Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in these texts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.
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In the Knutepunkt scene there is a history of larp designers and producers giving retrospectives, where they discuss all of their work. In this talk, here presented in two parts, Dr Stenros takes that format and expands it to other aspects of the community. He gives an overview of the work he has done around larp relating to documentation, community, and research during the past 25 years.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Cover Photo: screenshot from the video. Photo by KP SK on YouTube.
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Perhaps this conversation has been had before, perhaps it’s an elephant in the room. Since seeing a gaping hole in articles addressing environmental sustainability on Nordiclarp.org, I want to bring this topic into awareness to specifically address one topic, potentially a convenient and uncomfortable blindspot of the larp community: aviation emissions in international larp.
Climate breakdown is the most prevalent and urgent threat to life on the planet. In another year of record breaking extreme weather events — heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires — the atmospheric effects of global warming are tangible across the globe, and show no sign of slowing. The worst of it, floods in Pakistan practically submerging the country, killing thousands and displacing millions. Heatwaves in Europe created droughts so bad that ancestral carvings below a safe water level were revealed on the banks of the River Elbe in Czechia, complete with the inscription “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine” (If you see me, weep). The World Health Organisation reports that climate change is responsible for 150,000 deaths per year and that figure is set to double by 2030.
There is some hope. Nothing is inevitable and it still remains possible to keep the rise of global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees, as is the goal of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty agreed at the COP Summit in 2015. A transition to a decarbonised economy is essential, and the demands set out by a Green New Deal fight for environmental justice propose critical intervention on a local and international scale, at the same time as tackling widespread inequality across the globe. Alongside halting fossil fuel production in favour of carbon-free energy sources; transferring skilled labour to transport infrastructure; zero-carbon housing and environmental reconstruction projects; and sequestration of utilities into collective ownership; the area in which I wish to highlight is a sustainable model of how we reorganise our time to move away from production and consumption, towards a more fulfilling existence including more time for leisure activities. The Green New Deal puts forward the case that a collectively owned future allows more time spent with access to nature, sport, artistic activities, and play.
In a decarbonised future, jobs and activity in these fields is plentiful. In combination with the prospect of an ageing population, the focus for decarbonisation must shift away from a production economy to one organised around care and leisure. Zero-carbon cultural activity is integral to the survival of the planet and investment in its wider sense — education, funding, jobs, infrastructure, time — has to be escalated on a mass scale. Playful activity sits at the core of this, the very essence of play in its most rudimentary form is a zero carbon activity, borne of the imagination. In comparison to other forms of culture such as film, the average production releases 500 tonnes of CO² emissions into the atmosphere, play is a future-proof and sustainable activity.
Larp (live action role-play) occupies a unique cultural space where its activity is collectively generated by players. This sets it aside from the industrial production and consumption of the film industry (notice how these words are highly compatible), and to an extent visual arts and theatre. The way that larp activity liberates culture from passive consumption because of its active player agency is the reason that I fell in love with larp. Its adjacency to DIY cultural forms is incredibly exciting for me, designers and players collaborating to create a meaningful experience through their shared imagination. As a designer, you can start with an empty page. Of course, it’s useful to have setting, characters, prompts, and techniques for players to fill in that page, but in theory, you can start with incredibly little as the play is co-designed and improvised by players. And those players have the capacity to feel as if they are on a spaceship or Wild West saloon bar by tapping into their collective imagination. They do not need specialist skills to play, everything needed in order to understand and play the larp is communicated and learned in a short amount of time. At its core, the most basic description of chamber larp is people in physical or digital space using their imaginations to create, and immerse themselves in, fictional worlds. This doesn’t come at the expense of cultural relevance, but quite the opposite: through its collective storytelling we are able to experience a deeper contemplation of the questions society asks us, today and tomorrow.
Not all larp looks like this. Categorisation of role-play activity is a network of interlinked forms and design methods, but for the purposes of this article, I want to highlight the distinction between international long form larp and local chamber larp. These are intricately linked; without the international connections of events such as Knutepunkt and Larpwriter Summer School, many local scenes could not have flourished in the same way. Many local communities contain an international diaspora and chamber larp festivals programme international designs, arguably very important for the upkeep of local scenes. But nevertheless, I will try to draw an imaginary line in the sand between: long form larp — usually higher production values, with international participants, a relatively high financial cost to participate, lasting for multiple days — and chamber larp — usually DIY production values, with local participants, low cost, lasting a number of hours.
Firstly I want to clarify, this is not an attack on designers or players who enjoy long form larp. This is an attempt to advocate for forms of larp practice and design which should be celebrated and elevated for a zero carbon future. It feels necessary to highlight my feeling of incongruence between what I consider to be a highly environmentally sustainable practice and how this fits within a wider landscape of the international larp community.
I would imagine that on some conscious level, sustainability of larp design is an aspect of organising that is considered by most if not all designers. In a community with a progressive culture of compassion for those playing, the emotional and physical safety of players is usually a built-in priority throughout all stages of a larp. It is present in design, pre-game communication, workshopping, in-game safety techniques, and post-game briefing. In comparison, sustainability appears absent from design. I am not quite suggesting that sustainability requires parity by articulating design choices throughout; however, it needs a more careful consideration if larp can make a claim (or I can on its behalf) to have future-proof and sustainable credentials.
It is very difficult to analyse the whole larp landscape without empirical data so it should be made clear this is an anecdotal perspective. We can look at data for comparable art forms and the comparison to global visual arts activity is a useful one; however it has to be acknowledged in terms of scale, larp is a much smaller community. The estimated greenhouse gas emissions of global visual arts is 70 million tonnes; for context this fits into a global list divided by country between Romania and Morocco. This figure of 70 Mt of emissions falls dramatically to 18 Mt if visitor travel is removed. According to these figures, visitor travel accounts for 74% of total emissions from visual arts globally. This is a very sizable proportion of the sector. I understand that larp is comparably tiny compared to the proliferation of visual arts, and without having data to analyse, it’s an analysis based upon anecdotal evidence. For what it’s worth, here’s my hot take: in the case of larp events, the ratio of carbon emissions from travel is likely to be much higher.
From my own experience of facilitating sustainability activity for an arts organisation producing international work, land travel was sometimes not feasible; the delivery of the project required aeroplane travel for an artist and a producer. In these instances, aviation emissions tended to dominate the carbon footprint of the project, merely for 2 return flights. In the case of larp, even though there isn’t an audience per se, as players have an active role in the co-design and its “performance,” they are integral to the larp design and it really matters how they travel.
In larp design, I feel there is a blindspot to carbon emissions from international travel. This article isn’t a flygskam hex; players can make their own choices about travelling to events and it’s likely that many choose an international larp event as their way of taking a foreign holiday or seeing close friends. For larp designers, this is as much of a design choice as your setting and characters. Multi-day larps designed with higher production budgets and higher costs to play are very often designed for an international set of participants attending so have a disproportionately high environmental cost, in comparison to chamber larp events with local participants. If the number of players is up to 100, 50 of them taking international flights is not an unreasonable figure to estimate, generating 18.9 tons of carbon emissions from plane travel alone. This is around the same as 75,000 public transport journeys of 7km each. As designers we have agency to choose our venues or locations, the length and structure of the larp, and who attends. The last point is a salient one; if there aren’t local participants for the larp then the audience becomes an international one, consciously or unconsciously, in the design process. (I’m writing this from Oslo, where I moved nearly 2 years ago; chamber larp hasn’t really recovered from the shadow of the Coronavirus hiatus, a collective effort to nurture new players and designers only seems to be emerging now). Likewise if the price to play is one that only engages experienced players then I can’t see how new local players are able to access, nor new designers to flourish. This creates exclusions because of lack of affordability and divides potential players on the basis of class and race, something I believe the larp community wishes to avoid.
Flight emissions are a socially unequal source of emissions, a huge global disparity with the wealthiest taking a disproportionate amount of flights. Whilst aviation currently accounts for around 2.5-3% of global emissions, the proportion and total is set to increase as other sectors of the economy — electricity generation and transport — move towards renewable sources of energy. Unlike these sectors where existing solutions can be scaled up by urgent government action, the aviation industry does not currently have these technological solutions. Climate breakdown is disproportionately caused by emissions from the Global North, disproportionately affecting the Global South. The Global South is more vulnerable to extreme weather events as a direct result of historic colonial oppression leaving them with the least resources to cope with rising temperatures, sea levels, flooding, and drought. The compassion shown for human safety in larp design ought to extend to outside of those playing, by climate justice being ingrained in designs.
I have considered how I access information about larps, primarily through social media which may play a factor in how my perspective is shaped. It may be that I mostly hear about larps on a large scale because those are the organisers shouting the loudest, with the biggest promotional reach. I am less likely to come across information about local chamber larp scenes, or groups of friends quietly organising through Whatsapp to meet and play in living rooms on the other side of the world; (please make my day and tell me about this)! Larp designs can be digitally sent and received by facilitators in another part of the world; it is one of the few artistic mediums where international travel is not required in order for the larp to be realised.
There is a comparison I can make to my other playful love, football (*waits for Google Analytics to tell me half of all readers stop here*; please don’t, you’re almost done). In football, the elite leagues occupy the most media attention at the professionalised level of the game. Football as business has infected the game, players earning grossly inflated salaries and charging eye-watering entrance fees which has, at least in England, priced out the working class. However, the wider picture of the entire league structure, the football “pyramid,” named as such because the lower amateur leagues far outnumber higher, professional leagues. The lower leagues at the base of the pyramid are organised regionally, furthest from the top are organised with the closest geographical proximity. Below this, the number of games played informally in the park or on the school playing fields are even more numerous, and even though the difference in player skill and production values is notable, it’s the same game, enjoyed at its fullest by those participating. As an ecosystem, football as a comparison is not perfect, especially as financial resources are distributed incredibly unequally, but the football pyramid does provide an interesting model for redistributing a better balance between local and international.
In a sustainable decarbonised future, the network of larp design has to take the shape of a pyramid with a greater proportion of larp activity organised at a local level. I’m not saying whether or not the elite international leagues ought to exist; this is at the discretion of the reader. Besides, larp is not a competition, it’s a supportive and inclusive community. In spite of this, perpetuation of larp design which is reliant on wide scale carbon emissions from aeroplane travel without larp infrastructure existing at a local level, makes it a fantasy to claim that the imagination is without a substantial cost to the environment.
On a practical level, I would be interested to see evidence of designers working on sustainability of larp events in the future, sharing best practice, and continuing the discourse. To keep specific to the topic of flight emissions, this starts with data collection, as boring as it sounds. Knowing where participants are travelling from and most importantly, how they travelled, is fairly easy to implement with a travel survey as part of player sign-up or on-site. This shouldn’t create barriers along national borders for players travelling internationally, but rather, give a fuller picture of the carbon emissions for your larp event. By knowing this information, designers are able to see the environmental cost of the larp, identify gaps on local scenes if the event is mostly accessed by air travel, and adjust their designs and promotion accordingly. In this way the pyramidal structure does not become top heavy and avoid the danger of toppling over. A follow-up to this article could address some smaller scale sustainable design choices, however — serving vegan meals to players who have travelled thousands of kilometres to eat it — is like trying to put a fire out with a thimble.
Cover photo: Ross Parmly on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.
