I believe it was the late Rosalind Russell who gave this wisdom to a young actor: ‘Do you know what makes a movie work? Moments. Give the audience half a dozen moments they can remember, and they’ll leave the theater happy.’ I think she was right. And if you’re lucky enough to write a movie with half a dozen moments, make damn sure they belong to the star.
Why are we in this business of creating stories for people to play? What do we, as creators, get out of the experience of running games? Why do we do it? I get a kick out of knowing that the players have gone through intense emotional experiences. How do I know whether we’ve achieved that? I use a simple measure. I listen to what I call war stories.((My brother, who works in TV and film, reminds me that these are known in TV as “water cooler moments” i.e. where, in the workplace, people will cluster around a water cooler discussing last night’s episode.))
It’s something that’s obvious in hindsight. Every time you get a bunch of larpers together to socialise, out come the war stories; tales of things that happened at events to them, or to their friends, or at another event that they heard about once. “That bit when the demon appeared …” “And then, my God, I was running from that thing, I’ve never been so scared …” “The look on her face when she realised the truth!”
Most of those stories have been provoked by moments of intense experience, of intense emotion: fear, shock, hilarity, love, freezing cold weather, sleep deprivation, utter disbelief. These people have been put through the mill, and these stories are the resulting moments that stood out to them, memories that will live on in their heads forever, stories they want to share. And so they share them. Many become iconic, and are passed on second or third hand.
This isn’t solely restricted to larp, of course—it’s the sort of conversation that happens when film-lovers get together to discuss “the bit where Hulk punched Thor!” or “when Bruce Willis realises the truth!” These stories bind people together in pubs, or on forums, or at book clubs. A need to share the things that really affected them, that etched those experiences into their minds.
It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to the realisation that such froth((Used in UK larp circles to mean excessive outpourings of excited conversation about an event you’ve played, an event you’re going to, a game system, or really anything about larp at all. An umbrella is advised.)) is my primary measure of a successful game. But in starting to analyse the phenomenon, I realise that it’s how our team at Crooked House((A long-running UK larp organisation that runs high-budget one-off events with lots of special effects.)) has always approached shaping stories. We write larps by coming up with moments that we hope the players will talk about afterwards, and we’ve been doing that for years. It’s something we evolved entirely accidentally, with no in-depth analysis of what we were doing.
Background
Historically, the core of our team has been very focused on set-piece moments. This is because we have people who work in set design, stunts, pyrotechnics and props for films; we do our best to make best use of those talents. The art & stunt department always have gags they want to try, no matter the genre.
And we’ve always tackled games as an exercise in genre. When we ran a gore-based horror event, we did our best to push the boundaries of taste and decency and to cover a whole range of tropes that players would recognise, but would have never encountered before in larp. Similarly, on running a pulp action-adventure, we made certain to pack it full of red lines drawn across maps, tombs half-buried in sand, ridiculous accents, and traps involving lots of creepy-crawlies.
We write and run one-off events. We knew our pulp adventure was probably going to be the last one we’d ever run, so we packed it full of as much pulp as we could find, as we wouldn’t get another chance.
The Writing Process
So we get together with a rough idea of theme and setting, and a long list of experiences we’d like the players to have. These could be set piece stunts, gags, or special effects; atmospherics where we generate a certain mood; small interpersonal moments; several hours of continuous unrelenting horror. They could be ideas for rules. They could also be material for pre-event, to set the scene. At this point many of the ideas will be only partially formed. For example, our list might include “have to deal with a confined space,” “there should be a moment where all the lights go out,” “a scene where the antagonist lays bare every character’s deepest secret” or “we could do that trick with a Ouija board and magnets.”
Then, through brainstorming sessions, we identify a few key moments and solidify them, making them the tentpoles of our game timeline.
With our tent-pole moments in place, the shape of our event starts to emerge, as do the themes, and the story itself. This is the stage at which we may reject ideas from our list outright, as we find they don’t suit the story or the theme or the mood. Eventually we’ll have a firmed up set of key experiences and a rough idea of when they might happen.
If we were creating a story for a book or a film — and we’ve used this system for that — then the story would be essentially linear. One key moment would play out after another, and the viewer would have no options to change that, no choices to make. Our tent-pole moments would always happen in the same order.
With larp, we could run our games in that way, but there’s a danger of “railroading” the players—making them feel as if their actions have no effect on the story, as if it’s being told to them rather than as if they’re part of creating it.
Our games are somewhere between linear and totally free. We are certain of several fixed moments that will happen no matter what, and we know roughly when they’ll happen, but we leave a lot of space for flexibility with other moments and the order in which they might play out. This is critical not only for the dramatic flow of the story—for example, during these few hours the players shouldn’t be overly stressed or challenged, but right here we need a climax— but is also critical for the art department, so they know in what order they need to get sets built or rebuilt and stunts and effects rigged. We have a rough idea of the window of time in which a particular moment can be experienced.
Note that there’s no guarantee a moment will happen. We give the players the opportunity to take part in a particular scene, gag or event at specific points. All we’re doing is providing opportunity. Those opportunities may not be taken in the way we expect, or may not be taken at all. And, honestly, we cheat. In some cases we make the players believe they’ve made their own timeline choices, but we’ve secretly railroaded them. I give an example of that later on in this article.
We’ll do several brainstorming passes filling in the blanks. Normally I go away and write a treatment of the flow of the game as if it were a story, because this irons out inconsistencies and brings up all sorts of issues we haven’t thought of—it also shoots down ideas that we thought seemed amazing at 3am.
And then we’ll simply repeat, talking through the game again and again, picking apart each moment and polishing it until—hopefully—it shines, making sure the story is consistent, making sure our supporting cast fit in where they should, and layering theme and mood into everything we can. When we’re done, some of the things we’ve come up with will be concrete set-piece-like moments. Others will be ongoing opportunities for players to generate moments themselves. Both are equally important, and I’ll give examples of the design of each.
A Moment Design Example: The Jump
A ‘moment’ from God Rest Ye Merry (staged, Rachel Thomas).
It’s 3am. You haven’t slept for two days now. There are strange things happening in this mansion. You’re upstairs in your bedroom, in bed with your partner, but the lights are on; you’re both too scared to turn them off.
There’s something about this room. When you came in, you noticed the wedding pictures of the young couple, and the photos of their baby daughter. You know it’s a daughter, because the crib is still here, beside the bed; the name Gwendolyn hangs on a wooden plaque at the end of it. You turned the photos face down, because you realised who they were; the young couple who died here years ago. You’ve read the newspaper reports, and heard the family stories. You’ve found letters: receipts, bills, final demands.
And you’ve heard things. A baby crying, although you couldn’t find the source. A man and a woman arguing, muffled, through the wall; something about money. And, twice now, a gunshot, somewhere outside through the corridor. You’ve never found where it came from… although there was blood on the bathroom floor.
And now, tonight, you hear the gunshot again. And the baby starts crying outside your door. A girl screams. And the door flies open. There stands the young mother, dressed in black, the baby bundled under her arm. She’s in tears, makeup running. In her right hand she brandishes a revolver. She runs into your room and turns around, frantically warning away her pursuers. Except there aren’t any pursuers; the doorway is empty—but she can clearly see them. She runs to the window, still waving the gun; opens the window; and throws the baby out.
At this point, you, the player—because you are a player, and this is a moment in a live-action game that you’ve been taking part in for the last few days, having taken on the role of a 1950s character— might realise something. If you’ve got enough detachment from the terror of the moment, if you can draw yourself back, you can think “Ah. I get it. I understand what’s going on. The baby’s clearly not real. it’s all fine. It’s just a play, a scene, a trick. I don’t need to panic.”
At which point the young woman jumps out of the window.
When you’ve recovered yourself enough to get to the window and look out, there’s nothing below; no baby, no woman, nothing at all.
We started this one with a simple request from our stunt team. “We want someone to jump out of a first floor window and disappear. And we don’t want the players to know how we did it.”
This was for our event God Rest Ye Merry (Thomas and Thomas et al., 2015), a Christmas ghost story set in the 1950s. The house, a rambling old mansion set on Dartmoor, was perfect for our needs, and on our site visit we scoped out the perfect window.
So, from a writing perspective, we knew that our stuntwoman Kiera Gould would be the one who jumped. And it made perfect sense that, for a ghost story, the disappearance would be due to ghostly goings-on. It follows, then, that this must have been how someone died. And that the players would see this as if it were a vision—it would be a haunting. To make it extra-scary, we would have them seeing it late at night.
The first concern came from the stunt team. The window Kiera would be jumping from was a bedroom window, and we expected two players to be in bed asleep. What was to stop the players leaping out of bed and interrupting the stunt, ruining the gag? We came to the conclusion that we’d put a barrier between the bed and the window, and settled on a baby’s crib, since there was one in a nearby room. We would fix it to the floor.
This immediately led to story. The woman who had died had a baby. So who was she, and what happened to the baby?
Someone came up with the genius idea that Kiera should come in, distraught, with the baby under her arm—a dummy, obviously—and should throw the baby out of the window first. Not only would it add to the horror, it would mean there would be a moment where the players thought that the baby-throwing was the whole gag, and, internally, they’d relax—just as Kiera jumped.
“Wait,” said the stunt team. “If there’s a baby involved now, they’ll work extra-hard to interrupt the stunt. Can we introduce some other barrier?”
So—why was the girl distraught? Well, we decided, she’d just shot her husband, and now, filled with regret, was going to commit suicide. So we would give her a revolver. The scene would start out in the corridor, with the sound of a revolver firing and a scream. Now, as the girl ran into the room, she would be brandishing the revolver, “accidentally” waving it towards the players—who she, being a ghost, couldn’t see. This acts as a psychological barrier to anyone wanting to get involved; a gun being waved in their face.
An interesting facet of our barriers—the crib and the gun and, in fact, the mood we’ve engendered up to this point— is that we’ve almost certainly shut down the player’s desire or ability to stop the girl jumping but, crucially, they think it’s their own choice. They will think they’re unable to act through their own fear, rather than through our railroading or design.
So there was the basis of the stunt. On top of that, we built up and layered story—the room was filled with mementos from the young couple’s marriage; elsewhere in the house you could find evidence of the husband’s debts and excessive gambling habit; newspaper clippings reported their deaths; family stories told of the tragedy; a wooden plaque on the crib named the baby Gwendolyn. And sometimes, if you listened carefully, you could hear a couple arguing, muffled, through the wall.
From a very basic moment idea, we now had a chunk of story, a very visceral moment, that was wound into the fabric of the house and the event and which fitted our themes. We knew roughly when it would happen—around 3am Saturday night.
Oh yes. The girl vanished completely, as did the baby, when you looked out the window. Despite the long drop below. How did we do that? We’ll leave that to your imagination.
A Moment Design Example: Pulp Languages
Now something from the other end of the spectrum—a rule specifically introduced to allow the players to spontaneously generate their own memorable moments.
For our 1930s pulp action adventure Captain Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph (Thomas and Thomas et al., 2006), we’d decided that multiple languages would be a fun feature of the game, as we had an international cast of characters. However, very few of the players involved spoke multiple languages. How could we deal with this?
Well, we could adopt ridiculous accents. So if you spoke, say, with a French accent, it would be assumed you were speaking French. But if we did this, it meant that we wouldn’t be fitting into the pulp stereotype; in pulp, Germans need to sound stereotypically German, Americans need to sound stereotypically American and so on when speaking English.
So we dreamed up a very simple system. Any sentence that was supposed to represent French would be prefixed with the keywords “Zut alors!” Any sentence that was supposed to represent German would be prefixed with “Achtung!” “Effendi!” for Arabic. And so on. Terribly stereotypical, but pulp is stereotypical, and we were erring on the side of comedy.
Adding to that, we came up with a very simple system of written languages. Anything in red would be Arabic; green would be German; blue French and so forth.
This was introduced as a rule to our players. The key reason for including this was very simple—to allow them to create moments where the players OOC entirely understood what was going on, but, for comedy purposes, their characters would not. I call this sort of technique Seeding Opportunity—providing fertile ground for moments to happen in.
This would only work in this style of game. For a deeply serious game based on secrets and lies, the OOC/IC divide simply wouldn’t work. But for our purposes, it worked brilliantly.
Here I’ll cite an anecdote from one of our cast, Harry Harrold:
So when my bazaar salesman started a line with “Effendi”—the English-speaking customer couldn’t understand a word, but the spy who was posing as a translator could, and the conversation went something like:
Customer: How much is this statuette? It looks jolly ancient
Spy: Effendi: How much for this?
My salesman: Effendi: I don’t know, my uncle’s mother in law’s family makes them by the dozen, how much will the idiot pay? Tell him it’s tenth dynasty … I’ll cut you in.
Spy: He says it’s very valuable. Tenth dynasty.
Customer: I say, marvellous …
You see where it’s going. The customer’s player knowing exactly what I was saying, and the simple delight of three people performing their little hearts out to an audience of—oh, I dunno, maybe half a dozen at the time? It carried on for a while in the same vein. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told that story.
Harry Harrold, The Hole in My Tooth, 2016
Pay close attention to that last line. “I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told that story.” We’ve achieved our outcome—the desire to create a war story that players would tell and retell.
So, with our Jump stunt, we were introducing a specific moment. With this language rule, we were introducing the possibility for the players to create their own moments.((Okay, okay. Some moments we helped them create. For example, the minefield with a large sign—in greenreading “Achtung! Mines!” Which came into its own when it was crossed by a small group of players who could read it perfectly well, but none of their characters knew German…)) We’ve found the mix of these techniques extremely successful.
Other Media
I’ve talked solely about larp here. But since we started working this way, I’ve applied these techniques successfully to writing films, books, and in particular to computer games. Each medium has its own rules and styles, and by doing this you don’t need to eschew standard dramatic structure—but, in the same way as with larp, thinking about what your audience will take away is a great starting point for building your story.
Conclusion
It’s my contention—and experience—that if you work this way, if you concentrate on the highs and lows, on provoking war stories, you’ll have a memorable game.
It almost doesn’t matter what goes between those moments, so long as it makes some sort of sense. Honestly. I know that sounds crazy, but most people have terribly fuzzy memories and the bits they didn’t enjoy or found bland fade away, leaving the bits that excited them.
Sure, the quality of your whole piece will be vastly improved by good joining-of-thedots, but to turn it on its head, if you don’t have those memorable moments, you have nothing. I’ve lost count of the number of movies I’ve seen or books I’ve read that I can’t recall anything about a couple of months later. But people in pubs still talk about the time we had a WW1 tank, ten years later.((We didn’t. It was two sides of a tank faked up out of plywood + paint with a couple of pilots inside and some carefully positioned pyrotechnics, so that when a puff of smoke came out of the barrel, a piece of the ground exploded. But we still hear about “that game where they had a real tank.”))
Bibliography
Goldman, William, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Warner Books. 1983
Ludography
Harry Harrold, The Hole In My Tooth. LarpX. 07/05-2016 https://larpx.com/2016/05/07/ the-hole-in-my-tooth/
Ian Thomas and Rachel Thomas et al. God Rest Ye Merry. United Kingdom: Crooked House. 2015
Ian Thomas and Rachel Thomas, Thomas, Brewis and Macmillan; Captain Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph. United Kingdom: Crooked House. 2006
In recent years, we — the Nordic/International progressive role-playing scene, both tabletop and larp((I’ve been in on the tabletop/freeform side of things for many years; on the larp side, I got going with a splash with Just a Little Lovin’ in 2015. The otherwise admirable and magnificent Just a Little Lovin’ probably did a lot of messing with my head, but I was thoroughly softened up long before then.))– have produced games that can bring out powerful emotions in the players, and empower the players to engage with powerful emotions. This process has significantly extended the artistic reach of the role-playing medium, and also given a lot of people (myself among them) some great experiences. In this context, some design and cultural elements have been developed to help handle difficult topics and emotions. Of particular importance has been the widespread acceptance of the notion that it’s actually alright to feel a lot of feelings and not be too tough or hard to shed a tear or ten. Bleed is here to stay, and it’s OK to be concerned with the comfort and safety of yourself and your fellow players.
This is excellent! I’ve been a part of this movement as it regards play, design, and culture. Although I’m not personally inclined to weep over role-playing games, I’m happy with my part in all this. In those of my own games that deal with difficult subjects, I’ve included a debriefing: one containing the line that it’s OK to feel a lot of powerful or strange things, and it’s also OK to feel nothing much at all.
The New Norm
Last year, I discovered a surprising dark side to this new, accepting culture around strong feelings about role-playing games. Even though it’s a pretty standard disclaimer that it’s OK to not bleed all over the place, not just in my games, but in most games that come with debriefing instructions attached, somehow strong and care/space-requiring emotions have become not just normal (fine!) but also normative.((NORMAL = within the range of commonly occurring phenomena in a given category and commonly accepted as such. NORMATIVE = in accordance with social norms determining what is socially acceptable.)) It’s the norm for how you do demanding and artistically ambitious role-play; it’s how you demonstrate that you’re a good role-player. If you don’t feel all of the feelings, passionately, you’re not quite alright.
It’s a subtle thing, and certainly not the result of conspiracies and subversion, just the cumulative effect of a lot of usually enthusiastic conversations about earth-shaking, personally transformative experiences that have made the tears flow.
The #feminism nanogame anthology indicates the intensity of each larp with ratings of teardrops from 1-5.
Comparing Notes
It was rather by accident that I found out that there’s a problem that might be a bit larger than just me. Some time last year, after having witnessed (mostly online but also off) exchanges between people who had had earth-shaking experiences – even a year later, that one song brought tears to their eyes – I found that I was actually downright worried about how little I felt. As in, I seriously entertained the notion that I might be on the outskirts of some sort of personality disorder. And it’s not quite the first time that role-playing games and role-playing culture have had me wondering why I was reacting off — and below — the norm. Anyway, I struggled a bit with it, and after a couple of uncomfortable months, I arrived at the conclusion that the rest of my life doesn’t support the theory that I’m under-endowed with emotions and the capacity for authentic human relations. Probably.
At some point, I opened up and told my friend Anne Vinkel about my concerns. Her reaction was powerful and telling:
“Oh God, I thought it was just me!”
Then, I started considering whether there might be more at stake here than just my own discomfort: if we might have a cultural problem on our hands. When people are wondering whether they have real psychopathology (that they don’t), simply because the standards of this role-playing subculture for what “we” feel around games has become so extreme, it’s not great.
I know several role-players with real, honest-to-goodness personality disorders. They’re fine people that I care about both in and out of role-playing games. This is in no way a criticism or rejection of them. But neither Anne nor myself are in their situation! Diagnoses are a thing to approach soberly.
Promotional photo for KAPO, a 2012 Danish larp about imprisonment
Shame! Blame! Disgrace!
So whose fault is this? At whom should we point the finger of condemnation? When I put it like this, the observant reader might suspect that I’m about to say ”no one” and this is 98% true. This is a question of culture, and as is usually the case with such things, the responsibility is vague and diffuse. If, during the following, you feel personally accused, please dial down the feeling by 98%.
It started out with a desire to explore challenging subjects through roleplaying without falling into The Cult of Hardcore, which was quite prominent back in the early and middle 2000s. The standard was that WE as Good Roleplayers were too cool to bellyache over the Very Edgy games that we played. The revolt against The Cult of Hardcore that the role-playing culture around safety mechanics, debriefings, etc. represents was sorely needed.
In connection with debriefings — and war stories in a wider sense — the conversation focused on the extreme experiences that made safety mechanics and debriefings relevant. It’s natural enough to talk more about those players with issues — players in active need of inclusion — than about those who are just fine. But, as is the case in any (sub-)culture, it became a matter of prestige. Culture works like that; even in the most self-consciously egalitarian culture, there will be actions, objects, and stories that attract more positive attention than others. In this case, the tales of earth-shaking, transformative experiences became prestigious. There’s nothing weird about this; it’s a logical consequence of the inclusion and centering of the extreme emotions that had previously been marginalized. And on a very basic level, “I wept like I’d been whipped and I’m a new person now” is just a better story than “I had slightly moist eyes at one point in the second act, and I have some interesting things about sibling relationships to reflect on.” If both stories are tellable, the former is more likely to be told, shared, and remembered.
All of it is very human, understandable, and largely even sympathetic. It still resulted in myself and Anne — and who knows how many others? — separately and secretly worrying and wondering if we were sociopaths, schizoid, or otherwise emotionally under-endowed. Which is not cool.
Performative Emotions
It’s not that I see the powerful emotions as in any way fake. This is worth saying and worth repeating. I believe that, in the vast majority of cases, they are authentic enough. However, they are in many cases also performative, not just as in players theatrically performing the feelings of their characters — with a bit of player spillover through bleed — but also between players, outside of games, but inside the subculture. Because the intensity of emotions is a source of authority, prestige, and bonding, all the nice social goods are out of reach if others can’t clearly perceive that you have the valuable emotions. And then it makes sense to make a good show out of the things you feel. Conspicuous emotion is a gainful social strategy in this context.
And the more people are performing their emotions loudly, the harder it is to gain recognition for quieter thoughts and feelings, and so we have a tendency towards inflation.
Promotional information for the 2012 run of Just a Little Lovin’, a larp about desire, fear of death, and friendship during the early days of the AIDS crisis.
What Now?
This is a tough one. I have no interest in bringing back the hardcore culture that the new, more sensitive culture has dethroned. Emotion- and safety-accepting role-playing culture has a WHOLE lot of babies that it would be bad to throw out with the bathwater. It’s great that we have created spaces of safety and recognition where we can be, as Moyra Turkington memorably put it to me in a private conversation, ”deliciously vulnerable,” and we should preserve this. But if we want to think up something to do anyway?
TALKING ABOUT IT. Both in public and in private. A bit of consciousness-raising can go a long way, and is precisely the point of this post.
DEBRIEFINGS ARE NOT ABOUT TRAUMA. While gathering pace for writing this post I had an excellent discussion with Sarah Lynne Bowman about what debriefings are and aren’t good for. A lot of people, myself included, have absorbed from the general conversation the idea that debriefings are about after-treatment of trauma, and this is not the case at all. What they do is reestablish normal social relations between players after the shakeup of the game, and create a space for recognizing feelings — not necessarily, indeed probably not, traumatic — for later reflection and digestion. If players have been actually traumatized, it is rather psychological first aid that’s called for, which is an entirely different beast that should be fielded as soon as the crisis is seen as such and absolutely should NOT wait until after the game. At any debriefing, it should be clear that debriefing =/= trauma treatment.
