomenon concerned with designer vision and the affordances and safety of a specific larp design. Events emerge from a larp during runtime, and players steer (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015) their play in their encounters with a mixture of diegetic and non-diegetic material, between interpretations of the design rules and personal whims.
Iteration
The design of a larp does not stop at emergence, however. Simply instigating and being surprised by both diegetic and non-diegetic events does not lend structure to a larp. That’s what iteration does. The repetition of a process or utterance, iteration takes emergent diegetic and non-diegetic facts and continues to bring them back in slightly different forms, so that player-characters can begin to narratively structure and even analyze emergent content. Players need reliable touchpoints and benchmarks to make sense of their play, with rituals and their variation critical to the flow and processing of information (Harviainen and Lieberoth 2011). Iteration from both the design and the players provides these touchpoints. Here, Eleanor Saitta’s (2012) temporality models of expansion, compression, and periodicity are useful: the rhythms of the larp design involve accentuating certain moments, shortening time in others, and “the manipulation of time that evokes the rhythms of everyday life, allows them to build, and then highlights how those rhythms change or break down.” (126) Iteration means such temporal repetition and manipulation become fine-tuned by both the designers and players over the course of the larp, with the latter often seeking the sort of variance to produce suspense and plot turning points, the former often seeking repetition as a maintenance of the larp’s core rhythms. Killer featured varied bomb-drop points, but the ritual of the drop-off remained refreshingly similar: a public space, an ambiguous package, a quietly watching terrorist player. Variations on the space and whether or not an Interpol player had also been following the drop-off became the main points of iteration on the emergent narrative. Sometimes the drop-off was quiet, introspective, and on a sunny day; other times leading to an intense gun battle at the drop of a hat. NWM iterated on the murder furniture, introducing it as an element and antagonist again and again until it became a central node in many players’ plotline. In each case, the reintroduction of the element or ritualization of a routine allowed player perspectives to form and in-game character strategies to coalesce.
At its aesthetic core, iteration must maintain a delicate balance. Elements such as scenes, tropes, or characters can be repeated with variation, but too many times will instantiate the elements as an in-joke, rather than a weighty narrative component. Iterate too few times, however, and the elements in question do appear to be merely at the whim and caprice of the players and scenario, not the core experience of the larp. Iterating with little variation produces the effect of routine and ritual, whereas iterating with much variation produces outcomes of exception and arbitrariness. Good iteration allows designers and players alike to play with the themes of the larp without letting such thematic exploration deviate from a core, planned experience. Emergence with well-thought-out iterative mechanisms––act structures, daily routines, regular meta-scenes, recurring character motifs––gives the player space to chart their path through the story as it unfolds. But even themes and variation won’t clinch a narrative for a player without a sense of resolution.
Reincorporation
Reincorporation, or making something part of something else once more, remains one of the simplest and least appreciated aspects of role-playing aesthetics. As I’ve recently argued with respect to the literary-inspired PC game Planescape: Torment (Torner, forthcoming), reincorporation brings prior player actions and diegetic facts into meaningful dialogue with such actions and facts much later in the game’s runtime. Players feel as though they have had an impact on the narrative; that their decisions mattered. To reincorporate material from earlier in a larp into a later section is to create an arc that bridges over the chaos of emergence. Actual play could have been as messy and repetitive as one might expect, but the re-appearance of a disappeared letter, the familiar line from the beginning of the game delivered in different context, the fulfillment of a prophecy –– these tropes help structure and fulfill certain “promises” delivered earlier in the larp. Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979) remains a core reference regarding reincorporation:((See: http://story-games.com/forums/discussion/6122/games-that-actively-support-reincorporation)) improv actors regularly find common ground with role-players in creating meaning amidst the chaos of human collaborative creativity by taking statements or details from earlier and citing or re-casting them at the end.
Larp reincorporation can appear in a plethora of forms, In Killer, reincorporation happened when two players of the game knew of each other’s secret identity from the very beginning of the game, but chose not to reveal what they knew until they were the very last two characters alive. A fact known to the players and game masters alike was then redeemed by a satisfying fake public gun battle. Vampire: the Masquerade could provide no satisfying reincorporation: there was to be an auction, and then emergent events decreed that there was none. We struggled to give the experience meaning as a result. NWM saw the murder lamp as a date to the school dance, a redemption of the complexity of the murder furniture, thought to be merely lethal mundane objects. Inside Hamlet took the slighted soldier’s anger from Act 2 and channeled it into a murder that would have ripple effects during the final hours of Elsinore. Each larp mentioned had to engage with the simple logic of whether or not objects and events from early on would then appear in the final stages of the larp.
Conclusion
The model proposed above allows participants and designers to analyze their narrative progression in a larp, whilst also being able to pass aesthetic judgments on the overall experience. Emergence tracks against the flexibility of any given larp design, iteration and the rhythms thereof pin down emergent properties through routinizing and varying them, and reincorporation parses the stories told by reintroducing the familiar into a dramatically different game state of a given larp. Without having to distinguish reality from fiction, play from boredom, in-character events from out-of-character events, this model sees larp as a complex information system, “code that runs on humans” (Steele, 2016), and seeks nevertheless to give players the tools to make aesthetic sense of their experiences. The different forms of emergence allow game masters to calibrate the experience for the players, and players are aware that repeating and then sometimes varying an activity allows them to give form to the chaos that is larp. In order for us to expand upon and improve larp as a medium, it is high time that we use our aesthetic judgment to evaluate as many relevant characteristics of what we consider to be a larp’s “story,” and the tools offered here are but one way to spark that judgment. Other models exist and new ones are welcome to emerge, but the story architecture of a given larp event lends itself to so many diverse readings that there is merit in pinning down the basics for posterity.
References
Harviainen, J. Tuomas and Andreas Lieberoth (2011). “Similarity of Social Information Processes in Games and Rituals: Magical Interfaces.” Simulation & Gaming 43 (4): 528–49. doi:10.1177/1046878110392703.
Johnstone, Keith (1979). Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Faber & Faber.
Montola, Markus (2004). “Chaotic Role-Playing. Applying the Chaos Model of Organisations for Role-Playing.” Beyond Role and Play, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. Helsinki: Solmukohta: 157-173.
Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta (2015). “The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together.” The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted. Copenhagen, Denmark: Rollespilsakademiet: 106-117.
Pettersson, Juhana (2017). “Hamlet, Vampires, and the Italian Alps.” Once Upon a Nordic Larp… 20 Years of Playing Stories, edited by Martine Svanevik, et al. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt: 79-84.
Rilstone, Andrew (1994). “Role-Playing Games: An Oveview.” Inter*Action 1: 10-15.
Saitta, Eleanor (2012). “It’s About Time.” States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Helsinki: Solmukohta: 124-128.
Steele, Samara Hayley (2016). “The Reality Code: Interpreting Aggregate Larp Rules as Code that Runs on Humans.” International Journal of Role-Playing 7: 30-35.
Torner, Evan (forthcoming). “Planescape: Torment Immersion.” How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina Huntemann and Matthew Payne. New York: New York University Press.
Turner, Victor (1982). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications.
Immersive experience designers have been inspired by Ida Benedetto’s 2017 design reference work Patterns of Transformation (Benedetto 2017). The multi-part essay is the result of Benedetto’s personal involvement creating transgressive events such as The Night Heron (Sextant Works, 2013) coupled with her research on sex parties, wilderness survival treks, and unconventional funerals. She discovered similarities within all of these endeavors, and suggests these patterns catalyze personal transformation. She states in her introduction:
In previous eras, social gatherings and ritual experiences were the domain of religious institutions, cultural organizations, or the state. Now, they increasingly fall within the realm of design as it expands to address challenges of human emotion and connection. Experience design offers a possible solution to our very human craving for connection and meaning in the face of increased isolation and diminishing social cooperation.
Benedetto, 2017
Undergoing a risky experience can be personally rewarding on a fundamental level far beyond an amusing narrative or fostering a friendship. For experience designers, there may be no higher calling than the possibility of healing humanity through one self-improved person at a time. Oftentimes government and business interests regulate our interactions with the world and other people. It may befall the artists and craftspeople who, through unpredictable experiences such as larp, break the artificial restrictions continuously plastered over us and allow our spirit to breathe again. But transformative experiences are both delicate and wild, easy to ruin and inherently uncontrollable. Like fire that can devastate a city or fuel a moonshot, risk is a powerful instrument that should not be bound and buried in the creative tool box. We hope this essay will cultivate a respect for risk and reveal the possibilities for healthy individual growth through intentionally risky adventures.
What is Risk?
All of life is risk. Living without taking risks is not really living. That would be half-living, under a spiritual anesthesia. This high-security society that is developing sees in risk a declared enemy, but in doing so, allows a sort of gangrene to develop. The idea that we can achieve zero risk is not only collectively harmful, but also toxic for individuals.
Anne Dufourmantelle interview in Le Monde
According to Benedetto, “risk is any threat to one’s current state that offers the potential to destabilize the way things are. Higher order risks can include financial, political, and legal risks. Primal risks threaten our emotional, social, or physical well-being.” (Benedetto, 2017). We will concentrate on the primal risks.
An emotional risk jeopardizes one’s sense of self, a deeply-held belief, motivation, confidence, or one’s composure. Harm to your emotional state can lead to depression, anger, or compulsive thinking. It can leave psychological scars that can impact a person’s quality of life. The concept of bleed is a strong indicator of emotional changes, but change is not inherently negative. Benedetto suggests that facing risks can strengthen “one’s emotional range and resilience.” (Benedetto, 2017). Like physical exercise, we can use designed experiences to toughen our “ego muscles” through stressful exertion.
Benedetto’s explanation of a social risk is “a threat to one’s standing with a group. A social risk could damage one’s image, sever one’s connections with others, or bruise one’s sense of self-worth. Confronting social risks can give someone new tools for creating and maintaining connections with others.” (Benedetto, 2017).
