Nordic Larp

Category: Theory

  • Larp Design Glossary

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    Larp Design Glossary

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    The original version of this glossary was published in the 2019 book Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences.

    360° illusion
    Larp design idea where what you see is what you get. The environment is perceived as authentic, everything works as it should affording participants to engage in authentic activity for real, and participants perform immersive role-play.
    Act (noun)
    A segment of the larp runtime that has some kind of thematic unity, comparable to an act in a play.
    Act break
    The breaks between runtime when runtime is divided into acts. Often used to pause, reflect, and calibrate play.
    Agency
    The capacity of a participant or a character to act in a meaningful manner in a given environment, to have the possibility to impact the proceedings.
    Alibi
    The things that enable a person to (role-)play and to do things they would never do in everyday life while in character. Alibi is value neutral (“It says so in the character description”) and can be used in a positive (“We have all agreed to explore these themes together in a physical way”) or a negative way (“I was drunk at the time”).
    Amusement park design
    In the context of larp design this means creating a larp where there are pre-planned ‘rides’, story units, for the characters to explore.
    Bespoke design
    Approaching every larp as a new work and designing everything from scratch. As opposed to either iterating on a local tradition, or using the same larp system, such as Mind’s Eye Theatre, in multiple larps.
    Blackbox
    A genre of larp played with minimalist setting, with carefully curated props, and controlled light and sound. Often played in theatre black boxes. A room in a longform larp devoted to acting out scenes out of temporal sequence is also sometimes called blackbox, although a better term for that is meta room.
    Bleed
    When the feelings of the character impact on the participant, or vice versa.
    Blockbuster larp
    Longform larp that targets an international audience, features an expensive venue, high participation fee, and is hyped before and after. They usually have a high concept idea, often based on existing intellectual property. Originally, the term was critical of this type of larps.
    Boffer
    A padded weapon. Historically made out of foam covered with duct tape, nowadays often made out of latex.
    Boffer larp
    A larp where fighting modeled with boffers is a central feature.
    Briefing
    The part of the event before runtime where designers instruct participants about the larp.
    Calibration
    Negotiations relating to playstyle and personal boundaries, usually between participants.
    Campaign
    A pre-planned series of larps set in the same fictional world where events from one larp impact events in another.
    Chamber larp
    Shorter larps, with their length measured in hours, often taking place in a small venue and with participants in single or low double digits. Low demands for scenography and costuming make chamber larps easier to package and restage.
    Character
    The fictional persona a participant portrays during runtime. Sometimes also used to refer to the character description that is an inspiration for the character actually played.
    Character alibi
    The alibi provided by portraying a character.
    Character description
    The material on which a participant bases their performance of a character during runtime. Usually takes the form of text describing character background, motivation, goals, and contacts. In some traditions these can be very long and individually tailored, in others they are not used at all.
    Close to home
    Playing with themes, situation, experiences, or personae that one is very familiar with from everyday life.
    Collaborative-style
    Larps that have no victory condition and encourage participants to share and co-create, rather than conceal information and best each other.
    Competitive-style
    Larps in which there is a victory condition that only limited numbers of participants can achieve.
    Consent, physical
    Permission for something physical (e.g. relating to intimacy or roughness) to happen. Can be withheld at any time.
    Consent, story
    Permission to do something particularly impactful to another participant’s character (e.g. give permission to another participant that they can kill your character).
    Content larp
    A style of larp, predominantly Czech, primarily focused on pre-written and tightly structured plot content created by the design team.
    Debrief
    Larpmaker organised post-runtime event, where participants and designers talk about what they just did together. Can be structured or relatively free-flowing. Usually the goal is to put the runtime in perspective, to share stories, or to meet the other participants without the masks the characters provide.
    Decompression
    The cooldown period after the runtime of a larp, when the participant is leaving the fiction and the character behind, and gearing up to return to everyday life outside the larp. Sometimes also called aftercare.
    De-roling
    The process by which a participant divests themselves of the physical embodiment of their character, often used as a method to attempt to prevent or reduce bleed.
    Designable surface
    Anything that can be changed and made choices about that can impact the experience that is being designed. In larp, everything is a designable surface: the typeface of the website, the soundscape, the interaction patterns, character names, toilet temperature.
    Diegesis
    Things that exist inside of the fiction are part of the diegesis. For example, music during runtime is part of the diegesis if the characters can hear it, and non-diegetic if only the players hear it.
    Diegetic
    Something that exists inside of the fiction is diegetic. In a larp participants can address, react to, and interact with things that are diegetic, without breaking character. See diegesis.
    Director
    A runtime gamemaster who guides play in a very hands-on manner. Basically a freeform gamesmaster in larp.
    Escalation (and de-escalation)
    The process of incrementally increasing or decreasing the intensity of a scene to come to the optimal atmosphere for all participants involved. Sometimes there is a specific metatechnique for signalling desired (de)escalation.
    Fate (sometimes skjebne)
    A play instruction for character action that the participant is obliged to follow; occurs in fateplay designs.
    Fateplay
    Prior consent by participants and/or organisers to certain, immutable narrative beats or outcomes. A conscious design decision that presumes that how something happens or someone feels about it happening can be just as interesting to explore as if it happens.
    Freeform (freeform larp, freeform scenario)
    As the name implies, freeform scenarios have no standard form. They typically last a few hours, are usually played without costumes, props, or special lighting in whatever space is available, often feature heavy use of inventive bespoke mechanics and metatechniques, and are sometimes heavily gamemastered. In the Nordic countries, these used to be considered halfway between tabletop role-playing and larps; today, in the international discourse, they are lumped together with larps.
    Gamemaster, runtime
    A runtime story facilitator for a larp, keeping track of plot flow, solving narrative problems, and, if applicable, making rule-system calls. Sometimes but not always one of the larpwrights.
    Herd competence
    The amount of competence in the ensemble of participants. Running a larp for a group of participants where some have prior experience is much easier than running a larp for a group with only beginners. If there is enough experience in the room, beginners can learn by following the example set by more experienced participants.
    Immersion
    A term with multiple meanings, usually relating to how far the participant is engaged with the fiction of the larp. One common usage is in the sense of character immersion, that is, the participant experiencing the diegetic world through the eyes and mind of the character. Sometimes the word is used to mean immersion into the setting or the milieu, as in 360° illusion, or even engagement with the story as in narrative immersion.
    Ingame
    Things that happen during runtime and are true within the world of the larp.
    Inter-immersion
    In a larp, a participant is pretending to be a character, but is also pretending that everyone else is their character. The feedback from the other participants enhances the character immersion, creating a cycle called inter-immersion.
    Jeepform
    A specific tradition of freeform role-playing mostly coming from Sweden and Denmark. See jeepen.org.
    Knutepunkt (also Knutpunkt, Knudepunkt, Solmukohta, KP)
    Annual conference devoted to larp and larp design traveling between Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland that began in Oslo in 1997. The name of the event always reflects the local language. The whole tradition is discussed under the original, Norwegian name.
    Larp crush
    An infatuation with another participant, or maybe just their character, that a player develops during runtime due to playing a romance with them. See also bleed.
    Larpmaker
    All the people responsible for the creation of a larp, both in production and in content.
    Larp script
    All the materials (character documents, rules, venue requirements, etc.) created by the designer that are needed to run a larp.
    Larp system
    A set of rules for larping if they can be separated from the individual larp, i.e. multiple larps are run with the same system of rules. Some larps use complex rule mechanics to explain what characters can and cannot do, and those rules can be printed as books. This is the opposite of bespoke rules.
    Larpwright
    The author(s) of a larp. The person or group who defines the larp’s vision, world, workshop structure, characters, etc. A synonym for larp designer from an era before game studies terminology colonised larp discourse. Also, a person who creates larps.
    Longform larp
    Larps that last a full day or several days, possibly with act breaks between different parts, with full scenography and participants in full costumes.
    Magic circle
    Metaphor for the separate space of playing. The time and space of the larp, in which characters are played and different rules apply than normal; upheld by a social contract.
    Mechanics
    In larps where the skills of the characters are important, and they are markedly different from those of the participants, these actions are expressed through replacements that simulate things that are impossible, undesired, or too intimate (e.g. violence and sex). In some traditions, mechanics imply points, levels or other numerical systems representing skills.
    Meta room
    A dedicated room in a longform larp devoted to acting out scenes out of temporal sequence. Often features a runtime gamemaster. Sometimes also called a blackbox.
    Metareflection
    The player reflecting on character actions or the fictional situation, switching between the fictive frame and the metareflexive frame.
    Metatechnique
    Mechanics that allow participants to communicate player to player about their characters, without breaking play. Metatechniques are commonly employed to let participants share their character’s inner thoughts or motivations, or to let participants together establish things about their characters’ shared history and relationship.
    Mixing Desk of Larp
    A theory of larp design, guiding the designer to make conscious decisions between contradictory virtues of larp design. It consists of a series of faders, such as transparency-secrecy, illustrating that a typical larp cannot feature both high transparency and many secrets.
    Narrative
    Narrative is what you are left with after the larp is done, when participants look back on the plot, the story, and the character actions and try to answer the question “what happened in this larp”. The narrative is the choice of events included, and the way they are related to each other, when a story is told. The narrative of a larp continues to change long after the larp has ended.
    Narrative design
    All design choices made in the service of enabling participants to tell stories.
    NPC
    The acronym is short for non-player character. It refers to a character who follows the larp designer or runtime gamemaster’s instructions. NPCs are typically played by organisers, or a crew dedicated to this purpose. NPCs can be present for the whole duration of the larp, or appear only briefly. The term was inherited from tabletop role-playing games.
    Offgame
    Participant activities or utterances outside of both the larp’s diegesis as well as the play of the larp itself.
    One-shot
    A larp designed to be stand-alone and not part of a series of connected larps like a campaign.
    Opt-in
    An instance of choosing to participate in something.
    opt-in design
    Designing in a way where participants have to actively choose to participate in certain aspects or design elements of the larp.
    Opt-out
    An instance of choosing not to participate in something.
    Opt-out design
    Designing in a way that presupposes participation in certain aspects or design elements of the larp, where participants have to actively choose not to participate.
    Organiser
    A person who is at least in part responsible for making sure the larp runs. This can include logistics work as well as runtime gamemastering and other activities.
    Paralarp
    The practices, designs, and texts surrounding the runtime to enable the playing of that larp.
    Playstyle calibration
    Participants or gamemasters communicating beforehand about the desired playstyle of a scene or larp. This type of calibration is not about the content, but about how the participants approach larp in general and to find common ground: physical or not physical, slow or fast paced, very emotionally intense or with levity.
    Plot
    Sequences of narrative events pre-planned by the larp designers, for example in the form of intrigues written into the character descriptions giving characters motivations for actions during the larp.
    Post-play activities
    Any activities undertaken after the official runtime of a larp.
    Pre-written
    Created prior to the run of the larp; often implies that the elements of the larp have been consciously designed and intentionally related to each other.
    Producer
    Person or persons responsible for the physical production and logistics of a larp.
    Role
    A collection of legible social behaviours in a given social position. Everyone plays numerous roles (customer, larper, offspring), both out of the larp and within a larp as a character.
    Rules-light
    Containing few enough rules that the larp can be learned instantly by a novice and that these few rules can be recalled on the spot with little difficulty.
    Run (noun)
    An instance of a full staging and playthrough of a larp. “Some see the first run as a playtest, I see it as a premiere.” (verb) To stage a larp. “We ran House of Cravings last weekend.”
    Runtime
    The allotted time for playing, when characters are being played and the narrative design unfolds.
    Sandbox design
    Sandbox design focuses on providing participants with a playable world that reacts to their input, in which participants can freely bring in or create on-site the plots and the drama they find interesting to play out together.
    Secrecy
    The use of secrecy in larp design is to purposefully prevent participants from knowing things their characters would not know. Common ways to add secrecy are to give participants secret character goals and motivations, and to include surprise happenings during runtime. See also transparency.
    Secrets & powers larp
    North American larp design pattern. Pre-written characters in typically a single-run larp all have often-oppositional goals that they are primarily able to reach by leveraging secrets (hidden information not known to everyone) and powers (game mechanics that permit participants to get other characters to do what their character wishes).
    Setting (a scene)
    The act of framing and describing who is in a scene, what is happening, and where it is taking place. Hitting particular themes or emotional overtones is particularly desirable.
    Status line exercises
    An abstract larp exercise in which participants physically queue up in order to demonstrate and visualise where their characters lie on a specific status continuum. Examples include oldest to youngest, most powerful to least powerful, or degree of agreement with an ideology.
    Story
    Story is created in real time from the moment the larp begins until the participants are done playing.
    Tabletop
    Role-playing style played verbally, where you do not act out your character’s actions, but instead narrate them.
    Theme
    The theme of a larp is what the larp is about, in contrast to what happens at the larp. Setting clear themes for a larp informs participants about the desired tone and playstyle of the larp, and affects what participants expect they might be likely to experience. Larps divided into acts often have different themes for each act.
    Transparency
    The use of transparency in larp design is to purposefully let participants know things their characters would not know. Common ways to add transparency are to let participants read more pre-written characters than just their own, to divide the larp into acts with announced themes, or to tell participants what is going to happen during the larp before it starts. See also secrecy.
    Workshop
    The workshop is a structured period of exercises that your participants will do before the start of runtime, to familiarise themselves with each other and the larp mechanics, enabling them to play together. Typically done on-site before runtime.

    Cover photo by Massi Hannula, used with permission.

  • High Resolution Larp Revisited

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    High Resolution Larp Revisited

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    Recently I rediscovered one of my absolute favorite texts about larp, “High Resolution Larping: Enabling Subtlety at Totem and Beyond” by Andie Nordgren. Now, eleven years after it was written, it is a topic well worth returning to.

    In the article, Nordgren introduces the concept of high resolution larps as a way of trying to understand the larps Mellan himmel och hav (English: Between Heaven and Sea) (Wieslander et al 2003) and Totem (Andreasen 2007). Mellan himmel och hav was a science fiction game exploring gender, sexuality, and relationships inspired by the writing of Ursula K. Le Guin (Stenros 2010). Totem explored the life of a post-apocalyptic tribe as they carried out their traditional coming-of-age rites (Munthe-Kaas 2010). Nordgren found both of these games to be were powerful, fulfilling experiences. The question she asked herself was, why? The larp community at the time did not have a terminology to describe what made these games special.

    The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (book cover image) The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (book cover image)

    High resolution here is an analogy to computer games, in which high resolution is a description of the level of detail in the computer graphics. Nordgren suggests that some larps have higher resolution than others; however, she does not see this as a function of the level of detail of props, character descriptions, etc. Instead, she argues that high resolution games are characterized by high fidelity in two dimensions of play. Firstly, they have a high level of depth (subtlety) in interactions between characters. Secondly, they are able to represent a wide spectrum of the human experience in play. This is defined as width (“High Resolution Larp – Nordic Larp Wiki” n.d.). She presents the game Totem as an example of a high-resolution larp, proposing that “maybe the interaction in the tightly knit tribe at Totem felt so real and powerful because we had managed to create a game world and vision about the game that enabled subtlety across a wide spectrum of possible diegetic interactions.” (p. 91) Her main thesis, as I see it, is that high resolution interactions are (or at least can be) a design feature of a game and not a matter of player skill.

    A term that is often used to describe these types of powerful experiences is immersion. However, the exact definition of this proves difficult to pin down, and varies in use and understanding between traditions (Bowman 2017). In this article I will instead define these powerful experiences as flow-like experiences, as discussed in a larp context by (Hopeametsä 2008):

    “Flow gives a deep sense of enjoyment through the feeling that we are in control of our actions. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the best moments occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is an end in itself: the act of doing is a reward in itself. This is an accurate description of larp experience at its best.“ (p. 190)

    This type of flow-like experience can be found in the heat of combat in a larp focusing on epic battle simulation, or in the glances between lovers in a modern day drama. Different players will seek out different experiences. The strength of the concept of high resolution is that it can be applied equally well in both situations.

    In this article, I attempt to summarize Nordgren’s thoughts on high resolution larp and high resolution interaction, and expand on them, mainly from a designers’ perspective. I argue that the terminology of high vs low resolution interactions is a term that is useful for designers in understanding the games they create. I also discuss the idea that rules in themselves act as affordances of interaction and tools for emergent storytelling, beyond simulation and safety mechanisms. While player skill is likely an important factor in enabling high resolution interaction, it will not be covered in this text.

    Tools for Lowering the Cognitive Load

    Nordgren presents two main tools for achieving high resolution larps: diegetic rules and ensemble play. Diegetic rules are rules that are part of the fictional world and take place within it, i.e. the character and the player both experience the same thing. Ensemble play describes the practice of running communal pre-game workshop where the players co-design the larp.

    I find that both diegetic rules and ensemble play focus on depth of interaction, rather than on the width of interaction. However, these tools implicitly broaden the spectrum of interactions that can be included in the game; they allow the designers of a game to explicitly state which interactions are a part of the game, instead of relying on common culture between the players to dictate it. Both of these tools are commonly used in Nordic larp today. However, the idea of differentiating between low and high resolution larps and interactions seems to have been lost to time.

    The framework presented for the interaction with the game is a three-fold model of person, player, character. The negotiation between these three and the game itself dictates which topics, and interactions are broached in the game. The person exists in the wider social context of real life and takes on the role of a player in the game. The role of player has a certain set of encouraged modes of behaviour as decided by explicit game rules and common culture. Finally, the player embodies a character, which interacts with the diegesis. Nordgren makes the point that the person constantly needs to recognize at which level any interaction during the game is taking place, and that high resolution play emerges when character-to-character interactions are as unambiguous as possible. That means that the player needs to spend less time thinking about at which level an interaction is going on, thus lowering the overall cognitive load. This in turn serves to make the experience feel more immediate.

    Interestingly, the contextualization of experiences during a game as in-character has been indicated to be an important factor in preventing negative bleed-out. The ability of a person to manage their experiences is decided both by their individual capabilities, as well as by the circumstances dictated by the game design (including unforeseen factors). In particular, the cognitive load placed on the player by the game is an important factor here (Leonard and Thurman 2018). However, the purpose of high resolution interactions is a different one. Instead of aiming at acting as a psychological safety mechanism, the purpose is to increase the probability of flow-like experiences. While the two are not mutually exclusive, the intent from a design perspective is different.

    An example of how players need to properly contextualize experiences in a game could be that a person in-front of them is screaming at them. The player needs to decide if the person standing in front of them screaming is doing so in-character or not. Preferably the cognitive load of making that decision should be low enough that the player is free to scream back with gusto (or react in whatever way it would make sense for their character).

    Diegetic Rules

    “We use rules when we cannot trust players to represent a topic inside the game in a safe, coherent way that doesn’t spoil the game. Using diegetic rules is a way of moving these topics back inside the game world rather than excluding them or representing them with rules that are clearly off-game in the player’s head.” (Nordgren 2008)

    As can be seen above, rules are presented as a tool for incorporating topics that would otherwise be risky to represent in games. An example of such a rule is ars amandi. Ars amandi represents sensual situations by touching only the hands, arms, and neck (Wieslander 2004). This interaction can be either diegetic or non-diegetic depending on how it is understood in the game. Hence the distinction of diegetic vs. non-diegetic rules.


    Portraying Love and Trying New Genders, Eliot Wieslander (Nordic Larp Talks)

    The difference between the two lies in whether the player and the characters are experiencing the same thing or not. If the characters experience kissing when the players touch each others’ hands, the hand-touching would constitute a non-diegetic (or simulating) rule. On the other hand, if the fiction of the game is such that touching of the hands would be concidered an erotic act in itself, the discrepancy between the character and player interaction is lessened. For example, in Mellan himmel och hav, touching the arms was erotically charged in the fiction. Thus when players touch each others arms, the player and the character were experiencing the same thing. Nordgren argues that the latter increases the opportunity for high resolution interactions. The reason for this is that it lowers the amount of the players’ mental capacity that has to be spent in interpreting at which level the interaction is occurring.

    The resolution of the interaction is a key here. The strength of a rule like ars amandi is that it allows for the expression of a wide spectrum of interaction, from the shy first kiss of a teenager to the wild orgy of a rock band. Compare this to another common diegetic rule: fighting with boffer weapons. Boffer weapons, at least for the most part, will represent lethal violence. This loses out on a large part of the spectrum of human violent experience. Before cold steel, there are many other forms of violence, often progressing from one to the other: first shoving, on to a fist fight, and finally weapons drawn and used. With this in mind, designers can inspect the interactions in their design, and decide on which parts they want to be of high vs. low resolution.

    Rules Beyond Safety and Simulation

    I am not in complete agreement with Nordgren on the function of rules. I believe that rules in themselves fulfill a wider role than acting as a safety mechanism for the game. The rules in themselves act as affordances of the game, thus encouraging particular modes of behaviour. Introducing boffers into a game increases the probability of there being a fight in the larp. Thus, the rules in themselves have a wider function than acting as a safety or simulation mechanisms.

    Both of the techniques described above tend towards simulation; however, the idea of increasing the fidelity of interaction can also be applied from a narrativistic perspective. An example of such a technique is the use of in-character, monologues as an expression of a character’s thoughts and emotions. While the other characters do not hear what is said, the other players will. Thus, they can steer (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015; Pohjola 2015) their own characters interactions with that character to create the most appealing narrative. In this case, the resolution of the narrative itself, as well as that of individual interactions, increases, as more nuances of the characters’ inner lives come into the light. One game using monologues is A Nice Evening with the Family (Westerling et al. 2007). This game adopts nine theater plays into a larp set in a modern-day upper-class birthday celebration.

    Steering has been introduced mainly as player skill by Montola et al. (2015); however, they also note that it is something that can be more or less encouraged by the design of a game. The example of the monologue above demonstrates how steering can be facilitated through selection of appropriate rules and techniques.

    Rules can also be used in creating emergent narratives. One example of this is the use of acts to divide the time of a game. A Nice Evening with the Family utilizes this rule. In each act, the perfect facade of the happy birthday party, breaks down a bit more, until, in the final act, nothing is kept hidden, and not even murder is out of the question. This way of explicitly stating the narrative structure beforehand lowers the cognitive load of the players in steering for the appropriate interactions in each act. Thus, this structure increases the chance of flow-like experiences.

    I appreciate the aesthetics of diegetic rules over non-diegetic rules, that said, I am not convinced that non-diegetic rules cannot achieve the same effect in terms of facilitating flow-like experience. However, such rules add to the game at the player level, rather than the character level, by providing a context through which players can interpret and steer their characters’ actions. The use of acts, as described above, provides and example of how a non-diegetic rule can facilitate steering. However, my understanding is that Nordgren is trying to articulate what she felt has been special about Totem and Mellan himmel och hav, rather than pass judgement on what is a fulfilling larp experience in general.