UPGRADING THE STANDARD DISCLAIMER. I and quite a lot of others have our standard disclaimer, typically fired off in connection with debriefings, that it’s OK to feel a lot of weird feelings, and it’s also OK to not feel that much. I’ve been saying that myself for years, and yet I let myself be quite viscerally convinced that it wasn’t the case. I’m thinking that it might be an idea to simply reverse the order so you start out by saying that it’s normal and OK if it’s not that wild, but if it’s wild, that’s cool too. Thus, the non-violent reactions are pulled back into the range of the normal, rather than remaining an afterthought. In situations where we’re on the outskirts of the sensitive culture — where it doesn’t define the standards — I’d use the traditional order instead. And I’d write this in my debriefing instructions!
MOVING UP THE STANDARD DISCLAIMER. Right before the debriefing is awfully late in the game to establish that the acceptable range of responses is quite wide. How about before the game proper starts?
TEMPERATE USE OF DANGER SIGNALS. Warnings about harsh subject matter is a fine idea, and ambushing people with bad stuff is not cool, but as I see it, we could show a little more restraint in communicating HOW traumatized players are ”supposed” to be by a given game. I suspect that strongly framing games as dangerous contributes to the inflation of conspicuous emotion. I also suspect that it doesn’t really contribute much to actual safety.
I’m aware that the above is not terribly impressive. So if you have ideas for what to do that aren’t too harsh on the babies in the bath, I’m all ears!
Cover photo: “Don’t Cry My Love” by Axel Naud on Flickr. Photo has been cropped. CC BY 2.0.
Collaboration is in vogue. In Nordic circles and in blockbuster games, non-competitive play is ascendant. Portrayed in contrast to competitive, adversarial games, collaborative games are cast as healthier for participants, arguing for the removal of competition from many games in the name of progress.
You cannot really blame larps for popularizing this idea. Competition has had a bad reputation in Western society as being malignant and encouraging horrible behavior for years. But that reputation ignores the proven benefits of healthy competition and rivalry; while working to stamp out all negative behaviors associated with adversarial gameplay, we misunderstand competition and, in effect, throw the baby out with the bathwater.
We also overstate how beneficial collaborative play is and ignore how it can be just as toxic, in its own right, as the worst competitive play.
Yes, I am an Amerijerk
My resistance isn’t knee-jerk, goddammit.
To a European reader, I must look like one of those gun-toting hyper-aggressive individualist American jerks, set in his ways with a characteristic knee-jerk resistance to change.
My resistance isn’t knee-jerk, goddammit.
Maybe I am biased. And maybe that’s a good thing, because I am willing to defend competition without dismissing it out of hand. I look seriously at how people benefit from it, and am willing to question whether getting rid of competitive play is a good idea. I was raised in Texas, a place that values individualism, mavericks, and heretics.
If there’s an opposite of the Law of Jante, it’s Texas.
As most can tell you, Texans like nothing more than a good fight, whether the brawl is intellectual or physical. Crucially, we excel at staying friends after the fight is over.
So, let’s fight – and by that I mean, let’s play games where we compete and struggle against each other. I’m here to tell you why a little quarrelin’ is a good thing.
Let’s do this.
Writing the Good Fight
I said Texans like a “good fight”, but what makes a fight “good”?
There’s good food and bad food. There’s good friends and bad friends. And there’s good and bad competition. More precisely, there’s adaptive and maladaptive competition.
Adaptive competition
Adaptive competition is the kind of competitiveness that is overwhelmingly good for people. It builds confidence, helps conquer fear, drives excellence and makes us more sympathetic. It accepts that improvement takes time, views opponents as a challenge and promotes cooperation. It has the power to make us better, more empathetic people.
What might, at first, seem paradoxical is that competition promotes cooperation and respect. This is because adaptive competition requires that both parties agree to a set of rules, and promise to abide by them reliably. It creates an understanding between all participants that breaking rules is unacceptable, hurts everyone involved and is not viable in the long term. A field combat game is in many ways just as collaborative as your favorite freeform larp.
Adaptive competition crucially provides something that is missing from collaborative play – it gives competitors a sense of their own agency. Agency is grown from making your own choices, not communal ones, accepting fair consequences or benefits from them, without the need to justify your thinking to anyone but yourself. When success or failure depends entirely on your decisions, you learn to own them.
Building agency can be incredibly transformative. It builds resistance to criticism or oppression, creates feelings of empowerment and self-determination, and makes us less vulnerable to judgment or depression. We learn to look inward for answers to difficult questions.
The growth of agency is almost unique to competitive play, and is not to be confused with acceptance or confidence. In a fair competition with room for improvement and reasonable stakes, the benefits of learning that you determine your own fate cannot be understated. Even if those choices were incorrect, they are yours and yours alone, and in making them you must naturally overcome paralyzing indecision.
Maladaptive Competition
Maladaptive competition is the bad side of competitive play we are all familiar with. It encourages cheating, narcissism, and unempathetic behavior. It is associated with insecurity and the inability to accept losing. It is high risk, views opponents as threats to be crushed, and promotes cutthroat, unfettered belligerence. But these adverse side effects are more likely to be the consequences of bad game design, rather than deep flaws in competitive play or the morality of players.
These aren’t idle speculations on my part. More than a century of psychological data((Bronson, Po, and Ashley Merryman. 2013. Top dog: the science of winning and losing. New York: Twelve.)) ((Garcia S.M., A. Tor, and T.M. Schiff. 2013. “The Psychology of Competition: A Social Comparison Perspective.” Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science 8, no. 6: 634-50.
)) studying everyone from cyclists((Stone, Mark Robert, Kevin Thomas, Michael Wilkinson, Andrew M. Jones, Alan St. Clair Gibson, and Kevin G. Thompson. “Effects of Deception on Exercise Performance.” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 44, no. 3 (2012): 534-41.
)) to Air Force cadets((Air Force Academy Squadrons Test Peer-Effect Assumptions NPR. Accessed January 30, 2017.)), proves that two distinct sets of competitive situations exist, and we can do specific things to promote the better side of competition. These studies have proven, repeatedly, that adaptive competition is one of the most beneficial and healthy forces we can introduce our players to. It is one of the most compelling and (dare I say) fun things we can put into our games.
Luckily, we have enormous power over the type of competition we create in our games. Specific conditions produce adaptive or maladaptive competitiveness. And we can control them.
Let’s do this.
How to Make Everyone Miserable in 4 Easy Steps
No Fighting Chance
Competition is at its best when it is actually a competition. When we are set against someone we have no chance of winning or losing against, things go wrong. Firstly, the winner has expended little effort to succeed, leading to an unearned sense of superiority that can grow into narcissism and a belief about the inferiority of the opponent. Secondly, the loser becomes discouraged and can form feelings of negative self-worth, having put forth excessive effort only to fail, while their opponent has won so easily. In team play, feeling as if you cannot contribute to the team can be just as damaging as defeat itself.
Further, unfair competition can lead to a feeling of systemic injustice which drives good people to unethical behavior, as they believe their situation is already unfair and they are just balancing the scales. Meanwhile, easy success can lead winners to feel entitled to victory, overestimate their abilities, and make them more likely to cheat if they feel threatened by perceived lessers. It can lead to a situation where one small group thinks of themselves as the natural champions, discounting the role or importance of other players.
Rule: Encourage competition between characters of similar ability. Challengers should be of equal power whenever possible. Maintain a culture which encourages people to look for equals when competing and discourages predatory behavior towards weaker or newer players.
A Crowded Field
We are not wired to compete against one hundred people at once((Garcia, Steven M. and Avishalom Tor. “The N-Effect More Competitors, Less Competition.” Psychological Science 20, no. 7 (2009): 871-877. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~smgarcia/pubs/n-effect.pdf)). The presence of too many competitors makes a competition seem pointless and impersonal. We naturally compare ourselves to small sets of individuals, or single rivals. In a large adversarial game, if a player feels like it is their goal to best every single other player, it encourages insecurity, paranoia, and despair.
When we are given room to choose rivals from a small pool of equals, we stop being discouraged and see our situation as winnable. Rivalries can be healthy, so long as they are balanced and both sides benefit from them.
Rule: Make competition intimate. Make sure competitions are the appropriate scale for participants, giving them room for fair comparison. Have them feel like they are competing with a small group of people, not the entire game.
Winner Takes All
High stakes play encourages maladaptive competition. By creating situations where the only worthwhile outcome is victory, games unwittingly obscure the secondary effects of competition. In the face of a hard and absolute loss, without recognition of effort or skill which might be gained during the struggle for excellence, winning becomes all that matters.
A better model is “winner takes most,” where different levels of success exist; Effort and achievement is recognized on every level. This isn’t an “everyone gets a trophy” model. Rather, it is a recognition of the value and meaning of incremental improvements. And sometimes, being on the board is a meaningful enough achievement on its own. First or last, managing to cross the finish line in a marathon is cause for celebration and pride.
Rule: Avoid crushing victories or absolute defeats. Make partial success count. Make it so all levels of participation are meaningful in some capacity. Avoid giving all the spoils to one side or person.
It Nevers Ends
Healthy competition has a defined start and finish. In games without a clear beginning and end, defeat becomes inevitable and victory is reduced to a useless struggle to temporarily stave off defeat. It drains your proverbial batteries, making feelings of improvement get lost in a fog of anxiety, paranoia, and despair.
The best pattern of competition is marked by distinct periods of preparing, competing, and recuperating. Many games, especially campaign games, do not have this natural pattern. The pressure to play constantly and keep competitive can be overwhelming.
Rule: Have distinct periods of competition and recuperation. The recuperation should far outweigh the competition. Endless online play, between-game actions, and jockeying for position should be limited if not eliminated. It is not the stress of competition but chronic, endless stress that creates maladaptive play.
Why Bother? Just Collaborate!
“All right, Lone Ranger,” you might say, “I get it, competition can be good. But it can be bad in so many ways. Why not stick with collaborative play and steer clear of any problems?”
Unfortunately collaboration, and the absence of all competition, has its own set of problems. The Nordic and freeform larp community already admits this, even if it does not realize it.
We’ve established that competitiveness can be adaptive and maladaptive. Wouldn’t it follow that collaboration has its own adaptive and maladaptive forms? Let’s think about what maladaptive collaboration would look like.
In a situation where all disputes must be collaboratively resolved, those who are most capable of manipulation and building false consensus are liable to push their own egos and agendas onto the community. Alternately, tyranny of the majority may develop where having a unique or discordant opinion is penalized as selfish and destructive, marking you as flawed or leading to ostracization.
This is maladaptive collaboration, and it is extremely resistant to change. It is easy for any effort to correct problems to be seen as the selfish desires of individuals at the expense of the group. Further, in games that emphasize the need for consent to proceed, there’s incentive to pressure those who disagree into quick agreement. Failing to agree can make you look responsible for “ruining everyone else’s experience.” Even through an earnest desire to work together, a good community can become the victim of its own selflessness, descending into groupthink and self-policing, while needing no villains to do so.
Maladaptive competition, the great evil of larping, is rightly accused of teaching narcissism, encouraging cheating, promoting winning at all costs, and breeding feelings of entitlement via unfair victories and perceived competitive ability. But maladaptive collaboration should be recognized as teaching social manipulation, encouraging bullying, promoting submission to the group at all costs, and breeding feelings of entitlement via popularity and social intelligence.
We Have Confronted the Problems with Collaboration
We talked about how healthy competition requires rest and recuperation. Collaborative play is widely regarded as benefiting from guided recuperation — or, as some like to call it, debriefing.
We talked about how adaptive competition is defined by an ability to accept and grow from failure or show humility in success. Many techniques in collaborative play exist to ensure people must accept another person’s limits and not ignore the contributions of others.
We talked about how adaptive competition focuses on putting you into situations you can handle and improve from.Collaborative play features X-cards((Stavropoulous, John. “X-Card by John Stavropoulos.” Google Docs. Accessed January 30, 2017. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SB0jsx34bWHZWbnNIVVuMjhDkrdFGo1_hSC2BWPlI3A/mobilebasic)), bow-out techniques, and other methods to make sure the player can handle the content of their game.
These policies and rules are the result of the Nordic and greater collaborative game community recognizing the dangers of what I call maladaptive collaboration, trying to safeguard against them through good policies and rules.
Now We Need to Confront the Problems with Competition
The thing to take away from these comparisons is that on the whole, collaborative games have done a very good job developing the techniques that keep the collaboration healthy. We need to have that same conversation about keeping competition healthy without replacing it entirely.
We can improve competitive play and appreciate competition as competition, without treating it as flawed collaboration. We need to have fights, and make sure they are good fights.
In Part 2, Why We Fight, I will discuss all that competition does for a player and how it can provide a uniquely beneficial and transformative experience.
Cover photo: Larpers from around the world partake in some competetive boffer fighting at Knudepunkt 2015 (photo by Johannes Axner).
Dungeon Crawl Classics: Where Characters Are Made to DIE. Photo by Evan Torner.
Character creation and character sheets are a favorite topic of mine. Hang around me long enough and you’ll hear me utter the phrase “Character creation is 50% of the role-playing experience.” I mean this statement in several senses. We underestimate how much enjoyment we get out of the simple pleasure of assembling a thinking being whom we will then inhabit. Furthermore, we are actually already playing the (or at least a) game when we create a character. Finally, we often underestimate exactly how much actual time and energy we must invest in each character (unless you’re playing a horde larp or Dungeon Crawl Classics, with its infamous “funnel” of death). We are imbuing inanimate words with life itself; of course there are complications! They represent significant creative investments.
Character sheet from 10 Bad Larps, by Alleged Entertainment. Photo by Evan Torner. Character sheet as promotional material for Knights of Badassdom (2013). Photo by Evan Torner.
Character sheets are the textual evidence of this investment and, if you think about it, constitute just as much of a role-playing game’s “text” as the session itself. In this respect, we can consider Eirik Fatland’s important observation that we use the same word “character” to describe both what’s on the sheet and its actual embodiment,((See Fatland, “What makes a character playable?”)) as well as J. Tuomas Harviainen’s assertion that the act of role-playing generates numerous “texts” in the form of meaningful actions that players then subject to their own individual form of hermeneutic analysis.((Harviainen 66–67.))
Role-playing Games as a Medium
But it turns out that this fluidity between written and performed character text is, in fact, specific to role-playing games as a medium. Here I’d like to discuss the media-specific propositional quality of pre-generated character sheets to show that so-called “new media” – which larp is, to some extent – are where old media such as literature go to live an undead afterlife. We are still subjects shaped by the written page.
I argue that medium-specific assumptions about where “character” comes from underlie specific modes of character presentation which I have, for the sake of argument, subdivided into three different categories:
The Literary Mode
The Procedural-Performative Mode
The Explicitly Emergent Mode
The Literary Mode consists of providing an extensive character backstory. The Procedural-Performative Mode involves explicit commands given to the player. The Explicitly Emergent Mode relies on the player to supply significant content to “fill in” the character as described. Each of these modes carries with it a corresponding imaginary, which I define as the set of values it promotes, and of propositions made that we accept as “given.” What we consider to be “character” is contingent on both design principles as well as the epistemologies – theories of how we know what we know – that shape them. The character sheet determines in part what we can or cannot know about a specific larp.
A character from Lives, Births, Deaths by Martin Brodén & Tobias Wrigstad. Photo by Evan Torner.
“A ‘character’,” writes Markus Montola, “may indicate a group of quantitative attributes within the formal ruleset, a representation of the player in the game world or a fictitious person in the game world.”((Montola 32.)) How we present this fluid construct necessarily represents what we might see as our own specific system of knowledge creation.
My analysis here primarily focuses on what Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman call the “formal level” of a game: “the game considered as a set of rules … not the experience of the game [itself],”((Salen & Zimmerman 120.)) which would be what they call the “phenomenological level.” It would be interesting to see correspondences with my model in actual play, but that’s for others to attempt.
As a media scholar, I approach role-playing games as media, such that the games themselves mediate the cultural act of role-playing. What do I mean by this? Role-playing games frame our attention in specific ways, and construct subjectivities of “ideal” users much like newspapers or television. They have their own aesthetics, cultural authority, and political economy. They generate texts, and are texts themselves. Newspapers, for example, imply that the world’s events can be subdivided into digestible text morsels interspersed with glossy ads. The logics of television imply that content is irrelevant so long as it flows along. Role-playing games imply that a player is in a tense, co-dependent relationship with the rules of a given system, and only through the liberal interpretation of these rules can one appropriately explore alternative realities with one’s friends.
RPGs are structured not around the willing suspension of disbelief but the “willing activation of pretense,” as Michael Saler put it.((Saler 28.)) One creates – or is presented with – a character and then plays it within the diegetic world, bounded by certain rules which the players may have co-designed.
A slide from Eirik Fatland’s talk. Photo by Evan Torner.
At a (particularly good) presentation at Solmukohta 2012, Eirik Fatland called larp design “predicting player behavior,” but also notes how openness to player interpretation is, in fact, a primary design feature of good larp characters.
This poses us with a paradox familiar to most game designers: how do we predict and incentivize player behavior without sacrificing the very unpredictability of the larp experience, especially when the players are relying on the designer/organizers to provide a predictably unpredictable experience?
To deal with this inherent struggle within the larp medium, we must conceive of high-quality larp as both well-defined, immersive and immanent as well as fluid and elusive. If we frame larps as what Christoph Bode calls “nodal situations,”((Bode 1.)) then there is a predictable forking path of notable decision trees like in Interactive Fiction or a Choose Your Own Adventure novel that are predictable and actionable. In the world of larp, for example, Alleged Entertainment’s Garden of Forking Paths frames a series of nodal situations (see below).
Alleged Entertainment’s Garden of Forking Paths. Photo by Evan Torner.
But if we frame larps as mere frameworks for social alibi with no central narratives, as Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros have,((Montola and Stenros 10.)) then these “nodal” decision trees dissolve under the inherent complexity of human interaction within the medium. Larp is often too complex to be summarized in binary decision trees and other techniques.
Character Sheets Shaping the Medium
I conceive larp as a medium. As such, one can look at character sheets as an integral device in shaping its concept, much as the screenplay shapes a resultant film. Several recent perspectives on the character sheet have raised concerns about what exactly its role is in play. Daniel M. Perez sees the character sheet as a map,((See Perez.)) in that you can both use it as a reference to collect information about the game in one central place, and as a guide to what the game itself actually will prioritize during play. Reinforcing this point is Lars Konzack, whose article “Characterology in Tabletop Role-Playing Games” argues for the centrality of the character sheet in determining player experience (and here I quote him at length):
It is the central document from which the player relates to role-playing a character as regards to rules, setting, situation, and performance. In this view, the character sheet transgresses the boundaries of role-playing textuality. The text becomes vital to the role-playing experience as a textual machine in working progress.((Konzack 87.))
Konzack’s point is in direct response to David Jara’s argument that character sheets constitute paratexts, in the vein of Gérard Genette’s literary theory.((See Jara.)) Here I side with Konzack, in that I see Jara overemphasizing actual play as the real text, with all other texts being relegated to secondary and tertiary status. But Konzack’s analysis itself primarily focuses on semiotics – that is, how a character sheet signals a system’s priorities – and exclusively on tabletop games, which often have more thoughtfully laid-out character sheets. This is where I’d like to intervene as a larpwright and media scholar, so as to interrogate the medial significance of the larp character sheet.
What Are Character Sheets?
What are character sheets? Documents that make numerous propositions. In my mind, they are often non-diegetic texts that exist to preserve the diegesis by helping a player perform as a character within it. They do so by providing select information about the character and make deliberate emotional propositions to pull the player into the role.
Character sheets are documents that seek instantiation and/or confirmation in the actual play. They often provide a combination of naming/binding the character, his/her approximate physical appearance, a short backstory – written in the 2nd or 3rd person – relationship to other characters in the larp, and mechanical leverage of certain abilities.
The actual utility of a character sheet in a larp is to identify a character and telegraph how other characters should respond to him/her, provide character impetus for story engagement, abilities for advancing the story, and imply costumes. But these sheets presumably also offer the player a vision of character “interiority,” or a rich inner life with conflicted thoughts and emotions. This interiority proves somewhat crucial in one of the larp medium’s requirements: the act of becoming a “first-person audience,” as Christopher Sandberg describes it.((Sandberg 274–279.)) Once the player is “activated” by the character sheet, they will then undergo the hermeneutic process of responding to events and characters in the larp through the lens of a complex persona construct.
Our main theoretical and design question remains: how do we form this interiority with a piece of paper? The general solutions the larp medium has offered include: having the players read some literature about the character and interpret him/her based on literary analysis; just telling the players what they should be thinking or feeling; or doing away with the data on the sheet and creating a character through workshops, masks, or whatever else. The rest of my article will address these three modes.
The Literary Mode
The only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature.
The first is the literary mode, in which the larpwright often writes 2–10 pages of fiction resembling fanfic about the character which contains information the player is intended to internalize as their backstory. These are usually told in the second-person or third-person mode of address, depending on whether or not the larpwrights are signaling that the player immediately immerse themselves in their character. The point of such texts is for the larp organizers to start in media res with the player already knowing that which is known about the character within the diegesis.
I call it “fanfic” because these texts are either generated by a larpwright passionate about this character set, or occasionally by the player him/herself in order to establish the character. (Based on past experience, having the player write the backstory is more effective, but usually produces characters less linked into social circles in the larp.) In addition, we as players are scarcely permitted to evaluate the text’s aesthetic values as fiction. (It’s sort of a bonus when larp fiction is good.) Now, seeing as these texts are, again, non-diegetic, the player is asked to do literary analysis to extract the necessary data. Kathleen Singles has noted that we take such analysis of the printed page as “natural and non-significant.”((Singles 217.)) I wish to demonstrate, however, that we have many Freudian assumptions underpinning our character assimilation process.
Madam Dragon. Character sheet provided by Sarah Lynne Bowman.
