Tag: Casting

  • Flagging: A Response

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    Flagging: A Response

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    This article was prompted by the recent republication on Nordiclarp.org of the article ‘Flagging is Flawed’ (Brown and Teerilahti 2024) from the Solmukohta 2024 book Liminal Encounters.

    In the article, the authors describe the practice of circulating a list of names of participants prior to a larp event, and inviting ‘flagging’ – the indication of safety concerns about fellow-participants, privately to the organizers. They discuss problems that they perceive with the tool.

    Our perception is that the article itself is flawed, because it doesn’t discuss the commonest flagging practices that are actually widely used in contemporary Nordic and international larp (in those cases when flagging is used at all).

    The authors seem to assume that the only flagging indication possible is a ‘red flag’, meaning that the named person should be considered unsafe and should be prevented from attending the event. They go on to suggest that this is misapplied, with participants flagging for reasons other than serious and absolute safety concerns meriting a ban from the event.

    That would indeed be a problem – which is why larp organizers don’t, in general, ask solely for red flags. Instead, they usually ask for a range of different indications of concern, with only the most severe meriting a red flag and hence exclusion.

    For example, a ‘yellow flag’ is commonly used to indicate that one wishes to avoid playing closely with another person, but does not consider them a general danger. Brown and Teerilahti seem to be unfamiliar with this practice, or have chosen to ignore it for the sake of their thesis. Either way, it invalidates a large part of their argument, because in their article they seem to assume that flagging because of a wish not to play closely will necessarily lead to automatic removal of the flagged person from the larp. But in practice, larp organizers for the most part do not act in such a way: a yellow flag simply means that the flagger and the flagged person will be cast in roles that are not closely connected.

    Some of the difficulties of communicating about flagging relate to its dual purpose. Red flags are intended as a safety tool – we want to keep people who have hurt others out of our larps. This is a method of mitigating risk at the events we run.

    But organizers may also feel the need to offer a comfort tool. Casting two players who dislike each other in an intense relationship is likely to result in a poor larp experience for them, and perhaps for everyone else, too. Therefore it’s useful to have methods for participants to indicate those people who they will be uncomfortable if cast closely with. It is important that the difference between this and a red flag is communicated clearly.

    The authors, larping together in safety and comfort. Photo by Oliver Facey.
    The authors, larping together in safety and comfort. Photo by Oliver Facey.

    Flagging in Practice

    Flagging as a system has evolved and developed over the last ten years or so, and we feel that it’s valuable to share details of practice, so that organizers can learn from one another, and participants can understand how the system can work.

    Here is the default flagging system that we use at Larps on Location. This is a work in progress, which has been refined and tweaked, added to and taken away from, over the years. Other organizers use similar systems, and we feel that overall there is a general coalescence around certain practices.

    The gist of it is that people should only be excluded for absolute safety concerns. For serious interpersonal disputes not related to general safety, one or other party will self-exclude; for lesser differences, the parties will be cast apart where practical.

    “The names of everyone who has signed up to the larp will be circulated to everyone who has signed up. You will have the option to:

    • Red-flag – means ‘I believe that this person is unsafe to larp with.’  Examples of behaviour that might deserve a red flag include bullying, harassment, or abuse. Someone who has been red-flagged will not be allowed to attend the larp. We will not tell them who red-flagged them, or why. We will not tell them that they’ve been red-flagged without the consent of the person who flagged them.
    • Orange-flag – means ‘I’m unable to attend if this person is participating.’ Choose this if you don’t believe that that person is unsafe, but for personal reasons you are unable to attend an event that they’re at. In this case, whichever of you or them is allocated a place first will be prioritized.
    • Yellow-flag – means ‘I don’t want to play in a close relationship with this person.’ Choose this if you don’t believe that the person is unsafe, but for personal reasons you are unable to play closely with them. (An example might be a difficult personality clash.) In this case, we will prioritize not casting you and them together in relationships; even if that means that as a result of this one or both of you aren’t cast. We will not tell someone that they have been yellow-flagged. If someone receives several yellow flags, it may be impossible to place them in the larp, especially if it’s a small one.

    You don’t have to tell us your reason for giving a flag (although you may do so, if you wish to).

    IMPORTANT: Don’t use a yellow flag when it would be more appropriate to: 

    • Request not to play closely with a specific person – this is for when you prefer to play away from someone perhaps because you often play closely together, or you are real-life partners, or because you want to explore play with different participants, or because of a clash in play styles, etc. We will do our best to honour these requests, but they won’t be prioritized. We will not tell them that you have made this request.”

    Our practice is to circulate the signup list, before asking about flags – rather than, as some organizers do, asking during the signup process if there are any people who the prospective participant wishes to indicate in advance as unsafe. We operate in this way because we feel that it creates an emotional burden on a prospective participant to name the people that they find dangerous – perhaps, their abuser(s) – each time they sign up to a larp, just on the basis of a possibility that those people might try to take part in that event.

    The details of what ‘request not to play closely’ involves will differ from larp to larp, as there’s a wide variation around what kinds of close play the design requires. For example, in a pair larp, play might be extremely close with one other person, not especially close with others. It’s important that these expectations are spelt out to participants when inviting them to submit such requests.

    Inviting requests of this type can also allow participants to introduce nuance, if that will be helpful – for example, there might be someone who they are happy to play some forms of close relationship, but not others (e.g. romance). The details will depend on the needs of the larp – but in general, it will always be the case that the more participants understand about what will be involved in play, the more they can help organizers to help them in return.

