There has been said a lot regarding safety mechanics, tools and the safety mindset on nordiclarp.org over the last ten to fifteen years: Design discussions have taken place, talks and workshops have been held at Knutepunkt/Solmukohta, publications in the respective books have been published, and discussions between people who are volunteering — meaning working — in safety, have raised awareness about the need for safety at larps.
One topic that has not been talked or written about much is the work and visibility of a Larp Safety person.
Articles from 2017 give very good insight into the work. Problems and techniques of working as a Safety person have been addressed, such as giving players the space to express their feelings without being judged, when overwhelmed or anxious, offering them empathy, and validating their experiences and emotions. We have discussed how it fits into the community work as a whole, such as advising organizers on safety concerns and designing workshops or debriefs.
One thing that remains ironically obscure for many players is the invisibility of the person and their investment itself. With this invisibility also comes missing appreciation and the risk of creating a lack of people willing to engage in this important community work.
It seems the requirements to work as a Safety person are not widely known. Also, most players and even some organizers might not know what a Safety person actually does and what the experiences before, during and after a larp are like for them. We often know about the strains and stresses of organizer’s work, know about burnout risks and talk about what players struggle with, but what about the people in Safety teams?
What I experienced at an international larp I was doing Safety for, was players asking me after the game if I had a good time, or how my game was. I was a bit baffled to be honest. Of course, they meant well and maybe intended it as a conversation opener. But then a realization hit me: while the Safety people are often recognized in their role, their actual work and the individuals behind the role stay mostly invisible. Players rarely ask themselves if this job is easy or not, enjoyable or not?
Why Is Safety Hard?
As a Safety person, you’re skipping out on a perfectly fantastic larp you’re not actually participating in. You actively invest your time, vacation days, sometimes travel costs and energy to care for others. For this, you put other people’s needs first, making their well-being your priority.
People usually don’t come to the safety person when the larp runs “well” for them and they are happy, proud of something, or want to talk about how great everything is. Players usually also don’t interact with the Safety person if they do not have a specific safety need. Thus, the Safety person might be invisible to those who didn’t need them, during the game or even at the after-larp party.
To make sure everybody is emotionally safe, Safety people use various techniques, including: validating people’s experiences, being compassionate, being empathic, and offering space to the players who might need exactly that — a safe space to feel and deal with their emotions without being shamed, judged, or left alone.
Effective Safety people try actively not to give in to very human impulses like the need to “fix things” for other people that have a problem before they are ready. Often the “fixing” comes only after a player feels heard and having their concerns taken seriously before looking forward and being able to focus on getting their game or larp experience back on track. They also try not to quickly get out of an uncomfortable situation, even if it would be easier for them.
Another aspect of Safety that might pose difficulties is that you often have to keep things said or experienced anonymous and/or confidential — depending on what the person affected wants — as much as you might like to vent or share your “burden” afterwards. A player with a safety issue needs to trust the Safety working in their best interest as well as they are not seen as a “problem player” afterwards. This means you have to be as careful with what you communicate – similar to a lawyer or priest, just without the vows and training. Sometimes it is not possible to maintain confidentiality even if the person wants that, for example if a crime has been committed, or other kinds of situations. Anonymity yes, but confidentiality, not always. Similarly, a safety person should make the main organizers aware if there is a problematic person in the group. Also with the wrong information going out you and /or the affected player might face retaliation from other players or the community.
One strenuous factor is the “on-call” or “standby” situation that Safety people are in most of the time. People who have ever experienced on-call service or standby duty in work life know that this can be exhausting, creating internal tension as one can always expect to be called to action.
An important ability to have is self-regulation skills, because sometimes, even a Safety person can’t help with a problem. This means having to endure the helplessness of not being able to “do” something about a problem. Or there are situations where their own insecurities or past traumas are triggered, they become emotional themselves and they still have to try and focus to not get distracted with their own thoughts or bodily reactions – which is a strong argument for having a Safety person instead of loading that responsibility onto the shoulders of a single person. This, and the work that comes before (designing Safety mechanics and workshops, being involved in the flagging process if there is one, holding workshops) and after (doing debriefs, taking care of issues that might come up, after the actual event is over) takes a lot of energy out of many Safety people I have seen working on larps.
Additionally, people frequently underestimate the role of Safety. Sometimes, organizers, writers, and designers also do the Safety job — and in most cases they are usually pretty much detached from the larp (which is sometimes their own!) As an organizer or writer, they suddenly stop sharing player’s or even organizer’s overall experiences, seeing and hearing mostly the negative experiences that people had with content, scenes, other players, or even themselves.
The Gender Factor?
One factor weighing into the invisibility is that many people acting as safety people — in my experience — are socialized as women. Care work, putting the emotional wellbeing of others into the center of their work, being empathetic and trustworthy – these jobs are often taken on by people with female socialization and are mostly also silent and invisible. Women organizers can struggle with invisibility. And maybe this care work often done by people socialized as women is taken for granted as well. People socialized as men might be afraid of being called out themselves, which might make them behave in ways that are dismissive and even hostile to safety people (especially in public conversations, but also in defense of their friends, critiquing safety culture, etc.). Furthermore some participants may not feel comfortable talking about safety problems with a man Safety member — particularly if the problem is a gendered one, as they often can be.
At one larp event in the past, two other people and me, who were doing Safety on top of other tasks like writing and designing the larp — all socialized as women — experienced complete invisibility, not even being invited to team meetings or being credited after the game by the main organizers.
This is frustrating, demotivating and creates the opposite of the will to encourage community service, especially if the nature of that work aims to be discreet and low-key to protect the involved players which in turn can lead people who are not involved to assume there weren’t any issues at all. To keep larps safe for all people involved, this problem also reflects our communal societal need for change.
Visibility-Enhancing Checklist for Your Next Larp
Taking over the function as a Safety person is important and meaningful. Many larps need a Safety person to support players especially in conflict-heavy games, but also in games that may be light-hearted on the surface. And to be able to support someone, helping people to feel understood is its own valuable experience.
The following recommendations and behaviors are meant as tips and ideas, targeted at all parts of the community. They might make it easier for safety people who are spending their time to help us feel more empowered, safer and braver. And maybe they help encourage other people to become active in the community.
Safety People
Prioritize your own well-being, practice setting boundaries, and state your needs bravely.
Talk more about your work! Demand visibility even if your instinct is to be a “silent supporter.”
Connect and share knowledge with each other and maybe even with like-minded / interested people.
Design workshops / trainings to teach Safety techniques to others and support each other as peers.
Find players or people from the organizing team who check up on you regularly.
When and where possible, work in a team to support each other, not feel alone and also be able to take sufficient breaks or tap out yourself if need be.
Don’t do Safety at your own larp – beside from the potential disconnect with the joy of seeing how your work turned out, players may be reluctant to voice a problem to the safety person, if it’s an issue with the organization or with the design – for fear that it will be seen as criticism.
Organizers
Introduce Safety people as well as how to contact and where to find them thoroughly before the larp.
Inform yourself about what your Safety people are doing.
When possible, make sure your safety people are not responsible for other runtime logistics and especially do not have them play any important role in the game to not confuse their responsibilities / loyalties.
Care for your Safety team member as a person with needs and emotions.
Check-in with them every now and then.
Involve the Safety people throughout the process as safety is important at all points of design and implementation.
Put together an Internal Procedures document (Stavropoulos et al. 2024) to establish clear courses of action in crisis situations.
If there are decisions to be made about issuing bans and the like, please separate this from Safety. It should be the main organizers who issue warnings and bans, not the safety people themselves. Safety people can make a recommendation that someone be expelled from the larp, but in the end it is the organizers of the event who have responsibility to take that decision. Also it decreases the risk of being targeted for enacting consequences or for not doing enough.
To make them feel included and part of the team, ask if they want to join GM meetings or other team meetings. (It can also be helpful as Safety, to know how the game is running).
Ask if they’re interested in having updates about the game.
Credit & thank them after the event (as you would your fellow organizers, kitchen crew, tech support, etc.)
Players
Remember the name(s) of the people in the Safety team and show them (especially at the afterparty) that you care for them as individual people.
Learn to identify and communicate your needs so that a Safety person knows how and what to offer.
Safety people are not in a therapeutic relationship with players. They can provide support in times of overwhelm or crisis, but they should defer to external help, such as ambulances with mental health professionals, if the crisis continues and longer term support is needed. It is also not their job to mediate disputes within the community.
Take reflection and self-regulation seriously and practice identifying your emotions and setting boundaries outside of larp.
