Great work has been done in the larp community to improve player safety and comfort, but many of the techniques and methods are useless without the players prioritizing self care. Larp organizers can design safety measures, workshop them, and insist on the use of safe words, but it’s useless unless you, as a player, also pay attention to your own needs and actually use them. This article is about why self care should be your top priority as a player — and how to practise it. It will also address how your attitude to self care affects the community and how self care can enable you to be bold and go outside your comfort zone in a larp.
What Is Self Care?
Self care is about identifying your own needs and taking steps to address them. It’s about both taking preventive measures and fixing things when they’ve gone wrong. Self care is something that is done before, during, and after the larp.
Self care is your responsibility. While it’s important that we support and help each other, you are the person best positioned to take care of your own needs. You can’t feel if someone else has a headache coming on. You can’t rest for anyone else. You can’t drink water for anyone else. You can’t feel where anyone else’s boundaries are if they haven’t shared them, or (generally) be aware when someone else’s existing injury or health condition starts acting up.
You can do these things for yourself, however. You’re the person best suited to identify, take care of, and communicate your needs and boundaries. If you don’t do this, no one else can. Short and simple.
Examples of Self Care
Self care is a responsibility, and responsibilities aren’t always fun. In reality, self care is often boring and adult decisions, not bath bombs by candlelight.
For example, self care can mean:
Not hanging out with friends in the week before the larp, because you need to take it easy in order to have the energy to enjoy the larp.
Missing out on the cool scene in the woods, because your bad knee will hurt like hell if you do.
Putting on an ugly sweater that doesn’t fit your character’s aesthetic instead getting cold.
Going to bed early, despite your fear of missing out.
Taking the time to put on a bandaid on a blister.
Being mindful of your medical conditions
Communicating your boundaries to your co-players, even if it feels hard to bring them up.
Asking for help, even if you’re afraid to do so.
Going to the out of character area to call your partner and talk.
Leaving the larp early.
Not hanging out with your friends after the larp to recharge your batteries.
Self care can be whatever you need to do or not do to take care of yourself, but if it affects other players, please talk to them so that you don’t impose on someone else’s well being by accident. For example, you might need to listen to music to relax before bed, while other people might need silence.
Most of the things on the list aren’t fun, but they will enable you to have a much better larp experience and/or affect your well-being during or after the larp. It may not be fun, but it is worth it.
You Can Do Crazy Cool Stuff
If you want to challenge yourself, take risks, and do crazy cool stuff, you need to do self care too:
Do you want to swing down from the chandelier, Robin Hood style? Then you better take care of your old shoulder injury and find a way to help out before the larp that doesn’t involve carrying heavy equipment.
Do you want to have the most intense emotional experience ever? Then you better get enough sleep before the larp instead pulling an all-nighter to sew the perfect costume — unless you want to play “crying from exhaustion in a really nice outfit.”
Do you want to play the sexy evil demon? Then you better have that uncomfortable conversation with your ex about boundaries before the larp, rather than end up hiding in your room to avoid an uncomfortable scene.
If you had prioritized self care — by settling for a less perfect costume, sleeping before the larp, treating your shoulder well, and telling your ex you need some space to play your sexy demon character — then you’d get to do all the cool stuff. Self care enables you. It lets you do things you wouldn’t normally be able to do. Self care lets you take risks and push yourself further, and catch yourself if you fall. Self care will give you and your fellow players a better larp.
Your Attitude Affects Everyone
Your self care isn’t just about you — it also affects everyone else. And not just everyone’s safety, but also how cool the game will be.
First, on safety — larps are filled with the kinds of people who routinely put others first, even at the cost of their own wellbeing. While these folks are super nice, they can set a bad example by pushing themselves too far — to the point of exhaustion or even to physically or emotionally hurting themselves. This creates a culture that normalizes this, leading others to follow their example, meaning more folks get hurt.
Second, on the cool stuff. A larp is more than the sum of its parts. If everyone at a game is able to push themselves a little bit further and do something a bit crazier and cooler, the net effect on everyone’s experience is much bigger than what they were able to do alone. If everyone else does their part in self care, we all win.
Self care isn’t selfish. It is smart and kind and cool. Therefore, make self care your first priority. If not for your own sake, then for the sake of everyone else.
Escaping attitudes linked to appearance is always hard, and the main difficulty is in escaping attitudes that you’ve internalized about yourself. Larp can let us escape the prejudices we suffer or confront them in a controlled way.
I believe unequivocally in body acceptance but I also know the world I live in. I am a fat woman, and rarely see people who look like me portrayed as fully realized characters in films or on television. Archetypal fat women are the comic relief or less attractive best friend. Fat phobia masquerades as health concern, negative comments about anyone who doesn’t meet conventional beauty standards get passed off as “jokes”. Growing up in that environment, it can be difficult not to internalise these perceptions. As with any internalized prejudice, challenging it requires both self awareness and active effort.
This article introduces tools for body positivity and acceptance. It discusses what other people can do and how to avoid larps and larpers that might not be safe for you, but I also want to focus on what we internalize and the way that larp can help. Most examples come from my experiences as an overweight larper, but many of them generalise to other areas where larpers feel uncomfortable with their bodies.
Do your research
Check the policies and reputation of the organisation whose larp you are attending. For example, NotOnlyLarp’s games like Conscience (2018), explicitly prohibit comments about the players’ bodies. If the group doesn’t have defined policies, ask them. It’s easier to explore glamorous, flirtatious, or powerful characters when you can trust the other participants will play to lift.
Look for opportunities
Generally, people with non-normative bodies exist in a society that judges us, even if our immediate circle doesn’t. In larp, when you are cast as a glamorous or powerful character you can exist in a society that believes you’re just that. Being cast in such roles, it was important to me that the characters were described this way both to me and to their teams, admirers and fans. This made it safe for me to push myself to play in a way I otherwise would not have been able to.
Find support
Internalised misogyny causes me considerably less issues than internalised fat phobia, because I’m surrounded by people who think misogyny is dangerous, will help me fight it, and will listen to me if I tell them they are doing something that could be hurtful. Issues of attractiveness are harder to address, because of the shame that attaches to it, or because you think the offender didn’t mean to be hurtful. Learning that you deserve not to be hurt by your community and putting that into practice is scary but important.
Costuming
Costuming can be difficult for larpers with non-standard measurements (see Grove 2019). If the costume is provided by the larp, sending measurements can be nerve-wracking, especially if the organizers request players post them in a public document.
