And so the personal is political: the forces that shape our individual lives are the same forces that shape our collective life as a culture. — Starhawk((Starhawk. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (1997, p. 28).))
We larpers are a weird bunch: we make up stories, create costumes, research tiny historical details or read boring philosophical essays just to be able to play a character that feels right, for a few hours. We try our best to step into another person’s shoes, sometimes coming home with a similar pair to wear in our everyday life. How odd; but how precious.
Indeed, I will argue that larp has the potential to make meaningful change, by helping us expand our imagination and empowerment.
When writing this paper, I first wanted to – as goes the saying – tell you about my character. It was a story of overcoming personal limitations, expanding the alibi, and finding support and acceptance from my co-players. But I’m sure you’ve heard the story: or, better yet, lived it.
Instead, I want to tell you about the mental structures that lie beneath this. The way our brain got wired to meet the requirements of a society based on status inequality, isolation, and a belief in individual responsibility – radical free will, as opposed to the existence of social and material determinism and disparity of chances. I want to tell you about how larp can help us change these structures, dig out the roots of alienation, and find our second breath to create different mental and cultural structures. I want to tell you about magic.
According to witch philosopher Starhawk, magic is about achieving a shift of consciousness: take a step outside of our previous (ordinary) way of looking at things, and manage a truly different vision of the world and ourselves. Rings a bell?
In this essay, I will explain how Starhawk’s vision of magic allows us to gain a different perspective on what happens through larp and what can be achieved. Jonaya Kemper’s work on emancipation((Jonaya Kemper, “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity,” Nordiclarp.org, June 21, 2017)) will be instrumental to show how magic plays out, and to gain a deeper understanding of the world-changing potential of larping.
Magic at Play
Starhawk is an ecofeminism activist, philosopher and Neopagan witch. She uses magic to change the world, in a practical sense. Let’s see how it works.
According to her, magic is “the art of changing consciousness at will.”((Starhawk. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (1997, p. 13).)) Magic takes its roots in a paradox: “Consciousness shapes reality. Reality shapes consciousness.”((Ibid.)) Our mental structures, beliefs, intellectual and spiritual patterns, states of mind… and the things outside ourselves – the culture, places, people, myths… – are interdependent. We are both a product of the world that surrounds us and producing it in turn. Because we exist within reality, our actions influence it; but we also derive most of our “consciousness”, our awareness of the things within and without our mind, from the preexisting reality.
Magic is finding the path to change our own consciousness. It can be done through very practical things, such as activism, or more esoteric ones, such as mindfulness. Whichever path you take, one single truth remains: magic is about finding what Starhawk calls the power-from-within: the power that derives from what we ourselves can do and achieve, as opposed to power-over.
Power-over is power derived from hierarchy, constraint, or imposing on people by force, manipulation, or persuasion. Laws (secular or religious) rely on power-over: the threat of enforcement causes people to abide, not ultimately because they think it’s the right thing to do (though they may come to believe it), but because they are (symbolically or physically) coerced to do so. On the contrary, power-from-within is not about making people do stuff, nor is it about acting the way people want us to: it is about our own agency and capability.
Once you find your power-from-within and manage the shift, Starhawk is positive that you will act on it. Shift your consciousness and the world around you will change, because you’ll make choices to induce change – helping reality itself evolve to a different balance.
Now back to larp: I’ll argue that a successful larp is one in which we achieve that shift of consciousness. And that it is, in fact, the greatest thing larp can hope to achieve.
Caprice, a character I’d wanted to tell you about. She’s dressed in black shorts, suspenders and unbuttoned hoodie, her breasts flattened with black tape. She wears red lipstick and strange, scar-like make-up. Red words figuring scarifications can be seen on her thighs. She’s talking passionately to an unseen crowd in a room with white walls on which hang black-and-white pictures of well-dressed artists. Larp: OSIRIS, 2019. Photo by Lille Clairence.
Othering Oneself
The alibi is often at the core of the social contract in larp. It can be defined as “The things that enable a person to (role-)play and to do things they would never do in everyday life while in character.”((“Glossary,” in Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences (2019).)) It says: “By entering the game, we pledge to separate the character’s speeches and actions from the player’s.”
Without that insurance, we can’t play roles, because we can’t step out of our ordinary selves.
Oh, the alibi is a flimsy thing: mundane elements such as performance anxiety, an unsafe environment, the difficulty to differentiate the player’s and the character’s emotions from an external viewpoint, or internalised bias (ours or our co-players’),((Kemper, Jonaya, Eleanor Saitta, and Johanna Koljonen. “Steering for Survival.” In What Do We Do When We Play? Solmukohta (2020).)) put it in jeopardy. It doesn’t always live up to the task: more often than not, perhaps, we leave a larp having not dared enough, under-played our character, or even held a grudge (or had a crush) on a player after in-character interactions. Still: the alibi, albeit imperfect, is the key ingredient that clearly distinguishes larp from other types of play (we need alibi in table-top RPG too, but the embodiment required by larp takes it one definite step further).
Whether it works or not, the alibi as a social contract sustains an effort to perceive friends as elves, strangers as companions, or oneself as an artist. It is an attempt at a shift of consciousness.
Of course, famously called willful suspension of disbelief, the attitude a reader adopts to engage with a piece of fiction (withdrawing judgement on the veracity or realness of events taking place within the fiction) covers some of the same ground, and has been used and expanded in relation to larp:((Schrier, Karen, Evan Torner, and Jessica Hammer. “Worldbuilding in Role-Playing Games.” In Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach (2018, p. 349-363).)) but then again, embodiment and player agency in larps take that dimension further, to a place more intimate and more active. In addition, the strong collective component of larp goes far beyond the individual attitude towards fiction: we can only sustain our mindset, our attitude towards the game, if the others play along. In larp, we need others to achieve what we mean to achieve: there can be no individual success or failure. It’s all co-creation and collaboration towards the same goal: to create a meaningful, engaging story, in which we can let ourselves be caught.
So, larp is a kind of magic. Using our will to participate in larp, we engage emotionally and meaningfully in a character and relationships. When we interact with people, or with the larp design, we create a space for this to happen. In that space, things and behaviours are redefined, reinterpreted. The most mundane of elements can convey vastly different things: in this, we make art. We create meaning. This wooden door is a gate to the underworld. This young woman is the old queen of an older kingdom. This person whom I never met is my long-lost love.
We say these things and we believe them. We make that shift of consciousness. Magic happens.
So what? Permeating the Real World
The most common association with magic in regard to play is that of pioneer game scholar Johan Huizinga: the magic circle. According to the Larp Design Glossary, the magic circle is a “[m]etaphor for the separate space of playing.”((“Glossary,” 2019.)) It marks the game space, both physical and virtual (mindspace, belief system, gameworld, etc.), as separate, as distinct from the paramount reality.((A term used by sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, it designates what we call “reality,” our ordinary life and most commonly shared world, as opposed to “provinces of meaning,” which are like “pockets” of alternate reality (such as fiction, play or religion). Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1968).))
Huizinga’s theory has been widely criticised, as the separation between play and reality is often impossible to trace (and their definitions elusive). According to Stenros,((Jaakko Stenros, “In Defence of a Magic Circle: The Social, Mental and Cultural Boundaries of Play,” in Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, (2014)) the notion of a magic circle would actually be plural, expressing different “boundaries of play” – the player’s state of mind, the social contract, and the game space. Those boundaries remain porous: the magic circle can be endangered by external events, and the players are able to navigate between different “layers,” zooming in and out of character during larps.((Hilda Levin. “Metareflection,” in What Do We Do When We Play? (2020).))
Despite this criticism, and following its redefinitions, the term “magic circle” remains widely used to designate the elements sheltering a game from reality, and vice versa. “Play” and “reality” must remain separate, and by entering the game, we cast a spell to make it so.
But if we are to believe Starhawk, Huizinga was wrong all along: magic is not what makes the game impermeable. It’s what makes it porous. Magic is that shift of consciousness, temporary perhaps but with long-lasting repercussions, that allows larp to influence the bigger, outer world.
Magic is the reason why so many larpers report they became more comfortable talking in public, or wearing “eccentric” clothes, or exploring gender fluidity. It’s the reason we created bonds so strong with people we spent barely a handful of days with, why we were sometimes able to create a community of trust out of diverse people. Magic is seen through all the things in larps that allowed us to grow.
But careful: magic is not guaranteed to happen. Sometimes, we become more comfortable with things through larp just because we’ve had the opportunity to practice, when we couldn’t otherwise try them out. We might not need a deep change in mindset to become more at-ease talking in public when it’s the fifth larp this year in which we’ve had to deliver an inspirational speech. It may just be a matter of habit, of practice. Similarly, learning to impersonate a character doesn’t mean they’ve shaken us to our core, mingling with our sense of identity, throwing us out in the world with new perspectives.
A shift of consciousness is something more profound than that. It’s not pretense, or shallow belief.
Magic is demanding that we dive deep and redefine our core beliefs. And that’s gonna take us some work.
Building Our Power
Larp is a dense, demanding hobby, which tends to generate a tightly-knit social fabric. As such, it can be a truly powerful tool for community building. But the “community” thus made is no stranger to power dynamics,((Axiel Cazeneuve, “The Paradox of Inclusivity,” In What Do We Do When We Play? (2020).)) status inequalities,((Muriel Algayres, “The Impact of Social Capital on Larp Safety,” Nordiclarp.org. Accessed March 28, 2020)) and discriminations in access to games, hype, speech, etc.((Kemper, Eleanor, and Koljonen, 2020).)) These are all manifestations of internalized power-over – we have a hard time rejecting the script society hammered us with.
In her paper “Wyrding the Self,”((Jonaya Kemper, “Wyrding the Self,” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta, 2020.)) larp scholar and activist Jonaya Kemper brings into focus something many may find disturbing: that we’re all the oppressor and the oppressed. Even the most marginalized person in regard to society standards can still inflict power-over. Even the most privileged can be subjected to power.
Collective Liberation
“Wyrding,” Kemper explains, means to embrace being weird as opposed to being determined by society. “To be weird is to be outside of the normal aspects of society, yes, but to also collectively decide who you would like to be, not based on societal pressure.”((Ibid.)) The way I see it, wyrding is a way to increase our power-from-within: let go of social expectations and focus on what we can do and be.
If embracing weirdness is how we can achieve liberation, then larp sure is the place to do it. In fact, even if all larps do not make great magic, the habit of taking on different roles and perceiving others doing so is still an exercise at shifting consciousness at will.
Kemper’s now-famous concept of emancipatory bleed((Jonaya Kemper, “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity,” Nordiclarp.org, June 21, 2017.)) has thrown light on how we can use larp to overcome our own internalized limitations. According to Kemper, “bleed” (the transfer of emotions between character and player) “can be steered and used for emancipatory purposes by players who live with complex marginalizations.” Through careful calibration, players can navigate towards experiences they want to deal with or overcome in the safe environment larp provides (on the need to feel safe to larp.((Cf. Anneli Friedner, “The Brave Space: Some Thoughts on Safety in Larps,” Nordiclarp.org, October 7).))
Kemper’s proposition may seem individualistic, as it emphasizes on the player’s own empowerment. Likewise, magic as essentially a state of mind could feel self-centered at first. But as Starhawk points out in the quote I chose as an introduction to this essay, “the forces that shape our individual lives are the same forces that shape our collective life as a culture.”((Starhawk, 1997, p. 28.)) In acting on the things that determine us, that make us that way, we also induce change on a broader level – albeit in an often imperceptible manner. The converse is also true: we can only change ourselves to the extent that we make the world to allow that change.
Indeed, Kemper writes, “If we want liberation, then we must also liberate those who oppress us because they’re oppressed just like us.”((Kemper, 2020, p. 212).)) There is nothing like individual liberation – the social and the personal are deeply intertwined. And both Kemper and Starhawk agree that communities are where shit is gonna happen.
All limitations considered, let us nonetheless posit that larp is magical practice. A collective endeavour to achieve a shift of consciousness, an art of changing the way we see the world and the critters in it. Such practice would have to liberate us, to make us freer from social norms, more eager to act against them. If, and only if we could shake off the same old power structure we’ve been bathing in from an early age.
To hell with power-over; it’s time to find our Power-From-Within.
Caprice (the author) and Claude Giger (Lille Clairence) singing “Les Tuileries” together. They learned and practiced the song two hours prior and are now performing at dinner in front of all the players. Giger holds blind-folded Caprice closely against his chest, a technique used by the players to keep Caprice’s player from shaking with stress and coordinate their breathing. The light is blue, dim. OSIRIS, 2019. Photo by the organizers.
Ethics of Larping
The way we ordinarily imagine magic has everything to do with speech acts, or what we call language performativity.((After linguist John Austin’s theory of speech acts, though he didn’t use that exact phrase himself. John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962).)) It designates occurrences when saying actually does something. The most common example of this is when a priest or a mayor pronounces two people wed: they don’t only say it, as you and I might, they effectively make it happen, through the power granted to them by whichever institution backs them up. In our imagination, we figure magic works like that: a great wizard called fire upon them, and fire came.
This is power-over. It’s why we laugh at magic, cause we don’t understand how it could really work. It’s not like we could really summon demons or receive healing magic from gods, right?
But true magic is about the power you have, not that which is granted or appropriated. It’s no gift, nor curse. It’s inner strength, capacity, determination to act. And so we must act in accordance to our words, not merely expect our words to have effect on their own.
I propose we apply what Starhawk calls the ethics of integrity to larp. In her words, “[i]ntegrity means consistency: we act in accordance with our thoughts, our images, our speeches.”((Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics, 1997).)) It’s a basic principle that if we really do make the shift, if we manage to change consciousness at will, then our actions will follow.
Conversely, if we aim to take action – or inspire people to take action – through larp, we must wonder how we can try to reach the necessary shift of consciousness. In my master’s thesis,((Axiel Cazeneuve, Éthique et politique du jeu. Jeu de rôle grandeur nature et engagement politique en Finlande. Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 2019).)) I argued that what makes larpers more inclined to supporting progressive politics is that larp is largely non-hierarchical, non-competitive, non-productive, and non-profit.((The ethnographic study was conducted in Finland, with back-up from “experimental” (inspired by Nordic larp, often using its toolbox) larp scenes in France, and cannot account for all larping cultures. However, I believe that where analogous conditions are met, the same conclusion can reasonably be drawn.)) These are not individual traits, but structural features. In my opinion, they’re essential to a socially powerful and ethical larp culture.
Larp is discordant. Disturbing. It disproves many of society’s strongly established beliefs: that adults can’t play. That play can’t be serious. That people only work for money. That people don’t typically cooperate, or collaborate without some kind of management or coercion.
The shape of larp, albeit imperfect, supports a whole different structure and a distinct mindset compared to the general society. And it is this structure that we must cherish and sustain, for it is that which can reach us and move us and lead us to achieve a shift of consciousness.
Through larping, we make social magic. It allows each of us to grow and change, and our discordant consciousnesses help change the world in turn.
Conclusion
Using Starhawk, this paper aimed at bridging magical practice and activism with larp, to show how art, politics, and personal liberation articulate. It follows Jonaya Kemper’s work, which focuses on what each of us can do to use larp for emancipation purposes, by offering a different reading grid – magic – on those phenomena and emphasizing on the importance of the collective in achieving liberation.
There is a lot larp can do: but saying this is not enough. We must be wary of this assumption. We can be tempted to assume a larp tackling difficult social issues, for example, will succeed in raising awareness or leading people to have different opinions: but how we do things is at least as important as what we do. As Eirik Fatland demonstrated in a keynote held at the State of the Larp conference,((Eirik Fatland, “Larp for Manipulation or Liberation,” Oslo, 2018)) larps about specific, real-life issues have mostly no impact on the beliefs of the players, but can on the contrary reinforce stereotypes and preconceptions.
This focus on discourse, as opposed to structure, is a common flaw of progressive politics, especially among large political organisations such as parties or NGOs. They often make the mistake of believing in their own efficiency and effectiveness, regardless of the social and material reality they – and we, in spite of ourselves – exist in. So does larp, when it doesn’t examine its own structure with a critical enough eye.
Starhawk’s vision of magic provides us with an alternative framework, less concerned with discourse and more in touch with the material reality we live in – that which shapes us, and gets shaped in turn. As larpers, we learn to be flexible and to think differently about the world, both social and material: it’s a gift we can use and enhance to make true magic – change consciousness to take meaningful actions.
It’s only possible if we stay vigilant: the structure of the society we mean to change is pervasive. Resisting it is a constant struggle: but larp, like magic, might be just what we need to do so.
Berger, Peter, and Thomas L Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor, 1967.
Cazeneuve, Axiel. “The Paradox of Inclusivity.” In What Do We Do When We Play? Solmukohta 2020, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Makkonen Mia, Männistö Pauliina, Serup Grove Anne, and Johanna Koljonen, 244–53. Helsinki: Solmukohta 2020, 2020.
Cazeneuve, Axiel. “Éthique et politique du jeu. Jeu de rôle grandeur nature et engagement politique en Finlande.” Directed by Laurent Gabail. Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 2019.
Fatland, Eirik. “Larp for Manipulation or Liberation.” Oslo, 2018.
Kemper, Jonaya, Saitta, Eleanor & Koljonen, Johanna. “Steering for Survival”. In What Do We Do When We Play? Solmukohta 2020., edited by Eleanor Saitta, Makkonen Mia, Männistö Pauliina, Serup Grove Anne, and Johanna Koljonen, 49-52. Helsinki: Solmukohta 2020, 2020.
Levin, Hilda. “Metareflection”. In What Do We Do When We Play? Solmukohta 2020., edited by Eleanor Saitta, Makkonen Mia, Männistö Pauliina, Serup Grove Anne, and Johanna Koljonen, 62-74. Helsinki: Solmukohta 2020, 2020.
Schrier, Karen, Torner, Evan & Hammer, Jessica. “Worldbuiling in Role-Playing Games.” In Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach, edited by Zagal, José P. and Deterding, Sebastian, 349-363. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Starhawk. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997 (1982).
Cover photo: Caprice, a character that made me understand magic, at the larp OSIRIS in 2019. She’s standing blindfolded with loud music in her ears on a narrow wall in the cold February wind as part as an impromptu performance. She wears a long red cocktail dress laced at the back that reveals her bare tattooed back. She stands with her arms half-risen in a powerful pose. The background is a thickly clouded sky over a dry heath. Photo by Lille Clairence as Caprice’s partner, Claude Giger.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Cazeneuve, Axiel. “Larp as Magical Practice: Finding the Power-From-Within.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
In the summer of 2018, I signed up for a feminist spinoff of College of Wizardry (CoW, 2014) called Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft (HAW). Since CoW usually aspires towards a gender-neutral setting, I was interested in seeing what a specifically feminist and female-focussed version of the larp and the magic college might look like. How would the concept of magic academia be changed if we were to imagine it as developed mostly by and for women? Would magic itself become something different? What would gendered magic look like? And importantly, would there be room for magic expressions outside of the gender binary?
Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft was the brainchild of Agata Świstak and Marta Szyndler, and it was described as a “world where feminine means strong, powerful and unyielding’ and a “safe haven where witches can study magic without the risk of being burned at the stake.” The spinoff larp was marketed for “women, for non-binary pals, for anyone with a feminine experience, and for men who want to try something new.” ((College of Wizardry. “Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft”. Facebook video. 22 June 2018. Accessed 31 August 2020.))
Having played as a professor at CoW before, I immediately knew that I wanted to teach again at HAW. Especially the new subjects of Moon Magic and Blood Magic sparked creative visions in my head of witches gathering in a circle under the full Moon to celebrate their womanhood. (Since I identify as a queer feminist, a witch and a cis woman, ideas for magic rituals centred on and celebrating female empowerment come easily to me). However, I was aware that I needed to make anything I did accessible to characters and players of all gender expressions and identities – and this honestly seemed quite the challenge. For instance, if Blood Magic or Moon Magic connotes a focus on “the female cycle” and menstruation, how would I include female bodies that don’t menstruate, non-female bodies that do, cis-gendered male bodies and people who might feel dysphoric about the subject? Is it possible to separate menstruation from the notion of a female biology? In general, how do we celebrate female power and magic in any larp setting without simultaneously reproducing binary gender thinking? How do we avoid cis-hexism?
The special feminist run of CoW was eventually cancelled, but it left me with a lot of unresolved speculation about uplifting the stories of women through elements of female power and magic while striving to make room for all players, including trans*((In this text, I will use trans* as a signifier for all non-cis people (such as transgender, non-binary or genderfluid people, etc.). In other words, I will use trans* for brevity as a signifier for anyone who identifies (always or sometimes) outside of the gender they were assigned at birth. This is a common practice in writing about trans* experiences that I first came across in Ruska Kevätkoski’s work in the 2016 Solmukohta Book (Kevätkoski, 2016).)) players and characters. My goal here is not to provide the perfect answers (I don’t have them), but to share my thoughts and hopefully inspire others to gender their magic systems with awareness and intention.
The Social Construction of Binary Gender
Let’s have a quick talk about the gender binary and how our implicit biases about gender might influence larp design. The gender binary is the historical and current notion (particularly in Western culture) that there are two – and only two – distinct and separate genders. Biological sex is often invoked as a reason for upholding the gender binary, with proponents arguing that individual gender expressions spring ‘naturally’ from inherent biology – a view that is sometimes called essentialist. An alternative view (and the one I hold) is that the binary division of gender is a social construct, i.e. a socially constructed and culturally fluent set of expressions and behaviours that are implicitly taught, learned and sustained.((See e.g. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Vintage Books, 2011. Originally Le Deuxième Sexe. First ed. 1949; Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990, Tandon Neeru. Feminism: A Paradigm Shift. Atlantic, 2008. Accessed 23 September 2020.)) In the following, I will presuppose that gender categories are fluent, malleable and socially constructed – and that it is therefore possible to bend, break and rebuild them in larps and other fictional settings.
It is crucial to understand that just because something is a construct, this does not mean that it doesn’t exist. National borders are a social construct, but they are enforced by laws and sometimes maintained with violent force. Currency is a construct, but the numbers typed on a piece of paper or inside a computer still represent influence and agency in society. The male/female division of colours such as blue and pink or the idea that only women may wear skirts is obviously culturally constructed, but the negative consequences for transgressing outside the expectations of your assigned gender category can be substantial. Even when we resign ourselves to the restrictions of whatever gender category we were assigned at birth, there is still implicitly trained internalised and externalised social policing in place to ensure that we perform((“Perform” here not in the sense of “playacting” but meaning to present yourself through a set of implicitly trained and socially acceptable gendered behaviours.)) whatever behaviours have been designated as sufficiently “feminine” or “masculine” by our culture. This is true for both of the binary gender categories, because although white, straight cis-men are often viewed as a dominant group and as the “norm” (compared to whoever is being “othered” through normative discourse), their potential for self-expression is equally restricted by the rules of the gender binary. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains:
We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves…
Although the binary categories of “male” and “female” are constructs, they have tangible and material effects on our lives. We live within and around these identities and categories every day. Many people perform their expected gendered behaviours without even thinking twice about it. Our assigned gender roles are implicit and systemic, and therefore they become the norm. Anyone who exists outside of this norm, either because they resist binary thinking, or simply because they don’t fit easily within the two established categories, often risk being shunned, oppressed or overlooked. The consequences of not “fulfilling” your assigned gender role can be harmful. Exclusion from communities or being marked as “other” have very long histories as forms of social punishment intended (consciously or subconsciously) to correct behaviour back towards the culturally normative expectation.((See e.g. Munt, Sally R. Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (p. 32). Ashgate Publishing, 2007.))
When we understand the mechanisms behind gendering and othering, and when we recognise the binary gender categories and their associated expressions as constructs, we are better able to anticipate and play with these concepts in larps during world building and in the development of gendered or ungendered((Since the gendering of people, expressions and behaviours is the accepted norm, the decision to omit gender altogether also become a gender-conscious choice.)) magic systems.
Illustration by Marie Møller
Gendering Magic
When we create worlds and settings for larps, we are deconstructing and reconstructing reality. Most larps, however abstract (with a few exceptions), still tell the stories of connected or disconnected human beings and their communities. Nothing comes from nothing, and the stories we tell are reflections of the human experience.
When it comes to gender, this means that we might unwittingly be reproducing binary stereotypes. That is why gender awareness matters, and why it is important to make conscious decisions about gender and to include trans* characters and narratives. Because of the historical erasure of trans* narratives, examples of trans* historical figures are not easy to find,((Sharma, Ayesha. “Transgender People Are Not Included In Mainstream History.” Everyday Feminism, 2018. Accessed 24 September 2020.)) and it takes deliberate effort to search them out and include them((Preferably without ascribing trans* identities onto historical figures whose personal gender identities can’t be ascertained.)) or to create fictional historical trans* characters for players to portray.
Likewise, when we create magic systems that celebrate female power (or any gendered magic), we must take care not to conflate magic and biology, thereby insinuating that e.g. femininity and female magic spring from a “female biology”((I.e. a female gender assigned at birth based on physical characteristics.)) rather than from the female cultural experience. If we create a system which states that female magic comes from such a “female biology” (i.e. from having a womb or from something more abstractly female but concretely connected to the physical), we are reproducing the essentialist idea that gender is biological. If gender is a construct, then gendered magic is also a construct. This is true for the actual construction of gendered magic systems when we create them out of game, and that must be true inside the diegetic reality of the larp as well.
The great thing about this is that if gendered magic (such as a female witch’s potential connection to the Moon) is a social construct, then this gendered border within magic can be explored and transgressed just as the boundaries of gender can be explored and transgressed in real life. We can (and should) embrace and empower the female minority exactly because it is a minority((“Minority” here not signifying a numerical minority but rather any social group that is subordinate to a dominant group with more power and/or privilege regardless of group size, see e.g. https://www.britannica.com/topic/minority.)) – but we can do that and also make space for other minorities. We can do it without doing unto others what has been done to women for so long.