A social risk can for example mean being judged and found guilty of something by peers. In larp, this can come from role-playing a character close to your real self. You can potentially reveal truths about yourself to others who may not accept them, resulting in ostracization and, thanks to social media and whisper networks, banishment from other events. Playing a villainous character may also be a social risk, even if that character was pre-generated. People might mistake the player for the character, and be negatively biased against the player. This risk increases if you play the same character or type of character repeatedly. You may also be judged for the actions your character takes, as others may ascribe “poor” choices to the player. Social risk often appears in larp communities that create and enforce a code of conduct. The energy and impetus that causes the community to form is also the energy that creates a social risk of exile from the group. When someone causes harm to another—intentionally or not—they may be banned from the community. Benedetto researched a sex party curated by The Dirty Gentleman (TDG), or Mr. Gentleman, containing high social risk. This excerpt may sound familiar to campaign larpers:
When it comes to sexually permissive events, the risk is not only in being hurt but in doing the hurting. Enacting harmful behavior creates the social risk of shame and ostracization. “There is a term for deciding certain people are good or bad which is ‘Voting People off the Island’,” says Mr. Gentleman. “The idea is that you can be in this world until you do something wrong, and then you are dangerous and bad and need to go away.” The severity of a ‘Voting People Off the Island’ model is exactly what The Dirty Gentleman is designed to counter. The gathering focuses on social etiquette so that behaviors, rather than the individual participants, are the focus of potential improvement.
Benedetto, 2017
A physical risk is harm to one’s body. In the most extreme case, this results in death. Taking physical risks is common in mainstream activities such as skydiving, bungee-jumping, and most sports. Boffer larps feature physical risk and utilize many rules to mitigate it, e.g., no head or groin shots, maximum bow draw weight, weapon checks, etc. Benedetto writes “Confronting physical risk can reframe one’s sense of vulnerability in day-to-day life and change our relationship to the constructed environments we inhabit every day.” (Benedetto, 2017)
It must be acknowledged that Benedetto stresses that any risk should be roughly equal between the participants, especially social risk. Reacting to a recent Vanity Fair article about Silicon Valley sex parties that enable stereotypical heterosexual male fantasies, she opines “If all participants do not need to risk rejection equally, and those least empowered to leverage their personal boundaries are those most likely to suffer consequences outside the party, you have a recipe for coercion and abuse.” (Benedetto, 2018). Further inquiry into the effects of imbalanced risk among participants is needed. For our purposes, we assume that any risk is generally the same for all involved, possibly including the designers and organizers.
Each of these three types of risk can be actual or imagined, and this is not a duality but a spectrum. Our subjective perception can deceive participants into thinking risk
exists when it does not or is minimal, e.g., afraid of embarrassing oneself with “poor” role-playing among a group of supportive larpers.
is greater than it actually is, e.g., touching another person on the shoulder without their consent.
is less than it actually is, e.g., shooting an old padded arrow from a bow with 30-pound weight at 28” draw at a person when they aren’t looking (LARP Haven Facebook group query, based on over 60 responses, 2018).
does not exist when it does, e.g., getting food poisoning from a novice food preparer, or being unaware of the presence of bees and whether or not you are allergic to their sting.
Unknown actual risks are the most perilous, and discovering the risk after the fact can be exhilarating or traumatic; the danger was unnoticed, survived by someone unprepared for the challenge.
It is critical that experience designers understand the difference between actual and imagined or mis-perceived risk. This difference is particular to each participant as well—someone with an acute nut allergy has a greater actual risk in eating unidentified foods compared to someone who does not. Following a recommended transparency of expectation (Torner, 2013) the designers have a moral and possibly even legal obligation to inform the participants about the experience before undertaking it, whether it involves illegal trespassing, like Benedetto’s The Night Heron, or violence, like the Blackout Experience (Josh Randall and Kristjan Thor, 2009). Both events were up front in their marketing; The Night Heron was an intimate experience in a building’s empty water tower (without authorization to be there), and Blackout involves a single participant going through a series of scenes where they are grabbed, shoved, and choked by the actors (NPCs). Keeping actual risk hidden from participants means the designers are taking on their own undue risk, which may not be the purpose of the activity.
There is considerable opportunity, however, in playing off the perceptions or misperceptions of the participants. Benedetto describes risk perception as “Relying on our unconscious to steer us away from risks makes life manageable, as long as we can trust our unconscious to properly identify the risks. Occasionally waking up from our unconscious steering can put us back in touch with something enriching and transformative.” (Benedetto, 2017). Competition, for example, is an easy method of suggesting risk—the characters might lose the battle and die—while controlling the actual amount of danger faced by adjusting the power level of the opponents. In a controlled, specific manner, duplicity can be quite effective in setting up the conditions for a transformation. More about deception is in the tips section.
What is Transformation?
Risk is a kairos, in the Greek sense of the decisive moment. And what it determines is not only the future, but also the past, behind our horizon of waiting, in which it reveals an unsuspected reserve of freedom.
Éloge du risque, Anne Dufourmantelle
Benedetto defines transformation as:
A transformation is a fundamental change. The change can be big or small, but what makes it transformational is how close the change is to what makes someone who they are. Not all transformations are equal, and not all transformations come about in the same way. Transformation is hard if not impossible to measure because most measurements track the effects of the transformation, not the transformation itself. Sometimes whatever is worth measuring about the transformation isn’t evident until the transformation is well under way.
Benedetto, 2017
The main criteria for transformation is that it is personal. It is an interior redecorating of your psyche. Although any immersive, interactive experience can change your social circle, hobbies, discretionary income or vacation destination, those are not part of personal transformation. A personal transformation converts the human being through the process of the human doing. It can shatter parts of the previous self, and reconstruction takes time. Benedetto reminds us:
If the experience is successful in delivering transformative potential, the participant cannot fully wrap their mind around what has happened; they cannot satisfactorily tame the splendor of the experience with serious judgment about what happened to them. Leaving an experience in a state of disoriented awe allows for the participant to reorder their world view and sense of self in order to make meaning out of what they went through. Transformation is an unraveling, followed by a slow and sometimes prolonged stitching back together.
Benedetto, 2017
Benedetto describes three ways that we can be transformed via a designed experience: acute, repetitive, and dramatic.
Acute transformation is produced by a change that is imposed on someone without warning, against their will, or otherwise beyond their control. In this case, the purpose of the experience is to help the participants adjust to the change that has happened in their world and get past the shock of the change. Not transforming would mean being stuck as the world leaves them behind, often to their detriment.
Benedetto, 2017
Avant-garde funeral directors specialize in acute transformation because they design a ceremony unique to the aggrieved. Acute transformational larps are a minority of larps—possibly, too, of designed experiences in general. This is because of the time and care necessary to create something meaningful for a specific audience who already encountered something overpowering. Other people, especially strangers, may not understand or want to participate in something so personal to one or a few. Nevertheless, experiences have been designed as a reaction to an unexpected event, and it may be the creator who seeks transformation themselves. Siobahn O’Loughlin’s Broken Bone Bathtub (2015) is “an immersive theatre project taking place inside a bathtub, in an actual home. After a serious bike accident [the acute catalyst], a young woman musters up the courage to ask for help, and shares her story, exploring themes of trauma, suffering, human generosity, vulnerability, and connection. The audience takes on the role of Siobhan’s close friends; not only in listening but sharing in their experiences, and assisting the cast-clad artist in the actual ritual of taking a bath.” In this 2018 Knutpunkt Companion, larpwright Shoshanna Kessock describes her larp scenario, Keeping the Candles Lit, which became tied to an acute experience, the loss of her mother. Even as the creator, this fabricated experience (scenario) provided Kessock with a lifeboat to weather an unexpected tragedy. (Kessock, 2018)
Repetitive transformation happens through repeat exposure to something over a series of experiences. The shift in the participant may be gradual or sudden but it comes about through habituating an experience that incrementally moves the transformation forward.
Benedetto, 2017
Benedetto refers to The Dirty Gentleman’s quarterly escapades as an example of repetitive transformation. For larps, clearly, these are our episodic events. There are many examples of people who have changed, often for the better, through recurring larp campaigns; enough that we assume this is prima facie.
Benedetto defines the third type of transformation:
Dramatic transformation happens at the end of a dramatic arc that has built the participants up to a change. A dramatic transformation happens as a result of an intense and concentrated experience. While dramatic arcs are often associated with fiction, they can happen in experiences of a profound confrontation with reality, too.
Benedetto, 2017
The likeliest larp candidate for this type of change is a weekend-long, one-shot event. Yet designed experiences can reach profound intensity within hours or even minutes, depending on the design and the participants. For example, Tobias Wrigstad’s formidable and transgressive larp Gang Rape (2008), which uses the fiat system wherein consenting participants (the rapists) verbally describe the physical act of rape to the victim, who verbally describes the emotions the rapist is feeling, lasts 45-90 minutes. By putting players in a highly-relevant, high-stakes, high-risk and pre-defined arc, it reduces the opportunity to escape from the serious subject matter of sexual assault, creating opportunity for dramatic transformation.
Following the analogy of an ego gymnasium, acute transformation is like physical therapy after an injury, repetitive transformation would be daily jogging, and dramatic transformation would be a short but intense training regimen before a race or triathlon. Akin to what physical exercise can do for your body, so designed experiences can do for your soul.
Experience
Risk Type
Risk Veracity
Structure
Transformation
Just a Little Lovin’
Emotional
Actual, depending on history with subject
Exploratory
Acute
Vampire: The Masquerade (campaign)
Social
variable
variable
Repetitive
Legion: A Siberian Story
Physical
Actual
Progressive
Dramatic
Examples of different larps and their risk/transformative categories.
Why Design a Risky Experience?
In an interview with Kathryn Yu for the No Proscenium podcast #130, Benedetto states that “transformation requires risk. And real risk. And that it’s only in having the supportive structure of an experience, especially if it involves other people that you can go through it with, that you can even approach [a] risk that is too chaotic and too threatening to deal with outside the context of that experience. But by confronting that risk, some part of you reconfigures itself or becomes more alive.” (Nelson-Yu, 2017)
This may be overstating the case. Transformation, at least an intentional transformation, i.e., change consciously desired by the individual, is possible without risk, real or imagined. Overcoming alcohol or nicotine addiction, for example, carries less risk, in most cases, than maintaining your dependence. However, Patterns of Transformation presents a strong case for using risk to make personal transformation easier. Her quote suggests that it is a shared experience that an intentional personal transformation requires, not necessarily a risky one—though that helps.
The power of designed experiences, and larps especially, is their ability to create a space for the mind, body, and emotional self to work out in a controlled manner. Experience designers are like weight trainers and spotters for our spirit. They are there to help us better our ability to operate in a tumultuous era, and, consequently, better the world for everyone. This is a noble endeavor. Benedetto calls this “human enrichment.” (Benedetto, 2017)
It is also probable that the designer will benefit from creating these experiences for others, either physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially. They, too, take a risk in the act of creation.