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JM: Now that we have more people talking about larp, a lot of people say “larp taught me that I could be another gender.” That’s a great conversation that we’ve now had a few times, so what is the next conversation? What’s next after “larp can teach me that I can be different”?
ES: I would say that it can teach you how to be different. Gender is a thing we do, and having an environment where we can actually learn — I mean, my first Inside Hamlet was the first time I ever tried to perform that specific kind of high femininity.
AN: I was thinking about skills. It can take years to feel comfortable with the most basic skills of performing the gender role that you want to be reflected as.
JM: I’m what, eight years in? And I’m finding that I don’t feel like I’m getting so much more comfortable with the skills as much as getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. There are definitely people and situations where I still have no idea how to interact.
ES: It gets easier. There are still things that feel weird and fraught—but there are so many things that I’ve also stopped noticing are skills; I don’t realize they’re learned anymore.
AN: But there’s also some danger to larp being talked about in this sense. How do we talk about what it is that we do? Because there’s no way to make that immune from someone saying “well, this is just an act” – reducing it to clothing and skills. We didn’t just put on the dress or the suit, we put on the skills, and they don’t want environments where people can learn these skills and become comfortable with them. They don’t want us to exist. Maybe let’s not get too depressing here, but I think that’s what is radical about larp spaces: they can be a place where you can learn.
JM: Most people don’t actually want that liberation.
ES: To that I would say they’re going to try to kill us regardless, so making ourselves smaller isn’t going to stop it. My answer to that is to ignore it, and even to be explicit about this — here is the fraught thing, and we choose to ignore it. But skills are an interesting frame because body language isn’t a skill. You’re literally restructuring your peripheral nervous system to have different kinds of reflexes, right? You could argue that performance plus time is part of physical transition.
JM: Like fluency?
ES: Deeper than that, it’s physiological.
JM: Maybe similar to the way when you start to think in a new language and react in that language – you don’t forget your original one, but for a long time they can get mixed up.
*****
SS: As a player, I find it useful to have access to queer history and other queer experiences. And to play your own oppression, because it can be very liberating to fuck with it. But as the backlash against queer people has been growing, our queer games have become more sanitized; people don’t want to play on things they experience in real life. People playing the oppressors are scared of playing the oppressors.
JM: If you can’t have the oppressors in these games, you also lose out on the possibility for liberation.
SS: Exactly, and that’s what’s been bugging me. One of the things larp can do is let us see the oppression and act against it.
AN: We have to workshop people to get them to play mean and nasty!
JM: In The Future is Straight I played the head of the conversion camp and used this very nuanced, caring kind of normative oppressor — the counselors and I would do these horrible scenes and then meet up in the kitchen to cry. But at the end I didn’t feel horrible, I felt intensely grateful to anyone who had done any of that work, who had stood up to this in the past and now. But can trans liberation and larp overlap?
ES: I mean, we know larp is a very bad tool for doing politics because it doesn’t scale. But learning history in a very deep way is one of the places where it can be useful. Like, this is what it meant to come out as trans 15 or 20 years ago. Or the fight between the leather dykes and the conventional pride ecosystem in 1980 and ‘81. Understanding how we survived previously and how we fought is a direct survival mechanism.
JM: But are the kids even interested in history yet?
ES: Larp lets us create scripts for talking across generations. We don’t really have scripts for talking to our elders because they died, or went stealth.
JM: And there’s an active campaign to prevent us from interacting with young people.
*****
JM: Sometimes I go into a larp thinking I want to consciously play with a particular part of myself, or to try something out, and to cis people it might not be a characteristic or personality that is obviously gendered, but for me it’s inescapably gendered.
ES: I mean, as a trans person, can you actually imagine a version of yourself without thinking about the gendered implications of it?
JM: No, exactly.
*****
SS: One of the reasons I larp is that sometimes when I’m larping, I can forget that I’m trans, and I crave that so much.
JM: Do you reflect yourself as cis, or do you just forget that transness is a thing?
SS: I don’t know. I forget that I am trans. Not that it exists, but the inhabitation of another character can sort of reinscribe a bodily understanding of myself.
ES: I remember that specifically from Just a Little Lovin’, this physical weirdness of interacting with my own body after the game, like wait, what is this?
JM: I’m going to take a different direction. Obviously Just a Little Lovin’ was the larp that made my omelet more than cracked my egg, and it was jarring to leave that character body, but not just the body; the way that people behaved around that body. And like, in real life when I walk into a new social situation, especially a non-queer one, I’m always looking for my failure modes and the social and gendered awkwardness have real consequences. But in a larp, people are so ready to paper over your “mistakes.” I experience some of the usual anxiety of performing in the larp, but I have a lot less anxiety about just being in a social situation at all. And I wonder if this is the liberatory element; like, I would like to live in a society where I feel like that all the time.
ES: To be in a room where you’re guaranteed a kind reading.
AN: Also something about the fact that everybody has a layer of performance.
JM: Yeah, and they know it!
ES: Everyone is aware.
JM: Because we all do this all the time.
ES: I feel like we should ask some cis people about whether they have that understanding that they’re performing all the time.
AN: They don’t!
SS: Some do, but yeah.
AN: That’s the problem! But larp is an equalizer in that way, right? That’s why there’s safety in a larp pack and why we party so well at Knutepunkt — even if you’re not trans, everyone has some kind of understanding that reality is a stack and you can play with it, and at the base layer we’re all performing something.
JM: So larp levels the playing field when it comes to the creation of the self?
ES: There’s also something about the ensemble thing, though, right? Because we’re not just aware that everyone is performing. There’s this explicit trust and co-performance relationship that’s happening. And you know that everybody kind of knows that.
AN: Everybody is performing and everybody needs to support everybody else in that performance.
ES: And if you say that you’re X, of course I’m going to take that at face value, because why wouldn’t I?
AN: That’s why it’s so hard to lie at larps; we interpret everything so kindly.
JM: And then in the real world, in the office, people are deeply invested in not doing this.
*****
SS: You said something that made me think — about making explicit the gender play in every role. That would do a lot, forcing people to think about it, because the privilege of cisness is that you don’t have to think about gender.
JM: We often write very gendered characters in the backstory, but we’re not explicit about it.
AN: And now a lot of larps now have gender-neutral casting —
JM: Not a fan.
ES: I hate it!
AN: Because all this is taken out, right?
JM: I realize I don’t really play cis characters, but I don’t really play trans characters, either. I’m just kind of this guy —
ES: I know what you mean.
JM: And it’s not gender-neutral, but it’s somehow resisting or even escaping the categories. But here’s a conversation: When you larp, is your body your body? Are your scars your scars?
SS: It’s complicated.
JM: Yeah, me too. I feel like I have a bit of a Schrödinger’s body.
SS: I mean, the facts of our bodies are by and large inescapable. We can change them but that’s not really something we do for larp. How we physically access this world is a fact, though we might experience the liminality in that particular larp moment.
ES: Obviously I acknowledge that I’m playing the character with the same body as I have otherwise, but it would never occur to me to think of any of the specificity of my body as belonging to the character. Almost like something that I have to do to play the character is to step away from the history of the body, because it’s so bound up with identity — and not just identity, but path dependency and time and interaction with gatekeepers and all of this specific body history. For me to play a character it can’t be the same body. It has to be, at the very least, read through a soft focus.
*****
JM: Could we ever make a trans liberationist larp that cis people would get?
ES: What does liberation mean?
JM: [struggling] … with this sort of idea baked into it that… I have to describe it negatively — no gatekeeping, no violence, no prejudice on the basis of a trans identity.
ES: That just sounds like freedom from oppression. That feels like a really low bar.
JM: Yeah, it does. I’m not going to fall into the trap of saying it’s liberation from gender because I like gender and I think it’s a nice flavor. But I could imagine something where fluidity is actually assumed for everyone?
ES: I don’t want to play that game.
JM: Okay, not fluidity. But I somehow want the society I would like to see modeled in a larp, though I don’t think it’s so important to model the exact society so much as get something right in the design about the interaction. Why do we interact with gender and each other in a particular way?
AN: Another answer for a trans liberatory larp would be one that’s for trans people, one that actually leaves the concerns of cis people behind. I don’t know what that looks like —
ES: Me neither, but I would play that. Trans utopia sounds nice. I’ve never played a larp that is as queer as my life is.
Cover photo: Photo by Jasmin Egger on Unsplash.
This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
MacDonald, Jamie. 2022. “Beyond Cracking Eggs.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 51-54. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
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How it is to be a woman of color in the larp scene?
Dear non-Person of Color (PoC) larpers.
We are not here to give you all the answers on how to solve racism. Neither will we be able to give you one coherent answer for you to use on questions on how to make the larp community better.
We are four Women of Color (WoC) with different backgrounds and different reasons for why we love larping.
We are not the same but we have one thing in common: we all want to see the larp community change for the better and be a bit less oblivious towards racist structures.
With this article, we invite you to sit with us, listen, and remember our words and stories.
So, who are we and what do we do when we are not larping?
Aina: My name is Aina Skjønsfjell. In my everyday life, I work as a translator and have done for 10 years now. I have a degree in languages and linguistics. Oh, and I live in Norway!
Liselle: I’m Liselle Awwal, and I live in Denmark. I am a self-employed crafter with a webshop with a lot of nerdy things!
Jonaya: My name is Jonaya Kemper and I’m a Nebula Award winning game designer and an instructor of game design at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. In addition to that, I am known for some of my theories on identity transformation using role-playing games.
Anna: I’m Anna Erlandsson from Sweden. I work with digital games and have a burning passion for making the gaming culture more inclusive.
The four of us have larped for over 20 years and it‘s breathtaking to think that we have done this hobby for so long. But what made us start larping?
Anna: For me, it was a longing to play fantasy for real. I read a lot as a kid and I was drawn to the fantasy bookshelf in the library. I read these magical stories and so wanted to be a part of them myself. When I was a teenager, I discovered that there was a thing called larp and as soon as I turned 18, I went to my first one. I have never looked back.
Liselle: Just as Anna, I was an avid reader from childhood, particularly of fantasy books. Once I got online in the early nineties, I started role-playing online. It was a random segment on television, just before the turn of the century, which revealed the larp world to me: a brief clip of a fantasy larp in a forest. I was immediately obsessed, and upon discovering that my cousin was a larper, introductions were made.
Aina: I wanted to be a goth vampire and wear vampire clothes! My goth friend told me that she and her goth boyfriend played Vampire: the Masquerade not too far from where I lived and that I should absolutely join. So I had my grandmother sew me an all black, medieval-inspired “period” piece of the finest polyester fabric and off I went to drink red wine and look pretty.
Jonaya: I love to dress up and play pretend, and I have trained for my entire life in improvisational theater. A very close friend of mine, Noxweiler, suggested I give it a try as he loved it. I always said no to larping, because as a Black person in the U.S. we don’t tend to go to a secluded area unless we trust everyone involved. I know it sounds absurd, but this is very true. There is a real pattern of Black people dying on innocuous trips. Many large U.S. based larps are boffer campaigns taking place in forested areas, and this isn’t always accessible or safe.
I trusted Nox, but not everyone involved. Nox basically had to show me that no one would try to murder me, in order for me to go. He actually had to say: “There will be other Black people.” It worked, and here I am today. Dr. Diana Shippey was actually the first person I saw there and it made me feel a lot more relaxed.