Here’s an example character sheet: Madam Dragon. We can see her abilities as in-game affordances at the top: Breath Weapon, Tough Skin, Claws… notably before any other data, such as what these figures even mean. Then we get to the part marked ‘Your Story’ which goes on for 4 pages. The narrative ostensibly is there to replicate Madam Dragon’s traumatic childhood, going into detail about numerous traumatic episodes, looking at the various nodal moments (of agency and choice) in her backstory that might suggest how the character might behave in the future. These also overload the player with pre-generated genre fiction that is then to be submerged in the player’s consciousness, only to manifest itself in later actions.
Here, the character sheet is like a corked bottle of champagne, ready to burst forth through the player, who is meanwhile stuck with the task of memorizing a large pile of data, while also parsing it for actionable goals and character relationships. Such literary character sheets also operate on an act of faith that the fictions of each character sheet all align well with each other (so that play becomes “interactive literature”) and that the player is literate in the right way to retain the data so that their play can continue what the fiction started. Needless to say, this form of character sheet presumes genre fiction as the basis for all larp.
The Performative-procedural Mode
The second mode is the performative-procedural, in which the game organizers give a brief text about the character in question and explicit instructions to the players as to what they should do. Lizzie Stark and Alessandro Canossa have articulated many of the different ways this can be done. In this model, it is the responsibility of the players to follow the instructions given them by the gamemasters, with the key signifier being the “if-then” statement. It is particularly typical of so-called “horde” larps, with just a few PCs and many NPCs.
Character descriptions from Babysteps by Tobias Wrigstad. Photo by Evan Torner.
Fatland has called this “fateplay,” in which players exchange agency over their characters’ every action for heightened dramatic stakes and what Greg Costikyan calls the “semiotic uncertainty” of the game.((Costikyan 102.)) So rather than writing down an extensive backstory and providing characters with abilities to act on that backstory, designers working in the procedural mode break the “character” into tasks achievable during the larp and command the player to act on them. The player’s options are constrained, their larp experience boiled down to a series of “if-then” statements.
A character sheet from All In by Chris Hall. Photo by Evan Torner. Part of Akala’s objectives for Voyage to Venus, Planet of Death by Kat Jones & Evan Torner. Photo by Evan Torner.
Such play might be seen by some as disempowering, and also would in theory sacrifice the interiority created by the literary fiction of the first model.((In practice, however, perhaps not.)) Whereas such fiction is somewhat Freudian – giving your character a past history of trauma and so forth – the procedural methodology is decidedly Brechtian. Bertolt Brecht commanded all his proletarian actors to enact certain social gestes, gestures that would signify the alienating class structures of society. Larp does this apolitically, removing the agency of a player so that they then have the alibi that the alienating “system” forced them to do whatever it is that they did in the larp. I theorize this using an alchemical blend of Brechtian theory and Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric, which is probably familiar to most of you.
Here’s a quote from Brecht collaborator Ernst Ottwalt: “It is not the duty of our literature to stabilize the reader’s consciousness but to alter it.”((Ottwalt 22.)) Again, the model presented indicates that the actor carrying out these commands will somehow experience an interior change, but Ottwalt is implying it to be at the level of the consumer/user. Ian Bogost says about procedural rhetoric: “It’s a theory or a design philosophy. It’s a way of making things. A way of thinking about the process of translating systems in the world into representations of those systems in the computer… It gives you a framework through which to ask questions about what a particular situation might demand.”((See Bogost, “Procedural Rhetoric.”)) Procedure can lead to character interiority, but such procedures also can directly enact specific ideologies through the characters too.
The Explicitly Emergent Mode
The third mode of character creation is to dispense with sheets entirely and just “workshop” a character, or perhaps build a character through a single sound uttered while wearing a trance mask. These techniques help build character interiority by relying primarily on the player’s own social and physical assets, which are then directly interfaced with a group. Importantly, these characters without character sheets would be dismissed by many larpers as part of a mere theater exercise. This mode has become popular within the blackbox movement, notably in games such as White Death.
White Death at Blackbox CPH. Photo by Nina Runa Essendrop.
White Death has no character sheets, but rather a physical condition and a core prejudice your character has. Such abandonment of the character sheet makes for an RPG text divorced from the written page, seeking instead emergence of character, storyline, and the world through emergent player interaction. Other games such as Helene Willer Piironen and Maria Ljung’s Stereo Hearts create characters from music playlists. This mode is possibly the least well-understood mode of character presentation, and one that is rapidly evolving as our medium develops.
But I stress the primacy of a medial understanding of larp here: role-playing games mediate the cultural act of role-playing. I don’t really want to get into the argument of then “what constitutes a game” here, but I would say that my cursory analysis also reinforces Emily Care Boss’ recent point that the “crunch/fluff” dichotomy in games – where we attempt to separate mechanical leverage in games (this is what my stats say I can do) from fictional positioning (this is what the situation dictates) – makes little sense.((Boss 50–54.)) There is equally little substance in stats as there is in backstory as there is in arbitrary orders as there is in on-the-spot social fictions.
In short: When you write a long backstory for a character, you are asking the player to perform literary analysis in order to understand the character. When you write out procedures and objectives for the character, the player has clear activities to engage in, but may be in some ways ensconced in ideological logics of power and control. When you provide no character sheet whatsoever, the design itself is likely relying on emergence to form the characters. There are so many ways for us to present characters to players; I encourage us to start reflecting on how we do so, and what are the hidden motives behind said designs.
Works Cited
Bode, Christoph. Future Narratives: Theory, poetics, and media-historical moment. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.
Harviainen, J. Tuomas. “A Hermeneutical Approach to Role-Playing Analysis.” International Journal of Role-Playing 1 (2009): 66–78.
Jara, David. “A Closer Look at the (Rule-) Books: Framings and Paratexts in Tabletop Role-playing Games.” International Journal of Role-Playing 4 (2013): 39–54.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York UP, 2006.
Konzack, Lars. “Characterology in Tabletop Role-Playing Games: A Textual Analysis of Character Sheets.” WyrdCon Companion Book 2013. Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, eds. Orange, CA: Wyrd Con, 2013: 86-93.
Montola, Markus. “The Invisible Rules of Role-Playing. The Social Framework of Role Playing Process.” International Journal of Role-Playing 1 (2009): 22–36.
––– and Jaakko Stenros. Nordic Larp. Stockholm: Fea Livia, 2010.
Ottwalt, Ernst. “‘Tatsachenroman’ und Formexperiment: Eine Entgegnung an Georg Lukács.” Die Linkskurve 4.10 (October 1932): 22.
Sandberg, Christopher. “Genesi. Larp Art, Basic Theories.” Beyond Role and Play. Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination. Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, eds. Helsinki: Ropecon ry, 2004.
Salen, Katie & Eric Zimmerman. The Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
Singles, Kathleen. Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.
Cover photo: White Death, at Blackbox CPH (photo by Nina Runa Essendrop).
This article on larp pre-production is based on my experience as both a video game designer and larp designer. The concepts described are based on good practices in the video game industry, but are definitely applicable to larps and other games in general.
How can we define pre-production? In the broadest sense, pre-production is everything that we need to do before we can start making content for the game. You can think of pre-production as an exploratory and preparatory phase. This is where you ask questions and look for answers; where you get creative and explore different ideas.
Pre-production is much broader than just creating the concept for your larp. It’s also testing the concept to see if it’s actually feasible, and gathering all the building blocks needed to make a successful game.
Imagine that your larp is a building. Pre-production is not only sketching the floor plans, but also trying out different materials to test their strength and to see how they work with each other; and then gathering all the materials needed. It’s also asking yourself questions like what is the purpose of the building, how many people will it hold, and so on. Before you start laying bricks, you need to answer a lot of questions – and that’s what pre-production is for.
Why Should I Pre-produce?
Designing complex game mechanics, such as alchemy, and then testing them is a great use of the pre-production phase. Photo courtesy of LubLarp.
Pre-production is a fun process. It’s the part of making a game where you can get really creative, experiment and test your ideas. It’s also the part when you lay your groundwork for further development. Good pre-production will bear fruit and let you make a good game with less effort. Inadequate pre-production will add a lot of work and sleepless hours to your project – and that’s in the best-case scenario.
But do you really need to pre-produce larps? Yes, because either we want it or not, we all do it. It’s a natural part of the development process. In many cases, pre-production is very short, based on intuition, done unconsciously, and intertwined with the production phase: but it’s still there. Thus we shouldn’t shun pre-production, but instead embrace it. Mastering the pre-production process and doing it consciously simply gives you a greater chance to succeed.
What Pre-production Isn’t
Pre-production is all about exploring your idea. This exploration comes at a cost, however. During pre-production, you’ll make mistakes and even throw out most of your work. That is an entirely acceptable part of the design process. Making mistakes at pre-production is cheap, but you need to follow the basic rule:
Don’t make content for the game during pre-production.
Imagine you skipped pre-production and started writing characters. Halfway through, you realized that several characters don’t fit the theme and mood of the larp. Do you scrap those characters? Rewrite them? But that’s several pages and many hours of work! If only you had written down the concepts for each character and checked if they fit the theme and mood before you started proper writing. Scrapping a character concept before writing a 5-page character sheet would be so much better…
The example above contains an extra lesson: don’t assume that the things you do during pre-production will end up in the finished game. Things in pre-production change constantly, and you need to accept that. Good ideas are thrown away to make room for better ones, or because they don’t fit with the rest of the larp.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t write drafts, design mechanics, or do other things you normally do when creating a larp. But you have to remember that your goal at pre-production is to verify ideas. You should think of it as prototyping.
Prototyping
Prototyping is the act of creating makeshift game elements (for example character roles, game mechanics and systems) to test a concept. In some cases, a prototype will be a template or model that you can replicate, or learn from.
Prototyping might sound unfamiliar to many larp designers. In fact, it has been used in larp design for some time now – perhaps not as intensively as it should have been. Real-life examples of prototyping in larps include:
Writing a draft character to create a template (character sheet) for all other characters
Pitching the game to your target audience (for example using a design document), observing their reaction and gathering feedback, and then rewriting the design document.
Showing specific game elements or mechanics to outsiders to see if they understand them easily
Testing complicated mechanics (such as combat) in difficult conditions (e.g. with a large number of players present), to see if they work smoothly
Testing out props, special effects or makeup before implementing them in the game
Running an improvised larp during a creative session, to test an idea
Running standalone workshops, before implementing them in another larp
Testing a single scene/act taken out of a game that lasts multiple scenes/acts
Running a scaled down version of your larp (e.g. 10 instead of 50 participants)
Running a pilot game for a series of larps
As you see, prototyping is any situation where you make a mock version of the final design just to test it out.
Prototyping is rarely elegant and you need to accept that. It’s often done hastily, with very rough drafts, unbalanced systems, story full of plot holes, and a lot of important parts missing. You prototype to move from theory to practice as fast as you can, because that’s the best way to learn about your game.
Prototyping can be (and often is) a repeatable process. You make the prototype, test it, get feedback, and move on to another part of the game; or repeat the process to get better results.
You can, for example, quickly make a mock version of your game mechanics without balancing the numbers, and then test the game mechanics to see if they make any sense. Only when they do, you move to the next phase: balancing the numbers. If they don’t, you tweak the mechanics or scrap them and look for alternatives.
Such prototyping is an example of iteration in the pre-production phase.
Iteration
If the vision of the game gets blurry, materials created during pre-production will help you get back on the track. Photo courtesy of LubLarp.
Iteration is a technique of developing and delivering incremental components to reach the desired vision of the larp. A single iteration results in a conveniently sized but complete chunk of the game. Multiple iterations recurse (repeat the process while basing on previous iterations) to compose a complete larp.
Iteration in practice requires dividing the whole project into feasible chunks of work that can be completed in a reasonable, set amount of time. After each iteration, you should have a working (but not necessarily finished or ideal) piece of the game that you can evaluate in some way. Further iterations will build and improve upon the former.
One important advantage of iteration is that when the deadline comes, you won’t have any important features missing. Some of them might be unfinished or half-baked, but the game as a whole should at least be playable. And achieving playability as quickly as possible should be one of your primary goals.
A great example of iteration in larp design is the seven phases of character creation, which is a part of the seven-step model described in the Solmukohta 2016 book, Larp Realia((Seven Phases for Character Creation, Anders Gredal Berner, Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted Herløvsen. Larp Realia, p.73.)). The idea behind the technique is to make sure that all characters have gone through phase one of character creation process before starting phase two, and so on.
Test Run
The Holy Grail of pre-production is the creation of the ultimate prototype – a first playable version of your game, that can be run for people outside your design group. It won’t be a finished and polished game – rather, a rough draft with all the core elements and characteristics you want to test in place. Running the first playable version for people outside your group is the best way to resolve questions left unanswered during pre-production.
Making a playable version of the whole game is important, because sooner or later you’ll reach a point, where you can only improve the game by making subsequent runs, analyzing feedback and implementing changes.
Experimental Larp
If you take the technique of prototyping to the extreme, you’ll come up with the idea of a whole larp created for the purpose of testing new ideas and concepts.
Experimental larps aren’t exactly new, but the name “experimental” is often a misnomer – larps are often considered experimental when they introduce an innovative, bold (perhaps transgressive) technique or piece of design. But introducing a new technique isn’t everything – the core purpose of an experimental larp is to test a piece of design and verify if it’s worthy or not. If a new technique is introduced not for testing purposes, but, for example, to shock or disturb the player, or for artistic self-expression, then the larp isn’t, strictly speaking, an experiment.
This also means that a good experimental larp should possess means to evaluate the quality of the innovative piece of design. This might be done with thorough observation of the game, a good debriefing, player interviews, surveys and other techniques for gathering feedback after the game.
When designing an experimental game, you should consider removing as many unknown factors as possible. Make the game with familiar players, in a familiar environment, with familiar mechanics. The only unknown factors in your larp should be the techniques you want to test. Be aware that testing many new features in a single experiment might prove difficult, because this increases the amount of unknown elements in the game.
What Else to Do in Pre-production
So far, we’ve covered such big concepts as prototyping, iterative design, test-running the game and making experimental larps. Those are certainly important tools and ideas, but there are a lot of other things that can be done in pre-production, such as:
Doing the required research, including reading on game theory
Searching for inspirations and references
Analyzing past games with similar design elements
Figuring out what is the core of the game, and what is superficial
Scouting for prospective locations
Designing and testing core game mechanics
Designing groups (factions)
Drafting relations between characters
Experimenting with character sheet design
Writing a draft character
Checking if the game concept is feasible
The Goals of Pre-production
In the broadest sense, at the end of pre-production, you should have a good understanding of how your game works, what is needed to finish your larp, and what the production will look like.
You should also:
Have a clear vision of what the game should be
Have an understanding how the finished game should look like, and what features it should have
Answer as many questions about the core design of the game as possible
Identify priorities – what is core to your game, and what isn’t
Have answers for core questions: eg. if the location is crucial for the game, you’ll need at least one promising, prospective location that can host your game
Have a sensible estimate of the resources needed to finish the project
Evaluate what resources you can commit to the project
Be able to set specific tasks and milestones for the production phase
Have templates (like character sheets) and models you can replicate
Figure out efficient procedures and the workflow for your team
Have it all written down in a design document that will help your team, especially all the newcomers to your project
Killing the Project
Mapping out characters and their relations is a great way to check if everyone is connected to the story. Photo courtesy of LubLarp.
In some cases, you’ll have a hard time deciding whether to commit assets (time, money, workforce) to producing the game. Sometimes you’ll lose motivation. The end of pre-production is your last call to kill the project, if you think making it isn’t feasible. Don’t be afraid to do it – killing larps at this point is perfectly fine. You’ll probably regret all the assets you’ve committed to the pre-production process: but think how much you actually save by not making a subpar larp, or cancelling the game in the middle of production. The better you become at pre-production, the less larps you’ll need to kill; or, at least, you’ll reach the decision to kill the game faster.
Moving to the Production Phase
Only when you successfully end pre-production can you start making the game. The production phase covers all the necessary work needed to complete the larp: recruiting players, writing characters, crafting props, etc.
During production, you should avoid changing the project, experimenting with the design and devising new features. Instead, you should stick to what you’ve learned during pre-production and keep yourself focused on the vision of the game that you came up with earlier. Create only the elements that support the core design of the game. Everything excessive should be scrapped.
After scrapping all the unnecessary or faulty elements of the game, if you were using iteration to develop a first playable version, you can iterate further on all the promising bits of the game, to smoothly move from pre-production to production.
Summary
As I have shown earlier, pre-production is an essential, preparatory step in larp design, that is best done consciously. It shouldn’t be intertwined with actual production, because pre-production is based on rough prototyping as quickly as possible, and a lot of ideas and chunks of work done in pre-production are discarded along the way. This is because the role of pre-production isn’t making the game, but gathering knowledge about the game you’re going to make. With the use of iteration, you can quickly assemble a draft version of the larp; that draft should be testrun to gather feedback unobtainable in any other way. In extreme cases, you can design an experimental larp to test new techniques in a familiar environment. At the end of pre-production, you should have a good understanding of your game and know everything needed for production. This is also the time where you should decide to produce the game or kill the project. During proper production, you should avoid adding new ideas to the game. Instead, concentrate on implementing the things you’ve came up with during pre-production.
Following these guidelines, you should able to divide your work into two phases (pre-production and production), set your goals for each phase and consciously plan and carry out all tasks needed to complete those goals.
Cover photo: “Pandora’s Box” was a larp created entirely during two days of LubLarp workshops. You can learn a lot from running a quickly-assembled game. (Photo courtesy of LubLarp)
When Ben Morrow and I decided to offer a College of Wizardry-like experience in North America in April 2015, we knew we had our work cut out for us. Not only did we need to form a larp production company, secure the venue, build the costumes, obtain props, find players, and all the other duties associated with organizing a larp; we also had to write an entirely new magical universe for North America. We had to design the larp for what would be a predominantly American and Canadian audience, players who were not used to playing in the Nordic-style.
Maury Brown and Ben Morrow, creators of New World Magischola. Photo courtesy of Learn Larp LLC.
Even if we seeded the game with experienced players of Nordic-style larps, we knew we wouldn’t have what Teresa Axner refers to as “herd competence,”((Miriam Lundqvist, “Making Mandatory Larps for Non-players,” Nordic Larp Talks 2015, YouTube, last modified Feb. 11, 2015, https://youtu.be/xnIKzQlnRuU )) whereby enough players in the game understood and used the Nordic-style of roleplay, thereby bringing along the players who did not. In fact, we knew we would have a herd competence of a different kind. We would have the majority of our players whose only larp experience was playing in the kinds of larps that are mainstream in the US and Canada: campaign boffer larps set in high fantasy, medieval, or post-apocalyptic settings; or Mind’s Eye Theatre White Wolf games, especially Vampire. All of these larps rely on statistics, skill calls, points, levels, and numeric combat resolution, as well as gamemasters and storytellers. New World Magischola would use none of these. Thus, we not only had to pay careful attention to the design of the game, but we also had to teach nearly all of our players — who were primarily either first-time larpers or larpers who had only played numerical mechanics-heavy games — how to play in this style. That meant developing explicit mechanics and pedagogy for some of the techniques that are now an implicit part of the Nordic- style larp culture. It’s also worth noting that the needs of each of these types of players in our primary participant group are different. The safety, calibration, and culture design system had to be flexible enough to work for each player, no matter their experience.
Because this game and universe was new for North America, we had the opportunity to create a game ethos and community culture from the ground up. For us, this project was always more than making a wizard college. It was about changing larp culture to make one that was based on the feminist principles of value, care, and compassion. So, while the structure of the larp is very similar to College of Wizardry, the community design principles and the magical universe is unique. Larp designers are fundamentally experience designers. Often, we tend to concentrate on the organization aspects of the larp, e.g. logistics and scheduling. By design, we tend to think of lighting, sound, and other aspects of how the story will be told. What is often overlooked in design – or left to the “herd” – is how players will interact with each other, both in- and out-of-character. Since larp is experienced generally between two or more people, it is interesting that we often do not consider designing the community principles, norms, values, and behaviors that are expected of players and characters,((Lizzie Stark, “Building Larp Communities: Social Engineering for Good,” Leaving Mundania: Inside the World of Larp, last modified March 18, 2014. http://leavingmundania.com/2014/03/18/building-larp-communities-social-engineering-good/)) which fundamentally impact the experience of a larp. Yes, as designers we will post mission statements, creative visions, and even conduct policies, but how do we go about naming, modeling, teaching, and enforcing the game ethos and community culture that undergirds, predicates, and indeed makes possible the creative and artistic experience of the larp? This process must be intentional, and it must be designed and practiced by the participants so that they can express it. This article will discuss a system of techniques and mechanics developed or adapted for New World Magischola (NWM), a 4-day Nordic Style larp for 160 people, set in a magical universe specifically written for North America.
New World Magischola’s design is based on the Opt-In/Opt-Out Design principles espoused by Johanna Koljonen((Johanna Koljonen, “Basics of Opt-In, Opt-Out Design Parts 1 and 2,” Patreon, https://www.patreon.com/posts/basics-of-opt-in-5808793)) and requires the consent of the player to have anything happen to their character. These principles of “no one can do anything to your character without your consent” and “you consent to role-play at the level of your individual comfort because you are in control of your character” are largely unheard of in North American larps pre-NWM, although they have been used and discussed in Nordic Larp communities((Lizzie Stark, “Player Safety in Nordic Games,” Leaving Mundania: Inside the World of Larp, last modified April 26, 2012, http://leavingmundania.com/2012/04/26/player-safety-in-nordic-games/)) for many years. Many North American larps operate on principles that discount bleed((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character,” Nordiclarp.org, last modified March 2, 2015,
https://nordiclarp.org/2015/03/02/bleed-the-spillover-between-player-and-character/)) between player and character, consider discussion about the player during a game to be evidence of bad roleplay or metagaming. Additionally, some players value ambushing and/or betrayal by gamemasters and other characters as the norm of play. Players of these games know that at any moment in any game a more powerful character could flash statistics and end your game, including killing your character. For very real in-game and off-game consequences, these players tend to have their guard up throughout the game, suspicious of the motives and honesty of other characters, and often of the players who portray them.