    We would be very glad to see the practices of other organizers shared in this way, to prompt further discussion.

    Weaponization

    The other substantive point that Brown and Teerilahti make in their article is that a flagging tool can be misused maliciously, to deliberately exclude others from larps for reasons that are not related to safety concerns. They consider this bad-faith flagging to be such a widespread and pervasive practice that it causes unacknowledged damage to the community.

    We have not seen evidence of such ‘weaponization’ of flagging in our own limited experience (we have organized about a dozen international weekend larps of various sizes, plus five large larp festivals, that have used some sort of flagging tool) – and other, larger, organizers of Nordic and international larps have indicated that they also have had few or no encounters with it. And that they, like us, have in general received very few red flags, and none that seemed unjustified.

    This is not to dismiss the authors’ concerns – no doubt, malicious flagging may be more common in some areas of larp, and in some communities, than others. But our overall impression is that it is a minor issue compared against the value of being able to flag up genuine malefactors – who have previously taken advantage of modern larp’s internationalism to move to operate in new areas where the organizers may be unfamiliar with their records.

    Critiques such as these seem to argue that the benefits of flagging are not worth the risk of potentially ostracizing flagged people undeservedly. To set against that, flagging may have saved larger numbers of people from being harassed or worse at larps – but those accounts are quiet and invisible, as the threat has been avoided thanks to flagging.

    Additionally, concerns have been expressed, including at a panel on this subject at Solmukohta 2024, that flags could be abused to create systemic prejudice in the community. An example discussed was that of a neurodivergent person being excluded because another participant misunderstood their communication style. We feel that this can be addressed by giving clear examples of what does or does not constitute cause for a flag, and by emphasising that a red flag should only be raised if the flagger believes that the other person is unsafe to larp with.

    There are many people in our community who identify as neurodivergent in a variety of ways – including one of the authors of this article – and, as noted above, we ourselves have not seen evidence of red-flagging being used as a weapon against them.

    Anonymity and Emotional Labour

    There has been considerable discussion about the responsibilities of organizers towards those who have been flagged against, and those who have submitted flags. (This is particularly important for red flags, which result in the exclusion of the flagged person. But, it may also be relevant to orange flags, if organizers have a policy that involves choosing which of the people involved to exclude.)

    We feel that the highest of these responsibilities relates to protecting participants at the event – including those who have raised flags as part of the process. They are to be protected by not sharing their identity with those who have been flagged against. It’s of the utmost importance to protect people from experiencing further serious harm.

    It is possible to also consider a responsibility towards those who have been flagged against. If they have done something wrong, for they deserve to be given a chance to mend their ways? Or if they feel they have been unjustly flagged, do they deserve a chance to clear their name?

    Then, is there a responsibility to the larp community as a whole, to provide the opportunity for offenders to be rehabilitated; or at least to provide them with the information that they may need to be able to take that journey?

    Our feeling is that these aims will be hard to accomplish without risking breaching the anonymity of the flagger. And they will involve organizers in emotional labour that they may be reluctant to take on in addition to all the other burdens involved in making larp events happen – or that they may find difficult to handle objectively, if personal friends are involved. For these reasons, at our own events we do not undertake such work. If other organizers are able to do so successfully, then we applaud them. But we feel that it needs to be made clear in advance, if this kind of engagement with flagged parties will be taking place: because participants who have been victims of malefactors may seek to avoid such a situation.

    We need to bear in mind that attending a larp, or even being part of a community, is not a human right guaranteed to participants. Larps are private events, usually run by volunteers in their spare time. There is absolutely no onus on larp organizers to make their events available to those who they feel are unsafe to attend – and there is also no right to have such decisions explained or justified.

    Flagging is clearly not a suitable tool for rehabilitation of people who have unintentionally caused harm. Is there a better method, in which everyone involved consents to the emotional labour, and to any potential risk? Possibly. But we feel that rehabilitation needs to be considered as separate from the issue of finding optimal ways to keep participants safe. Restorative justice is a big topic in its own right – but it is better managed by friends of the abuser than by random larp organizers. And it is definitely not something that victims should get caught up in when they thought they were just signing up for a larp.

    Communication in Advance

    And this leads to a more general point – which is that all policy and practice around flagging must be communicated clearly to all prospective participants, in advance of seeking signups. Otherwise, no-one can be confident of what they will be encountering. Like any other aspect of safety, a flagging system is only as good as the culture around it – and clear and direct communication is essential to this.

    Evolution 

    Brown and Teerilahti (2024) end by stating:

    We recognize that there is no easy answer to the important issue of protecting player safety, and that this is a difficult conversation. Sadly, bad actors will learn to weaponize any safety system put in place, so the system must evolve in order to stay relevant and continue to do the greatest good possible.

    There is no question that we should continue changing and evolving our practices, as we find ways to improve them. And we do understand that flagging is an uncomfortable topic, which brings up fears around exclusion and ostracism whenever discussed. However, it is vital to keep in mind what the main goal for the system is: and to ensure that sight of that is not lost, as we look at ways of addressing other associated harms. Flagging systems were introduced as a way of addressing manifest and persistent abusive behaviour from predatory individuals within the increasingly internationalizing larp community. Any suggestion of removing them must be accompanied by tools that are at least as effective at this.

    References

    Brown, Maury, and Nina Teerilahti. 2024. “Flagging is Flawed.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.


    Cover photo: Photo by Hawksky on Pixabay. 