If you get your own costume, you may still find strict costume requirements more difficult to meet. Shop in advance if possible — last-minute panic orders limit your options — and remember there is no shame in asking how strictly the organizers need you to adhere to their standard, or in passing on a larp because your costume will be four times as expensive as others’. Organizers should bear in mind that strict requirements are exclusionary. Not every larp can include everyone, but it’s important to acknowledge these barriers of entry.
Photography
It would be lovely to think of photos as reminders of a great larp and the emotions that we felt. The reality is more complicated. I’ve been hurt not to appear in photos, and I’ve been disappointed that photos of me didn’t look as good as I felt.
Decide what you want. Most photographers will happily take posed pictures, make sure to include you in group shots, or refrain from photographing you at all if you feel that would be uncomfortable. Remember that you can be your own worst critic. I’ve cringed at my appearance in photos, and then seen a co-player’s comment about how beautifully it captured a meaningful scene.
Skills for other larpers
Playing to lift is vital to players whose lived experience works against how their characters should be seen.. Don’t force larpers to pretend to conform to mainstream beauty standards. There is something very empowering about playing a formidable character who looks just like you, and that can carry over into everyday confidence if you realise that this scenario — you can be charismatic, you can be attractive — actually isn’t at all ridiculous. If players will only accept this by pretending that you look other than you actually do, that is lost.
Organizers: cast with this in mind. Write characters with this in mind.
Don’t apologize
I am specifically addressing people who have internalised the hatred of their body created by our culture and the media. It benefits capitalism and the patriarchy if your body makes you miserable. It doesn’t benefit you. I have never once looked at a larp photo and thought someone was unattractive. I have thought about the scene, the character, the outfit. If I knew the person I might have thought about them as a friend. It takes more than a few words to undo a lifetime of conditioning, but there are books, friends, and allies who can support you. There are many things which make people attractive. You are enough.
I firmly believe that larp is a community and I hope that we can be inclusive and welcoming to everyone. The standards of beauty in our society affect us during larps, but we can acknowledge that and hold ourselves accountable for our mistakes. One of the core things we do as larpers is explore different worlds with different attitudes: this can be a powerful tool for acceptance of yourself and others.
(From the 1985 fantasy-themed arcade game Gauntlet by Atari Games, a warning that one of the players’ characters was running out of energy and would soon die)
Many different types of energy come into play during a larp. This short article surveys some of the terms larpers have used to describe the types of energy they bring to a larp. It also considers why understanding this may be important for our ability to larp effectively and safely. This is not intended to be a prescriptive taxonomy, but rather a starting point for discussion. The survey consisted of a single open question posed to larpers from a selection of different nationalities and larp traditions: The majority of respondents were European from the Nordic tradition.
Larping can be hard work. In many cases it can be very physical; we spend many hours moving around, often outdoors, and our sleep is not as good or as long as it may be at home. But what types of energy do we use? I’m looking to collect words that describe our collective fuel for interactions. What types of energy do you expend on larping?
Where necessary I asked additional questions to ask those who did respond to qualify or unpack their responses prior to classifying them by type.
Physical Energy
Larping can be very physical: we spend many hours standing and moving around. We may be outdoors, in the cold, or the dark. We get dehydrated, we tend to eat at irregular times, and our sleep is not as good or as long as it may be at home. But beyond these more obvious forms of exertion, players report some larp-specific bodily activities that used up energy.
We may use our bodies in different ways, either by standing or moving in an unfamiliar manner leading to sore muscles and stiffness after the larp. Some players have suggested they don’t speak as much in their daily life as they do at larps, others sing at larps but never out of it. In these cases, they have suggested that they have lost their voices during or immediately after the larp.
Even for larps that are not particularly physical or directly combative, the twin pillars of conflict and stress can lead to the release of adrenaline. Sometimes this is akin to stage fright, sometimes it comes from the physicality of the event, and sometimes it derives from the simulated conflict of the larp. While this can be an intensely pleasurable experience for the player, leading to sensations of fear or excitement and a sense of drive focus((When endogenous adrenaline is released due to stressful events (or simulated stressful events in the case of larp) it seems to focus the moment in order to modulate memory of the event. We need memory to be proportional to the importance of the event. There is evidence that suggests adrenaline does have a role in long-term stress adaptation and emotional memory encoding specifically. (Dornelles A, de Lima MN, Grazziotin M, Presti-Torres J, Garcia VA, Scalco FS, Roesler R, Schröder N (July 2007). “Adrenergic enhancement of consolidation of object recognition memory”. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. 88 (1): 137–42. doi:10.1016/j.nlm.2007.01.005. PMID 17368053. ) )), it is very hard to sustain this and, although the fight-or-flight response is useful when it comes to role-playing a moment of conflict or escaping from an antagonist, it can lead to anxiety and the release of other hormones, such as cortisol (the stress hormone). This can lead to an inability to sleep as players focus on conflict that has happened that day or worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow.
Social Energy
Introvert / Extravert Energy
We have Carl Jung to thank for the concepts of introversion and extraversion, he suggests that we possess both traits, but one is usually dominant, although most non-Jungian theories suggest that it is a linear scale. In simple terms, extroverts derive energy from interaction with others, and introverts from an opportunity to reflect((Laurie Helgoe (2008). Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life is Your Hidden Strength. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc)) If this is the case then there is an energy exchange going on between players. Finding the balance between interaction and reflection is important,and it will be different depending on the player and their needs at the time.
Respondents talked about the cost of interaction, reflecting that being around people all of the time when larping was exhausting. One explained that although they need alone time they consciously neglect this need for fear of missing out. Introverts talked about the energy required to focus one’s attention on engagement with others, with close listening and attempts at influencing, but without a pause.
Interestingly enough, the role of the antagonist is challenging for both ends of the scale. For the introvert it is hard work to enter or escalate conflict, to take up space and to deal with being judged; for the extrovert, fighting against the beige entropy of ‘larp democracy’ — where players seem to play towards an inert and inclusive outcome rather than a dramatic one — and also dealing with the isolation that comes with being the antagonist. Having interactions shut down — because you are playing a hated or distrusted character for example — drains the extrovert in much the same way as playing direct conflict does the introvert.
Emotional Energy
While most respondents who self-identified as introverts considered social interaction to be emotional energy, others made a clear differentiation between the energy cost of social interaction versus the effect of intense ingame emotional responses.