    Ensemble Play

    The second tool for enabling high resolution interactions presented by Nordgen is ensemble play. The idea here is that the players, as a group, are taking an active part in designing the game itself, i.e. going through things like communal character creation workshops.

    Nordgren focuses on how ensemble play allow the players to negotiate and strengthen the boundaries of the game. This negotiation of a common understanding of game boundaries has the effect of making diegetic interactions less ambiguous. That is, a player needs to spend less energy deciding which interactions are diegetic and which are not. While this is not specifically addressed in the text, I think it can be argued that a significant part of this strengthening of the game boundaries comes from the establishment of trust between the players. Getting to know everyone out of character prior to the game, as well as the act of collaborative creation, establishes trust within the group. To aid in this, many workshops will contain silly elements. As Nordgren (2007) puts it, “When you have acted like screaming monkeys hunting for mango, everyone has already embarrassed themselves in front of each other, and can afford to take game relationships to a more serious level without any significant risk of further embarrassment.” (p. 96)


    High Resolution Larping, Andie Nordgren (Nordic Larp Talks)

    In a sense, this trust established prior to the game can be seen as a type of currency in the game. This is spent towards ensuring that actions are interpreted at the appropriate level of the game. Returning to the example of a person screaming at you, it is easier to interpret this as an in-character action if you have established a higher level of trust with that player.

    An additional component to ensemble play in the form of pre-game workshops is that they blur the line between designers and players. The extent to which this happens depends on the original design. In some cases the players are asked to create a large part of the fiction, from details about the world to their own characters. In other cases, they are only asked to create their own characters. Finally, sometimes there is little novel material generated in the workshops, but instead, players are asked to work on interpreting their characters, relationships, etc.

    The co-creational aspect of ensemble play does more than strengthen the game boundaries. It increases the players’ understanding of what interactions to expect in the game. In a game where the players are made co-designers, they will have a greater degree of understanding for the parts that they have designed themselves. It can be argued that this greater degree of understanding increases the resolution of those interactions, and decreases the cognitive load placed on players, hence facilitating flow-like experiences. This suggests that it may be an effective design decision to allow players to co-create the parts of the game which require higher resolution, leaving the low resolution parts entirely in the hands of the designers. Exactly how to design the co-creation process is an important decision for the designer. Too much freedom may move the game away from the designers intent, and/or leave the players facing decision paralysis. On the other hand, to little freedom may reduce the resolution of the interaction.

    Two examples of recent games using workshop to enable ensemble play is Here is my Power Button (Atwater 2018) and The Naked Truth (Hanska and Katko 2017). Here is my Power Button is an American freeform game about people forming relationships with an artificial intelligence. The game uses the workshop to familiarize the players with each other (thus building trust), as well as to develop the short characters that are assigned to each player. A large part of the game is played in pairs with one player portraying a human, and the other player an artificial intelligence. In the workshop, the pairs can also discuss what they want to experience in the game, as well as decide on topics to avoid, etc. These pre-game discussions facilitate steering, as discussed earlier.

    The Naked Truth is a slow-paced game about friendship in which four Finnish men gather for a sauna evening. In this game, the pre-game workshop takes on an almost ritualistic tone, where short pieces of text are read by the gamemaster as an introduction to each exercise. The exercise in the workshop develops the characters, but also bring the players into the slow contemplative mood of the game itself.

    Ensemble play is very common in Nordic larp today. In particular, it appears to be common in games where characters and relationships are the focus rather than world building.

    Constructing Shared Realities

    Both of the tools presented above have the added benefit of making all interactions more transparent to all players. This point of the high resolution idea is stressed by Nordgren in her presentation of the text in the Nordic Larp Talks series, where she says: “And another interesting question is how can you make interactions between two people visible to others?”

    Extending from the idea of high resolution interactions, when it is clear what a particular type of interaction represents, you need to spend less energy in parsing the interactions you see around you. This frees up mental space for players. It can also be used by players to better steer their characters through the fiction, thus, once again facilitating flow-like experiences.

    Just a Little Lovin' (photo, Frida Sofie Jansen) Just a Little Lovin’ (photo, Frida Sofie Jansen)

    An example of a technique which makes interaction visible to other players comes from the much celebrated larp Just a Little Lovin’ (Edland and Grasmo 2011). This larp is set in the 1980’s and deals with themes of friendship, desire, and fear of death in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the New York LGBTQ+ community. Just a Little Lovin’ utilizes a technique called the phallus method to simulate sex. In this method, the players use a phallus to simulate sex while fully clothed. This method could be used to emphasize whether a condom was used during sex or not, which played into the setting, as the spread of HIV/AIDS is central to the story (“Phallus – Nordic Larp Wiki” n.d.).

    Indices to Icons

    Previously in this text, I have discussed how a property of high resolution interactions is that they put a relatively lower cognitive load on the person interpreting an interaction. One way of understanding why this might be is to take a semiotic view on the interaction. With this perspective, we understand everything that is part of a game as signs (of communication).

    These signs — everything from the locale and props to interactions — can be interpreted as indexes, iconics, or symbols. Or, indeed, they can be interpreted as any combination of these at the same time. Icons are linked to the concept they represent by being similar to the object, e.g. a boffer sword can be seen as an iconic representation of a real sword. Indices are linked to the concept they represent by having a relationship to what they represent. An example of this is using a cardboard card with a picture of a skull to represent poison. Symbols are understood to relate to a concept only by convention. An example of this is the use of words, which in general have no direct relation to the concept they represent (Loponen and Montola 2004).

    Loponen and Montola (2004) write about the interpretation of props in larps, stating, “The problems arise when players are confused as to whether to interpret a sign as an iconic, indexical or symbolic sign“ (p. 42). The same can be said for the interpretation of interactions. Iconic interactions are generally the easiest to interpret, as they are close to “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG), i.e. boffer fighting represents a real fight. Iconic interactions place a low cognitive load on the player. As interactions become more indexical, i.e. touching of the hands represents sex, the interpretation of exactly what is happening becomes more difficult. The cognitive load consequently becomes higher. According to Loponen and Montola’s model, meaningful role-play will occur when the players’ subjective diegesis — i.e. their understanding of the fiction in the head of each player — are equifinal. That is, their understandings of a situation are similar enough to have indistinguishable consequences. (Loponen and Montola 2004).

    Returning to the concept of high resolution, we see how diegetic rules work by making symbolic or indexical interactions iconic. Touching each other’s hands no longer represent having sex in the diegesis; it is having sex in the diegesis. Alternatively, ensemble play works with teaching the correct interpretation of symbolic and indexical concepts. By knowing the interpretations well, players need to spend less mental energy on parsing them once the game starts. Furthermore, it hopefully makes the players’ interpretations of the interactions equifinal, which according to Loponen and Montola, is critical for role-playing games to work.

    High Resolution and Bleed

    Nordgren closes with discussing the question of how much we want games to resemble reality with regards to relationships. She posits that the higher the resolution of the game, the more lifelike these relationships are bound to become. When the resolution of the interaction increases, the boundary between player and person becomes thinner, thus increasing the risk of the game impacting real life. This concept of things leaking through the semi-permeable boundaries between character, player, and person, are commonly referred to as bleed in today’s Nordic Larp discourse (Bowman 2015; Kemper 2017; Hugaas 2019). Strikingly, in Playground Worlds (2008) in which the text was first published, this term is not used to describe this phenomenon; however, in the foreword to the reprinting of the essay in The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (2014), Nordgren brings up the term and identifies that the text formed a foothold into that part of the Nordic Larp discourse.

    Closing remarks

    The term high resolution larp has not caught on to describe specific games. However, the idea of high resolution interactions is one well worth bringing back into the discussion.

    High resolution interactions can be understood as a way for larp designers to better understand the tools they have at their disposal. Nordgren identifies diegetic rules and ensemble play as two components of high resolution larp. I believe that these can be understood from a slightly different perspective.

    Diegetic rules should be seen as one of the tools in the designers’ toolbox – one that can be used to create high resolution interactions by transforming symbolic or indexical interactions into iconic ones. This is likely to prove successful in games that focus on simulation, either in the sense of having 360 degree aesthetics, or in the sense of simulating relationships and personal interactions. This may be why they worked so well in Mellan himmel och hav and Totem.

    Totem (photo, Rasmus Høgdall) Totem (photo, Rasmus Høgdall)

    If we change the perspective from simulation of character-to-character interactions to the narrative structure of the game, rules are still interesting. In this context rules can enable steering on the parts for the player, which in turn increases the resolution of the narrative. Thus, both ars amandi in Totem, and monologing in A Nice Evening with the Family, are examples of high resolution interactions. The first increases the resolution of the character-to-character interactions, while the second one increases the resolution of the player-to-game interaction.

    Ensemble play on the other hand is mainly a facilitator of high-resolution interactions. Its main purpose is the establishment of trust within a group. However, it also has a number of auxiliary functions, such as teaching the game, setting the mood, etc. As noted previously, ensemble play in the form of pre-game workshops is very common today in Nordic larp, probably owing to the fact that it has strong positive effects on the game, as well as having many practical benefits.

    To analyze the level of resolution (depth) in an interaction, consider a keyboard, with one or more keys available to the musician. It is possible to make music with a single key, for example pressing it to create a rhythm. If we add more keys it suddenly becomes possible to play a melody. However, just as the music is limited in which keys are used at a particular time by the musical key and time signature, the designer can select which interactions to make available to the players in order to create the desired experience. Incorporating the concept of resolution into a design framework, such as the FAtE (From Activity to Experience) model (Back 2016), could prove an interesting way forward. Briefly, the FAtE model suggests that the larp designer creates a construct (e.g. characters, workshops, etc) that encourages certain activities. These activities are what creates an experience in the player. Exactly how to create constructs that elicit high resolution interactions, beyond what has already been discussed in this text, requires further study.

    Cognitive load has been a key concept discussed throughout this article. While important, I think it provides only part of the explanation of why some interactions are more likely to produce flow-like experiences than others. As always, larps are very complex interaction systems, and understanding the whole from the parts will only provide part of the truth. Furthermore, I recognize that the concept of flow-like experiences is in itself inadequate in capturing what a good roleplaying experience is, however I think that it has served its purpose in this text.

    When Nordgren wrote her original text, she wished to express what was special about larps such as Totem. The language to describe it was lacking, so she came up with the high resolution analogy. Language lets us not only understand the world, but also shape it. I believe that by adding the resolution analogy to our vocabulary and refining it further, we can make more powerful, fulfilling games in the future.

    Acknowledgements

    I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Sara Engström for reading this text and providing feedback. I would also like to thank Sarah Lynne Bowman for her excellent editing and feedback, pushing me to take this text much further than I could have done on my own.

    Ludography

    A Nice Evening With the Family (2007): Anna Westerling, Anders Hultman, Tobias Wrigstad, Elsa Helin, Anna-Karin Linder and Patrik Balint. Flen, Sweden.((A Nice Evening with the Family was redesigned by Tor Kjetil Edland, Elli Garperian, Kajsa Greger, Susanne Gräslund, Anders Hultman, Caroline Holgersson, Frida Sofie Jansen, Maria Ljung, Gustav Nilsson, Martin Rother-Schirren, Daniel Sundström, Anna Westerling and Emma Öhrström in 2018, and subsequently re-run in 2018 and 2019.))

    Here is My Power Button (2017): Brodie Atwater. USA.

    Just a Little Lovin’ (2011): Tor Kjetil Edland, Hanne Grasmo. Lunde Leirsted, Oslo, Norway.

    Mellan himmel och hav (2003): Emma Wieslander, Katarina Björk & Ars Amandi. Stockholm, Sweden. Eng. “Between Heaven and Sea”.

    The Naked Truth (2017): Arttu Hanska and Joonas Katko. Finland.

    Totem (2007): Peter S. Andreasen, Rasmus Høgdall, Mathias Kromann Rode, Peter Munthe-Kaas and Kristoffer Thurøe. Copenhagen/Randers, Denmark.

    References

    Back, Jon. 2016. “Designing Public Play: Playful Engagement, Constructed Activity, and Player Experience.” Uppsala University. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A876519&dswid=4262.

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

    ———. 2017. “Immersion into LARP: Theories of Embodied Narrative Experience.” First Person Scholar. 2017. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/immersion-into-larp/.

    “High Resolution Larp – Nordic Larp Wiki.” n.d. Nordic Larp Wiki. Accessed July 13, 2019. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/High_Resolution_Larp.

    Hopeametsä, Heidi. 2008. “24 Hours in a Bomb Shelter: Player, Character and Immersion in Ground Zero.” In Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, 187–98. Ropecon ry.

    Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2019. “Investigating Types of Bleed in Larp: Emotional, Procedural, and Memetic – Nordic Larp.” Nordiclarp.org. 2019. https://nordiclarp.org/2019/01/25/investigating-types-of-bleed-in-larp-emotional-procedural-and-memetic/.

    Kemper, Jonaya. 2017. “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity.” Nordiclarp.org. 2017. https://nordiclarp.org/2017/06/21/the-battle-of-primrose-park-playing-for-emancipatory-bleed-in-fortune-felicity/.

    Leonard, Diana J., and Tessa Thurman. 2018. “Bleed-out on the Brain: The Neuroscience of Character-to-Player Spillover in Larp.” International Journal of Role-Playing, no. 9. http://ijrp.subcultures.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IJRP-9-Leonard-and-Thurman.pdf.

    Loponen, Mika, and Markus Montola. 2004. “A Semiotic View on Diegesis Construction.” In Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, edited by Markus Montola, Stenros, and Jaakko, 39–51. Ropecon ry.

    Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta. 2015. “The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together.” In The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted, 107–17. Rollespilsakademiet.

    Munthe-Kaas, Peter. 2010. “Totem – Body Language and Tribalism in High Definition.” In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 255–61. Fëa Livia.

    Nordgren, Andie. 2008. “High Resolution Larping: Enabling Subtlety at Totem and Beyond.” In Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 91–101. Ropecon ry.

    “Phallus – Nordic Larp Wiki.” n.d. Nordic Larp Wiki. Accessed August 17, 2019. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Phallus.

    Pohjola, Mike. 2015. “Steering For Immersion in Five Nordic Larps – A New Understanding of Eläytyminen.” In The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted, 95–105. Rollespilsakademiet.

    Stenros, Jaakko. 2010. “Mellan Himmel Och Hav.” In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 158–67. Fëa Livia.

    Wieslander, Emma. 2004. “Rules of Engagement.” In Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, edited by Markus Montala and Jaakko Stenros, 181–86. Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Arm painting at Totem (photo, Mathias Kromann Rode).

    Content editing: Sarah Lynne Bowman.

  • The Butterfly Effect Manifesto

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    The Butterfly Effect Manifesto

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    This manifesto describes in detail our preference for playing, designing, and facilitating larp experiences with the explicit purpose of encouraging transformative impacts within participants. This work is a synthesis of countless conversations over the years and reflects the insights of many people within a number of regional and international larp communities from a variety of cultures. Ultimately, this manifesto reflects our personal perspectives built upon our exploration of dozens of different styles and genres of larps over the years.

    This work also integrates concepts and language from group dynamics, psychoanalysis, and personal development work in order to enrich our discourse about the potential of the larp experience. Thus, while this work represents our own commitments and beliefs, we are indebted to our wider communities for much of the content of this manifesto.

    While this work represents our current completed thoughts on this topic, we understand that as we progress further and deepen our knowledge in the field of transformative larping, the need for revisions and additions will present itself. When that happens, we will revise as necessary. This manifesto is intended to promote serious and respectful discussion rather than humor or antagonism. These words are offered in good faith with full knowledge that many may disagree. The authors welcome reflective and kind engagement for those who wish to discuss this approach.

    If you are interested in larping, designing, and facilitating for transformation, we invite you to join us in exploring the next steps together. We have created a Facebook group called Larping for Transformation where we will discuss themes, strategies, experiences, techniques, and pitfalls pertaining to larping in this fashion.

    Central Tenets

    1. We believe in the power of larp as a tool for transformation, self-awareness, empathy, and personal growth. We actively and intentionally use our larp experiences toward cultivating these capacities. Like the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly, changing oneself can be painful and difficult, but ultimately rewarding. While sometimes messy, the transformation process can yield life-changing results if participants grant themselves and others grace throughout it.

    2. As with the Butterfly Effect in chaos theory, we believe that even the smallest experience in a larp can have profound effects upon individual human and collective consciousness. A considerable number of people have shared the ways in which experiences in larps have helped them personally grow or become more engaged in their communities. We choose to honor and conscientiously amplify these impacts rather than think of them as secondary or serendipitous.

    3. The world is often a dark, dehumanizing, and demoralizing place. Because we believe that these small experiences can have profound effects, we feel that we have the obligation as players, designers, facilitators, theorists, researchers, and documenters to amplify these transformative impacts in order to help make the world and people’s lives a little bit brighter.

    4. We honor and respect all play experiences and motivations, while strongly expressing our preferences. While we do not discount or devalue the experiences of people who wish to larp for other reasons such as for instance entertainment, we choose to focus our intention toward these transformative impacts. We hold no ill will or criticism for people who play toward other purposes.

    5. Transformation involves stretching our edges in order to grow. Transformation involves taking risks and playing outside our comfort zones. Transformation involves exploring the boundaries of what we consider ourselves to be. Transformation is nurtured by the consensual creation and maintenance of a container that is secure enough to emotionally hold participants.

    6. We engage in transformative work with a deep reverence for our vulnerabilities, our sensitivities, and our hard limits. We acknowledge the bravery of anyone who chooses to push their edges, while equally honoring anyone who chooses to set healthy boundaries for themselves.

    7. Transformation involves moments of expansion and contraction. We may have peak experiences within a larp or within the larger community where we experience intense catharsis, ride unparalleled highs, give tirelessly of our energy to provide an experience for others, or have profound realizations about ourselves. These experiences may feel as purposeful as our daily lives outside of a larp context.

    8. Contraction is part of the expansion process. In order to explore the higher limits of our potential, we may also experience equally profound lows before, during, or after the event. Dips in energy, enthusiasm, sociability, feelings of profound loss, alienation, angst, or even post-larp depression are examples of contractions. These lows are part of the process and are invitations for us to reflect upon the change that is occurring within us.

    9. These moments of contraction can be valuably informative, showing us the places within ourselves that need healing or change. Embracing the contraction with open arms can help us learn how to deeply care for ourselves and steward our own experiences of life.

    10. When undergoing transformation, we give ourselves permission to ask for help from members of our community when we may feel at our most vulnerable. We may also be called to help others when they experience a profound low after a peak experience. Supporting one another as much as we are able is critical for creating a container where the needs of individuals having transformational experiences can be met in a secure environment. Co-creation has the power to catalyze powerful change. Mutual support provides nourishment throughout the process so that participants feel resourced.

    11. If we complete a larp experience without learning something about ourselves that we can use to improve our daily lives, we feel that we have missed an opportunity.

    12. We acknowledge that larp is not therapy unless facilitated by trained professionals.

    13. We also acknowledge that people already widely and consistently use larp for transformative purposes. Increased awareness around the principles of facilitation for transformative larping will therefore help create a safer environment for these transformative experiences to transpire. Thus, we believe that all parties engaged in the creation and enactment of transformative larping have a responsibility to try to create a secure environment for such experiences to unfold.

    mural of a rainbow butterfly on glass
    Butterfly mural outside of St Martins Lane Hotel in London, England. Photo taken by the authors after the August 2019 run of Just a Little Lovin‘, a larp by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo that has inspired transformation in many of its players.

    Playing for Transformation

    14. As players, one of the tools of transformative larping that we employ is actively steering toward bringing aspects of our lives into our character experiences and stories and vice versa. We mindfully work with and intentionally insert aspects of our own lives into our characters and stories in order to examine, explore, and innovate our sense of self.

    15. As we believe that larp can be a transformative tool, we recommend treating the process of enactment with respect and reverence. Some players may bring into a larp content that is extremely personal and sensitive to them. We encourage this type of play when it is conscientiously used rather than disparage it, as it may lead to greater self-awareness and growth for the player and others within the community.

    16. We also believe that each player should have the right to opt in and out of challenging and intimate experiences. Therefore, we err on the side of consent and communication when inviting co-players into a particular theme or experience.

    17. Playing “close to home” — or close to one’s self-concept — may maximize the potential for transformative larping. Thus, we consider playing close to home a brave choice that we support whole-heartedly. The risks associated with playing close to home are lessened when the container surrounding the experience is held as supportively as possible.

    18. Playing a character unlike the self may also lead to transformation. Playing far from home may create an opportunity to explore characteristics one might like to attain, discover new facets of their identity, or reveal traits that a person might never want to embody again. Playing for transformation involves recognizing the humanity in both the heroic and the shadow sides of any given character. This recognition of the full range of human potential can encourage dramatic shifts in understanding and awareness about the world around us and ourselves if the opportunity for reflection is taken.

    Designing for Transformation

    19. While any larp content can be potentially transformative, how designers and players choose to implement that content before, during, and after the larp greatly influences the impact that a particular theme, moment, or story can have upon its participants. Conscious implementation of any and all design choices matters.

    20. As designers, we will choose themes, narratives, techniques, and facilitation principles that we believe have the potential to encourage transformative experiences. Of late, we have been interested in narratives that emphasize positive human potential, including traits such as compassion, empathy, humanization, personal growth, philosophical pondering, spiritual questing, conscious communication, and envisioning more optimal ways to build community.

    21. While exploring the darker sides of the human experience can be valuable, we are increasingly finding less interest in telling stories that only focus on oppression or harmful personality traits without offering some pathway to hope and redemption, even if such positive reframing only occurs during the post-larp process. Without sufficient post-larp processing and integration, we believe that exploration of narratives about oppression have limited transformational potential. We believe that play upon these themes can be recontextualized within the players’ lives in a way that motivates reflection, positive change, or prosocial behavior.

    22. We posit that all the stories we tell are connected to the world in which we live, even when exploring themes that seem fantastical. If we want to maximize the potential for transformation, then we need to contextualize these fictional narratives, anchoring them into the “real” world in a meaningful way.

    23. Because we believe that all stories are connected to the “real” world in some way and that larp can have a transformative impact, we emphasize the need for designers to write responsibly and inclusively. The goal of this process is to help the widest range of players relate to and feel engaged with the content. The positive impacts are limited and larp content can even become potentially harmful when care is not taken to consider the lived experiences that players bring into the fictional world.

    24. If a larp integrates themes of real world structural oppression, we believe that the design team must include and prioritize voices that represent people from those marginalized backgrounds as early and consistently as possible in the process. With greater nuance and care in representation, more people may experience a transformative impact from the larp.