Over the years, we have tried a lot of different styles of larp, from Nordic larp to blockbuster larps and we all have different types of characters we prefer to play.
Liselle: Ohh, I very deliberately try to bounce between characters that are very different, but I often have the most fun with scheming manipulators.
Aina: It depends on the larp, I enjoy playing a leader a lot, or a villain. That being said, I have greatly enjoyed playing Thug #3, The Mad Scientist, and even The Vapid (but pretty) Princess. I can find joy and fun in almost any character if I can play with good people at a good larp
Jonaya: In general I like to play any character I can learn from or learn things with. Or the ones I am most disallowed from being in actual society. My favorite role genuinely was an NPC. I played Death in the U.K. run of Just a Little Lovin’, and this was perhaps my favorite role of all time.
Anna: I either like to be very different from myself, like a visual pretty teenage princess or super cool ranger, or I like to create a lot of pain and drama for my co-players – with full consent of course! In the latter case, I love playing characters that are in the background but at the same time have all the power.
Besides being larpers, we have done different things in our communities and on the international level that we will now brag about!
Aina: I am proud of being a name many people recognise in the world of larp, both as a larper (some even say that I’m good – I am one of those people) and as a voice for larpers of color. The fact that people have come to me for advice on inclusivity is always something I’m proud of and grateful for, even if I don’t always have the ability and/or spoons to help out.
Jonaya: Despite the actual psychological harm it caused to me personally, I would say my biggest achievement is fighting as much as I can for the inclusion of people of color in fantasy, which led to me coming up with my theory of emancipatory bleed. I didn’t know how much the theory has helped people, but I think I am more proud of this than any of my other work. I love helping people.
Liselle: There are larps I have organized that I am proud of, but I am also proud to have developed my crafting skills to a level where I can monetize them. The making of things is the fun part, and selling them enables me to spend as much time crafting as I want.
Anna: I feel so proud over how much I speak up for inclusion for PoC in larp and in the gaming hobby. That I have also been able to push this on a national level and talk about it abroad gives me hope that perhaps it will make it easier for other PoC after me.
We are from different countries, Anna from Sweden, Liselle from Denmark, Aina from Norway and Jonaya from the U.S. What are our experiences when larping in our home countries and being a Woman of Color?
Liselle: Oh god, it is frequently exhausting, being one of less than a handful of PoC in my local community, and frequently at larger international larps or events. Sometimes lonely, if difficult debates surrounding marginalization are attempted, as it is very easy for my voice to be drowned out by a multitude of dismissive ones.
Jonaya: While I am grateful for the people who have helped me find success, for me, it has been genuinely awful. If I did not truly believe that larp was an excellent tool for liberation I would stop. I have many privileges being a U.S. citizen, but it was very difficult to get death threats for my work and to be accused of perpetrating “cancel culture.” I have been doxxed. I have been lied to. I have had other larpers scream in my face while running larps. It can be very exhausting honestly, and I am one of the more well-known faces. Marginalized people also face representational burnout, i.e. we have to be a perfect presentation of a human and any slip up can toss us out. So there’s a feeling that we must present perfectly while facing enormous scrutiny.
Anna: In the beginning, I did not think about it so much, mostly cause I was so happy to be able to larp. But it has been exhausting at times to both be one of the few WoC and a very loud voice about diversity and inclusion. I have mostly gotten small “well-intended” comments but it is the ignorance towards racist structures and how… white the larps hobby is in it’s thinking that really drains me.
Aina: Well, it is better now, as I am older and meaner and give fewer forks. But you rarely escape a “well-intentioned” “compliment” or an action/question that is a micro-aggression. They’re [at] least daily at events.
There are few PoC in our larp scenes and we four found each other in recent years. Have we felt supported by other PoC in the larping community during the years?
Aina: I think the larp community as a whole is too big with too many cultures to say only yes to that. Obviously not all PoC will support me, as I probably will not support all PoC. And I don’t always need support. But I try to focus more on the support I get from the people around me than the support I don’t get.
Anna: I have felt so much support from other PoC in larp during the years but at the same time, we come from such different backgrounds that it is impossible for us to agree on all things. I have way different experiences and opinions from some PoC and that is just as it should be and sometimes, the clashes are real.
Liselle: Yes, and no. Several years ago, I joined the newly created “Larpers of Color” group on Facebook. It was purportedly a global network, but since the vast majority of members were U.S. larpers, my experience was that my perspective as a European PoC was often ignored or dismissed. I was excited for such a group to exist in theory, but in reality it became a stressor to the point that I left.
I have felt very supported by PoC – from all over the world – I have met through larps and related events, and I have heavily relied on especially a handful of other WoC for support and encouragement.
Jonaya: Yes and no. I have a thriving and amazing community that supports me and I can dialogue with, but there have been a few noticeably bad actors who do their level best to close the door behind them by appealing to a “status quo.” There are certain PoC who have done real damage by perpetuating stereotypes and causing lateral violence. Even so, I think I have become a better person by learning from and dialoguing with many people of color, especially from outside of the U.S.
PoC are in a clear minority when it comes to larp and all four of us are in agreement that larping is a very white hobby. But why?
Jonaya: This is something we need to look at systemically. I don’t believe any one ethnicity is intrinsically disposed to a hobby, but that their lives allow them to do it. From a U.S. standpoint white people have a systemic upper hand and have more leisure time, unless they are lower class. It’s quite hard to think of larping when you do not have your fundamental everyday needs met. In the international larp scene as well, many of the participants are middle class and have large degrees of mobility and disposable income. If you don’t have to worry about healthcare and vacation days, then you can sign up for every game. There’s also the point that if you don’t see anyone that looks like you who larps, you may believe you don’t belong there. This happens frequently.
Liselle: We have to remember that not only is larp a white hobby. For example, Denmark is a pretty ethnically homogenous country. Even so, there should be more POC larping, but I fear that the experience of being one of the few larpers of color may have scared many off over the years.
Aina: I see the same in Norway, it’s a white hobby. The way larp is portrayed in the media, showing white people doing white nerdy things. The lack of representation will lessen any interest for the few non-white people who are interested in trying, because if you already are a little geeky, chances are you are ostracised in your current communities already. Not everyone is up for finding a new community where you will once more be the odd one out. Then when no PoC joins, including them for representation is harder, and thus the spiral continues.
Anna: From a Swedish point of view, this is an expensive hobby and you need to know someone that can point you to larps and help you with the first steps, from equipment and transport to friends. The lack of PoC is another thing that I think scares away people. It is not easy to go into a hobby where you are not represented and you have to worry about racism.
I think it’s a serious issue when we take larp as an example of an inclusive hobby. In Sweden, the larp scene is so good at welcoming women and queer people but white larpers tend to stop there and think that this is good enough. “Well, if more PoC would like to larp, they can just join us.” They completely forget about the previously mentioned barriers for PoC when it comes to larp.
Jonaya: Yes, I think the biggest barriers for getting more PoC into larp are time, money, and relevance.
Aina: And the lack of visibility and representation.
Liselle: This is an important thing. Because if the first thing potential newcomers encounter when they look at the larp scene is a wall of dismissiveness along the lines of “larp is for everyone, we do not see color, learn to separate fantasy and reality,” that is not reassuring or actually inclusive. We need to trust that our concerns will, at the very least, be taken seriously or listened to, rather than mocked, belittled and brushed off.
Without getting into details, we have had bad experiences when it comes to being a WoC in the larp community. How has that affected us?
Liselle: I spent too many years afraid of rocking the boat before I decided it was vital I raise my voice and object when I encountered issues. When I met other PoC in the international scene, it gave me confidence. The realization that me not speaking up on certain issues might mean no one would was also a deciding factor.
Anna: I started to speak up when I met another WoC and realized that she have had the same experience. That it was a structure and not just me. From then I just continued to “make a mess” and being the one that made trouble. I wanted it to be better for PoC that came after me. But dear god, it can be so exhausting.
Aina: Yes, it can often make me tired, and feel like I am “that person” who always has to bring up “that thing.” On good days it makes me proud that I am and can be, but mostly it makes me want to give up because I still have to.
But I see that times may be changing. Some people are trying more, making more effort. The larp community isn’t doomed or hopeless, but it looks like it will take a lot more time than I should like.
While it has become better, some big mistakes have nonetheless been made by white larpers when it comes to inclusion that still make us want to facepalm.
Liselle: A common mistake is to make assumptions about what PoC want or need without actually consulting us. I realize inclusion can be difficult to navigate, but it is frequently not enough to glance at the opinion of a single PoC on social media and then decide that this must be the universal truth. What is needed or wanted for a larp in Denmark may be entirely different from what PoC larpers in the U.S. require.
Jonaya: Totally agreeing on not listening to their local populations! As much as many of us are connected, we are different. I don’t know anything about being Ghanaian and Danish, so I don’t know what that community needs exactly. Listen to what the racialized people in your community need first.
Anna: The idea that all PoC are one big happy family is so weird, since we all have different backgrounds and experiences. I honestly get pissed off when it‘s assumed that we need to think the same way and give one answer, for inclusion to be allowed to happen.
Aina: Non-PoC larpers need to listen more when you are being told something is problematic. Do not dismiss it because you wouldn’t do that. Chances are, you might. Speak up if you see others do problematic things. Stand with us. Don’t make us seem like the only “those people” who always and only have to talk about “those things.” Be one of “those people” with us. If everyone is “those people,” none of us are.
Liselle: And make sure to elevate PoC voices. Listen attentively if attention is called to something being an issue, even if it is one you – or even your personal PoC friends – have not experienced to be an issue.
Anna: I feel that white people can be offended very quickly when they are pointed towards racist things, or even problematic people that are using racial slurs. That is one thing I would like to improve. And not having to argue why actual Nazis should not be allowed at larps…
Jonaya: And we need to rethink how the community uses “cancel culture” and “woke.” Oftentimes organizers may fear being canceled or complain about wokeness if a PoC player comes to them with an issue. Instead of listening, they use these phrases exactly like far-Right politicians, and that stops the growth of larp. I wouldn’t feel comfortable at a larp where an organizer reacts to feedback that way.
One question that we have gotten during the years is: “Why do we keep on larping if things are so horrible?” There are some reasons, apart from the fact that we love larp.
Liselle: To discover and bond with other WoC in recent years has been wonderful. It´s a special feeling to experience solidarity when we are meeting. Just to support each other in chats has been novel and delightful. There has been an uptick in allied voices of support trying to amplify my own to ensure it is heard on issues that affect me, for which I am thankful.
Jonaya: Another one of my favorite experiences is being a visible PoC in order to help other visible people of color. I played the Headmistress for the first run of Forbidden History, and had an amazing scene in which I was able to acknowledge oppression and power, and open a door for a player who played a student.
Aina: I love that I have met other WoC that I would not have met elsewhere. It has been really good, it is like we have our own little community within a community. To see how similar and yet different our experiences are, comparing “war stories,” and to really know that we are not an entity; usually most of these women have vastly different opinions on everything and I love us for it.
Anna: I have loved to find my voice in the community and be part of the change I’ve seen happen during these years. It goes slowly but it happens, and that gives me hope. Not to mention that I have met so many wonderful WoC that have become dear friends. They are people that I can reach out to and share experiences with as a WoC and that has been invaluable for me.