Negotiated magical spells in NWM3. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
We set out to create the opposite type of game by building on what College of Wizardry began. CoW uses consent-based spell mechanics, whereby the recipient of the spell decides its effects. The College of Wizardrydesign document overtly states that wizards have a variety of sexualities, working to normalize a variety of relationships and identities at the game.((Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform, “College of Wizardry Design Document,” Rollespilsfabrikken, last accessed September 6, 2016, http://www.rollespilsfabrikken.dk/cow/dd/designdocument.pdf (see p. 18, section on “Boys & Girls”).)) To design the game ethos and community culture for New World Magischola, we would:
Use feminist and queer design principles to explicitly write a world and characters that showcases non-masculine, non-heterosexual identities in positions of power;
Write character and player norms that value self-determination, autonomy, and expression of identity, and;
Write mechanics that both establish and reinforce a community of care.
A vampire and a poltergeist pretend to face off in NWM4. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
This article discusses the workshops and mechanics used in New World Magischola to establish and reinforce a baseline culture of empathy and compassion for fellow players.((Maury Brown and Benjamin A. Morrow, “Breaking the Alibi: Fostering Empathy by Reuniting Player and Character,” Wyrd Con Companion Book2015 (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con), https://www.dropbox.com/s/xslwh0uxa544029/WCCB15-Final.pdf?dl=0 )) This ethos and environment was necessary in order for players to feel safe and able to take the risks that role-play requires, particularly play that is in a completely different style than most of our players were used to experiencing. Subsequent pieces will look at the feminist and queer design principles and how they were aligned through world-building, characters, workshops, and mechanics. These topics are intertwined, but looking at the discrete mechanics created or adapted for New World Magischola demonstrates not only how players accessed the game, but also how they discovered a new way of playing that valued them as individuals and as members of a community collaborating to create a powerful and transformative experience.
Community Design is a System — with Rules and Mechanics
First of all, we have to acknowledge that these techniques are game mechanics. We often like to state that Nordic larps don’t have rules or mechanics. It is true that these larps don’t have skill calls and points and hierarchies, what are often referred to as mechanics. But as Johanna Koljonen and John Stavropoulos remind us in a recent Game to Grow webisode on Emotionally Intense Play, Calibration, and Safety,((Maury Brown, Johanna Koljonen, Lizzie Stark, John Stavropoulos, moderated by Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Episode 2: Emotionally Intense Play, Calibration, and Community Safety,” Game to Grow Webisode Project, YouTube, last modified September 1, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YtRJd5CR2I)) it’s a mistake not to think about safety, calibration, and culture-building tools as mechanics. They are systematized and symbolic actions, norms – and, dare we say, rules – for accessing and regulating play. They are, at their definitional heart, mechanics that govern player and character interaction. It’s time we recognized the tools used to create and moderate safety, play calibration, and community culture as the mechanics they are.
The mechanics featured in this article and pre- and post-game workshops at NWM were developed by Maury Brown, Sarah Lynne Bowman, and Harrison Greene. They were implemented — and revised and re-implemented based on player and staff input — at the four runs of New World Magischola held in June and July of 2016. Each game had roughly 160 players, so these mechanics were tested and evaluated on approximately 600-700 players who came from 40 US states, several Canadian provinces, and four European countries. The eight safety, culture, and calibration mechanics used at New World Magischola discussed in this piece are:
Normalizing a culture of Player Care: “Players are more important than games”;
Normalizing off-game moments for player negotiations using “Off-game”;
Checking-In with fellow players using the “OK Check-In”;
Slowing or stopping roleplay using “Cut” and “Largo”;
Graceful exits and calibration using “Lookdown”;
Negotiating physical roleplay (aggression and sexuality);
Pronoun Choice, Placement, and Correction, and;
Full opt-out of romantic play using a sticker on the nametag.
Additionally, this article will discuss the inclusion of the metagame characters of in-game/off-game Counselors, who were responsible for participant care.
New World Magischola students work together to heal a professor of a previously uncurable curse. Photo courtesy of Learn Larp LLC.
New World Magischola had four hours of workshops prior to the game beginning. The workshops used at NWM were explicitly designed to teach the safety, calibration, and opt-in/opt-out mechanics of the game. We would have preferred to have used even more time for workshops, and some player comments in the post-game survey corroborated this preference, but we were managing both player expectations and venue constraints with the four hour timeframe. In North America, with the exception of the small group of people who have experienced Nordic-style or freeform larps either in Europe or in small pockets at conventions in the US, larps do not have either pre-game workshops or post-game debriefs. Participants come to weekend or multi-day larps to play, and the concept of off-game workshops was both new and subject to a great degree of skepticism. We had to work to sell the concept of the workshops and to explain that they were an integral, and indeed mandatory, part of the game experience. ((We had one instance of a player deciding on their own to skip the workshops (unbeknownst to organizers), who then proceeded to have a disastrous first few hours in the game, causing conflicts with several other players. This was directly because they did not know how to play, and their interactions with others were toxic as a result. This incident prompted organizers to create a makeup policy for workshops, barring entry to the game until a player who had missed workshops had met with organizers to learn the ethos and safety techniques described in this article. This doesn’t fully make up for the workshops, since they do not have the opportunity to form relationships with fellow players, but it at least covers the basic game system and ethos. We did not feel we could tell people they could not play the larp at all if they missed workshops, as some were delayed due to travel problems outside of their control. However, in many larp situations, we would support barring playing the game at all if a player does not attend workshops.)) The four hours allowed us to get through much of what we needed to workshop. However, one of the takeaways from the four NWM runs is that six hours of workshops would be preferable in order to expand the negotiated physical role-play portion, both for greater specificity and for more intentional practice and modeling. More time would also have allowed for the additional development of character ties. The larp also featured a designated Sanctuary space where players could go for off-game quiet, rest, refueling, or conversation, as needed.
Greene running a workshop in NWM 1. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
1. Normalizing a Culture of Player Care
In many gaming cultures, the game is considered paramount. Players will make decisions regarding their own safety, comfort level, and needs by considering the impact on the game or their characters first, and the impact on themselves second (or even last). Breaking character is frowned upon, as is admitting player needs or emotions, which are seen as interrupting the game. While many larps have procedures for physical safety and mechanics to use if someone breaks an ankle or hits their head, the majority of North American larps do not have systems in place to account for a player’s psychological or emotional comfort and safety. In some cultures, attempts by players to opt-out of certain types of play, or to problematize certain themes — such as sexual violence — as triggering results in in- or off-game consequences, or a perceived assault on the game’s creative vision. Recent changes, such as Mind’s Eye Society’s summer 2016 ban on rape and sexual assault in World of Darkness games, are increasing the discussion around player safety and care within gaming communities and fictions.
At New World Magischola, we had to introduce, reiterate, and enforce this reversal of importance: Players were the most important element, not the game.((Maury Brown, “Player-Centered Design,” Keynote at Living Games Conference 2016, YouTube, last accessed June 10, 2016, https://youtu.be/oZY9wLUMCPY )) Players were urged to put self-care first. Self-care included physical needs such as sleep and hydration, but also individual psychological and emotional needs. Players were continually told that no one can make them role-play something or participate in something without their consent, and that no one can cause their character to experience something that they do not find interesting. The culture of this larp worked as the reverse of most mainstream North American larps: player autonomy and choice trumped “game needs” and the mechanics both encouraged and enforced this principle. Players faced no adverse in-game or off-game consequences for choosing self-care; in fact, it was celebrated. Once players realized self-care was the norm, they felt more comfortable exercising the other techniques described below, which specifically helped them make self-care calibration choices.
Students show empathy for a chupacabra in NWM3. The rights of parasapient creatures are a major subject of debate in the larp. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
2. Normalizing Off-game Moments for Player Negotiations Using the Cue “Off-game”
This mechanic may seem very simple, but we needed to establish that it was not only okay to pause the game for a moment, but we actually preferred players to do so in order to clarify or negotiate. For many players accustomed to the norms of campaign boffer larps and MES vampire larps, “breaking game” is anathema and players are expected to either guess at levels of interaction, be surprised by them, or to tough through off-game player needs for fear of being derided or ostracized for breaking character and “ruining” someone else’s game. The mere idea of quick off-game negotiations was already a change for our player base, as was the idea that such negotiations were considered normal and helpful, not “bad roleplay.”
The idea of an off-game symbol was known to most US larpers, where it is often used to pass unmolested through a camp because you are not “in play” at the moment, e.g. you cannot be attacked. We elected to piggyback on a known symbol, raising one’s fist to the forehead to signal “Off-game,” and to use the word “Off-game” to signal that the following conversation was between players and not characters. The hand-signal was intended to be more of a shortcut and to be used to signal at a distance, and the use of the verbal cue “off-game” was more for use during character interactions, but we did not make it as clear as we should have that one could be used without the other. We had to calibrate after the first two NWM runs when some players kept their fists on their foreheads during an entire off-game conversation, which was fidelity to the mechanic, but not necessary. To avoid players having their hands on their heads so often – an action that some found immersion-breaking since it is unusual for “normal” behavior – we clarified that it was a quick signal and then the hand could be lowered or one could simply use the phrase “off-game.” I prefer reliance on the verbal cue, “off-game,” but the hand signal does retain some utility for loud situations or use at a distance. It’s important to think about players’ access to the tools and to have alternative versions, e.g. in case the audible one can’t be heard or the gesture can’t be made due to hands being unavailable.
A poltergeist disturbs a Magical Theory and Ethics class in NWM4. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
NWM piloted two new safety, culture and calibration techniques: a revised version of the “Check-In” with fellow players and the “Lookdown.”
3. Checking-In with Fellow Players Using the “OK Check-In”
This technique uses a discreet hand movement of making the “OK” symbol at another player, who is then tasked with responding in one of three ways: thumbs up, thumbs down, or a flat hand/“so-so” gesture. Flashing the “OK” symbol as a gesture to indicate concern for another player appears to have developed as emergent play in some US larp circles in 2009 or 2010. Rob McDiarmid reported using it at a game around that time and Aaron Vanek and Kirsten Hageleit later used the “OK” symbol to check in with each other during larps in Southern California. The Texas game Planetfall has used a version of the Okay symbol for the last couple of years. The current version of this response system — thumbs up, thumbs down, or flat hand — was unique for New World Magischola, although Koljonen writes of its recent use in the American run of the Nordic Vampire larp End of the Line here.
The Check-In Procedure:
Player 1 flashes the “OK” symbol — with the thumb and index finger touching in an “o” and the other three fingers extended upward — to another player and establishes eye contact. This gesture means “Are you okay?”
Player 2 responds to the signal with one of three responses:
Thumbs-up, which means “Doing fine, no need for follow-up.”
Thumbs-down, which means “I am not okay.” Player 1 should respond by asking if the player needs to see the in-game/off-game counselor or go to the off-game room.
Flat hand, which means “I am not sure.” Player 1 should still respond by asking if the player needs to see the counselor or go to the off-game room
Additionally, a player could proactively flash the “OK” signal when displaying strong emotions, taking a break alone, or role-playing choking or a seizure, for example, to let approaching others know this was role-play.
The “Check-In” by using the OK symbol was beneficial because often it is difficult to tell whether a person is performing convincing role-play, or is in actual physical or emotional distress. Sometimes, a character is sobbing, but a player is having a good time. Sometimes, the player is sobbing because they are triggered or emotionally overwhelmed.((Maury Elizabeth Brown, “Pulling the Trigger on Player Agency: How Psychological Intrusions in Larps Affect Game Play,” Wyrd Con Companion Book2014 (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con), https://www.dropbox.com/s/3yq12w0ygfhj5h9/2014%20Wyrd%20Academic%20Book.pdf?dl=0 )) If we simply assume that a player is role-playing unless they reach out, then we miss the opportunity to care for a fellow player. Also, players in distress are often too overwhelmed, embarrassed, or afraid to risk reaching out to another player. This proactive mechanic encouraged players to check-in with each other. It was easy to flash an “OK” symbol to the player alone in the corner. This gesture could be done non-verbally, from a reasonable distance, without a full interruption for either player, and obtain a quick mental calibration by the player, who then responds in a similarly discreet and unobtrusive way. It’s designed to be player-to-player communication without causing large breaks in character play.
Students model “thumbs up” with an ethics professor in NWM4. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
Some feedback suggested that the flat hand signal was redundant and not needed, since the result was the same as the thumbs-down signal. While this is true, we elected to keep the three-tiered response due to socialization both within the gaming community and in general society that makes it difficult for many people – particularly women and people from other marginalized groups – to demonstrate distress or ask for assistance. Too often, we will “power through” and state that we are fine, so as not to be a bother, not to admit weakness, or — in the case of some gaming and larp cultures — so as not to be subject to retaliation with direct accusations of not belonging, breaking the game, or needed to be “coddled.” It is far easier to give the “so-so” signal than the thumbs-down; in the absence of the middle option, with only the thumbs-up or thumbs-down choices, too many people would have just defaulted to thumbs-up, figuring they were feeling “not that bad.” When Vanek and Hageleit used the technique, they used it by flashing the “OK” sign, over the heart, and the other player was to respond with the same sign to indicate “I am okay.” In the current system, the responses to the “OK” sign were deliberately not the return of the “OK” sign. This mimicked response can be done reflexively without discernment, like returning a wave to someone. By creating the three responses, we required a thoughtful response from the players to assess their feelings and determine which of the three was appropriate.
Players began using a hack for this technique in the final two runs: players were proactively using the “thumbs-down” symbol to indicate “I’m not okay,” rather than waiting for another player to check-in with them. This symbol would provoke the same response from another player: breaking play to assist them by escorting them to the counselor or the off-game room. We have now updated the system to include the use of a proactive “thumbs-down” to indicate distress or the need for assistance.
4. Slowing or Stopping Role-play Using “Cut” and “Largo”
Borrowing from the Nordic community, where kutt and brems — Cut and Break/Brake — are widely used, New World Magischola, like College of Wizardry, used the “Cut” mechanic. Any player could call Cut if they were in distress or needed play to stop immediately. Cut works like it does on a movie set: all action stops. Other players were instructed to step back and check-in with the player who called for the Cut and to determine if they needed to exit the scene; go to the off-game room or counselor; or address some other need.
We elected not to use Break or Brake, as is more typical in the Nordic community because it is an imprecise mechanic, at least as typically understood in North America, where there is confusion whether the word means “break” as in stop, or take a break — and is thus confused with “cut” — or “brake” as in slow down, which begs the question to what degree and for how long. We dispensed with brake and used “largo” instead, a word borrowed from musical vocabulary where it means “go slow.” Any player could call “Largo” and the result was that co-players immediately toned it down a notch by lowering the intensity. Calling “Largo” did not require a follow-up check-in like using “Cut” did, nor did it require any explanation, nor should one be demanded. Largo is Largo, and when it was called, the intensity was lowered by everyone with no questions asked.
A goblin journalist interviews a professor in NWM4. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
We liked that “Largo” sounded like a spell, since this was a magic school, but we especially liked that it is an unusual word that isn’t used in common vocabulary, so it wouldn’t be lost in a conversation like the word Break can be. Largo was a clear indication that the intensity – whether it was anger, noise-level, flirting, etc. – needed to be lowered and slowed. Some players used it in one-on-one or small-group interactions, while others used it as a control measure in large groups, e.g. players who were talking over each other, or to quiet a boisterous group for more productive conversation and role-play. Feedback from the survey indicates that “Largo” was well-received and perceived as more clear and precise than “Break/Brake.”
Cut Procedure:
Player 1 calls “Cut.”
Player 2 (or all players within hearing) immediately stop all role-play.
Player 2 checks in with Player 1, focusing on their needs. No one asks for an explanation for why Cut was called, nor makes any comment whatsoever.
Player 1 makes the decision to either exit the scene, return to the scene at a lower intensity, or go to the Sanctuary space.
Play resumes among remaining players.
Students in NWM4. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
Largo Procedure:
Player 1 calls “Largo.”
Player 2 (or all players within hearing) take a step back, then lower the volume, or otherwise lower the intensity of the scene. No one asks for an explanation or comments. Stepping back was visual confirmation that “Largo” was heard and understood.
Play continues at lessened intensity. It can continue uninterrupted, although an “OK Check-In” may be used to determine if newly calibrated play meets Player 1’s needs.
5. Graceful Exits and Calibration Using “Lookdown”
NWM piloted a new mechanic that Johanna Koljonen mentioned in her “Opt-in/Opt-out Safety Systems” keynote at the Living Games Conference in May 2016.((Johanna Koljonen, “Opt In/Opt Out Safety System,” Keynote at Living Games Conference 2016. YouTube, last modified June 10, 2016, https://youtu.be/7bFdrV3nJA8)) Lookdown was originally created by Trine Lise Lindahl and Koljonen in conversation earlier this year as a suggested technique for exiting a scene or conversation((Johanna Koljonen, “Toolkit: Let’s Name this Baby! (Bow-Out Mechanics),” Patreon, last modified May 30, 2016. https://participationsafety.wordpress.com/2016/05/30/toolkit-lets-name-this-baby-bow-out-mechanics/)) without causing as much disruption as calling for Cut, Break/Brake, or Largo. We called this simple gesture the “Lookdown” and it consists of placing one’s hand on one’s forehead, as if shading one’s eyes from the sun, looking down, and then stepping back and walking away. No questions asked, no explanation needed or demanded and no consequences given.((Matthew Webb notes that a similar gesture, exiting a scene by putting the hand on the back of the head and lowering one’s gaze, is used at his larp, Planetfall. However, Planetfall has in place an adjudication system so that if one player feels another player is abusing the bow-out mechanic to avoid in-game consequences, they can see a Gamemaster who will make a ruling and narrate a consequence.))
Lookdown Procedure:
Player 1 shields their eyes and walks away.
Player 2 (and all other players) continue play as usual.
We decided to implement Lookdown as a useful calibration and self-care tool for when someone realizes that a topic or scene isn’t going in a direction they want, is something they aren’t interested in playing, or is something that they may find triggering or troublesome. When using the Lookdown, a player isn’t signalling that they need or require assistance, or is any distress. They are simply making a choice to opt-out of the scene at the moment for whatever in- or off-game reason. No explanation will be asked or given, and all other players must accept their departure. Players were instructed, “If you see someone holding their hand over their eyes, ignore them.” This technique was practiced in pre-game workshops.
Johanna Koljonen patterns an early version the Lookdown method on her blog, Participation Safety. https://participationsafety.wordpress.com
Leaving a scene can be extremely difficult for many larpers, especially those from marginalized groups. It can be awkward at best, and draw unwanted attention to one’s self or character. It can be an action that one feels they have to explain or defend. Leaving a scene can draw comments or outrage from other players and, as a result, many players choose to stay in situations where they do not feel comfortable. By using the Lookdown, players can gracefully exit, no questions asked, and choose what they wish to play. This mechanic could be used even in situations where there was an in-game imbalance of power between the player using Lookdown and the other players, such as in class. A professor could not penalize a student for exiting class via the Lookdown mechanic. No in-game or off-game consequences of any sort were possible for using the technique. As a result, many players told us that they felt more comfortable being able to choose what scenes they wanted to experience.
Another use of the Lookdown mechanic was players using it to arrive into scenes rather than exit them, including arriving late to class. Many players told us they had anxiety over being late to an event, scene, or even a conversation. They were afraid of being called out, having to explain themselves in front of the group, or losing House Points. This anxiety was so great that some skipped classes and/or stayed in their dorm rooms out-of-character if they were late, even though they really wanted to go. By using the Lookdown mechanic, a player could arrive to class and the response was the same “no questions asked” as if they had just been there the whole time. Alternately, players could opt-in to roleplay where they could make a scene of being late to class or a meeting (no Lookdown hand). By using the mechanic, they could slip in and choose the role-play they wanted.
Because this larp operated on the principle of Opt-In with Consent, players needed to negotiate outcomes, desires, and boundaries before entering physical role-play. Negotiation was also required for the results of certain types of magic, such as healing.
The above video shows the techniques of “off-game” signaling and negotiating so that both players know how to play a scene requiring healing. As demonstrated, without negotiation, the approaching player may have healed the person too quickly when the receiver wanted to role-play being in pain, or otherwise might have ended a scene or surprised the player with an unwanted result.
Players were coached that when dealing with matters of sexuality, violence, aggression, or combat, they should use the “off-game” cues, take a step back, and discuss what they wanted and were comfortable playing. Only when both parties had agreed on boundaries and outcomes should play resume. If no physical touch was discussed as permissible, then it was not to occur.
Members of House Laveau in NWM4. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
Due to the length of the workshops, we did not provide a specific process for negotiating, although we did give an example negotiation for asking someone to the dance in the Player’s Guide. This process got more specific as the four runs of NWM progressed and we realized that players required a detailed process for negotiation of consent and boundaries. The main issue was that their negotiations were not specific enough. As a hypothetical example, a player might ask, “Are you okay with physical role-play?” and the other player, imagining pushing and shoving perhaps, states “yes.” The first character proceeds to slap the second character in the face, which the second player is not okay experiencing. So, while we found that players were negotiating, without coaching, modeling, and practice of a specific negotiation process, there was opportunity for miscommunication between the parties. These issues were then generally resolved using the other care mechanics, such as OK Check-In. However, by improving the specific nature of the negotiations through workshopping, this mechanic can be improved in future runs. We would like to extend the pre-game workshops by one or two hours primarily for this reason.
7. Pronoun Choice, Placement, and Correction
Sara Williamson (here as a Dubois student) and Liz Gorinsky (here as a revived House Ghost) in NWM4, who helped develop the pronoun workshop. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
Pronouns matter. A player who is continually misgendered experiences immersion breaks in their role-play at best and triggered gender dysphoria at worst. Sometimes, a player portrays a character with a different pronoun than they use as a player for a variety of reasons. Assuming pronouns for a player or a character can lead to trouble. To avoid pronoun assumption, the triggering effects of misgendering, and the sometimes troublesome process of correcting a misused pronoun, NWM used an intertwined system of four techniques:
All characters were written in the second person with a single initial for the first name and no gender markers indicated. Players could play any character as any gender they chose and pick their own name.
We made “they” the default pronoun of the magical world, which was used unless told differently.