Be mindful of what you are asking for – don’t use the Safety room or the Safety person as entertainment for a couple of hours, just because you don’t want to play or be alone.
If you don’t know what to do to make people feel safer but are interested in learning: Read up on those skills (like “validation”) and ask Safety people you know if you have questions. Most are open and happy to help you and share their knowledge and skills.
Take responsibility for your well-being, do your own risk- assessment of whether a larp is for you, and plan how to respond beforehand if troubles come up.
If you know about your triggers, medicational needs, or even what helps you in moments of emotional flooding or overwhelm: Communicate that to the Safety people before the larp so they can better support you individually.
Let’s make this community even more competent and safe for everyone – including the Safety people who try to make sure everybody feels safe at a larp. Let’s be mindful of how we’re treating them, so that we have more people in the future interested in doing this work.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the editorial team at Nordiclarp.org for their comments: Mo Holkar, Elina Gouliou, Kaya Toft Thejls, and Sarah Lynne Bowman.
Lindve, Petra, and Rebel Rehbinder. 2023. “We Organized These Larps Too!” Presentation at Knudepunkt, Sweden, May 19.
Kocabaş, Ezgi Özek, and Meltem Üstündağ-Budak. 2017. “Validation Skills in Counselling and Psychotherapy.” International Journal of Scientific Study 5, no. 8: 319-322.
Rather, Jill H., and Alec L. Miller. 2015. DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents. Guilford Press.
The current common safety practices of flagging someone as unsafe to attend a larp were created to handle predators in the scene, specifically to protect sexual assault survivors. However, flagging is also commonly used to prevent people from attending a larp for lesser reasons, such as a bad breakup, disliking someone’s communication or playstyle, simply feeling uncomfortable around someone, or loyalty to a friend who experienced bad behavior from the person. Our goal with this article is to bring these issues into the open for further discussion.
While created with the best of intentions, flagging as the main safety practice has helped create several undesirable consequences that negatively impact the larp community. These include: an imbalance and misuse of anonymous, concentrated, and hoarded power; a toxic culture of pre-emptive or retaliatory flagging to avoid any potential interaction outside a narrow comfort zone; and a requirement for organizers to become police, judge, jury or relationship therapist for attendees.
The current common flagging practice used to ensure event safety in many international larps consists of providing a list of participants to everyone planning to attend. Participants then can anonymously flag other players as unsafe, meaning people who should not be at the event at all, or as someone they don’t want to play with. Typically, people who are flagged unsafe are removed from the event while the flagger gets in. The flagging is not questioned and stays anonymous, although sometimes organizers will investigate and discuss the matter as much as they can without risking the anonymity of the flagger.
Although this practice helps protect the flagger, it is increasingly problematic because anonymity creates space to abuse the system, not unlike how discourse degrades in online forums where a person’s identity is hidden. Additionally, the scope and intention of the flagging system, built to stop sexual assaults, has changed. It has become a system to protect one’s comfort zone instead or to shift responsibility for managing one’s emotions and interactions to a third party. As a game organizer, Nina for example has seen flagging reasons such as: ”They sent me too many messages after a larp and I felt uncomfortable”, “They are my ex and it’s awkward.” and ”They always complain after a larp and cry too often.” Maury has also seen reasons for flagging including “They have a big ego and dominate play” and “They were abusive to my friend in a past relationship.”
When these types of reasons are used – and succeed in removing others from a larp – flagging is no longer about player safety. Flagging is being used to avoid resolving conflict that is an inevitable part of human contact in any community and to create cliques of players who ostracize others. People whose behavior is disliked in any way, especially cis men, get dropped from larps and, in worst case scenarios, ostracized from the larger larp community, because they may have behaved in a way that made someone uncomfortable. Flagged players generally do not get information on how to improve, denying them the opportunity for restoration.
Knowing that you can get someone removed from a larp simply by anonymously clicking a cell in a spreadsheet leads to a misuse of power. A player who does not like another player can simply flag them and ensure they will not have to see them at an event. The threat of weaponizing the flagging safety practice is also unfortunately common. Nina for example, has been threatened that they will be flagged as an unsafe player from now on unless they stop talking about an issue in the community, online and outside of larp events. Misusing the power inherent in the system for your own gain is all too easy. Being flagged once can also lead to a cycle of continued flagging, using the rationale that if another larp removed them, there must be a valid reason.
Flagging creates problems for organizers too, who need to act as investigators, mitigators, police, judge and jury unless they simply drop all flagged people without question, which leads to the problems already described. Organizers may also be asked to perform hours of emotional labor listening to players in conflict. Adding the responsibility to guarantee safety of participants to this is a huge amount of work that is highly biased, mainly based on rumors, and ultimately thankless. Any larp organizer who does not drop a flagged person, for whatever reason, risks being called unsafe themselves, leading to backlash, ostracization and even abuse from players who disagree with an organizer decision.
No set of safety tools and player support systems will guarantee that every moment of every larp is free of situations that may be problematic or outside of a particular player’s comfort zone.
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.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
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.
Photo credit: Image by Julien Tromeur from Pixabay. Image has been cropped.
Content Advisory: Statutory rape, sexual abuse, organizer negligence, manipulation
A Finnish man is dragging his luggage behind him as we approach a subway station in Rome. We both have wheeled suitcases with long handles, and while I carry mine down to the station, he drags his along the stairs. Bump, whirrr, bump, whirrr, bump, whirrr, bump…
“Aren’t you worried you’ll break your suitcase?” I ask him.
“No,” T replies, “if it breaks, it was a bad suitcase. I don’t want a bad suitcase.”
Little did I know, during the production of Dragonbane, I would become that suitcase.
Fifteen years ago, Dragonbane was played in Sweden. I was in the three-person team who begat it all, three years prior. I was the second, and the one responsible for the story, setting, and name of the larp.
The other two were Fýr Romu and T. My first book, the roleplaying book Myrskyn aika (“Age of the Tempest”) was about to be published when T came to the door of my studio apartment in Turku one day with a proposition. I have chosen not to use his full name.
“I am going to make a larp about a mechanical dragon. I want to set it in the world of Myrskyn aika, and I want you as the creative lead on this larp.”
(They might have used the word “main designer,” or “head writer,” but the meaning was the same.)
I knew T from before, us both having taken part in each others’ larps since the mid 90s. He was not a close friend, but I dare say we knew each other quite well. And knowing him, I had my doubts about his leadership style. His earlier big projects, the Wanderer larps, were known for bad management and burnouts.
“Yes. There were problems, but I have learned my lesson,” T told me in his deep voice. His deep, convincing voice.
Then he showed me their plans. A Finnish forestry company has an experimental six-legged logging machine. Like a robotic ant the size of a truck. With the published book giving us a professional status, we would convince them to loan that machine for the larp. Before that, we would recruit Fýr to build an animatronic dragon around it, and we could have it walk around in the larp. The dragon would be able to turn its head, make facial expressions, and even breathe fire. T and Fýr were both interested in pyrotechnics.
We did, indeed, soon recruit Fýr who, like me, was studying in Turku. He had a crooked smile and a ginger ponytail. I believe he would not object to me calling him a mad inventor. I did not know him then, but we are still connected now fifteen years later. I am still not sure if Fýr is younger or older than me.
Myself, I was a young artist and writer struggling with burnout, depression, and tendonitis. I believed larp is an art form and a medium, and wanted to prove this to the world. My professional writing career was just getting started, Myrskyn aika being a major breakthrough since it was published by a proper book publisher and sold in book stores. I was young enough to still be looking for mentors, but experienced enough in the larp scene to be wanted as a mentor by others.
Together, we set to work creating the coolest fantasy larp ever.
Plans and Realities
This was a time when the Nordic larp scene was still in its infancy. We had met foreign larpers at Knudepunkts, and taken part in some of their larps, but this was going to take all that to the next level. We would recruit an international team and create a mega-larp for 1200 players with pre-written characters. And the animatronic dragon.
Now, we did not have the dragon yet. We had our eyes set on a prototype made by Plustech, a Finnish subsidiary of the multinational corporation John Deere which makes tractors and forestry machines. But, T convinced me, once they see our plans, they would be idiots to say no. After all, what a prototype needs most of all is visibility, and that we could promise them. Imagine going to a forestry trade show with a dragon!