We will be larping for at least 20 years more and sometimes, we will be very loud when it comes to inclusion. For all non-PoC, here is some advice from us to you on how to get more PoC into larp.
Liselle: Invite PoC larpers into your projects, and not solely as inclusivity consultants but fully fledged collaborators. This is so important. Do not expect us to work for free.
Jonaya: Continue to support PoC in making their own stories and uplifting them, especially in their own communities. There are many racialized individuals living in Nordic countries who need their voices amplified in the ways that only they know how to explain. I would love to play in the worlds they create.
Anna: Support PoC in your community and accept that we have different opinions. Yes, it will get complicated but it is the road forward. Accept that larp is not so inclusive as of now, and that it is not enough to just say that “everybody is welcome.” Collaborate with organizations and schools to open up the door to larp for young PoC.
Aina: In short: Listen to us.
Cover photo: Aina Skjønsfjell at the larp Avalon. Photo by Nadina Dobrowolska. Photo has been cropped.
This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Erlandsson, Anna. 2022. “Not All Black and White.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 15-23. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
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One handful of larpers
Two spoons of diversity (feel free to add as much as you want, it will only make the result that much more exciting)
Three pinches of dialogue
Four shots of open minds
Five cups of awareness
Five splashes of understanding
Four drops of respect
Three sprinkles of tolerance
Two dashes of love
One sprig of community
Mix all the ingredients in a venue of your choice. You can add them in any order you would like; one at a time or all at once. When all the ingredients have been thoroughly mixed; let it set for a while and have a cup of coffee (or whisky if you like). Enjoy your magical larp experience and remember to share with your co-players. The recipe can be scaled up or down as need be.
Cover photo: Image by Borkia on Pixabay. Photo has been cropped.
This article is published in the companion book Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Hegre, Torun. “Recipe for a Magical Larp Experience.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
[1] No privilege needed in this recipe.
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Imagine this: It’s the afterparty of a larp, and you run up to a co-player who facilitated a scene that was the highlight of your larp to rave about how cool it was, and they just shrug and say, “Well that’s great, I just wanted to make sure you all had fun.” Doesn’t that kind of suck? Wouldn’t you rather have them go, “I know, right? It was SO cool when we all pooled our powers to get that MacGuffin.” Players shouldn’t just create things solely for the sake of other players. Such an approach is for organisers; I want players to be selfish creatures who take care of their own experience first and foremost. That will lead to better play for everyone.
And yes, there are exceptions and caveats and all those things. Do I want players to steamroll each other in a sort of ego-driven cage fight? No, of course not. I still think we should be considerate, open, and generous as players, but we can be all those things while still keeping our own wants and needs in mind. I sometimes hear players proudly state that they’re mainly at a larp to create play for others, or that the plot they created was mostly for the sake of other people’s enjoyment. Honestly, I think it’s bad form for players to approach plot in that way. It’s a hollow feeling to know the people you had a wonderful time with weren’t really enjoying themselves that much. I don’t want to play with those people; I want to play with people who are enthusiastic about it and loving the experience as much as I am. If I’m a part of a player-created plot I want all players to enjoy it, including the creators.
It is of course great to be considerate of your co-players while playing or planning, but make sure to create an experience that you will enjoy yourself too. If you want to be the hero, you absolutely should get that opportunity; just make room for other people to be heroes along with you. I think the best plots are the ones everyone is excited for, and so I think we should shift our focus when creating play from “making cool things for other people” to “making cool things for myself with room for other people.” Excitement can be felt, and it rubs off on other people. The best things I have done in larps have often been things I did chiefly for my own benefit and then dragged other players into. The passion and the enthusiasm for some play you truly want to have yourself too: that’s what makes co-creation come to life; that’s where the magic happens. Taking responsibility for other people’s fun is for organisers; as players we need to take responsibility for ourselves. I want my co-players to trust that I know what I want, and I extend that same trust to them. To butcher an old cliche: Create a cool scene for a new player, they have one cool scene. Help a new player create their own cool scene, all their larps will be cool (and you can get to enjoy their work as well).
The art of saying no covers some of the same territory. I want to play with people who want to play with me. When I approach people I never think to myself, “I really hope they say yes”; I think, “I really hope they want this.” It’s a subtle difference, but it is a difference, and too often we fall into the pitfall of saying yes just to be polite or inclusive. “No” is a very difficult word, but I really think we need to practice both saying and receiving nos. A no doesn’t have to be a closed door, you can still come up with compromises and alternatives. It could be, “I’m not up for romance, but I would love to be old friends” or “Saving the world isn’t really my jam, but I’ll totally be there for interrogating the bad guy” or whatever weird thing you have going on. A “no” should, in many cases, be an invitation to work out a solution together. “No, but” is just as powerful for creating play as the famous “yes, and.” We should talk more about that. It’s easy to say yes to someone just because you don’t want to hurt them, but ultimately a mismatch in engagement and enthusiasm can hurt even more.
Co-creation is such a beautiful aspect of larp. All of us are creating something together, for all of us, but that means everyone has to be creating for themselves too. It demands openness and flexibility, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your own fun. I believe that the best thing you can do for other people’s fun is to have fun yourself. In most larps we’re all adults; we can take care of ourselves. Trust your coplayers to build great experiences for themselves and others, and do the same for yourself, then everyone will have great experiences!
Cover photo: Image by Kulbir on Pexels. Photo has been cropped.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Kyhn, Mia. “In Defence of Selfishness: And the Beauty of a No.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.
This article is Part 1 in a series on Grooming in the Larp Community.
Content Advisory: Sexual abuse, mental health issues.
On a bus on my way to Poland, I met Julie, and we struck up a conversation.
It is pretty commonly known that teenage girls can come off as deceptively mature, but as someone who has worked professionally with teenagers, I am not usually surprised about people’s age. In Julie’s case,((This article uses anonymised names. The real names are only known to the author. )) she certainly seemed mentally older than her 19 years. It did not occur to me at the time that her maturity might have had a cost.
We found out that we had a lot in common and agreed to meet up for coffee once we were back home. It was only after a few talks that I came to know of the things she had been through.
Role-playing is a hobby that spans the gap between adults and children. While this gives us a great opportunity to interact with and even form friendships with people outside our own age group, it also means that romantic and sexual relationships occur. In that sense, role-playing isn’t different from football, basketball, scouts, and many other hobbies. The difference is that in role-playing, there are no clear guidelines to what is acceptable or what is not. As opposed to e.g. the 113-years-old scouts movement, we are a young hobby without an established hierarchy or procedures.
I have noticed that many people are accepting of these relationships. But should they be? Does love conquer all differences — including age?
As it turned out, Julie was one of the many young role-players who had experienced grooming.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, grooming is “the criminal activity of becoming friends with a child in order to try to persuade the child to have a sexual relationship.”((Cambridge Dictionary. N.d. “Grooming.” Cambridge Dictionary)) And that is exactly what happened to Julie, with role-playing as a backdrop.
Julie described herself as having been a lonely child. She felt ostracized at school — people would bully her for being a nerd. She was preoccupied with manga, Harry Potter, and games, while her classmates were discussing boys and make-up.
Things were not easy at home. Julie’s parents had divorced when she was five. Her mother, whom she lived with most of the time had found a new husband — one who didn’t like kids, and had very strict rules. He wedged himself between Julie and her mother, and expressed how much he looked forward to the day when she was old enough to leave home. Her father, on the other hand, would alternate between harsh criticism and undeserved praise.
Julie told me of how she got into contact with her abuser, “When I met H, I was 12 years old and starving for kindness and acceptance, and when he offered it to me, I ate it all up. You get less picky when you are really, really hungry.”
H. worked in an after-school youth club (a common form of childcare facility in Denmark). Julie described him as “the coolest adult ever.” He was a larper, and he organised trips for the kids to go larping. Also, he told Julie that she was his favourite.
When Julie was 13, H. began inviting her back to his place, where they could be alone. He would also take her out to sushi restaurants. One evening, after a visit to a restaurant, H. took Julie to a secluded wooden shelter in the forest and had her perform oral sex on him.
“I remember throwing up and shaking with disgust,” said Julie. “But I also felt so happy I could scream that I was his favorite.”
For Julie, the pain and disgust were a price she was willing to pay for H’s attention.
At the same time, H also began taking Julie to adult larps. He had to sign a form saying that he would take responsibility for Julie while she was at the larp since she was underage. It was like the wolf signing for the sheep.
“I was so proud,” said Julie. “He told me to lie to the other participants and tell them I was 14. That way they would accept us more easily, he said.”
H also brought Julie along to his boardgaming events. Julie estimated that she was the only person under the age of 30 at those sessions. She knew that the people she met there were not really her friends — she was seen as an extension of H — and she knew it. Still, it was better than not having a social life.
As Julie got older, H’s demands got worse. Although she still slept at home during weekdays, she visited him every day in his small flat, and played along with his make-believe. It was like they were role-playing an adult couple.
“I was so grateful for the company and I would let him perform more and more different sexual acts on me as the previous ones got boring to him,” Julie explained. Along with the one-sided sex, he also became more controlling. He demanded that Julie count calories in order to stay skinny, and she had to remove all body hair. She began to develop an eating disorder. Starvation made her exhausted, and she barely had energy left for anything else.
When Julie started high school, she somehow found the strength to leave H. She had fallen in love with a boy at school, and that gave her a reason to move on. “I guess I had a glimpse of something different,” she said. “Could I just be a normal person going to school, having a boyfriend, going out after school instead of having to get the first train back so I could do the dishes of this adult man who had become my life?”
Here is another account, as seen from the point of view of a mother.
Karin was the mother of a happy and smart 13 year-old who happened to love larping. She described her family as pretty harmonious. She and her husband were divorced, but had a very friendly relationship, and were good at working together when it came to the children.
Like Julie, Karin’s daughter had a lot of adults around her. Also like Julie, her daughter was perceived as being mature for her age.
Karin saw herself as a liberal person. She thought there were lots of things children could learn from having adult friends, and she loved the role-playing community. Trusting that her friends would protect her daughter from harm, she let them look after her. Little did she know that these so-called friends were using her young daughter for sex behind her back.
It was statutory rape, but at the time, Karin’s daughter would have denied it.
“The problem is that people are very focused on ‘no means no’,” Karin explained to me. “But teenagers don’t say no. They say a resounding ‘yes’. They agree, body and soul, to having sex with this adult who is so interested in them.”
And she continues,“Children have no idea what that yes means. They just don’t know. They might also think that downing an entire bottle of vodka might be a good idea, even though it might actually kill them.”
It took many years before Karin realised what had been going on. In the beginning, her daughter told her nothing, but she started getting ill. She suffered from shattering depression and had trouble with her studies. Karin was confused: What had happened to her lively, intelligent child? Only when her daughter was in her late teens did she start talking about what had happened. Her daughter had kept it all secret.
When Karin found out, she immediately contacted the police. Both men were sentenced and went to jail.
As for Julie, she and her mother went through a period of estrangement. H had told Julie not to trust her own mother: “She just wanted to separate us because she didn’t understand our love,” was what he told her.
Julie’s mother accepted that there was nothing she could do. Even when Julie told me about her experiences, she believed she would have threatened to run away and never see her mother again if her mother had reported H to the police. That is how much of a hold he had over her.