All players had player nametags and character nametags, both with player-chosen pronouns clearly displayed under the name, in a large enough font to be seen at a conversational distance.
A pronoun correction mechanic was modeled and practiced in the workshops, for when mistakes happen.
Players were asked to assume that other players had the best intentions and were attempting to use the correct pronouns — as was the in-game and off-game norm — and to use those instances to demonstrate a quick, non-judgmental pronoun correction. When someone uses an incorrect pronoun in reference to you or your character, players were taught, “If you make a mistake, and use the wrong pronouns in spite of your good intentions, the best response is to acknowledge the mistake, correct, and continue the conversation.” This technique was used for both in-game and off-game interactions and was developed in consultation with Liz Gorinsky and Sara Williamson, co-authors of the larp See Me Now, which explores queer identities.
Pronoun Correction Procedure:
The British sign language P. Photo from British-sign.co.uk.
Player 1 accidentally uses the incorrect pronoun to refer to someone.
Player 2 says the word “Pronouns” and shows the P hand signal, derived from the British sign language symbol for the letter P. If the player does not have both hands available, they can just use the verbal cue “Pronouns.”
Player 2 follows the verbal cue and hand signal with the correct pronoun for Player 1 to use.
Player 1 says “Thank you” for the reminder. Play or conversation resumes
8. Opting-out of Romantic Play Using a Sticker on the Nametag
By the fourth run of NWM, we realized there were some players there for whom any flirtatious or romantic interactions created player stress, and who preferred not to play on those themes at all. This feeling was for a variety of reasons, including not wanting to have those interactions so they could focus on other plots and themes. We gave players the opportunity to place a 0.5” (13 mm) colored circle sticker on their nametag, which indicated “I am not interested in romantic or sexual interactions.” Players wearing that sticker were not be approached for any role-play that dealt with romance or sexuality. The stickers functioned as a full opt-out of that type of play by the player and were easily visible to others from a distance. Players could point to the sticker as a reminder if mistakes occurred. We heard from some asexual and aromantic players that this practice was particularly inclusive and normalized their identities. However, many players used the sticker to opt-out of romance play, not just those identifying as asexual or aromantic. By having the sticker, a player not interested in romance or sex was spared having to repeatedly use the other mechanics in this system.
Students take dance lessons with the Chancellor. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
The Counselors: Metagame Characters Responsible for Participant Care
Because we knew the majority of our players were either first-time larpers or larpers who had not played in the Nordic-style, we anticipated that players would need access to organizers who could assist them with their logistical, fictional, physical and emotional needs. With 160 players spread out over a 320-acre campus, we recognised that, even without deliberately creating challenging content, we’d have a statistically certain number of players who would have need of some kind of emotional support. In addition, since the result of several of the mechanics listed above was to walk the other player to a counselor, to the Sanctuary space, or to the off-game room, we needed to create additional points of interaction for when the off-game room was a 30-minute walk away, unnavigable for some players even in their best situation.
In anticipation of these needs, two characters were written into the game to serve as in-game liaisons for players. Written as NPCs at the faculty level, the counselors had free range of any classroom or meeting, and maintained a visible presence throughout the game as people characters could approach if they needed to talk. They functioned in-game as a school and career counselor, roles that make sense in a college environment. In-game, a character could speak with a counselor about their career, classes, a conflict with another character, worry about the dance, or any other life decision. At any moment in the conversation, counselors could switch to off-game conversation if the player required it. Sometimes players visiting the counselor needed to role-play into admitting needing off-game care, so this meta-function eased their transition. It also gave a plausible diegetic reason for being upset or leaving a scene by simply saying “I need to see the counselor.” Exiting a scene that is no longer fun or is making one uncomfortable can be hard to do; having an in-game reason to do so that was accepted by all characters, no matter their in-game power, was a helpful resource.
The Divination professor (left) helps solve a time magic mystery with the two counselors (Greene and Bowman) in NWM4. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
Conclusion
While design visions, larp community guidelines, harassment policies, and codes of conduct help establish norms, they do not help players know how to enact the behaviors required to meet those visions, policies, and norms. Creating mechanics to break down expected behaviors into discrete steps, modeling them, practicing them, and then enforcing them with consequences if they are not used is required to bring a vision of an ethos and norms to life through interactions and play.
While these techniques and mechanics are neither perfect nor portable to all games, the aggregate toolkit does represent a step forward for systematic design of safety, calibration, and culture in larps. The careful attention to naming, modeling, teaching, practicing, and enforcing behaviors that create the norms that we wished to create for in-game and off-game interactions was a deliberate design choice. Many of these techniques formed the basis of the workshops and safety and calibration techniques we helped design for the End of the Line run at the Grand Masquerade in New Orleans, a White Wolf Vampire: the Masquerade Nordic-style larp organized by Bjarke Pedersen, Juhana Pettersson, and Johanna Koljonen with help from Sarah Lynne Bowman and Harrison Greene. We have heard from other players and designers that they are using some of these mechanics — such as the “OK Check-in” — in their larps, and we have heard from some NWM players that they are using some of these same techniques in their everyday life relationships and jobs.
Role-playing requires taking risks. Safety and calibration techniques create a measure of assurance, empathy, and trust among players that helps them feel able to take the risks they must to portray a character, feel emotions, and engage with others. Many players remarked that they felt more safe and comfortable with the fellow players of NWM — who they had not known previously — than they do in everyday interactions. Their reasoning is that they knew fellow players would support their boundaries and choices. Others told us they felt more cared from these erstwhile strangers than they do in familial and friend interactions in their everyday life. Having someone check-in to be sure you’re doing OK is powerful. Negotiating consent is powerful. Being able to make choices about one’s own needs without receiving retaliation is powerful. While this may not be the everyday world our participants’ experience, it is the “new world” we wish to create. For the duration of the larp at the very least, players were transported into this new world of magic, not just with their wands and spells, but also because of the way they cared for themselves and others using these safety and calibration mechanics.
Casa Calisaylá celebrates winning the House Cup in NWM3. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
Producers: Maury Brown and Ben Morrow, Learn Larp LLC.
Make-up Lead: Katherine Kira “Tall Kat” McConnell. Prosthetics by Mark Mensch
Costuming Lead: Derek Herrera.
Stitchers: Jenny Underwood, Robin Jendryaszek, Jennifer WinterRose, Amber Feldman, Summer Donovan, Michele Mountain, Nancy Calvert-Warren, Jennifer Klettke, Kristen Moutry, Caryn Johnson, Datura Matel
Music: Original songs (lyrics and music) by Austin Nuckols (Maison DuBois, Lakay Laveau, Casa Calisaylá and House Croatan) and Leah K. Blue (Dan Obeah), lyrics to New World Magischola Anthem by Maury Brown and Ben Morrow, music by Austin Nuckols. Other music and sound by Evan Torner and Austin Shepherd
Props: Mike Young, Carrie Matteoli, Indiana Thomas, Summer Donovan, Kevin Donovan, Gordon Olmstead-Dean, Jason Morningstar, Matt Taylor, Molly Ellen Miller, Michael Boyd, Moira Parham, Martin John Manco, Ken Brown, Dale, Laura Young, Harry Lewis, Mark Daniels, Michael Pucci, Terry Smith of Stagecoach Theater Productions, Yvonne and Dirk Parham, Jen Wong, Caryn Johnson, Jess Pestlin, Orli Nativ, Kaitlin Smith, The Center for the Arts of Greater Manassas at the Candy Factory, Melissa Danielle Penner, Jess Sole, Liselle Awwal, Nathan Love.
Helpers and advisors: Anders Berner, Claus Raasted, Christopher Sandberg, Mike Pohjola, Bjarke Pedersen, Johanna Koljonen, Anne Serup Grove, Mikolaj Wicher, Jamie MacDonald, Eevi Korhonen, Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, Staffan Rosenberg, Anna Westerling, Michael Pucci, Ashley Zdeb, Emily Care Boss, Daniel Hocutt, Charles Bo Nielsen, Joe Ennis, Kristin Bezio, Rob Balder, Kat Jones, Sarah Lynne Bowman, Harrison Greene.
Assistance with writing, editing, graphic design, music, art: Frank Beres, Claus Raasted, Richard Wetzel, Bethy Winkopp, Oriana Almquist, Craig Anderson, Zach Shaffer, Erica Schoonmaker, Madeleine Wodjak, Toivo Voll, Marie DelRio, Mike Young, Laura Young, Anna Yardney, Lee Parmenter, Stephanie Simmons, Nancy Calvert-Warren, Jessica Acker, Jason Woodland, Jason Arne, Harrison Greene, Sarah Lynne Bowman, Kristi Kalis, Quinn Milton, Anna Kovatcheva, Browning Porter, Orli Nativ, Rhiannon Chiacchiaro, Miranda Chadbourne, Lars Bundvad, Ffion Evans, David Horsh, Dani Castillo, Frank Caffran Castillo, Dayna Lanza, Sarah Brand, Tara Clapper, Suzy Pop, David Neubauer, Chris Bergstresser, Jason Morningstar, Evan Torner, Peter Woodworth, Peter Svensson, Daniel Abraham, Harry Lewis, Alexis Moisand, Alissa Erin Murray, Jennifer Klettke, Kathryn Sarah, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Austin Nuckols, Leah Blue, Joelle Scarnati, Dan Luxenberg, Chad Brinkley, David Clements, Niels Ull Harremoës, Adria Kyne, Emily Heflin.
Production and logistics: Austin Shepherd, Claus Raasted, Olivia Anderson, Kristin Bezio, Shayna Alley, Mike Young, Zach Shaffer, Dayna Lanza, Derek Herrera, Kristin Moutrey, Jenny Underwood, Jennifer WinterRose, Caryn Johnson, Amber Feldman, Michele Mountain, Summer Donovan, Robin Jendryaszek, Jennifer Klettke, Datura Metel, Amanda Schoen, Mark Mensch, Katherine McConnell, Chris Bergstresser, Christopher Amherst, Holly Butterfield, Uriah Brown, Kyle Lian, Evan Torner, Jeff Moxley, Ashley Zdeb, Thomas Haynes, Mikolaj Wicher, Charles Bo Nielsen, Jamie Snetsinger, Claire Wilshire, David Donaldson, Brandy Dilworth and the staff of the University of Richmond Summer Conference Services office.
The theme of alternate sexuality, identity, and freedom juxtaposed with the tragedy of death permeates Just a Little Lovin’. Photo by Elina Andersson. CC-BY-NC.
Just a Little Lovin’ is commonly touted as one of the best Nordic larps ever designed by those who have played it. Originally written in 2011 by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo, the larp explores the lives of people in alternative sexual and spiritual subcultures during the span of 1982-1984 in New York who attend the same 4th of July party each year. As the larp progresses, the AIDS crisis increasingly sweeps through their community, affecting each member directly or indirectly. The result is a cathartic explosion of emotions that leave a lasting impact on the majority of the players.
This article will discuss some of these rhetorical threads surrounding the design of Just a Little Lovin’. Then, I will emphasize the importance of the ritual spaces and structures within the larp, which work to enhance communal connection in- and out-of-game and help produce these strong moments of catharsis.
Player Discourse Surrounding Just a Little Lovin’
Oh no, not I! I will survive!
Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive!
I’ve got all my life to live.
I’ve got all my love to give.
And I’ll survive! I will survive!
Gloria Gaynor, I Will Survive Most characters came together each year in a ritualized fashion for the drag/variety show. Here, they enjoy a performance by the rock band Urban Renaissance. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
In play reports, participants mention several powerful elements of the design. The characters have realistic motivations and relationship dynamics. The intersecting themes of desire, love, friendship, and fear of death interweave beautifully throughout the larp to provide a roller coaster of emotions for the players. The mechanics for sex and death are thoughtfully implemented, providing a meaningful, relatively safe framework in which to experience these powerful moments. The larp is organized into three Acts, with careful workshopping and debriefing exercises framing each phase. These breaks allow players opportunities to co-create the experience with one another through negotiation and agreement. While the larp does deal with the tragedy of disease impacting a tightly knit community of creative, experimental, open-minded people, the emphasis of the larp is not to dwell in tragedy, but rather to undergo a strengthening of that community through shared experience.
A lesbian contingent with their dutch boy. Participants emphasize an intensified sense of community after the larp in their play accounts. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
I have never had my mind opened more by a larp, nor felt more bonded to a group of co-players – including those who I didn’t actually interact with during play. And, importantly, this is not because we came through a terrible experience together: it wasn’t like that at all. It’s because we came through an amazing and uplifting and life-affirming and worldview-changing experience together.
Similar accounts exist in articles by other former players:
I’ve got this sense that I’ve stolen a true glimpse of the past, or at least a past that could have been. We’ve created something real, and beautiful, and momentous. I don’t know how to handle that. It’s immense pride and I already feel nostalgic for it. In the most literal sense — I’m starting to feel the pangs of loss that are nostalgia. It’s exactly the right emotion I need to be feeling right now. Beauty, loss, sorrow, pride, admiration, longing, pining for something.
Just a Little Lovin’ was full of life and color. Death was real, but we needed to make the most of whatever time we had left, in order to be together. The very structure of the game was oriented towards living, and even suffering was just another way to interact with others, to deepen a character, and add even more meaning to his or her life. Death was not a beautiful release; it was just the end.
Eden Gallanter, The Bridge Between Love and Death, Cheimonette, July 6, 2015 Although death permeated the lives of the characters in the game, the party went on even through Act III as a celebration of existence and love. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Picture, if you will, a group of people discussing the death of one of their characters, which is directly brought about by the nature and behaviour of another in the scene, talking about what kind of impressions they want to construct in this scene. Then they play the scene, to spec, with screaming, tears, loathing, self-hatred, disgust, horror, everything. Then one raises their head and calmly says ‘thank you,’ and, with tear tracks still drying and breath still shaking, they dissect the emotions that each other’s play brought about, praising the particular moves, words, and timing that brought the greatest effect in their character’s response to the other characters. I still can’t decide if its madness, emotional vampirism, or the most awesome thing I have ever participated in.
JaLL is without a doubt the most intense and [thoroughly] designed game I have ]ever played. I understand now why some call it the best larp in the world. There [are] other as well-designed games out there, but it’s the mix of brilliant design with a theme and especially the handling of the theme that creates just a more intense experience.Simon James Pettitt, Just a Little Lovin’: Intro Post, Pettitt.dk, July 7, 2015
Documentation book for the 2013 Danish run filled with player and organizer accounts.
Ultimately, much of the discourse surrounding the larp focuses upon the intense connections the experience creates between participants, the enhanced understanding of the struggles of countercultural movements during the period, and increased awareness about the AIDS crisis. From a design perspective, Just a Little Lovin’ is also touted as successful due to its inclusion of metatechniques from the freeform and blackbox scenes and its careful framing with regard to workshops, negotiation, de-roleing, and debriefing.
One war veteran comforts another during a PTSD episode. The theme of death was woven into the larp in multiple ways: from AIDS to cancer to war. Photo by Elina Andersson. CC-BY-NC.
My examination of Just a Little Lovin’ will discuss this framing in more detail, emphasizing the multi-layered, ritualized nature of the larp design. The careful construction and use of ritual space facilitates progressively deeper and more intense levels of play. In this analysis, I will discuss ritual in terms of both a) atmospheric rituals within the larp transpiring in specifically established spaces, and b) the overarching game framework.
My intent in sharing these accounts is not to support the claim that this larp is the “best designed in the world,” but rather to emphasize that careful inclusion of heavily ritualized processes in larp design can guide players to deeper levels of connection and catharsis.
All Larp is Ritual
Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin.
The entertainment for this evening is not new.
You’ve seen this entertainment through and through.
You have seen your birth, your life, your death.
You may recall all the rest.
Did you have a good world when you died?
Enough to base a movie on?
Jim Morrison, The Movie
According to scholars Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner,((Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas: Form and Attributes of Rites of Passage,” Excerpt from The Ritual Process (London, UK: Aldine, 1969). http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Turner.htm)) ritual involves three stages: a departure from the mundane world with thorough separation, an entrance into an in-between state called liminality, and a return to the mundane world with an incorporation of the liminal experiences.
Separation: During the separation stage, the group prepares to shed their everyday roles and enter into new ones for the purpose of the ritual. The separation phase can include practicing the ritual, costuming, makeup, masks, establishing ritual space, or other activities intended to facilitate the transition.
Liminality: Participants enter their temporary social roles and play parts in a performance of some sort, either actively or passively. They cross over a “threshold” – or limen – into another state of being, which often transpires in a physical location specifically demarcated for the ritual. All participants agree to take part in this temporary, “betwixt and between” state, collectively agreeing to these new terms of their social reality. Turner refers to the liminal state as a “moment in and out of time”: a paradoxical, transitional experience.((Turner would distinguish play activities like larp as “liminoid” rather than “liminal” as they arise from leisure cultures, but this distinction is beyond the scope of this current discussion. For more information, see Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” Rice University Studies 60.3 (1974): 53-92.))
Incorporation: Participants then return to their previous social roles, leaving the ritual space behind. However, they incorporate the liminal experiences into their own lives to greater and lesser degrees. For example, if a community holds a rite of passage to mark a marriage, the couple leaves the wedding with a new social status acknowledged by all present. After leisure ritual activities – called “liminoid” moments — the individual can determine how the experience will impact their involvement in the community and their development of self.(( Turner, ibid.))
Turner believed that rituals create communitas: a greater feeling of communal connection between participants. Additionally, rituals are often guided by a shaman figure: some sort of guide or facilitator of the process who helps establish the atmosphere, tone, and components of the ritual.
Larp designer and co-organizer Tor Kjetil Edland gets everyone’s attention during pre-game workshopping. Organizers often serve the role of guide in facilitating the ritual activity of larp. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Several scholars have emphasized the ritual nature of larp itself.((For a few examples, see Christopher I. Lehrich, “Ritual Discourse in Role-playing Games,” last modified October 1, 2005, The Forge, http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html; J. Tuomas Harviainen, “Information, Immersion, Identity: The Interplay of Multiple Selves During Live-Action Role-Play,” Journal of Interactive Drama 1, no. 2 (October 2006): 11; Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Functions of Role-playing Games, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010, pp. 15, 48-53; J. Tuomas Harviainen and Andreas Lieberoth,”The Similarity of Social Information Processes in Games and Rituals: Magical Interfaces,” Simulation & Gaming (April 10, 2011): 528-549; Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Returning to the Real World: Debriefing After Role-playing Games,” Nordiclarp.org, December 8, 2014, http://nordiclarp.org/2014/12/08/debrief-returning-to-the-real-world/)) While not religious as many rituals are, secular ritual rites do exist in society. Generally speaking, larp includes the shedding of social roles, donning of new identities, performance of these identities in a temporary space guided by an organizer, and a return to the previous self, often with some sort of change individually and socially. Players often report a greater sense of community as the result of these experiences, as evidenced by several of the quotes above.
Therefore, Just a Little Lovin’ is not unique in its ability to create these bonds, as all larp has the potential to do so. What I believe the larp excels at doing is creating well-timed, nearly continuous ritual activities that have the potential to personally transform both the player and the character. Due to the personal nature of the larp’s content and its emphasis on sexuality, intimacy, vulnerability, and fear of death, the play offers participants the opportunity to reflect upon these aspects within themselves.
The larp afforded players the opportunity to shed old social roles, including sexual preference and identity, and explore intimacy in a relatively safe framework. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Each of the three Acts is framed by standard rituals common to the experience of most Americans to greater and lesser degrees: 1) the raising of the American flag while singing the National Anthem in the beginning and 2) a funeral at the end. Between these two poles of ritual experience, several smaller rituals are timed at regular intervals to offer potent, transformative experiences for characters and, by proxy, their players. On each side of these Acts, out-of-character ritual activities of workshopping, debriefing, and negotiating provide an even more structured frame. In this regard, Just a Little Lovin’ can be seen as producing rituals within rituals within rituals for the players. Leaving mundane life to go to a camp for five days with a group of people is a shift in perspective in and of itself, which is then followed by larping, and then followed by ritual activities within the larp.
Ritual Spaces and Subcultures in the Larp
Hey, babe. Take a walk on the wild side
Lou Reed, Walk on the Wild Side
The structure of the character relations in Just a Little Lovin’ involves each character belonging to one or more subcultures that were representative of the alternative scenes of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in America. These subcultures include: rich gay men; the gay leather/fetish scene; drag performers; lesbian clubs; literary circles; the night club scene as exemplified by Studio 54; alternative spirituality seekers; tantra practitioners; members of a polyfidelity commune; performance artists; swingers; peace activists; a group of cancer survivors; the Radical Faeries masculinity movement; and AIDS activists. Effectively, each character had multiple connections within some of these subcultures, including their core group of friends, their primary social circle, and their extended connections within their party scene.
Map of the character core groups and subcultural associations in Act 2. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
These subcultures often had ritualized activities associated with them, as outlined in detail below. I played Joani, one of the leaders of the Spirituals, which meant that my in-game husband Kohana (Kevin Burns), best friend Kim (Caroline Christiane Kasten Koren), and I were responsible for running some of these rituals ourselves. Joani and Kohana ran the Saratoga Pact of friendship for the cancer survivors in a copse of trees in the woods; Kohana and Kim ran the Green Drink ritual of personal transformation around the bonfire at midnight; Joani ran tantra workshops in a special room complete with lava lamps, dark lighting, and pallets; and Kohana ran all-male drum circles, also around the bonfire. Other subcultures had similar ritual spaces, such as the stage, the dance floor, and the “dark room.”
Joani, Kohana, and Kim made up the Heart of Saratoga core group, running rituals for the cancer survivors and the larger gathering as a whole. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
These spaces were established carefully as important parts of the scenography and were not in any way incidental to the setting. They offered Temporary Autonomous Zones for the Temporary Autonomous Identities of the characters: spaces where the rules of reality could function differently and where both characters and players could explore new facets of themselves.((Mike Pohjola, “Autonomous Identities: Immersion as a Tool for Exploring, Empowering, and Emancipating Identities,” in Beyond Role and Play, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros (Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry, 2004), 84-85; Saitta, ibid.))