Why Play a potentially Transformative Experience?
Benedetto says “A lot of the transformation I looked at, where the transformation’s desirable in some way, is because we have been estranged from something, somehow […] I think the transformation gets you back in touch with something that you’ve been estranged [from], and that changes your relationship to the world in your everyday life. That can be super enriching.” (Nelson-Yu, 2017)
An intense designed experience can create the psychological state known as “flow,” coined in 1975 by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. It refers to a mental point in which a person undertakes a challenge that they understand and lies within their skill competency. When someone reaches this state, they become fully immersed and focused on the experience, losing their sense of space and time. It is innately enjoyable and yields long-lasting and positive after effects. He writes “the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990)
Designed experiences just outside one’s comfort or skill level, too, are the basis for Lev Vygotsky’s (1896-1934) zone of proximal development and scaffolding pedagogy. By presenting a risk that seems insurmountable, yet including the tools or people in the experience that helps the individual complete the task fosters deep cognitive and emotional learning.
According to one of the first attendees of the Blackout Experience, Allison F., “it was almost like they were tailoring every scene towards some type of issue to trigger somebody.” (personal interview, 2018) Going through Blackout by yourself, a participant can expect to experience abuse, torture, and sexual assault—depending on your perspective.
Yet Russell E., also a repeat attendee, explains how repetitive visits affected him:
Since Blackout is a show that adapts to each audience members’ emotional response, the shows became more intense each time I went. In my opinion, the creators and cast were able to recognize patrons who were “getting it” and sometimes altered a scene’s pacing or content to personalize the event and make it even more affecting… I often found myself contemplating my own emotional responses in real life to scenarios explored within Blackout scenes. It seemed to me I was discovering more compassion and more strength within myself than I had previously realized. By exploring heavy, troubling scenarios within an intense theatrical presentation, I found myself approaching everyday turmoil from a stronger foundation…I became [a] stronger person as a result of this exploration.
Personal interview, 2018
Allison shares the same sentiment: “…it’s extremely empowering for me to know that I still have that survival instinct or, for lack of better terms, I have it in me to survive…” (personal interview, 2018)
It is important to note that transformative experiences are not for everyone, and not at every point in their lives. Benedetto says “Constantly being in transformation [makes] you lose sense of who you are, and it’s hard to establish things or gain momentum.” (Nelson-Yu, 2017) Although there should be a larp or designed experience for everyone, not every larp is for everyone, nor should they be. Not everyone always wants or needs to undergo a risky interactive or immersive experience. It is also true that not everyone always wants or needs to participate in a safety-stuffed event.
It is beneficial, every once in a while, to reconnect with our estranged passions, to transform through a risky, designed experience.
Guidelines for Designing Risky and Transformative Experiences
Here are some tips on managing risk in a designed experience to create favorable conditions for personal transformation. Ida Benedetto outlined the first seven design steps in Patterns of Transformation. Due to space considerations, they are not reprinted here in full. It is strongly recommended you read these in detail on the Patterns website. We have included some examples from larping that we felt matched Benedetto’s terms and ideas. Following are our additional thoughts and ideas on the topic.
For our purposes, a “designed experience” is any kind of planned real-world experience involving participant interactivity and engagement—things like alternate reality games (ARGs), immersive theater, escape rooms, extreme haunts and, of course, larps. Note that all three of the experiences Benedetto researched do not have a fictional component, i.e., at the sex party, funeral, or survival adventure you are YOU, really doing that real action in the real world. Yet the patterns Benedetto identified can also be applied to experiences that rely on fiction and role-playing.
Before the experience (planning):
Identify the Risk – “Drill deep and get as specific as possible about the risk facing the people you are designing for.”(Benedetto, 2017)
Distill what is worthwhile in the Risk – “Be mindful of cultural mores, life stages, and personal agendas (yours and theirs) when taking this step.” (Benedetto, 2017)
Commit to an Experience Structure (see below, with larp equivalent terms)
Exploratory – freeform, sandbox, undefined goals
Progressive – linear, railroad, pre-defined goals
Cyclical – repetitive scenes, rituals, or actions, like boffer combat in battle larps (Benedetto, 2017)
During the experience (runtime):
Construct the Magic Circle (two types) – The “Magic Circle” is a concept inspired by Johan Huizinga’s (1872-1945) book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938) and popularized by Katie Salen and Ryan Zimmerman in Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (2003). A magic circle is a shared space and time mutually created by participants where things and people bounded by that time and space are not necessarily what they really are; it a sacred liminal space where play, and change, can happen. Benedetto describes two types:
Conditioned – this type of Magic Circle includes the majority of larps where we learn rules, character backgrounds, etc. The Magic Circle comes into being due to our willing imposition of belief, e.g., a birdseed-filled packet is really a lightning bolt. (Benedetto, 2017)
Embraced – “A Magic Circle is embraced when it is drawn around an existing reality that is too overwhelming to engage without the supportive structure of a designed experience. The magic circle helps participants embrace a reality they otherwise avoid or are estranged from.” (Benedetto, 2017). This type of Magic Circle, although rare, appears in response larps that address a difficult concept such as GR (2008), Active Shooter (Tim Hutchings, 2014), or A Mother’s Heart (Christina Christensen & Eirik Fatland, 2010). Here, a slight fiction (the larp, the Magic Circle) is imposed over a troubling reality. Embraced magic circles can also occasionally appear in immersive theater, flash mobs, 1960s Happenings, and Benedetto’s primary example, bespoke funeral ceremonies. Dublin2 (JP Kaljonen, Johanna Raekallio & Haidi Montola, 2011), a pervasive larp reaction to EU’s asylum seekers policy, was held in one of Helsinki’s main plazas where real people sometimes interacted with the participants. Interestingly, an embraced Magic Circle coupled with an acute transformation is largely unexplored territory for experience designers, or at least larp designers. Imagine designing a bespoke larp for someone who was recently laid off that directly addresses that issue using few fictional elements.
Hold the space for transformation – Organizers need to respectfully maintain the liminal space to allow the time for transformation, recognize when more time is needed, when it is time to close, and when something is going wrong and it needs to close.
Close the Magic Circle – There are many examples of rituals and symbolic actions from larps that represent the closing of the Magic Circle. In some respects, a debrief after a larp can be considered part of this closing. Running debriefs the same day as the end of the larp should accept, though, that if it was a transformational experience, participants might be confused and shaken, their sense of self, tattered. They might not have the words or ability to join or participate in the meeting.
After the experience:
Check in – This should happen days or even weeks after the event, and this is where the effects of the transformation can be identified, after the individual has had time to process the experience.
From a larp design perspective, we propose the following additions to Benedetto’s seven design steps. We believe these techniques, some for designers, some for participants, heighten the transformative potential of an experience.
Identify the type of transformation desired “The first step with figuring out your strategy for care is to identify what the nature of the transformation is. How are you going to about it? That helps you construct the Magic Circle, that helps you figure out what the experience structure is.” (Nelson-Yu, 2017). Besides identifying the risk, decide if the conditions for transformation should be acute, dramatic or repetitive. A typical dramatic larp is a one-shot, and repetitive usually indicates an ongoing event. Consider flipping those so a campaign leads to one final intense conclusion, and a one-shot repeats the same action or scene in its limited time.
Once the risk is identified (tip #1) and the worthwhile part of risk determined (tip #2), minimize or eliminate all other risks. If you design towards a dramatic transformation through emotional risk, ensure that participants are shielded from social and physical risks. These other elements can detract from the power of transformational risk.
Promote ideal conditions and encourage participants to transform themselves (tip #5), but do not force players into a transformational state, nor dictate to them what their new “self” should be. The more emphasis a designer imposes on participants to become or behave a certain way, the more the experience resembles a cult. The movie and book Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk, novel, 1996, David Fincher, director, movie, 1999) is a fictive example of how physical risk presented as a transformative experience is deliberately used as a vehicle for creating an anarchist army. Organizers should only extrinsically set the conditions for transformation to occur; the actual act of transformation must be intrinsically activated.
When marketing the experience, do not claim that it is or will be transformational. Let others do that for you with testimonials. It is hubris to think that your daring design will work every time for everyone. If you label it transformational in your marketing, someone may go in demanding that, and become upset if the experience fails to deliver. But do let people know about the risk (see point below on deception).
Establish trust. “Trust is a prerequisite for enabling transformation.” (Benedetto, 2017). Constructing trust between participants, designers and facilitators is rightfully difficult. Once you have it and a community surrounds the experience, the bonds are often hard to break (Douglas, 2016). Additionally, greater trust facilitates the use of greater risk in the experience—though not necessarily greater transformative potential. To achieve the trust of participants before an experience has run, use different levels of transparency. For example, if participants sign waivers, have a “spoiler” and a “no spoiler” version for them to choose to read and sign. The spoiler waiver would include detailed descriptions of the risk, such as “you will unexpectedly have a cloth hood thrown over your head.” The no spoiler version would only mention physical contact, darkness, helplessness.
If you have designed previous experiences, mention those. Be honest about the use of risk in the experience, but not necessarily exactly what the risk is, for some people are attracted to chancy, mysterious events. If there is some kind of independent group that can vouch for your experience (Southern California has a nascent organization called LEIA: League of Experiential & Immersive Artists that may do just this), contact them and let them know about your production; perhaps applying a seal of approval. This may be unwise if it’s a government entity; would The Night Heron have been as profound an experience if everyone had permission to be in the water tower? Benedetto suggests it would not. Conversely, funeral directors, even avant-garde ones, cannot legally operate without license. This is where your previous decisions about the worthwhile risk and transformative type are relevant—is it worth being an underground, unlawful experience, or would the imprimatur of officiality allow attendees easy access into and a lengthy stay within the Magic Circle?
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS), an informal collective that created a number of legendary larps, made a point to let all participants know that nothing the organizers asked the players to do the designers had not done themselves. In his Master’s thesis, J. Michael Bestul describes The Mistress of Nyarlathotep (The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, Andrew Leman, 1991), a larp run by the HPLHS where players had to jump off a roof through a fabricated temporal gate not knowing what, if anything, would catch them on the other side.