Thinking about Julie and Karin’s experiences, I feel ashamed. Ashamed of the larp community — my community — but also on a personal level. This has been going on since I started larping. Why haven’t I done anything about it?
You might think that what happened to Julie and Karin is unique or at least rare. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
I am one of the witnesses who is here to tell you differently.
So why did I not react?
Because I didn’t know any better. I was repeatedly told by both the abusers and their friends that I needed to accept these relationships. I was even told by the children themselves to mind my own business.
There are some very strong voices within the Danish community that are telling us to be open and accepting to all types of love, no matter what the age difference might be. Asking questions is perceived as “ageist.” Not accepting relationships between adults and teenagers is framed as prudish and meddlesome.
The general position at Danish larps and larp conventions is that unless there is a conviction, there is no reason to call out the behaviour. People who are known to have repeatedly dated very young larpers are able to use our community to pick up teens.
However, to Julie it turned out that even a conviction didn’t change how people saw the relationship she had been in with H. In the beginning of 2018, Julie went to the police. She went through a mentally draining procedure where the police questioned everything she put forward and demanded evidence of her.
Once confronted with his actions, H. denied having had sex with Julie while he was still working at the youth club. Since it had only happened while they were alone, Julie had no way of proving her accusation.
In December of 2018, the case went to court. H. was sentenced with a fine and community service.
After the sentence, Julie experienced a backlash from the Danish role-playing community. H. was part of an extensive network of friends who were willing to support him, and who attacked Julie for having taken him to court. The general feeling was that she had been a willing participant, and old enough to be taken to account for her choices. They saw the charges as an attempt to ‘ruin’ H.
Anyway, if she was not happy in the relationship, why did she stay so long?
“Can you know that you are unhappy, even if all you’ve ever experienced are different flavors of misery? I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but that was my situation,” Julie explained to me, when I asked her the same question.
Within the Danish community, there are several examples of well-liked and influential roleplayers who have had relationships with either young teenagers or people who were in fact their pupils. Although some of these relationships are not allowed legally, people are willing to overlook them, because of the general feeling of goodwill towards these persons. However, what people are most likely not aware of is the long-term damage done to the teenagers due to the asymmetrical power distribution in such a relationship.
Karin, too, described being disappointed with the role-playing community.
“It was not just those two guys!” She said. “It was 30-40 other adults who bought my daughter alcohol, who saw her drunk and saw her flirting with adults without telling me, the mother”.
A female larper whom Karin considered her friend knew about the repeated rapes for an entire year before she revealed it to Karin.
According to a report by the Danish national board of social services,((Click here to download the full report as a PDF.)) PTSD is one of the most common reactions to childhood abuse in adults. Although reactions are individual and dependent on both the severity of the abuse, the duration of the abuse and the role of the abuser, there is a long list of common symptoms: anxiety, depression, low self-worth, problems with body image and sexuality, suicidal or overly sexualised behaviour.
It was the same for Julie.
“I mean, how doesn’t it affect me?” she said, when I asked about how she is still affected.
She went on to describe the long-term physical damage to her body from the strict calorie counting that had been forced upon her. The damage to her bones, teeth, and fertility.
“Less concrete but just as consequential for my health are the nightmares. It is very rare that I can get a full night’s sleep without waking up from nightmares once or twice. Sometimes they are about him touching me, sometimes he kills himself (as he threatened to do countless times), and sometimes I’m just back in his apartment, doing everyday things. If anything, the latter dreams are the scariest, as they are often the most realistic and the ones it takes the longest for me to shake off of me once I’m awake.”
Julie has attempted suicide several times and attributed these attempts to the abuse as well.
She also found it hard to have romantic relationships. She described to me how her first experience with relationships and sex had twisted her idea of what a normal relationship should be.
“I have a hard time handling conflict, as my body and brain shuts down in preparation for the situation to escalate into physical violence. At the same time, things I should see as red flags are not even registered by my brain. Certain behavior that other people tell me is manipulative and cruel seems normal to me, and normal human behavior which I should be able to expect from anyone, not only a romantic partner, can bring me to tears because of how kind it seems to me and how undeserving I feel.”
There was nothing Julie would have wanted more than to move on. However, the consequences of the abuse was not something she was able to just shrug off.
For Karin’s daughter, it took more than ten years from when she was raped and when she was finally able to overcome the PTSD, the anxiety, and the personality disorder that were direct consequences of the abuse.
Is it even possible for a 16-year-old and an adult to have a healthy relationship? Perhaps a more relevant question is this: What does an adult want to get out of having a relationship with a child?
As the power balance between adults and children is naturally skewed to the benefit of the adult, it is not a stretch to suspect that what they are after might be a situation where they find themselves in control. We are then looking at is a narcissistic drive to be sexually and otherwise dominant, in which the adult is interested neither in their responsibility nor in the moral duty to protect the child.
In the role-playing community, a lot of adults have grown up feeling stigmatised. We were called names — nerds, geeks — and perhaps we did not get a lot of attention. Growing up and becoming the subject of a child’s adoration might be tempting. Perhaps even too tempting. We, the peers, need to interfere. We need to ask questions. We may even need to report our best friends to the police if they refuse to change their behavior, if that is what is necessary in order to stop this culture of abuse.
Cover Photo: An anti-abuse event in Berlin. Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash.
Content Editing: Elina Gouliou, Mo Holkar
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.
The Split Attraction Model (SAM) was created within the aromantic (often shortened as aro) and asexual (often shortened as ace) communities to build language to describe members’ experiences. The model can be used to expand language in describing larps, in setting expectations, and in player negotiations. The language and understanding of the split attraction model helps to reduce struggles and misunderstandings.
To understand the Split Attraction Model, it’s important to understand the difference between sexual and romantic attraction, as they are often conflated. Sexual attraction is an attraction that would make someone desire sexual contact with the object of their attraction. Romantic attraction is an attraction that would make someone desire romantic contact with the object of their attraction. There is a societal view that people may experience sexual, but not romantic, attraction to a particular person: but the converse isn’t widely acknowledged, and when it is, it is generally presented in a negative context.
It is helpful to start with some background to best understand the model. Asexuality is a sexual orientation where a person experiences little to no sexual attraction to anyone, and aromanticism is a romantic orientation where a person experiences little to no romantic attraction to anyone. That these are separate orientations, and that they are separate from more widely-known orientations, can be understood via this model. While the SAM is known and inherent in aro and ace communities, it can also be put to use elsewhere, including larp.
The Aromantic spectrum Union for Recognition, Education and Advocacy (AUREA) defines the Split Attraction Model as:
The Split Attraction Model (SAM) is a framework that makes a distinction between experiences of attraction, depending on certain characteristics, and conceptualizes them as different types of attraction. Commonly used are: sexual, romantic, aesthetic, alterous, platonic and sensual attractions.
The above diagram offers a simplistic view of the model. Sexual and romantic orientations are considered separately. The left column indicates whether someone experiences sexual attraction, and if so to whom. If someone experiences little or no sexual attraction they may be considered asexual and if they experience little to no romantic attraction they may be considered aromantic. If they do experience sexual or romantic attraction then they would be considered allosexual or alloromantic respectively.
Someone who experiences no sexual attraction, and romantic attraction to the same gender as themselves could be considered asexual and homoromantic. Someone who experiences sexual attraction to a gender other than their own and no romantic attraction would be heterosexual and aromantic. It can also apply to allo identities — for example someone might be sexually attracted to multiple genders (pansexual) but only romantically attracted to a gender other than their own (hetroromantic).
While the SAM was developed by the aro and ace communities, it is intended to be agnostic to commonly recognized orientations. Another example is someone who is heterosexual and biromantic who might otherwise be seen as “straight”.
In the rest of this article, we will be discussing the SAM, and applying it in ways that refer to players’ interests within larp, which may or may not match their personal orientations. It can be common for a straight player to roleplay romance with players of the same gender, or to not have any desire to roleplay sex in larp. Likewise, an aro player may or may not want to roleplay romance in larp.
Larp often uses the terms ‘romance’ and ‘romantic’ as attributes to describe content, focus, or in creating character relationships: but the meaning varies and is often left unspecified. In some situations this means flirting, courting, and expressing feelings of love between characters. In others it may mean or include intimate or sexual content, in the background, off-stage or on-stage using metatechniques, or otherwise. This conflation is understandable, as many people view romance and sex as going hand in hand, and many societies avoid direct discussion of sex in public.
Understanding the SAM can be an asset to larp designers who need to understand the approach that they want to take to attraction in their larp.
It can help designers decide what they want to include in the larp. The model can examine whether romance is present in the larp and whether sexual attraction is assumed or played out. Even larps that don’t feature characters with romantic and sexual orientations that differ from each other might benefit from understanding how much play they want around each of these areas. For example many UK Freeform larps focus on romance, but don’t often have on-stage play around sex, although sexual attraction in the romantic relationships is usually assumed.
Working out the focus designers want to place on romantic and sexual attraction can also help development of metatechniques. If sexual attraction is an important element of the larp, then metatechniques used for sex generally reflect this, whereas if it’s less important then metatechniques may be less elaborate or omitted all together.
Using this model also opens designers up to the possibility of other relationship models such as queerplatonic relationships (ie close relationships which are not primarily romantic or sexual in nature) and a general approach of relationship anarchy (ie a belief that relationships should not be bound by set rules other than those which are mutually agreed upon).
Consent-based larp requires as a foundation that all involved are aware of what they are consenting to, which is something the SAM can help with.
When providing the details of a larp, it is common to include an overview of content potential players can expect, the principles of the larp, or a design document. Using the SAM when writing and sharing these details can remove ambiguity of what content players would be signing up for. This description or document can separately specify if romantic and sexual content is included, along with what is meant in each of those cases.
For example, without using the SAM, a larp may commonly indicate “romantic plots between characters feature strongly in this larp”. To some people, they may assume this means flirting, courting and expressions of love, and want to sign up for that, only to get to the larp and discover sheets which describe sexual content and a defined metatechnique that players can optionally use to represent physical intimacy during game. Using the SAM, this same larp might say “This larp strongly features romantic plots between characters including flirting, and expressions of love as well as sexual content in the background and use of a physical intimacy metatechnique.”
By separating sexual and romantic attraction and detailing how they are expressed within the character, the model can be useful for creating characters based on the type of play that participants want to experience.
It can allow them to understand exactly what they are opting into. They can feel comfortable creating or signing up for a character who has a romantic relationship(s), without feeling that there will be expressions of sexuality that they are uncomfortable with, or conversely can play a sexually driven character without feeling that there is an expectation that a romance should develop.
This can be used to build participant confidence in knowing that they don’t have to opt out of romantic or sexual relationships entirely in order to get the type of play that they enjoy. It also means that there is less uncertainty about whether a relationship will develop in a way that all the participants are comfortable with, leading to increased confidence during the larp. It gives agency to participants by allowing them to choose what is being expressed, rather than making assumptions about what trying to pursue a specific type of relationship entails.