  • We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps

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    We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps

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    [This article is also available in Spanish, at: http://vivologia.es/compartimos-este-cuerpo-herramientas-para-combatir-los-prejuicios-basados-en-la-apariencia-en-el-rol-en-vivo/
    Thank you to Vivologia for translating it!]

    Disclaimer: In this text, the word “relationship” never purely alludes to romance. It could be any connection between characters: from co-workers to soldiers and commanding officers to siblings or bitter enemies. This article compiles discussions with dozens of people spanning hundreds of hours in total. It is very possible that I quote something verbatim and not even remember that you gave me that idea. No harm is intended in any way.

    I was at a beautiful international larp. A big, raucous party was in full swing. People were flirting, drinking and fighting. And somehow, no matter how hard I tried, I could not find a way into the play. My attempts at provocation were brushed off, and my attempts at flirting fared even worse. My character was supposed to be powerful, but I certainly did not manage to evoke that feeling.

    After a while, I noticed that several other people were also drinking wine in chairs in the corner, all by themselves. Most of them seemed, like me, otherwise outgoing participants who had seen most of their relations fall flat. The one thing I had in common with my fellow wallflowers was that all of us were either older, overweight, or both. It is possible this was a coincidence. It did not feel like it.

    Later, at the 2017 Knutepunkt, I was dragged into a large conversation about casting and in-game status, and how those things are often determined by the way the participants look, either consciously or subconsciously. This discussion resonated with me, and, during that event, I asked many people about their personal experiences with their real life appearance influencing how they were treated at larps.

    The year after that, I hosted a programme item about appearance-based prejudice with a very diverse panel. This panel received a lot more attention than I had expected, and I kept getting approached about it during that Knutepunkt and long after. There were tears and powerless anger, loss of faith in co-participants and in the community, and so many stories. Once the stories started coming out, they never stopped. And I realized that discrimination based on physical appearance was even more commonplace than I thought. I also realised that we do not speak about it often enough.

    Larp usually strives to create settings, situations and relations, often involving total strangers, that feel completely real on an emotional level from the moment the larp starts. Most people will tap heavily into lived experiences and emotions to achieve this. That also means that unless the participant is very good at keeping themselves separate from their character, bleed((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character,” Nordiclarp.org, March 2, 2015.)) will happen and those same instincts, preconceptions and frameworks that we use for fast immersion are also applied to our co-participants and our perceptions of them.

    In itself, this is not a problem, but it can turn ugly very fast when those perceptions are built on negative biases. Gender, ethnicity, age, able-bodiedness, body type and many more aspects of our co-participants influence how we interact with them at larps. Most people are hardly, if at all, aware of these biases, as they are often unconscious.((Much has been written about this, but Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald’s “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People” (2013) is an accessible read. You can test your own implicit biases at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html)) For example, we may associate middle-aged people with being less active, overweight people with being less smart, or people with mobility issues with being frail, and adjust our interactions based on that. The good news is that once we are aware of our biases, we can train ourselves to actively work against them.

    This piece is mainly written to put a spotlight on a problem that many of us are only too familiar with from personal experience, so that it becomes something we can keep addressing as a community. I have mainly spoken to people who have experienced fatphobia, ageism, and rejection based on perceived attractiveness, and have personally experienced the same. Most of my examples will thus be based in those types of prejudice.

    Of course, many other biases exist. PoC and queer writers have been writing about appearance-based discrimination for years, for example in last year’s KP-book with Jonaya Kemper’s excellent “Wyrding the Self” and Kemper, Saitta, and Koljonen’s “Steering for Survival” in the same volume.

    What Forms Does Appearance-Based Prejudice Take?

    The people I have spoken to over the years mainly report the following behaviors of other participants based on their out-of-game looks:

    1. (Aspects of) their characters not being taken seriously, reactions being different from how the character should be treated, for example when playing leaders, soldiers or famous people.
    2. Rejection from in-game relationships, especially romantic ones.
    3. Not being involved in the plot or other aspects of the larp. This is for example often the case with older or less able-bodied participants when the plot involves action.

    These behaviours allow us to discern several forms of rejection.

    Rejection Surrounding Desirability

    This mainly happens with romantic relationships, but can also pertain to certain types of characters, for example being the ingenue at a party that everyone wants to be around according to the game material.

    Rejection Surrounding Status and Fame

    This mainly happens with people portraying celebrities, heroes or people of importance to a setting, when they are not treated as such by their co-players.

    Rejection Surrounding Authority and Power

    Shorter participants for example are often not taken seriously in commanding positions and have to work harder to be listened to, as do younger and/or female-presenting participants.

    Rejection Surrounding Expertise

    Skills that are not taken seriously, for example with older participants portraying hackers.

    Rejection Surrounding Athleticism

    Less able bodied or heavier participants may be given a hard time when portraying athletes or soldiers.

    Of course, we can never know why certain play did not happen for a certain participant. Maybe there was something else going on: it is always best to assume that people do not operate from bad faith. But for quite a lot of participants, the problems they encounter are too systemic to dismiss as bad luck.

    As said before, most people are simply unaware of the many cognitive biases they have. So when we engage with complex and stressful social situations like larp, it only makes sense that those biases partially take over. But not being deliberate does not make discrimination any less of a problem.

    Why This is Everyone’s Problem

    Lifting the characters in a larp is a collective responsibility, because the quality of the larp depends on it. Lifting the participants should also be a collective responsibility, because the quality of our communities depends on it.

    People who larp are vulnerable. We open up to other participants in many ways, and we have expectations of the experience that are often directly tied to aspects of our out-of-game personality.