    Facilitating for Transformation

    25. When facilitating a potentially transformative experience, organizers have a responsibility to create as secure and nurturing a container as possible so that the players feel held and respected through the experience. Building a strong container involves intentional and conscious co-creation and management of the social contracts between all participants; the safety structures that hold these contracts in place; and the content within the fictional world itself.

    26. The container of the larp experience does not only refer to the time spent onsite and in-game. The container starts with the genesis of the idea and continues with the beginnings of the organizing phases; the interactions with players before, during, and after the larp; de-roling and debriefing strategies; documentation; and the opportunities for integration that are made available after the experience. We recommend considering each of these stages at the forefront of design and facilitation throughout the process.

    27. When playing for transformation, everyone holds a piece of the responsibility for maintaining a strong container: the designers, the individual players, the play community, the organizers, and even the documenters, theorists, and researchers. Through shared responsibility and respect for the process, all parties can hold each other in a greater feeling of safety.

    28. We believe that the transformative impacts of larp can be amplified and negative impacts ameliorated through the use of proper frameworks. These frameworks can include consciously designed workshops, debriefs, meta-techniques, consent negotiations, check-ins, calibration conversations, and other methods that align the group toward both individual and collective transformative goals.

    a rainbow butterfly on a black and white leaf

    Integration

    29. We believe that the next step for maximizing the transformative potential of any given larp experience involves more extensive integration practices. Integration is the means by which a person or group can transition from a peak experience such as a larp back to their daily lives, evolving their own experience of themselves and the world in the process. Skills might transfer. Identities might shift. Social dynamics might change. Deeply buried pain may arise to be acknowledged. We encourage embracing the process of conscious and intentional integration from the fictional frame of reality to daily life, which involves facing and working with whatever arises.

    30. The post-larp integration process often involves a complex ebb and flow of emotions and thoughts. Relationships may shift, communities may expand, and consciousness may evolve. Contractions may occur that call forth intensely uncomfortable emotions. Creating solid structures to facilitate these transitions and integrate these experiences is paramount.

    31. Integration can also involve greater reflection upon the themes, the emotional dynamics, the social structures, and other aspects of the larp experience. Such reflection can occur through personal journaling, debriefing, documentation, discussion, theorizing, creating works of art, and many other processes. In larping for transformation, we understand that the larp does not end when the organizers call for the end of play.

    32. Our hope for the future is that we become increasingly mindful and intentional when designing toward transformative play. Engagement of this sort requires consideration of the integration of larp experiences into daily life as a vital part of the growth process for everyone involved.

    We appreciate your consideration of our manifesto. If you are interested in this style of play, come join us in the discussion at Larping for Transformation.

    Content editing: Elina Gouliou, Mo Holkar, and Johannes Axner.

    Valuable feedback on early drafts (alphabetical order): Arielle Brown, Clio Yun-su Davis, Dani Higgins, Jonaya Kemper, Joe Lasley, Lizzie Stark, and John Stavropoulos.

  • The Evolution of the Depiction of Rape in Larp

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    The Evolution of the Depiction of Rape in Larp

    Written by

    Content Warning

    Description of role-played and simulated rape scenes. Graphic or suggestive images of rape, assault, and trauma. Minor spoilers for some French-speaking games.

    Foreword

    This article is the amended translation of a piece that was originally published in French within the context of internal discussions within the French-speaking larp scene regarding emotional safety tools and calibration. I have since come to consider that it could be of interest to a wider audience. However, It should be noted that many of the examples that I will present may only be understood within the context of the French local scene. Furthermore, this article will only focus on rape depiction and simulation within the game’s fiction, not off-game incidents of assault.

    Introduction

    Why is rape such a specific issue in larp?

    Depicting rape in larp is often used as a prime example to demonstrate the importance of organizer communication and emotional safety in larp. When we role-play violence in larp, physical violence can be more easily dissociated and put at a distance. As horrible as the perspective of murder can be, it is rare enough in most of our daily lives that we can accept it as part of the fiction and, in most cases, without thinking that it might happen to us.

    Rape or sexual assault, however, remains a very real risk to women. We might discuss specific numbers and statistics, but it can be said with certainty that among the participants of a larp, there will be former victims of rape or sexual assault.  Most women have been confronted with the fear of sexual assault, including a whole series of measures meant to prevent it, from the way they dress to thinking about how they will manage returning home in the evening. And this is not limited to women either: men, trans, and non-binary people may also have lived through sexual assaults in their past or have reasons to fear assault in the present.

    Consequently, depictions of rape in fiction — and for the purpose of this article, I will consider larp as a form of media — can be more impactful to a significant part of the audience than other forms of violence. As such, choosing to depict or allow role-playing rape scenes inevitably has a stronger impact, and will often fall under close scrutiny, owing to the fact that it is still an issue that impacts a lot of people.  

    I have found it interesting to observe the way that organizers and participants have handled allowing — or not allowing — role-playing rape scenes in larp. I have found these decisions to be emblematic of cultural changes both in larp writing and social perceptions surrounding rape. I will try in this article to present an overview of this evolution, and how, in my opinion, it can inform us of the interconnection between larp, media, and cultural representations. However, this article will only represent my own experience as a larper and creator, and does not aim at being exhaustive or impartial.

    Painting of an ancient city of people engaged in violence and rape
    Jacques Stella, The Rape of the Sabines, mid-17th century.

    Trivializing Rape

    During my second larp, back in October 2001, which was part of a now-terminated Drow campaign, my character was knocked out by two other characters and robbed. Fair enough. That situation was written in the rules, and, as a beginner, I hadn’t learnt to walk with my back against the wall at all times. After that scene, right before leaving, one of the two participants in the scene added, “And before leaving, we rape you.”

    As in many games of the time, there were no simulation rules for sexuality. In campaign games such as this one, sexuality was mostly managed off-game to produce offspring that could become playable characters if your own character died. Games that offered rules for sexual simulation usually used mechanical rules: dice; cards; marbles, oftentimes with some random draw that would determine the quality of the relation; and sometimes a “pillow talk” mechanic, in which sharing intimacy could lead a character to share an important secret to their partner. However, the issue of sexual violence or coercion was rarely broached explicitly  — except in rare cases of complete prohibition, more on that later — and was considered, therefore, possible.

    Here is another emblematic example. In the mass larp campaign La Faille (or The Rift, which ended in 2007), the orc faction would organize fictionalized rape of female characters.  They would mark the victims’ clothes with green at the buttocks to signify what had happened to the character. While some of these scenes might have been discussed beforehand, it is certain that negotiation and consent was neither written into the rules nor systematic.

    In the context of these early games around 2000–2005, integrating sexuality rules was an answer to the objective of creating a 360° realistic representation and mostly “sandbox”-type game. In this style of game, players had to be able to do any action they wanted. Rules only came into play when an action was considered impossible (e.g. magic) or dangerous (e.g. fighting). Physical contact was completely prohibited. In that context, depictions of rape simply represented something “that could happen,” just like in real life. The practice was acceptable because there was no physical contact and because rape was usually only mentioned verbally.

    Rape scenes were usually performed by characters that could, in this manner, display their violence and could establish their role-play as a “villain.” Rape usually had no consequence in-game.

    Rape as a Narrative Device

    Meanwhile, we could also observe games that, while prohibiting rape in-game, used it as a narrative device in the game’s backstory. Rape, in this case, has consequences that take the form of in-game conflicts and dramatic outcomes. As illustrations, I will mention three examples from the so-called romanesque style. I played witness to the plot in the first game and the rape victim in the last two.

    In Greenaway’s Feeling (played in 2007), a Victorian-era game, I played as the governess to a wealthy family. One of the secrets of the family is that the lady of the house was raped before her wedding by a friend of the family. The game ended with the rapist being killed in a duel. In the second game, Spirits (started in 2008, played in 2013) I played as Maggie, a girl from the working class falling in love with an upper class aristocrat. Maggie was then raped by her lover’s cousin in what constituted clearly a punitive action on the rapist’s part. This storyline was lifted directly from the novel that inspired the game, A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Fowlett, published in 1993. In the run I took part in, the rapist also got killed in a duel. The final game, Noces de Cendres (The Ashen Wedding, 2012), was set in Argentina in the years following World War II. My character was a famous socialite, raped as a young woman by her wealthy patron, and bent on getting revenge. The game invites a resolution where she poisons her rapist. In my run, he was shot to death by another of his enemies.

    It must be noted that, in two out of these three cases, the resolution of the storyline resulted in a duel between two male protagonists, taking away the agency from the female victims, and that the “rape-and-revenge” trope was invoked in the last one. Furthermore, due to the historical context, a significant part of the story revolved around the victim being shamed and forced into secrecy.

    Important note: I still consider these games to be good and I generally had strong experiences playing them. However, these games are a reflection of the fictions that inspired them – sometimes picking plots directly from books used as inspiration. In these stories, rape is the traumatic inciting event that kickstarts the narrative arc for the female characters or drives the conflict. However, It feels important to point out that, in spite of their qualities, these games reproduced some of the stereotypes around rape that also can  be found in certain media.

    A woman in a jail cell and western clothing bent over and crying
    Conscience 2.0. Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee.

    The Criticism and Rape Prohibition

    I think that criticism and changes in the way rape is depicted in larp appeared in conjunction with criticism regarding the depiction of rape in media and fiction, as well as demands for changes in that regard. The subject is regularly broached in the media, mostly regarding the use of rape as “shock value.”  Regarding larps, two arguments were at the forefront of discussions: imposing rape scenes without the participants’ consent and using sexual assault as a cheap plot device.

    First and foremost, some members of the community argued that imposing rape in the storyline was neither agreeable nor fun for many participants for the reasons already mentioned in the introduction.  In cases where the possibility of rape was left open on the grounds of realism and 360° immersion, some argued that even a larp with an ambition for immersion has to enforce limitations on its players and some degree of abstraction, if only to accept, for example, that fake weapons will be real and wound the characters. Some participants claimed that letting players impose rape scenes upon others went against their own enjoyment of the game and sense of safety. Even a competitive player vs. player game could find ways for players to act against one another, including violence, without making rape part of the arsenal. Of course, in real life, rape is indeed a tool for humiliation and a weapon of war. Larp, however, remained a fiction, and even the most historically accurate larp makes choices in terms of what it can represent. Therefore, it was possible to contend that taking away rape from the larp wouldn’t change the narration in most cases, but would make the game experience safer and better for all.

    The second argument criticized rape as a cheap and somewhat overused plot device. That critique was not as severe, but pointed out the fact that rape was too often used as a cliché, either to justify a dramatic conflict or to illustrate the cruelty of a character or the world. So it was not so much the existence of rape narration that was at stake as its treatment and recurring aspect, e.g. making it a staple of most pre-written female characters. These critics underlined that there should be other ways to establish the unforgiving quality of a world or set up a character as an antagonist. Additionally, it was important to diversify female narratives using other angles than rape. The use of rape as a “shock factor” to show how dark a situation is, if not used to bring an interesting narrative, tell a good story, or deconstruct prejudices, can simply become derivative; these stories can contribute to trivializing rape; perpetuating stereotypes about rape and sexual assault; or invisibilizing survivors’ experiences.

    Because of these issues, larp design choices and communication surrounding rape depiction has significantly changed in the 2010s, with an acceleration in the wake of the #metoo movement. Sexual assault is frequently forbidden in games, with some games even banning any role-play around sexuality at all. If rape appears in the backstory, it will be explicitly communicated and only played with the participants’ consent.

    Due to these changes, communication and participant consent have improved. Most organizations now present a design document stating which themes and issues can be expected in their games, explicitly asking participants to write down issues they don’t want to play. It must be noted that, when I have handled participants’ sign-ups as an organizer and what they didn’t want to play, I had many male players requesting not to play a rapist. I also know many people who prefer to pass on any game mentioning rape, which in my opinion is a perfectly valid position.

    Can Rape Be Responsibly Depicted in Larp?

    This last question will of course be open to debate. Many people state that rape should be forbidden in larp altogether, which is a very understandable position. However, I would like to give a couple examples of games that, in my opinion, use rape in their scenarios in such a manner that it brings a real narrative depth, avoiding the issues that I addressed previously.

    The Swedish game Last Will (2014) presents a not-so-distant dystopian future in which big corporations have re-established legal slavery. The game fiction takes place in a modern gladiators’ arena and depicts teams of fighters and the arena personnel. One of the categories represented in game is the Pleasers: sex slaves whose purpose is to exclusively serve the needs of the fighters. This game is a Nordic larp with clear expectations in terms of safety: the themes are clearly communicated well in advance, the character distribution is done according to participants’ requests, violent scenes must be negotiated, and any scene can be interrupted with safe words. Ars amandi was used to simulate sex and was practised beforehand during workshops.

    My character was a fighter called Sol. She was forced to perform sexual acts in front of the medical examiners charged to evaluate her. As a reaction, she became in turn abusive to her own Pleaser, Eden. She was then forced to witness Eden’s rape by one of the guards as a punishment for her repeated insolence and transgression. In this game, the presence of sex slaves and the possibility to play rape scenes was part of the construction of a dehumanizing environment for the characters. After the game, discussions among participants and the viewing of a documentary on modern slavery were used to contextualize the whole experience.

    My own game Flowers of May takes place in a Parisian brothel in 1910. One of the prostitutes, Violette, is there against her own will. She has been locked up and blackmailed into accepting it before the beginning of the game. The game doesn’t allow the depiction of rape with violence, but the character being threatened and coerced means that she undergoes at least one rape scene over the course of the game. Using inspiration from Last Will, the game also uses ars amandi and follows along the same lines in terms of safety and communication. Sexuality and sexual violence are a central theme of the game. This character is used to show that rape happens any time there is coercion, not only through direct threat and physical violence. The game in general explores the interconnection between sexuality and power.

    Finally, Conscience 2.0 (2018, created by NotOnlyLarp in Spain, is another recent example. The game was inspired by the TV series Westworld and is set in a Western theme park populated by extremely realistic robots. Sexual violence and nudity were possible, but only in certain predetermined spaces, also called zoning. This practice has been recently introduced as a means to set up boundaries and allow players to steer towards or away the most intensive forms of role-playing (more examples in “The Larp Domino Effect”). As always, communication was extremely explicit about sensitive themes, with workshops and safe words. Participants who wanted to play on physical or sexual violence had to signal it by wearing a small white (physical) and/or red (sexual) ribbon over their costume. Sexual scenes were simulated in full clothing, while real intercourse was explicitly prohibited. Any scene of sexual violence had to be negotiated following a pre-scripted discussion. Here again, integrating sexual violence against robots sets up the action within an abusive context and, the more the robots were gaining consciousness, to question what makes a human being. Between characters who treated the robots as literal objects and those who wanted to defend their humanity and rights, the visible and brutal depiction of sexual violence could be a catalyst in these conflicts.

    In that larp, I played an abusive character who was intended to enable others in engaging in violent interactions. My characters very routinely organized collective rapes and torture sessions. The strict safety rules of the game allowed me to constantly check the well-being of the players who performed as my victims. Playing as an oppressor was way out of my comfort zone; it was indispensable to me to know that playing these violent scenes improved the game experience of other players and was not only there to show my character’s menace and physical superiority.

    I cited these examples because they have, in my opinion, common aspects. They all use sexual violence to show how the environment dehumanizes the victims of violence. They all try to deconstruct the way this violence operates, in particular how it can be trivialized. I believe that an essential difference from the examples I treated in the first paragraph is there: the rapists in these examples don’t see themselves as the “villains” and the characters themselves are not written as such. They simply consider using other human beings’ bodies as their right, whether as a client or simply from their position of privilege. Rape is not used for the mere “shock factor,” but to serve as a discussion about the type of society that renders the banalization of rape possible. I believe that the stories created in this context are all the more poignant for that.

    Members of a western town watch as a woman character straddles a prone man character in the Conscience larp
    In-game photo of the author’s character in Conscience 2.0 (2018).

    Discussion

    I originally wrote all of the above in a French context as a means to promote the importance of safety rules and mechanisms. My goal was to underline the necessity of building a culture of explicit consent whenever sensitive issues are portrayed. I especially wanted to debunk the all too common notion in my local community that implementation of emotional safety structures would condemn any game depicting violence or abuse by highlighting some games that treated such issues while putting participants’ well-being first.

    However, the discussion surrounding that piece of writing and the general handling of controversial themes have also led me to the following reflections:

    1. Larp doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Larp, among other things, exists as a medium and is therefore inspired by societal representations and the media we consume, sometimes explicitly by directly using existing franchises as a setting (e.g Wizarding World, Vampire, etc.) Even with a small audience, a larp will be part of the construction of a certain discourse and representation and should be analysed as such. The criticism that was levied against the abusive use and representation of rape in French larp stemmed from such media criticism approaches.

    2. Change takes time. The evolution that I present in this article stretched over years. I can also personally recount how I deconstructed my own internalized prejudices over those years before taking a more active role in promoting emotional safety rules, creating guidance for prevention of harassment, and defending a culture of consent. Increased global exchanges and digital communication may accelerate some of this process of acculturation, media criticism, and change of opinion, but they still take time nonetheless.

    3. Managing resistance. The cultural shift that is described in this article took time, and was met with quite a lot of resistant comments, one of the most frequent being that depicting rape was just “realistic.” In fact, I have yet to see any safety technique or communication that wasn’t met with some form of resistance. In this instance, change was brought about by a combination of communicating about the subject (e.g arguing why trivialized depictions of rape are problematic), valuing good practices (e.g organizing or promoting games with a clear safety policy), and, in some cases, avoiding games that do not have clear communication on these issues. I also believe that the issue with rape depiction was a good example and gateway to discuss safety issues, since the line between organizers’ freedom of creation and players’ safety was pretty clear in that case: trivialization of rape led players to feel uncomfortable or unsafe in the game, or even to avoid larping entirely. Taking the subject away didn’t hurt the structure of most games. Creators who wanted to handle rape as a sensitive issue could still do it, only with a better knowledge of the kind of communication and careful management that it requires.

    Conclusion

    By writing about the depiction of rape in larp, I hoped to highlight some important cultural changes that occurred in the media around these issues and subsequently in larps as well. Through these examples, I tried to show that you can absolutely handle sensitive issues in larps, but that a clear communication and safety policy is necessary. I used the example of depiction of rape to show how a design choice (or lack of consideration of it) could create a disagreeable, or even hostile environment for some players. Additionally, changes in communication and techniques have made the practice safer and more inclusive. Finally, I opened the discussion by affirming my belief that there are probably other issues and techniques that are still to be explored. My hope is that discussion on these issues will continue.

    References

    Algayres, Muriel. 2015. “Last Will, Second Run.” Electrolarp, February 2, 2015. https://www.electro-larp.com/886-larp-review-last-will-second-run

    Algayres, Muriel. 2017. “Character-Based Design and Narrative Tools in the French Style Romanesque Larp.”  Nordiclarp.org, February 20, 2017. https://nordiclarp.org/2017/02/20/character-based-design-narrative-tools-french-style-romanesque-larp/

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2018. “The Larp Domino Effect.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Companion Book. Edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner. 161-169. ETC Press. https://nordiclarp.org/2018/02/14/larp-domino-effect/

    Montero, Esperanza. 2019. “Conscience, Layers of Reality.” In “Knudepunkt 2019 Summary.” Nordiclarp.org, February 12, 2019. https://nordiclarp.org/2019/02/12/knudepunkt-2019-summary/

    Orsel, Amelie. 2015. “Les Fleurs de Mai.” Electro-GN, September 29, 2015. https://www.electro-gn.com/9845-critique-de-gn-les-fleurs-de-mai

    Cover photo: Last Will (2014). Photo by Lisa H. Ekbom.

    Editing: Elina Gouliou, Mo Holkar.

  • Investigating Types of Bleed in Larp: Emotional, Procedural, and Memetic

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    Investigating Types of Bleed in Larp: Emotional, Procedural, and Memetic

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    At Knutpunkt 2018, I somehow found myself holding a talk called “A Trinity of Consciousness.” This subject might seem an odd choice for someone who, although holds degrees in Nature Science and Public Administration, is pretty much void of any academic expertise on the subject of consciousness; I realize that my approach to the subject can be somewhat unorthodox as a result of this. As a trained actor with almost two decades of experience in Nordic larp though, I have spent a lot of time trying to understand the processes that are involved when we are shifting in- and out-of-character. If there are any concepts that can be considered central to these processes, they are consciousness and bleed.

    This article is a write up of a couple of the subjects that I touched upon in my 2018 talk. Since then, some of my thoughts have changed, hopefully for the better. In the aftermath of my talk, which was primarily on the subject of consciousness, the one thing people seemed to want to engage me in discussion on was my suggestion for further categorizing different types of bleed. In particular, the freshly coined term memetic bleed, which I in all honesty described fairly briefly, was something about which I received comments and questions in the following weeks and months. I am grateful to the people who contacted me and for the discussions that followed, as they have led to a furthering of my own understanding of the phenomenon

    A Brief Take on Consciousness

    In order to understand a little bit more about the nature of any type of bleed, we must first very briefly touch on how we understand — or rather perceive — consciousness. This is a subject that seems to present us with several new questions for every single answer we find. Yes, even an attempt to reach a consensus on the simplest definition is challenging, as it is an ambiguous term commonly used to describe a width of different phenomena. For sake of clarity, it can be helpful to make a distinction between the parts of consciousness that are possible to explain and define with the help of standard methods of cognitive science and the ones that, well… simply aren’t.

    Stained glass window of a woman in blue
    “St. Peter and St Paul’s church Fressingfield Suffolk: Stained glass” by David (CC BY 2.0).

    Chalmers (1995) calls these first aspects of consciousness “the easy problems” and among others names the following: “The ability to discriminate, categorize and react to environmental stimuli; the integration of information by a cognitive system; the reportability of mental states;…” (Chalmers, s. 2) The list can go on for some time, but the common denominator is that all of these aspects can be explained reductively in terms of neural mechanisms. Personally, I find it helpful to consider whether it would be possible to replicate the phenomenon with computational programming, and if the answer is yes, it belongs on this list of “easy problems.” For these phenomena, “consciousness” might not even be the correct term. “Awareness” — or rather “functions of awareness” — would be a better fit. A system that performs functions will be aware of the parts of its surroundings that are relevant to perform the function in question, but this awareness would not equate to “consciousness” in the sense that human beings are “conscious” or “sentient.”

    Then, what is consciousness? Good question. In fact, great question. British psychologist Stuart Sutherland’s attempt at an answer is one of the more memorable ones; the two last sentences went on to become rather infamous. Sutherland describes:

    Consciousness—The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness . . . The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it. (Sutherland 1989)

    Sutherland’s exasperation might be very understandable, although it does not really bring us any closer to an understanding. What it does do, though, is perfectly exemplify how our established scientific methods have not been capable of providing answers. So, while waiting for a future paradigm shift of thought, we will just have to accept that any work on this subject will have to contain a certain amount of subjective philosophical thought. Then again: what is human existence, if not a subjective experience of how it is to be the one who we are?