Only when a keeper can earn the trust of players are events like this possible. Under normal, everyday circumstances, a person would not jump off a roof into a prop time portal. They would most likely consider it an insane proposition. But, in a game setting, where the keepers have earned the players’ trust, that insane option is now a likely choice. The investigators, properly motivated, would jump in; the players, knowing the keeper would never ask them to do something exceedingly dangerous, can jump in.
Bestul, 2006
As an experience creator, too, you have to trust your players that they will engage to the best of their abilities. In larps, organizers entrust their players to carry out a plot and to role-play their characters as best they can. If you are designing for transformation, you also have to trust that the players will make themselves open and vulnerable.
Paying the designers/organizers money can alter the risk and transformative power. One of the keys to The Night Heron was its exclusivity and price point: “The Night Heron was very much inspired by a design principle that we had hit on in doing our previous events, which was this notion of generosity. We looked at what we were doing as a gift to the guests or the participants. We never charged for tickets because we were doing this all illegally […] as soon as we had a ticket relationship with the guests, it felt like we were going to be in nebulous legal territory. The positive byproduct of doing that is that people were even more over the moon that this was this weird thing they got invited to and was spectacular. Because it had such a profound emotional effect, it ended up informing how people got to The Night Heron […] you could only come as a gift of somebody who had already been.” (Nelson-Yu, 2017)
Similarly, the HPLHS usually did not charge their players money to play in their larps. “On the whole the Cthulhu Lives games [larps] we produced were never staged as for-profit enterprises and the Keeper would generally bear the cost of producing his/her own event. It’s possible that there may have been a couple of games where a Keeper asked players to chip in a few bucks to help defray expenses, but that usually wasn’t the case. Most of our Keepers would design their LARPs so they could be executed within the resources available to the Keeper.” (personal correspondence with Sean Branney of the HPLHS, 2018)
Asking for money alters the relationship between organizer and participant. It does not eliminate the risk or transformative nature, but gaining the trust of others might be easier if the organizers also take a financial risk. Conversely, paying a higher fee could also prime people towards personal transformation; they are already taking a financial risk. The immersive play YOU by Hall & Mirrors costs $5000 for one night of bespoke performance and interaction. The high cost can influence our reaction (“Britt”, 2008). The monetary cost of a transformative experience should not be treated lightly. Benedetto says one of the core questions to consider is “What’s the risk, and what’s the gift?” (Nelson-Yu, 2017)
Deceiving the participants: How much information do participants really need to know? Can you obfuscate parts of the adventure? In most experiences, certainly larps, there is a chaos factor that even the best-prepared organizers cannot expect. Since participants are by nature unpredictable, and more so in a risky, potentially transformative state, all variables cannot be accounted for and stated up front. But organizers owe it to their participants to inform them of at least the generalities expected in the experience. Do not forget that for first iterations or first-time participants, no precedent has been set, no foreknowledge provided, and that itself indicates a risk. Use this to your design advantage. An example from an immersive theater experience playing with transparency comes from Annie Lesser’s A(partment 8) (2016), the first chapter of The ABC Project. Although the waiver mentions nudity, physical contact, and darkness it did not put those together to say (spoiler alert) “participants with shut eyes will be kissed by a naked woman.” You can lose trust if you deceive too much, but if you have trust from the participants, there is a level of mendacity that you can use to a transformative advantage. Even with deception, any opt-out rules such as safe words should be apparent and honest; although this dictum has already been challenged by Frederik Berg Østergaard’s Fat Man Down (2009), which has a fake safe word and a real safe word. Where and when the safe words are usable should be carefully considered. How many positive personal transformations were ruined because someone took an early exit instead of breaking through to the other side? And of course, in some experiences it might be too late, e.g., using a safe word after you jumped out of the airplane.
Give up control. As an organizer, you need to loosen the bonds of any agenda or plan that you have made. But be ready to intervene if a crisis occurs. Being prepared to interrupt might be enough, too. Some participants, knowing safety rules are in place, may be more willing to push themselves further than if they do not know where the line lies between reckless endangerment and regulated hazard. Others may not push themselves far enough.
As a participant, you may need to relinquish control over your social, emotional, or physical safety to either the organizers, your own subconscious, or random chance. The latter two might be the most frightening of all. Be vulnerable.
Lack of epiphany does not mean failure. It may come to pass that after everything a participant has gone through, they have not been altered in any demonstrable fashion. That is OK. Maybe they were not fully committed to the event. Maybe they were not the right person for this particular experience. Maybe the Magic Circle could not wait for one last person. It could be a design flaw. Hopefully the participant still had a satisfactory or enjoyable experience. Keep the discussion channels between designers and participants open, be honest, and compare the reflections of all attendees. If you followed the tip about marketing, you never promised a metamorphosis.
For participants, avoid major decisions for approximately a month. Assuming the experience was transformative, you are different. The way things were in your former life will probably seem strange when viewed with a new perspective—and you might not like the way they look. While you put your pieces back together, refrain from making other major changes or decisions. You could lose a connection you may, years later, have wanted to keep. This sound advice is given at the end of Legion: A Siberian Story (Rolling, 2016), a Czech larp based on the historical past of Czechoslovakia’s army trapped in the Russian Revolution.
Limitations on Safety and Consent
The most stunning commonality among these experiences is that the risk posed to the participant also poses a chaotic and uncontrollable element to the guide that, if fully tamed, destroys the transformative potential of the experience.
Safety and risk are obviously related. Risk can be increased simply by decreasing safety, but without corresponding conscious decisions regarding the risk, participants can be unintentionally hurt. Even if safety is elevated, serious risk can still lurk in an experience. In this section we explore some of the limits of safety and some conditions where safety inhibits the experience and its potential. For more information on safety techniques and calibration, read this manifesto, this article, these four posts, or thesetwo entries from the 2018 Knutpunkt Companion. All qualities of larp safety techniques should be considered when deciding which mechanisms to adopt or eschew.
Consent-Based Play Reshuffling
While the word “consent” suggests that anything else is “non-consensual”, it is instead one of many social contracts that can be adopted by a group of people. Consent-based play moves the cognitive overhead of coordinating playstyle from the design and planning stage by the organizers to the players during run-time. This removes the possibility of errors in calibration, but it requires more work to be done during the larp itself.
This is an approach many people enjoy and find freeing, but it is not a universal response. Communication and coordination take effort. We do not often think of emotional effort the way we count walking far or carrying heavy items, but it is work. In low-coordination, high-calibration larps where the rules of engagement and interaction are pre-set, this work is not undertaken, and playing takes less emotional effort. For example, larps that have established no-touch policies remove player deliberation during the larp on whether or not a particular instance of touch is comfortable: the pre-larp external calibration replaces run-time player coordination.
Alliance, a New England sports larp organization, encourages players to be invested in their characters and play the same persona in many different games, with little to no preparation or specific connections. It is possible to travel across America to another chapter and drop in to play on a whim. This is supported because all Alliance events share a common rules system and constraints on the level of risk and reward, topics that are out-of-bounds, and elements of world design. Players who choose to play are opting in to a set of understood external requirements, and so dozens of strangers can play without so much as an introduction. Run-time calibration between players and a lengthy pre-larp workshop is not required.
Calibration and Coordination Issues
Although some people enjoy or find it easier to participate in run-time coordination rather than playing larps with a risk of mis-calibration, expecting players to be skilled in this effort limits the potential pool of players. If a game is designed such that one can play with people one wouldn’t trust to communicate accurately and effectively in the game (IG), there are far more people you can play with. Casual low-trust events are especially useful for reaching audiences who otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to larp at all. Adding mechanics and categories of interactions raises the barrier of entry for participation, and few non-larpers or untrained improvisation actors are used to an ongoing negotiation of play.
Consent and safety mechanisms are sometimes presented as a matter of accessibility. Instead, they are a question of competing access needs: there is no design that will accommodate and enable everyone to play. Some people with mental health or physical concerns find that consent-based play enables them to safely participate. For other people who struggle with communication and coordination, consent-based play can require forms of interaction they find difficult or impossible, making the events inaccessible. Often consent mechanisms are built to serve those with the emotional intelligence to recognize when, for example, check-ins should happen, and who are able to easily swap from in-character (IC) and out-of-character (OOC) considerations.
Someone with a nonverbal learning disability may have trouble interpreting facial expressions and body language (Petti et al., 2003). The expectation that they are responsible for successfully negotiating playstyle on the fly can be anxiety-provoking. This can be especially true with mechanisms such as the OK check-in that are exclusively visual, rather than audio and visual combined. Since this is an invisible disability, it is possible that someone who flashed a missed signal might think that the other person was unsafe to play with, even though they could safely play in systems that rely on expectations or verbal game interrupts to negotiate playstyle.
Additionally, slipping in and out of a check-in is much easier for people with strong working memories and executive processing. People with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder can be easily distracted and find interruptions or context-switching more disruptive than neurotypical people (King et al., 2007). Requiring coordination or task switching can reduce the probability of flow and the general enjoyment of players with ADHD. According to Pattern Language for Larp Design by J Li and Jason Morningstar (2016), “A typical person can only keep track of 5-6 unrelated things at a time, with concentration. Without concentration, that number is closer to 3-4. When trying to keep track of a set of potentially complex dynamics, a typical person will get lost if the set has more than 4 elements.” Combining consent-based play, where interactions are negotiated outside the Magic Circle, plus a litany of safety mechanics such as OK check, look-down, tap-out, cut, brake/largo, and pronouns can be overwhelming even for neurotypical individuals. These memorizations are layered atop your character’s life, your IC relations, the world setting, and real world considerations such as who the GMs are and where the bathroom is.
This does not necessarily exclude neuroatypical players from playing emotionally risky larps where consent mechanisms mitigate risk, but such experiences may be less appealing or more challenging for such people. On the other hand, physically risky games that minimize the kind of work they find difficult may make transformative experiences more accessible to players with such difficulties. Remember to identify the worthwhile risk and eliminate or reduce the others. There is no single answer for “the most accessible” experience.
Safety Mechanics and Play Styles
Are we truly increasing safety by using risk-reducing mechanics? As described in Target Risk 3 by Gerald J.S. Wilde, humans tend to maintain “risk homeostasis”. He says
…in any activity, people accept a certain level of subjectively estimated risk to their health, safety, and other things they value, in exchange for the benefits they hope to receive from that activity […] In any ongoing activity, people continuously check the amount of risk they feel they are exposed to. They compare this with the amount of risk they are willing to accept, and try to reduce any difference between the two to zero. Thus, if the level of subjectively experienced risk is lower than is felt acceptable, people tend to engage in actions that increase their exposure to risk. If, however, the level of subjectively experienced risk is higher than is acceptable, they make an attempt to exercise greater caution.