    This close connection can make in-game rejection, mockery, or being left out of parts of the larp very hurtful, even more when the rejections are based on aspects of the participant’s appearance that are also a struggle or sometimes even a source of trauma in real life. This can create very bad bleed situations or triggers that may cause people to drop out of a larp (or even out of the community altogether) and perceive it in a very negative light afterwards.

    The loss of confidence can be long-term. For example, it took me years to regain the confidence to play a severely underprivileged character again after being mocked for “certainly not looking hungry” over and over again during a larp.

    This downward spiral will lead those rejected participants to be skeptical towards others attempting to engage with them, and to approach any new in-game relationship very warily. Consequently, they can come across as closed-off, resulting in even more rejection from the other participants for seeming passive. Internalised oppression is powerful, and negative feedback loops are easily entered. Many people I have encountered see themselves as a “lost cause” for certain types of play, for example playing on romance or leadership, and they will self-cast themselves away from it, even when they would find it interesting. It will take conscious effort and support from the community to undo that.

    Apart from the personal pain, basing in-game reactions to certain characters on the way the participant looks, as opposed to what would make sense for the character, will often hurt the larp as a whole.

    This has to do with the responsibility to play to lift.((Susanne Vejdemo, “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press, 2017.)) When we do not treat our co-participants in a way that makes sense for their characters, we are not lifting. Not only that, but the human tendency to copy social behavior will mean that others may follow suit, and eventually everyone is rolling their eyes as soon as the Duchess gives an order – no matter how competent and powerful she is established as being in the fiction. Sidelining character agency in this way undermines the plot and setting for all participants.

    Rejected relationships can be equally damaging to a larp, especially if the relationship is very central to the plot: if nobody wants to marry the king’s eligible bachelorette daughter, a lot of the tension will drop for the whole story, and not just for the participants involved.

    Counterpoints

    A counterpoint that has some merit to it is that you cannot force people to play with certain co-participants. First and foremost: you should of course never have to play with participants who make you uncomfortable, for example romantic play with a significant age gap, or participants you have a bad history with.

    However, if you are likely to refuse certain types of play due to out-of-game preferences, it is best to not rank those types of play as high priorities on a casting form – because you’re choosing not to play the pre-scripted relationships may threaten not just the experience of your co-participant but the structure of the whole larp. It doesn’t mean that you have to renounce (for example) playing romances, as it is usually possible to create that type of connection with someone you feel comfortable with during the larp itself, but you will avoid being cast in a huge dramatic romance with someone you will end up ignoring.

    That being said: try not to let yourself get away with your biases. As with everything in life, it is important to acknowledge our prejudices in larp and actively try to work against them. We should take a chance on playing with someone we do not immediately feel drawn to every now and then. They usually turn out to be awesome.

    Another good point is that chemistry is elusive and cannot be forced. Of course chemistry is real and valid, and a wish to play on that chemistry equally so. But chemistry is a somewhat vague concept, and we often decide too soon that it is absent. I think part of the reason for that is that chemistry is often confused with attraction, especially physical attraction, and players may decide there is none based on that. Chemistry is definitely something that can be built on and created to some extent. A famous example of “artificially” created chemistry are the “36 Questions” that will cause people to fall in love.((Arthur Aron, et al., “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (1997): 363-377.))

    For individual larpers, it can be a delicate task to balance the need to play with somebody with whom they feel chemistry with giving all co-participants a fair chance at the interactions they need to play their character. Like with many things in larp, being conscious of why we play in a certain way is half the battle: when we favour play with someone we know we have chemistry with instead of working to build that chemistry with a newcomer (or someone that we might not feel immediately drawn to), this should be a conscious decision.

    Many larpers have told me over the years that it is immersion-breaking for them when people look different from how they would expect their character to look. The key here is, of course, in the word “expectations.” Expectations are learned and cultural, and very much a product of the other stories we consume through media. And because they are learned they can also be unlearned, and adjusted in the fictional worlds we create so that larps can be more inclusive and empowering.

    But even in cases where there is an objective physical disconnect between participant and character, such as older participants portraying teenage characters and the other way around: people are always more important than larp. Nobody wants to be limited by their body and only be allowed to play certain characters because of it. It is sometimes telling how the same people who easily accept that someone with green paint on their face is a goblin struggle to treat the 50 year old participant as a young princess.

    Another Way of Thinking: Individual Participant Responsibility

    I believe that larp is full of unwritten social contracts. As a community, we should keep stressing that in-game relationships are an example of such a contract, whether written by ourselves in pre-play or by the larpwrights.

    Doing our best to approach other participants based on their character’s attributes instead of their real life attributes is also a social contract.

    People can be very dependent on their co-participants for enabling their play, and we are all at least partially responsible for each other’s larp. If we abandon a relationship during the runtime, or if we ignore the behaviors we should embody towards a character, there will usually be very little opportunity for that person to replace it. In other words, their larp will suffer immensely from our rejection or passivity.

    So my opinion is that when we create larps as well as when we play, we should keep in mind that:

    1. You owe it to your fellow participant to at least try to play the relationships as designed, of course barring safety issues.
    2. You owe it to them to communicate clearly and early if you really cannot play on the relationship as designed any further for whatever reason, so they do not waste their precious playtime needlessly pursuing it.
    3. You owe it to them to try to play something with them. If it turns out there is no way to be a loving, caring father-figure to them, is there anything else they could use? Could the relationship turn harsh and bitter? Could you become an ideological advisor in their political career? This way you at least spend some of your play-energy on co-creating their experience, which is part of what the relationship is about.
    4. You owe it to them to take them and their characters seriously.