    Stained Glass vines, flowers, and water
    “Stained Glass Met” by Adrian Scottow (CC BY-SA 2.0).

    I am writing this, sitting by a beach in Spain. The sun is shining over a perfect azure sea, the wind keeps tugging at my papers and the air is full of languages that I do not speak nor understand. Now… the functions of awareness are explaining all of this to me; the colour of the sea, the strength of the wind, the words that I don’t understand. What they don’t explain though, is how I subjectively experience these factors. A mere description of the functions themselves does nothing to explain the deep pull within me, the longing for foreign shores that this scene awakens, this song of the sea that the poets have written about since ever there was written word. Clearly there is something that is like “being me” in this moment that defies both objective description and reductive methods.

    Chalmers (1995) calls this layer on top of awareness experience:

    When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. (Chalmers 1995)

    These musings into the fascinating field of consciousness could go on for some time. For the sake of this article, we can in summary say that while we do not fully understand consciousness, we can conceptualize it roughly in terms of external stimuli and our internal responses and perceptions to those stimuli.

    Reality and How We See It: The Stained Glass Window

    Stained glass window in Gaudi cathedral
    “Sagrada familia, stained glass window” by fry_theonly (CC BY-SA 2.0)

    Personally, I find it helpful to think of the world as a large building. My own particular cultural background makes it easy to imagine an old European cathedral, but any building will do. It does not have to be any particular one, and can be made up in your head solely for this exercise. The important part is that the interior of this building represents reality as it can be objectively described using the terminology of physical science. The size, layout, materials, structure of surfaces, and such can all be described in detail, providing us with an objective take on the reality we inhabit.

    In addition, there is a large stained glass window on one of the walls, like the ones you would find in many houses of worship that usually depict saints or religious scenes. This window is the only light source in the building and, in this exercise, represents the filter through which we experience the reality around us. Now imagine that every person that enters the building will have a personalized and different window from everybody else. So when I, for example, enter the building, my window is particular to me and is shaped by things that are particular to my life, like my long term memories, earlier experiences, skills, knowledge, and so on. When the light from the outside shines on the glass, the depictions and their colours will fill the empty spaces with sensory experience beyond the mere physical outlay of the building. The light will illuminate some areas while keeping others in the dark, in effect providing me with my very personalized experience of the seemingly objective reality. So, the world might exist objectively in a certain way, but the way we experience it changes from person to person.

    Furthermore, the glass is not permanently fixed, but rather it exists to be changed by the present, the future, and reflections on the past. Any action I take in my life can to some degree change it and most of them will. In my everyday life though, where most days are similar in both rhythm and content, changes are slow and minute. How many times will I have to drive the same 12 minute commute to work before that experience makes me reach new insights or have an epiphany that changes something fundamental about how I experience the world? My guess is: quite a few.

    Now, there are of course larger events in our lives that might change things both rapidly and oftentimes also violently: falling in love; the death of a loved one; sudden injury or loss of health; a new job in a different field; moving abroad; becoming a parent; and so on. Any event of comparable size to these is likely to bring more substantial changes in how I experience and see the world, and by that, what it is like to be me in any situation in the future.

    On Consciousness of Character: Altered and Othered

    When we larp, we consciously subject ourselves to simulated events like the life changing ones mentioned above. In fact, a lot of the time, the simulated events to which we subject ourselves will most likely be substantially more dramatic and intense than any we will ever experience in our own modern lives. In addition, most of us subject ourselves to these events at a rate that will probably be much higher than even the most dramatic life one could ever imagine. Of course, for the most part, our minds will know perfectly well that these events are just simulated, but the body and senses that we experience it with do not. In their article in the International Journal of Role-Playing,  Leonard and Thurman (2018) present a overview of the neuro-psychological processes that might lead to stronger bleed-out, stating, “These processes are fundamental, biological, and often outside of conscious awareness and control, which likely makes direct influence over bleed-out a fleeting or even illusory concept” (Leonard and Thurman 2018). I describe bleed-out in more depth later in this article.

    stained glass glass ceiling in a music hall
    “Palau de la Música Catalana” by Alvaro (CC BY-SA 2.0).

    In regard to the stained glass window, what we are doing is changing, substituting, or moving pieces of the filtered consciousness that belongs to us as a player in an attempt to create a distinctly different one through which our character experiences reality. The players’ window will of course never be fully substituted, but the simulated changes will affect how we see the world, even if it is just for a limited time. And as it is never completely static and fixed, changing with our experiences, it is safe to say that what we experience in character would also have an effect on us as players. In other words, when we simulate alterations to our glass painting, we will almost certainly also subtly alter it permanently, and thus we change what it is like to be ourselves.

    In summary, when we temporarily change the filter through which we see the world, we are adding a layer of altered consciousness. When the stained glass window of experience is sufficiently changed for the immediate experience of functions of awareness to overwhelm long-term established frames of “what it is to be you,” temporary states of “othered” consciousness can be experienced.

    Which Leads Us to Bleed

    The term bleed was coined by Emily Care Boss in 2007, and has since been generally accepted to describe when emotions “bleed over” from character to player and vice versa (Montola 2010). In the following years, the addition of thoughts and physical states were done by among others Sarah Lynne Bowman, who states, “Role-players sometimes experience moments where their real life feelings, thoughts, relationships, and physical states spill over into their characters’ and vice versa. In role-playing studies, we call this phenomenon bleed” (Bowman 2015).

    At my talk at Knutepunkt in 2018, I proposed a way to further structure the phenomenon by classifying it in three distinct sub-categories: emotional, procedural, and memetic. I also briefly touched on a potential fourth category that I named cognitive bleed, but the more I have studied it, the less I am sure that it merits its own category and as such I am leaving it out for now.   

    It is also important to note that even though it might be useful to categorize the different types of bleed, any actual bleed situation will most likely be a case of these categories both overlapping and clustering. It is also quite possible that such overlapping could be a catalyst for increasing both the duration and the intensity of the experience. For now, we will content ourselves with saying that the act of categorizing bleed might be useful, but it is important to remember that it is just a framework imposed upon a chaotic reality. In larping, as in the rest of the world, black and white are seldom the only colors.

    stained glass of three women lounging
    “San Francisco, St. Louis, New York” by Eugene Kim (CC BY 2.0).

    Emotional Bleed

    Emotional bleed is when emotions or feelings belonging to either the player or the character affect the actions and emotional state of the other. It is well-known, documented, and has been thoroughly described in theory over the last 10 years and more. It is the most easy to recognize and therefore its existence is not widely questioned in the Nordic larp communities. However, as a workshop that I conducted together with Jost L. Hansen at Knutepunkt in 2017 showed, there are players that report that they have never bled like this. Not even once. This workshop was partially the reason I started looking deeper into the concept of bleed, as the idea of exposing your body and mind to larping and not being affected by the consciousness of the character at all seemed very strange to me. I might not be the heaviest bleeder, but safe to say, I have bled a lot during my years a larper. For some time, I might also have been someone that actively steered my play to increase the chances of experiencing it.

    Bleed-in:

    Emotional bleed-in occurs when the state of the player’s emotions affect the actions of the character in the game. It is probably most easy to recognize when characters are exposed to things in-game that closely resemble experiences that the player has had out-of-game, be they loss, love, or other strong emotions that can be difficult to control.

    Bleed-out:

    Based on work done by among others Bowman (2013) and Leonard and Thurman (2018), out-of-game animosity and feelings of real life exclusion seem to be among the most common bleed-out phenomena. In “Social Conflict in Role-Playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study,” Bowman discusses how this form of emotional bleed-out can lead to negative effects on game communities:

    Participants explained that when overinvolved, the player assumes in-character interactions correlate with out-of-character personality traits and feelings. In addition, players may possess underlying psychological problems that events within the game world trigger or intensify. (Bowman 2013)

    Other well-known emotional bleed-out phenomena are commonly known as “larp crushes.” These are instances where the love played out between two characters are transferred to one, both, or all of the players that played said characters. As Sanne Harder (2018) describes, “Larp crushes are definitely real experiences of being in love. Larp crushes are real in the sense that the barrier between you and your character’s emotions are eroded to the point where you really, truly are going through limerence” (Harder 2018).

    In summary, emotional bleed is the sub-category that is most widely recognized. To me, the availability and quality of research and writings on the subject are sufficient evidence of the existence of this phenomenon.

    stained glass of male Olympian
    “Stained glass 1: Seen in the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art, Veletrzni (Trades Fair) Palace, Prague” by Tony Hisgett (CC BY 2.0).

    Procedural Bleed

    Procedural bleed gets its name from procedural memory, more generally referred to as muscle memory. Basically, it refers to gestures, bearing, ticks, or any other kind of physical action that originates in either player or character and then surfaces in the other.

    Bleed-in:

    Getting rid of the physical things we do without conscious thought can be very difficult. Procedural bleed does not cover physical expressions connected to ability, but rather the ways of moving and carrying ourselves that come from for instance cultural conditioning and force of habit. For instance, the culturally coded language of gender will tell us as players how to stand, move, and walk. Players that play other genders than their own will often have to make considerable conscious efforts to change their body language, a task that is made harder by the existence of procedural bleed-in. For my own part, years of being a competitive powerlifter has made procedural bleed-in something that is sometimes very hard to overcome. For instance, I am  unable to hunch my shoulders forward in a subdued stance for some period of time without substantial conscious effort.

    Bleed-out:

    Procedural bleed-out is for all intents and purposes the exact same as bleed-in, only with the roles reversed. The biggest difference would probably be related to the force of the phenomenon. It is natural to assume that the years of physical conditioning of a player would exert more force on the character than the few days of portraying a character’s physicality could ever exert on the player. There might be some exceptions, though.

    For instance, right after the larp Conscience (NotOnlyLarp 2018) ended, I could not stop drawing my phone from my pocket and twirling it as I had done for days with the gun that I carried on my hip. A more horrifying example would be how my portrayal of a Nazi officer at the larp 1942 (FLH 2017) seem to have removed the issues that I had with the Nazi salute as a movement, which for me had caused a considerable amount of physical cognitive dissonance in the past. It would seem though, that in general, it is common that procedural bleed-out burns itself out within a relative short time of the larp ending.

    Some players have told me of lingering procedural bleed-out, which is something I myself have experienced as well. For instance, I carry myself with an air of authority, sometimes quite military in nature. This has lead to my (for some reason) numerous interactions with police officers and military personnel in my travels around the world always being quite enjoyable. However, there is very little in my life outside of larping that could explain the ease with which I interact with (and subtly command) gun-carrying soldiers and officers. Now, I was in the military when I was young, and even dabbled with command, but this was too low level to fully explain my current tacit skill. So to me, at least part of the explanation might be my numerous military and law enforcement commanding characters forming some sort of feedback loop originating from my original military experience over the years. These experiences have provided me with the physicality of someone used to command and having their orders obeyed.

    Two stained glass soldiers with the words Home Guard underneath
    “Stained glass at Bristol cathedral” by Heather Cowper (CC BY 2.0).

    Memetic Bleed

    In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins presents the concept of the meme as a noun that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (Dawkins 1976). Since then, the concept has of course been popularized and redefined a number of times. For the sake of understanding memetic bleed, we can say that a meme is an unit of culture that carries an idea, behaviour, thought, belief, ethical conviction, or similar from person to person. In this definition, a catchy pop song on the radio would be a meme, as would the idea of the earth being flat, although paradigm shifts over time as a result of the scientific revolution have rendered the second meme somewhat less successful in recent centuries. On a side note, this example also shows us that the potential successfulness of memes is dependent upon environmental factors and as such will be subject to change.

    This leaves us with the following attempt at a definition:

    Memetic bleed describes the process by which a meme — a unit of culture — carries an idea, behaviour, thought, belief, ethical conviction, or similar cognitive construct between player and character and vice versa. In addition, it describes the process by which memeplexes — complex structures of memes — are transmitted in part or in whole between players and characters that are part of a group, scene, or subculture and vice versa.

    Bleed-in:

    Since memetic bleed at least partly deals with societal and political structures, it seems to happen on both individual and structural levels. In the case of the latter, the most well-known phenomenon might be what some know as larp democracy, where the players, mostly without communication, “agree” to handle situations in ways that are more in tune with the values of the players than the characters. For example, characters in scenarios involving historical systemic oppression may “solve” the situation through democratic means, a political structure with which their players are familiar and appreciate, but one that might also be entirely alien to the characters themselves.

    “A bearded king” by Tijl Vercaemer (CC BY 2.0).

    A somewhat more subtle example might be how tacit cultural knowledge can affect the feel of a game. For instance, after the larp 1942 (FLH 2017), a larp set in a small village in occupied Norway during the Second World War, the organizers shared how the Scandinavian run and the international one had played out somewhat differently. The assessment expressed verbally was that the tacit cultural knowledge of the Norwegian players playing the bulk of the Norwegian civilian characters in the first run had moved the game in one direction, while the lack of said knowledge among the international players playing Norwegian civilians in the second had moved it in a different one.

    Being Norwegian myself, I can quite clearly see the validity of this observation. Norwegians “know” how life in a small village in the bottom of a fjord would have been, because most of us will have family or relatives that actually lived those lives. Our grandparents would have told us stories and our history books would have explained the societal structures in detail. As modern and progressive people, we might not always like to think so, but concepts such as the low church Haugean movement and the Law of Jante are still deeply ingrained in the culture within which we as Norwegians have grown up. As a result, in the Norwegian run, the civilian play was reportedly quite subdued and low-key. International players, on the other hand, not having access to the same tacit knowledge, based their play upon other sources. What these sources were would probably be pretty individual, but as a result, the run was reportedly richer in both dramatic scenes and amplified play.

    ja.corby on Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

    On a individual level, memetic bleed might affect our ability to play on certain traits or play out certain actions. The one that stands out to me is how some players report that they are, not from lack of trying, unable to play oppressors or antagonists of a certain type. The larp Conscience (NotOnlyLarp 2018) is a prime example of a larp where the oppressive characters are quite extreme; I have spoken to two players that more or less mid-larp had to steer their characters away from how they were written in order to be able to portray them. My opinion is that this impulse is at least partly a result of memetic bleed-in of ethical convictions that were too strong for the alibi of play to overpower. As previously noted though, any bleed might have aspects of more than one of the sub-categories; in this case, it is also probable that there was some emotional bleed related to, for instance, the players’ ability to feel empathy for the oppressed characters.   

    Bleed-out:

    With bleed-out, the most difficult part might be distinguishing between where memetic bleed ends and cognitive reflection begins. By this statement, I mean that not all changes in ideas, values, beliefs, and so on will be the result of bleed, but also that it can be quite a mixed experience where no single reason can claim to be the instrumental one.

    For instance, on a structural level, I propose that the spread in our communities of ideas and values found in intersectional feminism is partly due to it being a memeplex that for years has been central in both content and design choices in a variety of Nordic larps that have, one way or another, set the contemporary standard. Of course, it might be a question of whether feminist larpers demand the creation of feminist larps or if feminist larps create feminist larpers; personally, I think that the correct answer is probably a mix of the two. There is no getting around the fact that we somehow seem to have gotten a lot better at making larps that incorporate these ideals though, and I for one believe that memetic bleed-out has played a part. For my own sake, observing the struggles of marginalized groups in general society on an intellectual level is one thing; routinely dealing with structures within which these marginalization issues are recognized and addressed as the most natural thing in the world is a lot more efficient with regard to furthering my understanding and evolving my progressive views and values.

    isox4 on Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

    On the individual level, memetic bleed-out can be quite hard to recognize. Why do we hum that particular song? Why do we hold that specific opinion on that particular subject? Why have our views evolved over time? Why do we “know” how to act and behave in certain social settings? I think it is safe to say that why we behave the way we do is rarely the result of one single defining reason and there is possibly no right answer to any of the questions above.

    This is what makes memetic bleed such a difficult thing to grasp. In fact, the moment we become cognitively aware that we are affected by it, it might even be possible that the effect diminishes, maybe even disappears. The reason why it is important to understand though is that the memes with which our characters interact will latch onto and take advantage of the exact same functions in our consciousness that any meme that we encounter in our daily lives will. In addition, it might be that when subjecting our characters to ideas that we as players will find ridiculous or even harmful, we will without being fully aware of it have lowered some of our “shields,” thereby making ourselves more susceptible to them.

    For instance, in 2017, to portray a German officer that was a true believer in Nazism in 1942, I read Mein Kampf as part of my preparation. My short review is that it was a jumbled together mess of ideas that were sometimes ridiculously easy to counter. Yet, when I read it in-game, my character hanging on to every word, and me using the same words to explain the ideas to my fellow German characters, it felt very differently. I am not saying that the experience turned me on to Nazism, but it felt uncomfortable enough for me to decide to actively de-role by rereading the arguments against the particular points to which my character had attached himself. I must also mention that I used this larp as one of a few to see if I could detect the elusive memetic bleed-out. To this day, I am not certain if I did detect it or if I just think I did because I wanted to do so.

    “Cleveland Trust rotunda – pt. 2” by Chewy734 (CC BY 2.0).

    In Summary

    As larp continues to evolve and take ever larger steps into the realms of education, training, and therapy, so must we also seek to further our understanding of the phenomena connected to it. It is my opinion that better understanding bleed is crucial in order for larp to be as valuable an addition as possible in the mentioned fields. In that regard, in the last few years, important work that has furthered our understanding has been done by, among others, Jonaya Kemper who introduced the term emancipatory bleed, Whitney “Strix” Beltrán who introduced the term ego bleed, and Maury Elizabeth Brown who has written about the connection between player triggers and bleed.

    As I add my thoughts to the ongoing discussion, let me make it clear that I am acutely aware of how we all tend to fall in love with our own ideas. As Dan Ariely puts it, “In the scientific world, the Not-Invented-Here bias is fondly called the ‘toothbrush theory.’ The idea is that everyone wants a toothbrush, everyone needs one, everyone has one, but no one wants to use anyone else’s” (Ariely 2012).

    Let me then be the first to say that I am certain that there is a lot more out there to figure out, but I hope that my thoughts on possible structures can at least be useful as a point for further discussion. For all I know, there might be categories that are lacking or one of my proposed categories is only part of a larger one. And so let me end this little write up with a very familiar call for further research, and state my belief that either some of the great thinkers I have cited or maybe someone we haven’t even heard of yet will deliver it to us in due time. To me, at least, the future of bleed seems bright.

    “Stained glass 2: Seen in the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art, Veletrzni (Trades Fair) Palace, Prague” by
    Tony Hisgett (CC BY 2.0).

    References

    Ariely, Dan. 2010. The Upside of Irrationality. London: Harper.

    Beltrán, Whitney “Strix.” 2013. “Shadow Work: A Jungian Perspective on the Underside of Live Action Role-Play in the United States.” In Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, 94-101. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2013. “Social Conflict in Role-Playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study.” International Journal of Role-Playing 4: 4-25.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character.” Nordiclarp.org. Last modified March 2, 2015.

    Brown, Maury Elizabeth. 2014. “Pulling the Trigger on Player Agency: How Psychological Intrusions in Larps Affect Game Play.” In The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2014, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman, 96-111. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con.

    Chalmers, David J. 1995. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2: 200-219.

    Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Hansen, Jost L. and Kjell Hedgard Hugaas. 2017. “To Bleed or Not to Bleed.” Workshop at Knutepunkt Norway 2017, February 24.

    Harder, Sanne. 2018. “Larp Crush: The What, When and How.” Nordiclarp.org. Last modified March 28, 2018.

    Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2018. “A Trinity of Consciousness.” Presentation at Knutpunkt 2018, Lund, Sweden, March 15-18, 2018.

    Kemper, Jonaya. 2017. “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity.” Nordiclarp.org. Last modified June 21, 2017.

    Leonard, Diana J. and Tessa Thurman. 2018. “Bleed-out on the Brain: The Neuroscience of Character-to-Player Spillover in Larp.” International Journal of Role-Playing 9: 9-15.

    Montola, Markus. 2010. “The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-playing.” Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players.

    Osmond, Will. 2018. “A Game of Give or Take? A Methektic Analysis of Scene-making in Larping.” Filmed May 18, 2018 at Living Games Conference, Boston, MA, video, 26:41.

    Sutherland, Stuart. 1989. The Macmillian Dictionary of Psychology. Basingstoke: The Macmillian Press Ltd.  

    Cover Photo: Saint-Malo Cathedral in Brittany, France. “Pillar and pinnacle, arch and corbel” by Derek Σωκράτης Finch on Flickr (CC BY 2.0). Image has been cropped.

  • Larp Counselor Code of Ethics

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    Larp Counselor Code of Ethics

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    Larp counseling is a unique personal / professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals and groups to pursue their own conceptions of mental health, wellness, exploration, and fun through play. Larp counseling is the practice of dedicating a staff member to overseeing participant well-being at a live-action role-play (larp) event. We defend the title as evocative of a camp counselor: a supervisory role meant to connect the player with the intended fun of an event, rather than suggesting therapeutic intent. Ideally, the event should financially support individuals in these roles, who operate outside of the logistical organizational staff.

    Larp counselors have a unique definition of and relationship to professionalism. Firstly, play is usually not the intended mode of player interaction and most conceptions of professionalism do not account for it as setting or mode. Conceptions of professionalism shared across various helping professions do not account for scenarios in which, within the lifetime of the player-counselor relationship, multiple personas / realities exist, and diegetic role reversal is expected. Classic conceptions of professionalism also fail us by assuming the nature of the counselor / player relationship is purely professional and not of a different foundation that is more likely to be fostered in organized play. Due to the privilege and authority inherent to the larp counselor role, there are still strict standards to which to adhere and lines which never should be crossed.

    Standardized values are an important way of living out an ethical commitment. The following are core values of larp counseling:

    1. enhancing human development;

    2. honoring diversity and embracing a multicultural approach in support of the worth, dignity, potential, and uniqueness of people within their social and cultural contexts;

    3. promoting social justice;

    4. safeguarding the integrity of the counselor–player relationship; and

    5. practicing in a competent and ethical manner.

    These values provide a conceptual basis for the ethical principles enumerated below. These principles are the foundation for ethical behavior and decision making. The fundamental principles of ethical behavior are:

    • autonomy, or fostering the right to control the direction of one’s life;

    • nonmaleficence, or avoiding actions that cause harm;

    • beneficence, or working for the good of the individual and society by promoting mental health and well-being;

    • justice, or treating individuals equitably and fostering fairness and equality;

    • fidelity, or honoring commitments and keeping promises, including fulfilling one’s responsibilities of trust in our ethical relationships; and

    • veracity, or dealing truthfully with individuals with whom counselors come into professional contact.