This means that simply adding safety mechanisms does not inherently change the level of risk in a game. If a mechanic makes an experience safer, people are likely to adjust the level of risk they take to compensate.
Calling these “safety mechanics” can suggest that larps with them are safer than those without, but that is not necessarily true. If a larp is not designed for risky play that would be padded by safety mechanics, adding unnecessary safety mechanisms can push people to adopt more risky play than the game as a whole supports. The context in which safety mechanics are seen as universally appropriate and universally adopted is one in which the riskiest possible play is seen as a goal, and every experience is expected to support such play.
It can be disappointing for players if they are prepared to experience risky play that safety mechanisms inherently advertise and instead find themselves in low-risk play where the mechanisms were not needed. This could encourage players to circumvent or ignore safety mechanics, reducing their effectiveness when they would be useful.
Additionally, with a consent-based larp where no consequence befalls a participant unless they agree to it, there is reduced possibility for growth because there is no conflict, struggle, or resistance. Our muscles grow due to tissue rebuilding after experiencing micro-tears (Goussetis, 2015). Emotions, like muscles, may need to be damaged in order for personal growth.
Although designers usually desire a safe experience, safety mechanics and consent conflict resolution are not the only nor necessarily the best tools to use in all instances for all people. For example, using instead deception to suggest, or to actually include a risk higher than one participants feel comfortable with may make the experience safer—as participants adjust their role-playing to their acceptable risk tolerance—without an undue burden of excessive safety mechanics.
As the philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle says, “We want intensity without risk. That’s impossible. Intensity is jumping into the unknown, that which was previously unseen, which has not yet been written, yet which is however attainable within us.” (Dufourmantelle, 2011)
Caveats to Using Risk and Designing for Transformation
The element of risk we discussed relates to that which is specifically embedded into the design. Risk outside the experience, such as the potential for harm to or from an experience or negative contact betwixt players and organizers between episodes, was not addressed.
Designing an experience to be risky when the participants only expect entertainment can be extremely hazardous and should be avoided.
Risk does not guarantee a transformative experience. Great peril can be faced, yet the person walks away unfazed.
A risk-based transformation may not always end positively. It could cause trauma and lead to a stress disorder, anxiety, physical injury, even death.
Not all larps should be made for personal transformation. It is infeasible and impractical to plan every one of your designed experiences to rewire every participant. For players, it is a fool’s errand to expect every experience you participate in be created with the purpose of transformation.
Greater risk does not always correlate with greater transformation. Although the prospect certainly exists for “more risk means more change,” it is not a guaranteed formula.
Transformative experiences are no substitute for psychological therapy, and should not be used as such nor made with that intent. They can be palliative, cathartic, eye-opening, self-consciousness expanding and perception shifting, but they cannot replace a licensed therapist or medically-trained psychiatrist.
Objectively, risk-laden larps are no better nor no worse than risk-averse larps. The enjoyment, appreciation, or qualitative transformative benefit is purely subjective.
Conclusion
Risk scares people. It is a natural human response to perceived danger. But avoiding or blocking all risk in a designed experience, as in life, is like chasing rainbows, an uncatchable illusion. Designing to limit risk through safety mechanisms can exclude some people and overwhelm others. Reducing risk curbs the participants’ ability to attempt personal transformation in the experience. While risky endeavors and personal revelations are not and should not be the norm of designed experiences, it behooves all creators to not only look at safety mechanisms but also risk, and to use both in their creative vision. Ida Benedetto’s landmark work, Patterns of Transformation, provides an excellent guide for these bold, daring adventurers.
In the first essay of the landmark Nordic Larp book (2010), “The Paradox of Nordic Larp Culture,” Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola list four ways that larp can be used: to escape, to explore, to expose, to impose. Perhaps a fifth way should be added: to transform.
Benedetto, Ida. 2018. “Patterns of Transformation Q&A 6: What about those f’ed up parties in Silicon Valley?” Group email, accessed January 24, 2018.
Bestul, J. Michael. 2006. “Cthulhu Lives!: A Descriptive Study of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society”. Thesis. Graduate College of Bowling Green State University
Kessock, Shoshanna. 2018. “Keeping the Candles Lit, When the Light Has Gone Out.” Knutpunkt 2018 Companion. Johannes Axner and Annika Waern, editors. (Accessed February 8, 2018).
King, Joseph A., et al. “Inefficient cognitive control in adult ADHD: evidence from trial-by-trial Stroop test and cued task switching performance.” Behavioral and Brain Functions 3.1 (2007): 42.
Lesser, Anne Katherine. 2016. A(partment 8). Immersive experience. Part of the ABC Project. http://annielesser.com/abc (Accessed February 1, 2018). Run: Los Angeles, 2016
Li, J and Morningstar, Jason. 2016. Pattern Language for Larp Design. http://www.larppatterns.org/ (Accessed February 1, 2018)
Lovecraft Historical Society, The H.P. (1991). Cthulhu Lives!: The Mistress of Nyarlathotep (a.k.a. “The Epic”). Larp. http://www.hplhs.org. (Accessed February 1, 2018). Run: Urbana-Champaign and other locations in Illinois, 1991.
Randall, Josh and Thor, Kristjan. (2009) Blackout. Extreme horror experience. http://www.theblackoutexperience.com/ (Accessed February 1, 2018). Run: New York City, 2009.
Salen, Katie and Zimmerman, Ryan. 2003. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press
Sextant Works. (2013) The Night Heron. Speakeasy. http://nightheronspeakeasy.com/ (Accessed February 1, 2018) Run: New York City, 2013.
Stenros, Jaakko and Montola, Markus, eds. Nordic Larp. (2010). Published by Fëa Livia.
Torner, Evan. 2013. “Transparency and Safety in Role-Playing Games”. Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013. Edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman, PhD. and Aaron Vanek.
Wilde, Gerald JS. 2014. “Target Risk 3.” Risk Homeostasis in Everyday Life. Complimentary copy, web-version
As larpers, we are world-class in making character immersion experiences. We have mastered it through years of larp making, and can apply this skill in many settings and with many different themes and end results. We can design experiences for bleed or even make them transformative.
Yet despite such experiences, there are other types of experiences with which we are not as proficient. In fact, one in particular I’m thinking of, I choose to call the narrative experience.
The narrative experience has roots in “narrativism,” or the disposition that rules and play should serve to tell narratives above all other goals. It comes from Ron Edwards’ (1999) reformulation of the “drama” component of the popular “Threefold Model” –– Game, Drama, and Simulation –– but narrativism and dramatism has been redefined, blurred, confused, and misunderstood many times since, such that today narrativism and dramatism is commonly not understood to mean the same thing. What separates them is difficult to define; I give a suggestion later on. Nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that a player perspective, play style or player goal exists called “narrativism,” and it is one of possibly many such perspectives in the complex field of preferences and motivations for play theorized by many, such as Robin D. Laws’ (2002) theory for pen-and-paper roleplay or Nick Yee’s (2005) work on motivations in MMORPGs.
In the Nordic larp community, and to my knowledge in the larp world in general, we have yet to discover good ways to make full-scale larps, not freeform or chamber larps, focused on a narrative experience. Sure, there have been larps with narrativist ideas, and some went well, but generally I see full-scale larps struggling with their narrative aspects, and the community has not learned much to confront this fact. Personal observations by Juhana Pettersson (2017) and my own experiences tell me that we do not have a coherent understanding of narrativism, mostly due to getting lost in semantics of Edwards’ (1999) formulation or the Nordic interpretation The Three Way Model (Bøckman, 2003). There are many diverging views and preferences, and I doubt I completely understand all of them.
Instead of focusing on narrativism in the abstract, I take a more hands-on approach to the narrative experience. In this article, I will talk about narratively inclined players and what they tend to do when they larp, recount some tools and methods with narrativistic leanings, then discuss a possible narrativistic redefinition of NPCs. Finally, I offer ideas for the structures of narrative larps as a foundation for further work.
The narrative experience in larp design I loosely define as: “the object of the larp is for players to focus on the story (or stories) of the larp, and one’s character (or characters) are merely a tool to play out these stories”. This should be seen as contrary to the character immersion experience, loosely defined as; “the object of the larp is for you to immerse yourself into a character, the actions you take during the larp should be rooted in character motivation and coherence”. These two experiences are not necessarily opposites. Definitions here stress the difference between the experiences; they are not meant to establish a false dichotomy.
My overall hope is that we as larp players and designers may become more skilled and versatile to play larps with any kind of mix between immersive and narrative experiences, and that we are more conscious about the choices we make in design and play style. At the same time, I want to expand our capabilities with new experiences within the narrative domain, as it is my notion there is a lot more to be gained there.
Narratively Inclined Players
Some larpers prefer to play with focus on stories and narratives and less focus on character feelings, motives or coherence. We all have our own preferences as to what we want from a larp, and there are definitely those for whom stories is the most important thing.
Preference and skill usually go together, also in larp, so narratively inclined players are quite often adept story handlers, who like nothing better than when a good story comes together. When these players participate in larps, they most often get their greatest kick when they are able to steer their character’s story or the story of other characters. Narrative steering is explained later.
To learn about the narrative experience, it makes sense to look at what narratively inclined players do when they play. In my experience, there are two types of narratively inclined players; those that like to create a good story centered on their own character, and those that like to manipulate the stories and characters of others. The first type is usually a master of drama and of setting the scene, while the second type is usually a master of intrigue and timely remarks. Both will have very good feel for the flow of play and “playing ball,” explained later.
These are skills that have high status in most larping circles. Thus, you will usually see that narratively inclined players are regarded as skillful roleplayers in their local communities, which is ironic since narratively inclined players will often work to create stories and drama, even if it is not in their character’s personality to do so. In fact, they may find themselves breaking character coherence several times during a larp in order to advance stories, which, for many players that are more inclined towards character immersion, would otherwise be absolutely taboo.
On the other hand, when narratively inclined players steer to advance stories in a larp, they do not go completely haywire. Even if they break character coherence, there are other things keeping them in check; some sort of narrative coherence or the instinctive feeling of a good story: This, to me, is what separates narrativism from dramatism.
Narrative concepts
Despite my earlier claim that we as a community haven’t experimented much with narrative experiences, we nevertheless have a long list of concepts with a possible narrativistic interpretation.