We had crazy plans. We would transform fantasy larp forever. We would have players from dozens of countries, making this by far the most international larp at the time. We would create the best larp in the world. Through pyrotechnics, magic would really work! The village would have bespoke wheat fields to reap, which would be sown months in advance. The budget would be one million euros. Every off-game item from cell phones to underwear would be forbidden. We would utilize experimental augmented reality technologies. Our trailer would feature Eddie Murphy and be shown in film theatres.
We quickly started to recruit teams of builders, designers, writers, and producers. T made plans for getting us sponsors and backers, Fýr started drawing blueprints for the dragon, and I went to work on coming up with a concept for the larp.
The recruiting process was a strange one to say the least. People found out they had been recruited when they started receiving messages from an e-mail list they had no idea they were on. Communication and leadership were chaotic, and I probably share some of the blame for that.
My own notes on who is working in what capacity are odd reading now, eighteen years later. We very quickly recruited Christopher Sandberg into the production team since we knew him as the hotshot producer of the Hamlet larp. The next time his name is mentioned in my notes, he is running the writing team together with me. Eventually he replaced me as the creative lead.
Mikko Rautalahti wrote in the Finnish Larppaaja magazine about how unflattering the project seemed from the outside. This rant was published in early 2004 so a long time before the larp actually happened:
The organization behind the project was constantly in flux … Communication between the different teams didn’t work, so for example the costume team made their plans based on an already obsolete player count without checking with the people in charge of the plot. As a cherry on top, some French harebrain decided to post a good portion of the project’s inner discussions online for the whole world to see, which obviously created even more confusion among organizers as well as the public.
…
The project checked all so-called [T] boxes. Even though the creative lead of the project is Mike Pohjola who has written Myrskyn aika and is known for the groundbreaking inside:outside, and has often demanded for more emphasis in larp writing, the producer [T] kept doing his own thing, recognizable by stunningly ambitious plans and a completely haphazard execution.
…
On the other hand, [T] is also known as a man who spits in his hands, takes the scarily big bull by its horns, and wrestles that monster to the ground regardless of how many people are standing by, saying it can’t be done.
…
One can’t help asking, does the game really have to be this big? Is the content such that realizing the vision really needs more than a thousand players – or is the true reason for the size simply the need to seem important?
Translated by myself for this essay.
This sort of feedback simply made us more determined to prove this could be done.
The Story
I had written a Middle-Earth tabletop roleplaying scenario for the Finnish roleplaying magazine Magus (published in 2001 in the magazine’s 50th and last issue). It was about beornings and dragon worshippers journeying into the Grey Mountains to encounter a dragon, and then, perhaps attack it, or bargain with it, or betray the others to it. I had written plenty of history for the dragon worshippers, and even added a note saying the adventure could be turned into a larp.
That became the first seed for the story of Dragonbane. The first brief went like this:
Two ancient peoples have been at war for longer than anyone can remember. It all began with a Dragon, god to some, enemy to others. Now, the dragon worshippers have almost won, and the last remnants of the once proud people have set a call for heroes: Who will slay the dragon?
The last few days have seen the arrival of several chivalric orders, a handful of mysterious sorcerors, and many strange travellers from lands afar. Some are there to contest for the right to slay the dragon, others (like the dragon worshippers) are present to argue against the slaying. And, of course, many people are there just to take advantage of all the foreign dignitaries.
…
What secrets does each hero carry inside them? What is your dragon? When it comes down to an epic battle of Good and Evil, you must decide what you think is Good. And pray to your gods you got it right.
That is where the project got the name Dragonbane from. (Later on, Christopher and I would try to change the name to the more appropriate Dragontide, but T deemed it too late.)
As the story was developed further, we listened to feedback from different team members, most prominently the country coordinators and the writers. Christopher and I talked endlessly on the phone about how to tackle the different creative issues we would face with having a thousand players from very different larp cultures with no time to get to know each other beforehand. The idea to use Finnish style pre-written multi-page character descriptions was soon scrapped.
The village of the dragon worshippers soon became Cinderhill. But it was not until later when Christopher was the main designer when we switched the approaching adventurers into the dragontamers and the witches. Those two groups, along with the dragon worshippers of Cinderhill, constituted the character mega-factions in the larp.
My plan was that Cinderhill would not be the typical feudal-capitalistic pseudo-medieval village of fantasy larps, but something like a religious cult and a Soviet commune. One of our Estonian team members had grown up in a Soviet commune, and did not see this as a very positive thing, but I tried to convince her Cinderhill would be a utopian version of that.
I, as a published author, was T’s trump card, and he took me to many meetings with sponsors and local authorities to show that he had a professional writer in the team. I would typically pitch the story of the larp to the potential partners, and then on the way home, write a letter we could send to our teams and the existing partners. In fact, much of my early work was writing these press releases instead of designing the larp.
Here’s one such letter, written to invite fantasy larpers into the project:
While larp is a fun hobby everywhere, there’s all the time more and more people saying it doesn’t have to be just fun, it can be an earth-shattering, world-changing miracle. Some larps in Northern Europe have made a stab at this. In the last few years, we’ve had larps like Europa, Panopticorp, inside:outside and Hamlet.
…
Until now, fantasy has been over-looked by the larp creators who wish to take the medium forward. Fantasy has long been stagnating into a tired collection of Tolkien clichés, but Dragonbane will reinvent fantasy for the 21st century.
…
We see larp as a medium very close to shamanism, magic and fantasy. With Dragonbane we aim to renew not only fantasy, but larping, as well.
Quite soon after we had announced the project, we were already on the way to Italy to be guests at Lucca Comics & Games Fair. I am still not sure whether we were really guest of honor, or if the local larpers just told us that. The “other” guests of honor included Larry Elmore and Margaret Weis, and we were quite starstruck.
We flew to Rome, T dragged his suitcase to the metro, and we took a train to Pisa, from where we were driven to Lucca. The local mayor cut an actual ribbon at the opening ceremonies of the convention.
We had two talks Friday, one about Nordic larp (which was called larp in Northern Europe back then) and the other one about Dragonbane. Everything we say was translated into Italian so the audience could understand us. We wondered at how these people could larp fluently in English.
In the evening I ran a small larp, I Shall Not Want, which was focused on subdued character immersion at murdered businessman’s wake. For many of the Italian participants this was their first non-fantasy larp, and the first one where the focus was on character immersion.
We did our best to network with the local larpers, and T put me to work writing lots of material for Dragonbane.
One morning at breakfast we noticed Larry Elmore was sitting alone at another table, eating his eggs. We knew him as the biggest fantasy artist of our childhoods, having made the cover of the Dungeons & Dragons red box we grew up with. T wanted to recruit him, I advised against it. Nevertheless, we went to his table, and introduced ourselves. Larry assumed we were random fans. He smiled politely and said hello.
Without blinking an eye, T started an unsolicited pitch on Dragonbane with his very strong Finnish accent. “And we will actually have a real animatronic dragon! Now, do you think that’s pretty cool or what?” Larry kept nodding politely, but it was obvious he did not believe a word we were saying, and wanted to be left alone. T took this as his cue to ask him to create original dragon art for us. Larry said something vague like “Sounds real interesting,” and promised to get back at us. He did not, of course. We were just two European crazies who interrupted his breakfast.
Later on, with a similar pitch, T did manage to attract the Argentinian dragon artist Ciruelo. The art on the poster was made by him.
The Rabbit Hole Method
Christopher Sandberg, a passionate Swedish larp designer and producer, delivered several long game design documents which included everything from the setting to costume design of the individual groups. We discussed the topics day after day, week after week, and finally came up with what we saw as a breakthrough: The Rabbit Hole Method.
The larp would start with the players in their regular clothes, suffering complete amnesia. They would not know who or where they are. Walking around in the woods, they would find clothes that feel much more appropriate, and slowly start to remember that they are, in fact, a dragon worshipper from the village of Cinderhill, or a witch, or a dragontamer. They would change into their real clothes, i.e. the costume. They would remember their new name, and find friends and family that they know quite well but they are also meeting for the first time.
This would take a few hours, and then they would arrive at the village or some other group location, where they would already be in character, and dream-like go about their business making paper or fetching water or starting fires. And then the larp would go on like a regular larp.
The Rabbit Hole would solve so many issues, mainly the players not knowing each other beforehand, and being able to play in their own languages as well as whatever English they can muster. Nowadays we would have workshops instead of trying to solve these issues in-game.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Rabbit Hole is also a metaphor for taking hallucinogenic drugs. Some people did pick this up, and it again was a blow on the public image of the project.