Gentlemen Magicians and Wild Witches
There is so much potential for stories about gendered magic, so let me offer an improvised example: Imagine a world historically reminiscent of our own where men go to school and learn magic while women are denied access to both magic and learning. In this world, girls are taught magic in secret by their grandmothers in the woods. Their magic grows wild and intuitive while the boys are taught structured and formulaic spells – both branches of magic equally effective, but each with their restraints and specialities. In this world, the cultural division between boys and girls has created a gender binary. It has also created two separate forms of magic according to gender – not because only two genders exist but because only two genders have been allowed to exist.
Now in this world, there are male magicians who will never learn (or even want to learn) what the wild witches know. But there are some among them who yearn for the magic of the Moon and the forests and who turn out to excel in intuitive magic. There are those who were told they were girls, but who now live as boys to attend classes and surpass their peers in every way. And there are those who can master both branches of the craft and combine them into new kinds of magic.
Of course, several things could happen next within this world when people break the social expectations. I would love to see a story where combined or gender-transverse magic is celebrated to empower trans* characters and where it begins to dissolve the gender binary. Alternatively, backlash, banishments or cover-ups of all non-binary magic could mirror the transphobia, ostracism and the erasure of trans* narratives in the real world. This is where it is especially important to consider the purpose of the gendered player experience you are shaping and to remember your trans* players. While I firmly believe there must be room in larp for people to explore lives and identities outside of their own, and while some trans* people will appreciate seeing cis players struggle with the same institutionalised challenges they face every day, others might find it hard to watch someone else live out their most difficult real life moments.
With no direct experience in larp development, I don’t claim to be an expert, but I have made note of some good advice and best practices: Make it very clear in your scenario description if your gendered magic system will lead to play involving gender discrimination and/or trans* discrimination. Create trans* or ungendered characters to make space for all players interested in playing trans* narratives. Acknowledge the existence of your trans* players in advance. Don’t wait for them to initiate the conversation, but make it clear from the start that you anticipate what you can and are ready to listen.
When it comes to magic in a historical setting, it is interesting to imagine how the two (culturally constructed and segregated, but very real) genders might perform magic differently. But it is not enough simply to declare that there is male and female magic. We need to know why that is and what it entails. Stories of gender segregation have value when they investigate the gender binary in order either to teach us something about the lived experience of all genders at that time and place or to explore and transgress the gender boundaries they establish.
Gender-Neutral Witchards and Agender Fae
At College of Wizardry, it has become custom to call witches and wizards by the universal gender-neutral portmanteau “witchards.” No one seems to recall the exact origin of the word (a reflection of the largely community-sourced gameplay), but the term functions well to support the gender-inclusive tone that the larp aims for. In the player handbook for CoW, there is a passage on equality and inclusivity which reads:
Witchard Society is different though: magical ability can surface in anyone, and that makes everyone equal regardless of their looks, body, sexuality, gender, beliefs or ethnicity […] and genderqueer and transgender individuals are common and wholly accepted.((College of Wizardry. Player Handbook. Company P, 2019. Version 3.0, ed. Laura Sirola and Christopher Sandberg. Accessed 23 September 2020.))
I imagine this rule stated clearly and directly (and repeated in pre-larp workshops) makes a difference for many players, although I can’t speak for them. I can say that it means a lot to me when portraying a female professor of age and authority, and it matters in the gameplay I have sought to create for other players. At CoW, there are also pronoun badges for players to show clearly whether their characters identify as they/them, she/her or he/him. This enables me to use the right pronouns for the characters I meet (something I very much appreciate), and then promptly ignore their gender because at CoW, gender doesn’t matter – but it matters a great deal that gender explicitly doesn’t matter, because this stands in such clear contrast to the importance implicitly placed on gender in the real world.
In-game: The author teaching magic through music at College of Wizardry 22. Photo by Przemysław Jendroska, Horseradish Studio.
The upcoming larp A Harvest Dance((A Harvest Dance, set for October 2021.)) by Lotta Bjick and the team at Poltergeist LARP features another kind of magical creature that has transcended (or rather never had) the need for gender. The site describes: “Fae society is not human and the concept of gender is bewildering and strange to them, therefore all characters will be written and played without gender.” The vision is that all players will portray genderless fae characters and use they/them pronouns about each other at all times. As fae, the participants will be able to play with – or rather completely disregard – gender in fashion and demeanour because the fae are bewildered by the silly human mortals’ constructed gender binary.
Of course, although characters might be written as unbiased or genderless, it doesn’t mean that players are able to enter into the fiction and immediately abandon their subconscious biases. It takes effort, and that effort takes awareness and intention – and even then, we might still slip up. (For instance, in spite of best efforts, I have personally experienced both sexism and sexual harassment at CoW.) But it matters that we get to try, and that we get to enter into a world where concepts such as gender-equality or the total lack of gender is explicitly stated as the norm and the expectation.
The organisers of A Harvest Dance are aware that players bring their trained normative behaviours with them into the event whether they want to or not. The act of using they/them pronouns for everyone around you is a new experience and a social exercise. It is stated clearly on the website that players should avoid gendered pronouns and not use words such as “man” or “woman.” But, the organisers say, “We are aware that this is not what most of us are used to in off-game real life and we might mess up. That is ok!” (A Harvest Dance).
Although our ingrown biases are hard to shed, larps give us the option to try. The trying is important in itself because it shows us that the established social norms of the real world are transmutable and replaceable constructs and are not the only ways to exist and interact. Even when we try and fail, we learn something about ourselves and the pervasive condition of our subconscious preconceptions. Through the narrative device of magic (and the actual magic of larping), we are able to construct, inhabit and investigate alternate realities that can show us a glimpse of what a truly unbiased community might look like, or experience what a genderless society feels like. The creators of A Harvest Dance say that they “are excited to see what characters we all can create together without the boundaries of gender!” And so am I.
Menstruation Magic
I would be remiss if I didn’t at least attempt to include a discussion on magic and menstruation. After all, it was the notion of Moon Magic and Blood Magic as magic school subjects that set my thoughts in motion exactly because they made me think of menstruation rituals and the potential for accidental gender-based exclusion. Menstruation is historically and implicitly connected to womanhood, but it is not something all women experience, and it is not something only women experience.
Menstruation is connected to womanhood because it has historically been associated with the physical characteristics ascribed to ‘female biology’. Not only that, but menstruation has been marked as something unclean or impure by the patriarchy and is still abused as a reason to subjugate and disfranchise the female minority and keep women subdued.((UNFPA. “Menstruation and Human Rights.” UNFPA, 2020. Accessed September 27, 2020)). Women have been called hysterical (from the Greek “hystera,” meaning womb or uterus), and the menstrual cycle is continually cited as a reason why women should not hold positions of power.((See e.g. Robbins, Mel. “Hillary Clinton and the clueless hormone argument.” CNN, 2015. Accessed 24 September 2020.)) In some cultures and traditions, women are kept separate from their communities during menstruation, and they must undergo cleansing rituals before re-entering society. The loss of dignity and agency that women face through the stigma of menstruation is exactly why it is an important act of resistance for women to celebrate it. Menstruation celebrations and rituals can and should be used as a tool to empower the female minority and break this age-old taboo.
However, as I said above, not all women menstruate, and not only women menstruate. Some women are post-menopausal, some have medical conditions that disrupt or prevent menstruation, some have reasons and medical means to opt out, and some women don’t have a uterus. Some trans* people menstruate but do not identify as women, including a number of men. And some people are dysphoric about their menstruation (or lack thereof) because it doesn’t correspond with the (socially constructed) physical expectations of their gender identity. So how do we celebrate menstruation through magic without risking the exclusion of bodies that don’t fit neatly into binary gender categories?
I’m sad to say I don’t have the answer. To be honest, I thought about not including this segment at all because I have more questions than answers. But in the end, I believe the question merits being asked. My ultimate intention is not to provide a ready-made solution but to inspire further contemplation in others. Two brains are smarter than one, and larps are the perfect playgrounds to ask the “what ifs” together and experiment with subversions of social norms. But I do have one final thought to share on the matter.
While womanhood and menstruation are historically related issues, they are not actually the same thing. When we look beyond the conflation that patriarchal history has made of women and menstruation, we see that the connection is yet another social construct. Some bodies menstruate. Some of these bodies belong to people who identify as women. Some of them do not. Menstruation is a thing that some bodies do – not a thing that just women do. So maybe it’s possible to separate the two.
Perhaps in the right story and the right setting, rituals celebrating menstruation could be something different and apart from rituals celebrating womanhood. The great thing about magical world-building is that we are not limited by mundane maxims. We are free to imagine and inhabit alternate realities that are partially or wholly different from our own. We can create worlds where menstruation is celebrated in all bodies regardless of gender, or where menstruation talk is commonplace and not taboo, or where menstruation represents something else altogether.
As I said, there is good reason to celebrate menstruation specifically in order to re-empower a female minority that has been disfranchised directly through menstruation stigma. That can and should be done in larps that focus on the gender binary and the concomitant limits it places on everyone – larps that hopefully also consider the injustices done towards trans* people through the same social system.
The Power of Gendered Magic
Whether you believe in magic or not, gendered magic will always be a social construct because gender is a social construct. When we create worlds and social settings for larps, we are either reconstructing or deconstructing the gender binary. Once we realise that genders are social categories that have been culturally constructed over time, it becomes easier to reframe and reimagine them, which we can then do with intention and awareness of the ramifications it will have for players and characters of all genders, including trans* players and characters. We should not accept an implicitly essentialist approach to gender simply because it is the norm of the real world.
Larping – and especially larping in fantastical settings – gives us the power to decide to try something new, or to question the status quo by reproducing it for the purpose of closer scrutiny. We get to imagine worlds not only where “feminine means strong,”((College of Wizardry. “Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft.” Facebook video. 22 June 2018. Accessed 31 August 2020. )) but where masculine means being sensitive to the needs of others and expressive about your emotions. We get to break the cages and the restrictions placed on all of us through the binary construct of gender. Whatever choice we make about gender categories in our world-building and magic systems, it should be done with intention and for good reason because it has the power to change someone’s frame of mind.
Gendered magic has the power not just to include but to uplift gender minorities. With Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft, the idea was to reframe and celebrate women and female magic in exact opposition to the historical persecution of female witches.((Even though men were also persecuted for witchcraft, and although there are examples of countries where more men than women were executed, women were the main target of witch-hunts and executions in Europe and Scandinavia. (Guillou, Jan. Heksenes forsvarere: en historisk reportage. Modtryk, 2012. Orinally Häxornas försvarere – ett historiskt reportage. First ed. 2002).)) At A Harvest Dance, there will be an absence of gender, which is in itself a gender-aware choice and a social construction, and it will probably teach the participants something about their own perspective on and relation to gender. In my own example above about boys schooled in magic and girls learning magic in secret (where gender segregation has resulted in two different types of magic), we can imagine how characters that are able to combine the two gendered forms of magic might become revered for the very fact that they see through and transgress the implicitly binary system.
In larps, we get to do the telling – but narrative power also means responsibility. When it comes to creating space for trans* narratives in larp, cis people still hold the most power. By stepping up and making sure to include trans* characters in our stories, and by asking the right questions when we create gendered worlds and gendered magic systems, we begin to counteract historic and current trans* erasure. When we create realistic or historically inspired settings, we need to work towards including those stories that are too often erased, overlooked and forgotten. When we write alternate, fantastical and imaginary worlds and settings, we are free to reimagine gender, or its absence, for everyone.
Although I don’t have all the answers, I hope that sharing my thoughts and speculations on this issue might have inspired some further play with gender, magic and gendered magic in larps. There are already a number of larps with rich explorative ideas about gender (e.g. Brudpris, Sigridsdotter and Mellan himmel och hav), and I hope to see even more larps in the future with a deliberate focus on gender in their world-building in order either to investigate or remedy the gendered injustices of the real world. I especially dream of more larps where gendered magic – or the explicit absence of gender in magic – is applied as an allegorical device to illustrate and illuminate the fundamentally constructed condition of the binary gender categories of the real world in order to uplift and celebrate gender minorities. To me, this would be true magic.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Møller, Marie. “Gendered Magic.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
In this article, I present a categorization of LAOGs – depending on how they make use of the communication channels in place. I identify three different forms: The Diegetic Call, The Invisible Call, and The Metaphorical Call. Let me take you on this journey of design exploration. Then make up your own mind how your experience fits or does not fit into this picture.
Three forms of LAOG, illustration by Gerrit Reininghaus
LAOG stands for Live-Action Online Game. As the name indicates, this is a category of games which have a strong live-action component and are designed for online play. LAOGs have dramatically increased in popularity due to the pandemic of 2020 / 2021 when many larpers turned online to find an outlet for the grief for the loss of their hobby in the time of social distancing. Many people also use the terms online larp, digital larp or LORP (Live-Online Roleplaying) for more or less the same thing. It does not matter that much how it is called.
However, LAOGs have the distinct claim that they are designed for the online space and are not a mere replacement for something else. Moreover, as the author of this piece is personally coming from a TTRPG background, the word LAOG nicely combines these worlds: taking the LA from larp, the G from RPG and then merging the two and their design world in the O for the online space.
The concept existed already before. The LAOG manifesto was published in early 2018, first as a collaborative Google Doc, then later on the larp theory website nordiclarp.org. The first LAOG in existence though at that time was already a few years old. ViewScream by Raphael Chandler came out in 2013 and already had all the ingredients in place.
The Golden Cobra freeform / larp competition recognized the existence of the design framework first in 2019 when the jury made LAOG its own category to win a Golden Cobra. The 2020 competition of the Golden Cobra was then already all and only about LAOGs (plus epistolary games).
With the plethora of LAOGs now in existence, it is time to take a step back and see if they can be categorized in a meaningful manner. Categorization is not to be understood to once and forever put ideas and designs into a box and never let them out again. It will also inevitably fail to recognize the beauty of imagination of game design and how it slips out of any attempt to pin it down on one definition. Quite the opposite, the following categorization shall be an invitation to break it. Designers, please look at this and prove it all wrong!
The video call – communication kernel of LAOGs
The core of most (not all, more about exceptions later) LAOGs is the video call. Google Hangout was the first and most prominent service for many years in which RPGs could be played in a video call for free (well, paying with your personal data in your Google account, that is).
In a video call you have many ways to express yourself: there is your voice, with all its nuances, your face expression, your background, i.e. what is behind you, the side chat. In some services you see yourself as a group (gallery view), other services provide an AI controlled speaker focus, most modern services allow you to choose whatever you prefer.
Virtual backgrounds add another dimension (thanks to AI identifying your upper body that even now works without a proper unicolored background – aka green screen). Many side chats allow for direct messages to other participants, allowing for secret communication. You can mute yourself and switch your video off. Hosts often can do so for others.
Features, fancies and the future
Every platform has its own set of features beyond that – allowing for very different design surfaces. However, as a designer it is a big bet to rely on a non-standard feature. Not only will the game be less likely played if players are forced to use a platform they are not on yet. More so, if the service your game relies on switches that feature off or goes completely out of service, your game is dead.
Another array of video platforms has arisen in 2020: 2D or spatial chat services like gather.town or spatial.chat imitate a two-dimensional landscape one can wander on. A video call is established as soon as people are in a certain proximity to each other. For some services, the sound volume depends on how close you are to somebody.
Finally, Discord is until now the most elegant way (though by far not the most elegant video call service) to connect many video, voice and chat channels together in a meaningful way. Games designed for a Discord use channels to imitate real world places or thematically separate players and their in-game-abilities.
Forms of LAOGs
Yet, the dominant play form still is the video call in one version or another.
Given this preset, what forms of LAOGs have we seen emerge in the last years? The following is the attempt to categorize some of the games we have observed and how to set them into position to each other. A disclaimer right at the start: no form is better than the other. However, I have to admit that I personally am more excited by some forms than by others at the moment. You can probably guess which.
Cover of The Space Between Us, composite image by Wibora Wildfeuer
The Diegetic Call
The first category or form of LAOGS, diegetic video calls, has been around since the very beginning. This is about LAOGs where the video call is a video call in-game or something very close to a video call for the characters.
Already in 2013, ViewScream was published and immediately a success in TTRPG circles (not in larp circles interestingly). ViewScream, by Raphael Chandler is a space drama to be played fully in-character about a crashing spaceship with just not enough tools to rescue everybody. Players are connected via video call which is interpreted as the board communication system. The call is a call. Characters are at different locations. They connect through a video call – just as the players do.
Another example is So Mom, I Made This Sex Tape. This game by Susanne Vejdemo came out in the #feminism anthology in 2016. The LAOG variant was first played in 2018. In the original game, female family members meet for coffee and cake to discuss the involuntary publication of a private sex tape. In the LAOG variant, the setting is naturally modified to have the family members only be connected through a video call. Bad connection, grandma not finding the unmute button, etc: you can build all your technology troubles into your game play.
The same principle applies to Winterhorn by Jason Morningstar. The LAOG variant was first played only a week after the game was published in 2017. A group at the Gauntlet Community, which is known for being at the forefront of work on online play, played the game as a LAOG. In its original version it is supposed to be a series of office meetings of secret agents and state policy to sabotage a group of political activists. Obviously, these meetings can equally be held in online meetings – as the rest of the world learned in the pandemic of 2020.
There are plenty of games now using the video calls in this diegetic manner. The Space Between Us by Wibora Wildfeuer, maybe the most often played LAOG until now, and winner of the prestigious German larp award FRED as the Best Mini-Larp 2020, is returning to the video call as a remote connection between spaceships as did ViewScream seven years before.
There are games which go a bit further in the diegetic interpretation. For example, games in fantasy settings consider the video call as “magic crystal balls of distant communication.” But in the end, the call is a call.
This seems important to many people coming from a physical larp background. I have heard voices who claim that their immersion fails if games consider the video call in other ways. It seems difficult to imagine doing what you did before out in the world, face to face, now disrupted by screens, headsets and microphones.
However, I would suggest thinking about this: wasn’t it equally difficult to imagine at the beginning of your larp career that you could ever take foam swords or foam fireballs seriously? That people with crossed arms on their chest can be ignored as if they were not there although they obviously are? Suspension of disbelief is a difficult beast. But I ask myself why it should stop at a video call but has not for other meta techniques.
This especially goes for safety techniques. I still remember the days when safety techniques were considered as making our games lame. The disruptive nature of the X-card or an out-of-game check-in if somebody is ok with certain content seemed problematic. But safety techniques did not take away the fun, instead quite the opposite. People got over it. We now have a widened repertoire of techniques and more games available than we had before. The same goes for LAOGs in which video calls are not diegetic. Which brings me to the next form of LAOGs.
The Invisible Call
Second-generation LAOGs did not mind about the video call. The call stayed invisible in the background. That you and the other players could not interact physically was considered as much of a fact as that you would not hurt or sexually interact with other players in a physical larp although your characters would possibly do that.
They might have taken inspiration from freeform RPGs like Witch: Road to Lindisfarne or Fall of Magic, which were already played freeform widely online without trouble and often enough pretty much all in-character within a scene. More likely though they were inspired from the Nordic Larp tradition of chamber larps or black box larps.
Digital Black Box cover from The Election of the Wine Queen, illustration by Gerrit Reininghaus
The first was The Election of the Wine Queen which started as an adaptation of a physical larp but quickly turned into its own beast. It was labelled as a “digital black box larp” back then (that was before the LAOG manifesto was published) and it delivered on these terms: The game ignores the video call. Players who are not in a scene switched off their camera. As this game is about a competition in a wine region (a bit like a beauty queen contest), players not in a scene are invited to make wine drinking noises, like pouring water or wine close to the mic, or letting two glasses clank. This is purely for ambience. Between acts, each consisting of 4 to 6 scenes, players step out of character to plan scenes and discuss the progress of the story. Then scenes are played without further breaks.
Inner monologues are part of the game: while everybody else has their camera off, the monologuing player talks to themselves as if they are alone in the room. Sometimes this can be interpreted as a video diary. Sometimes it is seen as talking with your mirror.
LAOGs with invisible calls might be designed to be about people sitting together at a table (like in The Wizard’s Querulous Dram or in the Society of Vegan Sorcerers) over the whole play time, and so by design not interacting physically. But, like in The Election of the Wine Queen, they can also focus simply on the dialogue. Aspects of the surrounding can be brought in easily as direct speech, in the same way that an audio play would do it: “How do you like my new green dress?” establishes smoothly what your character is wearing. “Shut up, little sis’, I’m now talking to mom” introduces an NPC without ever hearing an actual word from them.
While Diegetic LAOGs have to care less about the limitations of an online connection compared to being physically present in the same space, Invisible Call LAOGs have more freedom in the design.
Another important thing is tone setting: Diegetic LAOGs inherently emphasize the isolation between the players. We are not in the same space and this fact is part of the game. Invisible LAOGs allow us to forget the physical distance for a moment. We can feel like sleeping together in a room with bunk beds, focusing on hearing the others breathing: in the flow of play, we can forget about the fact we are bound to a computer screen and a keyboard. Especially in times of a pandemic, many people consider games an escape from feelings of isolation. So Invisible LAOGs might be a better choice for them.
The Metaphorical Call
Finally, the call can be a metaphor. This goes beyond coming up with a different interpretation of what the call stands for. Instead, what I mean by the metaphor is that the call is stripped to its essential ingredients, re-interpreted in some of its elements and transformed into an integral mechanic of the game. This might become clearer after some examples.
The communication setup of Last Words, illustration by Gerrit Reininghaus
Last Words is a three-player LAOG about a deceased and a living person who still has unresolved business with each other. The Living frequently comes to the grave of the Deceased and tells them what is changing in their life. The spirit of the Deceased is responding but cannot be heard by the Living. An Angel, the third player, is instead communicating for the Deceased by sending images into the Living’s dreams. This is all realized by a video call in which the Living is putting their volume to zero as does the Angel. If the session is recorded, which is especially recommended for this game, the player of the Living can later listen to what the Deceased had to say. The Angel still can hear what the Deceased has to say but not what the Living says, as Angel and Deceased are connected through a separate voice-only call. The dream images are sent through a shared Google Drawing. If you want to go full in, the Deceased can play the game from their bed, in the dark, emulating the feeling of lying in a grave.
As we see, the call is dissected into its communication components: who sees whom and can hear or express themself is limited by the game’s logic. The Metaphorical Call feels much less like a call than an intermittent medium subordinated to the meaning of the in-game equivalent.
Other games do not go that far and yet turn the video call into something new. In Makeup Moments players are a group of friends or colleagues preparing for a big event, by putting up makeup on together. Players actually put makeup on in the game and are asked to use their webcam view as a mirror. The intimacy of caring about your appearance is literally mirrored by the secret not so secret observer who can look at you as if they are behind the mirror. The webcam as a mirror is a powerful re-design of a tool which is in its original design meant to look at others, not yourself.
In The Batcave players play a family of bats hanging from the ceiling of their cave to figure out which cave to inhabit next. Feeling like a bat is achieved by putting a blanket around your shoulders – and by turning the camera view upside down – a feature Zoom currently offers and which can also be reached through the OBS video processing software. That way, players look like they are hanging from the ceiling. While in the game, one gets quickly used to that view – a group of people in a call all upside down is absurd enough – and players turn fully bat in their body motions and noises they make
Screenshot from The Batcave, by Gerrit Reininghaus
What’s next
I have given a short introduction into the art of LAOG and offered a categorization on what forms a video call can take in a LAOG. The LAOG manifesto will present to you more important stuff I could not pack into this article, like talking about the many aspects of inclusivity LAOGs are providing or discussing safety issues in LAOGs.
More and more sources about the potential and interpretations of this design framework are getting published. Scholars also discuss questions around accessibility of the format, extending on what has been laid out only roughly in the LAOG manifesto. The best place to stay in touch with the latest developments currently is a Facebook group called Remote, Digital Larp and Live-Action Online Games. There, you will also find out how many other forms LAOGs can take, far beyond the expected video call.
Playing a LAOG through sending songs to each other alone (Radio Silence by Hannah J. Gray) or a text chat based LAOG accompanied by its own pace setting soundtrack (Alice is Missing), playing through Instagram by sending euphoric and supportive comments to each other’s best yoga poses (#instayoga) – there are more options that “Online” can provide to us.
Give it a try. LAOGs come in all kinds of flavours and forms.
She strode down the stairs, purpose forgotten in the new surroundings. She had done what she had never expected to do: signed up for the kind of event she had never been part of before, and travelled to Poland on her own. Until now it had been an amazing experience, perhaps the first of many.
I have always thought of my body as my own, not something other people could own. Often it seems that I have more control of my body than my mind. Maybe that is why I have marked it with wolves and birds, lines and symbols. But the body is a canvas that can be filled out. At the time I played my first larp it almost was.
Being part of a larp is an exhilarating experience. For a few days of your life you can be a queen or a pauper, a whore or a nun. But as you play more games you start to realize there is a price to pay, rules you must follow, parts you must play. As time passes you learn, and you start to make choices. And when you become as old as I am, your life’s experience and the knowledge you have achieved will be part of your game.
And so, it begins.
The author at Fairweather Manor 4 (2018). Photo by Dziobak Studios.
Memory
They came for us in the early evening. We were hurled into a bus; they only gave us time to collect the most necessary things. We were not told where we were going, why this was happening to us. After some time, the bus stopped, and we were unloaded. The officials processed us and led us into the stadium. I am here now, looking at faces I have seen before and faces I do not recognize; waiting for the next move, the next atrocity.
I remember the real faces of the refugees from Pinochet’s Chile and the coup d’etat in 1973. I met them in 1978 just after I had moved to Copenhagen, young and without even the trace of an idea of what they had been through. I lived at Øresundskollegiet with the guy I would later marry. Just down the hall from us lived a famous Chilean harpist. We could hear her play when we came home.