    Managing the way participants interact, and finding solutions when something goes wrong, is a shared responsibility between the individual participant, the co-participants and the organizers. If one of these three does not do their part, the problem will persist.

    Of course all these things also apply to lifting others’ play in general and not just to people struggling due to the biases of co-participants. But if we all try to make it cool to play on the character instead of the participant, those biases will get way less of a foothold.

    Now that we have outlined the issue, let’s look at what we can actively do to improve our larps and behaviour. The following sections are a compilation of advice and ideas gathered over the years, both for organizers and for participants.

    Tips for Organizers: How to Limit Physical Discrimination at Your Larps

    Design and Casting

    • When designing a larp, think about the form that concepts like being important, being in charge, and being desirable take in your fiction, and how that may be expressed. It is very possible that this form will roughly be the same as in current Western society (youth is beautiful, being loud is being powerful, etc.) but it should not be an automatic choice.

    Maybe being quiet is seen as being thoughtful and thus important in your setting. Maybe age is attractive because it shows experience as a lover.

    If you have ideals about making the larp empowering for everyone, changing some of these expectations may be a tool to achieve that. It then must become an integral part of the design: if this is not clearly communicated before the larp and in the characters, and the active expressions related to it are not workshopped, participants will probably default to what they know.

    • When casting for a larp, take a chance on certain participants. It is tempting to cast people who seem like a perfect fit appearance-wise, but try to focus on who really wants to play on the character’s attributes. This precaution won’t help the people who have grown too afraid to even ask for certain types of play, but it is a step towards being more inclusive. If you find it hard to keep biases out of the picture, consider enlisting help to blind-cast based purely on participant motivations. When the organizers ignore participant appearance in casting, this will stress that inclusivity is a value of the larp and the participants are more likely to follow suit. Your casting has the power to be hugely empowering for participants, not in the least because it will provide the alibi they may need to take a leap of faith and play a challenging character.
    • The promotional materials should reflect the desired situation. If all photographs from previous runs that are picked for the website only show conventionally attractive participants, the idea that the larp is mainly meant for them will settle in the minds of the participants and make the larp harder for those that do not look like that.
    • Organizers should make it explicit in all aspects of the design that participants are expected to lift each other. Luckily, it is increasingly common to include a clause against discrimination based on out-of-game features, or texts like on the Inside Hamlet (2014-) website:((Participation Design Agency, “Is this Larp For Me?” Inside Hamlet, last accessed January 20, 2021.)) “All genders, sexualities and bodies are invited to act wicked and be beautiful at this larp.”

    However, a single written mention is not enough. Consider: are you also bringing attention to this issue in the workshops? Do people know if it is something they can contact the organizers about, and how? In short, how is the ideal “enforced” during the larp itself?

    Remember that most of the time, participants’ behavior is way more subtle than outright discrimination, and is often not a conscious decision. As an organiser, you have the power to raise your participant’s awareness by reminding them that the group expects fair, non-discriminatory play, and that they ought to keep an open mind.

    • Keep in mind that certain play cultures can greatly value “realism” in looks. When creating a larp with participants from many different cultures, this may influence their attitude towards other participants right from the beginning of the larp. It then becomes even more crucial to manage expectations and clearly communicate your values, especially when the designers’ own play culture is more aimed at inclusivity, which can lead to unspoken norms.
    • Make sure to also (or mainly) design platonic relationships. If romance and desire are not central to the themes and story of the larp, do not make it the central vector of the relationships you write.
    • Another tool for larpwrights, if workable with the design, is to refrain from defining the relationship too precisely. A way to do this is to stress what the characters do together instead of what they are to each other, and let them fill in the blanks: is the relationship romantic or a different form of closeness and intimacy?

    This freedom makes it much easier to make the relationship work. This method has been successfully used at larps like the Androids trilogy.((Do Androids Dream? (2017), When Androids Pray (2017), and Where Androids Die (2018) by Atropos Studios.))

    • Make sure to write multiple relationships with enough variation in their nature, both so participants have sturdy fallbacks when facing potential rejection, and so that the participants have examples of other types of relationships that do work for them, and that they can possibly turn the one that is not working out towards.
    • Communicate to the participants that playing a type of relationship (romance, for example), can take many forms. Romance doesn’t necessarily mean physically close or overly affectionate, and can always be shaped in a way all participants are comfortable with.

    Workshops and Preplay

    Good workshops are essential, especially if a larp is strongly based on pre-written relationships. Line-up workshops can help to make participants alert that for example character age does not always match participant age. If your larp involves a lot of authority relationships, practice how to play those. Even if romance is not central to the larp, it is still a good idea to create workshops around romance and, if applicable, touch.

    This will give people a chance to get to know their co-participants and get comfortable with each other. It is an opportunity to discover chemistry with strangers and to discuss expectations. If people are more relaxed with each other, they are more likely to try to make the larp better for those co-participants.

    If you really cannot integrate those types of workshops, at the very least make certain that there is sufficient time before the larp to get to know each other, and encourage your participants to talk to each other about their expectations.

    Whether it is an informal conversation or part of a workshop, explicit discussion among co-participants on what they expect and want to play creates confidence and makes it easier to hold each other accountable.

    • Chemistry is definitely something that can be workshopped. There are many workshops in use to build levels of comfort and understanding for larp, though not all of them well-documented. WILT (2019)((WILT (2019) by Karete Jacobsen Meland and Mads Jøns Frausig.)) is a larp with good examples of these workshops and is available online.