We felt this was an ingenious solution. But our Danish country coordinator who had promised us fifty Danish teenagers said this was way too experimental for them. The kids liked to beat orcs in the woods, not take part in strange ritual dramas. (I am sure many of those former kids are running full-blown ritual drama larps now.)
Christopher and I felt we could convince the Danish teenagers, or forget about them. But T was worried about our player base. This was a thousand-person larp. We must have those teenagers! So, the Rabbit Hole was scratched, and we started to look for a more traditional approach.
We still did not have a location for the larp, but we did not want it to be in Finland. The neighboring countries Estonia and Sweden seemed good options.
The team got in contact with Estonian larpers and a location scouting team left Finland on a ferry.
T brought along his legendary Humvee which was known as “The Finnish Bar” in many Knutepunkts since he held unofficial parties there with lots of booze. I never went, but knowing he was later incarcerated for sex crimes, it is hard to know how much grooming happened at those parties.
Nevertheless, the car came in handy driving to the Soomaa national park in south-western Estonia. Sometimes we would cross bridges that were only barely able to carry the car’s weight, and all the passengers would have to get out and walk.
Local larpers took us to explore Soomaa on boats. It is a vast area of bogs, forests, and meandering rivers, where Estonian freedom fighters and bandits used to hide. The area that on the map had seemed suitable, proved to be completely impossible. It was a virtual jungle, and in the summer would be full of rapid animals and violent boars.
The evening was reserved for workshops. The production people including T and Mikko Pervilä held their own meeting in one part of the house we were using, while I talked with some of the writers. Fýr ran a third meeting for the Estonians who were present, and their job was to come up with a name for the dragon. I had no idea such a key element of the fiction was being crowdsourced, and when later that evening I was told she is called “Beautiful Death,” I simply thanked them for the input. This, obviously, got them quite irate, having just spent hours coming up with a good name. (And it was good.)
I went to visit the production meeting and I discovered a very drunk T angrily explaining to Mikko Pervilä about how he does not understand the project like T himself does. And Mikko, exasperatedly trying to get some point across. The Estonians probably did not get a very good impression of us.
The next day T took me to meet the director of the National Park. He was polite and interested, and promised to stay in touch. (He did.) He also suggested a different location, parts of which were on privately owned land, and could be built on.
The new location was idyllic, you almost expected to find a hobbit village somewhere. The area was mostly plains or dried swamp, with small forested areas providing contrast. A beautiful river ran slowly through the plains, providing an interesting in-game obstacle for anyone needing to cross it. There was a ruined farm house with just the chimney remaining, and a wild orchard in the yard. Berry bushes and apple trees had started to spread in the nearby lands.
We figured we could build our village right on the outskirts of the national park. T envisioned a grand main hall for the village that he could then use as his personal summer cabin after the larp. “And I’m sure some envious larpers will twist that around to sound like I’m only using free labor to build myself a huge cabin! But after a project as huge as this, I think I’m entitled to something for myself.” Another possibility would have been to testament the cabin to the whole team or to one of the organizations behind the larp, but these were not mentioned.
For some reason, there was no room in the Humvee for me on the way back, so I had to take a series of Soviet-era buses to get to Tallinn and the ferry. This gave me time to do some of the writing tasks T had given me, including writing a letter about the successful Estonian scouting trip for our team and sponsors. Typing on a laptop in a bouncing bus, hands hunched like a vulture’s feet, was not good for my tendonitis.
The bus-ride turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I later found out T’s Humvee had broken down on the country road he had been driving. I was not there, but I remembered his comments about the suitcase in Italy. “It broke down, so it was a bad car. I don’t want a bad car.”
Still struggling with stress, depression and the wrists, I was starting to suspect, if I would break down, too, before all this was over.
After we had publicly announced that we had chosen Soomaa as the location, the Estonian authorities did, indeed, contact us again. They said we absolutely cannot use the National Park since many of the things we have planned are directly against the rules of the park and the laws governing it.
T and I were both quite angry and disappointed at the Estonians. If someone had made sure of this a few months earlier, we would have saved hundreds of hours of labor, by skipping the whole trip. In retrospect, it was us, the main organizers, who should have made sure of that.
Suspect Parties
Many of the bigger project meetings took place at T’s home in the countryside between Turku and Helsinki. There were also several other people there, some from T’s larp organization, some his friends, others just people hanging around. Or maybe they were all involved in Dragonbane. I discovered Fýr was now employed by T’s company.
The workshop weekends included meetings and commonly prepared meals, but also lots of extracurricular activities, including clearing the garden of dried shrubs. I did not take part in that. I was also a teetotaler at the time, so I could not fully participate in the other program which mostly consisted of drinking games in the sauna, drinking games in the pool, and drinking games wrapped in towels.
There were always teenaged girls around, and these older men wanted to get them drunk. I did not know the girls, maybe they were involved with one of them, maybe they were just working on the project, maybe something more sinister was happening. It was hard to tell, and knowing what I now know, I should have spoken out more clearly. Today, I would characterize the atmosphere as toxic.
We writers did have actual productive meetings, though, although sometimes they felt more like seance sessions, with us trying to decipher what Christopher was saying over a long-distance phone call on speakerphone.
The rumors and the strange mood and the “use them until they break” style of management obviously led to many, many people burning out, quitting or just quietly disappearing. This meant we had to constantly find new people to take on those positions. People kept coming and going. Christopher as creative lead was replaced by others before the project was over.
For Solmukohta 2004, Juhana Pettersson and I designed the art larp Luminescence, produced by Mikko Pervilä. It is known as “the flour larp,” since we had a room filled with 750 kilos of wheat flour. Plenty has been written of that larp in other articles, but cleaning up after the larp was quite a hassle.
T wanted me to be in some Dragonbane meeting, while I was expected to be cleaning the room. “No problem,” he said, and ordered two teenaged volunteers to go clean the flour room while I took part in the meeting. Needless to say, the volunteers simply left the project, and I later got an angry call from the janitor.
Luminescence. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.
At a later stage in the project, a larper woman I was dating told me T had asked her to join Dragonbane‘s music team. Having seen what was going on at those project workshops, I did not feel them to be a safe environment for someone I cared about. (Again, I should have worked harder to protect also those I did not know.) I asked her not to participate in the project, and she got mad at me at first, but then agreed.
Since we were constantly struggling to recruit new people, and I as one of the key organizers had just worked against that goal, I finally started realizing I could not be involved in Dragonbane much longer.
Everything Goes Wrong
I was sitting in the audience at an ice hockey stadium listening to a pyramid scheme recruiting event. T was convinced we should have them as our financing partners, and had sent myself, and some of the production people to take part in the event, and then later on try to meet some of the key people in their dressing rooms.
The whole thing was obviously a scam. Obvious to me, but others in our team were not as skeptical.
We managed to get an audience with one of the speakers, and explain our case. Dragonbane could be officially branded by the pyramid scheme, and they would get lots of publicity for their business. They promised to think about this.
When Mikko Pervilä heard about this, he said he would quit immediately, if Dragonbane went through with this. So, the cooperation was cancelled. I am grateful to Mikko for that. (He later quit anyway.)
We had long since forgotten about getting Eddie Murphy for the trailer. Then we found out we would not get the Plustech forestry machine, either. How could we have Dragonbane the great dragon larp if we have no dragon?
The project went through constant changes. The location was switched from Estonia to Sweden, the targeted player number was cut and cut again from 1200 to 400. Fýr’s dragon building crew were hard at work making plans on a new kind of dragon built on top of a truck, but without Plustech, they could not keep up with the schedule.
Christopher and I realized there was no way for the larp to happen in 2005, and managed after long, painful debates to convince T to postpone it by a year. He opposed the change because once he promises to do something, he does it. But, we told him, his promise could not be kept in 2005, but it could be kept in 2006.
Around that time, T decided he had to change his leadership style. This is how he comments on the topic in the documentation book Dragonbane: The Legacy:
“As the project progressed, it became increasingly evident to all participants that the only viable decision making model was a military style one. The more idealistic version proposed early in the game just did not produce results and in a project of this size and with this little time it is not a good alternative. There are reasons why corporations and businesses do not operate on committee or democracy basis.
A smaller, less international project could have succeeded with less dictatorial management, but with Dragonbane the more authoritative style should have been adopted even earlier. In hindsight, it is easy to see that the year we lacked could have been saved by choosing army style project management from day one.”
I wanted out. I was very stressed and felt I would soon break like the suitcase and the car and so many other people in the team before me. But explaining this to a person who does not take no for an answer was not easy.