As time passed some of the refugees stayed. Others went to other countries or back home when it became possible. But their memory stayed with me. A memory, something that is part of your personal life or history, can be the trigger that allows you to realize the true horror of being lost in a situation you cannot control, whether it is a detention center on the Welsh border or a prisoner in Villa Grimaldi in Chile. You start to recognize the same patterns in society today. This is part of the magic.
Larping can be an incredibly self-indulgent experience, even the very unpleasant scenarios. Fulfilling my dreams and desires has never been enough for me. Hugaas and Bowman (2019) write in their “Butterfly Effect Manifesto” that bringing a personal experience into your character can have a profound effect on your game. You may think that being an older person also means that this transformative experience is no longer possible. You are wrong. No matter how old you are, it is never too late. So use your experience to create change in your life and your community.
The author in Desaparecidos by Terre Spezzate (2019).
Weakness
She had failed them all, her husband, her daughters, her family. For years she had been silent, never complaining, always supportive of her husband, even when they had to leave their grand home in the country to live in this shoddy apartment in the city. Why had she let it come to this? Why had she not said ‘no’ a long time ago? Now everything was gone, everyone had left her.
Families are perhaps the most complex organism to use as the background for a larp. That complexity also makes them the perfect place for murder and mayhem, either symbolic or real. I have met and recognized parts of me that are different from how I normally perceive myself. I have met and played with amazing sons and daughters. Not just as the maternal figure who always supports her family, but sometimes also the monster. Sometimes you meet your own bad personal choices, your weakness in personal relationships, your failures in connection with your children or your family. I certainly did when I met this character.
I always wish for an older character given the choice. I larp because I want to learn about myself and maybe change the person I am now, warts and all – not the person I was a long time ago. Some of your choices in life may be wrong. As a human being, you constantly lie to yourself about your life and your relationships. In larps, you are sometimes forced to confront the bad choices and the lies. Often they will bleed into your character and be part of how you react to your “family.” You may not realize it until later, but they will come back to haunt you.
The author at A Nice Evening With the Family (2018) by Anders Hultman and Anna Westerling. Photo by Caroline Holgersson.
Choices
My dear daughters,
I think this will be the last letter I write to you. As you have probably already seen, I am now part of the Countdown Show, waiting to be killed. There is only one survivor and I very much doubt that it will be me at the moment. We are slowly being decimated person by person, but the violence has been hidden away, only visible in short outbursts. But enough about me – how are you doing? I hope my mother is looking after you both. If I am lucky, you now have her fame and are living in a nicer neighborhood. So, this will be my final goodbye. I hope you may have a better life than me and make better choices. — Your always loving Mum.
In this game I am a woman who is caught in a reality show from hell. Her every move is seen by a whole nation, including her mother and her children. Every move she makes is on a knife’s edge. She is incredibly lonely even in the crowd. Every choice she makes will be recorded; the future of her children will depend on these choices.
Children are important and having children is a joy. Even when you reach my age you will still be apprehensive. As time goes by you will also learn the fear of losing them, of not being a good enough parent. And you will make mistakes. I used this knowledge to give strength to my character, to make her into a fighter. Love is often part of larps, but mostly as romantic love. The love between parents and children is different. It can be strong or weak, and is often accompanied by loss and misery on both sides. It is dangerous territory but if you want to dive deep into your character it is an interesting place to explore. You can dive into the magic of fairy tales and mythology and be a good mother, a bad stepmother, or a fairy Godmother – your choice. But when you meet someone like me – remember that being old also means that I have been all of these and more.
Gluttony and Greed
Menu for the summer party at a country estate around 1800
Lunch
Vegetable soup
Salad
Pie (meat, vegetable)
Cold meat and fish (ham etc.)
Bread and butter
She was up early because the bread had to be prepared for the guests. Next she had to prepare the vegetable soup that his Lordship always insisted had to be served at lunch. An old friend had told him that it was good for the stamina required for the excesses experienced during the evenings and nights. This was the best time of the day. She enjoyed the quiet, the music and the occasional guest coming down for a cup of coffee.
Sometimes you can use personal work experience and knowledge collected through a lifetime as part of a larp. I know a lot about historic food. I was the cook at the summer party of Lord Mander at his country estate for the two runs of Libertines. The food had to be solid country fare, appropriate for keeping up the stamina of the house guests, something required of a true Libertine. The food was based on recipes from the era and served a la francaise, with all the dishes on the table at the same time. Luckily, I was blessed with a great kitchen staff, without whom this would not have been possible. But this was a larp, not reenactment,((As an old reenactor I agree with Harviainen (2011) in his differentiation between larp and reenactment.)) the food was not the center of the play and I was the cook, not a player – or was I? An old woman will have a certain role in this scenario: the undesired but all-knowing procuress or mother.((Angela Carter writes about this in The Sadeian Woman (1979).)) As the days went by, the line blurred.
I used my experience to create the meals, but not the play around the dinner table. Still, the meals were part of the different acts of this play, almost like a ritual. The outcome is prewritten, but the participants create their own story using their own knowledge and experience just as I used mine. It created a special and safe magic circle, where you can take risks. Libertines did just that – and I like to play with fire.((More about this in Bettina Beck and Aaron Vanek’s (2018) “Let’s Play with Fire! Using Risk and its Power for Personal Transformation.”))
The author at Libertines (2019) by Atropos Studio. Photo by Carl Nordblom.
Age
Love was easy for you; you had always known that you were beautiful in the eyes of others. When you looked in the mirror you saw what others saw. But now you are beginning to see another person in the cracked mirror, a skinny and haggard woman hiding beneath the doll’s face and dress. Will you always be loved even when you are no longer beautiful? And will you be able to connect and love anyone but yourself – and who are you?
(Trial for a larp character in a larp not yet written)
Larp is magic. If you dare to invest yourself and use your knowledge you can be part of the magic no matter how old you are, how broken your body.((But there is a physical limit that you must respect.)) I have presented you with ephemera from some of the larps I have attended since I started in 2016. Each piece represents an aspect of my journey, a piece to the puzzle. Together they represent aspects of what I already am, what I already know. They are also tools to be used in a personal journey. Jonaya Kemper (2020) talks about “wyrding the self.” She describes it like this: “When one does wyrd the self, they seek out emancipatory bleed, steer for liberation and investigate themselves through the lens of play.” But you can not do this by yourself.
I am one of the wyrd sisters, forever toiling, forever looking for trouble.
Carter, Angela. 2015. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. Virago, November 5.
Harviainen, J. Tuomas. 2011. ”The Larping that is Not Larp.” In Think Larp: Academic Writings from KP2011, edited by Thomas D. Henriksen, Christian Bierlich, Kasper Friis Hansen, and Valdemar Kølle. Copenhagen, Denmark: Rollespilsakademiet.
Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard, and Sarah Lynne Bowman. 2019. “The Butterfly Effect Manifesto.” Nordiclarp.org, August 20.
Kemper, Jonaya. 2020. “Wyrding the Self.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta. Available at: https://nordiclarp.org/2020/05/18/wyrding-the-self/
Cover photo: Photo of the author at Countdown (2019) by Not Only Larp. Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien. 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:
Petersen, Inge-Mette. 2021. “A Ramble in Five Scenes.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
The fact that larp has psychotherapeutic and transformative potential is certainly not an arcane knowledge in the larp world. Many, if not all, larpers know experientially that even the kinds of larp that are designed to be strictly recreational contribute to one’s growth and personal development. Through larping we get to know ourselves better, we develop our creative and innovative thinking, we become better problem-solvers. We enhance our empathy, improve our social and communication skills, learn teamwork, and increase our sense of community. We explore different values, beliefs, ideologies, ways of behaviour and expression. We develop multidimensional artistic skills and gain better understanding and handling of the physical world. Through larp, we develop holistically: on a physical, mental, emotional, creative, and social level.((Elektra Diakolambrianou, “The Use of Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) in Personal Development, Therapy and Education” (presentation, Smart Psi National Conference, Bucharest, Romania, 24/11/2018).))
Yet how does the psychotherapeutic magic of larp work? What are the mechanics behind this transformative experience? Are the processes and elements at play different when personal development happens informally in a recreational larp, as to when a larp is formally designed for psychotherapeutic purposes? What makes larp a valid and effective methodological tool in the hands of a mental health professional?
The current article will make an attempt at answering these questions by:
(a) exploring characters and stories in larp as psychotherapeutic material,
(b) analyzing the role of empathy in the embodiment and function of larp characters, as well as
(c) the connections between larp and some of its most adjacent psychotherapeutic methodologies (psychodrama-sociodrama, dramatherapy, narrative psychotherapy).
Finally, it will conclude in:
(d) discussing how techniques of the above-mentioned approaches can be used to design and use larps as tools in psychotherapy.
Photos from a mixed-media art project on personal development through creativity. Photo by Elektra Diakolambrianou.
Stories and Characters as Psychotherapeutic Material
Humans create and share stories in order to make sense of their world. Every story told in the world – be it a folk tale, a bedtime story, or a personal narrative – is a participatory experience and a journey of inner and outer exploration for both the teller and the listener.((Alida Gersie and Nancy King, Storymaking in Education and Therapy, (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1990), 23-24.)) Psychotherapy as a process could not be any different; storytelling is a core element in the therapist’s room, as clients present themselves in various characters and roles, and share their stories in order to make sense of themselves, their problems and their lives.((Kevin Burns, “The Therapy Game: Nordic Larp, Psychotherapy, and Player Safety”, in Wyrd Con Companion 2014, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman, (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2014), 28-29.)) In fact, what essentially differentiates the various approaches of psychotherapy from one another is the lens through which they interpret, understand and use these stories and the characters within them in order to understand the client and facilitate his transformation and change. So, from a psychological point of view, where do these stories and characters come from, and what do they mean?
Larp literature has often used the Jungian perspective of archetypes to answer this question. Carl Jung defined archetypes as universal symbols and personality patterns, deriving from shared “archaic remnants” and “primordial images” within our collective unconscious.((Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols, (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 27-59)) Whitney “Strix” Beltrán has examined in great detail the relationship between larp, archetypes and depth psychology in her work “Yearning for the Hero Within: Live-Action Role-Playing as Engagement with Mythical Archetypes,” where she analyzes and discusses larp as an answer to the societal need for myth in the Western civilization.((Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, “Yearning for the Hero Within: Live Action Role-Playing as Engagement with Mythical Archetypes,” in Wyrd Con Companion 2012, edited by Aaron Vanek and Sarah Lynne Bowman (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2012), 91-98.)) Sarah Lynne Bowman similarly studies immersion in role-playing games through the perspective of the Jungian theory.((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Jungian Theory and Immersion in Role-playing Games,” in Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-playing, edited by Evan Torner and William J. White (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 31-51.)) Kevin Burns discusses active imagination (a technique developed by Jung to explore the archetypes in the realm of the collective unconscious) as a process closely related to larp, and highlights how the exploration of archetypes through larp can facilitate personal growth and cultural richness.((Burns, “The Therapy Game”, 29-37)) And lastly, Beltrán has beautifully used the Jungian perspective as a lens for understanding the complexes and group processes in larp communities.((Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, “Shadow Work: A Jungian Perspective on the Underside of Live Action Role-Play in the United States.”, in The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2013), 94-101.))
Given the extensive work already existing in the field of Jungian theory, I will not revisit ground already covered, but will instead attempt to discuss the issue at hand from a different perspective: that of the person-centred approach to psychotherapy. By doing so, I am not proposing an alternative to the archetypal paradigm, but rather suggesting a supplementary view, more focused on the self-concept and its phenomenological representation in the here-and-now of the individual experience.
Configurations of Self: A Person-Centered Perspective
The person-centred approach, developed by Carl Rogers in the early 1940s, views the person as an organism, a holistic entity where the biological, psychological and social aspects of existence are intertwined and inseparable. Each organism is believed to have an inherent actualizing tendency, an internal force that promotes the organism’s survival, differentiation and evolution.((Carl Rogers, ”Theory of Personality and Behaviour”, in Client-Centered Therapy – Its current practice, implications and theory, (London: Constable, 1951), 481-533.)) The concept of self (our sense of who we are) within this framework is just a part of the organism; it consists of the elements of our internal and external experiences that we view as relating to us. This self-concept, however, is often distorted by our conditions of worth (our perception of what our environment and the important “others” in our lives expect from us to accept us and regard us positively); and this can lead to us only allowing parts of our real genuine self to enter our self-awareness and get integrated into our self-image, while other parts of us (the ones that are negatively regarded or not acceptable by our environment) are suppressed, distorted or denied.((Carl Rogers, “A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships, as Developed in the Client-Centred Framework”, The Carl Rogers Reader, ed. Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Henderson, (London: Constable, 1959), 236 – 257.))
In addition to that, the concept of personality is not viewed by the person-centred approach as an entity that is stable, unidimensional and harmoniously integrated. On the contrary, according to later theorists like Mearns and Thorne,((Dave Mearns and Brian Thorne, “The nature of configuration within self”, in Person-Centred Therapy Today, (London: Sage, 2000), 101-119.)) the self is a mosaic of configurations: a range of differentiated self-concepts (alternative personalities, if you wish) that appear in different circumstances. Each of these configurations of self represents a coherent pattern of feelings, thoughts and behaviours, and each one has different needs, desires and views of the world. According to the situational circumstances, different configurations arise within us, even in the course of a common day, without us necessarily being aware of the process. The coexistence of these configurations within us can be harmonious and functional, or a cause of constant conflict and distress, depending on many factors relating to our life experiences, personality structure and levels of self-awareness.((Dave Mearns and Brian Thorne, “Person-centred therapy with configurations of self”, in Person-Centred Therapy Today, (London: Sage, 2000), 120-143.))
Taking all the above into consideration, we can develop a view on characters in larp that is not far from the Jungian perspective, but slightly more focused on the here-and-now experience of the player than on their collective subconscious: When we create characters and stories that are consciously more on the close-to-home scale, we are essentially staying closer to our self-image and our symbolized experiences. Although we do not drift far from our comfort zone, this may still hold therapeutic value if it allows us to explore our self-concept and our internalized behavioural patterns (i.e. the behaviours that align with our conditions of worth). And most importantly to gain more insight and understanding as to how and why these have been formed within us, in what instances they arise, and how they influence our interactions with others. The further we drift away from our comfort zone and into a range of characters and stories that (at least seemingly) appear to be far from our self-image, the therapeutic value of the “material” is increasing, as we may be exploring the uncharted waters of parts of our real self that have been suppressed or denied, or we may be experimenting with alternative ways of being that can more easily arise in the safe environment that alibi provides us with during larp. Essentially, according to the person-centred perspective, what we will be portraying and exploring will always be some configuration(s) of our self, which can either be more close to our awareness and self-image or further away from it, depending on the level of challenge we chose to present ourselves with each time.
The Role of Empathy in Larp
Although there is a broad range of definitions of empathy as well as various empathy types recognized by theorists (cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, somatic empathy, situational empathy),((Hannah Read, “A Typology of Empathy and its many Moral Forms”, Philosophy Compass 14 (10), (2019) https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12623)) I will be here referring to empathy as our ability to understand another person’s feelings and/or experiences from within that person’s own frame of reference – in less scientific terms, our ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes.((Carl Rogers, “Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being”, in A Way of Being, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 137-163.)) Studies in developmental psychology,((Martin Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).)) as well as neurobiology,((Mbemba Jabbi, Marte Swart and Christian Keysers, “Empathy for positive and negative emotions in the gustatory cortex”. NeuroImage, 34 (4): (2007), 44–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.10.032)) show that all people are born with the inherent capacity for empathy (as it is linked with neuronic systems in our brains called “the mirror neuron system”), although the level of its development can be differentiated by parameters such as upbringing, life experiences, personality structure and psychophysiological factors. Thus, to some extent, every one of us can potentially perceive the world as another person sees it,((Jerold Bozarth, “Beyond Reflection: Emergent Modes of Empathy”, in Client-Centered Therapy & The Person Centered Approach, eds Ronald Levant and John Schlien, (NY: Praeger, 1984), 59-75.)) and that is why we can all larp.
Indeed, the role of empathy in larp is to a certain degree self-evident, as it is our empathic ability that allows us to impersonate a character; the extent to which we can empathize with our character will determine the depth of our immersion and our ability to roleplay as that character. But at the same time, larp is also enhancing our empathic abilities; theatre and theatrical techniques have been used as an essential part of empathy training for at least two decades now in the fields of medical, clinical and activist communities, with relevant studies showing that theatre as a medium not only produces, induces and grows empathy for the actors, but also for the spectators.((Maia Kinney-Petrucha, “The Play’s the Thing: Theater as an ideal Empathy Playground”, (2017). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317318081_The_Play’s_the_Thing_Theater_as_an_Ideal_Empathy_Playground)) In other words, the more we impersonate larp characters that are seemingly different from us, and the more we interact with other players impersonating such characters, the more our capacity for empathy increases. The importance of this needs to be emphasized, as it goes beyond the simple development of a social skill through larp but is indeed a factor of mental well-being on its own.
To better understand its significance, let us revisit the person-centred psychotherapeutic approach. According to Carl Rogers, there are six conditions in the context of a therapeutic setting that are necessary and sufficient to bring about therapeutic change: psychological contact, incongruence (on behalf of the client), congruence/authenticity (on behalf of the therapist), empathy, unconditional positive regard, and sufficient communication of the latter two. Therefore, from a person-centred perspective, in a setting/relationship where all these conditions are present, the person can safely grow, examining his self-image and its conditions of worth, broadening his perceptual field, increasing his self-awareness and positive self-regard, and thus becoming more functional and open to experience.((Carl Rogers, “Conditions which Constitute a Growth Promoting Climate”, in The Carl Rogers Reader, ed. Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Henderson, (London: Constable, 1986), 135-147.))
One could argue that in some larps all the above-mentioned therapeutic conditions can potentially be present (and we will revisit this in the section about ‘larp design for psychotherapeutic purposes’). For the time being, I will focus on empathy as one of the therapeutic conditions, even in the case of a larp where the remaining five conditions are not occurring. The development of empathy will, even in the absence of the other conditions, enhance the personal growth of the player in numerous psychotherapeutic ways:
Empathy dissolves alienation, by connecting us to others and to the human experience as a whole.
Empathy promotes inclusion and related values, as it is very difficult to enter the perceptual world of another without valuing it, or without ending up valuing it.
Empathy reduces judgmentalism (towards others and self), thus raising the person’s acceptance and self-acceptance.
An empathic internal environment will create more safety for self-exploration, thus fostering the ability to integrate more configurations into the self-concept.
Empathy allows the flow of experiencing (for self and others) to be unblocked, thus unblocking essentially our actualizing tendency.
Empathy is a vital element of effective communication in interpersonal and intergroup interactions.((Elisabeth Freire, “Empathy”, in M. Cooper, M. O’Hara, P. Schmid & G. Wyatt (eds), The Handbook of Person-Centred Psychotherapy and Counselling, ed. Mick Cooper, Maureen O’Hara, Peter Schmid and Gill Wyatt, (New York: Palgrave Mc Millan, 2007).))
Connections Between Larp and the Psychotherapeutic Process
Although every psychotherapeutic approach could potentially be linked to larp,((Eirik Fatland, “A History of Larp – Larpwriter Summer School 2014,” Fantasiforbundet, published on August 3, 2014, Youtube video, 48:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf_gej5Pxkg)) I will here refer to the ones whose techniques are, from my viewpoint, more closely linked to larp as a process. Given the theatrical nature of larp, the most obvious connections would be to the approaches of psychodrama-sociodrama and drama therapy. Added to that, I will also discuss its affiliations with narrative psychotherapy.
Psychodrama – Sociodrama
According to Eirik Fatland’s lecture on the history of larp, the lineage of modern larp can be linked to the invention of psychodrama by Jacob Levy Moreno in the early 1920s. Psychodrama probably does not need long introductions; it is a widely used and known psychotherapeutic approach, and more precisely a method of exploring internal conflicts by dramatically reconstructing them in a group setting, usually under the direction of a trained psychodramatist. In his own words, Moreno describes it as “an action method” and “a scientific exploration of truth through dramatic art”.((Jacob Levy Moreno, Psychodrama Volume 1, (New York: Beacon House, 1946), 37-44.)) His improvisational and political approach to theatre (rooted in his earlier groundbreaking work in his Theatre of Spontaneity) is evident not only in his theory of psychodrama but also in his later work on sociodrama, a method used for groups to reenact and explore social situations of conflict and oppression (which would in the 1970s become the cradle for Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed).((Beliza Castillo, “Psicodrama, Sociodrama y Teatro del Oprimido de Augusto Boal: Analogías y Diferencias,” Revista de Estudios Culturales 26 (26), (2013), 117-139.))
Theory-wise, the strongest connection link between larp and psychodrama is Moreno’s approach of the dramatic role as an acting and interacting entity, something that humans actively embody and not passively wear, contrary to the paradigm of his time that viewed dramatic roles cognitively, as a part of the self that has been absorbed by the mind.((Robert Landy, Persona and Performance: The Meaning of Role in Drama, Therapy and Everyday Life, (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1993), 52-54.)) On the other hand, a major difference between larp and psychodrama can be located in the methodological directivity of the latter; although spontaneity is necessary and desired in the content that participants bring and the way they engage with it in the psychodramatic session, the director (psychodramatist) is leading the process by instructing and guiding them through selected exercises and techniques.((Sue Jennings and Ase Minde, Art Therapy and Dramatherapy: Masks of the Soul, (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1993), 28-31.))
I would, however, argue that many of the techniques used in psychodrama and sociodrama occur in larp as conscious or unconscious player choices, despite the usual lack of directivity of larp as a medium. Let us take a close look to a few of the most commonly used psychodramatic techniques((Ana Cruz, Celia Sales, Paula Alves and Gabriela Moita, “The Core Techniques of Morenian Psychodrama: A Systematic Review of Literature”, Frontiers in Psychology 9 (1263), (2018) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01263)) and give some input to when and how they can be observed in a larp framework:
Role reversal: The participant steps out of their own role/self and takes on the role of a significant person in their life.
Mirroring: The participant becomes an observer while auxiliary egos (other participants) reenact an event they have previously described or acted out, so the participant can watch.
Doubling: Another group member adopts the participant’s behaviour, expressing any emotions or thoughts that they believe the participant has.
Soliloquy: The participant shares inner thoughts and feelings with the audience.
Role reversal can often be observed in larp when players end up creating or receiving a character that shares personality or backstory characteristics with a real person in their lives. As in psychodrama, this can build empathy and shed light on obscure relationship dynamics, as the player moves a step closer to perceiving the world through the eyes of that person.
Mirroring and doubling are “services” that, knowingly or not, other characters can provide to the player during a larp. Without necessarily intending to or even realizing it, other players may as characters embody personality traits that the player portrays out-of-game, may create scenes that are close-to-home for the player’s real-life experiences, or may express emotions that the player can relate to. When this happens, it can provide the player with an opportunity for self-awareness, self-compassion, as well as constructive self-analysis through a safe distance (see also next section: drama therapeutic empathy and distancing).
Lastly, soliloquy often occurs during the game when characters decide to open up to others in-game, but most importantly is a crucial element of the debriefing. As in psychodrama, this sharing, and generally the time allocated for group discussions about the in-game events, gives the opportunity for the meaning of the feelings and emotions that have come to light to be processed, thus essentially allowing transformation to occur.
Woman leading her companion through the Wieliczka salt mine in Poland. Photo by Nikola Sekulic.
Drama Therapy
Drama Therapy is a broad term, referring to the application of the art of drama in various frameworks and settings with the aim of creating a therapeutic, remedial and useful experience for the participants.((Sue Jennings, Introduction to Dramatherapy: Theatre and Healing – Ariadne’s Ball of Thread, (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998), 39-40. )) There are countless exercises and techniques used in dramatherapy, as it serves more like a methodological framework than as a concrete therapeutic paradigm; however, there are certain concepts that apply generally in its various implementations, and here we will focus specifically on those. In his book “Drama as Therapy – Theatre as Living,”((Phil Jones, Drama as Therapy – Theatre as Living, (London: Routledge, 1996), 166-196.)) dramatherapist Phil Jones identifies and describes nine core processes that occur in dramatherapy, thus explaining its psychotherapeutic effectiveness. I will shortly discuss each of them, arguing how all of them can be found in a larp, therefore rendering it a therapeutic medium:
Dramatic Projection
Dramatic projection is the process through which people project aspects of themselves and their experiences onto theatrical and dramatic material, thus externalizing internal conflicts. This way, a relationship is built between their deeper internal states and the external dramatic formation, rendering self-exploration and therapeutic change possible through the dramatization of the projected material. Dramatic expression creates a new representation of this material, mediating a dramatic dialogue between the material and its external expression, providing the person with the opportunity to create a new relationship with it and reintegrate it within that context.
In larp, dramatic projection of inner material can happen consciously when we intently choose to play close to home, or subconsciously when we end up in one way or another portraying some configuration of ourselves. Following the argumentation of the person-centred approach, some level of dramatic projection is inevitable, and what varies is the degree to which we are aware of our process of projection.
Therapeutic Performance Process
The therapeutic performance includes the process of identifying the needs for expression of specific aspects that a person would like to explore. Turning that material into a performance is in itself therapeutic, as the person may take on different roles in the process, changing their viewpoint on the situation and allowing themselves to experience their creativity and relate to their issues through it. Thus change can occur through engaging with the problematic material from a different perspective, experimenting, and breaking the feeling of being trapped in the problem.
The identification of our needs for expression starts at the moment we choose to participate in a larp, or choose to play a specific character in it. Again, the extent to which this process is a conscious or subconscious one may vary, at least in larps that would be categorized as recreational.
Drama Therapeutic Empathy and Distancing
Empathy and distancing in drama therapy are two distinct but correlating processes, that refer both to active participants and to “witnesses” of the dramatic material. In accordance with the previous analysis of empathy, dramatherapeutic empathy encourages the resonance of feelings and the intense emotional involvement, making the development of empathic responses therapeutic for people in and out of the drama therapy room. Parallelly, distancing encourages a way of involvement that is orientated more towards thinking, reflection and opinion forming. It allows the person to engage with the material using critical thinking, and therefore to form a meta-perspective on it. The two processes can occur interchangeably or simultaneously, creating a dynamic of therapeutic change through their interaction, and giving the person the opportunity to develop holistically.