“Playing to lose”
“Playing to lose” is where a player increases drama though actively trying to have their character come out worse off following each engagement. It is employed in many Nordic larps so often that many players culturally assume it by default.
“Playing to lose” can be interpreted as an anti-gamism or anti-powerplay rule to avoid players attempting to use the larp for character empowerment. More interestingly, however, it incorporates the sentiment that tragedies and stories about a fall from greatness are better stories, and this rule is in place to promote those stories by encouraging players to make sure they do not succeed in their characters’ goals without at least a dire cost.
Steering
Steering is simply the act of influencing your character’s actions for reasons that are extra-diegetic (Montola, Stenros, Saitta, 2015). As such, steering is itself not narrativistic, however in many cases these extra-diegetic reasons are. Whenever a player steers her character’s action with the aim to create a certain scene or promote a certain plot line, it is narrativism at work.
“Playing ball”
To “play ball” is a common expression for the concept of answering play with play; to see opportunities in the larp, to recognize plot points, or to register another player’s initiative and choosing to act upon it. A splendid article is written about this concept by Josefin Westborg and Carl Nordblom (2017).
To “play ball” is a skill that can be practiced and mastered, and it is useful for roleplayers of all preferences. In a narrativistic interpretation, it is a skill that enables a roleplayer to see story points and choose how to best act on them in order to further the stories of larp. It is an essential skill for the narratively inclined player.
Telegraphing
The act of telegraphing is to communicate intent without specifically expressing it. In sports and other places telegraphing is typically unintentional and many times viewed as a bad thing, as it enables your opponent to read you. In larp, it is a good thing and can be used intentionally.
Telegraphing in roleplay is the use of winks, intonation of words, and general body language to intentionally meta-communicate to your co-players. Note that this diverges from the technique of telegraphing as used in jeepform (Wrigstad, 2008).
Telegraphing is typically used to communicate intentions and desires for the outcome of an interaction. Not all of these intentions are related to the plots of a larp, but a great deal may be. For instance, it may be used to communicate about the intended outcome of a scene. When used proficiently, it is a very useful tool for a larper.
Play distribution
Play distribution comes from the idea that play is a resource in larps that we create with our actions and share among each other, but this resource tends to gravitate towards the high-status characters of the larp, who are then supposed to make sure that it is distributed back to the characters of lower status, hopefully with some manner of fairness so that everybody gets a piece.
This task of distributing play can be quite demanding to the point of being labor (Jones et.al., 2016), and usually the players that take it on will have their hands full the whole larp, leaving them with less time to pursue their desired larp experience. I would not consider play distribution specifically a narrative task, but it is interesting to note that it involves a great deal of steering and possibly narrative consideration as to how play should be distributed. Thus, the task of play distribution may easily quell the possibility of a good character immersion experience, but not the possibility a narrative experience.
Foreshadowing
Premonitions, forewarnings, or foreshadowing are gamemaster tools to hint at a future event within the confines of the fiction, so that the players react appropriately when the event does or does not come about. A classic example would be sending a messenger telling that the orcs are on the move some hours before the fantasy village is attacked, thus giving players time to discuss defense strategies and prepare for the fight.
Especially in the case when a gamemaster wants to make some kind of plot twist, it is in most larping cultures plain good style to foreshadow it; otherwise, the players may very likely react negatively to it. Cases of players feeling wronged by an unsuspected plot twist are too many to count. The feeling of surprise is rarely positive, without the chance to have seen it coming.
Foreshadowing can be made with varying degrees of bluntness, depending on the intent of the gamemaster. Sometimes you want to be very clear about what is going to happen, sometimes more subtle and cryptic, but the act of giving players hints of things to come is narrativism.
Act structure
The method of having an act structure in a larp is usually to promote some kind of story through those acts. Usually in larps, the different acts will have different themes ascribed to them in order to align players with the story. It is a rather blunt-but-effective way to enforce the story of the larp without having NPCs or high status characters directing it. Rather: if all players follow the themes of the acts, the story will emerge almost in its own.
An act structure provides another important advantage to the average larper: it helps us structure the narratives of our characters to have the right escalation, climax, and resolution to fit with the larp. It helps with building a narrative experience, even for a player that is not particular narratively inclined.
Fateplay
Fateplay (Fatland, 2000) is a gamemaster tool to direct a player to take certain actions or pursue certain goals with her character. Typically, it will be in the form of a message, called a “fate,” that is given to the player before the larp starts, stating an action that shall be performed and a condition for when it must be done. The condition can either be a set time or it can be whenever something specific happens. With this kind of messages the gamemaster can make entire chains of events and thus make sure a plot is moving forward the right way.
To my knowledge there are two types of fateplay larps: the strict fateplay as designed and played by the Oslo larp scene in the late 1990s, in which fates are imperative actions that must be undertaken, and the loose fateplay in which fates are merely suggested actions that a player can choose from.
Although the idea behind fateplay is clearly narrativistic, it is often the loose fateplay type that is seeing use in modern Nordic larp design, and it does not necessarily bring much narrative experience with it. Strict fateplay can be seen as intrusive by players with character immersion preferences.
But fateplay can yield great narrative experiences if, instead of focusing on the action that needs to be done and the problems with character coherence this may entail, one focuses on the story of the character that is going to do this action and what hidden agenda this character holds. Sometimes when playing narratively, it helps to see the character from the outside.
Planned scenes
In many larps it has become a common thing that players agree on certain scenes prior to the larp. Sometimes the organizer is involved, but in most cases players plan it among themselves. Especially in larps of a sandbox design, it is well-known that planning of plots, character relations and scenes to be executed during the larp will greatly increase the chances that you will have an awesome larp.
In my experience, most scenes planned in this manner do not include specific actions or things that should happen during the scene, they are typically more in the form of interesting setups where things might happen because of the engaged characters.
The whole planning of plots and scenes is narrativistic thinking, yet as long as it is done before the larp, most larpers are cool with it. For most larpers, the planning is done in such a way that what is agreed upon will seamlessly fit together with their character and not be a cause for distraction during the larp.
Directed play
In some larp cultures, it has become practice to create stories and tension in the larp though scenes of directed play. The idea is that these directed scenes will visualize to the players what is at stake in the larp, and it can be a good way to demonstrate to all when a story progress to a new stage, or when a new event changes the stakes for the characters.
Actual directed play can be done in many ways, from the use of playbooks with lines and actions that players should perform to scenes that have been rehearsed before the larp, to an actual director on stage who tells people what to do and say.
To many players, directed play feels like a brute-force means of advancing the story and they react strongly against it unless the implementation of the scene is done in way to fit with the overall design of the larp. A seamless transition to directed scenes or having the scenes in breaks between acts or simply having directed play as part of the larp’s premise all help make such actions fit.
Break and assembly
Break and assembly is a technique that pauses a larp at a certain time and has the players convene to talk about the current state of characters, relations and stories and where to take them forward when the larp is started again. Usually, break and assembly is used when there is traditionally low activity in the larp, for instance in morning hours, or between acts.
Some players may feel that break and assembly ruins their flow in the larp, but it can do a lot more good than harm, though naturally the break should be made gently to minimize disruption.
The assembly, which should always be facilitated by a dedicated person, gives a splendid opportunity to coordinate narratives in the midst of larp runtime. Even for players that lean heavily towards character immersion, the assembly can help them discuss their character’s motives and plots so they do not have be distracted by that during play.
Non-Player Characters
The saying that NPCs are players too, or even humans too, has been catching on the last few years. It is a topic that is emerging and I believe we will see more discussion aimed at finding good solutions to implement in larps.
“NPCs are dehumanizing”, Jaakko Stenros said in his keynote talk at Knutepunkt 2017. In a related article (Stenros, 2013) he speculates that the meaning of the different words we commonly use to describe NPCs are insufficient and all of them relate to some unspoken expectation of a norm that the NPCs are not part of.
Clearly that norm is the norm of what constitutes a player. NPC as an acronym for non-player character was coined in the early days of pen-and-paper roleplaying. It simply refers to the characters that are roleplayed by the dungeon master and not the players. Roleplay has evolved greatly since then, and somewhere along the way larp came and borrowed the acronym without thinking much about it.
It is strange that the name was just copied directly, since the concept doesn’t really make sense in a larp context where you actually have to have individual people playing the NPCs instead of a dungeon master handling them all; they are, in fact, characters played by people.
Since then, larp itself has changed; how larp is played and what we can do with it has nearly no resemblance to how it used to be, and the roles of both players and NPCs have changed with it. They have grown to become much closer to each other to the point where it is actually difficult to recognize a player character from a non-player character.
Yet our thinking of NPCs has not changed that much. We still see NPCs as persons or entities that provide a service to the players. The experience of NPCs has ostensibly no significance –– only the experience of players is important. Therein lies the dehumanization.
The norm of what constitutes a player is complex to define and probably consists of many things; one thing I believe is important is the type of experience a larp is aiming for, or a larp culture attributes value. Players make a social contract to aspire to the experience that the larp intended.
For instance, at a larp made as a dungeoncrawl, players would be the people actually able to go down into the dungeon, solve puzzles, fight with monsters, and emerge victorious or die in the attempt, because that is the experience provided by the larp. The wizard providing the quest at the inn and the storekeeper providing options to buy magic potions are NPCs to the larp.
Similarly, for sandbox larps and the majority of Nordic larps, one focuses on character immersion experiences, so players expect this experience. NPCs in this context are characters that only exist in the larp universe for a limited time or that are so heavily scripted that character immersion is difficult.
Yet why are we indifferent towards NPC experience? It is clear that NPCs cannot experience what the larp is providing, but still their experiences should not be regarded as insignificant. Maybe it is worth to consider that larps may provide multiple experiences and as a larp culture to be open to attribute value to more than one type of experience.
In their truest function NPCs are narrative vessels, it is the far most common reason to introduce an NPC that it serves a purpose for a plot in the larp. Yet we only focus on how the plot is experienced by the players, while the experience of relaying the plot, playing it, and making it work during larp runtime, in essence the narrative experience, is given no credit.
But the narrative experience fits perfectly with NPCs, and if they are given the opportunity to explore it, to develop narratives and play them out in response to the players’ backgrounds and wishes, I am sure that it will give both the NPCs and the players a more fulfilling experience of the larp. As larp designers and players we are already proficient at applying NPCs in many different narrative constellations, but for NPCs to have a narrative experience they require to be given ownership of their experience and of making plots and narratives for the players.