I told T I needed to do some paying work since Dragonbane was taking up all my time. “How much do you need?” he asked. He proposed I come work for him. Having seen how Fýr was already in a position of T having economic power over him, and now with militaristic style, this was not what I wanted to hear.
In the end I just had to tell him I could not work in the project under any circumstances. “Fine,” he said. “I hope you won’t turn against us and start badmouthing us.” I promised I would not. And I have not written or spoken about my experiences publicly, until now.
After that I became a broken object, someone T did not want around.
A year later the larp was actually about to happen in the forests of Bumfuck, Sweden. (Actually Älvdalen in Dalarna County.) I could not take part in the larp as my mandatory civilian service would start immediately after and if I was late, I would be punished. Travel to and from Älvdalen took so long I could not risk it, but I wanted to be there at the start.
I had read online about how the players who had arrived early had met angry organizers and been forced to work on building the village. The dragon’s neck had broken and it was being repaired at a vocational institute in Finland. Nothing was ready, and there was not enough food for the involuntary volunteers.
Fundin, a Dragontamer player from Sweden had this to say:
Mistakes were made, and I think the main one was not trusting that the players could fix things for themselves, less promises would have made a better game.
Had we been told to bring tents, cooking gear, food and taming tools the game would have been better. There were few who couldn’t bring tents for example, no problem, then only a few tents would have had to be made = less work for the organisers.
I asked about making taming tools and was told to go to Finland or southern Sweden for a workshop… I would have been able to make them at home if that had been cleared beforehand..But *No* was the general answer to any Idea, everything had to be specially made for DB, that was the big problem, and you were not allowed to make anything by yourself without an organiser or a workshop.
When I arrived, the mood among the organizers in “The Bootcamp” was, indeed, hostile. At the time I thought it was because I was seen as a traitor, having quit the project. Now I have found out the mood was hostile towards everyone so it could have simply been lack of sleep. That ten people who should have been there to help were repairing the dragon had taken its toll.
It was clear everything was badly organized and there were not enough people to do everything that had to be done. And not enough cars to get people from the Bootcamp to the larp village to build it. On the other hand, there were a huge number of incredibly beautiful props, fabrics, and such.
I did odd jobs. I cooked a hearty vegetarian meal for the people at the Bootcamp. I remember T being very happy that I took carnivores into account, not realizing the sauce was soy grit instead of minced meat. I helped dye scrolls with strong tea. I helped the players build the village. I held the opening brief for the players in the witch group.
The players and volunteers I met were exhausted and almost delirious. One of them, Tonja Goldblatt, looked at me, unbelieving, when I arrived at the village. They had not eaten or rested properly, and had to work in the poorly organized work camp. When I had wanted Cinderhill to resemble a Soviet commune, this was not what I had in mind. It was certainly no utopia.
I wasn’t part of any main organizing team, but I ended up working my ass off for this project and I burned out. It was no small feat and it did manage amazing things, but Dragonbane broke me for years. For years it was really hard for me to talk about the whole project because of the bitterness. It was my first international larp and turned me away from Nordic Larping for years.
I only caught rumors of the larp itself from the Bootcamp, and then I had to leave. As I was ready to depart, the dragon arrived. They had driven it to a ferry, sailed it to Sweden, and driven it from the ferry to Älvdalen. Its neck was still broken, but it could move.
At the last moment T decided to replace the person who had prepared to play the voice of the dragon. He replaced him with himself. Even though the fancy software could turn everyone’s voice into the dragon’s voice, it could not change his very recognizable accent.
Aftermath
For the longest time I was ashamed of the project. I assumed almost everyone had a really bad time. And sure, many people did. Many burnt out. But for others this was every bit the magical experience we had set out to create. Friendships were forged and sense of wonder essential to fantasy created lasting memories.
In the book Nordic Larp, Johanna Koljonen’s and Tiinaliisa T’s article on the larp starts with these atmospheric words:
I heard the dragon give out a heart-rending shriek. The sky exploded, and pillars of fire shot up behind the temple. The Dragon died – and at that moment it became truly real. The odd angle of the head looked like the twisted position of one who has expired in pain. And its skin, when I rushed in, wailing, towards it, felt slightly warm to the touch.
In the same book, an anonymous Cinderhillian player comments:
We indeed had a working village! When we bakers found out we had bread and cheese, but nothing to slice the cheese with, one of the village smiths made us a perfectly good cheese-slicing tool!
Charles Bo Nielsen recently reminisced on the group Larpers BFF:
I would like too add that as someone who was 18 at that larp, it was an amazing experience, first major international larp for me. So heavily coloured from that perspective.
There were some really interesting things about the larp. It was insanely ambitious, especially for the times, it had a really really big budget, due to being heavily funded, beyond the player tickets of 130 euroes, which back in 2006 was considered quite the sum for going to a larp.
From my point of view it ended up really grumbling under its own hype, the organizers ended up promising everything and certainly not delivering everything.
In Denmark spinoff larps were run, continuing the story of the dragontamers.
The village that was built was robbed soon after the larp, and then left in the woods to decay. Later on, the local municipality burned it down.
Essi Santala, who worked with Fýr on the dragon, wrote: “I would not be who I am today without Dragonbane. I know it was a devastating project for some people but for me it meant major friendships, togetherness, overcoming obstacles and a sense of awe over what we accomplished over the course of the project. I spent two years part of Dragonbane. It was awesome. Was it a good larp? The question, to me, is irrelevant.”
I would still stay in contact with Christopher, and a year after Dragonbane we would found a company together. Fýr is studying filmmaking in Prague. Mikko has produced many other big events including Solmukohtas.
In 2015, T was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for statutory rape and sexual abuse, and he quit the larp scene.
It is bittersweet to think back on Dragonbane now. Thanks to those who worked for and took part in our visions. Apologies to those that were hurt or broken. I hope young organizers and designers of today are more aware of toxic environments and what to do about them.
I would invite everyone who has memories or questions of Dragonbane to discuss the topic further with me and others.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.
This article is Part 1 in a series on Grooming in the Larp Community.
Content Advisory: Sexual abuse, mental health issues.
On a bus on my way to Poland, I met Julie, and we struck up a conversation.
It is pretty commonly known that teenage girls can come off as deceptively mature, but as someone who has worked professionally with teenagers, I am not usually surprised about people’s age. In Julie’s case,((This article uses anonymised names. The real names are only known to the author. )) she certainly seemed mentally older than her 19 years. It did not occur to me at the time that her maturity might have had a cost.
We found out that we had a lot in common and agreed to meet up for coffee once we were back home. It was only after a few talks that I came to know of the things she had been through.
Role-playing is a hobby that spans the gap between adults and children. While this gives us a great opportunity to interact with and even form friendships with people outside our own age group, it also means that romantic and sexual relationships occur. In that sense, role-playing isn’t different from football, basketball, scouts, and many other hobbies. The difference is that in role-playing, there are no clear guidelines to what is acceptable or what is not. As opposed to e.g. the 113-years-old scouts movement, we are a young hobby without an established hierarchy or procedures.
I have noticed that many people are accepting of these relationships. But should they be? Does love conquer all differences — including age?
Are Relationships between Teenagers and Adults Harmful?
As it turned out, Julie was one of the many young role-players who had experienced grooming.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, grooming is “the criminal activity of becoming friends with a child in order to try to persuade the child to have a sexual relationship.”((Cambridge Dictionary. N.d. “Grooming.” Cambridge Dictionary)) And that is exactly what happened to Julie, with role-playing as a backdrop.
Julie described herself as having been a lonely child. She felt ostracized at school — people would bully her for being a nerd. She was preoccupied with manga, Harry Potter, and games, while her classmates were discussing boys and make-up.
Things were not easy at home. Julie’s parents had divorced when she was five. Her mother, whom she lived with most of the time had found a new husband — one who didn’t like kids, and had very strict rules. He wedged himself between Julie and her mother, and expressed how much he looked forward to the day when she was old enough to leave home. Her father, on the other hand, would alternate between harsh criticism and undeserved praise.
Julie told me of how she got into contact with her abuser, “When I met H, I was 12 years old and starving for kindness and acceptance, and when he offered it to me, I ate it all up. You get less picky when you are really, really hungry.”
H. worked in an after-school youth club (a common form of childcare facility in Denmark). Julie described him as “the coolest adult ever.” He was a larper, and he organised trips for the kids to go larping. Also, he told Julie that she was his favourite.