This design created the possibility for overlap and exposure to new experiences. Rather than creating little pockets of exclusion, the social space was designed so that the environments occupied by members of these groups were in close physical and social proximity to one another. For example, the tantra room where my character ran workshops was physically next to the “dark room,” where cruising, BDSM, and lesbian activities transpired. Sounds from that room emanated into our space and some participants wandered between both at various times.
Members of the Saratoga Pact of cancer survivors and their loved ones head to the woods for their yearly ritual of recommitment. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
This design encouraged “regular” attendees of each subcultural space to experiment with new ones, especially when all characters were expected to participate in group rituals such as the Green Drink ceremony, which might normally not interest some individuals. As an example, my character helped run the Saratoga Pact ritual, an annual ceremony in which cancer survivors renewed their vow to remain true to themselves, live life to its fullest, and always support one another. As the years went on, we inducted new members into the Saratoga Pact based upon their connections with previous survivors: lovers, close friends, family members, etc. Therefore, other characters were exposed to a small part of the survivor experience, just as many from the Pact were exposed to the new worlds of drag queens, BDSM, performance art, etc.
In another example, due to my off-game interest in drag and desire to help with the show, my character spent a good deal of time helping with makeup in the backstage area. This experience gave her access to a new subcultural realm and mode of artistic expression, as well as deeper connections with that social group in the game. The design of the physical and social space facilitated these sorts of crossovers.
Ritual in the Structure of the Larp Design
You can dance, you can jive
Having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that scene
Digging the Dancing Queen
ABBA, Dancing Queen
Just a Little Lovin’ takes place over the span of three Acts, each focusing upon a central theme: Act I is Desire, Act II is the Fear of Death, and Act III is Friendship. The total game time is approximately five days. 5pm until 12pm the next day is spent in-character during the Act, framed by workshopping before and debriefing after. Before each Act, players negotiate with their groups about how best to proceed, followed by 1-2 hours of downtime. The whole experience is followed by de-roleing and debriefing, with a much-needed afterparty in the evening after Act III, where players can reconnect with their out-of-game selves, as well as process their experiences and connect with others.
Off-game negotiation within core groups in between Acts helps direct play for the next phase. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Game time itself is heavily structured with back-to-back in-game rituals, which I detail below. Players are empowered to design and run many of these rituals themselves, with the exception of the National Anthem, the Lottery of Death, and the funerals, which are run by the organizers. The 2015 run of the game had roughly the following structure, with some variation from Act to Act of non-essential rituals like tantra, BDSM, and drum circles:
Kohana during the raising of the flag, National Anthem, and subsequent speech. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Song: The organizers play the “Just a Little Lovin’” song by Dusty Springfield while characters are frozen. This song ritually starts and ends the entire larp.
Entrance to Mr. T’s party: The party is itself a ritualized escape from the mundane world, as people can feel free to explore new identities. For example, a professor by day can engage in gay BDSM scenes at night.
National Anthem: The raising of the American flag on the porch, accompanied by the singing of the American National Anthem.
Speeches: T gives a welcome speech. Kohana gives a speech to honor the Saratoga Pact and summons members to that ceremony.
Saratoga Pact: Joani and Kohana run the Saratoga Pact ceremony for the cancer survivors in the woods away from the main party. When I ran this ritual, I had us recite the words of the pact in call-and-response format. Then, I asked each of those gathered to state their intentions for the year, evaluate past intentions, and induct new members. I hoped the intention part of the ritual would serve as a form of steering ((Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta, “The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together,” in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted (Copenhagen, Denmark: Rollespilsakademiet, 2014), 106-177.)), where player-characters could focus their goals for each day of play in a directed manner.
The Games (optional): The Indigo House members organized some fun physical game activities in the field during Act II.
Eating together was an important ritual activity as members from different social circles had the chance to become acquainted. During the breakfast of Act III, an impromptu gay wedding took place. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Dinner: Ritual of eating together. Mr. T usually gave a speech during dinner.
Tantra Workshops (optional): In the tantra room, I ran workshops in Acts I and III, primarily using techniques of guided mediation, eye gazing, and ars amandi.((Nudity and actual sex were forbidden at the larp, as was the consumption of real drugs or alcohol. The sex mechanics are described in the next section.))
Dark room (optional): BDSM scenes, lesbian hour, and cruising pick-ups. The dark room was intended for characters willing to have semi-anonymous sexual encounters. Lesbian hour was part of the structure of the larp in order to establish liminal space for those characters as well.
Drum circles (optional): In Acts II and III, Kohana/Kevin ran all-male drum circles for the Spirituals and Radical Faeries around the bonfire, with several other men attending as well.
Blackbox scenes (optional): Transpiring throughout the Acts, the blackbox was a liminal space within which players could negotiate and play out scenes from the past, the future, or fantasies. Two blackbox rooms were set aside for these purposes and did not “exist” in the normal game space. Our group used this space, for example, for Kohana to guide the Spirituals through a shamanic journey to meet their spirit animals — a scene that had transpired in the past.
DJ Tony, singer-songwriter Marylou, and Nate, the Queen of Manhattan during the drag/variety show. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Drag /variety show: Performance art, drag shows, singing, male stripping, poetry readings, anti-war protests, safe sex public service announcements, and rock band performances. Most of the characters attended or participated in this ritual during each Act.
Dance party (optional): Seduction on the dance floor, vogue-offs, circles where characters danced in the center, and general revelry transpired during this time.
Hookah smoking (optional): A “love nest” similar to a treehouse in the woods was set up with lights, pallets, and a hookah. Characters ritually smoked tobacco, laughed, and shared stories.
Green Drink Ceremony at midnight: Serves as an in-game ritual and a metatechnique. The characters consumed the Green Drink, which has unspecified contents in-game. This technique allowed players the chance to steer their characters toward explosions of building conflict or redirect them into new perspectives. Brilliant in replicating the transformative moments of hallucinogens that many people experience, while also offering the player an opportunity to take the reins of the character in their desired direction.
Lighting the paper balloons to commemorate the fallen. Photo by Elina Andersson. CC-BY-NC.
Fireworks and paper balloon ceremony: Each night after the green drink, fireworks were lit. In Act II and Act III, paper balloons were lit in memory of those who passed that year. The balloons rose into the air, then the lights winked out just over the horizon.
Aerobics (optional): In at least one Act, the Amazons, a lesbian-run aerobics club, led a workout session for interested parties.
Breakfast: Ritual of eating together. During Act III, two gay characters had an impromptu, “unlawful” wedding during breakfast to celebrate being alive and in love. Another ritual within a ritual. This moment later proved poignant for the players; Marriage Equality was finally ruled legal by the Supreme Court the next day in the U.S., over thirty years later in real time.
Song Between Life and Death: In the diner, a song was played to indicate the space between life and death, as well as the passage of time. All players were expected to remain quiet during the song, though they could hold hands or hug.
The Lottery of Death: Angels arrived to announce the Lottery of Death. Characters had to place the amount of lottery tickets in the hat equal to the risk level of their sexual activity in the last year. Names were drawn and those characters were called away.
Death was personified in the larp, guiding the characters to the Funeral and delivering the eulogy for those who passed. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Death arrives personified as a woman: Characters were led outside and instructed to collect flowers for the funeral. Chopin’s “Funeral March” was played in the background.
Death marches the group to the funeral space: Individuals who survived death that year were released to their loved ones.
Funeral: The group approached the coffins, where the characters who died lay. Death read the second chorus of the National Anthem like a eulogy, which framed the end of the Act.
Little downtime existed between the non-optional scheduled events, but characters had plenty of time for seduction, explosive arguments, breakups, drug overdoses, or laughing around the hookah. The tight schedule ensured that usually no more than 1-2 hours passed where no significant group event was transpiring. This structure afforded players consistent involvement with the larp on some level.
Additionally, these in-game spaces sometimes changed meaning or significance over the course of the larp. Spaces where casual sex once occurred such as the dark room were often eerily empty in later Acts as the fear of death became a palpable mood. Rituals also changed; the drag/variety show became much darker and sadder as the Acts progressed. Still, having the primary rituals and spaces remain intact added a sense of consistency for a community plagued by fear and grief.
Off-game Ritualized Structures
Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick.
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.
Let’s play a love game, play a love game.
Do you want love or you want fame?
Are you in the game? Dans le love game?
Lady Gaga, Love Game
Another important ritualized structure within the larp involved the sex mechanics. In everyday life, sexual encounters are sometimes considered liminal acts in their own right. In larps, sex scenes are approached in multiple ways: not pursued at all, played literally, or enacted using representational techniques such as backrubs, ars amandi, rock-paper-scissors, or other “resolution” mechanics.
In Just a Little Lovin‘, sex scenes also followed a ritual structure. One player would offer a pink feather to another, which represented an invitation to a sex scene. The other could choose to accept or deny the feather. Denying the feather did not represent an actual in-game rejection, but rather out-of-game consent to play a scene. Players would then go off-game and negotiate the boundaries of the scene, comfort with kissing/touching, and the events that would occur. Groping of breasts or genitals was not permitted. Players had to remain clothed and use a wooden phallus as a representational object to indicate sexual touch regardless of whether the sex was gay, lesbian, queer, or heteronormative. When the negotiated scene was over, characters stood side-by-side and used the Monologue metatechnique, which allowed them to externalize their character’s thoughts to the other player. Altogether, these metatechniques ritualized the beginning, middle, and end of each sex scene in a way that allowed for intensity, while maintaining a sense of safety and player distance.
Members of the Indigo House, a polyfidelity commune in which all members were in an exclusive, group relationship. Photo by Sarah Lynne Bowman. CC-BY-NC.
Players could also call “cut” or “brake” in any scene. They could move their bodies to subtly indicate discomfort with kissing or touching in a non-verbal way that did not break the scene, a maneuver that was termed Deflection. Again, these safety mechanisms did not affect the fiction of the larp, but provided a greater sense of comfort for many of the participants engaging in intimate encounters.
Overall, extensive workshopping in large and small groups served as the separation phase for the main ritual of the larp, as did costuming. For the incorporation phase, the organizers ran structured debriefs that lasted around 1-2 hours in groups of approximately ten people. After Act III, we de-roled by placing a piece of our character’s costuming in the center of a large circle, then wrote letters to our characters as ourselves. We were assigned a de-roleing buddy, to whom we read the letters. We were expected to exchange contact information and check in with our buddy in two weeks after the larp. These processes aided in both the return to the self and in reconciling the relationship between the self and the character. The organizers then invited guest speakers to discuss their experiences with HIV activism and with cancer, which served as a way to contextualize the themes we had just larped with real world experiences and facts.
Post-game connection between participants through the playing of music and drums, which were central ritualized activities during the larp.
As mentioned earlier, the afterparty was another crucial part of this larp, allowing players time to decompress, distance, and discuss events with other participants. Additionally, each year at the Nordic larp conference Knudepunkt, organizers host an hour-long Just a Little Lovin’ dance party, which many players attend in their costumes from the larp. Social media sites like Facebook also provide outlets for people to discuss their experiences, organize reunions, and share information about HIV and other relevant topics.
Summary
The game content of Just a Little Lovin’ on its own is powerful, exploring themes of sex, love, death, and friendship. Adding ritual elements to the larp works to draw players even deeper into the experience. For example, many participants can no longer hear the songs built into the larp design without a flood of memories and powerful emotions returning to them. Even if the character rejects the content of one of the rituals in-game, thinking it “weird” or “uninteresting,” these events offer the opportunity for the character to react to in-game stimuli, which can draw them deeper into immersion. Additionally, the repetition of these in-game rituals in every Act with changes in the fiction each time can create new meaning: a sense of irony, feelings of grief, a sense of stability in an uncertain world.
All larps can include these ritualistic techniques and many larps have similar spaces set aside. Some fantasy and post-apocalyptic larps, for example, have elaborate religions built into the game, complete with rituals, sacred spaces, and mythology. Other Nordic larps such as KoiKoi and Totem have included extensive rituals as well, which are worth examining with regard to their impact on the larp experience.
In the case of Just a Little Lovin’, however, the inclusion of vulnerability, sexuality, romantic intimacy, and death summons a particularly cathartic element for many of the players, especially since these elements become intertwined. Therefore, Just a Little Lovin’ demonstrates how ritual elements in larp design combined with complex interweaving social connections and a strong theme can provoke intense emotional reactions and feelings of communal connection in the players.
Cover photo: The rock band Urban Renaissance closed the drag/variety show every night with an energetic performance. Although Rain (right) died in Act II, the show went on in Act III. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
2013 and 2014 may be remembered as the conception of the Nordic blockbuster larp. Two ambitious larps – The Monitor Celestra in Sweden and College of Wizardry in Poland – succeeded in attracting an unprecedented level of international attention from media and players. They did so, in part, by advertising their inspiration from established fictional worlds with large fan followings (Battlestar Galactica and Harry Potter respectively), and by the choice of spectacular and eye-grabbing locations: a naval destroyer turned spaceship, and a castle made into a wizarding college.
Both productions were created by large teams: Celestra boasted a team of 85 people, while College of Wizardry had a team of 20 organizers and helpers, plus 33 NPC players. Although they were partially run by professional larpmakers, they were both nonprofit games((While none of the CoW organizers got paid for their efforts, some Celestra organizers got a small payment.)). A ticket to College of Wizardry cost €180 and a ticket to Celestra twice as much, but they both provided players with room and board, as well as some costuming, yielding good value for money. The 32-hour Celestra was run three times for a total of 389 players, with plans for remakes. College of Wizardry, capitalizing on the success of the initial 138-player run, sold out tickets to the 2015 re-run in minutes.
However, this is not a story about production. Neither massive production teams, enthusiastic players, nor spectacular locations are by themselves enough to create a successful larp((As many participants of the spectacular art festival / forgepttable larp Futuredrome (2002) are probably aware.)). This is a story about the design model the Celestra team happened upon in their effort to produce a large larp on a rushed schedule – a model that mixed recent innovations from experimental and progressive Nordic larps back into the tried-and-true approach we will call brute force design. This is a story of how that model was further refined at College of Wizardry, and about how these larps may even set the new norm in how to create action-packed fast-paced larp entertainment for mature audiences.
Brute Force Design
Before the progressive Nordic tradition of larp, there was brute force design. Nobody, of course, called it that – they called it “organizing larp”. We are proposing this name retroactively to describe an approach to designing larps that we often encountered in our own scenes the 90s, and still recognize in many of the larps produced in other traditions.
At a typical brute force larp, designers will use a plethora of techniques to drive conflict and mystery, such as:
Characters are split into groups with conflicting agendas (orcs want to kill elves)
There are subgroups inside groups (the elvish general wants to attack head-first to show bravery, while the king favors a stealthy approach)
There are power hierarchies (the general commands the officers who command the soldiers)
There are secrets, which players can discover, hoard, and trade (the general is a traitor plotting to kill the king)
There are puzzles that can be solved (assemble a torn-up treasure map)
Run-time game mastering is conducted by triggering events, introducing surprises, and inserting messenger characters (an NPC scout enters the tent of the king, informing that a horde of undead is approaching the camp)
The key characteristic of brute force isn’t that it uses any one of the techniques in this list, but that it uses a lot of them simultaneously.
Rather than the less is more approach common in the last decade of Nordic larp design, the brute designer will embrace quantity over quality and insist that, in fact, more is more. The results of that are unpredictable and chaotic, but seldom boring. Some of the conflicts and puzzles might be completely forgotten, while others command center-stage. The larp exemplified above might end in a battle of four armies, the discovery of an ancient treasure, an elvish civil war, or all of these at the same time.
In addition to the philosophy of more is more, a typical brute force design combines the diegetic social structure of colliding power hierarchies, and the dramatic structure built around discovery of hidden narrative, with the assumption that players will play to win.
Colliding Power Hierarchies
In a power hierarchy, the higher ranks have the right to command the lower ranks, and expect their orders – within limits – to be followed. Power hierarchies are overt: everyone knows who the boss is. Both these features distinguish power hierarchies from more subtle status hierarchies typically ignored by brute force designers, which describe who is socially dominant, who is allocated more attention, and whose voice is more respected.
Power hierarchies make for easy role-playing. Neither the givers nor receivers of orders should be in any doubt as to how to perform their character’s social role. They also come with clear affordances for dramatic tension: the potential for rebellion is implicit in every tyranny, and every weak leader invites intrigue for succession.
To make things more interesting, though, the brute designer will rarely settle for just one power hierarchy. Instead, games are built around the contested relationships of multiple groups. The simplest possible collision is between two hierarchies pursuing mutually exclusive goals: both the orcs and the elves are looking for the ring of power, but only one side can have it.
More complex collisions happen when characters are given allegiance to more than one hierarchy (i.e. both family and close friends), or when some allegiances are secret and aim to subvert the visible hierarchy.
These collisions serve to furnish the larp with conflict, but they also provide characters with dramatic choices: to serve country or ideology, friend or family.
Discovery of Hidden Narrative
Brute force designs will usually distribute clues and puzzle pieces throughout the game, but they aim to be more than simple treasure hunts. The clues spread through character backgrounds and introduced by NPCs will often combine to reveal back story, the diegetic myths of the past that preceded the larp, and that often impart important further clues on how to win it; for example, by revealing the true motivations of other characters. Buried items combine to form game-changing weapons, or devices that reveal even more of the backstory.
In this way, the larp designer tries to fit the players’ experiences into a larger diegetic narrative, one that began long before the larp, and which is meant to give the unfolding of the larp meaning in the context of that larger narrative.
Playing to Win
The structures of colliding hierarchies and puzzle – solving implicitly invite participants to play to win. After all, outside of roleplaying, puzzles are usually meant to be solved and games about conflict are usually played for the thrill and challenge of seeking victory.
When the brute designer can assume that players will try to reach their goals within a limited set of strategic choices, their behaviour becomes comparatively easy to give direction: the designer only needs to dictate goals and rewards for each individual or group, thereby defining what constitutes “winning” for them, and manage their resources and strategic alternatives.
Playing to win, which is the core of gamism (see Kim 1998), usually requires the players to compromise between roleplay and gameplay. A player may try to achieve a coherent and true-to-genre portrayal of their character, complete with personal flaws that would hinder the character in conflicts of the larp. But the moment the player faces a strategically important decision, those flaws and attitudes are often discarded in order to achieve victory.
Ups and Downs of Brute Force
Playing to win is the default expectation of most people approaching a game, while power hierarchies make for the clearest possible social roles and relationships, and the existence of secret hierarchies and solvable puzzles match Hollywood genres such as the murder mystery, the spy story, and the supernatural thriller. For this reason, brute force larps tend to be easy to play and require little explanation.
The brute force approach easily brings about a string of great scenes and powerful moments for the players.
It is also resilient against mistakes; a malfunctioning plot will be overtaken by a functional one. Finally, the sheer amount of content – more is more – usually leaves each player with plenty of options for what to do next.
The key word, though, is “usually”: the chaos of brute force design provides no guarantees – of anything. And implicit in the model are also a number of dangers.
First of all, players in a brute force larp easily get overrun by a plot train. Secretly digging for treasure in the forest? Too bad. The elves just attacked, and the forest is the battleground. Adrenaline-pumped and ready to fight the final battle?
A pity; the generals just declared a truce in order to to pursue the hunt for hidden treasure. The emergent narrative of one group can easily disable the play of another group; crisis and conflict in particular trump subtler themes.
With power hierarchies comes the risk of plot monopolization: the characters at the top, if they play their cards strategically and sensibly, tend to sniff out and take control of the business of their underlings. Plot for the underlings is tricky to begin with: two kings are easier to write than twenty soldiers, and the designer’s attention – biased by a lifetime of exposure to film and literature – is often attracted to the former.
With the atmosphere of secrecy that hidden narrative and potential traitors tend to produce, the monopolized plots tend to become opaque, known only to leaders and their trusted advisors. At their worst, brute force designs provide great entertainment for the handful of players with high-ranking characters, at the expense of all the other players.
As mentioned, playing to win often leads players to sacrifice character coherence when encountering strategic choices. Increasing the number of plots further fragments the experience: the fisherman’s wife no longer has a function when the larp turns to battle against the orcs.
When overrun by a competing plot train, the player will need to reinterpret their character as someone different, someone who actually has a role to play in the plot. Brute force larps, while they often yield memorable scenes, also generate moments of frustration as players need to internally renegotiate their characters while steering((See The Art of Steering by Montola, Stenros & Saitta in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book.)) around plots and colliding allegiances.
Players do not always accept such compromises. At any given brute force larp of the 1990s, you would find individuals who approached the larp with other ideals than playing to win, culminating in manifestoes such as Dogma 99 (Fatland & Wingård 1999) and the Manifesto of the Turku School (Pohjola 2000) that confronted gamist play from different perspectives.
Dogma 99 prohibited backstory, secrecy, main plots, main characters and “superficial” action – in other words: hidden narrative and colliding hierarchies. The Turku Manifesto insisted that players should approach roleplaying with no other goal than to immerse in character, dispensing with goals such as playing to win, and implied that a coherent and selfconsistent simulation, free of narrative direction, should be the goal of larp designers.
Subsequent innovations in the Nordic larp discourse have served to emphasize, facilitate, and focus on those other ideals, from perfectly coherent simulation to faithfulness to the genre and narrative arcs.
These newer arthaus larps have emphasized relationships over conflict, implicit status over explicit power, life in the trenches over the adrenaline of the battlefield. They have evolved techniques such as workshopping, blackbox scenes and inner monologues to broaden the expression and to help players develop characters deeper.
Some have surrounded their players with a fully immersive 360° illusion (Koljonen 2007) made of impeccable physical representations and simulated access to outside world, while others have done away with physical illusion entirely and used empty rooms with stage lights, symbolic props and non-diegetic music.
Surveying the state of the Nordic larp discourse at 2012, it appears that brute force had fallen entirely out of fashion in this progressive scene.
Brute Force in The Monitor Celestra
The Monitor Celestra was a larp set in the world of Battlestar Galactica. It was played on the Halland-class destroyer HMS Småland, built in 1951. The game was created around the vision of playing space drama within a beautiful self-enclosed environment of 360° illusion in the spirit of the classic Swedish larps Carolus Rex (1999) and Hamlet (2002).
The organizers went to great lengths turning the museum ship into a decommissioned Monitor-class vessel commandeered for military use in the aftermath of the fall of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Most notably, the larp featured a system of control terminals for navigating through the galaxy, communicating with other vessels, and fighting space battles.