In a larp we are called upon to care about things faster and more intensely than in real life, and this idea of experiencing things intensely in a short period of time, takes effort to be receptive to the experience. We must regulate the intensity of experience and our own reaction to it, both ingame and offgame.
Players also talk about compassionate energy, the expenditure of effort in terms of giving emotional energy ingame and being aware of other player’s offgame needs and wants during a story.
Mental Energy
We know that high level chess players can burn 600 calories sitting at the chessboard so it should come as no doubt that we expend energy on larping. If emotional energy handles feelings, mental energy handles facts and thoughts. There is always a background level of concentration required to larp but we have broken down the mental effort further as follows:
Memory Energy
This refers to the work of remembering information that is relevant to the larp. Of retaining character names, and plot, and safety mechanics and meta-techniques and putting names to faces.
Cognitive Energy
This is the energy we use in-game for steering and pacing and managing character arcs. It is what it costs to make use of the facts we have recalled. It includes the constant mapping of the larp, the assimilation of information, our steering of the character. It also includes cognitive decisions pertaining to the storymaking process. From deciding what our character should do next, deciding what to say, or composing a speech on the fly. In some cases, players are doing this in a second or third language.
Immersive Energy
This is the effort of being someone who you are not, the literal cost of role-playing. One respondent suggested that this is the same sort of energy that one spends on lying. Another suggested that they derive energy from anything that happens in character — including negative emotions — but that anything that happens out of character is draining. Another suggested that anything that breaks immersion has a cost in terms of re-engagement.
The Fun Tax
There are some types of energy that only certain players need to expend.
Some respondents who self-identified as non-neurotypical argued that activities others described as requiring social energy, were more a cognitive function for them. One such respondent suggested they spend a significant amount of energy on “Processing” the noise, different smells, bright/shifting lights, foreign languages, unfamiliar or itchy clothes.
Similarly, some players identified a combined mental and emotional cost of Spatial energy, described as processing a new physical space. This could be an uncertainty of where are the bathrooms, not remembering the way to a particular room, remembering which stairs creek, or struggling to find something in their luggage. For players with other marginalised identities, there is the concept of Othered Energy which Jonaya Kemper describes thus, Othered folks have to still wear their identities, which means they must expend extra energy and time navigating the play space, people, and their characters in addition to the non-diegetic environment and players.((Personal correspondence.))
Some respondents talked about the energy they expended because they did not feel safe, suggesting they needed to be constantly on their toes, ready to be intimidating as a survival tactic. Others agreed that threat awareness and the need to keep track of where specific people were, combined with low-level anticipatory anxiety, cost significant energy out of the player of all types.
How to Renew and Replenish your Energy
Different players use different amounts of energy for different activities. Some will be recharged by conflict, others by physical proximity. However, if we examine our preferred playstyle and understand where we spend and where we recharge our energy, it is possible to mitigate the point we run out of hit points. Some players can recharge their social energy by engaging with others, but some of those engagements have an activation energy cost higher than others, and some of them will overall deplete the amount of social energy available to you for other things later, while others will not. Reflecting on this and understanding your own needs is similar to understanding when we are hungry, tired, or thirsty. It is not as sexy as steering, but it is about keeping fuel and oil in the engine to keep it running.
For example, to help deal with adrenal energy, you’ll need to engage your parasympathetic nervous system. The rest-and-digest response it is responsible for is the opposite of the adrenal fight-or-flight response. Slowing your breathing, meditating, or talking about stressful moments can help. If you think you need to do it, but find you are unable to do these in character then take an off-game break and do it out of character. Because if you don’t practice self care then you might run out of energy, and then — like in the classic coin-op — the game will be over.
When we larp, we make deductions about other characters and the types of role-play they will provide. Through speech, costuming, body language, and other signs, each player signals to others how to interact with their character. As you play, analyze what a character looks like, wears, and does with their body to learn important clues about status, affiliation, role, and personality.
Wearable Cues
Name tag: If the larp uses them, a name tag is a shortcut to critical information for play.
Costume: Clothing and accessories provide discrete details about the character. React to the most obvious explanation for a costume choice until you have reason to believe differently.
Affiliation markers: Some larps use colors or fashion guidelines so players know a character’s affiliation or status on sight.
Body Movements
How a character stands, sits, walks, and interacts with others reveals a great deal.
Space: Characters who take up space, such as with a wide stance, large gestures, bold strides, or manspreading are projecting authority, power and confidence. Characters who demure to others, step aside, or sit or stand on the edges are demonstrating lower status or discomfort.
Posture: Nobility, military, upper-class, and authority figures tend to stand straight and tall and look others in the eye. Servants and lower status characters tend to keep their heads down and eyes averted.
Directional stance: Face-to-face can reveal confrontation. Side-by-side can indicate alliance, and back-to-back or leaning-in can suggest covert communication.
Stealth: A sneaky character wants you to think they are up to something. Actions include: looking around to see if someone is watching, moving in the shadows, or ducking behind people or objects.
Facial Expressions
When portraying a character, deliberate facial expressions convey information to others.
Smile, light in their eyes: This character is friendly, approachable and eager. They are often looking for someone to converse with, spill secrets, or go on an adventure.
Scowl, dark eyes: This character wants you to know they are dangerous, villainous, or angry. Does your character dare to approach them to discover the source of their anger or their secrets?
Furrowed brow, wide or darting eyes: This character could be anxious, frightened, or confused. They are demonstrating discomfort and hoping someone will ask them about it. Is your character caring? This could be a good time to display it.
Deliberate warm eye contact, calm and inviting expression: This character is projecting safety and approachability. They likely want to help others and/or have information to share.
Hard eyes, set mouth: This character is projecting authority, intimidation, or disapproval. To play into this, approach with deference, look scared, or gossip about how you hope you don’t get in trouble with them. If you are playing a rebel, use disrespect to get reprimanded or put in your place.
Eye Contact
Knowing what to do with your eyes and paying attention to another character’s eyes creates play.
A person who makes deliberate eye contact is inviting you to interact with them.
In an interaction with an authority figure, avert your eyes to show respect. Either do not meet their gaze, or if you do, look away quickly or before they do.
As an authority figure, use eye contact to establish dominance and intimidate others. Extended eye contact can be uncomfortable.
Eye contact with eyebrows raised is a question. Go see what they want to ask you!
To show disrespect to an authority figure, refuse to look away from their eye contact. If/when you finally do, make sure it appears reluctant or sarcastic. Breaking eye contact with an eye roll will make an impact!