When Julie was 13, H. began inviting her back to his place, where they could be alone. He would also take her out to sushi restaurants. One evening, after a visit to a restaurant, H. took Julie to a secluded wooden shelter in the forest and had her perform oral sex on him.
“I remember throwing up and shaking with disgust,” said Julie. “But I also felt so happy I could scream that I was his favorite.”
The Price of Belonging to a Community
For Julie, the pain and disgust were a price she was willing to pay for H’s attention.
At the same time, H also began taking Julie to adult larps. He had to sign a form saying that he would take responsibility for Julie while she was at the larp since she was underage. It was like the wolf signing for the sheep.
“I was so proud,” said Julie. “He told me to lie to the other participants and tell them I was 14. That way they would accept us more easily, he said.”
H also brought Julie along to his boardgaming events. Julie estimated that she was the only person under the age of 30 at those sessions. She knew that the people she met there were not really her friends — she was seen as an extension of H — and she knew it. Still, it was better than not having a social life.
As Julie got older, H’s demands got worse. Although she still slept at home during weekdays, she visited him every day in his small flat, and played along with his make-believe. It was like they were role-playing an adult couple.
“I was so grateful for the company and I would let him perform more and more different sexual acts on me as the previous ones got boring to him,” Julie explained. Along with the one-sided sex, he also became more controlling. He demanded that Julie count calories in order to stay skinny, and she had to remove all body hair. She began to develop an eating disorder. Starvation made her exhausted, and she barely had energy left for anything else.
When Julie started high school, she somehow found the strength to leave H. She had fallen in love with a boy at school, and that gave her a reason to move on. “I guess I had a glimpse of something different,” she said. “Could I just be a normal person going to school, having a boyfriend, going out after school instead of having to get the first train back so I could do the dishes of this adult man who had become my life?”
An anti-abuse event in Berlin. Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash.
Where are the Parents?
Here is another account, as seen from the point of view of a mother.
Karin was the mother of a happy and smart 13 year-old who happened to love larping. She described her family as pretty harmonious. She and her husband were divorced, but had a very friendly relationship, and were good at working together when it came to the children.
Like Julie, Karin’s daughter had a lot of adults around her. Also like Julie, her daughter was perceived as being mature for her age.
Karin saw herself as a liberal person. She thought there were lots of things children could learn from having adult friends, and she loved the role-playing community. Trusting that her friends would protect her daughter from harm, she let them look after her. Little did she know that these so-called friends were using her young daughter for sex behind her back.
It was statutory rape, but at the time, Karin’s daughter would have denied it.
“The problem is that people are very focused on ‘no means no’,” Karin explained to me. “But teenagers don’t say no. They say a resounding ‘yes’. They agree, body and soul, to having sex with this adult who is so interested in them.”
And she continues,“Children have no idea what that yes means. They just don’t know. They might also think that downing an entire bottle of vodka might be a good idea, even though it might actually kill them.”
It took many years before Karin realised what had been going on. In the beginning, her daughter told her nothing, but she started getting ill. She suffered from shattering depression and had trouble with her studies. Karin was confused: What had happened to her lively, intelligent child? Only when her daughter was in her late teens did she start talking about what had happened. Her daughter had kept it all secret.
When Karin found out, she immediately contacted the police. Both men were sentenced and went to jail.
As for Julie, she and her mother went through a period of estrangement. H had told Julie not to trust her own mother: “She just wanted to separate us because she didn’t understand our love,” was what he told her.
Julie’s mother accepted that there was nothing she could do. Even when Julie told me about her experiences, she believed she would have threatened to run away and never see her mother again if her mother had reported H to the police. That is how much of a hold he had over her.
The Role of the Larping Community
Thinking about Julie and Karin’s experiences, I feel ashamed. Ashamed of the larp community — my community — but also on a personal level. This has been going on since I started larping. Why haven’t I done anything about it?
You might think that what happened to Julie and Karin is unique or at least rare. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
I am one of the witnesses who is here to tell you differently.
So why did I not react?
Because I didn’t know any better. I was repeatedly told by both the abusers and their friends that I needed to accept these relationships. I was even told by the children themselves to mind my own business.
There are some very strong voices within the Danish community that are telling us to be open and accepting to all types of love, no matter what the age difference might be. Asking questions is perceived as “ageist.” Not accepting relationships between adults and teenagers is framed as prudish and meddlesome.
The general position at Danish larps and larp conventions is that unless there is a conviction, there is no reason to call out the behaviour. People who are known to have repeatedly dated very young larpers are able to use our community to pick up teens.
However, to Julie it turned out that even a conviction didn’t change how people saw the relationship she had been in with H. In the beginning of 2018, Julie went to the police. She went through a mentally draining procedure where the police questioned everything she put forward and demanded evidence of her.
Once confronted with his actions, H. denied having had sex with Julie while he was still working at the youth club. Since it had only happened while they were alone, Julie had no way of proving her accusation.
In December of 2018, the case went to court. H. was sentenced with a fine and community service.
After the sentence, Julie experienced a backlash from the Danish role-playing community. H. was part of an extensive network of friends who were willing to support him, and who attacked Julie for having taken him to court. The general feeling was that she had been a willing participant, and old enough to be taken to account for her choices. They saw the charges as an attempt to ‘ruin’ H.
Anyway, if she was not happy in the relationship, why did she stay so long?
“Can you know that you are unhappy, even if all you’ve ever experienced are different flavors of misery? I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but that was my situation,” Julie explained to me, when I asked her the same question.
Within the Danish community, there are several examples of well-liked and influential roleplayers who have had relationships with either young teenagers or people who were in fact their pupils. Although some of these relationships are not allowed legally, people are willing to overlook them, because of the general feeling of goodwill towards these persons. However, what people are most likely not aware of is the long-term damage done to the teenagers due to the asymmetrical power distribution in such a relationship.
Karin, too, described being disappointed with the role-playing community.
“It was not just those two guys!” She said. “It was 30-40 other adults who bought my daughter alcohol, who saw her drunk and saw her flirting with adults without telling me, the mother”.
A female larper whom Karin considered her friend knew about the repeated rapes for an entire year before she revealed it to Karin.
The Long-Term Effects
According to a report by the Danish national board of social services,((Click here to download the full report as a PDF.)) PTSD is one of the most common reactions to childhood abuse in adults. Although reactions are individual and dependent on both the severity of the abuse, the duration of the abuse and the role of the abuser, there is a long list of common symptoms: anxiety, depression, low self-worth, problems with body image and sexuality, suicidal or overly sexualised behaviour.
It was the same for Julie.
“I mean, how doesn’t it affect me?” she said, when I asked about how she is still affected.
She went on to describe the long-term physical damage to her body from the strict calorie counting that had been forced upon her. The damage to her bones, teeth, and fertility.
“Less concrete but just as consequential for my health are the nightmares. It is very rare that I can get a full night’s sleep without waking up from nightmares once or twice. Sometimes they are about him touching me, sometimes he kills himself (as he threatened to do countless times), and sometimes I’m just back in his apartment, doing everyday things. If anything, the latter dreams are the scariest, as they are often the most realistic and the ones it takes the longest for me to shake off of me once I’m awake.”
Julie has attempted suicide several times and attributed these attempts to the abuse as well.
She also found it hard to have romantic relationships. She described to me how her first experience with relationships and sex had twisted her idea of what a normal relationship should be.
“I have a hard time handling conflict, as my body and brain shuts down in preparation for the situation to escalate into physical violence. At the same time, things I should see as red flags are not even registered by my brain. Certain behavior that other people tell me is manipulative and cruel seems normal to me, and normal human behavior which I should be able to expect from anyone, not only a romantic partner, can bring me to tears because of how kind it seems to me and how undeserving I feel.”
There was nothing Julie would have wanted more than to move on. However, the consequences of the abuse was not something she was able to just shrug off.
For Karin’s daughter, it took more than ten years from when she was raped and when she was finally able to overcome the PTSD, the anxiety, and the personality disorder that were direct consequences of the abuse.
The Healthy Relationship?
Is it even possible for a 16-year-old and an adult to have a healthy relationship? Perhaps a more relevant question is this: What does an adult want to get out of having a relationship with a child?
As the power balance between adults and children is naturally skewed to the benefit of the adult, it is not a stretch to suspect that what they are after might be a situation where they find themselves in control. We are then looking at is a narcissistic drive to be sexually and otherwise dominant, in which the adult is interested neither in their responsibility nor in the moral duty to protect the child.