    A scrabble tile holder with tiles spelling ethics
    “Ethics” by
    Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images.

    Larp Counselor Code of Ethics Purpose

    1. The Code sets forth the ethical obligations of larp counselors and provides guidance intended to inform the ethical practice of larp counselors.

    2. The Code identifies ethical considerations relevant to larp counselors and larp counselors-in-training.

    3. The Code enables the community to clarify for current and prospective counselors, and for those served by the community, the nature of the ethical responsibilities held in common by its members.

    4. The Code serves as an ethical guide designed to assist the larp counselors in constructing a course of action that best serves those utilizing counseling services and establishes expectations of conduct with a primary emphasis on the role of the larp counselor.

    5. The Code helps to support the mission of fighting for social justice and fostering safe play.

    I. Professional Conduct

    a. It is always necessary to act in good faith, and without coercion or misrepresentation. Larp counselors must know and stay within the laws of the country in which they are practicing.

    b. It is good, ethical practice for larp counselors to be clear with players about their professional status and training.

    c. Larp counselors must be aware at all times that they are not mental health professionals and should NEVER to attempt to perform psychotherapeutic interventions beyond valuable micro-skills.

    d. Larp counselors use their professional work to benefit players and not primarily to satisfy their own needs.

    e. Larp counselors seek ways of increasing their personal and professional awareness and development.

    f. Larp counselors must maintain standards of practice by monitoring and reviewing their work alone, with peers, and by seeking supervision when necessary.

    g. Larp counselors must openly and clearly explain the possible presence of observers, recorders, and auxiliary-ego co-therapists. They must make any limits of confidentially aware to the players being helped.

    h. It is not the decision of a larp counselor to decide if players are (i) fit to play and (ii) fit for the specific group in which it is proposed to place them. If they are perceived as not fit, the counselor must indicate that to the player and may suggest alternative courses of action, but they must not prevent someone from engaging in play for this reason.

    i. In order to be fit to practice, larp counselors should maintain an adequate balance of emotional and physical health. This standard should be maintained as a model for other colleagues and trainees. They should not knowingly practice if their mental or physical poor health is liable to have a detrimental effect on their players. This includes the misuse of substances that may be detrimental to professional practice. Notions of health are both personal and cultural, and such connotations should be heavily weighted in this assessment.

    j. Larp counselors should be aware of and respect the cultural expectations of the community in which they work.

    k. Larp counselors should be aware of and respect the cultural mores of their players, trainees, and colleagues.

    A typewriter with Counselling Services written on a page
    “Counselling Services” by
    Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 ImageCreator

    II. Relationship with the Player

    a. Counselors’ guarantees on confidentially extend as far as themselves. While counselors should always be expected to maintain confidentiality in almost all cases, if other players, organizers, or bystanders are present for counseling, there can be no guarantee of privacy. It is a larp counselor’s duty to inform all parties of any limitations to confidentiality. Diegetic encounters between counselor and player character-selves are assumed to be part of play and thus have no promise of confidentiality or privacy.

    b. Larp counselors shall treat as private all information received from the player whether this is during a session or during other situations when they might be communicating delicate non-diegetic information; unless the player specifically agrees that this information is generally communicable. Comment: For best practices please see the Reporting chapter.

    c. Larp counselors must not use information received in the course of their relationship with players or trainees for personal gain.

    d. Larp counselors undertake to set out clearly and without prejudice a verbal contract with players before play begins and to reiterate relevant facets (i.e., confidentiality or the limits thereof) during play. They must almost remember that consent is an ongoing process.

    e. Larp counselors will give attention to the physical environment in which they work with players in order to provide a safe and secure space for play.

    f. Larp counselors should be aware of the professional boundaries with players and trainees. Larp counselors should be aware of the possibilities of role confusion, which can damage the interpersonal and/or training relationship. It is the duty of the counselor to maintain an understanding of the power dynamic, from their own point of view, as well as the players, both diegetically and out-of-character.

    g. At no time should a larp counselor enter into a sexual and or romantic relationship with a player or organizer during the course of play. Pre-existing relationships of this kind between counselors and players/ organizers should be bracketed. If possible, counselors should avoid moderating conflicts or engaging in sessions with these individuals, but not at the expense of anyone’s safety. Comment: For best practices, please see the Dual Relationships/Conflicts of Interest Section in our forthcoming guide book.

    h. Larp counselors should inform players of the use of videotape or other recording systems, where it is possible such a factor could upset the nature of the confidential relationship. At all times, the counselor is obliged to obtain clear, informed consent from all participants involved in any recording and to inform them that they have a right to withdraw their consent at any time.

    Scrabble tiles spelling support
    “Support” by Wokandapix on Pixabay.

    III. Relationship with Society

    a. When dealing with sensitive intimate issues that arise in play, larp counselors should treat them with appropriate caution. The use of diegetic techniques should be carefully considered in order to minimize the possibility of compounding the abuse.

    b. When approached by organizers for work or consultation, larp counselors should present a clear unambiguous statement of intention of the services they offer.

    c. Larp counselors have the responsibility to acknowledge research undertaken during an event and, where appropriate, initiate, assist, or participate in the process of informing and seeking the consent of players when they are involved. Players used as research subjects should give informed consent to participating in the nature of the research being undertaken.

    d. Larp counselors have an educative role in the larp community as well as a helping one and should seek to continue their own education. Larp counselors have the responsibility to continue their own development by being an active member of the larp safety community.

    e. Larp counselors subscribe to the principles of anti-discriminatory practice, freedom of speech, and human rights; they should take positive steps to promote them.

    IV. Relationship with Play

    a. Character immersion should never be prioritized over the counselor’s vigilance. Counselors acknowledge that their embedded role is explicitly for the benefit of players and always follow the Prime Directive. Counselors forgo intensive immersion in favor of a perspective that prioritizes their ability to vigilantly perform their duties. Comment: The Prime Directive refers to the counselor’s responsibility to the well-being of players, and the limitations of their involvement within the diegesis: No intentional interference with the development of plot. No protracted relationship with a player-character.

    b. A larp counselor’s character self should exhibit characteristics and behavior becoming of a counselor. Players should always feel comfortable engaging with counselor characters.

    c. Larp counselors only disrupt another’s immersion for the express purpose of resolving issues relevant to their position.

    d. Larp counselors always consider the culture of play in which they exist before acting. However, such considerations should never jeopardize the well-being of players. Counselors are always assessing and reassessing their notions of “well-being” in the context of the players and environment.

    e. Larp counselors should always reserve the ability to stop/ start and relocate play as well as declare in-game areas as temporarily out-of-game to facilitate their duties. Caution should be used when exercising these abilities; counselors should consider the impact upon player experience as well as the urgency of the situation.

    f. If organizers have agreed to allow counselors the authority to use diegetic devices, counselors may do so within the context of the Prime Directive (i.e., directive abilities should never affect the plot beyond a single or small group of characters).

    g. Diegetic devices are to be used only when the counselor believes they will have a positive impact on the player’s experience and well-being.

    h. If a larp counselor’s character-self is a psychotherapist or an adjacent position, they may role-play psychological interventions. Caution should be taken to ensure these interactions stay within the realm of fiction and fulfill the needs of play.

    i. Counselors should take care to explicitly articulate when play ends and begins.

    References

    Atwater, Brodie, and Alex Rowland. “Developing a Framework of Larp Counseling.” International Journal of Role-Playing 9: 16-23.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne, Maury Brown, Brodie Atwater, and Alex Rowland. “Larp Counselors: An Additional Safety Net.” Nordiclarp.org. Last modified August 7, 2017.

    Cover photo: “Ethics” by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 ImageCreator.

    This article was originally published as an Appendix in the International Journal of Role-Playing 9.

  • Larp Crush: The What, When and How

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    Larp Crush: The What, When and How

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    [This article is also available in Spanish, at: http://vivologia.es/larp-crush-el-que-el-cuando-y-el-como/
    Thank you to Vivologia for translating it!]

    This article is based on a presentation I made at the Nordic larp conference Knutpunkt 2018 in Lund, Sweden. It is based on my own experiences as well as conversations with larp crushed people.

    There must be more to it. That’s what I’ve always thought.

    Larpers generally agree that what happens in-game stays in-game. This idea is known as an alibi — as described by e.g. Markus Montola (2010). Just because your larp character is a sadistic tyrant does not mean that you are. The same goes for relationships: Your sister is not your actual sister, your friend is not your actual friend, and your lover is not your actual lover.

    Right?

    But then there’s the larp crush. It sounds like a little blip on your romantic radar — something you laugh at and quickly shrug off. But as it turns out, that is often a misconception. In the words of a young lady who approached me after my talk at Knutpunkt: “It’s called larp crush because your heart is crushed afterwards.”

    Defining the Larp Crush

    What is a larp crush? If you are not sure whether you have had one, you can rest assured: You have not. It is not the kind of experience that goes unnoticed.

    A larp crush is a condition where you and your character get your wires crossed, so to speak.

    It is a close relative to larp bleed, which Sarah Lynne Bowman (2015) defines as “moments where […] real life feelings, thoughts, relationships, and physical states spill over into [the players’] characters’ and vice versa.”

    However, larp crushes are known to be potentially more intense than pretty much any other experience of bleed.

    In order to examine the larp crush, I have been looking into how actors deal with the equivalent of bleed. According to professor of media psychology Dr. Elly A. Konijn, actors rarely get confused about their identity (Konijn 2000). In my experience, the same goes for role-players. However, they do get affected by their character’s emotions and behaviour. Just like actor Jim Carrey was affected by portraying Andy Kaufman in the biopic Man on the Moon, so do role-players get affected by their character’s emotions.

    This is my definition of a larp crush:

    • A larp crush is a variant of bleed, which means that you are having trouble separating your real world emotions from your character’s.
    • You know that you have a larp crush when you feel an inexplicable desire to spend time staring into another person’s eyes for unreasonable amounts of time.
    • It is only a larp crush if you felt no prior attraction to the person in question. You might have thought they looked nice, but you didn’t see them in a romantic light. If you did, it’s not a larp crush — it is a regular crush!
    • It is only a larp crush if it was triggered by your in-game relationship. Finding out at an afterparty that you really like each other is not a larp crush — it is a regular crush.
    Painting of a woman gazing longingly at a man staring at himself in a lake Echo and Narcissus (1903) by John William Waterhouse.

    Immersion into Character

    In Nordic larp as well as in most Hollywood films, realism is by far the most prevalent genre. This means that being able to reproduce realistic emotions is considered “good role-playing.”

    Our approach is much like that of actor and theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski’s work.

    Early Stanislawski method acting claims that the actor should give themselves up, and become one with the role. Furthermore, you should use emotional recall to create believability.

    Recalling genuine emotions not only creates the expression of those emotions; it also makes you relive them. Because of the potential danger of this method, Stanislawski later distanced himself from it. However, it was too late: Hollywood had already embraced it. Some of the most famous actors, from Dustin Hoffman to Heath Ledger, used this method.

    When larping, so do I.

    Becoming emotional or being moved by a performance appears to be one of the most important criteria an audience uses to judge the impact of a performance. The same is the case for participants larping in the Nordic style (Bowman 2017).

    Unless we get emotionally involved, we do not get the catharsis feeling that the ancient Greeks used to describe the feeling of being emotionally purged — of having gone through a great ordeal, and coming out on the other side.

    As a side note: For some larpers, emotional identification with the character never happens. However, many people are able to create an emotional bond with their character some of the time, although not always. Because Nordic larpers often see character immersion as an indicator of success, larp without immersion into character is often considered a failure and a disappointment.

    Actors agree that the ticket to an emotional bond with your character is preparation. You must know all about your character — where she comes from, her status, her character, her habits, her life goals or lack thereof. You must know enough that you are able to build “an inner model,” or as psychologists describe it, a theory of mind.

    Limerence

    Larp crushes feel like falling in love. They consist of a mixture of obsession and compulsion. You are constantly thinking about the object of desire, and you can’t help but interpret everything he or she says or does and what that means for your relationship.

    While doing research for this article, I stumbled on the term limerence. It was coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in 1979. It is an often involuntary state in which you are emotionally attached to another person to the point of obsession. Although it involves physical attraction, it goes much further than just the wish to have sex. You might call it an extreme version of romantic love. As Tennov (1979) describes, “Limerence is first and foremost a condition of cognitive obsession.”

    According to Tennov, never experiencing limerence is just as natural a state as experiencing it. However, people who have never gone through limerence are prone to think it is a myth. It is not, but it is a bit of a unicorn that some people go their entire life without ever seeing. Larping is excellent at inducing this state.

    The limerent person — that is, the person experiencing a full-on crush — becomes extremely attentive to little signals, such as body language, wording, or actions.

    Being limerent is like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when the doors open, and you step out of Kansas and into Oz. It is like an awakening. You are high on energy, and everything is doubly intense.

    Dorothy with Toto staring in wonder at Oz The Wizard of Oz (1939). Photo by Insomnia Cured Here on Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.

    According to scientists, an MRI brain scan of a person in love looks a lot like the brain of a person under the influence of cocaine (Fisher, Aron, Brown 2018). Over the years, it has in fact been debated whether being in love should be classified as a mental disorder (Tennov 1979). There is no doubt that limerence is a very powerful physical condition as well as a state of mind. Also, while you are going through it, you have as little power over the chemical reactions that are going on in your brain as if you were on drugs.

    Limerence is not the product of human decision: It is something that happens to us. Its intrusive cognitive components, the obsessional quality that may feel voluntary at the moment but that defies control, seem to be the aspect of limerence in which it differs most from other states. (Tennov 1979)

    Larp crushes make you feel alive. Everything is coated in meaning. For better or worse, whether you are drowning in misery or over the moon with joy, you are incredibly tuned into the world around you.

    We all have a generalized longing for union with the beautiful and the excellent. Limerence is a pure manifestation of that longing.

    Are Larp Crushes “Real?”

    The answer I have currently arrived at is: Yes and no.

    Larp crushes are definitely real experiences of being in love. Larp crushes are real in the sense that the barrier between you and your character’s emotions are eroded to the point where you really, truly are going through limerence.

    However, larp crushes are “created” because you deliberately place yourself in a situation where you are balancing between hope and uncertainty. Placing yourself in a state where you are constantly balancing hope and uncertainty feeds the limerence. That is what is referred to as The Bungee Method in Charles Bo Nielsen’s (2017) article “Playing in Love,” which is intended as a guide to playing romantic relationships in Nordic larps.

    Often, when you experience a larp crush, you have no idea about the person behind the character. But actually, that lack of knowledge does not set larp crushes apart from other kinds of crushes: There is no need to know the person who becomes the object of limerence. People often describe falling in love at first sight.

    A knight in armor and a lady in a veil Tristan and Isolde Sharing the Potion (1916) by John William Waterhouse.

    According to Tennov, the best way of getting rid of limerence is if it is revealed that the limerent object is highly undesirable. However, since most people are decent enough, this approach is not very reliable.

    Tennov estimates that the average limerent reaction lasts approximately from 18 months to 3 years. However, a few may last a lifetime, while others might wear off more quickly. There seems to be a connection between exposure and duration.

    There are three efficient ways of getting rid of limerence:

    • Consummation: you get together and have a relationship. (No, sex is not enough)!
    • Starvation: you never see this person again.
    • Transference: you somehow manage to transfer your feelings to a third person.

    Staying in touch is most certainly not the way to go, if you want to get rid of unwanted feelings. However, Tennov believes that the person who is at the receiving end has an ethical obligation to help diminish the pain that the limerent person is undergoing.

    Also, if the limerence is not reciprocated, the suffocating attention from the limerent person can be an unpleasant experience, which needs to be dealt with. What both parties need is a very clear statement from the object of limerence (the person whom the limerent person is in love with) that they are not interested. Otherwise the limerent person will continue to nurse the embers of hope.

    Can you Make Your Body Fall in Love?

    According to Konijn, there is only slight evidence that performing specific physical exercises, such as staring into each other’s eyes, will make you fall in love (Konijn 2000). However, separating the character’s feelings from your own is a different story.

    Konijn explains how it is rare that even method actors become affected by a character’s emotions while actually acting. It is during rehearsal and while preparing for the character that they wind up being affected. However, larpers are in a different situation — our performance is significantly more immersive, if not for any other reason, then because we do not have to remember lines, and we are not standing on a stage.

    Scientists Arthur Aron et al. (1997) wanted to find out if intimacy between strangers can be accelerated by carrying out “self-disclosing” and relationship-building tasks. The tasks would gradually escalate in intensity. Indeed, self-disclosure turns out to be linked to establishing intimacy and feeling close. The conclusion was that under the right conditions, and with the right pairings, intimacy can be accelerated.

    In my experience, larping has a similar effect: Having lived through strong emotions together, you feel intimate afterwards. However, while I don’t doubt the sincerity of the feelings, the idea that you truly get to know a stranger on a deep level after spending a few days together, I find dubious at best.

    The emotional “shortcut” to feeling intimate with strangers that larp provides is perhaps best considered a stepping stone to get to know each other. You may have opened the door, but the actual relationship building comes after — and needs to be done, so that you do not wind up in a relationship with someone with whom you are not compatible.

    Still, larp crushes are not that different from falling in love at first sight. While most people are most likely to be nice, you may be falling in love with someone with whom you cannot connect long-term.

    Have I Fallen for a Real Person, or for a Fictional Character?

    You have fallen for a fictional character. However, there is nothing new about this. People do it all the time, when they fall in love with Mr. Darcy, John Snow, or Lara Croft. Just because the object of your desire is fiction, your feelings are not.

    Woman and man about to kiss
    Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (2005). Photo by Peter Pham on Flickr. CC BY 2.0.

    Limerence is very often built on fiction. When people talk about “falling in love at first sight,” what they fall for is obviously not a deep knowledge of each other’s character, but rather a fantasy of who they assume this person might be.

    According to sexologist John Money, everyone carries a blueprint for our ideal partner. Love maps are fairly complex — they both have to do with fulfillment and upbringing. When you fall in love at first sight, what happens is that you find someone onto whom you are able to project your lovemap. Money (1986) continues, “That is to say, the person projects onto the partner an idealized and highly idiosyncratic image that diverges from the image of the partner as perceived by other people.”

    Of course, that projection is in itself a fictitious character.

    The question you need to ask yourself is not whether your feelings are real — of course they are — but rather: Do I want this? Depending on the degree of compulsion/obsession, a larp crush can disrupt your everyday life to a degree where it becomes destructive. Tennov (1979) explains, “Limerence for someone other than one’s spouse can cause major disruption to the family, and when frustrated, limerence may produce such severe distress as to be life threatening.”

    However, limerence can also be a positive, transformative experience that helps you reevaluate your life in a constructive manner.

    Controlling Your Larp Experience

    According to psychology professors Thalia Goldstein and Ellen Winner (2012), there are three psychological skills that help an actor create a strong characterization: theory of mind, affective empathy, and emotion regulation.

    Theory of mind is the ability to understand what others are thinking, feeling, believing, and desiring. Being able to see through someone’s actions and understanding their intentions is integral to creating a strong character, because those are the skills that character creation require. Some people have strong theory of mind, while others find it difficult. Reading fiction, and — of course — larping, trains this skill.

    Affective empathy — as opposed to cognitive empathy — is the feeling you get in response to someone else’s emotion. It is sometimes referred to as “emotional contagion.” It could be sadness for someone’s grief, joy for someone’s happiness, etc. Being happy and shedding tears of joy at someone else’s wedding counts as affective empathy. Letting yourself be affected by your character’s emotions does too.

    Finally, a good larper needs emotional regulation skills. You need to be able to decide whether you want to feel the emotions of your character or not, or to what extent. This is not just a skill for when you are larping; from an early age, we all learn to regulate our feelings, because sometimes it’s inappropriate or inconvenient to show them.

    To be able to control your larping experience, you need emotional regulation skills. Being able to play a romantic relation without getting larp crushed — or the opposite, deliberately getting larp crushed — all comes down to this particular skill.

    Juliet kissing Romeo on a balcony
    Detail of Romeo and Juliet (1884) by Frank Dicksee.

    Tools for Emotion Regulation

    Emotion regulation is currently not something that is emphasized in the Nordic larp vocabulary. Interestingly, though, in other larp scenes the idea of being fully immersed in your character is seen as stigmatizing.

    This stigmatization is something that Tennov (1979) also describes in relation to limerence, stating, “Many societies have attempted to prevent love or, more often, to control it in some way.“

    She even describes how Stendhal, a 19th century author who is often quoted for his philosophical thoughts on love and beauty, was embarrassed at the thought of being discovered as someone who could be taken over by feelings of passion. She ascribes this reaction to society generally being more inclined to reward rational behaviour than emotional.

    While Nordic larp generally praises character immersion, larp crushes seem to be trivialized. The idea that we need tools for handling too much immersion does not seem to have taken root.

    Larp crushes are not trivial fiction. They are real emotions, and they should be treated as such. With regard to finding the tools that will help us get better at creating the experiences we want, we still have far to go. Becoming aware of these emotional responses, and admitting their impact on us, is a first step.

    References

    Aron, Arthur, Edward Melinat, Elaine N. Aron, Robert Darrin Valone, Renee J. Bator, et al. 1997. “The Experimental Generation of Emotional Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23, no. 4 (April): 363-377.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2015. “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character.” Nordiclarp.org, March 3.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2017. “Immersion into Larp: Theories of Embodied Narrative Experience.” First Person Scholar, March 4.

    Fisher, Helen E., Arthur Aron, Lucy L. Brown. 2006. “Romantic Love: A Mammalian Brain System for Mate Choice.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 361, no. 1473 (December): 2173–2186.

    Goldstein, Thalia R., and Ellen Winner. 2012. “Enhancing Empathy and Theory of Mind.” Journal of Cognition and Development 13, no 1: 19-37.

    Konijn, Elly A. 2000. Acting Emotions, Shaping Emotions on Stage. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press.

    Money, John. 1986. Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition in Childhood, Adolescence, and Maturity. New York: Irvington Publishers Inc.

    Montola, Markus. 2010. “The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-playing.” Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players, 2010.

    Nielsen, Charles Bo. 2017. “Playing in Love.” In Once Upon a Nordic Time, edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand, 176-184. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt.

    Tennov, Dorothy. 1979. Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Lanham, Maryland: Scarborough House.