A wink is a sign of a secret, either between characters or one begging to be shared.
Blinking without speaking is a sign of confusion or can be coquettish if flirting. You’ll need to roleplay further to find out.
Read the Character, Not the Player
Diegetic clues are deliberate choices made by the player that belong to the character, such as those above. Don’t make the mistake of initiating roleplay or making deductions about aspects that belong to the player, but not the character.
You should disregard factors about the player such as:
Size: A large or tall person does not automatically mean an intimidating or powerful character. React to the roleplay and the character clues, not assumptions about the player’s physical body.
Age: The age of the character is not the same as the age of the player. React to the stated age of the character and do not make comments about someone’s out-of-game age.
Body type or fitness: The shape of a player’s body does not indicate any measure of power, stamina, or health. Use other clues, such as weaponry, costuming, and reputation of the character.
Skin tone: Do not make diegetic assumptions from a player’s natural skin tone.
Gender: The player’s gender and the character’s gender are not always the same. Use the correct pronouns and accept the character as presented. The player’s gender is not relevant.
Accent, speech difficulties and grammar: Do not make assumptions about accent or grammar at international larps played in English. The manner of speech often has nothing to do with the character, but is instead the player communicating in a non-native language. Do not react or remark about speech unless the player makes it clear that this is part of the character.
Birthmarks or physical disabilities: Ignore things a player cannot change, such as medical or accessibility devices. If you are unsure whether an attribute belongs to the player or the character, wait for the character to bring it up during roleplay. If it never comes up, use other attributes to make your deductions.
Conclusion
Learning how to read other characters to know how to interact is a skill that is honed the more you play. Misreading cues can lead to awkward roleplay or even hurting someone’s feelings, especially if you react to them as a person instead of their character. If you’re unsure what to do, go with the most obvious archetypal interpretation of a character and assume that attributes of the player are not in play until you are certain they are available for interaction. And if you make a mistake, apologize and move on. Honest mistakes happen and are part of the learning process of collaborative play.
In the summer of 2018 a middle-aged Danish woman, Inga Wilson, married to an English tattoo artist, moved into a house on the outskirts of Tintagel with her husband and three teenage children. In the attic she found an old journal, and in the following years she wrote in it as her children grew up, got married and moved away.
The journal was written as preparation for The Quota (2018). This is just one version of the content. There is another one, which follows her through the years as the country breaks apart, fascism shows it ugly head and she ends up in a detention center, utterly broken and alone. Both stories are part of her journal. Both experiences can be read from her journal. But why is this interesting?
When you write by hand, you remember. Research has shown (Mueller & Oppenheimer 2014), that the best way to remember the substance of a lecture is writing notes by hand. Handwriting is a medium between the body and the mind. It is a physical manifestation of your thoughts. When you write as the character you are going to play in a larp, you remember — not just the background and story of the character provided to by the organizers, but the mind of the character as you want it to be, with the knowledge and quirks characterizing this person. You start to know the character, not just in your mind but also in your body. You learn.
On receiving your character, you start the arduous work of creating a persona that is both you and not you. You choose your costume, the props you want to use during the larp, contact your relations — and if you have the time, you start to write. You must now choose the form your writing is going to take. Is it going to be a journal, a diary, an essay or maybe letters to your contacts? And you must choose your tools according to the setting of the larp. If you are a noblewoman around 1800 you may want to use pen and ink. And if you are Granny Weatherwax, you will probably go to the nearest farm and grab a tailfeather from the rooster((Do not try geese — much too angry.)). This is not a reenactment, nobody will comment on what you use or how you use it, but your choice will be part of how you build your character. So will the paper you are using and the handwriting skills of your character. Handwriting is a very tactile medium. You feel how the pen moves over the paper as you start writing. You may find out that your choice of pen and paper will impact your calligraphy.
Now you must decide what you will be writing. When will your journal start? Is it an old diary, started a long time ago? Are you writing to friends or foes? Is it private or public? This will be the start of a long list of choices you have to make on behalf of your character as you start writing. It will start dawning on you that there are things missing in your character sheet essential to your writing and your story. You start to look up clues, to find the missing links to your character on the internet or in books and journals. As you start exploring, your character will start to awaken.
Now you and your character are ready to start the larp. Your writing will become part of your play, a way to pick up clues and relations, or to take a break in a space of your own if you need to. You can write your deepest secrets or comment on the shenanigans going on around you in your journal, diary or letters and leave it to be read by others or keep it private. How, when, where and if you use it is up to you and your character in the larp. Writing is not a goal but a tool to immerse yourself in the larp and maybe recognize patterns and relations that you might otherwise have overlooked.
After the larp you may want to write your last entries. This could be the next day or maybe later. But always say goodbye to your character — if possible, in handwriting. Just as the character is created using your body and mind, you send it away.
Bibliography
Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (2014): The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 6.
Larping has been described as an extreme social sport. Players often get the most from games they devote time to and when they expose themselves as characters to situations that are both pleasant and distressing and attempt to immerse themselves in the experiences. Players are expected, or expect themselves, to put quite an effort into the larp. These expectations can include cognitive demands (such as ability to memorize background materials and switching one’s attention between relevant information during the game), emotional demands (for example, immersion into the character and how the character feels about the transpiring events), physical demands (including preparing props or doing physical feats in the game), and social demands (getting to know new people and adapting one’s behavior to new social setting). These expectations may cause stress for the players.
Players may also stress about whether the larp is organized in an effective and practical manner, about catering and sleeping arrangements, and even about whether they will feel lonely before, during, or after the game, among other practical and personal issues. Often larp related stress is centralized around the larp event and isn’t expected to be prolonged.
Not all stress is harmful. Potentially stress-generating events, or stressors, can even be positive life events (such as a wedding or a graduation cere-ceremony). Stress generated by positive life events is often labeled positive stress and typically has little long-term effects on well-being (e.g., Lin et al., 2013).
Richard Lazarus (e.g. Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), suggests negative stress occurs when a person appraises an event as a negative or dangerous (versus positive or irrelevant). In Lazarus’ model, stress is a resource issue; if task demands exceed the available resources, a person may become stressed. A person’s response to stress varies based on both their specific coping strategies (adaptive, i.e., constructive versus maladaptive, i.e., harmful) and how their individual characteristics predispose them to stress or, how resilient they are to adversity.