In order for the participant in a larp to fully understand what they are consenting to, it is important that as few as possible assumptions are made about the nature of play. This is particularly true around romance, sex and relationships where participants might find it necessary to set boundaries for personal comfort but struggle to do this where the SAM model isn’t normalized, leading to players either continuing with scenes that make them uncomfortable or opting out of romantic or sexual play completely. Not only does that unnecessarily limit play, it can cause games which feature these things heavily to be unplayable by some people as they would be shut out.
The majority of people have expectations of what a romantic (or sexual) relationship should entail which are carried into larp. When two or more characters are defined as being in a relationship, it is generally understood that this will include romantic and sexual aspects. Discussion of participant boundaries would normally take place, but generally would start with the expectation that the player is comfortable in participating in at least some metatechniques involving symbolising sex within the relationship (assuming such metatechniques exist within the larp.) There would also be the assumption that the participant would be comfortable with playing on some romantic attraction, possibly as an endgame in a relationship which is initially based on sexual attraction.
By using the SAM the participant can discuss the sexual and romantic attitudes of their character, as well as the boundaries they are setting as a player. It also means that the other player in the relationship can understand the intended trajectory and steer play accordingly. Use of the SAM can also allow more people to play larps that feature romance or sex, by providing more detailed aspects to be negotiated on.
Just a Little Lovin’ (Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo) could potentially allow players to use the SAM during play. One of the key themes of the larp is ‘desire’: and there are metatechniques to offer sex and to play out a sexual encounter with the amount of desire and passion discussed beforehand by the participants. Afterwards each character gives a monologue about what occurred, which could allow them to express a (lack of) romantic attraction.
Cult used a technique where when characters negotiated physical intimacy off-game, they also discussed how the characters felt about it and how it would affect their relationship. Due to the setting (a manipulative and exploitative religious cult) it was assumed that not all sexual attraction would necessarily have a romantic element.
Born this Way (Rei England) has opportunities for participants to calibrate their relationships with each other and specifically to ask questions about any sexual or romantic attraction, or deepening of a queerplatonic relationship, as separate emotions, rather than assuming that one entails the other.
More Than Friendship (Quinn D and Eva Schiffer) specifies both romantic and sexual relationships and orientations in the main description, to be explicit and remove ambiguity. There, while the focus is specifically on platonic relationships, romantic and sexual orientations still need to be specified separately.
Currently in larps there seems to be more opportunity to convey that sexual attraction might not be romantic, than to convey that romantic attraction might not be sexual, as the metatechniques used generally focus on sexual activity.
Most of the above is focused on romantic and sexual attraction because they are the most recognized and explored in larp. But the SAM also invites us to look at other types of attraction. While some larps do include some of these, there is a lot more that can be explored. In the same way larps often use romantic and sexual attraction to draw characters towards each other, these other types of attraction can as well.
A larp setting where appearance is important could lean heavily on aesthetic attraction. One focused on exploration of touch could explore sensual attraction. And almost all larps can focus on platonic attraction between characters. These are not often explored in larp simply as a reflection of our amatonormative society which supports the widespread assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive, romantic, long-term coupled relationship, and that everyone is seeking such a relationship; and which prioritizes romantic connections above all others. By untangling these assumptions larp has more and various directions to explore.
Using the SAM can help larp designers and players think about sexual and romantic attraction separately throughout the larp process. This allows more deliberate design and roleplay by examining and breaking into pieces something that society just assumes all goes together. And it better supports consent in larp by helping everyone understand what is included, instead of players interpreting things differently. The SAM can function as a language and tool in larp to recognize and apply the distinctions it brings. And it can help expand the topics explored in larp.
This article was released to coordinate with Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week, and inspired on the Ace / Aromantic Spectrum Larpers group.
Ace / Aromantic Spectrum Larpers Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1133807373664006
Guidelines for Asexual and Aromantic inclusive larps: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V2pArroYr4g0DMA0e3QMCuAVc8A6siw6R5TfIXIh8Zk/edit?usp=sharing
“I Don’t Get It”, a larp about asexuality available in the Make a Scene anthology: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/makeascene/make-a-scene-larp-anthologies
History of the Split Attraction Model:
https://historicallyace.tumblr.com/post/152267147477/what-kind-of-attraction-a-history-of-the-split
Cover photo: An in-game wedding during Live or Die: Break the Wheel, a Game of Thrones larp (photo: Maya Kuper)
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.
Larp designers who choose a real-world setting – historical or contemporary – are faced, whether they realize it or not, with a set of decisions about how to portray the social prejudices (based on gender, race, sexuality, class, age, etc) of that setting. Exploring prejudices in larp can be an interesting and enlightening experience, but there is a question of whether the players whose characters are discriminated against will have enough interesting game content. Moreover, there is potential for bleed in and out, especially if players are encountering the same prejudice in their real lives.
In this article, I’ll identify different approaches that may be taken to these decisions, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Approaches may be divided broadly into expressing (playing the prejudice ‘realistically’); erasing (aiming to represent the game setting without the existence of prejudice); or exploring (approaching the prejudice by playing a parallel or sideways version). Moreover, I will describe and discuss some techniques for playing prejudice, in the context of player safety.
Oxford Dictionaries define “prejudice” as follows:
Preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience: dislike, hostility, or unjust behaviour deriving from preconceived and unfounded opinions.
The world is full of prejudice and its consequences: discrimination, microaggression, violence, and societal friction. It makes some people’s lives miserable, while endowing others with (perhaps unnoticed) privilege. Some political groups work to reduce or destroy it: others try to intensify it. A non-exhaustive list might include prejudice on the basis of: sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability/impairment, neurodiversity, body shape/size, etc.
Some larps are designed specifically to investigate a particular prejudice or group of prejudices. However, prejudice can also be presented as a realism-supporting factor in a larp whose subject is something else, or which is a sandbox in which players find their own subjects.
Broadly speaking, these are the escalating intensity levels of prejudice that you can work with in a larp:
So for example you might be portraying a world in which sexism exists, but (perhaps because the characters are all of the same sex, or are morally enlightened) it’s not going to be actually apparent during the larp itself, other than maybe by reference. Of course, that will be less intense as an emotional experience than if you’re expecting characters to be sexist towards each other during play.
It’s quite common to use non-real larp settings as a lens to examine aspects of human society. So, for example, a larp set in space might have prejudice against aliens as a kind of metaphor for human racial prejudice. Or in a fantasy world, prejudice against a third gender might take the place of male–female sexism.
Any real world setting, and most larp settings will include at least some aspect of prejudice. After all, irrational dislikes and hostilities seem like an integral part of human societies. So, whether you realize it or not, you have to make a choice on how to portray prejudice in your larp.
Players who have to face prejudice in their daily lives might find it tolling to have to encounter similar prejudices ingame. This can be exemplified by the notion of Fun Tax.
In video games, Fun Tax refers to the practice of being urged to make payments to speed up, or otherwise improve, a free-to-play game (see eg. Ralph 2013).
It was later adapted to the context of tabletop role-playing, but there it has become a rather different concept:
I use [Fun Tax] to describe a passage in [a] gaming book that typically reads something like this: Yes, you technically CAN play a person of color, a woman or a queer person in our game but you’ll have to put up with that character being harassed, discriminated against or ignored because of it. What you are doing, with that passage and the infinite variations upon it, is saying ‘If you are a gamer who isn’t a cis-gendered, heterosexual, white, middle class or higher male, you have to pay a toll of unfun to have fun playing a person like you’.
So Curt Thompson here is proposing a positive virtue of erasing prejudice in a game setting – that failing to do so may make the game miserable for players who are themselves among the real-world group that would be suffering the prejudice.
A 2015 discussion around the tabletop role-playing game Lovecraftesque (2015) develops the idea a little:
[F]or some people, the historical impact of bigotry is too unpleasant to be fun. For those people and their group, it would be better to play in a historic setting that carefully avoids those issues or excises them altogether, or to choose a different setting.
Player sensitivities are important, of course, but it might be that tailoring your game design to the players’ wishes (rather than designing the game and then seeing who wants to play it) is more common practice in tabletop role-playing than in larp.
If you’re setting a larp at an advertising agency in the 1960s, in the world of the TV show Mad Men, sexism in the office is likely to be prevalent. Suppose you’ve decided that you do want to explore it thoroughly, and your players have been briefed accordingly. Female characters can expect to be constantly sexualized and diminished.
You will need to consider how this is going to feel for players who themselves are experiencing sexism at work in their real lives. Is it going to be unfun for women who experience lecherous microaggressions and dismissive comments in their daily routine, to have to experience even more of the same in this larp?
The Fun Tax argument suggests that you should at least have tools and techniques available to help players deal with these bleeding-in feelings, and to allow opt-outs.
Perhaps you feel that sexism in the setting is so important that you actually want to make it the focus of your design. Rather than being “about a 1960s advertising agency” it’s going to be explicitly “about sexism in a 1960s advertising agency”. This description will repel some players, but will encourage others.
And there are some settings where you’d be unlikely to be designing a larp unless you actively wanted to explore the prejudice manifest there. St. Croix (2015), set in the Danish–Norwegian slave colony in the Caribbean in 1792, with some players in the roles of slaves and others as owners or overseers, is a good example. The tension between slave and slave-owner is predicated upon the latter’s view of the former as a lesser form of human being. To run a larp set in such a colony without focusing on the racist nature of the establishment would be distorting history. And once you take that as the basis, you can explore variations in prejudicial thoughts, feelings and experiences across the range of characters available.
Larp is a fantastic medium for investigating social and political themes, and prejudice is an interesting and significant aspect of society. A suitable larp design can be the right tool to give your players a really thorough and thoughtful experience into which they can take their own thoughts and feelings about prejudice, and from which they can hope to emerge having learnt and felt more and more deeply.
What can go wrong with this approach? One pitfall is that the larp may end up being too grim and difficult for many players to enjoy. The other is that you may find that you’ve sacrificed other things that you found interesting about the setting, by focusing on the prejudice. Your vision of characters breezily drafting clever ads may have been swept away and replaced by anxious and tearful workplace-sexism discussions.
Perhaps the simplest approach to prejudice in your larp design is to play it realistically: allocating feelings and experiences of prejudice to your characters in the same sort of way that would be expected in real life, and encouraging the players to express them in the same range of ways that real people do.
Sexism will be prevalent in the 1960’s ad agency game. Some male characters may express it in a ‘gentlemanly’ or ‘chivalrous’ way, like the character Roger in Mad Men; others may be cruder and more exploitative, like Pete. Some female characters may suffer it in silence, like Joan; others may complain, like Peggy; others may not see anything wrong with it, like Betty.
This approach may of course require research. We’re not always as aware as we may assume of the extent and shape of prejudices in other societies, historical or elsewhere in the world. Some historical forms of prejudice are now obsolete, or weakened: some were unremarkable at the time but are highlighted in today’s society. If you aim to give a realistic picture of prejudice at work within your depicted society, make sure that it actually is realistic.
In Just a Little Lovin’ (2011), which is set mostly among the gay community of New York in the early 1980s, the characters are in a largely homosexual bubble during the game. But prejudice that they may experience in the outside world plays an important part in the backdrop. As does straight-on-gay, male-on-female, homo-on-bi and cis-on-trans prejudice between individual characters during play: it’s there and acknowledged, and players can pick it up and use it as much as they feel will be valuable to their own play experience. In the 2015 run, the hetero male leader of the Saratoga cancer survivors’ group, Kohana, was initially ignorant and mistrustful of homosexual male lifestyles. And Nick, a trans man, had to demonstrate by deeds and self-sacrifice that he deserved to be respected as a gay man rather than a straight female “tourist”.