    Cover photo: Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1777) by Antonio Canova in the Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

  • Tensions between Transmedia Fandom and Live-Action Role-Play

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    Tensions between Transmedia Fandom and Live-Action Role-Play

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    Larp is a medium that helps us co-create intricate shared fictions through subjective understandings of the story world around us. Meanwhile, large story franchises – the Marvel Universe, the Potterverse, the Star Wars Expanded Universe, etc. – both steadily add content to their story universes and also canonize (and copyright) this content. Larping in a franchise or adjacent to a franchise means that players can rapidly build competence and familiarity with the material. Yet franchises encourage fans to establish canons and traditions that occasionally contradict the flexibility of the larp medium. This essay addresses tensions related to larps that aspire to create larger story universes and/or draw on the fandom related to larger franchises. I argue that larp organizers and designers must attend to how their events interact with fandom behaviors, especially the impulse to 1) canonize specific practices, characters, and events, and 2) manufacture second-order knowledge and products related to the game. Both fan practices, while in many cases beneficial to the larp, have the potential to unintentionally supplant designer principles and goals. It will be helpful for us to figure out how to wield this double-edged sword of mass culture for larps in the future.

    Transmedia and Franchises

    In our current socio-historical moment, immersive story worlds connected to billion-dollar global franchises such as the Potterverse let us live and breathe the fiction thanks to those dollars purchasing ubiquity and high-quality design. By “ubiquity,” I mean that it becomes hard to avoid knowing at least something about a particular franchise, given that the material is everywhere and being discussed by a critical mass of people. By “high-quality design,” I mean that the money involved has given the universe an undeniable “look” that becomes part and parcel to its brand and affordances. Design has re-asserted its authority in the corporate world (Rhodes, 2015), as franchises abide by the truism that Harry Potter isn’t the same without robes and wands or Star Wars isn’t the same without lightsabers and Death Stars. Merchandising then ensures such objects can be purchased on the open market. These franchises engage us precisely because they catch our attention, provide an easily accessible basis of the premise (i.e., Harry Potter is about wizards trying to get through school while also investigating Voldemort’s potential return), and can be found everywhere. The last point would deem them “transmedia.”

    cover of a book with an iPod on it
    Cover of Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins (2008).

    Transmedia, or the instantiation and narration of events in a story world across multiple media platforms, pervade today’s globalized society. Coined by Henry Jenkins in his widely cited book Convergence Culture (2006), “transmedia” describes a climate of media production in which franchises seed fan participation: “The circulation of media content––across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders––depends heavily on consumers’ active participation” (Jenkins 3). These consumers, or “fans,” are prompted to seek more information about and connect the dots between the content of a G.I. Joe movie, a G.I. Joe comic book, and a G.I. Joe action figure. The business model is simple: get a niche audience to emotionally invest in your content on at least one platform, and then support these devoted fans as they promote this fictional universe and consume related products. Much as we would like to dismiss transmedia as purely cynical, however, the fan practices of promotion and consumption cultivated by the business model (and transmedia’s ease of accessibility) affect our storytelling practices in fundamental ways.

    Arran Gare (2016) has argued recently that most of our societal rewards now stem from a “dematerialized economy,” and that our habitus, our whole way of life, encourages us to divorce ourselves from reality as much as possible. Fans spend huge portions of their lives laboring on behalf of immersive story worlds, largely uncompensated for their efforts (De Kosnik, 2013). Fans write fan fiction (“fanfic”) about their favorite characters, much of which is readable for free on http://archiveofourown.org or Tumblr. They crowdsource and maintain Wikis and “story bibles” that are then referenced by the producers of the content, who are in turn pressured to keep continuity with previous “facts” in the story worlds. Pierre Lévy observes that this “circuit” formed between authors, readers, spectators, producers, creators and interpreters blurs the distinction between them all, as they each work to support the others (Lévy, quoted in Jenkins, 2006, 95). In the end, genre fiction and transmedia story worlds guide us to a pleasurable divorce from reality: they give us clear characters to follow, a language to communicate, and a pre-established set of expectations about the world that give us easy entry into a complex fictional world. When transmedia spreads to larp as a platform, however, the complexity of that world, its corresponding fandom, and the practices that fandom engenders all strain against the possibilities that larp affords.

    Larp is above all an ephemeral medium, heavily reliant on the narrative and social emergence that happens when you get actual humans together in a space (Montola, 2012). The first-person audience (Sandberg, 2004) of the form ensures that each player experience within a larp is radically subjective, may not correspond with agreed-upon “facts” about the world, and is not readily reproducible. Yet we also have within us the impulse to make larp a canonical medium, i.e. one that builds worlds with their own intricate history and weight. Although the 360° illusion so popular in larp theory is but a myth – “a complete environment alone does not generate better role-playing” (Koljonen, 2007) – the guiding principle that one should larp in a well-conceived, deeply structured aesthetic world is endemic to most larp cultures.

    photo of a man in vintage military coat and hat
    Photo of the author in his Inside Hamlet Stormguard costume as Colonel Perdue.

    We have a couple of practices that we regularly use to establish “world facts” in our ephemeral medium. We articulate them in large PDFs and books, writing dozens or even hundreds of pages of text normally not readily available during role-play that we hope some people have committed to memory. We create visual media, physical artifacts, fictional maps, acoustic environments – anything to give players a foothold on what the fictional world would look, feel, and sound like. We also form small groups on social media and strategize. In Inside Hamlet (Ericsson, Pedersen and Koljonen, 2015), for example, I was given the character of Colonel Perdue, commander of the Stormguard. Given that we wanted to make them “seem real,” we had a four-person Facebook group in which we co-created fictional aspects of the Stormguard that were to come up during play, including our own insignia patches and musical anthem. These aspects formed part of what Moyra Turkington calls our “socket” (Turkington, 2006), or the “place where people plug themselves into a game and give and take their focus and energy to and from.” We invested, and received returns on that investment. We gladly invented this ephemera to secure our character immersion and help others with theirs, but we also did not expect for this material to survive the run: it was for the Stormguard’s use in Run 1, and we let the Stormguard in Run 2 come up with its own material. We assumed that none of our own world building should impose any further on other runs as a matter of etiquette, that our fictional “facts” would remain an artifact of our play, rather than as aspects of the game that future players must attend to.

    The act of “attending to” anything in a larp is not neutral. As J Li and Jason Morningstar (2016) recently argue it costs player energy and cognitive load to keep the fiction in focus. “Players need their working memory to fictionalize,” they write. “Structure plot so that each person only has 4-5 things to keep track of” (19). The same could be said of a story world. If I need to know off the top of my head that engineers are categorically unable to revive the ship’s computer, or even the name of that one CoW House with the unspeakable drinks (Sendivogius), then I am often committing working memory to internalize that information. If a fact about a game is recorded on some Facebook thread or some fan Wiki and I cannot readily access it in character, there is a question as to whether or not that ephemera will even exist in the duration of the larp. Transmedia from major franchises actually help us secure more fiction in our brains, as we have engaged with that story universe before and have more of its nuances stored in our long-term memory. Yet much of that readily-available fiction vanishes when creating even a re-skinned version of a franchise: new words must be remembered, new fictional events attended to, and new casts of characters with their own personalities met and judged. If a larper has to keep a “story bible” in their head as they try to navigate to find food in a place unfamiliar to the player while also navigating their complex relationship with a half-hydra, chances are that the story universe information will be forgotten.

    The Case of the Wizardry-verse and the Magimundi

    In 2014, the wildly successful Polish-Danish blockbuster larp College of Wizardry (CoW, Nielsen, Dembinski and Raasted et al. 2014) took the larp community by storm with its high concept and low bar for entry: players get to play wizards in a Harry Potter-esque school for several days in Czocha Castle, co-creating immersive fiction as they compete for the coveted House Cup. The “-esque” suffix in “Harry Potter-esque” is important. The organizers had to attend to Warner Brothers’ request to separate their story universe from that of the famous wizard school series due to copyright following the first 3 runs (CoW1-3). The transition from the Potterverse to the College of Wizardry-verse for CoW4 and on (or, for that matter, the Magimundi for the American adaptation New World Magischola (NWM, Brown and Morrow, 2016) proved a model lesson in filing the serial numbers off of a well-known franchise. “Muggles” became “mundanes,” Hogwarts was wiped off the map, and suddenly necromancy took on an increasingly central role as a story device.

    On the one hand, a player from CoW1 in the fan-expanded Potterverse reported that having all the names, creatures, places, and events already established in the world as canon “[made] it possible to play almost without preparation and without having to remember background text, if only you knew your HP.” On the other hand, players of the post-Potterverse CoW and NWM runs remarked how much space had been established for them. Peter Svensson writes that “the emphasis on diversity and acceptance is something where NWM [and CoW] shone. I’m a gay man. The Harry Potter books could only hint at the existence of people like me. But NWM firmly established that this is a world where I exist. Where people like me are and have been part of the historical record.” The framing of our fictional lives matters. Content and expectations around the immersive story world let players know what is and isn’t possible to see happen during play.

    Nevertheless, fan culture also sets expectations, with CoW and NWM taking center stage as larps adapted from the propositions of the larger Potterverse. One fandom expectation example is the concept of the OTP (One True Pairing), a term from fanfic meaning one’s emotional commitment to two franchise characters being destined to be together. In Harry Potter, for example, popular OTPs include Sirius Black and Prof. Snape, Harry and Hermione, and so forth. This is fine in fanfic, but becomes an issue when one as a player wishes to have an OTP-type experience in a larp. At the end of CoW and NWM, there is a dance that involves characters showing up in pairs or groups. Players who privately reported expecting something resembling a OTP experience were often sorely disappointed that the relationship did not go the way they (as a player) had imagined it, and were unable to fateplay((http://fate.laiv.org/fate/en_fate_ef.htm)) or “play to lose”((https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Playing_to_Lose)) as a means of controlling the situation. Larps promise living out one’s fantasies, but the expectations that come with those fantasies must be managed around the natural emergence within the game. Fandom does not necessarily prepare us for this.

    a wizard in a rob, flying hat, and sunglasses
    DJ Dizzywands at New World Magischola 1. Photo by Sarah Lynne Bowman for Learn Larp, LLC.

    Another example from CoW and NWM involved canonization. During a pre-game video call with NPCs from a previous run who would participate in my run of NWM, I mentioned in passing that I might be able to step in and do some music at the dance, in keeping with organizer expectations for us to use the affordances of the playspace. One former NPC was shocked: “But… but… DJ Dizzywands!” they stammered, thinking it inconceivable that anyone but the designated NPC whom they enjoyed from a previous run could possibly help run the dance. Although DJ Dizzywands –– played by Austin Shepard in a smashing wizard’s cloak –– did not exist in any of the game materials, he had become canonized as part of the NWM experience.

    Finally, both CoW and NWM are exploring the marketing of merchandise, as one does with a franchise: control of one’s product across platforms creates multiple financial outlets for fans to show their support. The problem arises when the making and marketing of merchandise confuses relevant information about the game with fandom. A NWM player lamented to me about the constant upselling of the game through products such as T-shirts, wands, and supplemental world materials, such that one of their friends dropped out of the game “when the ‘game’ became no longer apparent amidst a marketing machine.” Second-order products, such as fan art or homemade merchandise, suddenly fall into the gray area of having to be “endorsed” or not by the larp, and can help further canonization of specific aspects of the game that may or may not remotely resemble someone else’s first-person audience experience. While larp is a means of expression and a catalyst for other forms of expression, expressing oneself through material means about a larp also has transmedia fan assumptions underlying it.

    Responses to Transmedia

    Larp communities have been responding to franchises for decades, and in various ways inventing interesting strategies to the dilemmas around fandom. To escape the tyrannical ubiquity of J.R.R. Tolkien-esque fantasy worlds, for example, Mike Pohjola created what he calls “folk fantasy” to re-localize and re-nationalize globalized transmedia products. “Could we retell our own myths and say something relevant to our time?” he asks (Pohjola 51). Täällä Kirjokannen alla (2011) was a larp derived from specifically Finnish folk legends, which ultimately served as a means of reinvigorating a local storytelling culture. In this capacity, neither overt, garish nationalism nor fandom serves as a proper response to the material: larpers had to negotiate their own national myths and the fact that deep, immersive story universes ultimately came from somewhere, while also being cautious against the exclusionary idea that these folk legends are “superior” to others. The larp embraced specificity over ubiquity, and emergent qualities of these narratives rather than relying on fandom and franchise familiarity to drive play. Eliot Wieslander’s Mellan himmel och hav (2002) and the Danish team behind Totem (Schønnemann Andreasen and thurøe et al., 2007) both heavily relied on workshops and co-present co-creation((i.e., players actually in the space working through their characters, rather than on social media)) to formulate ways to make science-fiction stories and stories of indigenous societies respectively neither cliché nor too abstract for the players to grasp.

    One can also turn to rules and regulation as part of the design. The common practice of using social media groups to structure in-game relations can also prompt player-characters to start play via post and even prompt the organizers to moderate or intervene such play. Having a clear policy about pre-game play and the in-game larp consequences allows organizers to not have to attend to every piece of fanfic or “what-if” scenario created by the players. Establishing that no single player has rights over a specific character in the fiction is also important: these characters are roles, not canonical figures, unless designed that way. Merchandise should above all serve play or memories of play, and memes and merchandise that point to specific moments in-game should generally have the run title (NWM2, CoW4, Inside Hamlet Run 2, etc.) somehow associated with it, so as not to create the impression that this is an eternal moment of the “classic” version of the game. Better still, organizers can connect multiple images of the same character or comparable situation across multiple runs, so as to engage with the dynamic of cosplay, in which one celebrates the labor of performance across multiple different representations of emergence (Scott, 2015). Such strategies assist prospective players in imagining themselves into their roles, rather than championing and canonizing the ephemeral acts of the past players.

    Conclusion

    Although franchise story worlds function through ubiquity and high-quality design, most larps do not. Our internal fictions, however cool, largely dissipate beyond war stories and actual-play reports. Few know our larp worlds, and fewer still keep track of all their details. This is fine, for it removes the pressure to establish anything we’ve done beyond the ephemerality of play. However, as we lay down track in our story worlds, we should be mindful of our impulses to canonize the configuration and results of our play across multiple runs of a game not designated a campaign. Canonization creates more laws, facts, and general overhead for other players to deal with later on, and it serves to cheapen future experiences by according social capital only to those who played the “classic” earlier runs. Especially in a climate in which Kickstarters and global simultaneous ticket release dates determine who gets into which larps, the players who had the benefit of a fast Internet connection should not get to pre-determine storyworld aspects of the game for other runs beyond what the organizers and designers have already established. Each larp run in a non-campaign larp benefits from its “reset” switch. Furthermore, fan-created ephemera about the game can comment on it and its world, but should not be confused with the material of the larp itself, which remains yet-to-be-determined.

    Inside Hamlet 2017 promotional photo. Photo courtesy of Participation Design Agency.

    As larp moves into becoming a platform for well-worn fan properties – albeit re-invented without the burden of their original franchise – we must now figure out the contradictory balance between being a good fan and a good larper. A good fan knows the story world inside and out, perhaps contributing their own small portion of it in keeping with the general spirit of the fiction. A good larper knows that the rules, design, objects, and setting of a larp are but playthings for their imagination and the co-creative space of their fellow players. They understand the intent and spirit of a component, and use it for emergent play as it develops. A good fan, however, also speculates and chooses favorites from among the various fictional options available. A good larper, at least for the time being, leaves much up to chance encounters in play, leading sometimes to bittersweet results after months of preparation. Pre-playing as the good fan can sabotage the good larper; the vast storyworld overhead becoming instead a ballast as pre-game role-playing and the established canon of previous runs take on more importance than an individual run itself. Moreover, seeing certain players as the only ones able to inhabit the “classic” versions of characters inhibits the emergent properties of a larp’s design in favor of establishing a rarefied high court of “key” larpers and their social politics. Merchandising of franchise-related materials pulls in much-needed revenue, but also puts fetish objects at the center of organizer attention, the proverbial act of “selling the T-shirt” perhaps overtaking the event itself.

    Now: much of this argumentation could constitute my overly precious attempt to preserve some particular larp aesthetic in the face of imminent commercialization, such as through Disney’s impending licensed Star Wars larp attractions or expansions of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, but I find the corporation cooptation of the larp artform much less a threat than the colonization of our minds by fandom. Larp is a medium through which we can say anything we want, provided negotiation with the design, the organizers, and one’s co-players. We must therefore be agentic and proactive with respect to our designs, adopting Bjarke Pedersen’s (2016) ethos that not only is design everything, but that what we call “tradition” is its opposite. When we unintentionally encourage players to use fandom interests to patrol other players, then that is, indeed, the fandom tradition sneaking into our larp design. Whatever Jedi Knights or their analogues happen to do or be in our larps, they must follow the design of the larp first and the dictates of the franchise second. Whatever strict adaptation one wants to make of the Doctor Who universe, the larp should include the points of departure in its initial write-up, lest competing fandoms overtake the preparation and implementation of the game. Whatever character you thought you played well in one run of the larp, the next person will have an entirely different interpretation and that will be perfectly fine. As we calibrate our play with each other, let us know that our impulses to create fan Wikis, fanfic, speculation about what characters will and won’t do, fan-favorite actors and portrayals, and second-order merchandise have an overall effect on the larp in question and larp culture in general. Worldbuilding is an act we can undertake together, but let us recognize our fellow players first before the franchise.

    Bibliography

    De Kosnik, Abigail. “Fandom as Free Labor.” Digital Labor. Edited by Trebor Scholz. New York,US: Routledge, 2013. Pg 98-111.

    Gare, Arran. “Beyond Modernism and Postmodernism: The Grand Narrative of the Age of Re- Embodiments.” Edited by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer, Vito De Lucia, and Sian Sullivan. New York,US: Routledge, 2016. Pg 27-46.

    Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York,US: New York University Press, 2006.

    Koljonen, Johanna. “Eye-Witness to the Illusion: An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role- Playing.” Lifelike. Edited by Jesper Donnis, Line Thorup, and Morten Gade. Copenhagen,DK: Projektgruppen KP07. 175-187.

    Montola, Markus. On the Edge of the Magic Circle. Ph.D. Dissertation. Tampere: University of Tampere, 2012.

    Morningstar, Jason and J Li. Pattern Language for Larp Design.  2016. http://www.larppatterns.org/

    Pedersen, Bjarke. “Game Design Tools for Intense Experiences.” Living Games Conference. May 19-22, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYAZupokjEw

    Pohjola, Mike. “Folk Fantasy: Escaping Tolkien.” States of Play. Edited by Juhana Petersson. Helsinki: Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura, 2012. 48-53.

    Rhodes, Margaret. “Take It From An Expert: Design Is More Important Than Ever.” WIRED. 17/03-2015. https://www.wired.com/2015/03/take-expert-design-important-ever/

    Sandberg, Christopher. “Genesi. Larp Art, Basic Theories.” Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination. Edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. Helsinki: Ropecon, 2004. Pg 264-288.

    Scott, Suzanne. “‘Cosplay is Serious Business’: Gendering Material Fan Labor on Heroes of Cosplay.” Cinema Journal 54.3 (Spring 2015): 146-155.

    Turkington, Moyra. “Covering the Bases.” Sin Aesthetics. 13/11-2006. http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/34

    Ludography

    Björk, Katarina and Eliot Wieslander. Mellan himmel och hav. Denmark. 2003.

    Brown, Maury Elizabeth, and Benjamin A. Morrow. New World Magischola. US: Learn Larp. 2016.

    Ericsson, Martin, Bjarke Pedersen and Johanna Koljonen. Inside Hamlet. Copenhagen,DK: Odyssé. 2015.

    Nielsen, Charles Bo, Dracan Dembinski and Claus Raasted Herløvsen et al. College of Wizardry. Poland: Liveform(PL) and Rollespillsfabrikken(DK). 2014.

    Pohjola, Mike, et al. Täällä Kirjokannen alla. Helsinki. 2011.

    Schønnemann Andreasen, Peter, Kristoffer Thurøe, Mathias Kromann, Peter Munthe-Kaas and Rasmus Høgdall. Totem. Denmark. 2007.

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories which was edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand and released as part of documentation for the Knutepunkt 2017 conference.

    Cover photo: The heads of New World Magischola, Nibelungen, and College of Wizardry speak before those assembled at The Challenge. Photos by Made by Iulian Dinu, Nicky Sochor and Brent Rombouts for Dziobak. Photo has been cropped.

  • Ludo-narrative Dissonance and Harmony in Larps

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    Ludo-narrative Dissonance and Harmony in Larps

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    Out of Tune

    Ludo-narrative dissonance seems like a pompous term but actually defines a simple concept that appears when gameplay (“ludo” from ludis, “game”) and narration (“narrative”) diverge or oppose: the story created by players’ actions contradicts the story tailored by the narration.

    For this article, the definition of “gameplay” in larps includes the system of rules, techniques and meta technical setup which allows players to express themselves in the larp-specific fictional universe, thus to build and expand their story through common tools. The term “narrative” refers to the context in which the game takes place (historical period, genre), displayed themes, game masters’ intentions (what experience they want the player to have), tone, etc. In larps, the narrative is set up primarily through character sheets, player tips and guidelines (describing the universe, social conventions, background), scripted events, etc. The marriage of gameplay and narrative creates the story.

    Prelude in Video Games

    Clint Hocking,1 the creative director at LucasArts and Ubisoft, first used the term “ludo-narrative dissonance” in 2007 when discussing an issue related to the video game Bioshock (2K Games, 2007). The term became an instant success and a practical tool of analysis for video games.

    To summarize Hocking’s original argument, there is a conflict between the ludic contract and the narrative contract in Bioshock. The game enhances the theme of personal interest vs. generosity through the gameplay, but denies the player that freedom of choice through its narration, creating a breach in the player’s adhesion to the overall game history.

    Other examples of such dissonance are abundant in video games. For instance, in the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, a “hero next door” young man or woman is presented in the intro cinematics as immature and fragile and then transformed in the early stages of the game into a killing machine, almost without transition. Another typical example appears in Batman Arkham City, when Batman is poisoned and encouraged to rush to find the antidote; actually, the player has all the time in the world to fulfill as many side quests as he wants. As soon as he explores the city, the game mechanics actually encourage him to do so in order to increase his skills, negating the feeling of emergency put in place by the narration.

    The ludo-narrative dissonance goes beyond a simple bug, continuity error or occasional incoherence. When it emerges, it’s the whole system that is at fault, where the story promised to the player is contradicted by the story that he lives, which is precisely what we wish to avoid in larp.

    Counterpoint in Larp

    "Anne d'Autriche with a Jambon-Beurre", or when anachronism is a kind of dissonance. Photo taken before the Fouquet's larp by Jérôme Verdier - Photographe. “Anne d’Autriche with a Jambon-Beurre”, or when anachronism is a kind of dissonance. Photo taken before the Fouquet’s larp by Jérôme Verdier – Photographe.