In the case of a sandbox larp, NPCs will have a lot to offer in terms of a narrative experience. There could be a lot of excitement in being the ones that manipulate the players and spin them around in a web of stories, intrigues and drama. But it requires that the NPCs are given autonomy by gamemasters and agency by the players.
Indeed, another problem with the indifference towards the experience of NPCs is that they have been stripped of anything but their core functions in the larp; as such they are given very limited options to gain meaningful experiences at all. What NPCs need to be given are autonomy and agency.
Autonomy to make plots instead of just heeding the call of a gamemaster, and agency to exert power over those plots and execute them on behalf of the players. For this to happen, there needs to be trust between all parties of the larp – especially between NPCs and players, who have to recognize that NPCs are in fact co-players instead of non-players.
Narrativist Larps
The Nordic larp community has not committed itself to narrativism, at least not compared to the large number of larps based on character immersion, simulation or other perspectives. But that’s not saying that we haven’t done anything.
Below, I offer ideas for structures of larps that can offer a narrative experience to all or a part of the players. Some of these structures are well-known, and larps have been made with them before.
Pearls on a string
All players go for a narrative experience in this larp. The idea is that all players form groups before the larp to coordinate and rehearse a sequence of predetermined scenes, so as to form a story, like pearls on a string. During the larp, there will be time to execute the planned scenes, but there will be a lot more time in between the scenes where the characters are supposed find motivation and get to a point where the next scene seems plausible to the character.
The interesting thing is that the predetermined scene will work as a guide for the story, but they will not in themselves be the story. The story will be built during larp runtime, and it is a question of building coherence in both story and characters, something that a lot of larpers actually love to do.
Typically, when planning such a series of predetermined scenes, one tries to logically link scenes together into a well-known story. To make matters more interesting, however, one might try a set of scenes that have no apparent logical connection, just to make it a bigger challenge to play through the larp and make everything fit together in play.
Larp as adaptation
A good way to make a larp with some narrativist undercurrents is to base the larp on a book, theatrical play or movie. With varying degrees of adherence to the original material the larp can scale from “inspired by”, where players try to fit their stories with the original theme and mood, to “adaptation of”, where players play through the original story with a strict act structure and sometimes with scripted scenes.
Larps based on a well-known story will always give a hint of a narrative experience, but it is up to the organisers how much they actually want to give players an experience of living the original story, or if they will rather give an experience of being with the theme and setting of the story.
NPCs with agency
Following the possible redefinition of NPCs above, these new NPCs would require testing in full-scale larps. This larp should provide narrative experience to the NPCs while character immersion and simulation experiences to the players as normal.
Take an example of a standard character immersion larp with NPCs, make an agreement that the NPCs can decide themselves what they want to play and that they will have charge over the plot of the larp. Make sure that NPCs are a tight-knit group that have workshopped a lot together and have a good understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Give the NPCs insight into the player characters and relations and instruct them to play on these things. Finally make sure that the players are in agreement with this, as it will greatly influence their play and take away some of their autonomy.
The melting pot
In any Nordic larp, there are both players that look for character immersion experiences and players that lean more towards a narrative experience. The recognition and knowledge that not all wish for the same experience can be enough to alter the larp’s design. If the players are brought into that recognition it could probably also alter their play and give more room to different kinds of experiences.
If organisers knew in advance what kind of experience the players were looking for, they could tailor characters after that and make the appropriate casting. It would also give the organisers knowledge of where in the network of characters they should give different kinds of input.
This is however not as easy as it sounds. Casting characters on the basis of players’ preferences in terms of the Three Way Model has been attempted before with little success. The problem is, I believe, that character casting is simply not enough when a larp in itself is designed around one single type of experience. The creation of a multi-experience larp is difficult, but necessary.
Shadow characters
A larp could be built up in such a way that for each ordinary player character you would also have one or more shadow characters acting in relation to the player character, for instance as guardian angels, good and bad conscience, or anything else fitting with the theme of the larp.
The purpose of the shadow characters would be to have them plan events and make setups for the player character, both good and bad, which should give the shadow characters a good narrative experience.
Different rules should apply to these shadow characters; how they could communicate to the player characters, to the other shadow characters, and to other player characters, how they could make events, or if they can make impersonations and thus also act as NPCs. All this can be decided through the theme and setting for the larp.
Conclusion
With this article, I lay the foundation for creating narrative experiences in full-scale larp and finding out what we can do with them. It has been my goal to keep this text on a level where it is directly applicable to the larps we make and the larps we play in.
I want to stress that I don’t rate narrativism or narrative experiences higher than any other player perspectives or experiences available from a larp. Within character immersion in particular, I find an enviable perspective, and I am proud of the excellence with which we can make experiences to fit with this play goal.
I have however the belief that there are many good larp experiences that can be found in the realms of narrativism, if only we went looking for them.
References
Bøckman, Petter. 2003. “The Three Way Model; Revision of the Threefold Model”. As Larp Grows Up. Edited by Line Thorup, Mikkel Sander, and Morten Gade. Knudepunkt 2003.
Jones, Katherine Castiello, Sanna Koulu, and Evan Torner. 2016. “Playing at Work – Labor, Identity and Emotion in Larp”. Larp Politics – Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action. Edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi. Solmukohta 2016.
Law, Robin D. 2002. Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering. Steve Jackson Games
Nordblom, Carl and Josefin Westborg. 2017. “Do You Want to Play Ball?”. Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories. Edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreasen, Simon Brind, Elin Nielsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand. Knutepunkt 2017. Rollespilsakademiet.
Pettersson, Juhana. 2017. “Hamlet, Vampires and the Italian Alps”. Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories. Edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreasen, Simon Brind, Elin Nielsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand. Knutepunkt 2017. Rollespilsakademiet.
Stenros, Jaakko. 2013. “Between Game Facilitation and Performance: Interactive Actors and Non-Player Characters in Larps”. International Journal of Role-Playing – Issue 4. Utrecht School of the Arts, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Wrigstad, Tobias. 2008. “The Nuts and Bolts of Jeepform”. Playground Worlds. Edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. Solmukohta 2008.
Yee, Nick. 2005. Motivations of Play in MMORPGs – Results from a Factor Analytical Approach. Presented at the Digital Games Research Association Conference, Vancouver, Canada.
Many of us have seen it unfold before us in larps: a seemingly insignificant piece of information suddenly becomes the central topic of every conversation; one character’s personal business somehow becomes a topic for public debate; a rumor spreads across the larp, somehow becoming accepted Truth; a plot point intended for a small group of characters sweeps through the group, becoming the Big Plot of the weekend. Whether players or organizers, we may have even orchestrated such effects, catalyzing the larp in a certain direction.
This article will discuss some of the pros and cons of this larp domino effect, in which content from one area of the game spreads throughout the fiction like a wildfire as the result of emergent play. In larps where the content is “seeded” by game masters through the character sheets or delivered via non-player characters throughout the larp, such a result may be desirable. But, in larps where a particular tone or theme is central, such emergent play can derail the emphasis of the design. In extreme cases, the larp domino effect can potentially upset or even trigger other players, if “surprise” content spreads throughout the larp without their consent.
The goal of this article is not to criticize this domino effect, but rather to explore its pros and cons. The larp domino effect is neither positive nor negative at its core. Instead, I plan to discuss the ways in which organizers and players might either use it to their advantage in order to stimulate play, or work to contain it as needed. In addition, understanding and discussing the domino effect can help us strategize ways for larps to accommodate multiple styles of play, such as participants who enjoy “hardcore” violence versus those who prefer more philosophical, social play. The article will advocate for the use of zoning in these latter cases in order to help contain sensitive scenes to specific locations and players when necessary.
Some games and larp situations may benefit from the domino effect, whereas others may suffer from it. This article uses examples from a variety of play cultures and formats, including one-shots, campaigns, boffer, theatre style, etc. Regardless of style, greater awareness of how the introduction of certain content might affect emergent play can help designers and players steer toward their optimal larp experiences. Note that all of the below examples are hypothetical and not specific to my own larp experiences.
Organizer-Driven Dominos
In some cases, the entire design of a larp event is intended to produce some degree of the domino effect. Some examples:
Organizers seed a particular piece of information to various characters through character sheets or rumors, hoping to spur some sort of group reaction, e.g. whispers of political corruption for a beloved ruler or intelligence that a ticking time bomb somewhere in the town requires defusing.
Organizers send out specific non-player characters meant to catalyze action, either as sympathetic or antagonistic agents, e.g. a crying mother hoping to find her lost child or a villain wanting to kidnap characters for ransom.
Organizers embed certain types of emotionally provocative content into the larp, e.g. explosive relationship dynamics between two characters or backgrounds with domestic violence, systemic abuse, or grief from the loss of a loved one.
Organizers create a setting that encourages a certain degree of volatility, e.g. a lawless state where “anything goes” or a political environment filled with characters with questionable ethics.
Organizers establish a “common enemy” in the setting in the hopes that the characters will mobilize against it, e.g. a warring state threatening to take over the town or a disease that the town doctors need to contain before it becomes an epidemic.
Depending on the design style, this type of content is typically deployed in one of three ways: 1) through the history of the setting itself, with various social practices that reinforce it; 2) through pre-written character sheets and other fictional briefs given to the players in preparation for the larp; or 3) through run-time delivery as physical messages, props, or embodied characters.
In some cases, this embedded content ends up falling flat, failing to topple the rest of the dominos. Perhaps the players find the “plot” uninteresting, become distracted, or fail to pass on the information. Perhaps they steer their characters in a different direction. Organizers sometimes express frustration when their carefully orchestrated plots “go nowhere” with the player base.
However, the best case scenario for some organizers is for such content to “go viral,” in the sense that it spreads throughout the larp, generating interest and engagement. In these cases, the organizers hope the larp domino effect will occur, because they want the players to feel immersed and captivated.
Such plots can backfire, however, when a significant number of the players feel overtaken by them. Some players bemoan railroading, a practice in which the organizers have set up a plot train that everyone must jump upon in order to engage (Bowman 2013). The domino effect of a plot can also reduce a player’s sense of agency; if a player enjoys quiet, romantic play, but their kid brother has been kidnapped by the moustache-twirling villain, they may find it unrealistic to pursue their personal goals of play by ignoring this overarching plot. This domino effect is especially potent in larps that feature factions to which players belong; if a faction must mobilize to address a certain conflict, the individual player-character may feel pressured to engage with it, abandoning their personal character goals.