What can go wrong with this approach? If you find that, to express the prejudices realistically, you end up overwhelming your other material – because these prejudices were such an important part of that society that they end up influencing every interaction – then this may not be the best way to go. And furthermore, the players themselves may be overwhelmed – because as modern people, they are likely to be more aware of and sensitive to expression of prejudice than their characters would have been. This can make players feel that the prejudice you’re representing in your design is a more important theme, colouring their experiences of the game, than you had intended it to be.
But of course you have to set that against the considerable advantages of using a realistic portrayal: accessibility to players via their real-world experiences and those of others; availability of research materials that players can immediately apply to their expectations without having to apply some sort of filter; the chance to learn directly about an authentic part of history; relative ease of simulation and creating immersion; and so on. For these reasons, departing from realism has to be a positive decision from which you feel your design has much to gain.
A common approach to real world prejudice in a larp setting is to not represent it at all – either because of lack of awareness or thought about its existence, or because of a wish to make the players’ lives easier by not forcing the task upon them. Examples include Mare Incognitum (2014, set in Sweden in 1951) and Tonnin stiflat (Thousand Mark Shoes, 2014, set in Finland in 1927), both of which gave characters full gender equality.
If you’ve taken the conscious decision to ignore prejudice, you needn’t feel guilty about it being a cop-out. It may be necessary in order to keep attention on the parts of the setting that are important to your design ideal.
However, you might want to think about whether by erasing the effects of prejudice from your larp, you’re maybe doing a disservice to its victims by misrepresenting their situation. Take those female staff in the 1960s advertising agency: their real-life counterparts suffered abhorrent discrimination and sexual microaggression. And many women in modern-day offices still do suffer those effects of prejudice. Is it right to present the agency as a sexism-free utopia, and ignore that historical and contemporary suffering? (The answer to that will depend on your view of a larp designer’s sociopolitical responsibilities.)
The experience of prejudice may have been important in shaping a person’s identity, and when you erase prejudices, there is a danger of erasing experiences and identities. Prejudice is often based on the idea of seeing someone as the ‘other’: out of the norm, and unlike oneself. However, some aspects of the ‘other’ identity were actively embraced by some of the people you’re portraying – and may be so too today, including potentially among your players. For example, if you remove prejudice against queerness from your setting, you remove part of the rationale for queer pride – and this may make queer characters less interesting to play.
It’s very tempting to be drawn to the glamorous and fun parts of a setting but to neglect the less pleasant aspects of what it was actually like. If you’re making that decision, make sure that you’re doing so consciously and with awareness of the implications – not just by not thinking about it. Perhaps instead you might think about moving the larp to a modern setting – like the trendy ultra-21st-century advertising/PR corporation depicted in PanoptiCorp (2003) – where you can still have the advertising-agency fun, but sexism isn’t such a dominant part of the setting, and so can be more readily left in the background for the players to express and portray as they see fit.
A rather different way of approaching prejudice in your larp design without making your players feel too uncomfortable is to explore it via a parallel of some sort. If you’re concerned that the prejudice you want to investigate is likely to have a high Fun Tax component – or if there’s some other reason that you prefer not to address it directly, perhaps because you’d like players to approach it fresh rather than with preconceptions – abstraction can be a useful tool in presenting your players with the thoughts and feelings that you seek to inspire, while detaching the associated emotions somewhat from those that they might be all too familiar with in real life.
Suppose that having researched your 1960s ad agency setting, you realize that sexism is such an important part of the milieu that you can’t leave it out. But you don’t want the intensity of bleed that players are likely to feel when playing sexism of the period, which might cause this play thread to dominate their game experience at the expense of other aspects of your design.
A suitable parallel might be eye colour,((See Jane Elliott’s ‘Blue eyes / Brown eyes’ experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott)) or hair colour, or the colour of arbitrary scarves that you hand out to the players. Instruct characters of one colour to be casually discriminatory and microaggressive towards characters of the other colour, in ways analogous to sexist behaviour, but regardless of the characters’ gender. That way “scarfism” can colour the in-game interactions in the same ways that sexism would, but without the unhappy associations of playing actual sexism.
Note that this not the same as using coloured scarves or similar as a representation of in-game race, as seen in Hell on Wheels (2013), the Czech Old-West-set larp. There, in the first run, some players playing African-American characters used dark face make-up: in the subsequent 2015 run, to avoid the unfortunate associations of “blackface”, instead coloured scarves were used non-indexically to indicate the characters’ race. In the situation we’re now discussing, though, the coloured scarf is the actual indexical property that causes its possessors to suffer or inflict prejudice.
The classic example of this technique in practice is Mellan himmel och hav (2003). In this larp inspired by the science fiction writings of Ursula K. le Guin, conventional gender was replaced by the notion of “morning” and “evening” people, denoted by different-coloured clothing that was intended to replace visible gender signifiers.((In addition to “morning” and “evening” people, there was a third gender, the sunnivas, who wore white robes.)) In this way players were empowered to explore the social effects of a structure similar to gender but without all the bleed-in baggage that working with actual gender would bring.
So let’s look at playing prejudice from the player’s point of view. This is potentially troublesome material, with a lot of opportunity for bleed in and out. As well as the normal things that any emotionally intense larp should include for player safety, there are some techniques specific to prejudice, which are worth looking at.
If you want to address real prejudicial traits directly in your larp, a possible safety approach is to taper in their effects, either intensifying over time to a planned schedule, or intensifying when the players choose to do so. So, in the sexist ad agency setting, you would start with the male characters only allowed to make mild sexist remarks to the female characters (“Nice work taking the minutes of that meeting, honeycakes!”). Once people are comfortable with that level, a signal (or player agreement) allows them to intensify the sexist behaviour, with discriminatory practice (“A pay rise? When you’ll most likely be getting pregnant and leaving?”) and microaggressions (“Let me stand behind you so I can see down your blouse, gorgeous…”) Next, add in coarse and disparaging speech and physically-exploitative touch. And so on until the prejudice is in full exercise, as far as you or the players are willing to go.
An escalation technique of this type was used in Inside Hamlet (2015). In this larp set at a decadent and vice-filled court, players were given scope for quite extreme acts, so it was necessary to be able to establish levels of comfort interactively. The word “rotten” was used, included naturalistically in a spoken sentence, when a player wished to increase the intensity of an interaction; and “pure” was the spoken signal that the right level had been reached. Another common system uses traffic-light colours – “red”, “orange” and “green” – as spoken signals for “stop”, “slow down”, and “that’s OK”.
This sort of technique will need workshopping first, and opt-outs must be clear and available. And you’ll need to ensure that your larp has an overall safety culture – an embedded mutual awareness and care-taking (Pedersen 2015) – that empowers players to opt out of the technique at any point without anxiety or fear of condemnation. But, given those provisos, it’s a workable system which in safety terms perhaps has an analogy with the combat-replacement meta-technique Ars marte:((Described on the Ars Amandi collective’s website: http://www.ars-amandi.se/resources/ars-marte/)) each participant has the freedom to raise the intensity to their own level of comfort, and then to stop the escalation cleanly.
Finally we need to look at one of the most important tools in the play of prejudice – playing the Other. The assumption underlying the discussion around the Fun Tax is that players will identify with the experience of playing “people like them”. But what if they are playing people who are explicitly “not like them”?
In many larp traditions it’s customary for players to play characters who physically resemble themselves (with suitable costume, makeup, etc), for the sake of immersive verisimilitude. So for example the default assumption may be that the character will be the same gender as the player, the same broad ethnicity, and so on.
But there’s great expressive and exploratory power to be found in playing the Other – playing the trait which is unlike oneself, and which is consciously or unconsciously seen as “Other” in one’s own society. In European societies, “othered” traits include: female; ethnic minority; queer; trans*; disabled/impaired; fat; mentally ill; poor; etc. The default social identity is none of these things; and it requires an effort of imagination and empathy for a person who has none of these traits to put themselves into the position of someone who is seen as “Other”.
So, for example, as discussed, exploring male-on-female sexism in a 1960s ad agency might have Fun-Tax-associated issues if the female characters are played by female players. But if the female characters are played by male players, then those players will get an unusual and perhaps valuable insight into the life of the female Other.
Whether you also choose to inverse-Other by casting female players in the male roles is a design question. The effect is likely to be more powerful if the males in female roles feel themselves the victims of prejudice from other male players, rather than from female players: because experiencing sexist anti-female prejudice delivered by a male should feel more real than if it’s delivered by a female, which would have a stronger alibi of “we’re just playing at this”. You’ll need to think about how intense a lesson you wish your male players to be learning; and what you want your female players to get out of it (or if you want to have female players at all).
A larp example of playing the Other can be found in Halat hisar (State of Siege, 2013), in whose setting Northern Europe is in turmoil and the Arab League is a wealthy, stable bloc similar to the real-world EU. Finnish and Nordic players took on characters who were othered in the larp setting in the same way that Arabs are othered in our own world, while Palestinian players played first-world citizens.
Prejudice is such a significant and interesting aspect of human society, and larp is such a potent and mind-expanding creative tool for examining life, the two seem a natural fit. It’s understandable that many designers are wary of addressing prejudice in their larps: the pitfalls are many and the requirement for safety is great. But with sufficient thought, imagination, and communication of your design goals, you can give your players a valuable and powerful experience which has the potential to make a real impact on their lives.
Joshua Fox (2015): Google+. Feb 9th, 2015. https://plus.google.com/u/0/116932540386279575846/posts/MeAAm6TfcCA, ref. Jan 3rd, 2016.
Oxford Dictionaries (2016): http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/prejudice,
ref. Jan 2nd, 2016.
Troels Ken Pedersen (2015): Your Larp’s Only As Safe As Its Safety Culture. Leaving Mundania. Aug
4th, 2015. http://leavingmundania.com/2015/08/04/your-larps-only-as-safe-as-its-safety-culture/,
ref. Jan 11th, 2016.
Nate Ralph (2013): Don’t fear the fun tax, and try Dead Trigger 2. Greenbot. Oct 31st, 2013. http://www.greenbot.com/article/2059741/dont-fear-the-fun-tax-and-try-dead-trigger-2.html, ref. Jan
3rd, 2016.
Curt Thompson (2014): Google+. Jan 3rd, 2014. https://plus.google.com/+CurtThompson/posts/X3R2C4jeqKm, ref. Jan 3rd, 2016
Halat hisar (2013): Fatima AbdulKarim, Faris Arouri & al., Parkano, Finland, Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen
seura. http://nordicrpg.fi/piiritystila/, ref. Jan 25th, 2016.
Hell on Wheels (2013): Filip Appl, Jan Zeman & al., Stonetown, Czech Republic. http://howlarp.cz/about/, ref. Jan 11th, 2016.
Inside Hamlet (2015): Martin Ericsson, Bjarke Pedersen, Johanna Koljonen & al., Helsingør, Denmark,
Odyssé. http://www.insidehamlet.com/, ref. Jan 12th, 2016.
Just a Little Lovin’ (2011): Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo, Lunde Leirsted, Norway.
http://www.justalittlelovin.com/, ref. Jan 11th, 2016.