Figure 1. Factors of the larp-related stress according to preliminary analysis. Arrows denote relationships between the factors.
Aspects of Larp-Related Stress
Larping is a recreational activity, and larps are positive life events. However, larps can be more demanding than the player expects, and thus create stress. To assess how larps generate stress, we conducted a comprehensive online survey amongst Finnish larpers, to which we received more than a hundred responses. We investigated how stressful larpers consider different situations that can occur either before, during, or after the game, and assessed what types of coping mechanisms larpers use to alleviate that stress. Respondents also answered questions about relevant background information that might protect from or alleviate stress (like relationship status, personality and wellbeing, predisposition to anxiety etc.). Finally, we examined the symptoms larpers generally experience from larp-related stress.
Preliminary analysis of our data shows eight distinct categories of larp-related stressors (see Figure 1). The category explaining most of the variance in the data was feelings of failure. This means stress generated by larper’s own feeling of not performing to the expectations either before, during, or after the game. For example, not coming up with a good enough backstory, forgetting relevant information during the game, or making mistakes in scenes during the game. Feelings of failure seems to be associated with other stressor categories: sexist and discriminatory themes in the game, feelings of bleed or post-low, and disappointment with the game or character. These four areas represent stress generated by internal experiences of the events or themes in the larp. We found four other distinct categories: events related to design and practicalities of the larp, loneliness, demanding or distressing characteristics of the game, and harassment or worry for safety. These factors seemed less associated with other stressor categories than the first cluster of stressors.
In terms of experienced stress on a scale from 0 to 10, larping was perceived as quite stressful (mean 5.2), but larpers also found themselves recovering from this stress rapidly. Based on a preliminary analysis, stressor groups harassment or worry for safety, sexist and discriminatory themes in the game and feelings of bleed or post-low seemed to generate less stress on average than other stressors. We want to emphasize that these are averages and can be misleading: our data shows that while most players don’t experience harassment or worry for their safety in larps, a minority of players suffer a great deal of this type of stress. The players for whom harassment and insecurity is a large stressor are generally women or of non-binary gender((We expect minority-related stress applies to all marginalized groups, e.g. PoC players in a predominantly white environment. However, since our questionnaire only tracked the responders’ age and gender, we have no data for other demographic sources of minority stress.)). This aside, gender does not seem to play a large role in terms of the causes or intensity of stress larpers experience. A comparison of averages suggests men may experience less larp-related stress than other genders, but our data was inconclusive. Youth seems to predict stress: younger larpers seemed to experience more stress over loneliness, which is understandable as older larpers are likelier to be established in the community and to be familiar with their co-players. Finally, larpers in relationships seemed to experience less larp-related stress than those not in a relationship.
Factors Predisposing Players to Stress
Five general background factors seemed to have the most impact on how much stress respondents reported: low self esteem, predisposition to anxiety, stress related to other aspects of life, poor experienced quality of life, and emotional instability.
Low self-esteem is associated with stress in many studies, although it is not always evident whether experienced stress or coping failures reduces self-esteem or vice versa. Low self-esteem may predispose people toward low self-efficacy and make it harder to use constructive coping mechanisms. Predisposition to anxiety can color a person’s perception of whether future events are likely to be positive or potentially threatening, which makes it more likely that they will experience related stress. Stress from other aspects of life may increase larp-related stress by reducing the available mental, physical, and emotional resources available to manage it. Poor quality of life is characterized by unhappiness related to some aspect of life: work, health, friendships and so forth. This unhappiness may increase stress experienced from other sources as it reduces the stress management resources available. Finally, emotional instability((For emotional instability and other personality personality factors, we used the 50-item questionnaire from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP – https://ipip.ori.org/ and Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., & Gough, H. C. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 84-96. ))) is characterized by frequency of changes in mood and the frequency of feelings worry and concern. This may either make larpers more sensitive to stress or also reduce the available resources for dealing with stress.
Constructive and Harmful Coping
Even if players are similarly predisposed to stress, they subconsciously or deliberately use different approaches, or coping mechanisms, to ameliorate the effects of stress. Using a battery of questions((Coping was assessed using COPE-inventory; http://www.midss.org/content/cope-inventory (Carver, C. S., Scheier, M. F., & Weintraub, J. K. (1989). Assessing coping strategies: A theoretically based approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 267-283.))) we assessed respondents’ stress coping approaches and compared them to the reported stress symptoms.
These harmful behaviours were associated with reporting more stress-related symptoms:
denial (not acknowledging the feelings of stress)
avoidance (not confronting the feelings of stress)
substance use
externalization (blaming others)
paralyzation (to avoid or to be incapable of taking an action related to stress)
In contrast, these constructive behaviors were not associated with reporting more symptoms:
humor
planning or taking action to alleviate stress
recognizing mistakes made and attempting to remedy them
Generally, constructive coping strategies require more resources, while harmful ones avoid confronting the feelings of stress. As expected, our data suggests harmful strategies are more common among larpers who reported more life stress, poor self-esteem, or a predisposition to anxiety. In short, larpers with fewer resources to spare use harmful coping strategies, unintentionally increasing the experienced stress even further.
Figure 2. What larp related stress consists of. Arrows denote relationships between the factors.
Tips for Players
How to Recognize Larp-Related Stress
Recognizing stress is paramount for coping with it. Understanding your strengths, weaknesses, and current psychological state allows you to plan your activities effectively.
Larp-related stress manifests much like stress from other sources. According to our data (Figure 2) there are four interconnected symptom categories: depression, anxiety, physical symptoms (such as loss of appetite, fatigue), and sleep disturbances. Another symptom category, tiredness and social avoidance, seems to be separate from the other four.
Keeping a diary of stress symptoms, eating habits or sleep rhythms and looking for changes can be a useful tool for identifying how stress affects you: looking back, you can learn evaluating when you’ve felt most or least stressed, and what was going on. Monitoring your body sensations and anxiety levels before and during the game can help you manage your stress levels, reduce symptoms, and calm your nervous system by e.g. doing breathing and mindfulness exercises. It is also worth noticing how you interpret stress related sensations — as positive excitement or as negative and overwhelming symptoms?
How to Cope with Larp-Related Stress
For most players, larps are moderately stressful but the stress is not long-lasting. For players predisposed to larp-related stress, the impact may be more significant and prolonged. If this is you, recognizing the stressors affecting you the most can let you plan coping strategies more effectively.