During the first act, the Celestra found herself stranded in deep space, separated – perhaps irrevocably – from the remainder of humanity, pursued by the vast firepower of the enemy Cylons, with onboard society deeply fractured.
At the first glance, the Celestra design bears resemblance to a typical brute force larp. Celestra featured at least a dozen colliding power hierarchies ranging from Colonial Navy to the civilian crew of the vessel, from the Vergis corporation to organized crime factions. The larp was set in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of human civilization, so which of these hierarchies would command the allegiance of any one character was anyone’s guess.
The game masters had prepared surprises, such as Cylon infiltrators, and occasionally brought in non-player characters to stir the pot. There were hidden narratives to be discovered by piecing together clues and asking NPCs the right questions.
For example, the players could figure out the origin story of the three Cylon models, determining whether they were friend or enemy, and learn to understand the holographic ghosts that haunted the ship. Clearly, the philosophy of more is more was at work.
However, The Monitor Celestra added several elements to the concoction. While not all design choices worked out equally well, we can discern a new model of larp design in the combination of the ones that did.
While these additions were mostly triedand- true design solutions, the way they fit together and complemented each other was new and unique, with the potential to improve significantly on the brute force design model.
Playing to Lose
Most importantly, the Celestra team subverted the brute force tradition by insisting that all participants play to lose. The players were instructed in detail on how to avoid winning the larp, and were obliged to follow that instruction: in fact The Monitor Celestra Briefing document distributed to players proclaimed that “playing to win is for asshats anyway”.
Although Celestra may have been the first Nordic larp to explicitly tell players to play to lose, the idea goes back at least to Keith Johnstone’s (1979) work on improvisational theatre. At previous Nordic larps focused on oppression or tragedy, such as Hamlet, the necessity of playing to lose did not need to be articulated: these larps did not make any sense if approached with a gamist mentality.
Celestra also subverted gamism at its holy of holies, with gun rules emphasizing responsibility and drama over fairness and challenge:
A gun controls a room until another gun is pulled. […] The rule is simple: they get what they want, whereupon the gun is holstered or otherwise removed from play. It’s the responsibility of the whole room involved to play up the lethality of the situation […] When the gun wielder has gotten what she wanted, it is her responsibility to get the gun out of play – by running away (good luck with that), holstering the gun, dropping it and surrendering, or stand down in some other way […] You can never stop someone brandishing a gun from getting what she wants, except by pulling another gun. The second gun now trumps the first.
The Monitor Celestra Briefing
Breaking Up Plot Monopoly
In addition to asking that participants play to lose, Celestra featured widespread player duties((In Celestra they were called “out of character duties”, but we chose to simplify the expression.)). The scientist characters were instructed to share secrets late in the game for dramatic impact, or to introduce other characters to HoloBand equipment used to create diegetic black box scenes in the style of the Caprica TV series.
Civilian journalists were instructed to gather information, to keep everyone posted, and to activate civilians by providing them with news to play on. Corporate middle management had player duties to keep the game dynamic by repeatedly gaining the trust of one of the factions and then switching sides or staging coups.
Most of the player duties served to break up plot monopolies and emphasized playing to lose: to have characters reveal secrets they strategically should have kept to themselves, to involve and inform others of their agendas and back story.
While in a typical brute force larp, power hierarchies end up serving the players on the top, Celestra sought to make them serve the players at the bottom. The tops of the hierarchies received extensive player duties, encouraging them to funnel plot downwards in the hierarchy and make choices leading to better roleplay, rather than making strategically smart decisions.
Being a cog in the machine provides the player with a social role and game content, even when it means running errands or monitoring a comms terminal. By building an elaborate 360° illusion, with technology simulating a fully functional spaceship, such tasks could be set up to give nominally bottom-tier characters agency and relevance.
Being in charge of the comms terminal meant that the messenger could withhold or sell crucial information, and the engineers in the reactor could shut off power to other parts of the ship at a whim. Even when they chose to obey orders to the letter, these characters were exercising agency.
In terms of play experience, though, not all errands are equal. Especially in the first run, some players noticed that tasks such as standing guard alone made for poor play experience.
Playing a leader in this kind of an environment and guiding the experience of subordinates is akin to game mastering without the overview that the actual game masters enjoy: highly dependent not just on player skill set but also on the information provided by the organizers. In the second run leaders were instructed to make people always work in pairs.
Especially after this change, the players at the bottom of the hierarchy had better experiences of Celestra than the players left entirely outside one: It was much better to play a crewman in the engine room than a refugee without a place.
The Power of Established World Material
In brute force games, players sometimes have an incoherent understanding of how to behave in the game. This pertains to things such as acting style (should every sentence uttered by elf queens sound like a fateful prophecy) and to diegetic culture (how should an elf scout salute his queen).
Being based on two television shows, Celestra got both the acting style and the diegetic culture almost for free – very few changes were made to the established world material, so everyone could have an equal understanding on how the world worked. Both players and designers drew on the characteristic narrative patterns of Galactica, such as the ever-present conflict between civilian and military leadership.
Another way of controlling players’ stylistic choices is through employing an act structure. An act structure, inspired by theatrical storytelling, divides a larp into temporal chunks with explicitly different play style instructions and even conflict rules. Act structures and player duties have been used in some form in Nordic larps since the late 90s((At least since Moirais Vev, organized by Eirik Fatland and others, in Norway, in 1997. )), but Celestra may have been the first to combine these with brute force design elements.
The four acts took the game from collaboration against the common Cylon enemy to space exploration, internal conflict, and finally the critical moments that would decide the fates of the Celestra and everyone inside. In the fashion of the 2002 larp Hamlet, player characters could only die in the last act – and indeed, the conflicts inside the ship escalated steadily so that characters dropped like flies in the final hours.
The Celestra Model and The Monitor Celestra
Celestra went a long way in reworking brute force design. By using established world material and slicing the larp into acts with clear purpose, player confusion was reduced and the risk of plot trains going stray was lowered. By asking participants to play to lose and distributing player duties, the tendency towards plot monopolization could be counteracted.
A thorough and technology-assisted 360° illusion made the world more coherent, gave agency to the lower rungs of the hierarchies, and made the Celestra a spectacular aesthetic journey.
In short, this was the secret sauce of The Monitor Celestra:
Brute force + play to lose + player duties + act structure + 360° illusion + established world material.
We’ll call this The Celestra model, although it should be noted that this is the model we, as critics and participants, discern in the functional and mutually dependent parts of the design. For example, some techniques employed in Celestra have been intentionally omitted: the larp featured phantom players, diegeticblackbox scenes and verbally roleplayed Viper battles, which were not essential to the overall structure discussed in here. Thus it is not necessarily the model conceived of by the design team.
How did it work? Amongst the Celestra participants we find those who, two years after the event, cherish the time spent on the Småland as the greatest cultural experience of their life. But we also find players who left in rage and frustration long before the game had ended, and are still certain that was the right decision((Eirik Fatland played a Vergis corporation scientist, Markus Montola played the faction leader of the Colonial Navy. Due to the complexity of the larp, these vantage points only covered a fraction of the game: As Montola headed one hierarchy and Fatland was subject to another, the experience of not being a part of one remains underrepresented in this text. Both authors played in the second run of the game.)).
While these extremes are both unusual outcomes of a larp, they are not contradictory: a larp design may work differently for different players, depending on many factors such as the character they play, their personal preferences in larp design, their personal preparation and so on.
The players celebrating the larp, who are in the majority, will remember it as an important milestone in Nordic larp history – in terms of costuming, scenography, gameplay, technology and design – and as an action-packed, adventurous and emotional journey in an interactive 360° environment.
However, the critical voices are also clear. Some of the worst experiences were had by players who attended the first run, and were caused by errors that were fixed – in part due to constructive feedback from those players – for the second run. But there were also negative experiences reported at the second and third runs.
The impressive complexity of the design, with dependencies between collapsing hierarchies, individuals, and computer systems, made the game very fragile. For example, in the first run the seemingly minor problem of a lack of an instruction manual for the systems – one document amongst hundreds – had game-ruining consequences for many players.
In the second run of the game, it was very hard for players to distinguish fact from fiction in the rumour mill going on inside the game, and solidly determine whether Cylons had actually infected the onboard computers or not. Replicating the clockwork operation of a full battleship with complicated social roles, social groupings and spatial designs was an amazing experience when it worked, but it was highly vulnerable to the disruptive chaos of a brute force design.
While recognizing this, we think it is equally important to recognize that Celestra is celebrated as a major achievement and life-changing event by many players. That many of its production and design choices, such as the unsurpassed quality of organizer-provided costuming or the interaction with mysterious phantoms, were executed perfectly. And that by daring to innovate on such a large scale, The Monitor Celestra set the stage for future larps that could iron out the kinks in its groundbreaking approach.
Robust Adventure in College of Wizardry
College of Wizardry was a larp inspired by the Harry Potter fiction, played in the 13th century Czocha castle in southwestern Poland. The game ran uninterrupted for 52 hours, portraying the first days of the school year at the Czocha College of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The game was a combination of school routines (teaching classes, pranking other Houses to lose points, snitching about pranksters) and adventure (sneaking around the basement, fighting Death Eaters, handing out detention for such activities), culminating in a grand opening ball.
In the spirit of the 360° illusion, the Czocha castle served as a perfect environment for this game: not only is Zamek Czocha a fully furnished castle, but it is also a remarkably Potteresque one: it features a cellar for Potions classes, a tower for Divination, a dungeon for Defence Against the Dark Arts, and large dining halls for common dinners. It even comes with secret passages hidden behind bookshelves and panels. To perfect the illusion, the organizers handed out robes and ties that were the required parts of the school uniform, while the players brought in loads of small props, such as notebooks, trinkets, and wands with LEDs to light the tunnels.
Even with no physical combat, CoW was a larp for all senses, where you actually drank wine with frat boys in the common room, actually wrote an essay with a faux quill, and actually sneaked quietly in order to avoid janitors after curfew((Players’ contribution to the larp was considerable: for example, Liselle Angelique Krog Awwal made more than a thousand props for the game, Christopher Sandberg organized the professor players to produce a 200-page schoolbook, and Staffan Rosenberg created the Potions laboratory with hundreds of ingredients, tools and recipes. As player-created content was integrated to organizer materials, it is not easy to retrospectively say which parts were in the game “by design”, and which ones should be considered “player contributions” external to the design itself.)).
According to Claus Raasted, the figurehead of College of Wizardry, some of the design was directly inspired by The Monitor Celestra:
The school setting made it especially easy to utilize this [kind of design]. Teacher/student interaction, house rivalries, bloodline conflicts, former school cliques, junior/sophomore/senior conflicts, etc. The list goes on and on, and all of these structures were good at producing emergent narrative and interesting stories. If you weren’t interested in doing one specific area of play, there were always five more you could dive into.
Claus Raasted, personal communication
Since the organizers knew they would have an international and varied audience, College of Wizardry was intentionally designed to be hard to break: according to Raasted, a key component was to disconnect game design from character design, which gave the organizers a lot of flexibility. Once you have a fully functional school larp with all the appropriate structures in place, the larp is going to work regardless of individual students and teachers((In Celestra, a similar approach was used in the sense that many character descriptions spent vast majority of text to describe the social structures and out of character function of the character, and very few paragraphs on descriptions of personality, or personal goals. As a major difference, CoW explicitly permitted players to radically work on their characters.)).
The academic schedule was a perfect example of a design element that was hard to break. No matter what kind of a student or professor your character was, for most of the time the school schedule answered the question of what to do in the game.
Lectures, meals, and club meetings would largely proceed no matter what else happened. Good work catching that Azkaban escapee, ten points for your House, now attend your Divination class before you lose them. The academic schedule interwoven with an act structure((Unlike most games with act structures, CoW was played continuously. Diegetic events signified act changes.)) provided both game content and an arc of escalation and de-escalation, which worked well as a broader framework for emergent stories. Due to the laissezfaire attitude towards characters, the solid backbone of established world material, and everyone playing to lose, College of Wizardry could adopt a strict policy of your character not ours, a policy which would break most games, but made this one more robust:
The first rule of characters for College of Wizardry is that you can change the character if you don’t like it. […] If the character is a troublemaker with a heart of gold, but you’d rather play a cowardly snitch who’s obsessed with the rules, then we’ll change it. The only thing it needs is ideas from you on what you’d rather play instead, and together we’ll make it work.
College of Wizardry player instructions
This allowed the organizers to max out player agency: players were explicitly instructed that changes pertaining to diegetic facts were allowed even while the game was running. The message was clear: you traveled all the way to Czocha for a 52- hour larp; if it doesn’t work for you, change it. And if you can’t change it yourself, the game masters will help you.
The hard to break principle also showed up in other areas of the game. As staff players were given player duties, if perhaps not as explicitly as in Celestra, the students were liberated to do whatever they liked, as the carefully cast professors would eventually contain any player-created crisis.
The magic system was made hard to break by basing it on the principle of playing to lose: whenever a spell was cast on a character, the target player would ultimately decide the effects of the spell, meaning that student duels would always end in one of the players choosing to lose.
The only exceptions were that no-one could die before the final act, and that the staff would always win magical conflicts with students. While Celestra had a main plotline to resolve that players were able to impact and to a certain extent break, CoW eschewed one altogether.
The staff players adopted even more practices to open up student play. For instance, the organizers suggested that the professors should accept every excuse to skip class, which provided the student players the freedom to swap classes, to go adventuring, or even to take a much-needed nap.
While in Celestra most characters belonged to power hierarchies, in College of Wizardry, every player character was a part of them. In that sense, the equation was very simple as the game only featured three kinds of player characters: students, professors, and a very few members of the janitorial staff((While the Celestra had very few non-player characters, College of Wizardry had a cadre of them, ranging from ever-present ghosts and visiting Aurors to monsters residing in the nearby forest. The nonplayer experiences are excluded from this analysis, since there was no uniform NPC experience due to the difference of those roles.)). Even the characters who did not belong to secret societies or student Houses were a part of the broader school hierarchy. This structure largely eliminated the outsider caste, giving everyone a part in the community. Indeed, according to the evaluation survey it appears that College of Wizardry worked best for the students, then for the professors, and worst for the less integrated janitorial staff.
The power hierarchy was also very wide and interchangeable: While the ship hierarchies of Celestra could only have one captain and one first mate at the top tiers, the professors were largely interchangeable in the school hierarchy. This took some pressure off their players, lessened the need to find a particular player during the game, and mitigated the risk of a central player being unable to play.
The College of Wizardry design was made possible very much due to the genre and the fiction of the game: the topsy-turvy Harry Potter fiction is forgiving and easygoing, practically the very opposite of the military and naval hierarchies of Celestra. It does not matter if a professor appears a little silly when leaving alchemical ingredients to be easily stolen, or when accepting a spurious excuse for not showing up for class.
Indeed, several professors played to lose by drinking a potion that made everything appear wonderful to them – even the fact that their wonderfully talented students conjured up spirits of the dead and dabbled in unforgivable curses. By removing themselves from the conflict equation, they provided play for people below them in the power hierarchy – such as the group of Auror students left to deal with the issue((The Design Document instructed the staff to stay on the sidelines during the grand opening ball when conflicts started to escalate. However, they were not offered a ready solution on how to do this, and it is debatable whether this instruction was intended as a binding dictate or merely a helpful suggestion.)).
This design, combined with the brilliant 360° illusion of the Czocha castle and the very significant contributions of several players, made the players give the larp rave reviews. Out of the 112 respondents to the evaluation survey, 91% totally or somewhat agreed with the statement “I had a great game”, and an astounding 74%((Players attending their first larp were excluded from this figure.)) of the respondents agreed with “College of Wizardry was my best larp ever”.
The implication of these overwhelmingly positive numbers is not that this was a perfect larp, but that by building on the Celestra, CoW discovered a formula for blockbuster larp: a brute force larp of adventure and escapism, guaranteed to win popular appreciation. The jury is out on whether the new formula can be applied outside the world of Harry Potter, as the disorganized fictional setting of young adult Bildungsroman was an essential part of making it hard to break.
The next, clear step towards improving the formula will be the addition of workshops for character relationships and group dynamics. Indeed, even though the Celestra was already criticized for leaving social relationship development to players’ own internet discussions, College of Wizardry still used the same approach. As a result, the majority of players responding to the evaluation survey expressed their desire for on-site character relationship workshops before the game.
Both of these games would have greatly benefited from just a few hours spent efficiently building relationships and dynamics, and indeed the CoW team will utilize them in the second run of the game.
The Terrific, Terrible Blockbuster Formula
From the late 90s onwards, larp in the Nordic countries (and, increasingly, internationally) has undergone a revolutionary pace of development. By rejecting brute force designs in favour of structural and stylistic innovation, larpwrights have shown that larp can deal with complex and mature themes – from the fraught psychology of intimate relationships to the politics of the Cold War and the social dynamics of the AIDS crisis. The Celestra model combines the traditional brute force larp with inventions from arthaus larp to great effect – perhaps a bit like the Hollywood blockbuster appropriated techniques from popular vaudeville theater and from experimentalists such as Sergei Eisenstein or Fritz Lang. In other words: this is a blockbuster formula for Nordic larp.
The attempts of Celestra and CoW to deal with contemporary politics, such as nationalism and discrimination, were peripheral compared to the action-packed, sometimes thrilling and sometimes comedic events generated by the brute structure. In this regard, these larps were faithful to Battlestar Galactica and Harry Potter that inspired them. While even action movies can find the time to portray compressed emotional and romantic content, in blockbuster larps intimate and serene moments are always in danger of being hit by a stray plot. There might be an unsolvable problem in how to serve the bottom ranks of power hierarchies with enough brute game content without pushing the leaders to steer constantly with both hands full of plot.
While the formula can be improved with techniques such as character relationship workshops, some problems are likely to prove unsolvable: most importantly, the chaotic arrival of competing plot trains is likely to plague these games in the long run.
These risks are inseparable from the sense of action and agency produced by such designs, and must be accepted as such by players and organizers. After all, the blockbuster formula is a formula for an action movie or an HBO drama, not a formula for an accurate documentary or a subtly nuanced performance.
Acknowledgements
A number of players and organizers of The Monitor Celestra and College of Wizardry gave their opinion on this paper prior to publication. Although we did not follow all their suggestions, those discussions significantly improved this text. Above all, however, we are grateful to the teams that organized these two larps.
Ludography
Carolus Rex (1999): Karim Muammar and Martin Ericsson (game design), Tomas Walch and Henrik Summanen (production and dramaturgy), Emma Wieslander (writing), Mathias Larsson, Erik Stormark and Daniel Krauklis (runtime logistics help). Norrköping, Sweden.
College of Wizardry (2014): Szymon “Boruta” Boruta, Dracan Dembinski, Freja Gyldenstrøm, Agnieszka “Linka” Hawryluk- Boruta, Agata “Świstak” Lubańska, Charles Bo Nielsen, Aleksandra Hedere Ososińska, Ida Pawłowicz, Claus Raasted, Dorota Kalina Trojanowska and Mikołaj Wicher, with a team of around 15 helpers. Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform. Lesna, Poland. http://www.cowlarp.com/
Futuredrome (2002): The Story Lab, Riksteatern, Fabel, Oroboros. Kinnekulle, Sweden.
Hamlet (2002): Martin Ericsson, Christopher Sandberg, Anna Eriksson, Martin Brodén, with a large team. Interaktiva Uppsättningar and riksteatern JAM. Stockholm, Sweden.
Moirais Vev (1997): Eirik Fatland, Lars Wingård, Erlend Eidsem Hansen, Karen Winther, Martin Bull-Gundersen, Andreas Kolle.
Koljonen, J. (2007): Eye-Witness to the Illusion. An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing. In Donnis, J., Gade, M. & Thorup, L. (2007): Lifelike.
Fatland, E. & Wingård, L. (1999): Dogma 99. A Programme for the Liberation of LARP. In Gade, M., Thorup, L. & Sander, M. (eds.) (2003): As Larp Grows Up.
Pohjola, M. (2000): The Manifesto of the Turku School. In Gade, M., Thorup, L. & Sander, M. (eds.) (2003): As Larp Grows Up.
Cover photo: Part of the crew of The Monitor Celestra before the start of the first run, by Johannes Axner, is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Other photos by Johannes Axner from The Monitor Celestra (first run) and College of Wizardry (first run).
Let me tell you about how you can game master yourself in a larp.
In a tabletop role-playing game it’s easy for the actual game master to work on pacing and theme and mood and so on, because she sees the whole group pretty much all the time, knows what’s happening where, and controls the entire environment.
In a larp that’s much more difficult. You might have run-time game masters, but they probably won’t be able to focus on all the players at the same time. They have to take care of the big picture, the main plot lines, the secret NPCs arriving in time.
So who’s there to take care of your pacing and theme and mood in a larp? That’s right. No one, but you.
Before I tell you about how you can game master yourself, let me tell you about my character.
I was playing in Sweden, and decided to play only in Finnish. None of the Swedes would understand me, and I would rely on my limited Swedish skills to get what they’re saying. There were a few other Finns in the game, and I could communicate with them, and they could communicate with the others in English or Swedish if they wanted to. But to make things interesting for myself and others, I’d decided to speak only Finnish.
The game was Moira, a modern-day fairy tale with different sorts of gnomes, trolls and elves from Scandinavian mythology. Faerie courts, Aesir and Vanir, the weavers of fate, changelings, humans no longer believing in the supernatural and so on and so on. There were five mundane modern-day humans in the game, who had been captured in the land of the fairy folk, and their disbelief soon turned to awe and later maybe into fear.
I was one of the vittra, who were sort of the nobility of Nordic critters. There were about a dozen vittra in the game, all mad as hatters, and we had frequent meetings and discussions and debates. Everyone else spoke Swedish, I spoke Finnish, and everyone nodded as if they understood what I was saying. Occasionally Johanna Koljonen, the only vittra who could understand me, repeated some of my comments in Swedish, if she felt it would serve her interests.