    If you want to invite your participants to develop physical chemistry, you can workshop around finding beauty in one another: for example to take one thing they find attractive about the other person and focus on that. Including these types of workshops stresses the fact that chemistry and play compatibility are to some extent malleable, and giving the participants ample time to find that connection increases the chance it will work out.

    On the Styx,((On the Styx (2019-) by Evolution Events.)) a relationship-heavy larp, is another example of a game with a set of workshop-exercises specifically dedicated to creating chemistry between the participants of characters in intense relationships. They involve a combination of extended eye contact, physical touch, and looking at and appreciating things about the other, and participants have reported a lot of benefit from those.

    If you want to invite your participants to develop general chemistry, you can workshop around what makes the characters fond of each other. For instance, as someone taught me, you can create a workshop to develop character relationships based on statements such as “you like/love me because…” (i.e. “You love me because I always remember to buy you a present after a business trip”). This is a technique that I now personally use in my own larps.

    I found that it neatly works around the physical because participants are the ones making decisions about their own characters’ desirable traits, which ultimately makes it easier for them to steer the focus away from their looks.

    •  If your larp is more of a sandbox, be aware that your participants are likely to be more nervous to step out of their typecast due to lack of alibi, and that many, if not most, will revert to personal preferences when picking co-participants for relationships and allegiances.

    Unfortunately there is no perfect way to create inclusive relations: having pre-written relationships means there is a chance for lack of chemistry or outright rejection that can hurt a lot, and letting participants make relationships during the workshops or preplay will make for more comfortable play but usually favor the well-connected and conventionally attractive participants.

    Keep these things in mind when designing and running team- and relationship-building workshops or other pre-larp activities. Try to take steps to mitigate this effect and address it directly, multiple times if needed: ‘it makes sense to write your character with your friends in mind, but please keep an open mind and involve participants you do not yet know as well. Do not underestimate the power of explicitly communicating values such as openness and personal responsibility to your participants.

    • Using badges, ribbons or other markers to opt in or out of play types has become somewhat commonplace over the years.

    Consider also using physical signifiers for characters to visibly convey meta-information about for example desirability or fame, so the participants are less likely to fall back on their own opinions instead of those of their character.((For example in Dangerous Liaisons (Muriel Algayres, 2019), where a ribbon signified physical attractiveness. For added fairness, the participants were unaware which characters had the physical attractiveness trait when choosing them.))

    • Be available to mediate if needed. Participants should know that being ignored by their relationships is something the organizers and/or safety persons are here to help with. Making sure there is a culture of trust on your larp is always important, but because voicing these types of concerns feels incredibly vulnerable, it will be tougher for them to trust you with this. By actively checking in with participants and asking them how it is going and how the relationships are working out, you can make it much easier for them to talk about difficult play rejections.

    Try to find a sweet spot between helping people change relationships that do not work for them, and making sure they give it a fair chance.

    Tips for Participants: How to Be a Decent Co-participant to Everybody

    Once the larp starts, the responsibility mostly switches to the participants. Here are some tips on creating positive and inclusive play.

    During Runtime

    • Keep calibrating and communicating with your co-participants. By expressing that a situation makes you nervous, should it be because you are afraid you will not be cool, smart, or pretty enough to do it justice, you can make people more alert and supportive. Give them a chance to help you.
    •  If you do get rejected, take a step back and get support from your co-participants or organizers. Try to not let the feeling fester, and focus on the fact that the rejection says more about them than about you, even if it often doesn’t feel like it: try to actively bring to mind larps in which a similar relationship went well for you.

    Then get help from the organizers to find the play aspects you needed from that person in another participant (for instance respect, someone to bully in-game, someone who admires you, etc.), or go to a trusted friend. If you wait until after the larp, it is too late to turn the experience towards the positive again.

    • Co-participants: be on the lookout for ways to be a fallback for what others drop. I am a big fan of the article “Do You Want To Play Ball” by Josefin Westborg and Carl Nordblom (2017), and even though this framework mostly addresses narrative play propagation, it is applied to characters as well.

    When looking for someone to swindle during the soiree it makes sense to immediately go to the charismatic boisterous man in the centre of attention, but is there also someone more in the fringes and does their name tag peg them as a wealthy industrialist? Not immediately going for the easy option is also a skill that can be trained. You can make someone’s larp and who knows, maybe you will discover your new favorite co-participant?

    • If bad chemistry persists, it can be a good choice to just play the relationship as written anyway, of course depending on the larp specifics and how much it will negatively influence your own larp. Sometimes, making a relation more performative and less intimate can work: the relation can be publically played out, which will lift your co-participant without putting you in a setting that might make you uncomfortable. You might be able to trick your mind and discover that, through performing the relation, you can actually develop an emotion or chemistry, even if it is not entirely based on the other person.
    • Remember that it is alright if some things just don’t fully work out, as long as you give everybody a chance to have enough good play. We sometimes put so much stock in building that overwhelming, highly immersive experience, that we forget that it doesn’t have to be perfect.
    • What if the participant of, for example, your very important boss, simply can not pull it off? It is important to still give them the appropriate reaction and lift them as far as is needed for their character to work. If you were really looking for a certain type of play from the relation, for example having an authority figure to look up to, you can then seek some of that play with other characters, rather than undermining your predesigned relation by counterplaying. If we are never given a chance to play something, we are never given a chance to grow and learn.
    • Depending on play culture, immersion can be valued over co-creation, or the other way around. And when different play cultures come together, misunderstandings arise. Do not assume that the other character understands you are, for example, ignoring them because your character is depressed and you want to immerse in that. It is better to have an extra out-of-character check-in than to have them wonder if your in-game lack of enthusiasm has to do with one of their perceived out-of-game qualities. This can also be a good moment to check how you can help them find other play, which is in this case even more a shared responsibility.
    • In a panel discussion, one of the participants suggested workshopping a non-intrusive phrase, similar to how we use and workshop safety- or escalation phrases. This phrase should communicate to a co-participant that they seem to be interacting based on the participant’s attributes instead of the character’s, or that they are ignoring an aspect they should lift. Their suggestion was to interject with the sentence “Don’t you know me/them, I am/they are…”, and remind them of the attribute they are ignoring. For example, “Don’t you know me? I am the commanding officer of this unit!” This, or a similar phrase, can be a way to make people aware of their behaviour without interrupting the larp
    • In larps that use a physical messageboard of sorts to request certain types of play, that board can be made explicitly available for asking people to adjust their attitude towards your character.