Essentially, when we are talking about drama therapeutic empathy and distancing, we are talking about immersion and aesthetic distance / meta-reflection. Their degree may vary depending on the larp and its design, but the balance and shifting between them is in the end what allows the player to develop and achieve self-growth through larp.((Hilda Levin, “Metareflection”, in What Do We Do When We Play? The Player Experience in Nordic Larp, edited by Eleanor Saitta (Finland: Solmukohta 2020), 62-74.))
Personification and Impersonation
Personification (representing personality characteristics or aspects using objects in a dramatic way) and impersonation (creating a persona by adopting and portraying characters and roles) are two techniques through which people can express their inner material while exploring the meaning these processes have for them during and/or after their development. They provide a concrete focus point for expression and exploration: the participants have the possibility to experience how it is to be someone else or themselves while playing someone else. Opportunities for the transformation of the inner material are created, as the fictional world that is being built can allow the freedom for explorations that would be judged or denied in real life.
Both processes are necessary for any kind of larp to take place, with the importance of each to vary according to the type of the larp and its design. They are the psychological processes that explain how characters, costumes and props function in larp, and provide the safe frame (alibi) in which larp (and transformation through it) can happen.
Interactive Audience and Witnessing
Participants in drama therapy can become an audience to others but also themselves through a framework of deep self-awareness and development. Thus they start to witness their experiences, empowering their ability to work on issues in a different way and from a different angle. To be witnessed can be therapeutic in itself, as it can be experienced as acceptance and reinforcement. Moreover, projecting part of themselves or the experience on others in the audience can assist the drama therapeutic process by providing more opportunities for material expression. The witnessing process is interactive, without formal boundaries between actors and audience, leading to a powerful dynamic in the group experience and support.
Although interactive witnessing in dramatherapy may seemingly look very different from a larp on the surface, it is essentially the same core process that lies within the interactivity of larp as a medium. Playing together with others makes us constantly shift from witnessing to being witnessed. Other players’ larp performances can be equally valuable for our personal growth; and their interacting with our performances functions as an accepting environment in which we can explore ourselves.
Embodiment
Embodiment refers to the (actual or envisioned) physical expression of personal material, and generally to the connection that the participants form with that material in the here-and-now. The relationship between the body and the identity of the person makes the body use in drama therapy of vital importance for the nature and the intensity of the participant’s engagement. The participants can engage themselves in the development of their bodies’ capacities; they can unleash powerful therapeutic dynamics by adopting a different body identity; and they can explore the personal, social and political forces that influence their bodies.
The significance of the role of the body in larp is increasing in the last years, rendering the process of embodiment more important, recognized and discussed. The power of embodiment can especially be witnessed in larps where players can, through their characters, explore playing with age, gender and disabilities. However, it can be also witnessed in the most common Anglo-Saxon larp, where the players need to physically and accurately embody their characters’ abilities or inabilities.
Playing
Through the element of play, a playful atmosphere and a playful relationship with reality are created, in which the attitude towards facts, consequences and dominant ideas can be flexible and creative. This offers participants the ability to adopt an equally playful and experimental attitude towards themselves and their life experiences. Play, as part of the drama and the expressive continuum, becomes a symbolic, improvisational and creative language. Its therapeutic value also has a developmental aspect, as play can, on one hand, promote the cognitive, emotional and interpersonal development, while on the other hand, it can also be a means of returning to former developmental stages, in order to revisit an obstacle or trauma through different eyes.
The element of play needs no introductions when discussed in the context of larp. Play, as a context and process, allows us to be someone else during a larp, as well as to explore what being this someone else means for us. The larp setting and alibi create a framework where this play can be more or less free, and certainly free from real-life consequences, thus allowing us not only to transform but also to reconnect with our inner child.
Life-Drama Connection
The connection between drama and life can be evidently direct or seemingly indirect, and it can be a conscious process for the participant, or a more spontaneous and unaware one. Often the life-drama connection only becomes evident after the dramatization is over. For some participants, it is the experience of the drama itself (and not a cognitive realization) that becomes the link between dramatization and life, and this can also happen (consciously or unconsciously) during the dramatization itself. It is of utmost importance that the drama therapy framework can be connected to real-life without being a part of it; this is what brings freedom for real action in the drama therapy space.
The life-drama connection process can sometimes happen within playtime, with meta-reflection allowing for revelations and aha moments to occur while we are playing. However, it is mostly facilitated and supported during the debriefing, thus rendering the debriefing a vital part of any larp.
Transformation
Transformation is the end result, as well as a multidimensional process itself. Life events are transformed into dramatized representations. People are transformed into roles and characters. Real-life experiences and patterns of experiencing are transformed through the language of drama into an alternate experimental reality. The participation in the drama itself, and the emerging artists in the participants, lead to a transformation of identities, perceptions and emotions. And real-life relations are experienced as transformative in the here-and-now of the drama therapeutic group and framework.
This transformation, closely linked with bleed processes, is what essentially renders the player a changed person after taking part in a larp. It is the result of all the above-mentioned processes, actualized through the immersive experience, and rendered possible through the alibi of the fictional world. The potential of self-growth may vary on many factors already mentioned, as well as on the quality of the debriefing. However, even a slight or subconscious transformation is still something the player leaves the larp with, knowingly or not.
Narrative Psychotherapy
Taking a few steps outside the realm of expressive art therapies, let us visit another psychotherapeutic approach that can be connected to larp as a process: Narrative therapy is a form of psychotherapy, developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Michael White and David Epston, that focuses on the stories (narratives) we develop and carry with us through our lives. Through these stories, we give meaning to our experiences, life events and interactions, while at the same time they influence our self-perception and world views.((Catrina Brown and Tod Augusta-Scott, Narrative Therapy: Making Meaning, Making Lives. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 2007), 18-22.)) According to the narrative therapy perspective, reality is not objective but socially constructed, and thus having narratives is our way of maintaining and organizing our personal reality and making sense of our experiences. Although our narratives are usually multiple and multidimensional, we often carry one that is more dominant over the rest. When our dominant story is problematic, in the sense that it is becoming an obstacle to our personal growth and change, this can be the cause of emotional pain, distress and dysfunctionality. Such a dominant story may derive from judgemental and/or negative external evaluation that has been internalized, as well as from societal and systemic sources of influence and pressure. This internalization may make us perceive our problems/issues as personal defining attributes and lead us to think we “are” the problem, while at the same time unwillingly following behavioural patterns that reproduce the dominant story in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy.((Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, (New York: Norton, 1996), 22-41.))
To help achieve emotional and mental well-being, narrative therapy focuses on people’s stories, with the aim of exploring them, understanding them, and eventually challenging them with alternative healthier narratives. This is achieved with a range of techniques (often referred to as conversation maps) that aim to separate the person from their problem, to deconstruct unhelpful meanings, and to give the person the agency to construct their own narratives and ways of being and experiencing:((Michael White, Maps of narrative practice, (New York: Norton, 2007), 9-144.))
Putting together the narrative: A primary task in narrative therapy, that helps the person become aware of their stories, explore their origin and identify the values and meaning they carry.
Externalizing conversations: To separate people’s identities from their problems, narrative therapy employs the process of externalization, which allows people to distance themselves from their relationships with problematic narratives and become observers of themselves.
Deconstruction: It is used to help people gain clarity about their narratives, especially in cases where a dominant story has been carried for so long that it overwhelms the person and creates overgeneralizations.
Unique outcomes: When a narrative is experienced as stable and concrete, it can overshadow many aspects of our lives and render us stuck in it and unable to consider alternative narratives. A narrative therapist can assist by challenging the story, offering alternative views, and exploring information that is within us but is not allowed to gain value if it does not fit into the dominant story.
Re-authoring identity: People are assisted by the therapist to create new narratives for themselves, more genuinely meaningful and accurate to their own existential experience.((Michael White and David Epston, Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, (New York: Norton, 1990), 58-82.))
All these processes are relevant to the character and story creation that takes place within a larp. Players are constructing a narrative when they create content in larp, with dominant stories often being reproduced through bleed and its many aspects.((Ane Marie Anderson and Karete Jacobsen Meland, “Bleed as a Skill”, in What Do We Do When We Play? The Player Experience in Nordic Larp, edited by Eleanor Saitta, (Finland: Solmukohta 2020), 53-58.)) The game play itself can function as a kind of narrative psychotherapist at this point; the embodiment of character can function as an externalizing conversation, often also providing unique outcomes, as we are not playing alone but with other people who may at any point challenge our dominant narrative, knowingly or not. Moreover, a transformative larp experience can on its own provide us with revelations that allow us to become aware of our narratives and deconstruct them, leading to one or more re-authored identities (essentially any character embodiment is to some extent a re-authored identity). However, the role of the debriefing in facilitating the actualization of all these processes and their therapeutic potential is crucial, also often supported by pre-larp workshops for character creation (see next section for more details).
Photos from a mixed-media art project on personal development through creativity. Photo by Elektra Diakolambrianou.
Larp Design for Psychotherapeutic Process
I would like to start this section by pointing out something that is often not obvious: When designing a larp for psychotherapeutic purposes, it is vital to have at least one mental health professional in the designers’ and/or organizers’ team. As Maury Elizabeth Brown very thoroughly analyzes in her article “Pulling the trigger on player agency: How psychological intrusions in larps affect game play,”((Maury Elizabeth Brown, “Pulling the Trigger on Player Agency: How Psychological Intrusions in Larps Affect Game Play”, in Wyrd Con Companion 2014, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman (Los Angeles, CA: Myrd Con, 2014), 96-111)) larps can contain triggering content even if they do not intend to do so, and this is something that needs to be carefully handled by organizers. Particularly in the case of psychotherapeutic larps, where the triggering is intended, the contribution of a professional will be essential both in designing / curating the larp within a theoretical and practitioner-oriented framework focused on mental well-being and relevant processes, as well as in providing emotional safety and emergency care if needed during its implementation (briefing, gameplay and debriefing). Moreover, especially in case the psychotherapeutic larp in question is aimed to address specific mental health issues / themes (e.g. grief, abuse, trauma etc), or is targeted at specific participant groups (e.g. people with personality, anxiety, mood disorders), a deep scientific understanding of these issues and/or participants is a necessary element of the larp design.
Having said that, this section aims at providing some ideas and potential guidelines either for mental health professionals that would like to use larp as a psychotherapeutic medium, or for larp designers that wish to collaborate with a mental health professional to direct their larps towards the field of psychotherapy. Keeping in mind all the psychological and psychotherapeutic processes previously analyzed in the article, I will attempt to indicate the points of the larp design process that can transform the larp into a formal psychotherapeutic tool.((Elektra Diakolambrianou, “Larp as a Tool for Personal Development and Psychotherapy” (presentation, PoRtaL 8 Interntational LARP Convention, Zagreb, Croatia, 8/3/2020).))
Designing the World
When the intention is to immerse participants in a specific psychological theme, the setting is there to serve the purpose of the alibi. To ensure the optimal balance of drama therapeutic empathy and distancing (see section about dramatherapy), the created world should effectively mask into a fictional setting a situation that may, for many of the participants, be close to home. The distance between the real-life situation and the fictional situation should be carefully evaluated, and playtests are essential for receiving feedback on whether a functional and meaningful balance has been achieved, or whether the setting should be “moved” closer to reality or further away from it. Essentially what has to be decided at this point is the appropriate level of immersion that the designers intend the players to experience, with emotional safety in mind.
Within the designed setting, the scenario / plot of the game has to be designed carefully to portray the desired processes that the larp intends to bring to the surface. This can be achieved either by a more railroaded design that provides direct mirroring of a real-life situation, or by a more abstract and/or sandbox design in which the intended situations / themes can be enabled or facilitated. At this point, it is essential for the larp designers to decide how much they would like the players’ experience to be guided or freely created (this may also vary according to the psychotherapeutic approach they want to adopt, with some approaches being fundamentally more directive or non-directive than others), and make design choices accordingly.
Props and scenography should be there to support the above-mentioned design choices, as well as the level of immersion that is considered as desired and healthy for the specific larp purposes. A 360` illusion approach with rich costumes and props will increase the immersion and drama therapeutic empathy. A more abstract, blackbox or chamber larp approach will probably provide more drama therapeutic distancing. Another thing to be taken into consideration is the potential need for stimuli management in the case of a player target group with relevant difficulties.
While an indoor larp venue can provide more possibilities for managing the space and its use and function (also for purposes of safety), the therapeutic potential of the outdoors needs to be taken into account and possibly considered. Experiential data from adventure therapy,((Michael Gass, Adventure in Therapy: Therapeutic Applications of Adventure Programming in Mental Health Settings, (Boulder, CO: Association for Experiential Education, 1993), 153-160.)) wilderness therapy,((Keith Russell, John Hendee, Dianne Phillips-Miller,. 2000. “How wilderness therapy works: an examination of the wilderness therapy process to treat adolescents with behavioral problems and addictions”, in Wilderness Science in a Time of Change Conference Proceedings – Volume 3: Wilderness as a Place for Scientific Inquiry edited by Stephen McCool (UT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2000), 207-217.)) and outdoor experiential therapy((Alan Ewert, Bryan McCormick & Alison Voight, “Outdoor experiential therapies: Implications for TR practice”, Therapeutic Recreation Journal 35(2), (2001), 107–122.)) underline the added therapeutic value that nature and the outdoors can offer.
Mechanics and Rules
If game mechanics and rules exist generally in larps to provide safety, this needs to be furthermore emphasized in the case of psychotherapeutic larps. Careful design choices need to be made about whether specific actions will acquire a deeper psychological meaning if embodied more physically, or if the emotional safety requires them to be portrayed through more gamified mechanics. Playtests can once more be valuable in fine-tuning these elements.
Special attention should be generally given to elements of physical touch, intimacy, acts of violence (of any form). In the case of specific player groups, these elements may expand to other areas, like stimuli management or specific actions / situations that are potential triggers.
The rules should therefore be very well-curated, specific and player-friendly when it comes to consent (in and out of game), emotional and physical safety words, emergency handling, and trigger warnings.
Characters and NPCs
The designers have a choice to make about whether the larp will better serve its purpose with the characters being pre-written, or created by the players. This may depend on logistical and organizational factors, but also on the intended player target group. In both cases, there are ways to foster emotional safety as well as the psychotherapeutic effectiveness of the larp, as described below.
In case the characters are pre-written, it would be useful for their backstories and backgrounds to be created and/or curated using real-life relevant material (e.g. real-life stories and/or case studies, diagnostic criteria and experiential research data).
Proper assignment of pre-written characters to players can be assisted by the use of short personality questionnaires or similar tools that the players need to fill in before the larp. The use of such tools can provide the organizers with information regarding the players’ profiles, as well as how much they are willing to step out of their comfort zone, or what kinds of situations and/or emotions they are comfortable with experiencing in-game. If the larp design allows it, it would also be useful to give each player the opportunity to choose from 2-3 characters that match his profile and/or survey choices.
In case the characters are to be written by the players themselves, it would be good for this to happen during a pre-larp workshop, facilitated ideally by a mental health professional who will assist the players to make emotionally safe but meaningful choices in the character creation. In this process, it is essential to keep in mind the already mentioned balance between drama therapeutic empathy and distancing, as well as the narrative psychotherapy processes of narrative construction and deconstruction, externalization and unique outcomes.
When it comes to NPCs, in psychotherapeutic larp they are expected not only to serve as plot-pushing mechanisms, but to also act as facilitators in a setting of expressive arts therapy. Given that it may be difficult to recruit mental health professionals for all the NPC roles, a functional solution would be to have at least one GM in the game who is a mental health professional, and have the NPCs carefully trained and/or briefed by this person before the game runs. It is also useful to have another mental health professional as an emotional safety arbiter (in-game as an NPC, or in the off-game area), so that the GM can monitor the whole process and game dynamic, while the arbiter can tend to individual needs if they occur, or intervene to ensure emotional safety.
Depending on the larp theme and the players’ profiles, the briefing should be extensive, carefully facilitated, and possibly involve relevant pre-larp workshops. It is essential for the rules to be well-understood to ensure emotional safety, with special attention given to elements mentioned before.
Generally, one-off events are more functional than campaigns in psychotherapeutic larp, as it is essential for the experience to be framed in a safe environment that downtime between events cannot securely provide.
Depending on the game duration and intensity, it may be useful to have off-game breaks, either by having intermissions in the playtime, or by providing the players with the opportunity to spend some time in a quiet room / off-game area when they feel they need it.
Careful attention should be given to deroling, as it is important for the players to disrobe themselves from their characters, especially in the context of a psychotherapeutic larp. It would be good to include here some deroling exercises, possibly in the form of rituals. Particularly in the case of specific player groups, one has to take into consideration that they may need more time and further facilitation to successfully transition from their characters and the game back to reality.
The debriefing is namely the most important part of the whole larp experience from a therapeutic point of view. It is where the players are supported to gain a psychological and critical distance between the extra-ordinary and the ordinary self, and make the desired life-drama connections. At this point, a mental health professional with experience in group therapy and/or facilitation would be well-equipped to lead a debriefing session that provides the participants with therapeutic value. Through stimulation for self-reflection and facilitation for verbalizing thoughts and feelings, the potential intense emotions and/or cognitive dissonances can be mitigated, the revelations and self-exploration outcomes symbolicized and outlined, and their meaning clarified. This way, the participants can become aware of their configurations of self, reauthor their identities and narratives, and consider new possibilities of being by allowing the transformative experience of the larp to be actualized.
It is at this point significant to revisit the necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic change, previously described at the section about empathy. These conditions very likely will not all occur during the larp, but they have to exist during the debriefing in order to form the therapeutic climate and safe environment where all the above-mentioned meaningful outcomes can take place. The debriefing facilitator needs to not only embody and model these conditions, but also carefully guide the participants into being themselves empathetic, congruent and non-judgemental during the discussion and feedback that the debriefing may include.
Photos from a mixed-media art project on personal development through creativity. Photo by Elektra Diakolambrianou.
Epilogue
This article intended to contribute in deciphering the psychotherapeutic magic of larp, and I hope it has offered the readers some theoretical and practitioner-based frameworks through which to better understand the therapeutic processes and elements in larp and larp design. However, I hope it did not kill the magic; science often does that, and we are often witnesses of the ever ongoing battle between science and magic in larp as well. We all need magic, and that’s essentially why we larp. Therefore, I hope that the readers will be able to compartmentalize all the knowledge gained from this article in the meta-reflection corner of their brains, while allowing the immersion to fill the rest of their minds with transformative magic.
References
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Cover photo: Girl with a leaf on her hair overlooking a river in South Poland. Photo by Elektra Diakolambrianou.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Diakolambrianou, Elektra. “The Psychotherapeutic Magic of Larp.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
This article, by Thomas Munier, was initially published in French on ElectroGN on January 18th, 2021. It was translated into English for publication here by JC, with the approval of the author and with the permission of ElectroGN.
“It’s not me, it’s my character.”
In larp and tabletop roleplaying, this justification of our actions is called alibi, and it allows us to dare to try new experiences. Alibi is a key factor in benefitting from what larp has to offer.
However, alibi is not always accepted: either because the participant does not see any difference between themself and their character, or because the other participants refuse to forget about the participant when considering the character.
This article will categorize several definitions of alibi, consider the ways in which it is emancipating, and finally the situations when alibi is not enough. Another article will follow, focused on ways to strengthen alibi.
Summary
The common contract of “it’s not me, it’s my character”, also called alibi, allows the participant to experience both themself and otherness, which is both enriching and liberating.
However, the simple fact of knowing about this process keeps us from really abandoning ourselves to the role. We are aware of the concept’s limits: the larp remains part of reality and so there are some things we do not allow ourselves to dare.
Furthermore, even when we fully wish to abandon ourselves to the character, this remains very difficult if other participants do not consider us fitted to play them. We see this when the group does not manage to distinguish the character’s social category from the participant’s; or when it refuses to recognize a character’s ability that the participant does not have. This stems from a larping perspective where “the character is what the participant does and says”, which keeps participants from being seen as able to play characters too different from themselves. The cognitive load, which can be significant in certain larps, also sometimes keeps participants from giving the actions of others the consideration they deserve.
These cases where alibi is not enough motivate us to search for tools to reinforce it. These will be studied in a follow-up article, Building the aura.
Definitions of Alibi
Dico GN (written by Leïla Teteau-Surel and Baptiste Cazes) states “Alibi is making your in-character actions legitimate through your larp character and the larp context”.
Axiel Cazeneuve states: “The basis of the social contract in a roleplaying game is alibi. Alibi is what allows us to say: it’s not me, it’s my character. It’s a contract because, by taking part in the roleplaying game, we in a way commit to not holding other participants to account for their in-character actions. This is an essential aspect of roleplaying, because without this alibi, it’s impossible to really play someone else, including when this someone else commits morally reprehensible acts. Playing a war-criminal or a narcissistic manipulator is only possible because we trust others to differentiate between my actions as a character from those as a person. This is even more true in larp, where we are directly involved in our character’s actions and cannot simply represent or describe them.
To go further (in French):
[Video] Axiel Cazeneuve, LOIDOROS – Alibi, on the Larp in Progress channel
The basic principle is that alibi is a form of social contract that stipulates that participants are not held responsible for what their characters do and say (and, in return, that they accept to not hold other participants accountable for their characters’ words and actions). In other words, “What happens in Alibi-land stays in Alibi-land”: once the larp is over, no participant has to answer for what their character did.
The larp constitutes a “magic circle”, an imaginary space where we cease to be ourselves to become the characters, or, at least, where we change social masks. In that space, participants agree to dissociate the actions and words of other participants from what those participants do and say outside of the larp space.
In reality, things are of course often quite different. In practice, alibi implies a tolerance margin (how far can I go before I go “too far”) rather than actual freedom from responsibility.
Firstly, freedom from responsibility only covers a limited number of situations (participants are, for example, still legally liable). These limits are often informal and implicit (participants are responsible for each other’s physical and psychological wellbeing). They are also often unclear and arbitrary: while some have no issue with being spat on, others will consider the contract broken as soon as someone raises their voice.
The tolerance margin is also often (implicitly) linked to how different the other participant’s character is from that participant: oppressive insults by a cyber-pirate on amphetamines will go down better than if they come from a modern-day character that is similar to their participant.
Finally, the freedom from responsibility is only formal, because despite the alibi contract, the human psyche creates subconscious transfers between “participant–participant” relations and “character–character” relations. Participants who play friends tend to be more mutually friendly after the larp. Our thoughts end up conforming to our actions.
Alibi and its practical manifestations lead participants to exploit it. Abuses of the tolerance margin are easy to find: abusively extending the margin (for example, harassing other characters despite your character not fitting that profile) or abusively reducing the margin (for example, being vindictive towards a participant because their character disobeyed).
There are also abuses of alibi’s porosity. These can be “bleed in”, from outside towards the larp (for example, becoming close in character with real-life friends), or “bleed out”, from the larp towards outside (for example, becoming close in character to someone you would like to meet in real life).
Used well, alibi is emancipating, in a way that the larp community almost unanimously defends, letting participants act without fear of being personally judged (for example, allowing them to speak or sing in public).
Of course, alibi does not grant total immunity. Even inside the magic circle, participants must obey the law (some laws may be broken in character, for example with insults). They must also respect a number of usually implicit rules regarding the physical, material and psychological well-being of other participants (we will see later that the psychological aspect is the most ambivalent, since that is where the participant/character distinction is least obvious).
Alibi is one of the almost systematically assumed social contracts when participating in larp. But it is one of its tacit components. Alibi is considered as self-evident and is rarely explicitly expressed in design documents or larp briefings. In most larps, “you are playing a character” is supposed to be enough, and participants are expected to infer “what the character does cannot be attributed to the participant” by themselves.
Those were, hopefully, the more rigorous definitions of alibi.
Now here are some of the fallacious ways alibi is defined in practice, and which are the cause of the problems we will detail later on:
Alibi is an excuse to justify certain behaviours, in good or bad faith.
Alibi is an authorization to be “rude”, as defined in improv theatre (to refuse the character or situation the other person proposes, or to impose a character on them).
Alibi is a state of deep immersion (we believe in the situation and in our character).
As we can see, alibi is, in its most rigorous definition, most often an implicit concept. Therefore, it is not always known or understood. Other, fallacious definitions of alibi are also implicit and can generate misunderstandings, which we will see later can be quite damaging. But let us first take a deeper look at the benefits of alibi, when the concept is well understood and mastered by participants.
Emancipating Alibi
The concept of character, which was initially a gaming construct, allows us to inhabit another person’s identity for the duration of a larp or RPG.
This allows for escapism but also for the experience of oneself. After all, in reality, when we do or say things in an RPG or (even more so) in a larp, we have really done and said them, simulation techniques aside. The role was a pretext to do it, both making us disinhibited and helping us get legitimacy from the group.
Axiel Cazeneuve confides that they are afraid to sing in public. But when, in the larp OSIRIS/Wish You Were Here, they are supposed to play a renowned artist, they can finally go for it. Axiel explains how the audience (the other larpers) fully supports them. Alibi has attained its goal: it has given Axiel the ideal excuse to try a new experience.
Playing a role is an opportunity to experience oneself. We are still ourselves, but we try different things.
And this makes our real life richer. By experiencing polyamorous relationships and making art in the larp “The Ivy and the Vines”, some participants revisited what they allowed themselves to do in art and love.
Because playing a role is doing, says Marie Olivier in her anthropology memoir of that title on roleplaying (unpublished). Thanks to the alibi it procures, the character is a wonderful tool to construct our identity, by giving us a safe space to experiment before drawing conclusions to use in real life.