In the role-playing community, a lot of adults have grown up feeling stigmatised. We were called names — nerds, geeks — and perhaps we did not get a lot of attention. Growing up and becoming the subject of a child’s adoration might be tempting. Perhaps even too tempting. We, the peers, need to interfere. We need to ask questions. We may even need to report our best friends to the police if they refuse to change their behavior, if that is what is necessary in order to stop this culture of abuse.
Cover Photo: An anti-abuse event in Berlin. Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash.
A community is made up of a group of individuals and the larp community is particularly broad, encompassing people who take part in a range of different activities that come under the heading of larp. These can be vastly different, ranging from competitive larp, to larp with immersion as a goal, to solo larps and larps with thousands of participants. Possibly the only thing that the members of the larp community have in common is that they adopt a character to participate. The differences in what larp is can make discussions of community difficult to frame.
This year, the majority of larps including one of mine have been cancelled due to COVID. When the organizers announced their decision to disappointed players, they were met with almost universal support. When I postponed my larp, in addition to supportive players saying that they understood, and it was the right decision on the social media post, and in response to e-mails, I also received several private messages acknowledging that it must be disappointing for me. There was no expectation of me to manage other people’s emotions – just recognition that it was a difficult decision. This is an example of when a community comes together.
However, the community can also have issues. We can perceive “the larp community” as a separate entity that we are not part of, particularly when trying to address the problems that it has. In this view the individual has no responsibility and the community as a whole, sometimes presumed to be guided by influential people, needs to change and improve – to be more inclusive and less toxic.
At the other extreme it’s an unhelpful message to say that, as the community is made up of individual larpers, its problems can be addressed by each person at an individual level. An individual can only do so much and telling larpers to address every problem in the community by themselves is at best naive and at worst ableist.
There are some activities that can, and as far as possible should, be taken by individuals to help improve the larp community as a whole.
Educate Yourself as a Designer and Player.
Consider what choices you’ve made around accessibility and why. Read up on why, even if you aren’t actively excluding people, they may feel excluded. You are always going to exclude some groups unless you get very lucky with logistics, e.g.:
Looking for locations accessible to people with certain disabilities may increase your price range;
Your 20Km hike larp isn’t going to work for people with certain disabilities or who don’t have a certain level of fitness;
Your horror larp may not be accessible for people with certain mental health issues;
Casting by lottery is going to exclude players who are anxious to go without their friends; and
First come first served sign ups may limit access to people who are working or have childcare responsibilities or just a slower computer during the sign up period.
You need to understand and be mindful about this rather than falling into exclusion by default.
Be Helpful and Inclusive, Including with the Organisers and Volunteers.
If you’re going to a larp or a festival, chances are none of the organizers or volunteers are being paid for what they’re doing: in practice, the volume of labour that the organizers have put in is going to be far more than is covered by the ticket prices. One way to contribute is to be helpful and inclusive. Entitled behaviour is stressful for organizers and volunteers. When attending a larp consider what you can do to help, for example being inclusive of new players, helping with setting up and taking down, and ensuring that your communication with organizers and volunteers is polite and non- aggressive.
Be Aware of What’s Required for the Larp You’re Attending.
The majority of larps require active engagement. The is likely to include creative collaboration and working with other participants to creative a narrative that is satisfying for everyone participating. This is not to say everyone has to be the perfect larper, or always in a supporting role – but consideration for other’s experience is necessary. Also, you may decide that what’s required isn’t something you can offer or something that you would enjoy. For example, if there is a requirement that costuming is authentic and you don’t particularly enjoy costuming you may decide that the larp isn’t for you.
Don’t Use Larp as an Alternative to Therapy.
Although larp can be transformative, it isn’t therapy. Treating it as such may have a negative impact on the participant’s psychology. For example, the participant may discover after a scene that they have tried to use a character to explore personal issues and misjudged the long term impact, or forced themselves to play a scene relating to personal trauma, expecting it to be helpful, only to realise that they should have listened to their feelings of discomfort. This is not to say that larp can’t have a psychologically positive impact, but if the participant is trying to work on a specific issue, they should do it with the assistance of a professional. It is also unfair to use your fellow players as adjuncts in your own journey without their knowledge or consent.
Understand and Use Safety Tools in Larps. Normalize their Use.
Participants should never feel uncomfortable about prioritising their own comfort and safety over a scene. If they need to use safety tools to leave a scene that should be considered unremarkable. Organizers should make this clear, but it’s also the duty of other participants to respect tools as they are used and allow play to continue around them.
Be Aware and Considerate.
People have different privileges, opportunities, and energy, which make certain actions easier or more difficult – the important thing is to be aware of yourself and how you relate to others. Some problems you can’t solve on your own but you can be part of the solution.
Reach Out to New Players.
Or if you’re a new player, reach out to people that you’ve had interesting conversations with. Don’t feel it should be the other person’s responsibility – people don’t always have the energy to initiate contact, regardless of their standing in the community.
Accept “No” Gracefully.
Whether it’s playing a certain scene, being involved in a collaboration, or to hooking up after a larp.
Examine Your Own Behaviour.
In terms of general talk of toxicity in the community – check you’re not part of this. There are people who may not recognize that they are actively acting in toxic ways, and examining our own behaviour is always useful. There is also a passive part of this where we might allow toxic behaviour within larps we run, or defend people after someone has disclosed difficult, abusive, or toxic behaviour on their part because they are a friend, or respected in the community. If you have done either of these they aren’t necessarily insurmountable obstacles to you being part of the community but do what you need to do to change.
Look at Who’s Being Held Accountable.
Sometimes talking about the community being toxic can disguise specific bad actors. Look at who’s being held accountable. This is not to say that anyone is obliged to name and confront an abuser.
The magic of community and of finding a place to belong is powerful. I have been very fortunate to have people around me who have supported me in learning and continuing to learn how to better myself and the community around me, while making the process of discovery fun. One of the unique aspects of larp is the emotions that are invoked during play that allow us to be vulnerable with people who we don’t know outside of their character. Such vulnerability is both what we must protect by educating ourselves on safety, and what we can use to become more compassionate and helpful members of any community, starting with the larp one.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Wood, Laura. “Why Larp Community Matters and How We Can Improve It.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
One of the most important tenets of the communities built around Nordic larp these past few years has been inclusivity. “Inclusiveness” was defined by Lars Nerback in a 2013 Nordic Larp Talk as the feeling of being culturally and socially accepted, welcome, and equally treated (Nerback 2013).
From a larpmaker’s perspective, it designates the effort to design spaces in which people who experience discrimination in their ordinary lives are actively supported and encouraged. Over the years, people involved with Nordic larp have consequently developed practical and educational tools to support their claim of being inclusive. For example, papers have been written about how to perform cultural calibration so that players have the same vision and understanding of the culture depicted ingame (Nielsen 2014) or of the actual culture and everyday experiences of the people whose lives are being used as a direct inspiration for the larp (Kangas 2017). Others have written to address discrimination experienced in larp contexts, for example due to race (Kemper 2018) or body type (Kessock 2019).
Those tools, although primarily designed to be used in larp contexts, contribute to shaping the behaviors and practices expected on a community level. Indeed, if larps are the ground from which most social relationships among larpers grow, sociability doesn’t end at larps. For most people, it continues, through Facebook, chat, public meetings, events, etc. That’s why, in this chapter, I will address larp primarily as a community — a social group sharing common interests, supported by a feeling of belonging.
In addition, many (larp and non-larp) communities, seeking inspiration from Nordic larp or following the spirit of the times, also strive towards inclusivity. Those communities may encounter similar problems: inclusivity questions our collective ability to remain actively open while taking part in a group of interests. It is, at its essence, a matter of community skills.
The partial success of the effort towards inclusivity is especially apparent in the increasing visibility of queer people, for example at Solmukohta — from Drag me to KP to “queer at KP” badges to the prominence of rainbowcolored pieces of clothing. However, the larp world remains strikingly homogenous, revealing limits to how inclusivity is currently practiced. Even though it is not true of all larp cultures, most Nordic larpers are white, able-bodied, and come from moderately wealthy, educated backgrounds: people of color, people of reduced mobility, and people with low income or education, are scarce.
Intersectionality, a notion created by African American academic Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), helps us understand how different discrimination (for example, race, ability, and class) combine in ways that make it necessary to address all its aspects in order to understand how a person is being limited or suppressed based on their identity. We must also take that into account in designing for inclusivity.