Almost 80 respondents described in their own words how they actively dealt with stress. Coping strategies could be roughly divided into planning ahead, reducing stress-related symptoms, controlling the source of stress, dealing with the emotion itself, and compensating for lost energy levels afterwards. Using these strategies in advance, during the game and after may help you cope with stress.
The most common strategies were social coping approaches — talking to other larpers, friends, family, and organizers to ponder, analyze, and rant about the experience. Talking things over can help reframing a stressful situation and put it into perspective. Respondents talked about seeking support or advice from others on specific issues. However, social coping can also mean socializing with others to take one’s mind off of the stressful experience. Social support structures can give players the resources they need to be able to use more constructive coping strategies, which require them to confront the causes of stress, and make plans for using mental resources to cope with it.
Players also reported using a wide range of internal strategies for dealing with feeling of stress. They could e.g. analyze and ponder the situation by themselves, write about their experiences, try to tolerate and accept the emotion, change their focus to something else, try to think positively, or lower their expectations. During the game players also dealt with stress by regulating their energy levels, emotion intensity, and focus by, e.g., taking scheduled breaks and carefully picking the content they wanted to focus on. Players also found that sleep and rest, as well as eating and drinking enough during the game, improved their coping ability. Some reported planning for upcoming stress or choosing games carefully based on things like game themes and design, to reduce the possibility of excessive stress. Some players also planned for stressful, taxing, and demanding larps and scheduled themselves post-larp time for recuperating physically and mentally. They took days off after games to do pleasurable, low-stress things: watch Netflix, sleep, do self care, and generally recharge. If you are planning to play a larp you expect to be stressful, plan ahead for recovery too!
Bibliography
Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer publishing company.
Lin, N., Dean, A., & Ensel, W. M. (Eds.). (2013). Social support, life events, and depression. Academic Press.
Many Nordic larps portray instances of one character oppressing another — individually, not as in systemic oppression — including abusive relationships, uneven power structures, and perpetrator/victim dynamics. Some of us like to explore the victim side of these dynamics, but there is a risk that responsibility for advancing the story falls entirely on the perpetrator’s player. This means the victim character’s game becomes a long wait for the perpetrator to act or approach, which can be frustrating for everyone.
Some great articles have already been written on how to play the oppressor (e.g. Dalstål 2018). But in this piece, we’ll draw from our experiences to give you tools as a victim player. What can you do to help tell the story of the relationship? How can you support the perpetrator’s game or have agency even when your character doesn’t?
Types of Victims in Larp
There are different types of victims and they create different kinds of play. How you approach your character’s lack of power will change your story. When we think of a “victim”, we first imagine someone who is mainly afraid of the abuser — the passive victim. The passive victim is the biggest challenge for player agency, because their main drive is to stay away from the abuser but the story you want to tell as a player requires seeking them out. Constantly doing something your character doesn’t want can be both hard and draining. There are tools that can make it easier, but first, let’s see if another type could be the answer.
Someone who fights their perpetrator but is destined to lose anyway can be the defiant victim. The defiant victim has agency and can act independently, but they might have fewer resources or less strength, status, or willpower than the perpetrator. Regardless, you aren’t a poor, frightened thing. You will actively seek the other character out and shout or fight, making it clear you are not afraid. A few of the prisoners of war in Spoils of War (2019) are an example.
Relationships are complex, so you can have some warm feelings or even genuine interest in the abuser’s character — the ambivalent victim. You can be drawn to them even as you’re disgusted. Fighting your own emotions as well adds a layer of dilemma and complexity to the character, whether it’s Stockholm Syndrome or an abusive partner who your character still loves. This ambivalence both gives you agency and gives the abuser more power over you. It also can prevent other characters from saving you from the abuser permanently.
Offgame Tools
Ask for specific scenes. As in many other aspects of larping that try to explore hard dynamics without crossing boundaries, communication, collaboration, and calibration are essential.
Don’t be afraid to ask for specific directions or scenes . This makes it easier for the perpetrator’s player to provide, because they don’t have to come up with all the ideas and they know they have full consent. Calibration goes both ways, though — make sure that they don’t feel pressured into play they don’t want. The perpetrator’s player has boundaries too.
Give enthusiastic consent! As always with edgy content, it’s important to stress that you want the play. If they are dragging you by the wrist and you struggle to get out, signal or use mechanics to communicate that you as a player are happy even though your character isn’t. This makes the other player feel safe and encouraged.
Ingame Tools
Vary in your reactions. The two extremes of freezing/just taking it or shouting/fighting physically are opposite and valid reactions to abuse. However, without variety the first option can lead your character to become entirely passive if it’s your only reaction during the game. However, only doing the latter creates an adversarial dynamic, not an oppressive one. Quiet reactions — long haunted looks when they aren’t looking, whimpering, shaking a bit while holding someone’s hand, or just a moment of sympathy or pity — will give nuance to the fear or fighting.
Let them win (sometimes). Collaborating toward losing is valuable in this dynamic. Your character may think that giving in a bit will get them off the hook, but it will only draw them further in. For example — if an abusive and controlling boyfriend insists you wear certain kinds of clothes, agree to change your clothes because your character thinks it will make them stop and it’s such a sacrifice. Really, it just encourages the perpetrator character, and also encourages the player, offgame.
Fail to avoid your perpetrator. It’s easy to avoid someone at a larp. You can hide in the bathroom or the forest for the whole larp, but this isn’t an interesting conflict. It’s hard to be scary or abusive when you’re being avoided all the time, and it takes a lot of energy to constantly seek out the victim. Help your abuser by seeking them out or make other characters push you into being near them. Your character can still want to stay away, but use your fear to create an active connection. For example, look in the perpetrator‘s direction too often, or always keep them in line of sight but never look at them directly. Walk into a room you know (offgame) they’re in, and then act shocked and try to sneak back out.
Be a bad liar. Tell different versions of the same story to the same person, or get others to spread conflicting versions as rumours. Be really obvious or flag it offgame, so players know it’s not just you being confused. When the perpetrator finds out you were lying, you give them an extra tool to be angry at your character and maybe even to be in the right. You were the one being dishonest. This gives them some moral high ground to work with later in the relationship.
Involve other characters. You can draw people into your scenes with the perpetrator. Show others how scared or powerless you are. Tell somebody what is going on in confidence, or make sure that they witness something they shouldn’t have. Maybe they can become a victim too, and sharing the experience of being oppressed can be very powerful.