But all is not simple in Alibi-land. Alibi mostly works, for participants used to the concept: but it is more fragile in novices – as well as, paradoxically, in some participants who are very experienced or focused on others’ well-being, because alibi’s limits are hard to pinpoint accurately. Alibi can also be exploited for abuse by people who are clumsy or have bad intentions.
When participants self-sabotage
Participants themselves are not always convinced by alibi. Many fail to suspend disbelief when the character sheet lacks coherence, or when they don’t think they have the necessary ability or self-confidence to play their character. If a participant does not believe in their character or feel credible when playing their character, they cannot immerse in their role and reach the experience of self and of otherness promised by alibi.
Misunderstood alibi
It may also happen that alibi, being an unspoken social contract, is not well understood by beginners. These participants then will not “dare” to act in character in a reprehensible or socially charged way.
Alibi demystified
This concept of alibi, progressively popularized in articles and discussions, has become demystified. Let there be no misunderstanding: it is important that concepts like alibi be discussed far and wide. Most participants can finally “go all out” once they really understand the implications of alibi. But for some, learning the tricks kills the magic. We end up understanding that alibi is just a pretext, and that if roleplaying is doing, then we are just playing ourselves. Alibi made us not responsible for our actions, making it possible and acceptable to experiment. But now that the concept has been explained, we are once again responsible for our in-character actions.
Larps reveal themselves to be political spaces. These larps are more than games and they aim to transform the participants through their characters. It therefore becomes difficult to really dare to go beyond one’s comfort zone and social markers, because alibi, considered a scam, no longer operates. Some larps aim to denounce alibi. In Love Is All by Yannis, for example, participants kiss each other. Can anyone really consider that that kiss only happens between characters? This is perhaps only an issue for larp veterans that tend to over-analyse, but it was worth mentioning.
Hacking alibi
“It’s not me, it’s my character” actually becomes a suspicious sentence as we ponder a new question: emotional safety. Because if alibi can be a pretext for experimentation with oneself, it can also be one for abusing others, if there is no consensus on the limit between participant and character responsibility. Anecdotes abound of people using their character and gameplay to simulate aggressions, that are felt by the victims as real ones. This is a case of rudeness or alibi hacking, since the participant knowingly or unknowingly uses their character as cover to exert actual physical or psychological pressure.
Because we know that the border between participant and character is porous. Because if alibi allows us to get invested in our fictional life, it also implies an emotional back and forth between participant and character.
There are cases where the simulation is too far removed from reality to impact us emotionally (even so, some feedback from mass-larp battles relate incredible emotions), but in other cases, the difference between doing and pretending is very small.
When you say “I love you” or “I hate you” in character, you really say it. It has an impact on us and on others. For example, a larper who had to play out a love story with someone they did not really like testified they were still a little bit in love with that person at the end of the larp. It is not so easy to erase the impact a role has on us. I personally avoid larping love stories (less so in tabletop, which seems more abstract) because it makes me feel like I’m cheating on my wife, which goes against my wish to be faithful to her. And I also do not want to run the risk of falling in love.
Alibi’s unclear limits
We have seen previously that the unspoken social contract that creates alibi is limited to ensure that the physical, material and emotional wellbeing of other participants is protected. But how does one discern those limits when it is hard to distinguish the participant from the character? The previous example about romantic relationships is relevant, but here is another one: is it OK for me to shout at another participant? They might find loud noises painful, or they might find getting shouted at difficult to deal with on an emotional level. So yes, alibi should allow me to shout since it’s my character, not me, but by shouting I might be jeopardising the other person’s physical or emotional wellbeing.
As a consequence, out of precaution and in a bid to be inclusive, larpers have no choice but to pull their punches. I would also like to remind everyone that videos of larpers shouting at each other in a historical larp were used to criticise larp in the French Zone Interdite TV show (by people who did not give alibi any consideration). So how can we truly play a character with intensity when it can hurt another participant or impact our hobby’s image negatively?
To go further (in French):
[Video] Zone Interdite, Roleplaying games (1994)
No alibi, no transgression
In short, even if we were at one time fooled by alibi, we no longer are once we calmly think about it. By recognising the artificial nature or the unwelcome effects of alibi, we remove the opportunities for transgression that it offered us.
Photo by aripborip, cc-by, on Flickr
When Others Ignore Our Alibi
If it can be difficult to believe in one’s own alibi and so to really let oneself go, it can also be difficult for others, because of:
cultural and social barriers;
an unwillingness to see the participant as legitimate;
a larping culture that reduces the character to the participant;
a cognitive difficulty in giving importance to the actions of all characters.
Cultural and social barriers
It does not seem to me that respecting the alibi of other participants is part of the social contract of all tabletop RPGs and larps. It depends on the culture, the people and the organisations. Here are some examples where a participant’s alibi is not recognised, preventing them from legitimately playing the role of someone different, and sometimes even of someone similar to their real identity!
In the Harry Potter at the School of Masculinity podcast, Axiel Cazeneuve talks about their experience on a Harry Potter larp where character creation was quite free, including choice of gender. Gendered as female at birth, Axiel decides to present their character as male. They then change their mind, explaining their character is in fact genderfluid.
During the larp, Axiel plays their character as masculine, in a way they deem convincing. Despite this, most participants gender Axiel’s character as female. Axiel explains that, even though most of these larpers were from a progressive environment, accustomed to issues of gender, they still ignored Axiel’s alibi, gendering their character not as neutral or male, but as female, their socially assigned gender. This can be explained by determinism that remains strong within the group, as well as by Axiel changing their mind during character presentation, which might have confused people.
My point is not to blame anyone for what happened in that particular example. I am simply trying to show that alibi is not always a given and that certain factors can lead a group to ignore your role to see you as your usual self instead.
This is also something we see during boffer fights in larp. If combat is touch-based, without a system that codifies damage or magic that could give you an advantage, you can only play a dangerous adversary if you are indeed good at boffer fighting. Even with a character background and roleplaying that say you are the finest swashbuckler in the land, if you are a beginner in boffer fighting, you will probably lose your fights, because the mechanisms of boffer fighting keep your opponents from taking your character background into account.
We see here that the problem comes less from people than from design. Systemless boffer fighting is a legitimate part of larping, but it is not a tool designed to support alibi. If you do not assign yourself a role that aligns with your actual boffer fighting skills, we observe ludonarrative dissonance. We will not here delve either into the fact that boffer fighting is a form of sports combat and is thus different from real fighting (where touch-based victory makes no sense), or into larps using metal weapons instead of boffers (which support alibi even less).
The concepts of authority and hierarchy between characters are also often problematic in terms of support for alibi. In a rules-light larp, if you are lacking in natural leadership, there is a risk that characters that are supposed to be under your orders will not show you respect. Even if their character backgrounds indicate that they fear and obey you, the participants will quickly forget this if they don’t find you charismatic enough.
The problem with the search for convergence
In these cases, longstanding sexism and ableism can of course be involved, but the problem comes essentially from an approach to roleplaying based on “roleplaying is doing”, or convergence.
Convergence is a technique that guarantees simplicity, immersion and bleed. It is sought after for its many advantages, but does not support alibi.
Convergence is making what the character and the participant feel and do as similar as possible. In larp, this is close to a “what you see is what you get” approach. In other words, the main source for the virtual experience is the actual experience. Simulations such as “let’s pretend I’m very athletic even if I’m not in real life” or “let’s pretend that stick in front of you is actually a dragon” or “let’s ignore these electric wires” are put aside.
In other words, when you interact with a participant, you mostly take into account how you see them and their real-life background. Anything in their character sheet that contradicts this is hard to take into account, and the mechanics of convergence tend to erase as much as possible any dissonance (this is a caricature, because a larp can be convergent on some aspects and divergent on others). This means you will gender a character based on the participant’s roleplay and real-life background, you will only lose a boffer fight if they are more skilled than you are, and you will respect them only if their roleplay and real-life background confirm their status.
Convergence completely blurs the distinction between participants and characters. Here, roleplaying is more than ever doing, and there is no room for make-believe, abstraction, or taking into account character background information that is not corroborated by roleplay, the participants real-life background or reputation.
When we see participant and character as one and the same, we can sometimes bear a grudge towards the participant for something the character did or said, for example because the character hurt us, humiliated us, turned us down, foiled our plans, etc. It seems difficult for anyone to just forgive, even if some participants thank others “for having been a great antagonist”. But within populations who are new to alibi, grudges can appear that outlast the larp.
When we also see some participants using their character to assault others, it seems all the more reasonable to say: “Wait a second, what your character did to me was not OK.”
In other words, whether for reasons legitimate (assaulting the participant via the character) or not (lack of familiarity with alibi), alibi does not magically grant immunity or forgiveness for everything we said and did as a character. Other participants will not automatically forgive everything, and this can hold us back.
The issues of cognitive load
I wanted to finish on one last instance of ignoring alibi, which does not necessarily have to do with participant–character confusion, but rather with the issues of cognitive load.
To go further (in English):
[Article] Anonymous, Cognitive load, on Wikipedia
You may know these climactic scenes that frequently occur in larps, where many issues are resolved at the same time. While you are declaring your love to the duchess, two sisters are challenging each other to a duel nearby… and that is when the zombies attack.
In general, it is difficult to roleplay a strong emotional reaction to several things happening at once. So we concentrate on our personal roleplaying objectives, which for example lead us to continue a trivial conversation even as the baron just dropped dead from poisoning.
This creates dissonance in our own experience, but also ignores other participants’ alibi. When you challenge your sister to duel to the death, you expect everyone to react – this is your moment – but unfortunately no one does. Alibi is definitely impacted!
Conclusion
Alibi is an implicit part of the social contract, that removes responsibility from the participants for the things their character does and says.
When the participant is familiar with alibi, they can abandon themselves fully to their role and so access experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible. Alibi is a real tool for emancipation through an experience of self and of the other that is deep and without judgement.
But the physicality of larp and our flawed humanity catch up with us in the end. Some participants do not believe in alibi any more, either because they do not feel able to play their character, or because they lack knowledge of the concept of alibi, or have analysed it too far to still believe. Still others use this concept to commit abuse, knowingly or not.
The community can also be a hindrance. Alibi’s “non-judgement clause” is not always respected and others can sometimes confine us to our social constraints, refusing to let us legitimately roleplay the character we have chosen.
For us to roleplay someone different from ourselves and for the group to acknowledge it, we would need to be surrounded by some kind of aura that gives us legitimacy.
So, how can we build this aura? That’s what we will see in the next article!
Where do we find beauty in larp? Can we make sense of the moments in larp where we, as players, have an aesthetic appreciation of the larp? Can we account for moments that are striking, that leave us breathless, that stay with us for the rest of our lives, that propel tears or joyous rapture? Can we develop theory to render at least some of the logic of those moments visible?
Larp is a specific form of expression that has similarities to performance, theatre, tabletop role-playing, sports, installation art, and to games, yet it is clearly distinct from all of these (Stenros 2010; Simkins 2015). Working out the aims, conventions, and methods of the form implies an aesthetic theory. In this article, we unpack what makes larp play beautiful. We wish to explicate the aesthetics of larp in a way that is recognizable for practitioners (i.e., players and designers) while also being potentially useful for people coming from different fields.
Aesthetics is a broad, even terrifying, term. It covers the subjective, emotional sensations we experience when encountering an object or environment, from pop music to a sunset viewed from the top of a forest ridge. It also pertains to a set of principles that may govern the production of aesthetic objects; an aesthetics of jazz, for instance, gives a general outline of what makes jazz jazz, and also what makes jazz beautiful. It is also a term for a field in philosophy relating to the nature of art, and so on. Indeed, Leonard Koren (2010) has identified ten different ways to understand the term, explaining why the ‘aesthetics’ is sometimes hard to grasp. In this article, we develop an aesthetic theory of larp that describes the ways in which we find larp beautiful, as well as the principles of design and play that make larp an object of aesthetic appreciation.
The beauty of larp has been discussed surprisingly little previously. Obviously the form of larp has received quite a bit of attention, particularly in the Knutepunkt community (e.g. Koljonen et al. 2019). However, while descriptions of design and play abound and there is a rich tradition of implicit standards of beauty couched in declarative accounts of how larps should be (i.e., manifestos), accounts of beauty and the aesthetics of larp are scarce (cf. Zagal & Deterding 2018, see also MacDonald 2012; Stenros 2013).
Two key limitations need to be noted here. This article approaches the beauty of larp from the point of view of the player. Beauty in larp is probably different if it were to be pivoted around the designer or an external audience. Second, although this article talks of beauty in larp in general terms, it is important to realize that it emerges in the context of Nordic and international larp, in a very specific artistic tradition, and is meant to make sense of that tradition.
Setting the Stage
Larp is embodied participatory drama. It unfolds in real-time, in physical surroundings, through the actions of participants bodily portraying characters. Larp can incorporate other forms of expression, and when it does include other art forms, they can be analysed with aesthetic tools developed for those specific expressions. For example, tools borrowed from theatre, music, visual arts, cinema, and the emerging field of aesthetics of games (e.g. De Koven 1978; Myers 2010; Kirkpatrick 2011) can fruitfully be leveraged to make sense of larps((There is no question, for instance, that a musical performance inside a larp will be evaluated and enjoyed by players on the basis of how we usually enjoy music. However, while it may be important that the music is good, the song might also be beautiful for reasons germane to the larp: perhaps the character is expressing a major change in their life; perhaps the song choice refers to things that are known to the players but not to the characters; or even, a “bad” performance of the song can create larp beauty if it is meaningful in a way that the players appreciate.)). However, while we will draw from these other fields, the focus is on understanding what is beautiful in larp specifically.
To understand the form of larp one needs to consider how larp is created and appreciated — and how these two processes are tied together. The participant in a larp is present in two ways. They are both a character within the fiction, and a player participating in a larp. The participant has a sort of dual consciousness, seeing everything both as real (within the fiction) and as not-real (as in playing). The participant is both a character and a player, able to flip between the two modes, and able to see things in double. We can call this bisociation (Koestler 1964, 35).
The participant is both a player and a character, which creates interesting frictions because there is only one body to inhabit, and one set of experiences to encounter (Sandberg 2004). The participant experiences the events as a character who has agency within the fiction, but they can also appreciate the larp from a wider perspective as a player with meta-awareness, and can shape this structure as a player.
Obviously the division of the participant into two roles is not real in the sense that these two personas would be somehow fully distinct and separate (Järvelä 2019). Instead, the role-play agreement — that the player and the character are to be treated as separate entities — is a social contract, one that gives alibi to act in ways that conflict with the participant’s story of self (Sihvonen 1997). This social contract obviously has limits; there are acts one cannot get away with as a player, even if done in character.
The main audience in larp is the player/character participant. However, the participant is also the main performer in a larp — for that audience. The performer and the spectator are also brought together in one body, and thus in larp we talk of the first-person audience (Sandberg 2004). In order to see and witness these works, one must participate. A significant part of the work is internal. The thoughts and feelings of a character, from doubts and schemes to joy and surprise, are only accessible from the first-person point of view (Montola 2012). The private landscapes conjured by a participant’s imagination are very much part of the experience, even if never shared.
Furthermore, first person is not just a metaphor for personal experience, but a concrete description. The participant will, very literally, only see what their character sees, experience only those scenes where they are present, in body. The participant is the lens through which the work unfolds.
This first person audience differs from, say, theatre, art, and music, where the division between the artist/performer and the audience/appreciator has traditionally been clear. Here we cannot make such a separation. Even someone at a larp who is watching a scene is not an “audience”. They are actively listening; their physical and social presence is meaningful to the other players, and at any moment their watching may turn into doing.
In considering beauty in larp, we find it useful to separate the question into two categories: first, the beautiful things that others have done and can be appreciated and, second, the beautiful things that we do (or participate in doing) ourselves that we ourselves can appreciate.
Beautiful to See
American artist Brody Condon has formulated a way of appreciating larp from the outside. He has noted that larp is a “generative engine” that creates an interesting visual surface (Condon 2010). While Condon works with this visual surface in a sophisticated way, we can see more straightforward examples in larp photographs and videos that try to capture the visual beauty of the scene. While it is possible to look at a larp as one looks at a painting, as a surface, while playing, this is not something that players commonly report, even though players can spend dozens of painstaking hours preparing costumes and props to contribute to this visual surface. It seems that this surface becomes most visible to people who do not participate in the play of the larp. Anyone can access it when it is mediated with a camera (see Torner 2011).
It is perhaps worth noting that the visual surface is part of what has sometimes made larp an object of derision or ridicule. From the outside, the props may look less authentic than what we have come to expect from films, just as the dialogue may sound stiff compared to what we expect from plays, and the narrative may appear completely disorganised when compared with what we expect from novels. It is important to acknowledge that larp is not trying to imitate these forms — the failure of larp to be like a play is not an aesthetic failure.
In expressive forms where there is a clear division between the artist and the audience, we often marvel at performative excellence. The artist has spent thousands of hours becoming excellent at something, and now this skill is on display. We find this in larp as well.
We can talk about performative excellence in larp, when someone portrays their character perfectly with exquisite body language and pitch perfect accent, or when someone has the perfect costume and carries it in the most fitting fashion, or when the scenography of the larp location is a perfect fit with fully functioning props. “Perfect” here means some kind of a combination of “appropriate”, “pleasing”, “fulfils all the requirements of the imagination” and “supports play”. We can appreciate the skill that goes into such performances and creations, and we can gaze on in appreciation when faced with such displays. Sometimes performative excellence is created in the moment; sometimes we see a truly beautiful artefact or encounter another kind of residue of a creation that took place before the larp.
The third source of external beauty in larp is rooted in their structure. Larps are rule-bound. Like games, they are constituted through the enacting of the rules the designers have created and curated (Suits 1978). Shared rules provide the necessary foundation for playing together. They also provide a framework for moments of delight to emerge, just as the rules of football provide the framework for astonishing feats of athleticism that were never specifically called for; yet they are made possible by the framework.
Nordic larps tend to have bespoke rules, meaning that the rules are written (curated, combined, created) specifically for that work (Koljonen 2019). By contrast, in other larp traditions there are tendencies to create general rules that can always be used, or to attempt to take into consideration any and all possibilities. In the Nordic tradition, the rules tend to be light; a minimal amount of rules is preferred in order to create the foundation for a shared experience with a specific topic, theme or situation, with enough of a safety net. Simplicity of rules is regarded as elegant((To avoid the notion that simple rules are superior rules, it is worth pointing out that the lighter the explicit rules, the greater reliance there is on unspoken rules, herd competence, and shared values. Extremely light rules may simply mean that players are only playing with people who are very familiar to them.)).
This is the part of the beauty of games that can be attributed to the designer — or in the case of larps, the larpwrights. They create the rules and the structure of larps. Rules here include the actual dos and don’ts (that usually are inherited from tradition), but more importantly the replacement techniques and metatechniques, as well as the interaction codes that are used in play, and the overall structure of the larp. There are different ways to create the structure, from character and character network design to timed events and thematic acts. The minutiae of the design that larpwrights do is not the focus here; the important thing is that this larp design can be beautiful in and of itself. It is possible to appreciate elegant design when reading the rules, while playing, or when hearing someone talk about a larp. Indeed, a great deal of larp talk revolves around design, and it produces the same kinds of appreciative “oohs” and “aahs” one would expect to hear from rocket scientists working to get a new model off the ground. “Did you hear how they solved the hierarchy issue in the last iteration? It’s genius.”
Of course, since this is an area of design, there are competing design ideals that value things differently. For example, some find high resolution interaction (Nordgren 2008) to be beautiful, enabling nuanced play indecipherable to an observer, while others may favour a 360° illusion and a WYSIWYG aesthetic (Koljonen 2007). Naturally, fashion is also a component here.
The rules must be explicit to the participants. Everyone needs to know them in order to participate in constituting the fictional world into being. (The structure of the larp can also be transparent, although it is more common that it is only revealed to the players as the larp unfolds.) As participants interpret written rules in different ways, it is common to have a shared workshop amongst the participants before the runtime of a larp begins to test out rules and interaction codes. This helps get participants on the same page before play starts, and minimizes play-style conflicts.
Sometimes designers, especially when they are coming from outside larp, want to hide the rules. Artists more accustomed to, say, theatre or film can regard explicit rules as ugly and inelegant, preferring to communicate the rules within the fiction. This is usually a mistake (MacDonald 2019). In comparison to larp, film and theatre have intuitive seamless interfaces. This means that we know how to read them, mostly because we are encultured to understand them. Even experimental pieces tend to contain keys to unlock their meaning. You are supposed to be able to understand a film or a play just by watching it. The director of a film usually does not appear before the screening to explain what a film is about, or how the colour red symbolizes desire in this particular piece. Despite, obviously, a whole paratextual industry of marketing, reviews, and behind-the-scenes featurettes, mainstream films, plays, and books are supposed to stand on their own. In culturally established forms of expression where there is a division between the audience and the work, there is a strong hesitancy to give explicit guidelines or rules.
However, when the work is created through doing things together, the rules of conduct must be haggled out in advance, settling the language of the work. When everyone knows the rules going in, it is possible to engage in subtle play knowing that all participants understand, even if it would be completely incomprehensible for an external audience. This very structure is what separates larp from free play. Anything communicated within the fiction is subject to interpretation. To take an example from another co-created form with rules, if a jazz band is playing Ain’t Misbehavin’ and the tenor sax solo starts to riff on Mary Had a Little Lamb, the band interprets the nursery rhyme within the musical frame of Ain’t Misbehavin’. Nobody in the band thinks that everyone is supposed to switch songs, or even genres.
If we were to approach larp as a designed object or a procedural artefact, we could conclude our analysis here. However, as we are interested in larp as played, performed, and co-created, we need to go further. Most often, when larpers speak of beautiful larp moments, they are not talking about the design or the setting. Instead, they say that something beautiful happened to them and to their character, or that someone did something beautiful.
Beautiful to Do
There are three different ‘larps’ we can talk about: the larp as designed, the larp as played, and the larp as remembered (Stenros 2013). The first is the larp as created by the designers. This includes the rules, the characters, pre-scripted events, spatial design, sound design, time design, possible metalarp rules, and other such design information. This ‘larp as designed’ can be published as a larp script. Also, if the ‘same’ larp is staged a number of times, this is (more or less) what remains the same. The larp as designed is largely covered in the previous section.
The larp as played is what happened during the runtime of a larp. This is where the players bring the design to life through improvisation guided by the rules and characters. Larp as played is, of course, ephemeral. The moment a larp is complete, it ceases to exist (Koljonen 2008). It cannot be revisited or replayed, and each participant can only ever experience from their own point of view.
The third larp, larp as remembered, emerges after the larp. As participants talk about the larp afterwards, find out about what happened to other participants and hear their interpretations, a reading of the larp starts to emerge. Usually some kind of hegemonic view of the larp emerges, though that can never be too specific. Still, enough people might agree on what the larp “was about”. This larp as remembered is shaped by analysis, documentation, reflection, photographs, and even interpretation by people who did not play the larp. Participants with more social capital may have a stronger influence of how a larp is remembered. Even so, dissenting voices on how a larp is remembered are common, and are equally part of the larp as remembered.
Considering larps as beautiful to do, from the point of view of the participants, we concentrate on the larp as played. The rules, the designed structure, and the material reality provide a shared ground for the participants stepping into the fiction of the larp. However, it is the emergent play of the participants (including the larp organizers) that constitute the larp as played.
But what does that mean in practice? Players talk about being part of the fictional world, about immersing into the world, the character, and the situation; of creating a satisfactory story, and of sublime moments of bliss. These memorable moments rise out of the design of the larpwrights, but also from other players, the environment, or even the weather; and might exist in juxtaposition to whatever else is going on in their lives outside the larp. These are moments of synchronicity and perfect happenstance. We might try to label these moments apophenia (Dansey 2008) or pronoia (McGonigal 2006), but players often talk about “larp magic”. Let us try to pick apart a little bit more what emergent co-creation includes and how it can lead to larp magic.
Consider an example of two characters in a multiple-day larp, who do not have any pre-written relationships or interests. The players never speak to each other in the workshops. On the first day of the larp, their characters happen to both be queueing at the bar; one tells a joke and the other laughs. They introduce themselves to each other and think nothing more of it. On the second day, they find each other at the bar again, and this time end up having an unexpectedly candid conversation. On the third day, they react to a crisis together, side-by-side, and realise that they were always meant to be friends and allies. The offhand joke told on the first day becomes one of the most meaningful moments for them both. Their stories are now inseparable.
Larp is socio-dramatic play (see Burghardt 2005), in which everyone pretends to be their character. Sometimes people attempt to not only act and look like their character, but to actually think and feel as the character. This ideal we call immersion, immersing into a character. Other players have a more instrumental attitude towards their character — even if the character is, basically, their body. However, it is not enough to pretend that you are your character. You need to pretend that everyone else is their character as well. This gives rise to inter-immersion (Pohjola 2004), the collective experience that ideally arises from pretending together. You do not play just your characters, but everyone’s. We cannot have prisoners without jailors; no kings without subjects.
Larping is fundamentally a social endeavour, done together with others. Doing things together is hardwired in humans. It is fundamentally different to do things together than to do things side-by-side. Social play is different from parallel play (there are a lot of terms for this in game studies, see Stenros 2015 for a discussion). Furthermore, liveness is an important part of doing things together. In this kind of mutual creation, each participant has agency. An ensemble is revelling in togetherness. Participants see each other and are seen by others. The validation of one’s performance, identity, and actions is important.
If we take the example of the allies who met at the bar, we can tease out an important point: both players are open to larp magic, and the experience deepens when both players know the experience was magical for the other((We call this the friendship is magic principle. This is when the to and fro of inter-immersion leads to beauty, where one knows that the other is also experiencing the magical moment in a way that feels like synchronicity and telepathy.)). There is a template for high-pitched, breathless postlarp conversations recounting these moments that goes roughly: “And then your character did this… and my character had no idea, but then I did this… and then you did that… and then we both did this…”, etc. It’s interesting that we capture, confirm, and re-live the moments that were important to us with the people who were also there.