Player-Driven Dominos
In other cases, individual players introduce content that may cascade throughout the larp in unforeseen ways, such as:
Player-written backstories that feature difficult content, e.g. sexual violence, unwanted pregnancies, or the death of close family members.
Player-requested scenes, where the staff produces content by request in order to incite dramatic conflict, e.g. a character confronting their abusive parent or a violent encounter leading to that character’s planned death.
Players improvising scenes that unfold in unpredictable directions, e.g. a beloved couple’s dramatic confrontations leading to their breakup or a character’s unethical actions becoming common knowledge, forcing everyone in town to take sides.
Players introducing new content into the larp that does not match the design goals of the organizers or the setting, with the other players adopting it as fact, e.g. spreading rumors about a villain hiding in the town, causing everyone to become hypervigilant.
Some larps thrive on player-driven content, with very little “plot” dispensed by the organizers themselves. In these larps, the introduction of player creativity through interactions, stories, rituals, events, or other spontaneous improvisations can become the lifeblood of the larp. In these cases, player-driven content can be deeply moving and personal for the players involved — even more so than generic plots designed by the organizers to keep players engaged.
Other larps rely heavily on the players following along with the design of the game or on characters responding to organizer-driven content. In these cases, player-driven content may enhance the larp to some degree, but can sometimes overpower the design. For example, if players show up to a murder mystery dinner refusing to discover who committed the crime, but instead throwing a raucous in-game party, they may still find the experience enjoyable, but the organizers are likely to become frustrated. Similarly, other participants may grow frustrated if they were still invested in solving the mystery, but their co-players have decided to “derail” the larp. The common phrase, “No plot survives contact with the players,” often applies in these circumstances. To read more about the creative tensions inherent to emergent play, see Evan Torner’s “Emergence, Iteration, and Reincorporation in Larp” in this volume.
Some larps feature a “sandbox” style, where both player-driven and organizer-driven content exist alongside one another. In these types of larps, characters often feel free to choose their own adventure, so to speak — to engage with the metanarrative or to focus upon their personal goals and stories. However, sandbox style larps can also domino. For example, if a beloved character dies — even if the player chooses it — the shock can ripple through the entire sandbox, affecting the narrative for many of the characters. That shock may be experienced as cathartic and powerful for some players, but others may find it frustrating or overwhelming, as they feel forced to respond to it authentically. As Eirik Fatland and Markus Montola describe in their article on brute force design in blockbuster larps (2015), plot trains disrupt the flow of play when “the emergent narrative of one group can easily disable the play of another group; crisis and conflict in particular trump subtler themes.” In such situations, some players do not feel free to steer (Montola et al 2015) toward their desired stories, whether due to conformity, peer pressure, or the fear of judgment for “playing incorrectly.” Indeed, in some play communities, intentional steering might be considered a form of cheating or poor role-play. However, character immersion advocate Mike Pohjola has explained how character fidelity and steering are not incompatible (Pohjola 2015).
Complications with the Larp Domino Effect
The larp ecosystem is delicate and chaotic. What one player might experience as the most epic moment ever, another might view as deeply upsetting on an out-of-character level. What one group might think to be an amusing or engaging plot to introduce, another might find boring or challenging. The smallest of actions can sometimes have dramatic effects throughout the larp.
In extreme cases, this domino effect can impact players in a profoundly negative way. The content of certain plots or the ways in which they unfold may make certain players extremely uncomfortable. A common example of this sort of content is sexual assault. Some larps feature an “open world” setting, in which anything can happen as long as those actions are not expressly forbidden by the rules. Thus, a person can discuss sexual assault in their backstory, a character can threaten rape, or an actual assault can occur within the framework of the fiction. Other larps feature sexual assault as a central part of the setting in order to illustrate brutal power dynamics. In my view, such content is acceptable as long as everyone in the scene expressly consents to its inclusion and the parameters of enactment.
Problems occur, however, when such content spreads via domino effect elsewhere to the larp to others who have not consented. For example, if a beloved character in the larp is assaulted and word spreads, the vengeance of righteous townspeople seeking justice for that character may become a central theme through emergent play. Such play may be extremely gratifying for those who consent to enacting it. However, some players may not wish to engage with sexual assault at all for personal reasons or due to past trauma. While the content did not technically happen to their character, they may still get triggered, feel alienated, or disengage if the content spills over into their play emergently. Thus, a scene that a player may not have even witnessed can still deeply negatively impact them as a result of the domino effect.
On the other hand, such unintended ripple effects can also occur with positive experiences, such as an impromptu wedding raising the spirits of the group; feelings of relief if the local town guards fight off assailants; or feelings of pride if one’s faction is victorious in a competition. Perhaps the entire group celebrates their success in the streets as a result. Even if a character is not personally involved in those victories, they may experience vicarious pleasure via the domino effect. Ultimately, a great deal depends on the circumstances at hand and the comfort levels of the players involved.
Another unintended consequence of emergent play involves larp muscle memory. Certain players may have learned how to larp in a particular style, such as boffer combat, secrets and powers, play-to-lose high drama, etc. Thus, even if the organizers work hard to set a certain tone, in some situations, the larp muscle memory from past play experiences may kick in — and all of a sudden, players are reacting in a manner common to their previous style. A light-hearted fantasy game may become a survival horror game if the players react to an external threat based on their larp muscle memory, particularly if players in leadership positions model that behavior. This muscle memory is not entirely conscious and relies on previous models of understanding how to problem solve or deal with conflict in larps. Issues arise when those models spread to other areas of the game, accounting for a dramatic shift in tone or playstyle against the intentions of the design. Such instances require conscientious steering and recalibration among the organizers and players in order to get everyone back on track.
Zoning as Boundary Enforcement
As mentioned above, the larp domino effect is neither negative nor positive as a force. Just as a crowd may take up the same chant started by one person at a music concert, the impact of one player’s strong role-play might ripple through the rest of the larp. Such effects can be powerful and profound. However, when the larp domino effect unfolds in an unchecked manner, some players and organizers alike may feel frustrated or upset by this emergent play. The question remains: how do we set boundaries around emergent play in order to contain these unintended consequences?
One approach that some designers have found successful is zoning. With zoning, certain types of play are confined to specific areas of the larp space. Some examples:
In Convention of Thorns (2016) by Dziobak Studios, the castle was zoned according to the degree of “hardcore” play, with the lower floor designated mainly for social interaction and dancing; the middle floor allocated to political meetings and rituals; and the upper floor reserved for more graphic forms of violence, feeding, and/or sexual play (Bowman 2016).
Dystopia Rising chapters sometimes zone specific locations of the play space as “splatter mods” or “hardcore scenes,” with organizers standing guard to warn unsuspecting players about the content.
Conscience (2018) by NotOnlyLarp features specific areas of the town where sexuality, nudity, and sexual violence are permitted if off-game consent is negotiated among all parties.
In the United States run of Just a Little Lovin’ (2017), the organizers encouraged players to use the black box if they wished to play out planned scenes involving brutal marginalization due to the character’s gender, sexuality, race, and/or ethnicity.
While zones do not ensure that everyone entering the space is comfortable, they do allow players to more consciously steer toward their desired intensity of play or type of content by physically marking off areas of the playspace for those specific experiences. Zoning makes it more difficult for sensitive players to wander into a scene that might trigger or upset them off-game, especially if the organizers are explicit about what sorts of activities take place in those areas. Zones also make it much easier for players to obtain consent in small groups or one-on-one, rather than playing out such content in public or easily accessible locations where others might accidentally witness it. Again, witnessing might create powerful play for some participants, but feel intrusive to others.
However, the larp domino effect can still impact players, even if they are not present. As mentioned above, sometimes other characters may learn about events occurring within a zoned location, causing a chain reaction. In the example of a sexual assault in a “sandbox style larp,” while both players in the scene may have consented, the rest of the larp may not have made that social contract and may feel ambushed by that content. Alternatively, in a larp like Conscience, in which that theme is explicitly stated up front, the players are not necessarily consenting to experience sexual violence, but are agreeing to play in a fictional reality where such acts routinely take place.
Thus, content advisories are also useful, both for specific scenes and for larps in general. Stating the sorts of content a player may potentially experience can help set expectations about whether or not that larp is right for the player in question. Many of the example larps mentioned above feature content advisories connected to particular zones. On a meta-level, a larp’s website may feature a content advisory that effectively zones the whole game as a space for those potential themes.
Reality Hacking
As players, organizers, and designers, larpers intentionally hack reality, adopting new identities and social conditions. This reality hacking is temporary and flexible, in that we can alter these conditions in order to optimize the experience for multiple types of players. While the larp domino effect is not always a negative condition for a larp, it can have unintended consequences. As larpers, we can develop tools to redirect the tide of play to make the experience more enjoyable for everyone.
Upon reflection, our Western social reality is already zoned in certain ways. Acceptable behaviors in a bar may be unacceptable in a corporate boardroom. Just as we wear different social masks and adopt specific roles based on the demands of our default lives, so too are our social spaces coded in particular ways, affording certain behaviors while discouraging others. With awareness of the ways in which we operate on social stages, we can construct our larp spaces to create certain bounded experiences, redirecting the flow of the dominos as they fall.
Bibliography
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. “The New World Magischola Revolution.” Nordiclarp.org, July 4, 2018.
Fatland, Eirik and Markus Montola. “The Blockbuster Formula: Brute Force Design in
The Monitor Celestra and College of Wizardry.” In The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted, 118-131. Copenhagen: Rollespils Akademiet, 2015. https://nordiclarp.org/w/images/2/27/Kp2015companionbook.pdf
Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta, “The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together.” In The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted (Copenhagen: Rollespils Akademiet, 2015), 106-117. https://nordiclarp.org/w/images/2/27/Kp2015companionbook.pdf
Pohjola, Mike. “Steering for Immersion in Five Nordic Larps: A New Understanding of Eläytyminen.” In The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted (Copenhagen: Rollespils Akademiet, 2015), 94-105. https://nordiclarp.org/w/images/2/27/Kp2015companionbook.pdf
Torner, Evan. “Emergence, Iteration, and Reincorporation in Larp.” 2018. In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Companion Book. Edited by A. Waern and J. Axner. 153-160. ETC Press.