Delay the “Hero”. Involving others can mean that unwanted heroes step up. If other characters try to fix things at the wrong time, it can make a victim dynamic blurry or difficult to play on. Explicit calibration can help — ask players to support the relation — but so can working to make sure the hero isn’t in a position to fix things. Being powerless to intervene or having to work around the victim can also make great play for others.
Have allies keep the two of you together. For example, calibrate and make sure that some of your character’s loved ones like the perpetrator and keep them around. Or have the perpetrator’s allies notice you can help them, and decide to work with them.
Defend the perpetrator. Take care of the abuser’s reputation. Things like making excuses for the perpetrator or making sure they don’t do anything unambiguously wrong for as long as possible can prolong and intensify the dynamic, and help stop unwanted heroes.
Many larps I’ve attended have had at least one character who did some kind of sex work, whether it was their primary job or not, regardless of the setting or era. I’ve played these roles too, but before I started to do sex work I didn’t understand how important those characters — and their portrayals — actually were. The way we portray sex work can reproduce harmful biases in the world, and can also alienate and isolate your co-players — more of whom than you expect may have themselves done sex work. My experience with sex work showed me the harm these characterizations can cause. I also realized how often players aren’t aware of the way they’re portraying sex work or sex workers, and how tropes about sex work are reproduced without examination.
Respect
First, consider your language. In some games, especially in historical settings, we refer to people or professions using language that has negative connotations. Consider taking the word prostitution out of your vocabulary. It has negative connotations for most sex workers, and in particular is used as a rhetorical device to deny them agency in the world. Words like “hooker” and “whore” are no better. You might use those words ingame, but I suggest you not use them offgame to describe your character, and that you be clear about the difference in language.
Avoiding Stereotypes
It’s easy to create a caricature of sex workers if you have a limited understanding of real-life sex workers (in their voices, not those of people who claim to speak for them) or you if haven’t considered stigmas you may hold against them. Sadly, few public officials and journalists choose to resist that stigma, which sometimes rubs off on us — the players — when we decide how to portray sex workers. Sex work is complex, and while there are negative sides to it — often coming from interactions with social bias — if you fixate on one part of what it can be, you won’t be able to portray a whole character or a role with any emotional depth. If you don’t interrogate the messages you receive about the profession, ideally in contrast with what sex workers actually say about themselves, you’ll just reproduce biases.
Ask yourself why you want to play the role. Is it because you believe the role will include trauma or a sad past, or do you want to play a marginalized person trying to be independent in a time where it might have been challenging? It’s easy to tell the other co-players that you yourself would “never” do this kind of work in real life, but difficult to judge or know what you would do in a situation until you’re in it. Playing someone who is involved in sex work should hopefully assist you in understanding those who are, even if it’s not something you think you could do in your current life. It’s common to approach sex worker characters with the assumption that their work must involve trauma or human trafficking. While these are both perspectives and problems that exist in the world, they are not even close to the majority experience. It also should go without saying (but doesn’t) that playing a sex worker for in a manner that’s primarily about fetishization is just as reductive. Build characters who are human first, even if they’re glamorous or flirtatious, and don’t use it as an alibi to bring sex into a game without considering the rest of who they are.
Nuance
The good news is that you have the power to insert nuance into your character in almost every game. What kind of sex work do they do? Are there some things they do and other things they don’t? Why do they do this work, and what do they think about it? Is it a thing they enjoy, or just a job that gives them agency in life they wouldn’t otherwise have? You can be as creative as you want with deciding what your character does when they do their job — like any other profession. If you were playing a door-to-door salesman, you’d think about what they sell and whether they see their profession as something they want to do for the rest of their life, or just over the summer — do the same with a sex worker.
Much of this comes down to doing your research. Watch shows or movies that showcase different types of sex work and have characters with agency who aren’t just sexual objects. I recommend Pose, The Deuce, Euphoria, and Harlots here. Confront your own biases, don’t just search for things that confirm them. Listen to sex workers and their experiences, no matter what type of sex work they do — be it porn, full-service sex work, domination, erotic dancing or webcamming. Sex work is an varied field, and I recommend you research which types of it your character may do or have encountered. If you’re playing in a fantasy or science fiction game, first understand the diversity of sex work in the real world, and then think about how that might translate to the fiction. Reading background material that looks at sex work from an economic and labor rights perspective can add depth to your understanding of their lives, like Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing The Whore (Grant, 2014).
The biggest real life danger to sex workers is the prejudice societies hold against profession. It’s the reason why few laws that try to regulate sex work protect workers from violent clients or give them the same worker rights as other professions. It’s also the reason why many people feel they need to “save” sex workers from their profession when they don’t want or need saving. This prejudice is the reason why I’m not using my last name here, as I don’t know how accepting future employers will be. Fiction, and especially larp, can be a powerful tool for understanding lives and breaking down biases. If we start portraying sex worker characters in a respectful and nuanced light and as whole people, it can help us get past our own preconceptions and inspire those around us to do the same.
This piece tries to provide a practical tool for overcoming machismo, internalized norms, and other patterns that can lead to physical injury to the player’s body.
I have injured myself larping, and I know several other larpers, often men who have hurt themselves during larps. Often, this was due to taking physical risks and then downplaying the severity of the injury or hiding it altogether. Using the tools described here will help you both make more risk-aware decisions and overcome any learned response you have to downplay or to hide injury. Accidents can still happen, but we can decrease their likelihood by not creating circumstances that contribute to them.
Preventing Injury
Preventing injury is about both taking an internal stock of your body’s weak points and being honest with yourself. This means not looking at your body as you wish it was, but at the way it is when the larp starts. If the larp is some time away you might even have time to lessen your injury risk through training, if you decide it’s both important and possible for you. The other part is taking external stock of what risks will be present at the larp site or the way the larp is organized.
Is my body at the start of the larp in worse shape than I am used to? Do I have an old injury that hasn’t healed yet? Do I have chronic issues like weak ankles or night blindness? Will these be an issue at the venue?
Are there reasonable, easy to use assistive devices I need at the time of the larp? Use them. My experience as a player and designer has shown me that everyone has a better experience when they’re used, larp cultures notwithstanding, and that the impact on the game is minimal. Examples can be CPAP machines or glasses, braces or walking sticks.
Do the activities my character performs during the larp have inherent risk? Fighting, heavy lifting, roaming the forest at night? Will you work tools which are unfamiliar to you? If you have time before the larp, you can manage these risks by training for these activities.