The creation of an aesthetic object out of the act of doing things together is not just from game studies; it’s also performance art. Those unfamiliar with performance art (now sometimes called Live Art) often find it confusing that “anything can be performance art” and that it often does not look good, like art traditionally is expected to. But performance art very frequently uses the same elements for its canvas that larp does: behaviours, bodies, rituals, social norms, interactions, or time-based processes. It sometimes creates a trace or residue, but this is distinct from the ephemeral performance itself. It is making art out of what we do as humans; when we encounter it, we reflect on how things are done, by whom, and why. Performance art shares with larp an inseparable connection to the social world, but also to the process of reflecting on how we create this world socially((See Nicolas Bourriaud’s (1998) Relational Aesthetics as a basis for situating art in relationships rather than in artistic objects.)).
Inter-immersion is what transports us to the fictional world. It is not just that one steps into a carefully constructed fantastic setting, but that one is seen as part of it and recognized as having agency. This is how a new social reality is created. It does not matter if a larp is full-on escapist fantasy or a critical exploration of sociological alternatives, the alternate reality is still constructed in the same way. Of course, this inter-immersion and new social reality is also supported by the physical location, props, and scenography, but mostly it is about the new world being played into being.
This is why larp is so often about community. As a form, larp lends itself particularly well to the study of networked interpersonal relationships. While larp is pretence, the relationships and interactions feel real, for they are real — even if they are fictional.
Consider an example of a character who undergoes a coming-of-age ceremony within a larp. The ceremony contains ritualistic elements that are made up for the larp, and the whole concept of becoming an adult is different in this society. One comes of age, say, at 50. The player has only been in this “society” for 30 hours, but when the ritual comes, it is devastatingly emotional for both character and player. He is touched by the care his society takes in him, feels apprehension at his new social role, and feels personal ownership of the ritual objects and texts. He reflects on these social processes in his real life and what they have meant to him.
In larp we are transported to another meaning, but we are there in our bodies. Larp is embodied. The play is in the body, and the body is, fully, in play. This is not just a linguistic point, but a concrete and physical thing. Larp design consciously addresses the body: sleep deprivation, discomfort or luxury, dance as communication, sensual and sexual play. Often, this means using sensations, exertion, or discomforts that cannot be ignored: the body is in the foreground when players need to march 25 kilometers in the wintry countryside as soldiers. But even a larp with players seated around a dinner table is equally embodied.
Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) describes the body as “our general medium for having a world.” His writings in phenomenology (the field of philosophy investigating things as we experience them) have been invaluable to analysis of contemporary dance, particularly as dance spilled over from conventional stages and created choreography from natural movement of human crowds, everyday movements, and social interactions. He describes the social world as not an object or sum of objects, but “as a permanent field or dimension of existence.” In larp we create experiences that are emergent, inter-immersive, and embodied; it would be remiss to leave phenomenology out of an aesthetics of larp when we essentially use “being-in-the-world” as a designable surface.
The things that happen to our characters also happen to us. Yes, simulation does take place, but our bodies are moving and being moved, touching and being touched. This is, of course, also connected to the liveness. The experience is immediate. Even if larp is heightened and artificial, our bodies often do not distinguish between the artificially-induced and ‘the real’ — it’s all real. Larp pushes our buttons with bodily experiences: surprise, arousal, freshness, exploration, and neophilia. There is also the physical exhaustion of repetition, and embodied learning. Doing things for real, even when ‘the real’ is fictional, is a powerful aesthetic. When larpers speak of having had a beautiful larp, often they are talking about having had a meaningful sense of physical and mental engagement, presence, and authenticity.
Furthermore, larp is most beautiful when we are present not just in body, but in mind. Larpers talk about authenticity, generosity, and being present in the moment as being beautiful. These are all affirmations of existence — they say “I am here right now.” We can call that presence((Theatre director Herbert Blau (1982) has written eloquently about presence. His words resonate with the larp experience: “With mortality as a base, Presence is fragile, subject to change (and chance), yet persisting through that. Breath blood nerves brains, the metabolism of perception.”)). Being sensitive to the emotions around you, understanding the exact situation, creating the right character response, feeling the emotion.
Sometimes we see this as overcoming personal boundaries, being able to do something in larp one would not do outside it. Being vulnerable and open reduces the distance between the participant and the character they embody.
The idea of fully being in the present with all sense modalities is certainly part of doing something beautiful. However, even the term ‘beautiful to do’ is not without its problems — it is not necessary to do anything. Larpers talk about beautiful boredom. Those are moments when one is just chilling in the fictional world; present, and in character, but not doing anything. One is simply present and content, hanging out in the moment. Here it is important to note that beautiful boredom requires agency. If there is nothing to do, or if the agency of a participant is strictly limited, then the boredom is not pleasurable, meaningful, or beautiful.
However, being present in the moment is a bit more complicated than first might look, since the participant is present both as a player and a character. Everything is simultaneously real and not real, fictional and not fictional, authentic and representational. Playing larp is always reflexive, building on dual consciousness and bisociation. This is what enables larp to move beyond game-like goals such as winning, and significantly opens up the design space and aesthetic realm available for exploration. The player can win even if the character loses. This is not failure, but tragedy. This is a key difference between traditional games and role-playing games. Larpers call this friction between the character failing while the player has a meaningful experience positive negative experience (Hopeametsä 2008). Sometimes this is also called, tongue in cheek, Type 2 Fun. When players use terms like Type 2 Fun, it usually signifies that something has not been pleasurable, but it has been beautiful.
However, reflexivity also means that while the participant chooses to treat the fiction as real, they are also alienated from it, since they know that it is not real. Back in the mid-1990s, the ideal was to stay fully within the fiction from start to finish. While this kind of continuous illusion is still important, over the years the Nordic design ideals have drifted and now bisociation is recognized as an important part of the larp form as something to be played with (e.g. Pettersson 2006; Westerling & Hultman 2019)((Today, there is a valorization of the continuity of the experience, even if the in character continuity is disrupted.)). Nordic larp is Brechtian in the sense that the estrangement effect is built in due to this space for reflection between fiction and non-fiction (see also Levin 2020). This has created the space for metatechniques to design in the space between the player and the character. We also talk about playing close to home: creating a character that is very similar to the player to make the events in the larp feel more immediate. The term bleed is used to discuss how the emotions of the character travel (or bleed) into the player, or vice versa. Notice that bleed is not necessarily a negative experience, but something participants crave. They play in order to feel something (and then to reflect on those feelings, once they have some distance). It is also possible to consciously use larps as reflective tools, and play towards emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2020).
There is one further duality in larp: the participant is both the performer, and the director/ writer. The participant is living in the moment, being and performing, but also able to plan and steer playing in a way that makes sense in a larger context. This is another source of beauty in larp: narrative or structural excellence produced by meta-awareness. This means that the playing creates a satisfactory story (the term ‘story’ is used loosely here). We might see narrative forms like seeding and call back, closure, and fugue structure. This requires being in and out of the larp at the same time, experiencing it first hand, but also looking at it from a distance as a thing that will be a whole.
We can appreciate and get pleasure from moments of larp magic, from playing a world into being together, playing out interesting social dynamics, from physical pleasure of embodied play, from a sense of being present, generous towards, and vulnerable with others, and from the meta-awareness that we are creating something satisfying, either for our character’s arc, or the fictional world as a whole. We can also find pleasure in our ability to steer in a larp by acknowledging our dual consciousness and playing with it. Of course, the question we have not answered is why we find these things beautiful. Those answers may take us deep into psychology, physiology, and anthropology, and they are likely to remain as slippery as similar enquiries about dancing and architecture. But to develop an aesthetic theory of larp, we must first be descriptive, not causal. We can say ”larpers say they find this beautiful” without knowing why.
On Dualism and Failure
In this article, we have divided the beauty in larp into the seeing and doing. This division is practical when we consider whether “this is beautiful” or “that is beautiful”. Are we looking for beauty that exists without our participation beyond witnessing it, or beauty that exists only when we are integrated into it?
If we take the binary to its extremes, we can still find beauty. For example, when considering performative excellence, we see sometimes the appreciation of a performance or other pre-created piece takes us out of the work. If a participant is performing their character perfectly, but it feels like acting and not larping, it puts us in a different position. It moves us from co-creator to viewer. The player-participants, at least temporarily, are not part of the thing they are appreciating. This is just beautiful to see, this is ‘that’.
On the other hand, when we are very deeply engrossed in the larp, we may find ourselves in a state where we are only lightly conscious of the fact that this activity is framed as fictional; our emotions and thoughts feel like there is no distinction between the self and character. In such moments, we do not reflect and have no meta-awareness of other players’ experiences. This, and it is ‘this’, is just beautiful to do.
However, this dualism is purely an analytical distinction. It is a model we have constructed to understand larp; it is not the reality of larping. None of the analytical dichotomies we have used are ‘real’, but attempts at mapping the terrain of actual larp experience. A speech by a queen in a larp might be performed beautifully, but is also touching, meaningful, and so rooted in the social moment, that it is beautiful as something we are doing together. After all, the queen is a queen, because we are playing that she is — we are playing a world into being. And we are aware, in the moment, that there is a beauty to playing this world into being together with others, right now. This comes close to what Levin (2020) discussed as metareflection, and it is the space where most beauty occurs in larp.
Finally, one way to look for beauty is to consider its opposite. When is there an absence of beauty? When are larps ugly? It is not beautiful when we are aware that we have no agency. It is not beautiful when we do not connect with our co-players. It is not beautiful when the physical setting does not support play. It is awful to be cold and hungry unless we are meant to be cold and hungry. It is not beautiful when we are lonely in a larp. It is ugly when we feel disconnected from our own character, and that speaking and acting is “work” all the time. It is not beautiful when we are emotionally disengaged. There is no beauty when we physically cannot take part. It is not beautiful when the world played into being is disjointed, disappointing, or never shows up at all. It is not beautiful if we have a good time but our co-players do not.
These are our failure modes, our ugly spots. But they are also sites to invite beauty to appear. Risk is important as it implies commitment; vulnerability is beautiful because it contains the possibility of rejection; presence is beautiful because it defies absence, refusal, and death.
Coda
Larp is both beautiful to see and beautiful to do. Participants can appreciate the performative excellence of individual performances and other skilful exhibitions, there is a visual surface that can be enthralling regardless of the context, and certainly there is the intricate work in crafting the rule-bound bespoke design. These elements we can appreciate from afar, as an audience, whether we are also participants, or even just someone going through larp documentation, be it design documents (larp-as-designed), photographs, video, written reflections, or costumes (larp-as-remembered).
The larp as played, for the participants, has three additional ways to encounter beauty. In larp, the participants mutually play a world into being by improvising within the rules and structures given by the design, partaking in emergent co-creation through play and inter-immersion. Furthermore, participants engage in vulnerable and generous play while being mindful, embodied, and present. Yet they also remain reflexive about the conceit of larp and strive for structural and narrative excellence.
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Have you gone to a larp that somehow required more work than your day job? Have you done work in a larp and been compensated with fictional resources in the larp rather than money or in-kind, real resources such as shelter and food? Have you had video of your larp experience used in a commercial setting outside of the play context? While larp is in no need of a Marxian revolution, the community is in need of a reckoning with regards to players’ play being also valuable as labor.
Let me explain.
Modern societies operate based on a division between human activity considered “productive” — i.e., that delivers value to someone — and “non-productive,” that seems to deliver value to no one. Value is a central part of labor, and also part of play. Despite recent public discourse on the topic (Bogost 2019), few players care about the distinction between play and labor. We all understand that the line between work and play is murky in late capitalism, as evidenced by so-called “modding” culture, streaming, eSports and other “playbour” movements (Kücklich 2005). But, as Aleena Chia (2019) asserts, players do care about who is gaining what benefit at the expense of others, and whether or not they are burning themselves out in the process:
Vocational passion energizes social, cultural, and organizational practices that create economic value for companies, yet drains workers and aspirants through class-based expectations to compromise employment security in ‘doing what you love.’
Few play more intensely and passionately than larpers.
This chapter continues research begun four years ago with our piece Playing At Work: Labor, Identity and Emotion in Larp (Jones, Koulu, Torner 2016), where we asserted that core larp activities — playing roles as supporting characters, pretending to dig ditches, putting up with off-putting players — involve labor during the game’s runtime. Larpers’ passion for play means a lot of work before, during, and after the game. We also introduced a three-fold taxonomy of labor during a larp: first-order labor (that which keeps players alive, beyond any system of value), second-order labor (non-survival-critical work that would otherwise be financially compensated in other contexts), and third-order labor (entirely fictional work performed with entirely fictional rewards.)
Such research continues to accompany discussions as they evolve around a wide range of labor-related topics: the art of larp volunteering (Mutsaers 2018), in-game larp counseling and post-game debrief (Atwater 2016) as well as the range of skills that larp requires as an assemblage of practices (Kamm 2019). Our work focused on in-game labor, as pre-game and post-game labor has a different set of issues associated with them.
It appears that structured live-action role-play with preparation, rules, and unspoken play cultures is indistinguishable from labor. When players enter the “magic circle” of play, supposedly they have entered a space in which different rules apply from social reality. Yet from the start of the game, players perform intensive work to keep the game itself afloat as well as support their own play experience. Moreover, such “playbour” may create surplus value for the players themselves or, more frequently, others. This work is inseparable from the bodies and emotions of the participants, just as play is (Keogh 2018). Using the conceptual framework of the human body, a model used in a notable film theory textbook (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010), I discuss below the varied ways in which play and work intermingle, and how players actively evolve skills not only to do this labor well, but also to effortlessly elide it from their consciousness as “play.” Relying on several examples from Nordic larp and freeform, I explore the complex relationship between play, work, the body, mind and, above all, capital.
Hands and Feet
Let’s begin with the hands and feet as metaphors for physical labor play, the most obvious form of playbour. Building, crafting, cleaning, cooking — there is so much to be done in a larp, and much of it can be done in-character. Olle Nyman’s post-apocalyptic larp Skymningsland (Dusk Land 2010), for example, incorporated chopping wood, making coal, pumping water and other labor-intensive jobs into the design, so as to let the refugee and marginalised characters in the game feel their lower stations in life in their very bodies. Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo’s five-day larp experience Just a Little Lovin’ (2011-) has a whole kitchen staff, the cooks of Pepper’s Diner, that is also in-character; they spend most of the game preparing food for the other characters, but are also able to get involved with fictional plotlines and take part in the party. The Czech game Legion: Siberian Story (2016) involves long, physical treks on foot through January snow in order to move from one location to another.
This form of in-game, physical labor has wildly variable value, since its value as play may not be as high as its first-order contribution to the basic survival of the larpers (i.e., food preparation, custodial work, transport), but such physical activity can certainly contribute to the deepening of one’s investment into one’s character and the core themes of the larp itself (i.e., survival, hardship, labor inequality, etc.)
It is interesting to note that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed his concept of flow (1975), or the pleasurable mental states produced by a steady, voluntarily chosen set of achievable tasks and competence at those tasks, against the backdrop of Italian fascism. His family was in Italy during the chaos of war, and he was able to nevertheless maintain a stable mental state by playing chess. How do certain physical and mental activities secure our minds against fear and despair? How could both play and work be actually two sides of the same coin? Csikszentmihalyi’s schema Flow is created through concentration and effort, a revolving state of being mildly challenged and rising to meet the challenge.
Losing track of time in the “playbour” state of larp can be a positive thing: it means the player is thoroughly engaged in activity, whatever it may be. In the larp context, Sarah Lynne Bowman (2018) calls this “immersion into activity,” or when the physical and cognitive tasks of a game become rewarding in themselves and, in turn, a player’s activity as a character becomes spatial-motor and tactile. Neither play nor labor induces flow by necessity, however. There can be play that is not remotely fun (Stenros 2015, Sharp and Thomas 2019), and there is plenty of work that serves no purpose in society other than to subjugate us with mind-numbing tedium (Graeber 2018). Players must voluntarily enter into the activities of a larp, but they’re better when conscientiously designed and implemented.
Larp as a medium often exhibits its best side when these structured physical tasks are introduced by way of conscious design. Rather than simply standing around as if at an awkward party, players have something concrete to do that may require additional in-character problem-solving, player physical effort, and time. Larp designs that revolve around professionals performing small talk while taking care of volumes of tasks, either fictional or not, preoccupy the players with various stakes in their characters’ stories as well as brute reality. If dinner at the historical larp Fairweather Manor (2015- 2018) isn’t served by in-character servants, for example, then players do not get to eat.
As we have argued earlier (Jones, Koulu, Torner 2016), first-order and second-order labor in larp can also cause jarring context collapse: the vital tasks that would ordinarily be compensated with money are both (A) variably or not remunerated outside the larp and (B) now mixed in with ingame drama that may interfere with the tasks themselves, forcing players to make a choice between dropping character and doing the task well or doing the task poorly (or not at all) and risking both ingame and out-of-game consequences.
Larp play can itself produce objects of value and transaction in the open market. For example, Martin Tegelj’s game Polka Pillow Production (2018) simulates a Slovenian workers’ co-op that stuffs pillows, all while interrupting work on occasion for music and dance. The four stages of production — spinning yarn, looming the cloth, embroidering the cloth, and constructing and stuffing pillows — can be play-acted, but there is at least one group who has played the game and constructed actual pillows. Who owns these pillows? These are clearly artifacts of play, having emerged from a fictional context, and one with starkly different regimes of value (i.e., Slovenia under communist rule) at that.
Larps that produce actual goods, even those just meant as keepsakes for their participants, have added “commodity creation” as one of the design outcomes, meaning that the play that produced them now has monetary value, scant as it may be.
Obvious physical labor in larp thus straddles a wide range of value to the players and organizers. Ingame cooking, cleaning, and security may be vital to the larp, or entirely marginal. Tasks that players must perform in-character may create flow states, allowing the player to lose themselves and induce a positive mental state in the player or they may be distractions and liabilities that sideline play away from the larp’s core focus.
In turn, larps may create objects with exchange value or services with use value, in which case an organizer team has an ethical obligation to their players in being transparent about who profits from those goods or services. Larps have the power to engage their participants in vigorous, meaningful physical activity, but design and play must mediate against distraction, drudgery, and economic exploitation.
Eyes, Mouth, Ears, and Brain
Turning next to the eyes, mouth, ears, and brain in our metaphor, we conceive of our ideal larper as someone actively investing their cognitive energy and sensory capacities in making the larp work: they are noticing details, making sense of them, and communicating about them in a certain way. Players work and create value in the larp as a whole when they pay attention to others, in particular to in-play cues. They then perform additional labor by sorting the cues and acting upon them with their full cognitive and emotional capacities.
Almost any play advice worth mentioning will encourage players to, at bare minimum, listen to each other. Players in larps are typically not “lost” in character, but rather are constantly shifting their attention between various in-character goals, extant player needs, and just “being” in the game. This requires active awareness, or the devotion of one’s full attention to the comprehension of one’s environment and fellow players. For example, in blockbuster games such as the magic school larp College of Wizardry (2014-), whether or not someone is aware of a group of students headed off to follow a serpent spirit or is in an area cordoned off for an impromptu magic ritual can make or break multiple players’ larp experiences.
The core skill being exercised in many games is reflective listening, or the basic repetition of material one has perceived to ensure one understands. Players do this every time they noticeably state a fellow player’s character name aloud instead of their real name: “Hi Miguel!” They are confirming “I understand you are playing a fictional entity by the name of Miguel and acknowledge you as this entity.” Reflective listening in larps also manifests with respect to all the meme-like nuggets of plot information normally circulated: “The king has a traitor in his court!” “Susanne has an illegitimate child.” “I am not actually a horse.” Larps are usually robust enough to deal with the social realities of tacit misinformation — think of how a message transforms over time during a child’s game of “telephone” — but accurately passing on the message “Stefan is not actually a horse” can have profound effects on subsequent play, due to the host of fictional triggers and social opportunities at hand in a larp.
It turns out that paying attention and good communication are some of the most basic and valuable work skills there are. German rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff already outlined in Psychologia empirica (1732) and Psychologia rationalis (1734) the formal bases of our perception, apperception, and attention, with the goal of controlling one’s own conscious thought for as long as possible. Centuries of inquiry have been devoted to how to increase one’s self-control over one’s attention, and it is an overt commodity in the digital age (Dean 2012). 21st Century capitalist societies both require extensive intellectual work in programming, engineering, teaching, and management to survive, and also relentlessly exhaust those capacities through advertising, email, and the daily distractions of digital life. John Tierney (2001) argues that this relentless struggle over our attentive decision-making capacities is more taxing than one would think:
No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired-but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts…
When we larp well, we are not just good players. We are also good co-workers and employees of the larp (Saitta 2012) — we not only submit to its rules system and genre expectations, but we also watch out for fellow players and listen to the various subtleties in their expression and demeanor. Taking it all in and making in-character decisions is both the object of most games and also, as described above, substantively exhausting.
Listening empathically to both player and character, performing emotional labor where needed (see Koulu 2020, also in this volume) — a responsibility that often falls to the already marginalized — can be part of play for certain, but also constitutes labor in the informal sense. Participatory art is thorny in this way. Cognitive and emotional load take center stage in larp design (Li and Morningstar 2016), and players self-manage their labor on this front, regardless of whether organizers do.
One scenario I have witnessed on occasion is the labor performed by close social acquaintances of high-maintenance players. If said player regularly does not have a good time at games without playing with their acquaintances, they will likely steer their play toward these acquaintances, who suddenly have the labor of providing a decent larp experience for this player. I mention this after encountering multiple players weighing their in-game emotional labor before a large event: “If Janaki is in the larp, then that will mean they will eventually wind up playing with me, and I do not know if I can handle it this time when they suffer their typical emotional breakdown after Act II.”
Another scenario includes players actively steering away from portions of the larp that make them uncomfortable, especially when they know someone in power might nevertheless choose not to keep them safe (Algayres 2019). Much of this labor goes unseen, but is absolutely vital for maintaining seemingly “effortless” play.
Skin
We turn to the metaphor of skin specifically to validate costume and beauty work as an immense portion of both pre-game and in-game player efforts, as well as the physical preparations to embody a character. Such efforts are often feminized and de-valued, something I consider every time I watch a woman apply make-up on a man’s face when he exhibits no capacity to put it on himself.
For events that last hours, one wants a topnotch look that acceptably portrays one’s character for the evening. For events that last days, one wants a durable set of costumes that can be easily donned or taken off at the end of a larp day. And in our current era, we also need to look good for the cameras: larp photographers dart amidst us, taking hundreds of photos for perusal afterward. Sharing good photos shores up self esteem and confers social capital.
Preparing one’s body for the portrayal of a character can prove intensive. Characterization changes one’s posture, voice, facial expressions, hand gestures, and dozens of other details that, often, only the player knows about. Characters that require cultural sensitivity to play also mean that players must balance between their own desires for the character and what is respectful and acceptable in a cosmopolitan, multicultural society; embodying the character without using harmful accents or mocking bodily movements. Costuming and make-up simply add another layer of labor on top of this. Larp costuming and make-up straddle four primary focal areas: character portrayal, comfort, durability, and overall polish, and few of these come without a financial or labor cost.To portray a character, it can take anywhere from 5 minutes to upwards of an hour to get ready for a game prior to a larp’s start time. This is not to mention all of the planning, measuring, shopping, sewing, experimentation, and touch ups required before one even sets foot on the larp site. Some larps such as the period game De la Bête (2016-) provide costumes themselves in order to achieve desired “looks” for the game; others such as Inside Hamlet (2015-) rely on players to supply their own costumes, but one needs to fit the 1930s style for an “epic party and heartbreaking tragedy.” Players scour online photo boards, consider historical fashion textbooks, and do video make-up tutorials in order to get the proper look.
The comfort of costumes or make-up cannot be underrated as part of a player’s labor. Discomfort impacts all aspects of play, including the sheer amount of energy required to simply “be” that character. One makes oneself comfortable through a variety of means: padding, extra zippers, breathable fabrics, and lightweight materials. A heavy make-up mask that looks stunning for staged larp photos can be substituted for a lighter make-up mask for actual play. Those who have theatrical or dress-up skills that allow for such shortcuts are able to help the players who have chosen onerous costume and make-up arrangements. The same goes for costume and make-up durability: regardless of one’s monetary investment in a particular look, a player must be mindful of wearing out the elements of that look before the end of the larp. That level of care and attention to one’s materials is also labor.
A player with an appearance that nails the character and period, looks sharp for others and the camera, and is easy to take on and take off is what Karl Marx would call “congealed labor,” in which the commodity’s effortless appearance belies how much labor went into its creation, and that it is not correspondingly valued either. And yet we also deny social capital to those nerds who just throw on a cape over street clothes and show up for a larp: they have not shown proper deference to the play of the larp through their labor, and will pay a subsequent social cost. This can vary, from exclusion from recognition in the larp itself — and thus, play — to visual absence in the post-game documentation.
Smartphone
Finally, I have included the smartphone as a body part, as it represents an object that is both an extension of our being and also something fully external to us. Modern smartphones represent outside forces endlessly pushing in on our lives, as well as our externalized memory and communication with the world. In our metaphorical universe of larp labor, the smartphone represents the permeability of the magic circle and the pressures of non-larp forces on our larp play. Larp as a medium demands much of its participants but generates little to no profit, as one can see from the collapse of many for-profit larp companies over the years and the struggle of even Disney’s 2019 Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge immersive entertainment resort. Nevertheless, there are many stakeholders lurking at the edge of our play. Larp-adjacent activities such as military or search & rescue simulations are designed to teach real, testable skills and responses. Political messages can be advocated in a larp (Rantanen 2016), and larps funded through government grants may be obligated to take a particular position on a topic or on the outcome of the larp itself. Larp organizers and players are not necessarily the owners of the overall larp business which pays for the event itself, and thus labor on behalf of for-profit entities.