    It is not always easy to differentiate between what people would like (“I would like to have more torture scenes”) and what they need to be able to play their character (“people need to stop disobeying my orders or I can’t play the general”). However, it is essential to train that skill and stress the difference during workshops: the first is a soft offer that can be negated by, for example, the oppressor participants being out of energy, while the second is quite essential to the larp and should not just be dismissed.

    After the Larp

    Like with many other aspects of the larp, debriefings are important. Talking after successful in-game relationships in terms of what worked for you and why, can change future larp relationships for the better. You can use this information to get valuable insights in how you personally create chemistry with your co-participants and how you can turn the play around when you are struggling. As part of your individual after-larp process, try to reflect on what made it easy or hard to respect certain roles in terms of status and expertise. Be honest with yourself if that was (partially) to do with how the participant looked.

    In Conclusion

    Recently, the discourse about larp seems to shift from being very design theory-focused to putting more thought towards participant skills and what happens when we play. I think that is for the better for multiple reasons, not in the least because it stresses that a good larp is a shared responsibility between participants and designers.

    To find appropriate tools to approach a complex subject such as participant exclusion, we need to keep talking. We need to keep talking as participants, so that the fear and experience of being excluded can be something that is openly discussed, and so that we can watch out for each other. And we need to keep talking as designers, and make the existence of appearance-based prejudice one of the parameters when making design choices for our larps.

    By communicating clearly about desired behavior and values, we can work to truly make our larps as welcoming and empowering as we always hoped they were.

    Bibliography

    Aron, Arthur, et al. “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (1997): 363-377.

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

    Banaji, Mahzarin R., and Anthony G. Greenwald. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Delacorte Press, 2013.

    Kemper, Jonaya. “Wyrding the Self.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta, 2020.

    Kemper, Jonaya, Eleanor Saitta, and Johanna Koljonen. “Steering for Survival.”  In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta, 2020.

    Meland, Karete Jacobse, and Mads Jøns Frausig. 2019. “WILT.” Google Drive, last accessed April 24, 2021.

    Participation Design Agency. “Is this Larp For Me?” Inside Hamlet, last accessed January 20, 2021.

    Vejdemo, Susanne. 2017. “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.

    Westborg, Josefin, and Carl Nordblom. “Do You Want To Play Ball?” In Once Upon a Nordic Larp, edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand, 130-142. 2017.


    Cover photo: Image by johnhain on Pixabay.

    This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    van de Heij, Karijn. “We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps for Participants and Organizers.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).

  • Russian Roulette in Practice

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    Russian Roulette in Practice

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    Players Casting: A Case Study from the Larp Skoro Rassvet

    This article describes the selection process used for high-resolution dramatic larp called Skoro Rassvet [Breaking Dawn] (2012, 15 players). Its advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Knowing that we could take the risk because the number of potential candidates exceeded the number of offered roles several times over, we decided to perform an experiment and select players according to their motivations and abilities.

    Generally in the Czech larping community, the opposite problem is more common: how to find enough players for your larp. Nevertheless there are several events (especially chamber larp festivals and certain specific games) which tried to resolve the same problem as we did. The most common approach is the “click fest” (applicants are accepted solely based on the time of registration), friends-only (one simply chooses people she personally knows), and “pay more to ensure you will be selected”. For a number of reasons we decided not to follow any of these possibilities. Instead we prepared a questionnaire with the ambition to measure the multi-dimensional concept of players´ motivations and abilities.

    There were five questions in the questionnaire. First the applicants had to watch a three minutes’ clip from a Czech modern movie adaptation of the Karamazov Brothers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVXAZM3vDSs; English subtitles included). The clip shows a scene where all  brothers are arguing with their father about God, immortality, drinking and women (all these topics were used in the larp). The scene is expressive enough to provide number of associations for answering questions. We chose this clip also because it refers to our larps setting and the movie is about a group of actors playing a theatre drama, mingling their real lives and drama characters (which is in fact quite close to larp). The video was followed by five open-ended questions the applicants had to answer:

    1. Choose one of the main characters from the clip and describe one of his or her aspects, attributes or attitudes which figured there using 3 sentences. This question measured the understanding of the character and sensitivity toward roles of other players. Unfortunately, we failed to perform a final check of the questionnaire and this question (with the same youtube link) occurred twice with different wording. It confused and even discouraged certain applicants. In the evaluation we focused only minimally on the repeated question. We collected a wide variety of answers which were rather difficult to compare (varied from list of character traits, hypothetical past, dynamics of relationships toward the others, to interpretations of inner emotions and possible adaptations for larp), but the length of an answer highly correlated with its the richness and adequacy.
    2. If it was a scene from a larp, which scenes could follow after this one? This measured another aspect of the larpers´ imagination. We were quite satisfied with this question as it was quite easy to evaluate (finally we decide to score the question primarily on the basis of the number of relevant suggestions).
    3. Which elements from the clip are interesting for a dramatic larp? The intention of this question was to measure the understanding of dramatic larp. After evaluation we realized that the players understand the concept well. We received a wide variety of tips: gestures, building conflicts, the themes father versus sons, a clash of authorities, a subtle indication about Ivan´s lover, Christian values, a promise, secrets, an intoxication, an icon, a reflector, props, the table as the center of the scene, a fainting, the seemingly retarded brother and so on. In retrospect I feel this question measured the time one is willing to spend with the selection process rather than the understanding of the concept much more that the others.
    4. Would you like to deal with any of the topics you have seen in the video? Or are there any other topics from Russian literature you think you are interested in and want to deal with in the larp? There was no correct answer, but we had two reasons to ask this. We wanted to see if there is overlap with the topics in our game (and yes, everyone got at least one topic), and we use it as a secondary guide for selecting roles. Applicants mentioned more than 30 topics including family, alcoholism, rationality, traditions, faith, (low) price of the life, war, boredom and love.
    5. In which way are you willing to prepare for the larp? I have to admit that for me personally this was the most determining question. As it was an open-ended question we received a large variety of answers. Some of them were really surprising: “I’ll certainly come”, “I’ll get there in time”, “I’ll do what you tell me to do” and “I’ll be looking forward to it”. Than there were some serious answers: “I’ll go through the materials several times”, “I’ll talk to someone who knows a lot about Russian history”, “I’ll watch the movies/dramas/read books”, “I’ll bring some special props with me”. And my favourite was: “I’ll learn a poem by heart”. Each activity promised received a certain number of points. And even though we did not check if the promises were upheld, it seemed to me, that players we really prepared for the game.

    The positive aspect of the questionnaire was that it self-selected the applicants very effectively. We know about a number of people who did not manage to fill it in or refused this type of application. There were several arguments ranging from “I didn’t have enough time” and “I’m not clever enough to fill it as I don’t know anything about larp design/Russian history” to “Your questionnaire is stupid, I’m not at school anymore” and “I’m a skilled larper/famous larp person/your friend and that’s why I’m don’t have to go through this process”. Nevertheless we had to select 30 from 55 applications.

    We decided to score each of the five answers with 0, 1, 2 or 3 points. The higher the score, the better the answer. The evaluation was blinded, so we did not know which set of answers belongs to which applicant. After detailed discussion the question no. 4 received lower value than others. We made a sum index and realized that applicants were naturally divided into three groups: approximately 18 of them were in the “green” group with the clearly highest score (these were accepted), around 15 were in the “red group” with the lowest one (these were refused). But so far we had “yellow” middle group. In this group the differences among individual applicants (or rather their scores) were rather small and it was impossible to divide them clearly.

    After all we had to select 12 among 22 applicants, which meant we still had to adopt other criteria than those based on the questionnaire scoring. We applied several not very systematic modes of selection: we went through the evaluation once more and reevaluated some answers, we preferred those who already applied for previous runs and for some reasons did not took part and finally we chose three of our friends. The reason for the last step was simple: it was too personally difficult to refuse them (we had to refuse our friends from the red group anyway). To the rest of the yellow group we offered places only in case someone cancelled their participation the game. After the whole process the overall feeling was rather negative. It was time consuming to evaluate all the written answers and the differentiating power was not strong enough, especially among those in the yellow group.

    But after both runs we found several positive unintended aspects of the selection: players came in time, they were motivated and well prepared and all of them had read the pre-game materials. Moreover, compared to the previous runs during workshops it was easier to explain to them how the larp should be played. All of these aspects are unusual and we have not seen them all among players of previous iterations. It seems that selection process did not choose the most skilled ones but those who respected our rules not only during the application process but also during the on-site workshops.

    To conclude: I have to admit that the selection process itself raised negative emotions around some part of the larping community. The questions only partially measured the dimensions they should have measured. In the end we actually measured the willingness to spend free time with the questionnaire and the ability to accept not very precisely set criteria given by us. This application method discouraged quite a large number of potential attendants in advance. On the other hand as an unintended consequence all the players were highly motivated to take part in the workshops and the game itself. In the future we will probably use the questionnaire only as a partial criterion, improve question wording (and omit questions 1 and 3) and more clearly communicate the questionnaires purpose. All in all I believe that this method of selection is still better than those commonly used in Czech larping.


    Skoro Rassvet [Breaking Dawn] (2012, 15 players)

    Skoro Rassvet is a high-resolution dramatic larp. The game was about Russian aristocracy in mid-19th century and it is inspired by classic authors like Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and others. After the first run of the game, the players spread very positive word-of-mouth feedback among the Czech larping community.

    Credits: Martin Buchtík, Sarah Komasová, Petr Platil, Markéta Haladová, Tomáš Hampejs, Jaromír Vybíhal

    Date: November 2012 – April 2014 (7 runs in total)

    Location: Vacíkov u Rožmitálu pod Třemšínem, Czech republic

    Length: game – 7 hours, workshops – 10 hours

    Players: 15

    Participation fee: €50

    web: www.rassvet.cz (in Czech only)

    photos: https://www.facebook.com/martin.buchtik/media_set?set=a.10202235993481935.1253094743&type=3