Lovecraftesque (2015): Becky Annison and Joshua Fox, Black Armada. http://blackarmada.com/introducing-lovecraftesque/, ref. Jan 11th, 2016.
Mare Incognitum (2014): Olle Nyman, Sara Pertmann, Sebastian Utbult and Andreas Sjöberg,
Göteborg, Sweden. http://xn--ii-viab.se/, ref. Jan 12th, 2016.
Mellan himmel och hav (2003): Eliot Wieslander and Katarina Björk, Stockholm, Sweden, Ars
Amandi Collective. http://www.ars-amandi.se/larps/mellan-himmel-och-hav/, ref. Jan 12th, 2016.
PanoptiCorp (2003): Irene Tanke, Jared Elgvin & al., Norway. http://rollespilsakademiet.wix.com/panopticorp, ref. Jan 11th, 2016.
St. Croix (2015): Anne Marie Stamnestrø and Angelica Voje, Maristuen, Norway. http://sverigeunionen.wix.com/sankt-croix, ref. Jan 11th, 2016.
Tonnin stiflat (2014): Niina Niskanen and Simo Järvelä, Helsinki, Finland. https://tonninstiflatlarp.wordpress.com/in-english/, ref. Jan 12th, 2016.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.
I think of safety work in larp as having two different aspects. One is safety from unpleasant or triggering experiences. But, for larp to be this transformative, amazing, brilliant artform we know it as, another aspect is just as important. As players we also need safety to lean in, to be brave, and to get the play we crave.
So a safe space is not enough. For larp to be amazing, we also need to create brave spaces.
I am dead scared of rollercoasters. I have never actually gone on one, but my mother has kept me safe from them my entire upbringing by telling me that they are hideously scary and that I really do not have to try them. I had a similar experience when I met the safety from discourse at full scale at a larp for the first time. And it baffled me.
So, I had opted in by signing up to a challenging larp. I was scared and uncomfortable, but I wanted to do it. But even if I want to do something ever so badly, I will probably get intimidated if the safety workshops preparing me for it are all focused on the right to opt out; to not take risks or challenge myself. After a day of workshops and safety talks, I was more scared than I had ever been of a larp before.
This is an inherent risk with the safety from discourse. I define it as an approach to safety where the focus is to create a safe space by saving players from triggering experiences. It may contain policies like “no touching without consent in advance” or “all play on intimacy or violence should be pre-negotiated before the game.” Other parts of it are thinking about safewords as something used only to break play, sometimes completed with the idea that one should never have to tell why one safewords or withdraws from the game; and safety rooms where players can get away from the game and talk with a third-party safety host. Another common feature is a flag system to prevent predators and unsafe players from participating in games. Maury Brown’s (2017a, 2017b) articles on community safety here at Nordiclarp.org contains a good example of this discourse.
We need safety from unsafe experiences at larps. However, without the feeling that we all lean in, create a good experience together, and care about each other, I will feel insecure and hold back a lot. Knowing that my mother will keep me safe from the rollercoaster is nice, but it will not make me dare to ride. And knowing that I can seek out a safety host if I need it will not make me trust my co-players and be brave enough to get the play I signed up for.
The idea of the brave space is pretty simple. It is a space where the players feel safe enough to lean in and get the play we really crave. It is an environment where players dare to open up and be vulnerable. This requires trust and a sense of caring for each other, both during the game and after it.
Creating a brave space cannot come from above, with a code of conduct or a set of safety mechanics. As Mo Turkington and Troels Ken Pedersen (2015) point out in this article, the most important thing with those is to signal to the participants that here we take care of each other.
As a game master or larp designer you can do wonders by creating an environment where the participants dare to lean in and be brave and vulnerable. Make sure your players get to meet. Create opportunities for them to start talking with and caring about each other. But the big job is our shared responsibility as players. We are the player culture, and we are responsible for giving each other a good experience.
I want to borrow some feminist terminology here and say that a brave space requires a consent culture. This means that to play together we need enthusiastic consent. No means no. And “err… maybe later?” generally also means no. Always give your participants the possibility to opt out of play they do not want.
But also remember that yes means yes. Make it easy for your players to opt in, and to help each other get the play they crave even if it does not come easily to them. Normalize the scary things and set the tone. If you treat your challenging content as normal and expected, the players are more likely to do so as well. And workshopping content like oppression or sex mechanics is not just to make the participants know how to use them, but also a way to let them try with guidance, and discover that they dare doing so.
For yes-means-yes reasons, I really like check-in words like the traffic light as a complement to safewords. This mechanic uses the colours of a traffic light to calibrate consent during play, and I specifically like it for the opportunity to signal what you want to do (e.g. hold a bucket of water as if you were to throw it over a co-player), ask “green?” and if you get a “green!” back, go ahead and do it. The OK check-in is a similar mechanic.
If you are unsure if a co-player wants to do something, it is better to check in and get that enthusiastic consent, than to just-to-be-sure refrain from doing it.
Informed consent is a tricky one at larps though. It is easier to feel secure when you know in advance what you are signing up for. Some designers talk about expectation management – when we know that a larp will handle challenging themes, we can give informed consent to play them (Svanevik & Brind 2018).
Designers can use ingredients lists or make explicit rules against content they do not want in a larp. But they can not control what the players bring into the game, and therefore we can not expect consent in larp to work with pre-negotiation only.
Larp is like sex in this regard. Most people would call it impossible to pre-negotiate everything we want to do in a sex scene. The same applies to larp. Often we are not aware of all our limits in advance. Something might seem like a thing you would never do, but when you try, you end up loving it. Something might be fun for a little while, but not what you want to spend the entire night on. And some things seem like amazing play in advance but end up awkward or horrible. Consent is dynamic and can be given or taken back at any time. There are many mechanics to make this work during runtime: for example, Johanna Koljonen’s Safety in larp blog (2016) is a veritable goldmine of these.
The risk with the idea of pre-negotiating so that uncomfortable or triggering things should never happen in the first place is that players get ill-prepared for actually calibrating and finding their limits during play. And then we risk players holding back and not getting the play they crave, because there is too little space to calibrate and check in for consent.
This leads me to another key aspect of the brave space. It is easier to achieve it when we practise to actually find our limits – soft and hard ones – and know how to set them.
In this context, I find it very useful to separate between different kinds of limits. There are hard limits that should not be crossed. And then there are soft limits that we can push when we feel brave and comfortable enough to get new and exciting experiences. Many of my best larps are those where I have learned new things about myself, love, or life by stepping out of my comfort zone. Those where I have been able to let go, embrace the uncertain, and let other people affect me. The ones where I have felt safe enough to push my limits and see where I end up.
When one is playing with pushing limits, one always risks hitting them. And this is good. The goal is not to never have to use a safeword, but to know that you are able to. And what happens after you safeword or get safeworded at, and that it is gonna be okay.
I actually consider fake safeword workshops a harmful feature in larps. It is very common in pre-game workshops for players to be told to practise using safewords in an artificial setting where no-one is actually close to their limits. This teaches players to lie with safewords, but not to recognize their boundaries and experience how to actually use them.
In contrast, I learned a really good safeword workshop technique at the Atropos game Reborn (2018). There, we were told to practise the sex mechanic of the game and to escalate it until we felt a need to say “this is comfortable but don’t go further,” – or to use the safeword “off-game” followed by the information we wanted the co-player to have, e.g. “off-game, no touching my face please.” This was a chance to actually feel where our limits were, to experience authentically using safewords, and to get a good experience when they were respected.
The last part of the brave space that I will explain here is what to do when we hurt someone. This is important, because the key to make players safe enough to be brave is making them care about each other. I will only dare to push my limits and to do amazing transformative things at a larp if I trust my co-players to care for me when it hurts. And it will.
If someone ever promised that they would never hurt you, they lied. Because one cannot know that. Sometimes we hurt each other. And an important part of building consent culture is realising that not only Bad and Unsafe people do this.
When we allow larp to affect us, and get emotionally vulnerable together, we sometimes make other players uncomfortable. We fail to communicate, we transgress boundaries, or we do not realize until afterwards that someone else has transgressed our own. But that is a natural part of life. The important thing is what happens afterwards. If I hurt someone during a larp, I have a responsibility to try to help them feel okay again.
This is where I start worrying when I hear thoughts like “you never have to explain why you safeworded” and when this responsibility between players gets replaced with flagging systems and third-party safety hosts. I have spoken with too many players who fear that they will make someone feel unsafe at a larp and will not get to know about it until the harm is already done, someone is hurt, and they are red-flagged from further activities. I have also seen too many players become defensive and claim to have done nothing wrong because only Bad and Unsafe people do that. And when a safety discourse makes players react with defensiveness and mistrust, feeling that the threat of being labelled a Bad Person is too great for them to admit to their mistakes, it does not build safety. It destroys it.
I honestly think that a responsibility we have as players is to make amends and try to correct our mistakes. We cannot promise to never hurt a co-player, but we can promise to do our best to help them feel okay again. Sometimes, they do not want that help, and the best thing can be to give a little space before we try to solve something. But in order to not leave conflicts hanging, we must get to know what has gone wrong and take responsibility for it. I think a third-party safety host can be a great asset here to help solve conflicts between players or between players and organizers. But I find it important that the safety host is a support and not a shield. Solutions like red-flagging or letting a safety host remove a player from a larp are there for when the trust between the players is irreversibly broken – but when creating a brave space, it is important to not let them replace communication between players before that happens.
For larp to actually be safe, we need to be safe with each other instead of away from each other.
We need to build spaces where we as players can grow together, learn together, and have intense, emotional, vulnerable, and unexpected experiences. We need to talk about how to make mistakes and then correct them. How to lose trust, but also how to regain it. How to feel bad after a larp and how to care for each other in it. How to lean in, explore difficult topics, and learn to fly.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne, Maury Brown, and Johanna Koljonen. 2017. “Safety & Calibration Tools in Larps.” Knutepunkt 2017.
https://www2.nordiclarp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Safety-Calibration-in-Larps-Knutepunkt-2017.pdf
Svanevik, Martine and Simon Brind. 2018. “Playing Safe?” Nordic Larp. https://nordiclarp.org/2018/01/22/playing-safe/
Brown, Maury. 2017a. “Safety Coordinators For Communities, Why What and How?” Nordic Larp. https://nordiclarp.org/2017/04/17/safety-coordinators-for-communities-why-what-and-how/
Brown, Maury. 2017b. “The Consent and Community Safety Manifesto.” Nordic Larp.
https://nordiclarp.org/2017/03/24/the-consent-and-community-safety-manifesto/
Friedner, Anneli. 2013. “Gränsdragningar och gråzoner, ett utvecklingsforum om lajvetik.” Jeu de rôles. http://jeu-de-roles.blogspot.com/2013/03/gransdragningar-och-grazoner-ett.html#more
Koljonen, Johanna. 2016. “Safety in Larp. Understanding Participation and Designing For Trust.” Safety Participation.
https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/
Pedersen, Troels Ken. 2015. “Your Larp’s Only as Safe as its Safety Culture,” Leaving Mundania. http://leavingmundania.com/2015/08/04/your-larps-only-as-safe-as-its-safety-culture/
Cover photo: Backlit couple floating (photo, Isabella Mariana).
Content editing: Elina Gouliou