It is odd to think the actual play of a larp could be financially exploited, but the 21st Century has seen to it that neoliberal financialization will creep into every activity we do. In particular, content creators on social media and video-sharing platforms, many of whom seek clicks and advertisers for revenue, now use larp as a rich trove of imagery and stories with which to provide content for a wider audience.
Gone are the earlier days of stilted larp documentary (Torner 2011), replaced by “influencers” and media professionals making high-quality webisodes for Larp House or The Nerdist. Influencers can increase the Internet attention paid to a particular larp, and there are occasions in which their publicity labor is exchanged for perquisites such as free admission, lodging, and more. Yet the players’ playbour becomes contested terrain once the influencers’ cameras start rolling. Players are suddenly “performing” for an unknown, broadly conceived global Internet audience, and their playbour is likely to go uncompensated, despite the congealed result of their physical, mental, emotional, and cosmetic efforts. Even if organizers clearly state in the photography and video policy that their images will be circulated in such a fashion, the value being derived from the players’ play is highly suspect. Players are in theory exchanging money for not only the larp but also high-quality imagery of them in-costume and in-character, and yet in practice are providing surplus value to be extracted by others in the digital economy.
Organizers must be mindful of the external stakeholders in the images generated by a larp, and streamers must be particularly mindful of the wishes of the players for the circulation of their larp character images online. It is hegemonic to simply ask players to be happy that they are getting high-quality images taken of them. Moreover, the labor of creating quality streaming material means, in practice, that the influencers become a separate larp within the larp with different stakes and stipulations. Players are forced to take on more labor to collaborate with or avoid such entities.
The Whole Body
It is not of much intellectual or social benefit to distinguish between play and work — the modern age has produced a surreal sliding scale of play that also makes its participants millions of dollars and worthless work that serves only to occupy the time of those who do it. It is, however, of great importance to recognize the value of one’s playbour as a player. Physical and/or remuneration-worthy work in a larp can be of great surplus value to the players and organizers, or not. Players who pay active attention to each other, communicate, and respond in consensual, socially acceptable ways are absolutely crucial for most larps, and are thus producing value internal to the whole operation. When we travel long distances or do uncompensated emotional counseling of fellow players, we are putting work into making the play experience better. But when we make ourselves beautiful, presentable for the camera and the outside world — beyond our own gratification and the game itself — the value of our playbour becomes increasingly clear.
When our larp play becomes consumed vicariously — through photos, videos, or a live, ticketpaying audience — then our playbour is producing surplus value for outside stakeholders. When we actively employ it to teach a lesson or transmit a political message for some institution, our playbour now has investors seeking a particular outcome or effect, possibly resulting in the conferral or denial of future resources.
Good play and good make-up/costuming among the players does indeed increase the larp’s value to others. Our communities can be financialized and, in doing so, our playbour alienated. One begins to think of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s long-rolling DAU project: players staying in costume and on a set for 24 hours a day, but still being filmed for some future moving-image project.
Above all, our players should attend to these principles:
Your play is also labor.
Your play has value.
Keep track of what others do with the products and recordings of play.
Sarah Lynne Bowman (2018): Immersion and Shared Imagination in Role-Playing Games. In José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding (eds.), Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. New York: Routledge, 379-394.
Aleena Chia (2019): The Moral Calculus of Vocational Passion in Digital Gaming. Television & New Media, Vol. 20(8), 767-777.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1975): Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener (2010): Film Theory: An Introduction Through The Senses. New York: Routledge.
David Graeber (2018): Bullshit Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Katherine Castiello Jones, Sanna Koulu, and Evan Torner (2016): Playing at Work: Labor, Identity and Emotion in Larp.In Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi (eds.), Larp Politics – Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action. Helsinki: Solmukohta. 122-132.
Björn-Ole Kamm (2019): Adapting Live-Action Role-Play in Japan: How “German” Roots Do Not Destine “Japanese” Routes. Re-Playing Japan 1, 64-78.
Brendan Keogh (2018): A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Teemu Rantanen (2016): Larp as a Form of Political Action: Some Insights from the Theories of Political Science Political Larps: Two Audiences. In Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi (eds.), Larp Politics – Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action. Helsinki: Ropecon ry, 111-118.
John Sharp and David Thomas (2019): Fun, Taste, & Games: An Aesthetics of the Idle, Unproductive, and Otherwise Playful. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jaakko Stenros (2015): Playfulness, Play, and Games: A Constructionist Ludology Approach. Dissertation. Tampere: Tampere University.
John Tierney (2001): Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue? New York Times Magazine.
Evan Torner (2011): The Theory and Practice of Larp in Non-Fiction Film. In Thomas Duus Henriksen, et al. (eds.), Think Larp. Denmark: Bymose Hegn, 104-123.
One of the most important tenets of the communities built around Nordic larp these past few years has been inclusivity. “Inclusiveness” was defined by Lars Nerback in a 2013 Nordic Larp Talk as the feeling of being culturally and socially accepted, welcome, and equally treated (Nerback 2013).
From a larpmaker’s perspective, it designates the effort to design spaces in which people who experience discrimination in their ordinary lives are actively supported and encouraged. Over the years, people involved with Nordic larp have consequently developed practical and educational tools to support their claim of being inclusive. For example, papers have been written about how to perform cultural calibration so that players have the same vision and understanding of the culture depicted ingame (Nielsen 2014) or of the actual culture and everyday experiences of the people whose lives are being used as a direct inspiration for the larp (Kangas 2017). Others have written to address discrimination experienced in larp contexts, for example due to race (Kemper 2018) or body type (Kessock 2019).
Those tools, although primarily designed to be used in larp contexts, contribute to shaping the behaviors and practices expected on a community level. Indeed, if larps are the ground from which most social relationships among larpers grow, sociability doesn’t end at larps. For most people, it continues, through Facebook, chat, public meetings, events, etc. That’s why, in this chapter, I will address larp primarily as a community — a social group sharing common interests, supported by a feeling of belonging.
In addition, many (larp and non-larp) communities, seeking inspiration from Nordic larp or following the spirit of the times, also strive towards inclusivity. Those communities may encounter similar problems: inclusivity questions our collective ability to remain actively open while taking part in a group of interests. It is, at its essence, a matter of community skills.
The partial success of the effort towards inclusivity is especially apparent in the increasing visibility of queer people, for example at Solmukohta — from Drag me to KP to “queer at KP” badges to the prominence of rainbowcolored pieces of clothing. However, the larp world remains strikingly homogenous, revealing limits to how inclusivity is currently practiced. Even though it is not true of all larp cultures, most Nordic larpers are white, able-bodied, and come from moderately wealthy, educated backgrounds: people of color, people of reduced mobility, and people with low income or education, are scarce.
Intersectionality, a notion created by African American academic Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), helps us understand how different discrimination (for example, race, ability, and class) combine in ways that make it necessary to address all its aspects in order to understand how a person is being limited or suppressed based on their identity. We must also take that into account in designing for inclusivity.
The aspects we need to consider to make a community effectively inclusive are many: gender, class, race, ability, but also education, and even social skills. Nordic larp was born out of an endeavor to get several emerging larping traditions to share practices and ideas, and it worked tremendously well. However, this creative proliferation has, over the years, built to increase the distance between insiders and outsiders. From the outside, the threshold to participate in the Nordic larping community now seems ridiculously high.
I joined the Nordic scene two years ago at age 23 during Knutpunkt 2018 after a pretty short larping career in France, in the pursuit of a degree in Social Anthropology. I was fortunate enough to have a motive to join (research), a feminist background, and a compulsive learning attitude forged by years of university training. Yet, even today, after spending some time in the Nordics countries, reading as much larp theory as I could stomach, and writing a thesis I’m pretty happy with, it still feels I can never, ever catch up with what was produced during the last twenty years.
As a result, I feel dangerously ignorant of the cultural and social ways of the community, and constantly in danger of making a misstep. I think it is safe to say I’m far from being the only one. Many other larpers I had the chance to talk to shared similar feelings. The cost of access, i.e. the amount of specialized knowledge required to participate in the Nordic larp community is very high.
Some of the cost of access that impedes inclusivity is, in fact, due to the efforts to support it. There’s two sides to every coin: to be inclusive to certain people, a space has to be exclusive of others — and it is not always clear who.
This is the paradox of inclusivity.
In this chapter, I would like to address how “being inclusive” and “feeling safe” come into contradiction, notably in the way that we design community spaces. Then, I will try to question the phenomenon of community violence and how it relies on our in-group conceptions of difference and ways to confront it. These thoughts will help build a clearer vision of what inclusivity does, and can, mean. Finally, I will try to offer practical advice to help us build more inclusive communities, encourage collective reflexivity, and conceive of larpers’ spaces as a piece of a more global society, which needs to become more inclusive as well.
Inclusivity vs. Safe Space: Bringing In or Keeping Out
When trying to achieve inclusivity in practice, the first obstacle encountered is the exclusiveness of general society. Just because a space seems public, or open, doesn’t mean that it is: homeless people are constantly pushed away, people of color are at risk of police violence, openly gay couples often have to fear assault, sex workers are criminalized and stigmatized, etc. Therefore, all attempts to build an inclusive community must deal with the matter of the space in which events, gatherings, or larps take place.
In short, we need to make the participants feel safe. According to Johanna Koljonen, this involves the following:
Participants need to feel seen and secure, they need to know they’re in the right place, and have a reasonably good idea of what kinds of experiences and activities they are about to engage in. This makes them not have to worry, which allows them to be present in the moment and explore the actual instance of the experience in a playful, mindful and proactive manner.
Koljonen 2016
The careful framing of such spaces, the rules and limitations we actively give them, differ from how we experience our everyday lives. There are no safety mechanics in real life, no word that magically stops your boss from yelling at you, no graceful opt-out that’ll let you walk free of a street harasser.
What we try to achieve through all the rules, the caring, the long discussions about consent, is commonly called a safe space. And, as society itself is certainly not a safe space, we need to build a space that is separated from it and tries to counter it, to cancel the prejudices, power relations, and inequalities that we encounter in our ordinary lives.
We try to build an inclusive environment by removing it from society, and by making sure unwanted elements of society don’t follow inside. We try to bring (people) in by keeping (the problems which individuals are a part of) out.
In short: safe spaces, which are instrumental in allowing for inclusivity, are exclusive. Then again, what choice do we have? The world in general remains a dangerous place for many of us. In the absence of other options, we must ponder what we call safe and what (or who) we deem unsafe.
First, it is important to acknowledge that safety is a collective concern requiring all members of the community to actively contribute to the social design that organizers — primarily — come up with. As Maury Brown puts it:
For a community to be safe, all of its members must: uphold the agreed-upon social contract of respectful behavior; be intolerant of harassment, abuse, and assault within the group; share the duty of monitoring behavior and educating new members; support the decisions of organizers to enforce safety norms; and respect and offer support to those who make reports of safety violations.
Brown 2017
These are no small tasks: the exact meaning of words like harassment, abuse, and assault, is far from evident. Safety requirements are specialized knowledge, and contribute to raising the cost of access to communities such as the Nordic larp scene. Fortunately, in larps, cultural calibration tools and workshops provide support, and have shown remarkable efciency in including, for example, autistic people (Fein 2015).
Blockbuster larps and performance or art games marketed to the general public have an ability to attract new faces, thus building an entry point to the community. However, becoming part of the community, being a valid, full member of the group, able to participate in Facebook conversations, is not easy.
In fact, during my first Solmukohta, I felt so distressed and alone (I knew barely a handful of people among the 500, and none of them well) that I spent a whole afternoon in my room writing about “extrovert privilege”. The first time I wrote the Nordic larping community was not actually inclusive was the first time I came into contact with it. Being told this community was “a big family”, it was hard to realize that it was as difficult to take part in for an introvert as anywhere else.
The amount of community skills required to support a safe space is high, and at odds with the concern for inclusivity. To address it we can, at least partly, rely on “herd competence” — hoping the people bold enough to enter our spaces learn by doing in contact with others. However, by relying on the rather elusive notion of safety, we court confusion.
Safety is a many-sided issue: we need to be safe to play, express our identities, meet our needs, voice our opinions, etc. (what Friedner 2019 calls the brave space), but also safe from. There’s a positive safety, rooted in empowerment, and a negative safety, emerging from the perceived need of protection and defense.
Although enforced in more or less tangible ways, safety is a feeling, not a state of affairs. As such, it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with reality: we may feel unsafe while running no risk at all, or engage in risky behavior because we feel safe.
In an interview for the Knutpunkt 2018 Companion Book, Johanna Koljonen says that larp safety “is about feeling safe to play rather than being safe from harm” (Svanevik and Brind 2018, my emphasis). However, this principle of safety offers very little ground for facts. It relies largely on subjectivity.
It is difficult to decide what constitutes a threat, and even more so to distinguish between an actual threat and one we project based on our own past experiences.
What (supposedly) makes the larping community safe or inclusive is primarily the language we use to qualify it: it is safe because we’ve said so. It is inclusive because we’ve written about it. This is what is commonly called, following linguist John Austin (1962), a performative use of language: uttering a certain speech, in appropriate circumstances, may produce effects in reality. When we collectively declare “larp is safe”, we make safety happen, because all of a sudden we become mindful of others, their vulnerability, the precariousness of any social situation, etc. But when we have no clear definition of what “safe” means and the word “inclusivity” is little more than gibberish to many community members, the performative function of language is in jeopardy.
That’s when crises happen.
What We Do to Each Other: Community, Care, and the Making of Forgiveness
We often perceive safety as a human right. As far as I’m concerned, this is true. However, the chasm between “the right not to be shot on the way home” and “the right to not feel uncomfortable” is wide. As Sarah Schulman, author of an essay called Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016), warns:
Feeling “safe” of course is already a problematic endeavor since there is little guarantee of safety in our world, and the promise of it is a false one, as the effort to enforce this is often at the expense of other people.
Schulman 2016:130
There is no way to ensure 100% safety, and by trying to increase our chances, we might put other people at risk. If safety is a feeling, so is the impression of threat, unsafety, or intentional harm.
According to Sarah Schulman, projecting fears and insecurities onto others (the people who are “not us”, not part of the safe group) is common with two attitudes that we usually do not think to associate with each other: supremacy and trauma. Supremacy is the belief that the reference group is superior to other groups (by way of race, nationality, gender, ability, etc.), and therefore their own needs must be prioritized. This can lead to hate crimes, but more mundanely manifests in the feeling that the members of the supremacy group are put at risk of harm by non-members, and it’s therefore legitimate to use whatever means of “protection” against the (imaginary) threat they deem necessary.
In Europe, supremacist ideology directly translates to anti-immigrant laws, horrendous detention camps, and thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean each year.
Schulman describes supremacist attitudes in terms of the irrational feeling that one’s group must be protected against and separated from others, who are deemed dangerous, unworthy, or inferior. She draws a disturbing parallel with the attitude of traumatized people, whose feeling of being unsafe can be based not on actual risks in the present tense, but “a projection in the present based on dangers that occurred in the past” (ibid.). Because both supremacy and trauma are rooted in an analogous feeling that the group is being at risk of harm from non-members, the traumatized can become the supremacist. The Israeli occupation of Palestine constitutes a major institutional example of that escalation.
It is natural to seek to be, and feel, safe. However, when it leads to expecting others to comply with our own (not necessarily clear, visible from the outside, or reasonable) needs, conflict becomes inevitable. Moreover, conflict is often simplified until one can clearly distinguish a victim and an abuser.
The following pattern is common especially in communities using a lot of social media: A person commits, often without realizing it, an act that makes some members of the community feel hurt. These people share their pain, unease or dismay with other members. As more and more people become aware of the situation, the initial feelings flare up and reach a level where the status quo can’t hold, inducing a crisis.
At this point, it seems like nothing can be done: sides are taken, the community becomes polarized, and a stable state is only reached through splitting the community or shunning the wrongdoer. When this process targets public figures, it can take the form of “canceling,” an attempt from an active minority to deplatform a creator by publicly denouncing, slandering, and threatening them and their supporters.
Issues concerning the building of a safe space are involved in such crises. Designating a space as safe leads to the passive exclusion of people who do not know, or feel they know, enough, and the active exclusion of people thought to threaten the safety of the group. By creating a space that is viewed as separate, different from “the rest of the world,” and validating it through a feeling — safety —, those attitudes may lead to creating a critical differentiation between “us” and “them,” and to posit otherness (difference, disagreement, strangeness, etc.) as a threat. As a consequence, it becomes difficult to treat others with the same care as we expect to be treated as rightful members of our community. A Finnish larper who had been part of a recent community crisis as one of the wrongdoers told me: “You heard about the Week of Stories? We didn’t even have five minutes.”
The “Week of Stories” is a short period of time after an event (generally a larp) in which the participants withhold their criticism to give the organizers an opportunity to recover — and let the steam cool down.
As the actions of the organizers of this particular event were deemed outrageous, many attendants reacted by expressing their shock and indignation immediately. These feelings were, of course, legitimate: all feelings, in fact, should be acknowledged — although not always acted upon. In that case, though, the immediate outburst caused the organizers to feel hurt and disregarded in turn.
The rules and norms of care and attention in larps are largely there not to be used: they are there in case of need, but their primary purpose is to support a feeling of “safe enough” to participate — much like a lifejacket or a seatbelt. But when those rules, like the Week of Stories, could come in handy to address a particularly difficult situation, we are not always able to resist the initial flare of emotion.
Unfortunately, social media encourage us to react immediately to stimuli, and facilitates emotional outbursts at the expense of caution and reflection. As the authors of the Living Games’ Crisis Management Workshop put it:
While many communities and events are working hard to make their spaces safer, it’s not enough to have a Code of Conduct. You need to practice it.
Stavropoulos and Steele 2016
Speaking about safety is not enough. Imagining safety measures is not enough. We need to practice understanding why we made those rules.
Violence happens. Conflict happens. But violent reactions, even verbal, even righteous, even targeted at the people who wronged us, are unlikely to lead to positive outcomes in a community. There are other ways than exclusion to support a safe and inclusive space, and resorting to it too often may weaken the space we try to preserve.
We frequently use the metaphor of the missing stair to describe an individual that we know to be “problematic” in a community, yet carefully avoid instead of confronting (putting at risk those who are unaware a stair is missing). It could have provided a nice basis for understanding how to address detrimental elements in a community, but this metaphor was built on a logical error: we don’t fix a stair by removing it, but by safely replacing faulty parts, adding safeguards, and making sure the stair doesn’t put people at risk anymore.
If shunning can be a temporary solution to address a potential danger in the short term, it is not likely to support understanding of the harmful behavior, for the perpetrator or the community.
Being denied the right to speak, the perpetrator can experience a strong feeling of unfairness and rejection. This won’t help them listen and understand the consequences of their actions. As for the community, it cannot reach an adequate comprehension of the sociological causes of the harm done without facing the perpetrator and hearing them too. As a consequence, the community renders itself incapable of preventing similar behaviors in the future. Furthermore, enforcing safety rules using the fear of shunning encourages perpetrators to hide and deny their actions instead of acknowledging them and trust the community to resort to transformative justice.
Transformative justice is a comprehensive and non-legal approach to problem solving and peacemaking that doesn’t seek to punish the perpetrator, but to collectively reach a new state of balance through educating, supporting, and encouraging dialogue. It doesn’t mean that we are responsible for fixing people: in some cases, that would simply be impossible. However, “sacrificing” members of the community who are known to misbehave may be beside the point. In fact, punishment for the sake of righteousness is often beside the point. I believe that it is our individual and collective duty to try to understand the etiology of a crisis. Otherwise an appropriate response remains impossible.
Reaching Past the Choir
By keeping us from reaching more people, building our communities as safe spaces fails to allow us to fully benefit from the educational and transformative powers of larp (e.g. Bowman and Hugaas 2019). To change that, we need to be inclusive towards other kinds of people, to be able to extend the safe space in ways that allow anyone to step in and benefit from the kind of awareness we’ve had.
The para-larp environment is awfully technical, albeit for good reasons: in general society, something as widespread as e.g. sharing one’s pronouns is mostly unheard of. Being for once in a space where people won’t misgender you is priceless — that’s also why I’m not rejecting inclusivity as we usually conceive of it, simply pointing at some of its dark spots.
Most people quickly become allies when they are placed in an environment that is appropriately forgiving with their missteps, yet encourages their efforts in learning and being included. On the contrary, hurtful reactions to honest mistakes can create more anger, confusion, and a feeling of rejection that fosters resistance and hatred. Getting angry happens, of course: but offering the other person an explanation for our reaction can help bridge the difference, and slowly bring them to our side.
Shunning hurts us. When addressing community issues, violence is almost always detrimental. If inclusivity is synonymous with purity, we are not protecting ourselves from harm, but ensuring it happens.
As it stands, the community requires specialized knowledge and legitimacy to talk about many sensitive topics. As a consequence, it is more difficult for newer and low-status members to achieve social recognition, while older and high-status members benefit from a kind of indulgence that might result in unhealthy power relations (especially in the event of a crisis). Muriel Algayres’s article about social capital in larp offers a detailed account of the effects of status differences on play opportunities and social dynamics (Algayres 2019).
The Nordic larp community is inclusive, but not all the time, and not to everyone. In fact, inclusive is, in my opinion, not the right term to use for the larp community: instead, it is queerfriendly, with (white) feminist values, and an education to difference. Not bad, but with a few fixes, we can do better. By understanding that the need for safety may come into contradiction with the ideal of inclusivity we can move to an increased awareness of how to address and support differences in our community. Here are a few steps:
Acknowledging feelings, while at the same time recognizing that feeling alone cannot be the baseline for acting upon a conflict situation.
Ensuring the persons who felt hurt receive appropriate care, but remaining careful in assuming the intentions of the wrongdoers or initiating punishment.
Keeping in mind that being inclusive means making space for different people and opinions to coexist.
Holding the space to hear all parties involved in a crisis, and offering or asking a neutral community member or entity for mediation.
Refraining from immediate social media exposure.
Instead of projecting our expectations based on a unilateral understanding of a given situation, we need to assume the best of others (at least provisionally) and create the space for reasonable dialogue to occur.
A lot of good can arise from constructing a safe space around positive tenets meant to cancel, or compensate, behaviors at play in general society. However, we need to be wary of the risk of seclusion and insularity. Indeed, such a state of affairs would give way to distorted thinking about the state of the world and the intentions of the people who don’t belong. In wanting to defend the group from harm, insular communities may thoughtlessly replicate harmful behaviors such as bullying, shunning, and rejecting difference. In doing so, community spaces become less resilient to change and dissent and thus more precarious.
Inclusivity has to meet a double logic. First, the creation of a safe space allows, from the outside to the inside, to take in people whose identities do not meet the dominant social norms. Second, from the inside to the outside, larp and larp communities can create opportunities for educating people to difference and provide alternative social models that contribute to the struggle against all oppression — a purpose the seminary The State of the Larp in Oslo in December 2018 explicitly pursued.
However, neither the one nor the other should be taken for granted or implied: what makes a space safe is far from obvious, and the power of larp is only as great as the people it reaches. In the design of our larps and communities, we must explicitly ask ourselves: what do we think we are doing, and what do we want to do in practice? To put it provocatively: to make a better place in the world for ourselves, or to make the world a better place.
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989): Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum.
Elizabeth Fein (2015): Making Meaningful Worlds: Role-playing Subcultures and the Autism Spectrum. Cult Med Psychiatry, 39(2), pp. 299-321.
Kat Jones, Mo Holkar and Jonaya Kemper (2019): Designing for Intersectional Identities. in Johanna Koljonen (ed.), Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost, 2019.
This common childhood insult comes in many languages and forms. The gist being that if you are not like the other children, and you do not fit in, then there must be something wrong with you. To be weird, is to be outside of what was expected of you. This may be something you are familiar with. The outsider is something we, as a collective part of humanity, have always tried to deal with. The notion that we are weird, and therefore somehow outside of society, and unwanted, is strong. If you do not fit in, then you must be fixed. This can be especially strong in collectivist cultures, where being outside the norm may even be considered selfish.
However, what if the concept of weird, was not bad at all? What if the act of being weird, was actually a powerful and radical act of controlling one’s destiny? In this article, we will learn how to wyrd the self, that is, we will learn how to use basic tools to decolonize((Colonization is when a dominant group or system takes over culture and society from other groups. This may involve taking land, physical and mental violence, systemic injustice, and forcing people to only follow the colonizer’s way of life. When one decolonizes something, they are trying to undo the long lasting harm colonization has done. In this article, we are attempting to decolonize ourselves by rejecting a mythical norm. In this meaning decolonize means that we will learn how to press the proverbial restart button. What if we could be the being we truly want to be without the confines of society’s rigid interpretation of who we must be?)) the body and search for liberation from internalized oppression using navigational play. In simple terms, by learning to steer for liberation, and to engage in deep reflection after a larp, we may end up finding a version of ourselves who we want to be, rather than who society tells us we must be. This article is a condensed and rewritten take on my Master’s Degree thesis, Playing to Create Ourselves: Exploring Larp and Visual Autoethnographic Practice as a Tool of Self Liberation for Marginalized Identities (Kemper 2018).
What is Wyrding?
The word weird has its root in the Anglo Saxon word, wyrd, which roughly boils down to the action of controlling one’s fate. To be weird, is to control one’s fate, rather than let society determine your place and fate. To be weird, is to be outside the normal aspects of society, yes, but to also collectively decide who you would like to be, not based on societal pressure. It is my belief that larp affords us the actual ability to wyrd ourselves, that is to shape ourselves and our conceptions of self through play. In her book, The Functions of Role-Playing Games (2010), scholar Sarah Lynne Bowman speaks about role-playing’s ability to allow players to alter parts of their identity by trying on different acts of self hood:
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the process of role-playing lies in the ability to shift personality characteristics within the parameters of the game environment. Games and scenarios allow participants the opportunity to ”try on different hats” of selfhood, experimenting with the adoption of personality characteristics that either amplify or contradict aspects of their primary identities.