    Like for video games, I believe ludo-narrative dissonance is not only a useful analytical tool, but also a key challenge for larp storytelling. Whether a larp is gamist, simulationist or narrativist (or any other category if one does not adhere to these) does not say anything about its quality. However, if the rules are not consistent with the announced intention, then the organiser is exposed to the likely disappointment of the players. Imagine a larp centred around introspection or character relationships, but whose preparation material instead focuses on encyclopedic rules that detail every aspect of the external world; or a larp promising to explore the daily life of 16th century Venetian merchants, without designing an in-game economy or rules of exchange.

    Although other classifications are possible, I’d like to distinguish the most frequently encountered dissonances into two categories: passive and active.

    Passive dissonances are related to unnecessary rules. Sometimes these are rooted in the desire to present a comprehensive overview of the world or the designer’s work, which leads to an encyclopedic system. Other times, they are a result of the designers’ anxiety to cover all possible avenues of play and not limit players’ freedom or immersion. It is even specified sometimes that some rules are detailed “just in case,” even if it is not advisable to use them.

    Players’ observations tend to show2 that the more our memory is cluttered by the need to take charge or remember the rules of a game, the less space it can devote to emotional impact and empathy. Consequently, a game that would favour an abundant, complex or counterintuitive system of rules diminishes the quality of players’ immersion. This argument alone should lead designers to promptly and ruthlessly suppress any rule not actively reinforcing the game themes (safety rules not included, obviously).

    Not forgetting a more insidious effect: some players, intuitively familiar with the famous trope of Chekhov’s gun,3 may be tempted to think that if the rule exists, it is to serve a purpose. It would be a shame to unintentionally encourage players to use a rule that doesn’t serve the intention of your game, or worse, which lessens the impact of the game’s story. Even though combat, sex or healing rules cover basic subjects (from a simulationist point of view), this is not a reason why they should appear by default in a game system. Every rule should meet a need. One way to avoid passive dissonance and strictly focus on relevant rules may be to suggest to players other means of resolving situations that might occur, more in line with the game themes. Organisers should also clearly communicate what will not take place during the game because it is not part of the scope. For instance, in Prima la Musica or L’Agonie du Poète (The Poet’s Agony, 2016), there are no rules to simulate sex. In operas or 17th theatre plays, protagonists do not sleep with each other, so the same rule applies to these larps set up in the same context, period. However, the theme of being in love is central, thus other means consistent with the setting are suggested to express it like sighs, looks, and gentle touching of hands.

    Active dissonances are caused by rules conflicting with the intentions of the game. The experience they offer to the player is different from what the larp promises. As a consequence, the story experienced by the player is different or even in contradiction with the narration of the game. This situation can take many forms, among which:

    • A discrepancy between the intention of the game, and the type of rules set up by the game design: games anticipated as fun and light but burdened with heavy or complex rulebooks, or games without rules or with minimal rules, where players’ objectives require simulationist mechanisms. This last case can make players and designers think that rules are necessary in a larp, when the actual problem is that it’s not possible to achieve the game objectives with the tools provided.
    • Poorly chosen rules, inconsistent with the narration, and ultimately harmful to the game. Ars Amandi for instance, is a sex simulation rule requiring touching one’s partner’s arm that allows a wide variation of interpretations. Nevertheless, it should not be systematically used as a default sex simulation rule: in games where sexual intercourse is not an important stake, other rules that don’t involve physical contact may be as relevant, and less intrusive for the player.

    Rules are marvellous tools to support, structure, and build a story. Just as it would be unthinkable to reuse character sheets from one game to another (except in the case of a very innovative concept), it would seem at best neglectful, at worst counterproductive, not to design specifically tailored rules for each larp in order to define the game’s own identity. The assumed ambition by most larps—to propose original, varied, strong, and inspiring experiences—requires designers to pay attention to the consistency of all tools used to reach the Holy Grail of ludo-narrative harmony.

    From Dissonance to Harmony

    Following the above thoughts, a term has naturally emerged to greet the effort of preventing—and indeed actively counteracting—the dissonance: ludo-narrative harmony.

    Passive and Active Harmony

    In the same way that passive and active dissonances can be categorised, it seems relevant to distinguish passive and active harmony:

    The Santeuil Boating Party design illustrates seamlessly their "slow gaming" approach: "Take your time, enjoy, live at the pace of the ripples on the lake..." The Santeuil Boating Party design illustrates seamlessly their “slow gaming” approach: “Take your time, enjoy, live at the pace of the ripples on the lake…”
    • Passive harmony: when the rules are consistent with the premise of the game, without necessarily supporting the theme. Consider for instance a post-apocalyptic game where everyone is accustomed to the rigours of survival since childhood, but that promises players the opportunity to explore interpersonal relationships, the importance of family ties, and the experience of group life. To fully focus rules on combat or survival would be consistent with the setting, but would be inadequate to convey the theme. Dissonance is then avoided but harmony is not fully achieved.
    • Active harmony: when the rules, whether chosen among existing ones or created, are always selected specifically to support the whole story by incorporating themes into players’ actions. By this means, the focus of the rules and their tone and treatment are in line with the fictional framework. Again using the post-apocalyptic game example, it may translate to rules setting up group rituals for instance.

    In an effort towards active harmony, many games have brilliantly set up such rules, through the choice of their subject matter (which rules to focus upon, such as sex-play or inter-generational dynamics) or the choice of their treatment (the mechanics by which this focus is handled). Let’s take a look at some examples:

    The first path to ludo-narrative harmony is to choose rules that address a specific topic, to frame the specific larp narration setting and themes. It ranges from designing rules about quodpot for a Harry Potter university larp (Salem-Never forget, 2012), where the championship is not only competitive but part of the narrative; or duelling rules in a western larp to create smooth scenes (Hell on Wheels, Appl and Dulka et al.,. 2015); to more unexpected ones, like rules that allow players to forget or blur serious events as a means of reinforcing the desired dreamlike atmosphere in an oneiric larp (La Sirena Varada, 2015); or a rule that channels madness through a necklace that enhances charisma and lowers a character’s inhibitions, imbuing the game with psychological horror (Pan, 2014).

    Once the designers have chosen the subjects of the rules, it’s time to design them in a relevant way that reflects the narration specific to the larp. Sex simulation rules are a good illustration for that kind of choice. The needs unique to each of the following games has led designers to address this topic, but each set of rules has been executed differently, echoing the identity of the larp:

    • In Les Liaisons Dangereuses [Dangerous Liaisons] (2014), where love is seen as a tool of power and competition, a tarot deck is provided in each room to calculate the sexual performance of each character and determine the winner, with consequences ranging from change in reputation to pillow talk; and even the ultimate disgrace for both characters, the birth of true love.
    • In Les Canotiers de Santeuil [The Santeuil Boating Party] (2014), where love is a floating dream in a light and leisurely atmosphere, there is no crude simulation, no undressing, and (almost) no contact, but a system of ribbons to lovingly tie each other’s wrists before counting clouds together to climb to seventh heaven.
    • In Les Fleurs de Mai [Flowers of May] (Algayres, 2014), where love is designed as a tool of power and enslavement in a brothel, each player is required to use a range of various and subtle interpretations of Ars Amandi.
    • In Just a Little Lovin’ (Edland and Grasmo, 2013) where homosexual advances are at the heart of unbridled evenings, bowls of feathers are available in some scenes: to give a pink feather to someone is a smooth way to suggest directing the scene towards sex. If the player ignores the feather, the scene then moves elsewhere. If black feathers had not also been used to invite to black box scenes, this meta technique could even have been integrated as an intradiegetic mechanic to further strengthen harmony—the feather would then have been considered a usual code of these kind of evenings and well-known by the characters.

    The same attention to consistency can also be advantageously applied to explain the game intentions or overall design. In Vivre Vite [Live Fast] (Allermoz, 2014), a game about young punks in the 80’s, rules are offered to simulate headbutts or ass grabs, in order to enhance a violent, vulgar and sexist atmosphere. Aside from these rules, though, the playing intentions are all consistent with the subject, either in the writing (some paragraph titles for instance: “I’ll punch you,” “I’ll stab you,” “I’m on drugs” “I’ll f… you”) or the numerous incentives to break generic larping codes, including those regarding conflicts (“let’s prioritise shouting over discrete quarrels”) or physical fighting (“in that culture, opponents may finish off a fight either with a few insults or by grabbing a beer together, depending on the case”).

    In the same vein, the rules for Dirty Little Secrets (Algayres, 2013) provide several dramatic elements based on tropes from the soap opera genre—dramatic monologues, slamming doors, looks toward the camera— creating an innovative experience where ludo and narrative merge seamlessly.

    Arabesques

    Pre-game workshops could also be regarded as tools of ludo-narrative dissonance or harmony, as well as other kinds of rules; for example, the many and varied workshops for Mad about the Boy (Raaum, Edland and Lindahl, 2010) – especially the one collectively building the world through examining how the disappearance of all men would impact each character’s daily life. Similarly, the meta technique of using safewords may enable greater harmony, even if it does not create it. In our violent post-apocalyptic world example, safewords would allow to safely and fully experience the rigour or cruelty, designed as pillars of a society fighting to survive.

    Another interesting reflection: once aware of the ludo-narrative harmony mechanism, one could imagine playing with it, in order to create what I’d call constructive dissonances: dissonances that at first don’t appear to be part of the story, but in the end benefit the game, as described in the first musical definition of dissonance:

    Despite the fact that words like ‘unpleasant’ and ‘grating’ are often used to explain the sound of dissonance, all music with a harmonic or tonal basis—even music perceived as generally harmonious—incorporates some degree of dissonance. The buildup and release of tension (dissonance and resolution), which can occur on every level from the subtle to the crass, is partially responsible for what listeners perceive as beauty, emotion, and expressiveness in music.

    Consonance and dissonance

    Game designers can use players’ unconscious desire for resolution as a (comprehensive and benevolent) manipulation tool, to push them towards playing in a certain way, creating a home for some unexpressed expectations that will be resolved in-game, or to induce the tone of game without announcing it.

    Such use may be dangerous, exposing the organiser to the risk of poor communication and the player to disappointment, but tempting to lovers of non-transparent games.

    Why not imagine, for instance, apparently ill-designed rules (rules too simulationist or insu cient, detailed topics unfit with the announced themes) ultimately justified by the unexpected change of direction along the way, with the introduction of new issues that finally justify the original rules (it was all a dream, your character wakes up in another world/lives in a different one than they thought they were living in, etc). Or also, the use of certain preparatory workshops in order to create an artificial intimacy on a meta-level, which can resurface during some unexpected internal changes to the game and impact characters’ actions; for instance, characters supposed to hate each other who are teamed up during the Ars Amandi workshop, seemingly as a joke, but discover ingame that they are attracted to each other. In this case, the dissonance allows designers to avoid foreshadowing in character sheets, suppressing the consequent risks of players understanding, and enhancing the emotional impact of unexpected events and psychological turnarounds.

    The Breakthrough, a Perfect Tune?

    So much Space is played in a real bar, allowing life to imbue the game experience. So much Space is played in a real bar, allowing life to imbue the game experience.

    To go further, I would like to introduce a notion sometimes called “breakthrough” in the field of video games. I do not, however, use it in the overall sense of “breakthrough that marks the era or the history of the game,” but in a more restricted sense, a technical or design innovation at the heart of the game, defining its specific identity and allowing for—in the most successful cases—a new way to play. This concept provides an interesting construction and analysis framework to apply to larps.

    Crystallisation of Storytelling

    It is possible to create a breakthrough that does not lead to ludo-narrative harmony— for example, in the case of a gameplay innovation that isn’t related to the game’s theme. But when given its full potential, the breakthrough is the innovation that amplifies and gives an unexpected echo to the narration. It is the one rule that will often be the most memorable and regularly cited when trying to describe t he game—and therefore a good way to help define and differentiate one larp from another.

    For example, the massive medieval fantasy larp Légendes d’Hyborée [Legends of Hyboria—Opus 1] (2015) offers an innovative system of instances, derived from video games. Instances scattered throughout the site were accessible to players during some quests, with the objective of recreating the kind of epic pulp scenes that groups of adventurers had been told about in their character sheets. For instance, the dungeon of thieves, a succession of rooms filled with physical and mental puzzles to decipher in order to access the following room was an exciting adventure in which each player could refine and a rm their role within the group.

    The breakthrough is a particularly valuable way to direct the player’s attention to the theme at the heart of the game. In all larps—even the most detailed and carefully designed—immersion is an illusion. Only the agreement of the players, who willingly suspend disbelief during the duration of the game, allows what is commonly—albeit imperfectly—called “immersion.” To do so, the players tweak their sensory perception. They mentally erase what doesn’t align with the proposed narration (other players’ appearances, boffer weapons or other anachronisms), and instead focus on elements in tune with the story that they want to experience, which ideally matches the narration offered to them. More than aesthetics or the story of a game, what best enhances this objective are the rules which provide the framework for action and drive the story forward. The breakthrough is a meaningful way to help them focus their attention towards what enriches their game experience, and away from what contradicts it.

    Tant d’Espace [So much space] (Duvned, 2014) is a game for two players based on the themes of melancholy, nostalgia, and a known non-dramatic ending. Participants can play in a real bar, which reinforces on multiple levels the intention of the game. First of all, thanks to the familiarity of the setting, it utilises known references such as the selection of drinks and the presence of other customers as a way of strengthening the bleed-in inspired by the game design. Playing in a real, open world also encourages the interruption of reality through its unpredictability (rose vendors interrupting, the dynamics of background music, server downtime, closing time that forces the game to end). These hazards do not break immersion, but rather reinforce it, immediately merging with the story and offering a different experience for each session. In this sense, one could even qualify it as a systemic feature.

    The larp Comme le Houx [Like the holly-tree] (Henry,2015) explores quite another path, as the game consists entirely of a phone call between two friends. This idea is born out of the desire to remove the bodily dimension from a larping experience, in order to facilitate “immersion” and identification with the character rather than the player, as well as to encourage listening, confession and dialogue, which are the essence of the intended experience.

    Creating Languages Beyond Words

    Many larps already include breakthroughs, although they have not necessarily been identified as such. The following examples provide players new ways to express their characters, through songs, dance and music:

    Tango is a powerful way to convey emotions in The Wedding of Ashes, set in 1945 Argentina. Photo by Ze Moz. Tango is a powerful way to convey emotions in The Wedding of Ashes, set in 1945 Argentina. Photo by Ze Moz.
    • L’Eté 36 [Summer 36] (Artaud and Frénot, 2012): In order to recreate the “bucolic, romantic and festive” atmosphere, designers invite players to sing as a way of expressing their state of mind at key moments of their choice. To achieve this, a song book with customised songs of the relevant period is provided in addition to each character sheet. They become a powerful means to channel emotions, relevant both as a way of expressing the concerns and hopes of the era, and for reinforcing, through communal choirs, the characters’ sense of belonging to a group. The songs can also reveal dilemmas and intimate revelations, either through force or subtlety. This tool could be transposed and fully exploited in a musical larp, for example, where ludo and narrative would then be perfectly tuned. In any case, singing is a specific gameplay technique to personify characters.
    • Les Noces de Cendre [The Wedding of Ashes] (Gresset and Abbey, 2012): In this game, players are invited to express their characters’ moods through tango. The rules emphasise the diverse palette of emotions that can be communicated, as well as the universality of the language (everyone can dance and convey an intention while dancing: love, friendship, passion, hate, …) thus providing an additional tool shared by all players.
    • Prima la Musica (2016): This game, typical of the French romanesque genre, revolves around the world of opera and offers the players a game mechanism called the Theatre of Emotions: a clearly defined theatrical space in which the player can play a scene, sing, mime, or dance with the accompaniment of famous arias in the background, selected from a catalog available before the game so the players can familiarise themselves with the music. It punctuates players’ stories by enhancing key scenes that they choose, at their discretion, to disclose to the other players (open curtain) or play in private (closed curtain). It is a clever mechanism to enhance the atmosphere and intimately connect the opera to the game, allowing the players to interpret scenes worthy of a real opera.

    Make no mistake: I am not claiming that every game should have a breakthrough or should create an innovative rule. Innovation only makes sense if it adds to the game narration. That’s why it can be an interesting question to ask when creating a game, and the answer will depend on the nature of the larp.

    The Sound of Music

    What best than a phone to relive the friendship's years from the pre-social networks area? Photo taken by Rémi Lapcinelle during a session of Like the Holly Tree. What best than a phone to relive the friendship’s years from the pre-social networks area? Photo taken by Rémi Lapcinelle during a session of Like the Holly Tree.

    It seems obvious that when creating rules, one should keep in mind their relevance to the game. Yet the persistence of ludo-narrative dissonance in larp suggests that it may be not that simple, as it requires from larp designers both a clear vision of what they want the players to experience, and what the rules and mechanics will engender.

    Still, larps have by nature many advantages, especially compared to video games, and these advantages should be utilised as much as possible:

    First, the team composition and the workflow pipeline: in a larp team, designers often conceive all aspects of the game, including the rules and story. Even when that is not the case, the team is small enough for everyone to work tightly together. In video games, this kind of collaboration is an exception. Worse over, video game designers are not necessarily trained to take the story into consideration while developing the game design. Fortunately, narrative designers and producers, who translate the story into gameplay, are more and more frequently part of the development teams. But the fact that writers are not always included in the video game development team from the start of the project increases the chances that narration and gameplay are treated as parallel strands rather than as two sides of the same coin. On the contrary, larp designers usually keep a clear overview of the experience they want the players to live, and can more easily harmonise their design and story, since they control everything.

    Also, contrary to video games, last-minute gameplay changes in larp do not usually have cost implications, which makes it easier to align ludic and narrative elements and to address any divergences, right up to the very end.

    Finally, and most importantly, larps are ahead of video games when it comes to avoiding ludo-narrative dissonance, because larps are by essence a collaborative form of storytelling. One of the most exciting and di cult challenges that video games are trying to overcome today is at the heart of most larps: providing players with tools that allow them to take an active role in the creation of the story and to build and tell powerful, non generic-stories within the framework of the game.

    In conclusion, here are some questions that can help game designers interrogate the ludo-narrative harmonics of their game design:

    • What experience do I want the player to have? Which eras, themes or questions will they explore? Therefore, what kind of actions would logically happen during the game?
    • As a consequence, which topics require rules in order to frame, guide and strengthen this exploration? For instance, if the game is categorised as gamist, it should include rules for defining the winner of various kinds of conflicts; if simulationist, it should introduce rules reflecting the atmosphere and detailing societal injunctions and codes; if it’s a campaign, it needs to provide rules for the play happening between events.
    • Conversely, what kinds of rules do not fit into this framework? Does each rule support the narration? If not, is it useless and therefore dispensable?
    • Once the rules have been defined: what kind of execution best reflects the themes of the game? Do relevant rules already exist to support the intended theme? If the answer is no, they need to be created.
    • What is the focus of the game, the essence of the experience? Which specific game mechanics should I create to enhance it? What about preparatory workshops or rules dealing with unexpected topics or treatment? A specific structure (linear, ellipse, cutting into action with gradation of intensity)? A specific medium? etc.
    • Would constructive dissonance be a meaningful way to create a specific feeling or tool for my larp?

    These are only some leads to help explore new paths towards a meaningful and consistent larping experience, without any claim to absolute truth or completeness. Employing these concepts of ludo-narrative harmony and breakthrough may help drive the expressive power of the game, and ultimately, improve the players’ experience.

    Ludography

    • 2K Games. Bioshock, Novato, USA: Take-Two Interactive. 2007
    • Algayres, Muriel. Les Fleurs de Mai [Flowers of May] France: Association Rôle. 2014
    • Algayres, Muriel. Dirty Little Secrets. France: Association Rôle. 2013
    • Allermoz, Isabelle and Olivier Allermoz. Vivre Vite [Live Fast]. France: Association Clepsydre. 2014
    • Appl, Filip, Tomáš Dulka and Jan Zeman et al.,. Hell on Wheels. Humpolec, Czech Republic: Potkani and LARPard. 2013, 2014 & 2016 http://howlarp.cz/about
    • Artaud, Olivier, Marie-Claire and Olivier Frénot. L’Eté 36 [Summer 36]. Castle Cernay, France: Association Rôle. 2012
    • Barnabé, Frédéric. L’Agonie du Poète [The Poet’s Agony] France: Association Rôle. 2011 http://agoniedupoete.fr/
    • Crystal Dynamics. Tomb Raider, Redwood City, USA: Square Enix. 2013
    • Canotiers de Santeuil, Les [The Santeuil Boating Party] France: Les Francs Papillons, Beaulieu and Association Les Amis de Miss Rachel. 2014.
    • Duvned, Sébastien. Tant d’Espace [So much space]. France: Association eXperience. 2014 http://www.murder-party.org/tant-despace/
    • Edland, Tor Kjetil and Hanne Grasmo. Just a Little Lovin’. Denmark: Rollespilsfabrikken. 2013 http://just-a-little-lovin.blogspot.fr/
    • Gresset, Veronique, Raphaelle Gresset and Vauluisant Abbey. Les Noces de Cendre [The Wedding of Ashes]. France: Association Rôle. 2012 http://agoniedupoete.fr/NocesDeCendre/
    • Henry, Hélène. Comme le Houx [Like the holly-tree] France: Association eXperience. 2015 http://www.murder-party.org/comme-le-houx/
    • Légendes d’Hyborée [Legends of Hyboria]. Château de Guise, France: Association Eve Oniris. 2015 http://www.eveoniris.com/
    • Liaisons Dangereuses, Les [Dangerous Liaisons]. Castle Carsix, France: Association Les Masques de Dana’t for organization, Don Quixote for creation. 2014
    • Prima la Musica ou L’Opéra Terrible [Prima la Musica or the Opera Terrible]. Castle Montbraye, France: Primoot Team and Association Urbicande Libérée. 2016
    • Raaum, Margrethe, Tor Kjetil Edland and Trine Lise Lindahl. Mad About the Boy, Norway: 2010
    • Rocksteady Studios Batman: Arkham City, London, United Kingdom: Warner Bros. 2011
    • Salem—Never Forget. France: the Very Disturbed Team and Association Le Chaudron penché: 2012
    • Sirena Varada, La. Granada, Spain: Somnia. 2015 http://somnia-larp.wix.com/lasirenavarada
    • Udby, Linda and Bjarke Pedersen. Pan. Organised by Nina Teerilahti et al. Finland: 2014

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

    Cover photo: Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Édouard Manet.