Martin Ericsson was playing one of the humans, a surfer dude clad in bicycle attire, and I started tormenting him for my own pleasure. He didn’t believe in faeries, and wanted me to show him around. I explained things to him, in Finnish. He didn’t understand a word, but I kept explaining. He challenged me and confronted me and attacked me, but I would remain mysterious and inexplicable.
The game went on, and eventually Martin’s character saw too many strange and wonderful things to remain skeptical. He started losing his mind, and I tormented him to make things worse. At one point I stole his bicycle helmet, and that seemed to be the tipping point. He went over the border, and realized everything he’d believed in was false.
Martin’s character started searching for answers, and I kept talking to him in Finnish. If nothing else, he at least wanted his helmet back. He was desperate. Towards the very end of the three-day game, he begged of me to tell him what was going on, to help him, to protect him, to give him back his helmet. He would do anything. Anything! Anything? I asked in Finnish. Anything, he swore in Swedish.
That’s when I spoke my only line in Swedish. I smiled, and looked deep into his eyes. “Dyrka mig”, I said. Worship me.
He fell on his knees and bowed his head. My character had gone from zero worshipers to one, and his from a skeptic to a believer. An hour or two after this transformation the game was over.
Years later sitting in a bus in the suburbs of Stockholm, I talked with Martin about larp. I claimed I never thought about the dramaturgy or any external factors like that when playing in a larp. I was in character, and only did what the character would do.
“In that case you must be really, really lucky,” Martin said. For him such great scenes as our final one in Moira, only come through focusing on the drama of the events.
We discussed our views, and I admitted I probably created quite dramatic characters so that I could focus on the drama while staying true to the character.
Of course, the character wouldn’t know when the game is about to end, and when is the perfect moment for final farewells or the romantic first kiss. That’s all me.
We came to the realization that one must be one’s own game master in a larp. When the game is running, the game master won’t have time to guide us into playing the themes or the moods or the plots or the drama we want. We have to do it ourselves.
Whenever we see interesting developments that will enhance our story, our experience and our character immersion, we have to jump at the chance to engage with them. Otherwise we’re not doing anyone any favors.
In a larp you should be your own game master and help your own character immersion by building a better game for yourself.
This article was originally published in the Knudepunkt 2011 companion book Talk Larp – Provocative Writings from KP2011. All photos from Moira and provided by the author. Center of cover photo as well as photo 1, 2 & 4 are by Karin Tidbeck. If you are the copyright owner of the other photos, please contact us.
The rhetorics of Nordic larp often imply that role-players play in an intuitive fashion guided by the character, rarely or never contemplating their actions during the game. In reality, however, we are often keenly aware of what we are doing as our characters and why. This paper explores the practice of making in-character decisions based on off-game reasons – also known as steering.
In discussions about role-playing, there is a tendency to treat the character as an entity separate from the player. While we need some kind of separation to understand the contextual difference of killing an orc and adjusting a name-tag, this separation also obscures some important processes of roleplaying. As the participants in a larp enact their characters, the choices they make as characters are not always driven by diegetic (in-game) motivation. The rhetorics of immersion, character and coherence would have us believe that characters in role-playing games, at least when played by “good” role-players, do not let extra-diegetic motivation invade the game world.
In the actual practice of roleplaying however, player motivations seep into the game constantly. The player of a tyrant might choose to play in a more benevolent style when interacting with beginners, or a vampire character might leave an interesting scene because the player needs to find the restroom. These are basic examples of steering, of doing things in a game due to the player’s reasons – rather than the character’s.
While the idea of steering complicates some ideals of what players ‘should’ do, we consider it a critical player skill in most larps. We hope that by naming it, we can provide players with a useful tool to discuss their craft.
We define steering as follows:
Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.
In other words, while the player’s character is an entity within a game world, the behavior of a steering player is motivated by reasons outside the game world. To manage this contradiction, steering players almost always attempt to maintain the semblance of coherence in their character’s behavior.
Specifically, players attempt to ensure that characters maintain the outward appearance of coherence for the character’s actions, from the perspective of other characters first and other players second. In other words, a player who is steering strives to maintain the illusion that the actions of her character make sense as a whole.
Whenever possible, players also attempt to maintain the internal coherence of their understanding of the character. In the above example of the vampire player looking for a restroom, the player undoubtedly fails to preserve internal coherence, but she still seeks to maintain the outward appearance of coherence for other players.
Steering is often subtle and nuanced. As an example, the player of a prison guard might be considering whether her character should pursue a love interest or fulfil her character’s guard duties. In deciding that pursuing the love interest will make for a better game, she subtly decides to heed the pull of the romantic interest more strongly, maintaining her internal coherence while actually influencing her play based on a non-diegetic decision on how to generate better play.
By definition, steering is always intentional. Thus, you can never steer by accident, and it requires conscious choice and effort. The behavior in the above example would not have counted as steering if the player was just deeply focused in the romantic affair and would have never considered the effect on the larger game before deserting her post. Instead, she consciously evaluated the impact of her actions, and then acted towards deepening the romance. This can happen quickly and semi-consciously so that the player can stay in the emotional flow that inspired the choice – but it is still a marked moment the player can identify afterwards. Of course, we do steering decisions so often and so quickly that we often forget about them before the larp is over.
Steering can be used to create good or bad play. Usually such definitions depend on the play culture and the overall dynamics of the game: In a gamist aesthetic, playing to win can be seen as acceptable, while in games focusing on a play to lose aesthetic, the players are expected to steer towards failure. Steering can even be immoral or unethical, for example if a player uses her character as a pretence for stalking another player.
Not all character actions result from steering – only those actions intended to guide the character to a specific effect for reasons that exist outside of the character’s conception of the world. At a minimum, we consider the reflexes and unconscious reactions of the player as external to steering. An example of the difficulty of establishing a line between steering and not-steering is player attraction toward other players: If a character’s choice to pursue a romance is influenced by the desire of the player it could be seen as steering – but only if the player is aware of this.
It is also important to note that steering is something one does to one’s own character. There is by definition no such thing as ‘steering others’. However, through steering her own character, the player can also change the way others are playing and influence the direction of the larp as a whole. Indeed, that is often the goal.
Dual Consciousness
We believe that knowing how to steer properly is one of the most important player skills.
Since steering breaks down the division between the player and the character and exposes the moment-to-moment reality of play, it is a useful tool in taking a brutally honest look at what happens in the practice of larp.
Most of the time during larp runtime, players have the dual consciousness of looking at the event both as diegetic, and as non-diegetic, as play and as non-play. This dual consciousness, or bisociation, informs most of their actions. It is an important part of playing and games; standing with one foot within the border of play and another outside it can not only be powerful, but also instructive.
Viewing something both as play and as non-play not only teaches the viewer about the thing she is looking at, but about the overall structure. This helps in understanding the socially constructed nature of reality as a whole, but specifically it helps in understanding how a game functions. This competence at reading situations on multiple levels is a skill that can be developed in play and applied when steering.
Steering Examples
Practical
Physical needs. Food, sleep, warmth, etc. Looking for someone. Searching for another player to play a scene or to get the car keys. Documentation. Posing for or avoiding a camera. Filming in characer. Logistics. Entering hostile territory because that is where the toilet is. Physical safety. Not running in the pitch-black forest even when your pursuers do.
Smooth Play
Coherence. Preserving the external coherence, even at the expense of your internal coherence. Legibility. Overplaying emotions to make sure they are conveyed to other players. Game mastering and fateplay. Pushing the game towards some direction as required by larp design. Retrospective rationalization. Smoothing over the plot holes of earlier bad steering. Post-hoc player vetting. Mitigating the perceived damage to the game caused by a ‘bad’ player. Theme. Accepting that vampires are real in two minutes.
Aesthetic Ideals
Narrativism and dramatism. Making a better story for yourself or others. Gamism. Winning conflicts, gathering power. Immersionism. Avoiding heavy game mechanics that might detract from character immersion. Bleed. Seeking maximally intense emotional impact. 360° illusion. Avoiding the sight of the parking lot in fantasy games. Play to lose. Sharing secrets loudly for eavesdroppers to hear them.
Personal Experience
Boredom. Looking for stuff to do. Picking up fights. Staying in game. Not leaving the haunted mansion even when two people are dead. Relevance. Getting closer to the perceived core of the game, or seeking more agency. Overcoming disabling design. Deciding that your character wants to become a revolutionary only after you realize that most characters only talk to revolutionaries. Avoiding the same-old. Not rebelling against the tyrant in two games in a row. Attraction. Getting to play with skilled or cool players. Player status. Doing things likely to increase one’s status as a player. Shame. Not wanting to do or to be seen doing certain things, even as a character.
Ethical and Unethical
Consent. Observing a slow-down safeword such as “yellow” or “brems”. Trust. Creating a safe situation in which to play demanding scenes. Inclusiveness. Including characters that have nothing to do at that moment. Harassment. Using the larp to stalk another player. Revenge. Killing your character because you killed mine in an earlier game.
There is nothing mysterious about this process. It simply means that a player is able to see at the same time both the cheerful friend who gave her a lift to the larp wearing old army surplus clothes, and the frightful commander of the space station her character could never approach. Both of these things are true at the same time. Recognizing the difference between the diegetic and the non-diegetic is the difference roleplaying is built upon. However, that separation is not actual, but rather one made in interpretation.
The idea that one realm, the non-diegetic, is allowed to influence the other realm, the diegetic, may seem wrong, even immoral. Indeed, the idea of steering may seem like anathema to roleplaying. Is not the key tenet of roleplaying the idea of portraying a fictional being in a fictional setting – without the petty motivations a player may have outside roleplaying? Yet steering is not a bad or an undesirable thing to do. In fact, many players steer almost all the time when they are playing. The diegetic world of fantasy never maps completely on the physical world, nor does the body of the player completely become that of the character. The draw of larp is that it is not-real and that it feels real.
Steering and Immersionism
The concept of steering – and the criticism of motivations originating with the player – emerge from a tradition that values character immersion as an ideal. Immersion is perhaps most frequently defined as moments when player forgets herself – when the dual consciousness of simultaneously being a player and a character fades away and player only focuses on being her character. This experience has been characterized, for example, as the player pretending to believe that she is her character (Pohjola 2004) and as bracketing the everyday self (Fine 1983).
It has been compared to ideas such as flow (Hopeametsä 2008) and wilful suspension of disbelief (Pohjola 2004).
In the Manifesto of the Turku School, Mike Pohjola (2000) argued that character immersion should be seen as the ideal aesthetic of the larp. But with an ideology that forbids dual consciousness comes some baggage – it prohibits steering:
Sometimes it might be fun to do something that is not in strict accordance with the character, but – unless the GM has specifically asked you to do so – THAT IS FORBIDDEN.
The psychological idealism focused on immersion has faded since the turn of the millennium. It is now commonly acknowledged in the Nordic larp discourse that even when player’s focus is on her character she still does not become the character. The idea that someone could use character immersion as a moral justification for punching another player in the face would universally be found ridiculous.
But even as full character immersion has been found impossible, this rhetoric of playing true to the character has persisted. The dogma of character fidelity can be seen whenever players discuss whether it is realistic that the king fell in love with the peasant girl, or whether it was credible that mortal enemies joined forces in order to win the war against orcs.
However, as the player cannot psychologically transform into her character, the problem of Pohjola’s statement is that it is impossible to determine which actions are in “strict accordance with the character”. Even as a player, one can determine several credible courses of action for almost any situation the character can be in.
This uncertainty and ambiguity about what would be fitting for a character is what makes steering possible. If there was always one right choice for a character to make, steering would be meaningless. It is this very uncertainty that is the site for steering – the minute choices a character makes. Steering is rarely about making major life choices and often about pushing a discussion gently in a new direction.
Indeed, the skill in question is not entirely dissimilar to the skills one needs when steering conversation away from difficult topics in an everyday social situation like a polite chat with colleagues over coffee. When you understand that you have a potentially inappropriate joke that is perfect for the situation, you still decide whether or not to tell it. Sometimes that decision may be done very quickly, subtly, or half-unconsciously.
The strict reading of immersionism presented above appears to be incompatible with the idea of steering. However, contemporary immersionists do not argue that character immersion is an overwhelming and persistent state. Rather, it is seen as an aesthetic ideal and a goal to strive for when playing.
From this perspective, we actually argue that some amount of steering is even a requirement for immersionist play. The immersionist player seeks to ignore and forget the fact she is larping while doing so. This wilful suspension of disbelief requires the player to maintain internal coherence of her character: It might be hard to forget yourself and become a medieval queen if you are standing on the balcony with the clear view to the parking lot. Getting a powerful immersionist experience of committing a tragic suicide is more likely if you consciously choose to commit one.
Or, as Pohjola wrote himself years later:
Whenever we see interesting developments that will enhance our story, our experience and our character immersion, we have to jump at the chance to engage with them. Otherwise we’re not doing anyone any favors. In a larp you should be your own game master and help your own character immersion by building a better game for yourself.
The reason why the idea of steering is sometimes seen to be at odds with The Manifesto of the Turku School is probably historical. It was written at a time when player motivations were seen to be influencing Finnish roleplaying too much.
Although it was a response to Dogma 99 (Fatland & Wingård 1999), it was actually directed against gamism (steering to win), dramatism (steering to create interesting scenes and stories), and bad roleplaying (for example, steering on the expense of coherence).
The idea of steering shows how rare moments of real immersion and flow are. By lifting the dogmatic ways of talking about the play experience tinted with the idea of immersion, it helps account for many of the actions a player takes during runtime. By shifting emphasis from the ideals of playing to the actual practice it illuminates what we really do while roleplaying.
Designing for Steering
The idea that larps contain characters that are there to direct the play is as old as larping itself. This is what the non-player characters and other game master controlled actors have been doing since the beginning of larping (cf. Stenros 2013). However, player characters have done this since the beginning as well – even if it was not always directly discussed.
Explicit steering instructions have been a part of the tradition of Nordic larps at least since the emergence of fateplay (see Fatland 2005), a style of making larps where players are given some instructions on how to behave in certain situations – the character Claudius, for example, was fated to die in the larp Hamlet (2002).
More recently, larps such as The Monitor Celestra (2013) have introduced the idea of having large amounts of characters with pervasive and persistent steering duties. In the Celestra, which featured strict naval and military hierarchies, higher-ranking officers were expected to generate play for their subordinates. For example, the commanding officer of the Colonial Navy was instructed as follows:
As the Major in charge, your foremost duty is to act as a game master for bridge and CIC personnel, generating interesting play and putting flavor into the tasks of running the ship […] Always keep in mind that your job isn’t to be an effective Major, but to be a good player/game master, and enable interesting action for others.
Character material, The Monitor Celestra
While all players had similar duties, the higher the character was in a hierarchy, the stronger the expectation of steering was. This was of course a practical solution: By having the Major to steer hard the game masters could alter the course of the entire larp, as she could use her diegetic authority to impact the game for all her subordinates, shielding them from the need to steer.
This mechanic worked rather well for members of those hierarchies, especially compared to older and more selfish play styles (see Fatland & Montola in this book for a detailed discussion).
Although the top brass was expected to steer the most, Celestra explicitly encouraged following the philosophy of play to lose, which basically expects everyone to steer in the larp. The following play instruction was given under the heading “Rules” in the briefing materials:
You are expected to play to lose, prettily. In a game where experiencing the journey is the whole point, winning is moronic. Losing, on the other hand, is dramatic and cool since it puts a spin on the story and contributes to emotional impact.
The Monitor Celestra Briefing
These games have established a new steering norm along the ones such as gamism, dramatism, immersionism and bleed: In these games, players are expected to steer in order to play to lose. This anti-gamist stance can arguably contribute to many other play aesthetics, as it “puts a spin on the story” for dramatists and “contributes to emotional impact” for immersionists and bleedhunters.
Obligatory and Heavy Steering
Sometimes it is every larper’s obligation to steer. Barring some unusual arrangement, role-players share an almost universal implicit obligation to steer for coherence. Different game styles have different conceptions of what coherence is, yet internal logic of some kind is valued in all larp cultures.
In some roleplaying games, especially larger larps with less-tightly organized plots, what would be seen as a significant coherence conflict in another game may be glossed over by all players concerned as they acknowledge tacitly that a conflict has occurred by choosing not to fix it, as it would require too much work on the part of disparate groups of players.
In other games, often smaller or more tightly plotted, it would be seen as a serious problem for such a breach of coherence to occur to start with, requiring either heavy steering by all parties to fix immediately or possibly (in some play cultures) a break of play so the ‘truth’ of the situation can be decided directly by the players off-game. Usually, when coherence cannot be achieved by steering, the next solution is to ignore the problem; to steer play away from the mess.
Two examples can help clarify this. In long-running campaigns the character arcs can become increasingly improbable. Like in soap operas and superhero comics, certain ancient acts may be de-emphasized by those character’s players.
In larps this works particularly well, as no one can go back in time three years to check and nitpick what actually and specifically happened. In larps that use them, mechanics like experience points can also shift balances between masters and apprentices or parents and children, if players put in different amounts of play time.
Another example comes from the second run of The Monitor Celestra, where at one point the key to the hyperdrive was stolen, and a dozen characters got involved in recovering it from the characters who used it as leverage in a negotiation. Problems arose because the game organizers held that no such key existed, as some player had improvised it up. As the characters raced to solve the issue the gamemasters ignored it; as far as they were concerned, this plot did not exist.
The game masters could still not solve the problem simply by issuing a decree, because too many characters were involved with the key.
In the end the issue was solved twice in the game – once very rapidly due to game master pressure and again by some characters not being aware of the first time – and only then were all the characters able to move on. No equifinal understanding on what actually happened can be produced.
When characters are forced to steer hard, it causes wider ripples in the play. Specifically, one player steering hard may leave another player confused about the steerer’s character’s identity, her relationship with the second player’s character, or the events of the larp. This is sometimes unavoidable, especially when a player is forced to steer in a character-breaking way. This is a specific kind of game incoherence associated with steering that many players, especially heavily immersionist players, may consider unacceptable.
Steering can be characterized as character-breaking steering when the player cannot maintain her internal sense of coherence. For example, if the player is executing a game master directive that is important for the larger plot of a game but finds their character has moved away from the gamemasters’ expectations of who they would be when the instructions were originally specified, they will need to steer their character to ensure they fulfill their obligations to the game, but will do so knowing that this action does not make sense for the character.
Likewise, a player may realize part-way through a game that they have played themselves into a corner, and if they wish to continue playing or return to the main plot of the game, they will have to simply reinvent part of their character. While to be character-breaking, this shift need only be incoherent to the player, when done poorly (or under extreme circumstances) it will often result in the character also appearing incoherent to other players.
In order to repair the disruption created by heavy steering, players sometimes engage in retroactive rationalization, wherein they decide on the thus far unvoiced rationale for choices they have already made to maintain the appearance of coherence. For instance, a player who forgot their character’s sidearm may later steer, deciding that their character was feeling especially secure that morning, and thought they would not need it.
If the player discovers that this will cause a coherence problem with other players expectations, they may engage in retroactive rationalization retconning – if they have not already told the other players, they can changing their prior retroactive rationalization. In this example, the player might decide that instead of being supremely confident, their sidearm was actually stolen, allowing them to integrate with a game mood of suspicion and paranoia.
The roleplay agreement (Sihvonen 1997), the social contract that participants treat the player and the character as separate entities and refrain from making judgement about one based on the other, is a cornerstone of roleplaying. Without it establishing trust amongst players to also engage in anti-social behaviors, like playing a villain, can be hard. The concept of steering does not obliterate the role-play agreement. However, it needs to be modified; the separation need not be between player and character, but diegesis and non-play. Indeed, it is the character that acts as an alibi for steering. The player can choose what she wants to do or what best fits the larp, and as long as it somehow makes sense in relation to the facts of the character thus far established, it is acceptable.
Conclusion
Sensitivity to other players – knowing when and how to steer – is a key player skill. A considerate player can create play for others, pace drama, include others players, support beginners, and avoid hogging plots and secrets. A good larper steers in a nuanced way that is invisible to other players and does not damage the coherence of play. Steering is not a bad thing to do in a game, and most of us steer much of the time while we are playing.
Just like good steering contributes to the game, refusal to steer can detract from it. If one player does not steer, her fellow players may be forced to steer even harder to sustain the game. It is not rare to encounter a selfish player in a larp with a preference to avoid steering who expects other players to accommodate her play style. The other players may end up steering hard to maintain play and allow her to preserve the immersive flow instead of caring about the overall game.
Steering is a skill and not all players are good at it. Steering coherently and reliably requires thinking and performing simultaneously on two, three, or more levels while maintaining an accurate model of both the perceptions of both other characters and their players.
Players holding on to an ideal of playing entirely without dual consciousness may even argue that the expectation of steering ruins their game. Steering is perceived by some players as distancing them from their character. In part, the degree of distance perceived may relate to how quickly players are able to slip between different levels of play.
It is not necessarily the case that more intense emotional experiences require less movement between levels of player consideration, but this appears to be true for some players. Some players and some game contracts may consider steering to be cheating, as in those contexts, only diegetic concerns are considered to be acceptable as motivations for player choices. We believe that such contracts are often self-deceptive, and that acknowledgement of the role of steering in play is critical to designing for character immersion in the context of a coherent, functional game.
Acknowledgements
We would especially want to thank Juhana Pettersson as well as other organizers and participants of Larpwriters’ Winter Retreat 2014.
Ludography
Hamlet (2002): Martin Ericsson, Christopher Sandberg, Anna Eriksson, Martin Brodén, with a large team. Interaktiva Uppsättningar and riksteatern JAM. Stockholm, Sweden.
Dansey, N., Stevens, B. & Eglin, R. (2009): Contextually-Ambiguous Pervasive Games: An Exploratory Study, Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory. Proceedings of DiGRA 2009. Sept 1-4, 2009, West London, United Kingdom.
Stenros, J. (2013): Between Game Facilitation and Performance: Interactive Actors and Non-Player Characters in Larps. International Journal of Role-Playing, No 4, 78-95.
Sihvonen, T. (1997): Pieni johdatus live-roolipelaamisen psykologiaan, in Vainio, N. (ed.): Larppaajan käsikirja. Suomen live-roolipelaajat, Tampere.
Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.
A ‘moment’ from God Rest Ye Merry (staged, Rachel Thomas).