Make a plan. If you know there is a possibility you might hurt yourself, making a plan can work like a promise to yourself. If you are going with a group you can share the plan with the group. It can be something like this: “I will use my knee brace to prevent injury and I will ask the group to remind me in the mornings to put it on.” or “If I hit my head I will go to Martin and have it checked out”. Plans also make it more likely that we’ll do the right thing in the moments right after an injury.
Reacting to Injury
So an injury has happened. First comes the pain, and then you may get overwhelmed by feelings of anger, disappointment, or even shame. Will you be able to stay in character? Will you be able to even stay at the game? Maybe the organizer team will force you to go home? For some people in this moment it can be a reflex to pretend as if nothing happened, that they are “fine”, or to downplay the injury and refuse to accept help. I’ve also seen the reaction to immediately spring into action and run for the first aid station. This can make a concussion or a foot injury worse because the player didn’t want to be the one to disturb other players or a scene. Here are some things you can do instead:
Remind yourself your real body was just damaged. Your body is your body and self care comes first. That means that the larp can pause for a few seconds, or longer. You taking a few seconds to check how you were hurt might not even disrupt the game. Questions to ask:
Are your airways affected?
Are you bleeding anywhere?
Is there intense pain or numbness anywhere, especially in joints?
Are you going into shock? Rapid breaths, cold hands, high heart rate, nausea.
How is your head?
If you need help and there are people around, be brave enough to ask for it. It’s very unlikely that anyone will think less of you for this. Accept help from those who come to you and say they want to help. There may be a voice in your head that tells you that shouldn’t burden other people, but please remind yourself that they are here to help.
If the larp has a designated first aid area, or a designated first aid person, make your way there, with assistance if needed. For some injuries it’s best if someone walks with you.
If you can’t walk then don’t force yourself as that can make an injury worse. Wait for the first aid person responder to come to you. Many sprains will heal faster if secured tightly as soon as possible after they happen.
If the event has a first aid person and they want to take you to an emergency room off-site, just let them((We’re assuming you’re in Europe, where sane medical care is normal.)). If it’s not a problem, you will come back to the larp.
Pain is the body’s way of telling you that something is wrong. Many of you live with chronic pain, but if you do, you know when there is extra, uncommon pain. Even if some injuries will heal better if you “walk it off”, this first acute moment is not when you do that. Assess the injury properly first, with help if needed.
If you made a plan in the first step that applies to the injury you sustained, follow the plan. You promised yourself, and maybe your group.
Happy larping — with less time lost to avoidable injuries or unnecessarily prolonged recovery.
As a player, I build my larp characters using the tools of sketch comedy. The style may be different, but the toolbox is the same. The crude basics offered by sketch comedy provide a functional basis on which to build more nuanced play during the larp.
The sketch comedy character building method is a hack. It means breaking down the character into repetitive concrete actions that make the character recognizable in the eyes of others and give you something to do when you’re uncertain and confused. How do you build a character for sketch comedy? Here are some of the basics:
A visual hook. This is not the same as a good costume. Rather, it means that your costume has a few distinctive, memorable elements and the rest is unobtrusive. The goal is for people to remember the hook and forget everything else. (I’m not a costume oriented player and this is my cheat method.)
Patter. What kind of things does the character say? Catchphrases, standard reactions, repeating subject matter, stories, anecdotes.
Distinctive reactions. This is even more basic than what the character says. A good reaction or two can be milked endlessly through the larp. They can be things like surprise, excitement, or fear.
Irrational opinions. One or two extremely strong irrational opinions about something peripheral are great for creating quick drama and making the character distinctive.
I played a teacher in one of the early College of Wizardry (2015) larps. My subject was combat magic. I was also secretly a vampire.
Creating the character based on the text provided by the organizers, I decided that my irrational opinion would be about how to properly hold a wand. I came up with a bunch of ways to hold it that I approved and one that I detested. I called it the “Farmer’s Fist” (the same grip you’d use with a hammer) and every time I saw someone do it, I would start an overblown lecture.
The distinctive visual element was easy: Sunglasses. Because of the vampire thing. No points for originality, but it worked.
In 2019, I played in the larp Grums By Night in Stockholm. It was a comedic larp based on Vampire: the Masquerade and my character was a violent idiot. For him, I created a distinctive reaction: Every time something he liked happened, he punched the air with both hands and yelled: ”Yes!”
It worked wonderfully, although it proved embarrassing after the larp was over when I found it hard to shake.
That character had a simple default shtick: He wanted to punch people, or for people to punch him. Both were okay. Thus when I didn’t have anything else to do, I started on that.
In a 2019 run of the Danish larp Baphomet, I played a travel writer. To get the character going, I developed a line of comedic patter about a trip to the Amazon. Then in the early parts of the larp I’d talk about that to keep social situations going. Later I discarded the Amazon line because the larp had provided other, more interesting subjects for conversation.
In another Danish 2019 larp, House of Craving, I had an even simpler catchphrase, describing everything as ”A beautiful, beautiful thing”.
The key to successfully building a character using the sketch comedy method is endless repetition. You have a limited number of reactions, phrases, and other elements and just use those all the time. In some larps where I’ve done this I’ve felt like I played for two days using a vocabulary of 200 words, but it doesn’t come across like that from the outside. It looks like consistency.
My personal measure of success for the sketch comedy method is when other characters start to make fun of me by imitating the defining elements of the character. This signals that the character has been drawn clearly and distinctly in their minds.
You’ll note that the sketch comedy method says nothing about the personality, motivation, relationships or any of the other elements we usually think of when we consider what a character is. Indeed, it resembles the experimental character building methods of larps like White Death where the character consists of repetitive physical action.
When I use this method it connects strongly to the larp’s pacing. Early in the larp I’m all about the repetitive character tics. This is because I haven’t internalized the character or the larp, and the tics give me something to do. As the larp progresses my internal play becomes more nuanced and I’m caught up in the events of the game. At this point, I don’t pay so much attention to sketch comedy characterization but usually I do it anyway because I’ve internalized it during the early game.
The best type of larp for the sketch comedy character is a sandbox-style, loose design where you have the space to play around with the character’s tropes. It doesn’t matter whether the larp is serious or lighthearted. Once you’ve internalized the tics, you can use the bandwidth this frees for other aspects of the larp, whatever that is in each specific design.
The method works less well in larps where you have to produce concrete in-game results, do work or solve plot. In such cases, there is less social space for the kind of social freestyling required.