  • Telling Character Stories

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    Telling Character Stories

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    There are many ways to tell a character story. Nordic larp design often implies that characters are written by the larpwright(s). Relationships and turning points in character stories are set up from the start, often being part of the overall design of the larp. With authorship comes a certain degree of ownership and control over the character for the larpwright. The player who receives such a character, continues telling a story that someone else started and owns.

    German larp design mostly leaves it to the players to bring characters they created completely on their own. Characters belong to the player alone. The story belongs to the player and every larp (and every piece of downtime in ongoing campaigns) is another piece in an ongoing tale, which the player influences as she sees fit. Those characters live whenever and wherever the player decides and often collect years of relations, experiences and tales at numerous events.

    This article will explore the effects and implications of a self-written, player-owned character on different levels: How do larpwrights, organisers and game masters incorporate this kind of character into a game? What is the influence on design choices? As a counterweight to the German concept, the article will look into the character creation at College of Wizardry (Nielsen, Dembinski and Raasted et al., 2014-).((College of Wizardry is a weekend larp, depicting the school life at a college for witches and wizards in an alternate version of our current reality.)) Originating from a nordic tradition of pre-written characters, the rerunning larp now faces an increasing amount of characters that are player-written. It will become apparent why both plot-driven and character-driven larps can incorporate self-written characters and how this can enhance the individual player’s experience.

    1. The German Concept: Bring Your Own Character!

    1.1. Terminology

    Talking about “the German concept” of larp characters does not imply that there is only one way all characters are made. The German larp scene includes a growing variety of playing-styles. This article will, however, focus on the most common way of character handling that is typically assigned to German larp. From here on, I will work with the following definition of “the German concept”: A player comes up with a character idea independently from any larp. She developes a background story and traits based on the initial idea, as well as a costume and possibly even props. The character may or may not be attached to the backstory or world-setting of any larp ever played. Anything from using pen & paper inspired backgrounds, references to settings from novels and movies, to free floating ideas is possible. There is no corrective or norm to follow. The only limit that has to be taken into account is the genre of the larp the character is supposed to belong to. As most German larps can still be summed up as based in a “fantasy” setting in the broadest sense, that will be the reference frame for this article.((Considering plot, the roots in pen & paper show again: The setting of most larps is “fantasy,” ranging from low fantasy (most characters would be thieves, rogues, healers or knights, plots are about politics, justice and fighting the evil) to high fantasy (characters such as elves and other fantastic races get involved, plots are about demons, rituals, otherworldly menaces and evil witches and wizards, etc).)) The newly created character may take part in campaigns such as ConQuest((Commonly known as ConQuest of Mythodea, mostly referred to as Mythodea in the international scene.)) (Guess et al., 2016) and Drachenfest (Schlump and Wolter et al., 2016) and may attend any other smaller larps of different campaigns, or events that are not associated with a campaign at all. There are no restrictions: any event can be attended with the same character, even if the different games do not refer to the same setting. The same character can be played in different campaigns.

    The word “campaign” is not used consistently in German larp. The biggest ongoing campaign is ConQuest of Mythodea, with three annual events, of which two add to the main plot.((ConQuest being the main event. Jenseits der Siegel serves as a prequel to this. Chroniken von Mythodea is set in the same world-setting and loosely tied to the plot of the main event.)) But “campaign” is also used to describe a loose assemblage of larp settings. Among various, one is well established in Germany: The so-called Mittellande Kampagne. (Deutscher Liverollenspiel-Verband, [date unknown]) This “campaign” works as a giant sandbox. Depicting a fantasy world, it contains various fictional countries, that vary in politics, population, and subgenres. Over the course of years, many larp organisers have established plotlines that tell the story of a freely scalable part of the fictional continent and uncounted one shot larps have been played in this setting. Other campaigns exist under this definition, but are less frequently played upon. (Larp Wiki, 2106) In this article, the term “campaign” refers to events like ConQuest of Mythodea and, to add another European example, Empire in the UK.

    Nevertheless, the very structure of the Mittelande Kampagne reflects the German approach to characters and their stories: It creates an environment, in which players have a huge variety of options on which larp to play next with one character and thus determining how the story continues, while the setting remains vaguely consistent as a bonus to the consistency of the character story.

    1.2. Roots of the “German Concept”

    In contrast to Eirik Fatland’s assertion that nordic larp has its roots in psychodrama (Fatland, 2016), larp in Germany emerged quite firmly from the pen & paper gaming tradition. Presumably the first German larp-like events took place in the late 1980s. The first event which is acknowledged to meet the definition of a larp in Germany and was directed at a public audience took place in 1991 under the name Dracon 1. (Neupert, 2002)

    Coming from a gaming tradition, early German larps were heavily regulated by rule systems, which defined what a character could do with a certain amount of experience. As the active larp scene developed simultaneously in different parts of the country, a number of rules systems were published, none of which achieved a leading position across Germany.((Prominent rule systems were among others: DragonSys, Phoenix-Carta, Silbermond, That’s live. As German larp develops away from the gamist approach of the early days, WYSIWYG “rules” now mark a majority of the games held. (Bolle, 2010))) What they had in common was a game-like structure: Skills were bought with experience points, which were gained by attending a larp. The aim was to translate pen & paper rules to a playable and practical framework for larp. Even the conversion between different rulesets was regulated,((Most larp organisers offering a set of “house rules” on how to convert your character from one system to another.)) enabling players to attend more events with the same character. Attending many larps was, save few exceptions, the only way to get to play a powerful, capable character. As previously stated, this collection of experience points could extend over campaigns and stand alone events alike. The amount of experience points that a character would receive after a larp depended on the duration of the event: One day at the larp was rewarded with a fixed amount of points. The skills and power had to be earned over actual years. Personal and systematic progress of the character went hand in hand.

    Today, the strict obedience to rule systems is broadly abandoned. Although many events still o cially follow a rule system, the rules have less influence on the actual game, which mostly shifts to a variation of WYSIWYG, called “you are able to do, what you are able to depict.”((“Du kannst, was du darstellen kannst,” commonly referred to as “DKWDDK.”))

    1.3.Practical: Implications, Influence on Design, Problems and Solutions

    1.3.1. Prerequisites: Players “versus” NPCs

    From the first events up until now, German larp has developed many forms of organisation and structure. Again, to make the case more clear, I will refer to the best known and widest spread structure, which is also typically connected to the fantasy setting. The larp is run by organisers and a rather big amount of non-player characters (NPCs), aiming at a 1:2 ratio between players and NPCs. The NPC roles vary in quality and importance, but altogether, they drive the plot.

    Because the characters don’t come along with a backstory that is inherently connected to the plot, they cannot be used to trigger events. This task falls completely to the NPCs as “tools” of the organisers, creating circumstances that push events forward. Characters and players alike start the larp with very little knowledge about the plot. Their task is to engage in play with NPCs, who carry information about the current in-game situation and try to manipulate the characters for their own advantage, give them mysteries to solve or help them in doing so. They can depict conflicting parties, which try to pull the players’ characters to either side. In general, NPCs are used to make the setting of the larp “come to life.” Dramatic escalation or factors such as time pressure to solve a plot are communicated in-game through NPCs. Depending on the game designers’ choice, NPCs can help move the plot forwards when it is at risk of being derailed by the players.

    1.3.2. Challenges for Organisers and Game Designers

    Along with this concept of character creation and ownership come a lot of challenges and implications for every party involved in a larp. Game designers and organisers certainly face the most of them. How can you create a plot, not knowing who will be there to take part in it? There are basically two ways to solve this challenge: One is to adjust the game as far as possible to the characters, which is mostly done for smaller events with up to 50 participants on the player side (e.g. Verushkou—Si vis Pacem, Bad Monkeys Crew, 2016). The second option is to let the characters adjust to the game, which has proven to be a good strategy for larger events, like ConQuest and Drachenfest.

    1.3.3. Know Your Players

    To gather information about the characters that will take part in the larp, many organisers combine the signup with the option to send in information about the background and special skills of the characters. This serves the purpose of identifying significant gaps between the planned plot and the set of people to solve it. Organisers get the chance to adjust their plans according to their audience and create personalized, small scenes for each player. This may be an individual in-game arrival to the site, during which players meet an NPC that in some way refers to their character’s background. It may also be a dream or vision scene during the game that picks up on personal plot hooks which the players gave to the organisers at sign up, intertwining the character’s story and the story of the larp. Less frequently, organisers design (side)-plots especially for the characters that have been announced to the game.

    Another influence of gaming tradition can be found in the “character check-in” and “check-out.” This used to be a standard procedure at German larps but has been dropped by many organisers over the course of years. During check-in, organisers go through the written character sheet and check if skills and experience points match and list up the items that a character brings to a larp. The check-out awards the character with new experience points and documents the new status on owned in-game items. The thorough, written documentation of the character makes it easier to switch between campaigns and settings.

    Although all these tactics give designers an idea of which characters are at their games and gives them the opportunity to a certain extent to tailor plot to groups, working with player-written characters does have the effect of disconnecting larp designers from their players.

    1.3.4. Beat Them with Mass

    If an event surmounts a certain size, it becomes undoable to adjust plot personally for each player. The challenge is met by offering a main plot for a certain set of characters, assuming that a fitting constellation will show up and/or that players will steer their characters towards the plot. Additionally, these events offer smaller side-plots. Those are designed for character types that will most likely not become involved in the main course of action and focus more on character game rather than following the more epic setup of the main plot. For example, a main plot could be “reconstruct an ancient magic machine to ward off a powerful demon” while a side-plot about “find out who stole the midwife’s healing herbs” happens. In events that reach a capacity of 1.000 and more players, again like ConQuest and Drachenfest, a part of the larp turns itself into a sandbox.

    1.4. German Character Concepts: An Epic Journey

    The process of writing characters is surprisingly badly structured and supported in Germany. Knowledge about how to create an interesting and functional character is not spread across players and most larp organisers don’t proactively support character creation for their players. It is assumed that players attend the larp with characters that are ready to be played. The responsibility for the playability of a character lies completely with the player.

    For creation, most players deduct from pen & paper experience. For example, they work with sets of questions that a player may answer about their character, determining background and traits, incorporating topics such as religious beliefs, biggest dreams and fears, turning points in life and so on.((Such as the sourcebook of the German pen & paper system Das Schwarze Auge, widely known in the German larp community (Römer, 2007, p. 294).))

    This process of creation leads to a set of recurring stereotypes((“My parents were killed by Orcs” has turned into a running gag in the German larp community. Additionally, many character stories are set up according to the archetype of the “Hero Quests.”)) and a huge amount of character stories that are very similar to begin with. The lack of originality in character stories leads to the common conception that telling another player your character background story is considered bad style both in-game and off-game. This does however not apply to telling the stories that make the character an original person, based on larps that have been played. The sharing of “war stories” around a campfire is an inherent part of German fantasy larp which is valued by many players as a part of what makes the spirit of a good game. The unoriginal starting point is kindly disregarded for the sake of stories that are truly unique because they were actually played out.

    The focus of character creation is not on making up a deep, highly dense and well designed character, but more about generating a starting point from which the player can immerse into the larp straight away, letting the course of events and the relationships that develop shape who the character is. This aspect of actually co-creating a character during the game is not unlike the process of creating character relations that takes place before a College of Wizardry run.

    1.5. Effects on Player and Playing Style

    Owning and playing a character in the long run also has various effects on the player side. These cover a broader range of categories. Starting on a practical level, one may assume that players planning on playing the same character across several events are more willing to put effort and money into costume and props. It can be argued that the longer a character is played, the higher the identification between player and character becomes.

    The longer a character story is being told, the more chances arise to form the picture of a natural person, including bad decisions, traumatic experiences, successes, romances, friendships and so on. Characters that have been played over years can grow to be a part of their player. They go through a development that may resemble the actual personal development of their player. “War stories” that a character experienced are told both in-game and off-game.

    Consequently, the death of a character is a highly important event to most players that is thoroughly planned to make it a memorable moment that is “worth it.” Players steer their character towards not dying on most of the larps they attend: They are less prone to take lethal risks to not end the story ahead of time, so for example, they may engage in physical conflict, but not without regard to their own safety. In this, the element of literally having leveled up a character with experience points over years certainly plays a part.

    2. College of Wizardry — A Sandbox for Your Character

    The College of Wizardry larps offer another perspective on how character stories can be told and fitted into the design of a game. There are two parallel developments to be observed with CoW: First, the opening of the initial setup from mandatory pre-written characters to opt-in pre-written characters and secondly, players extending the stories of their pre-written characters beyond the larp. Both developments are supported by the CoW game design.

    2.1. Nordic Concept: Pre-written Characters

    Locating CoW larps as a middle ground requires a look at the Nordic end of the scale. Just as for the “German concept,” there is no such thing as “the Nordic larp.” The applied approach to “Nordic concept” in this article will follow the idea of what is commonly perceived as “nordic” in the German larp community: Many nordic larps tell a standalone story not situated in a campaign. Characters are often pre-written by the game designers, including at least a basic setup for relations and personal character goals during the game. The characters are usually connected in a way that allow a low ratio of NPCs to players.((Of course, the defining aspects of a “Nordic larp” extend these parameters by far and it can be argued if there is a thing such as “the” Nordic larp.))

    In this setting, the game designers have a lot more potential influence on how the story of the larp will unfold. By retaining control of the characters, they can insert breaking points and levels of escalation beforehand by anchoring characters in relations and background stories. It’s possible to create a more coherent design, reflecting themes and moods in different elements such as plot, set design, props, and characters. The designers access and influence all layers of the game (Stenros 2014). The player takes part in someone else’s narrative, in which the character plays a fixed part.

    Opposed to that, the German concept means that a player continues to tell their own, independent character story in the framework that the larp provides.

    The more detailed the relations between characters are predesigned and the more their actions and goals during the larp are predetermined, the better drama and escalation can be anticipated and again be incorporated in the overall design. Games which follow this form are consequently much more characterthan plot focused.

    It can be argued that a pre-written character story, including connections to others, produces a higher level of drama at a larp than a self-written, unconnected character would experience. The fact that the nordic narrative is often more carefully crafted does not necessarily mean that it turns out as planned. Relationships and storylines that develop on the spur of the moment during a larp can be just as powerful as predetermined developments.

    2.2. Practical: Creating a College of Wizardry

    2.2.1. Design and Balancing of a Sandbox

    College of Wizardry is designed as a sandbox larp. Handing out characters that are only roughly sketched out, is a very different approach than predetermining every connection and in fact, the whole game is set up to give the players the biggest possible amount of freedom both in their playing style and with the topics they want to play on.

    “The larp will not fail because a certain character is played differently than it is written; it will just mean that different stories are created. This is important. Your character is your own.” (Raasted, Nielsen and Dembinski et al., 2014, p. 19)

    CoW follows a number of design choices that enable both self-written and pre-written characters and even allow the combination of the two concepts in one larp. Similar to the plot driven German larp that has been discussed so far, the key element for CoW is to give the players broad freedom in choosing the focus of their game.

    How a certain run of CoW turns out very much depends on how much players indulge into the co-creating aspect of the design. The larp offers both the space and time for different playing styles to coexist. No matter how many demon summonings go on in the dungeon, the college drama can still be gossiped about in the common rooms (Nielsen, 2016). Although the focus of character stories shifts from run to run, the overall framework that ties the larp together will still work.((Events that are fixed in time and place, such as lessons, school gatherings, and the Saturday night ball etc.))

    In a plot driven German concept larp, a lot of how well the larp goes depends on balancing the different kinds of characters. That can be done by announcing the larp to be mainly aimed at a specific group (rogues and thieves etc.) or adjusting the plot to the characters that actually attend, as described earlier. The individuals have a high impact on the game. Opposed to that, the structure of CoW is focused on groups and collectives. The College has to work as a whole and the Houses have to work as ingroups for their members. (Jankovic Sumar, 2016)

    This is achieved by a few, but effective fixed balancing factors at CoW: The large majority of players play students. Special roles such as headmaster, teachers, janitor and prefects are assigned by the organisers.((This may seem to be understood, but would not necessarily be in a German larp, where there is no given limit to how many kings and queens of made up realms may show up to an event.)) To make the collectives and groups at CoW work, players have to stick to the Houses and years their characters are assigned to. Whereas the design can take an excess of rich snotty students, evil characters or any other kind of personal alignment, it could not handle one missing House or a school in which no Juniors exist, because the game dynamic evolves around the interaction of Houses on a vertical and years of students on a horizontal layer. The design of CoW as a college eventually unites all individual characters due to the fact that they are all students in the first place. And in this, they are all the same and part of the same collective. (Jankovic Sumar, 2016)

    2.2.2. Character Creation

    After three runs, CoW went through a thorough redesign, removing all Harry Potter references and setting up a whole new background for the larp. What remained was the choice to hand out pre-written characters, which left vast options for individual interpretation and design by the players. (Again: “Your character is your own.” Raasted, Nielsen and Dembinki et al., 2014) Laid out as an international larp from the very start, CoW had to incorporate a broad culture of players. Openly created characters enabled various interpretations and playing styles. (Nielsen, 2016)

    The pre-written characters for CoW have never been balanced on a scale of royals and rebels, werewolves and hunters or other factions represented in the student body. Starting with a very diverse team of character writers and trusting the self balancing power of large groups as well as the natural inclination of players to aim for different styles, the organisers of CoW did not actively adjust characters to balance the game for the first five runs. (Nielsen, 2016)
    Relationships to other characters were suggested on an abstract level which fitted the character. For example, a bookworm would be suggested to find study partners, a dashing duellist would be proposed to assemble a group of fans. The characters were written action-focused, giving agencies for all kinds of play (Nielsen, 2016). Accordingly, suggestions for “things to do at the larp” were listed as inspirations to enhance the playing experience.

    The option to bring a self-written character was not proactively advertised, but was allowed by the organisers on personal request. For the very first run, organisers put a lot of effort into developing characters together with the players, which turned out to be impossible to uphold with the increasing feedback they received from outside the player community as the popularity of CoW grew. (Nielsen, 2016)

    One element of design, however, was written into the characters in order to set the tone for the larp. CoW was designed to be fun experience but also a serious larp, so most characters came with a “darker tone and atmosphere.” (Nielsen, 2016)

    For run 10, which is upcoming by the time this piece is written, the option to bring a self-written character has been incorporated into the signup form. A 50/50 division between preand self-written characters is expected for that run (CoW 10, Casting Document, 2016). Many players who’ve previously played with pre-written characters now opt to return with characters they’ve created on their own (CoW 5, Casting Document, 2016). It can be argued that this degree of opening up the sandbox even further is possible because of two factors: the mood of CoW has been successfully established and settled in numerous runs. And a huge part of players keep returning, carrying on this spirit both through their own depiction of their characters and actively helping newcomers and first time larpers to adjust to the setting (Nielsen, 2016). Foremost, this means to pass on the idea of creating an action-focused character and encouraging the creation of character relations.

    The combination of both the design focus on collectives rather than individuals and the strong player community enable CoW larps to not only incorporate self-written characters, but merge them with a set of pre-written ones.

    2.2.3. Telling CoW Character Stories — Extending the Game

    The organisers choice to hand over creative ownership of the characters to the players worked well for a large group of participants. As the runs proceeded, an increasing amount of online pre-game took place. Events leading up to the larps were played out in Facebook groups and chats and collaborative fiction. The social online platform “Czochabook”((“Czochabook; an in-game social media platform in which players sign up in-character. The platform mirrors a Facebook-style format and is thus immediately familiar and accessible to most players who choose to engage.” Ashby, Charlotte: Playing around the Event: The College of Wizardry pre-game and postgame, in this book)) served as a tool for characters to stay in touch and forward their plots (Mertz, 2016). After several games, uno cial spin offs were held,((The Debauchery Party, 2015 To hell and back, 2016, CoW5: A Midwinter Night’s Dream, 2016.)) continuing to tell character stories.

    For example, for a group of around 28 people, a story arc developed that started with pre-game before CoW5, extending to the spin off larp To hell and back after CoW5 had taken place, and ongoing text based role-playing up to CoW8, which was set up as a sequel to CoW5 and CoW6 (Jankovic Sumar, 2016). On the final event, most of the character stories of that specific group were led to some kind of resolution. The overall feeling was that they had now been told to a point at which the players could find closure.

    This dynamic developed due to the fact, that in the course of intense prebleed (Svanevik and Brind, 2016), bleed and immersion, the members of this group created not only an individual character story each, but a complex network of social connections that shifted and grew throughout the process.

    This development was heavily favoured by the action-focused design of the characters in the first place. Starting from pre-written characters, the intensity of the experience lead the players to embracing their characters as their own creations and they tasked themselves with telling their stories in the best (most dramatic, immersive and intense) way possible. Whilst this development in general resembles the German concept in so far as that the storylines evolved over a number of events, there are significant differences. A CoW character cannot be played outside the CoW setting and it is not possible to bring a character from any other larp campaign into the game. Instead of “just” attending more larps with one character, the players of CoW created events, plots and life for their characters outside the hands of the organisers.

    3. Conclusion

    At first sight, the difference between the German concept of character creation and storytelling on the one side, and the nordic-inspired approach of College of Wizardry seem to bear a lot of differences. Having taken a closer look, it has become apparent that both concepts enable players to take control over their character’s stories and the option to play them longer, either moving one character from larp to larp, or extending the story of one larp with pre-games, spinoffs and sequels. Both mechanics create high identification between player and character and thus intense immersion during the game.

    Both a self-written German character and a pre-written CoW character start as sketches that are designed to allow an action-focused, immediate start into a larp, where they can grow and develop during the game and in interaction with other characters. A part of that process is put before the game for CoW, where players create relations before the game, online and in workshops. As both design and player community favour the incorporation of self-written characters, CoW has successfully opened up to this character concept.

    In essence, the German concept and College of Wizardry prove that there are (at least) two core strategies to design larps for self-written characters: One is to adjust the larp to the characters, focusing plots on their backgrounds and skills and giving the characters a strong guidance towards a determined goal. The second one is to do much the opposite: Let the individual characters play freely in a sandbox, where they will be re-collected regularly in various collectives that frame the experience.

    Giving players freedom to run their own characters and play them over time—through pre-game or several events—has a chance to make them identify more strongly with their characters and immerse more deeply, even if the character only started out as a list of traits or two paragraphs on a character sheet. The war stories they tell are real, in a sense, not just written as background story. As they play the same character again and again (on Czochabook, in co-creative fiction or across events) they experience, grow, learn, and create stories that are much deeper than what you may find at a stand-alone event with no pre-game.

    Bibliography

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    • Jankovic Sumar, Edin. Email interview. [held 16/10-2016]
    • Nielsen, Charles Bo. Email interview. [held 17-Oct-2016]

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    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

    Cover photo: Osmond von Bar, leader of the Heereswacht, during battle. Conquest of Mythodea 2016. (Play, Holger Sommer)