Bowman 2010, 127
What this essentially means is that when we role-play, we can completely shift who we are to fit the game. Each game allows us as players to explore the selves we could never be, or that we might have been, depending on how close to home we are playing. Larp then becomes a dressing room where we experiment with different selves that we can try on or take off as it suits us, and it is within this space we might find some of the characteristics we have always wanted to exhibit, but we have been closed off or discouraged from being. A large man may be allowed to be seen as soft and tearful, a woman of color may be able to be seen as smart without someone believing it is unbelievable, and someone who feels outside of the realm of attractiveness may be seen as a sex symbol. When you begin to alter yourself through this type of investigation and play it is taking fate into your own hands.
When one does wyrd the self, they seek out emancipatory bleed, steer for liberation, and investigate themselves through the lens of play. What follows below, is a practical tool for using larp as an investigation tool, integrating those discoveries into your life, and a suggestion for the ethics of doing so.
The Mythical Norm, Internalized Oppression, and Internalized Bias
Before we go further, it is important to understand the concept of marginalized is larger than we have come to believe, and that these tools and theories are here to liberate all peoples, regardless of their station in life. While the word ‘marginalized’ may be commonly used to describe those populations who are often at the risk of the most oppression, it is important to understand that most people are both the oppressed and the oppressor. It is an uncomfortable thought to sit with, as it makes you aware that no matter how oppressed you may be, you still have the power to oppress others. Even people who face an extreme set of marginalizations (people of color/racialized populations and gender and sexual minorities) can still have the ability to oppress others.
This can be best summed up by Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Friere, who explained what he believed the true goal of liberation in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Frieire writes:
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.
Freire 1968/2014, 541
Freire is saying that even though oppressors may do things that oppress others, they themselves are stuck in the same destructive cycles, and the only way to break them is to notice that we are all stuck inside of them. For example: A person who belongs in an ethnic minority may still have English as a first language, and can then take space of those who do not speak the language fluently. At home, this player is routinely oppressed by their government and culture. However, they are a native English speaker, and never have to worry about conveying what they want to say in a larp. The player realizes this, and attempts to remember this while playing, which leads them to being far more egalitarian in play. They must notice their behavior, and seek to change themselves.
By freeing yourself, you free your oppressor and encourage them to break their social binding roles. Wyrding the self, is grounded in an intersectional theory of self, and so must sit with our messy definitions and recognitions of oppression. This tool is just as easy to use and accessible to a white, European, cis-gendered, hetreosexual man. Why? It is because it is my belief that society oppresses all individuals in ways that may be unseen, and if we want liberation, then we must also liberate those who oppress us because they are oppressed just like us, through the mythical norm.
The concept of the mythical norm comes from intersectional theorist and poet, Audre Lorde, who defines it in her essay, “Age, Race, Class and Sex” when she states:
Somewhere on the edge of consciousness, there is something I call the mythical norm. Which each one of in our hearts knows, “that is not me”. In America this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is within this norm that the trappings of power reside in this society.
Lorde 2015, 116
Identities like Western European, English speaking, cisgender, able bodied, and neurotypical are all things commonly seen as the mythical norm. In each of our societies, the norm goes even further, oppressing more and more people, and setting up those people to oppress others.
Our primary identity is constructed and shaped by our culture and the mythic norm. When one lies outside that norm, they find that their primary identity is complex and intersectional. Sometimes you do not even need an outside oppressor to harm you, as your own thoughts and feelings can hold you back. You believe you cannot do something because you are not “the type” to do it. This is called internalized oppression. For example, if you do not go in for the sexy Goddess role because you believe you are too fat, and no one can believe a fat goddess, this is internalized oppression. Similarly, if you do not go for a leadership role because you think your English is not as good as others, and you’re worried no one will listen to you.
With internalized oppression, we only see ourselves as not normal, as the other outside of the mythic norm, and we uphold that unconsciously. By continuing to stay in these roles, we uplift the very oppression that can pull us down.
In addition to internalized oppression, we have internalized biases that stop us from playing as fully, and impacts our co-players as we are engaging in their oppression. Here are some examples: A woman who is playing a leader is never listened to by her war council, despite being cast as the most knowledgeable warrior who they are supposed to listen to. Someone in their 60s is considered too unattractive to be seductive, despite the fact that their character is seductive.
If we hold ourselves captive to these internalized myths of who we can never be, how then do we break it? We can do this through consciously telling our own stories and creating our own selves. With larp, you have the power to live your own stories and put them to action in your body. In larp, we find yet another realization that stories have the power to liberate.
Emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2016) is the feeling of liberation that comes from being able to fight back against or succeed against a systematic oppression, or allows you to notice those things that have held you back. For example, when a male player who was routinely bullied as a child for being emotional, plays a character who has the ability to freely share that emotion without being bullied for it. Or when a player notices that they are no longer afraid of speaking their mind at the office, or taking up space in public, after playing a person in charge at a larp.
Capturing Story, Narrative, and Plot
How can we capture what has happened during a larp? According to larp theorist Johanna Koljonen (2008), when a larp is over, it ceases to exist, and it is hard to pin down the narrative. In order to understand the importance of stories and narratives in relation to wyrding the self, we will be using the definition of story, plot, and narrative as defined by designer and scholar Simon Brind (2016). His definition of stories and narratives allows you to see how the fluidity and temporality of larp as well as how you may progress through it. Plot is the larpwrights plan for what is going to happen in the larp, Story is what is actually happening during runtime, and narrative is the events that have taken place and described after the fact.
A larp follows an overall plot conceit (i.e. we are all in a forest in a magical land, we are all at wizard school, we are all at the dinner table) and then the players take the designer’s plot and structure, and turn it into a co-created story, which is ephemeral in nature, and becomes the narrative when it is all done.
Since the narrative of the larp is only decided after the larp has taken place, it is fairly personal to each player. Therefore, each instance of play is a fleeting moment in time which can never be recreated exactly. The narrative of the larp lies in the mind of each player, and that narrative becomes their embodied experience. The story you create with your co-players evolves moment to moment with player interactions and choices, each person bringing themselves and the fiction to life. While the larpwrights may have ideas about how a larp ends, it is generally up to you as a player to get there, even if the larp ends in a specific conceit.
How can we contextualize our own experiences if they are hard to document and the narrative is not created until after everything has happened? You will need a set of reflexive tools to help you remember and contextualize your experience, and since the co-creation of the story ends up in many individual narratives, I believe that larp experience can be best suited to be investigated from the personal, which is why we use autoethnographic techniques.
We know that the narrative of a larp is not the plot of the larp, nor is it the story. The story is what happens during the larp, and the narrative we can investigate is not apparent until the end. This means you must create a record of your stages of play and actions as a character. This is something you may already do after many games. You may write up what happened to you during the game, or give your character’s story an epilogue. This is often bundled into a narrative write up, which can then serve as an autoethnographic set of data we can investigate. A visual ethnography is a study of a people done in media, namely photographs, ephemera, and videos, and autoethnography is a self-study of a group you may be in. These two combined approaches may help you to explore your experiences.
A visual autoethnography allows you to capture as much of your experience as possible, like ephemera and narrative epilogues or write ups, and then use those to reflect on who you played. You may already be taking pictures and documenting your ephemera, and you may even practice reflexive writing every time you share narratives of your game.
When we write reflexively, we do not just look inside the magic circle with this approach, we look inside ourselves, inside the character, and inside the greater world. This reflexivity is what gives us the ability to see into ourselves. Social scientists, Tony Adams, Stacey Jones, and Carolyn Ellis (2014, 103) define reflexivity in Autoethnography Understanding Qualitative Research, “Reflexivity includes both acknowledging and critiquing our place and privilege in society and using the stories we tell to break long-held silences on power, relationships, cultural taboos, and forgotten and/or suppressed experiences.” By allowing ourselves to pin down the narrative and then look at it and compare it to our lives, we can potentially see where our fantasies lie within our realities.
Navigational Play
When we choose to wyrd the self, what we are actually doing is engaging in something I have termed, navigational play (Kemper 2018). The main purpose of navigational play is to try and see yourself outside the bounds of the mythic norm. Instead of constantly inhabiting your own oppressive world, you can use a self-exploratory, liberatory play style, that allows you to feel free of or investigate a particular marginalization. Navigational play is the act of steering yourself during the full process of a larp, to seek emancipatory bleed and consists of two components, steering for liberation and reflective writing.
When you steer, you are making in-character decisions based on out of game reasons (Montola, Stenros, & Saitta 2015), and thus steering for liberation is the act of seeking liberatory experiences through steering. Reflective writing is the act of looking at and writing about how your experiences relate to fictional situations, in our case, our larp experiences. In order for us to reflect on our narrative, we have to remember what our larp experience was. Using ephemera, pre larp writing activities, and creating a narrative write up, will create an artifact that we can then explore reflexively.
In order to steer for liberation and create an artifact we can then look at reflexively, we have to investigate what we want and need from the larp. By investigating your character and self, at various points of the larp stages you can identify similar oppressions and desires between the character and self. In the next section, we will explore ways to invoke pre-bleed, create ephemera, involve others such as co-players and organizers, as well as touch upon how to take field notes during a larp so you may write reflexively. Chart 1 roughly explains how each step may be achieved during various stages of a larp.
Pre-Larp
During Larp
Post Larp
Explore Character
If characters are pre-written, and not created by you, attempt to find and ask for casting in relations to the themes of the larp you would like to explore. Look at alibi. What will the larp allow you to do that you otherwise cannot in the real world?Explore relationships the character has to others. What are the similarities and differences?
How does this character connect to you? Think about their name and history, what can you add to it to make it personal? How are they different? Which of the larp’s themes feel most important to play on? Are there parts of yourself that you would like to think about and bring into play? Are there themes you would like to play on that the larp and the character explores?
Investigate the character. Which proverbs, virtues and values, rituals, mentors, and artifacts mean the most to you? To them? What if anything is in common or dissimilar to your lived experience? To your latent or obvious fantasies? Visualize the self.
What feels interesting to the character in the play space? Who would they be drawn to throughout their story? What rituals, social mores etc. are they seeking to break, embrace, or understand?
What in the end were the similarities and differences to you and the character?Using your narrative write up, or field notes re-investigate the character and their narrative. Compare and contrast which proverbs, virtues and values, rituals, mentors, and artifacts mean the most to you after play.
What means the most to the character?
What if anything is in common or dissimilar to your lived experience?
To your latent or obvious fantasies? Visualize the narrative self and the personal.
Identify Themes and Exploration
Identify similar themes and oppressions between the character and yourself if they are prewritten. If the character is self-written identify themes you may want to explore now that you have alibi.If the character is pre-written and feels unplayable ask for a new casting or write changes and ask for them to be implanted within reason.
Asking that your character bring in their ethnic heritage in a larp about going to a barbecue is reasonable, asking your character to be changed to a Martian in a game about the Crusades is not. To break the fiction premise radically when that will harm others’ games can throw off other players who are seeking to explore their own oppression or simply play. This would be a critical breach of ingroup social mores and unethical.
Steer for optimal play experience of the themes chosen. Notice any behaviors you are replicating for better or worse. Notice who you gravitate towards. Steer for relationships and situations you have the alibi for. Look for situations that uphold narrative cohesion and satisfy your steering goals. Attempt fearlessness. Attempt exploration. Remember Alibi.If you are engaging in oppression play, be aware of intersecting identities and that oppression does not occur in a vacuum. Respect safety mechanisms.
Go through your write up and look for replicated behaviors that tie into your personal life. Evaluate your steering in comparison to what you looked for. What stopped you? What encouraged you?What relationships did you gravitate towards? What roles did you enact that either broke or upheld the oppressive behaviors you sought to dismiss? What roles or people did you gravitate towards in order to feel liberation?
Were there mentors?
Did anything unusual happen that you weren’t prepared for? Did you stop yourself from doing something you wanted, or engaged in behavior that you don’t enjoy?
Writing/Recording
Flesh out Character through fiction or poetry writing. If this is not possible, ask yourself questions about your character. Where are they from, what do they like? Seek to make them as whole as possible.If possible, explore co-writing with established relationships in the larp.
Take pictures of your costume choices, create a Pinterest board, or organize thoughts and feelings with music or art.
Take notes during the larp or shortly thereafter. Diegetic notes and diaries are preferable. Write or draw ephemera as much as you can. Save notes.If allowed, take photos of spaces and people that mean things to your character.
Gain informed consent from the larp runners and other participants.
Create a narrative write up that focuses and centers your player experience in character. When you are ready to investigate the larp from your personal non-character point of view, attempt to find common themes in how you played. Look for moments that felt particularly poignant. Instead of trying to capture the entire larp, seek to capture what was most important to the character in the moment.Write the narrative write up in any creative format that makes you feel the most comfortable. Use annotations and footnotes to add in self reflections.
Ephemera
Using the character concept, design and think about the costuming, props, notes, and other things that may be important to your character. If the larp is short and you cannot create props consider creating in-game ephemera. If you are playing close to home, explore using personal objects to immerse yourself. Pictures of family and friends, your own wardrobe, etc.
Take photos, write letters, create props, collect important objects that are useful for your character and provoke a sense of missing. Ephemera created during the story period often has significant meanings.
Take photos of all of the ephemera collected. Sort through character portraits and other in game ephemera. What ephemeral artifacts can you explore?Save official game documents given to you by the organizer. How did the structure of the larp help? Hinder? What does the ephemera mean to the character? Are there similarities between the ephemera you collected at the player and you collected as the character?
Identifying Oppressions and Desires
The first part of liberatory steering, is to think of what you want to accomplish or explore within the magic circle of the larp’s plot. Not every larp is useful for exploring yourself in this way, and you can save yourself a lot of trouble by looking at playstyle, length of time, tone, and overall larp culture. A larp that allows you to play a role that can challenge your perceptions of yourself and the world, is a good candidate, as is one where the larp culture allows you to make more choices about what happens to your character. You should avoid forcing yourself to play on themes that deeply distress you, are not in the spirit or theme of the larp, and would affect the play of your co-players to the detriment of the game.
For example: A player has two options of larps. One is a larp about an unequal society that murders lower class people, and the coming revolution. The other is a larp about wealthy nobles and their servants in 1918. The player who is from a lower class background, would like to experience what it would be like to successfully rebel against the upper class, so they choose the first larp as it would provide more opportunity to rebel and succeed than the larp in which most of their play is in subservience to others.
If the characters are prewritten, you can try to select a character that may allow you to achieve your desires by applying for characters, groups, or requesting certain themes be written heavily into the character. If the characters are created by yourself or tailored to you, then you may ask to play around certain themes and desires in a casting questionnaire. In the former example, you may ask specifically to play a rebel because you want to explore that dynamic. Then if you are cast as such, you can seek to explore how or why you are doing so. After you identify your desires and things that may hold you back, you should then look at the relations your characters have and talk to your fellow co-players.
Talking to Co-Players and Playing to Lift
After casting, but before playing the larp, reaching out to co-players and actually expressing your needs and wants for the game is a challenging but necessary step. You can divulge what themes you are thinking of playing on more heavily, and ask your co-player if there are any themes they might want to play on. Asking questions of your co-players, even quickly, can help you both steer for the type of game you both would like to achieve. When you seek to share responsibility like this, you are also engaging in what designer and theorist Susanne Vejdemo (2018) calls, playing to lift. Vejdemo defines this as by saying, “Play to Lift means that the responsibility for your drama and your character also rests on all your co-players. You have to lift each other.” By talking to your co-players you can work to create a game that allows you to steer towards your desires together, and seek to help them in creating drama and interesting play that will lift them as well as yourself.
Depending on the length of the larp, you can also go on to create connections with your co-players that can be as easy as choosing to be siblings who support each other to many pages of back stories with intricate details. This is done in larps that have or allow pre-play, which is the act of writing or engaging with players in character before the larp. This type of relationship building can lead to something called pre-bleed (Svanevik and Brind 2016), which is very useful for getting into character. Pre-bleed is usually conceived of as an activity between two or more players, but it does not necessarily require a co-player.
Larps may set up chat groups where in character dialogue may happen, players may write stories between their connected characters that happen before the larp, and various other methods which deepen character connection.
Here are some ways to invoke pre-bleed:
Writing a series of short fiction pieces with another player or a group of players that flesh out the world of the larp before the larp happens.
Writing a short story for yourself about your character’s relation to a key theme of the larp.
Creating a piece of ephemera that you will use heavily during the larp, such as a personalized handkerchief or other item.
Exploring the topic of the larp through research.
Creating a playlist of songs to listen to that reminds you of your character.
Creating a mood board that captures the character’s home, wants, and desires.
Actions You Can Take Inside of the Larp
By carefully choosing your larp based on what experiences, tone, and theme you will embody, you can set yourself up for better results. Look out for opportunities to experience things you may never get to do so in your daily life. If, for example, you never got the experience of finishing your studies, you could choose to play a high achieving and successful student in a school larp. Even if you did not overcome what stopped you from finishing in your actual courses, you may feel as if you overcame them within the larp.
Here are some examples of actions to take during play:
If an action is prohibited for someone of your social rank, do it.
If an activity is something you wouldn’t be expected to do, do it.
If a style is something you have been prohibited from wearing because people like you are not allowed, wear it.
If your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation usually prohibits you from owning something, buy it.
Creating Ephemera and Reflexive Writing
When a larp ends, what do you have left as a participant? Perhaps some photos, your costume, a vague narrative you remember, lots of ephemera and…not much else. It is hard to be reflexive about your experience if you do not have a memory of what happened. How then, as a player can you investigate your experience after it is over? One way is by creating and writing about ephemera, things that are primarily used for a larp and typically discarded or recycled.
Larps may produce a surprising amount of ephemera. Ephemera are generally objects that have limited use, like concert tickets, or a show program. However, within larp’s ephemeral nature, ephemera becomes a unique way to bond player to character.
Within an autoethnography of larp participation, a player who carefully chooses, creates, documents, and uses reflection in regard to their ephemera may be able to immerse themselves deeper into their character, use ephemera in liberational steering, and document an otherwise transitory medium.
Here are a few examples of ephemera you can keep and later investigate:
A letter sent to your character from another character that is important to you both.
A prop that your character always carried or used frequently during the larp.
A homework assignment, poem, or plan drawn up by your character or others.
Costume pieces like identifying badges, sweaters, and any other piece that firmly reminds you of an experience.
Photos taken in character by an in character photographer.
After the larp is over, you can begin to look at each ephemera and write down your reactions to them and what they mean to you as the character and/or the player. This connects the character to the self. Interrogate and reflect on how the character and the self connect:
Why is this object important to the character or myself?
What do I feel when I touch it?
Why did I keep it?
Have I ever owned anything like it? Why or why not?
Have I continued to use it out of character?
Have I used it for multiple characters?
Where does it live when I’m not this character?
By answering these questions you may begin to see the connections between yourself and the character. For example, perhaps you choose to explore a series of notes passed in class by your player, and realize that you were too nervous to pass notes when you were in school yourself. Passing notes made you feel daring, and you particularly enjoyed it in the larp, because you never got the opportunity to do so before.
When you write this down, you may develop a sense of why you play the way you do, or whether you actually explored the desires and oppressions you wanted to. However, this reflexive insight must still be put in context of the narrative.
Taking Field Notes at Larps
For our purposes, field notes within larp are observations by players about their larp experience as it is happening and is collected into a field journal. There is no one way to write a narrative field journal, but having one if a larp allows it, can provide a valuable tool in searching for the transformation of self through immersion and examining bleed. A diegetic journal is also an ephemeral artifact that allows the player to connect to the character’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. You can use this journal to write a summation of your narrative write up, which you can then look at reflexively. Those who write them often turn their larp experience into pleasurable reading and a document of play.
Here are some tips for taking practical field notes during larps:
Focus not on other’s experience, but your own. Avoid writing what you wish happened, and stay truthful to your own experience and your co-players actions.
Just as a character might take a diary, and note what happened, try and write what happened during the day.
Note who your most important relationships are, what is occurring around you, and how your character is reacting to it.
If you are in a short larp or are not able to write much, consider writing up your character’s feelings in a letter to yourself while the larp is still fresh.
Do not spend too much time trying to remember everything that has happened, but the key experiences, beliefs, issues, and rituals the character engaged in.
Do not stop other’s play in order to record a conversation. Feel free to go out of play to a separate space to record important moments immediately, if you fear forgetting.
Do not write more than you play.
When you are done writing, you can then begin to be reflexive. Give yourself time and space before looking at what you wrote. When you are ready, use the following questions as a sample guide to begin investigating your experience while rereading:
Are there memories that remind you of your actual self?
Did you associate with characters or players that you you, yourself would or that you wished you could interact with?
Did you avoid people your character wouldn’t have? Why do you think so?
Is there something you overcame?
Was there something you felt stopping you from playing as you would have liked? Was it yourself? Design? Your co-players?
Did you notice moments of internalized bias towards yourself or others? If you did, what did you do about it?
Do you recognize habits that you do as yourself that you did in character?
Do you recognize any habits you always wished you had? Did you end up taking home any of these habits? Have you retained them?
Do you have any regrets about what you did or didn’t do? Why?
Retyping your narrative in a word processor and then placing your reflective writing answers as footnotes can be particularly helpful to seeing the separation between self and character. You may begin to see clear threads about your own desires and oppressions, and notice patterns in your play style over time. This can help you choose which larps you may enjoy, and which larps you can steer away from, as well as what you may take away. For example like this:
Field Note: After the battle meeting, I realized that the power I channeled during a previous ritual had been inside me all along.
Footnote to the Field Note:
After the larp I realized that I was more assertive at work than I normally am. I’ve been speaking up at a lot more meetings now then I used to, and I think it comes from this moment. I should really pick more larps where I have a leading role.
Ethics
While you should absolutely be using larp and a navigational play style in order to seek emancipatory bleed and investigate our own relationships to trauma and internalized oppressions, we cannot do this in a vacuum. Larp is a co-created medium, and while we may want to use it for our own liberation, our liberation cannot come at the cost of others. While our narratives in a larp are individual, our stories are not so easily cut off. Much like our actual lives, your co-players do play a role. Anthropologist Heewon Chang (2008) in her book Autoethnography as Method reminds us that we must be aware of the role of others in our research and outlines some practices I believe are also important when thinking of a larp autoethnography:
Strangers can be connected to self through group membership or common experiences, if not through personal contacts. In autoethnography, self and others may be positioned in different ways. You can consider three possibilities. First, you can investigate yourself as a main character and others as supporting actors in your life story. Second, you can include others as co-participants or co-informants in your study. Third, you can study others as the primary focus, yet also as an entry to your world.
Chang 2008, 65
It is preferred to position yourself as the main character and your co-players as supporting characters in your own personal narrative. You must be aware though, that your narrative in no way is the only narrative of the larp, and even your closest co-player may have had a radically different experience. We must consider how we involve our co-players in the practice of our write ups and our play. We must take care to not misrepresent them, even though it may make for better fiction. The goal is liberation for yourself, not at the expense of others. In the cases of autoethnographies that are published for ingroup pleasure as well ones published for player-researcher means, I argue the following two approaches based on Chang’s above suggestions:
First, focus only about your character’s experience of the world, making sure to keep all of your co-players anonymous as possible. In this way, you center your own experience over others’ in the write up, but not in play. In play, you should strive to be as generous as you would if you were not steering for emancipatory bleed. Your liberation should not come at the expense of others’ play.
2. Involve your co-players in the writing and steering process. Making a collaborative larp autoethnography would be an excellent way to involve all of your players and help each other to dissect facets of the character you might have missed. Imagine if an entire faction took turns writing mission reports that served as a diary for that group during game.
We must never put our liberation over co-player’s experience, and that means we must not steer ourselves in the play space to disrupt a larp when it would negatively impact others who may play. We must take into context the ethics of consequence (Etherington 2007) and the benefit of self. If you are writing something solely for your own discovery, this is less cumbersome as no one else outside of the group will see or read it. If, however, you chose to use it in your own research, then you must practice process consent (Ellis 2007) namely, you must check in with those who you have played and who appear in the work to see if they are still willing to take part. If the answer is no, then you must keep your narrative to the ingroup community or to yourself.
An autoethnography that is kept purely for the discovery of self and never shared is still as valuable as anything that may be published. It is the act of reflection, not the publishing where liberation lies. Here are some things you can do with a finished autoethnographic larp write up:
You can share it with your co-players.
You can look over it with a trained mental health professional.
You can keep it for yourself, and reread it comparing it to other write ups and finding clear patterns in how and why you play the way you do.
Conclusion
Wyrding the self is the sustained effort to decolonize your body from the mythical norm, and begin the process of identity alteration. This alteration can be a direct result of experiencing emancipatory bleed that you may be able to achieve through navigational play which involves the acts of reflexive writing and steering for liberation.
The ability to wyrd the self lies in a player’s desire to do the reflective work that is necessary for decolonization. It is not easy, and requires pre-planning and commitment to co-create narratives collectively with your co-players while seeking liberation. While this tool has been created with those who face systematic marginalization in mind, the ability to investigate how you played the larp, and it’s relation to your own life has been immensely helpful to larpers who are interested in playing for transformative purposes. Recording your actions during a larp, transcribing it, and then investigating your play by comparing it to some of the questions you may ask yourself, can allow you to see internalized biases or oppressions that can hold you back in your day to day life. As long as you do not push your narrative and experience to be more important than your co-players, I believe this too can be used to see and cultivate a community of transformative larp practice. When you seek to wyrd the self, you create a more resilient self by seeing yourself as truly want to be, not what you have been molded to be by a mythical norm.
Sarah Lynne Bowman (2010): The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. Jefferson: McFarland.
Heewon Chang (2016): Autoethnography as Method. Routledge.
Paulo Freire (1968/2014): Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Jonaya Kemper (2018): Playing to Create Ourselves: Exploring Larp and Visual Autoethnographic Practice as a Tool of Self Liberation for Marginalized Identities (Unpublished Master’s Thesis). New York University, Gallatin Graduate School.