The aspects we need to consider to make a community effectively inclusive are many: gender, class, race, ability, but also education, and even social skills. Nordic larp was born out of an endeavor to get several emerging larping traditions to share practices and ideas, and it worked tremendously well. However, this creative proliferation has, over the years, built to increase the distance between insiders and outsiders. From the outside, the threshold to participate in the Nordic larping community now seems ridiculously high.
I joined the Nordic scene two years ago at age 23 during Knutpunkt 2018 after a pretty short larping career in France, in the pursuit of a degree in Social Anthropology. I was fortunate enough to have a motive to join (research), a feminist background, and a compulsive learning attitude forged by years of university training. Yet, even today, after spending some time in the Nordics countries, reading as much larp theory as I could stomach, and writing a thesis I’m pretty happy with, it still feels I can never, ever catch up with what was produced during the last twenty years.
As a result, I feel dangerously ignorant of the cultural and social ways of the community, and constantly in danger of making a misstep. I think it is safe to say I’m far from being the only one. Many other larpers I had the chance to talk to shared similar feelings. The cost of access, i.e. the amount of specialized knowledge required to participate in the Nordic larp community is very high.
Some of the cost of access that impedes inclusivity is, in fact, due to the efforts to support it. There’s two sides to every coin: to be inclusive to certain people, a space has to be exclusive of others — and it is not always clear who.
This is the paradox of inclusivity.
In this chapter, I would like to address how “being inclusive” and “feeling safe” come into contradiction, notably in the way that we design community spaces. Then, I will try to question the phenomenon of community violence and how it relies on our in-group conceptions of difference and ways to confront it. These thoughts will help build a clearer vision of what inclusivity does, and can, mean. Finally, I will try to offer practical advice to help us build more inclusive communities, encourage collective reflexivity, and conceive of larpers’ spaces as a piece of a more global society, which needs to become more inclusive as well.
Inclusivity vs. Safe Space: Bringing In or Keeping Out
When trying to achieve inclusivity in practice, the first obstacle encountered is the exclusiveness of general society. Just because a space seems public, or open, doesn’t mean that it is: homeless people are constantly pushed away, people of color are at risk of police violence, openly gay couples often have to fear assault, sex workers are criminalized and stigmatized, etc. Therefore, all attempts to build an inclusive community must deal with the matter of the space in which events, gatherings, or larps take place.
In short, we need to make the participants feel safe. According to Johanna Koljonen, this involves the following:
Participants need to feel seen and secure, they need to know they’re in the right place, and have a reasonably good idea of what kinds of experiences and activities they are about to engage in. This makes them not have to worry, which allows them to be present in the moment and explore the actual instance of the experience in a playful, mindful and proactive manner.
Koljonen 2016
The careful framing of such spaces, the rules and limitations we actively give them, differ from how we experience our everyday lives. There are no safety mechanics in real life, no word that magically stops your boss from yelling at you, no graceful opt-out that’ll let you walk free of a street harasser.
What we try to achieve through all the rules, the caring, the long discussions about consent, is commonly called a safe space. And, as society itself is certainly not a safe space, we need to build a space that is separated from it and tries to counter it, to cancel the prejudices, power relations, and inequalities that we encounter in our ordinary lives.
We try to build an inclusive environment by removing it from society, and by making sure unwanted elements of society don’t follow inside. We try to bring (people) in by keeping (the problems which individuals are a part of) out.
In short: safe spaces, which are instrumental in allowing for inclusivity, are exclusive. Then again, what choice do we have? The world in general remains a dangerous place for many of us. In the absence of other options, we must ponder what we call safe and what (or who) we deem unsafe.
First, it is important to acknowledge that safety is a collective concern requiring all members of the community to actively contribute to the social design that organizers — primarily — come up with. As Maury Brown puts it:
For a community to be safe, all of its members must: uphold the agreed-upon social contract of respectful behavior; be intolerant of harassment, abuse, and assault within the group; share the duty of monitoring behavior and educating new members; support the decisions of organizers to enforce safety norms; and respect and offer support to those who make reports of safety violations.
Brown 2017
These are no small tasks: the exact meaning of words like harassment, abuse, and assault, is far from evident. Safety requirements are specialized knowledge, and contribute to raising the cost of access to communities such as the Nordic larp scene. Fortunately, in larps, cultural calibration tools and workshops provide support, and have shown remarkable efciency in including, for example, autistic people (Fein 2015).
Blockbuster larps and performance or art games marketed to the general public have an ability to attract new faces, thus building an entry point to the community. However, becoming part of the community, being a valid, full member of the group, able to participate in Facebook conversations, is not easy.
In fact, during my first Solmukohta, I felt so distressed and alone (I knew barely a handful of people among the 500, and none of them well) that I spent a whole afternoon in my room writing about “extrovert privilege”. The first time I wrote the Nordic larping community was not actually inclusive was the first time I came into contact with it. Being told this community was “a big family”, it was hard to realize that it was as difficult to take part in for an introvert as anywhere else.
The amount of community skills required to support a safe space is high, and at odds with the concern for inclusivity. To address it we can, at least partly, rely on “herd competence” — hoping the people bold enough to enter our spaces learn by doing in contact with others. However, by relying on the rather elusive notion of safety, we court confusion.
Safety is a many-sided issue: we need to be safe to play, express our identities, meet our needs, voice our opinions, etc. (what Friedner 2019 calls the brave space), but also safe from. There’s a positive safety, rooted in empowerment, and a negative safety, emerging from the perceived need of protection and defense.
Although enforced in more or less tangible ways, safety is a feeling, not a state of affairs. As such, it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with reality: we may feel unsafe while running no risk at all, or engage in risky behavior because we feel safe.
In an interview for the Knutpunkt 2018 Companion Book, Johanna Koljonen says that larp safety “is about feeling safe to play rather than being safe from harm” (Svanevik and Brind 2018, my emphasis). However, this principle of safety offers very little ground for facts. It relies largely on subjectivity.
It is difficult to decide what constitutes a threat, and even more so to distinguish between an actual threat and one we project based on our own past experiences.
What (supposedly) makes the larping community safe or inclusive is primarily the language we use to qualify it: it is safe because we’ve said so. It is inclusive because we’ve written about it. This is what is commonly called, following linguist John Austin (1962), a performative use of language: uttering a certain speech, in appropriate circumstances, may produce effects in reality. When we collectively declare “larp is safe”, we make safety happen, because all of a sudden we become mindful of others, their vulnerability, the precariousness of any social situation, etc. But when we have no clear definition of what “safe” means and the word “inclusivity” is little more than gibberish to many community members, the performative function of language is in jeopardy.
That’s when crises happen.
What We Do to Each Other: Community, Care, and the Making of Forgiveness
We often perceive safety as a human right. As far as I’m concerned, this is true. However, the chasm between “the right not to be shot on the way home” and “the right to not feel uncomfortable” is wide. As Sarah Schulman, author of an essay called Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016), warns:
Feeling “safe” of course is already a problematic endeavor since there is little guarantee of safety in our world, and the promise of it is a false one, as the effort to enforce this is often at the expense of other people.
Schulman 2016:130
There is no way to ensure 100% safety, and by trying to increase our chances, we might put other people at risk. If safety is a feeling, so is the impression of threat, unsafety, or intentional harm.
According to Sarah Schulman, projecting fears and insecurities onto others (the people who are “not us”, not part of the safe group) is common with two attitudes that we usually do not think to associate with each other: supremacy and trauma. Supremacy is the belief that the reference group is superior to other groups (by way of race, nationality, gender, ability, etc.), and therefore their own needs must be prioritized. This can lead to hate crimes, but more mundanely manifests in the feeling that the members of the supremacy group are put at risk of harm by non-members, and it’s therefore legitimate to use whatever means of “protection” against the (imaginary) threat they deem necessary.
In Europe, supremacist ideology directly translates to anti-immigrant laws, horrendous detention camps, and thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean each year.
Schulman describes supremacist attitudes in terms of the irrational feeling that one’s group must be protected against and separated from others, who are deemed dangerous, unworthy, or inferior. She draws a disturbing parallel with the attitude of traumatized people, whose feeling of being unsafe can be based not on actual risks in the present tense, but “a projection in the present based on dangers that occurred in the past” (ibid.). Because both supremacy and trauma are rooted in an analogous feeling that the group is being at risk of harm from non-members, the traumatized can become the supremacist. The Israeli occupation of Palestine constitutes a major institutional example of that escalation.
It is natural to seek to be, and feel, safe. However, when it leads to expecting others to comply with our own (not necessarily clear, visible from the outside, or reasonable) needs, conflict becomes inevitable. Moreover, conflict is often simplified until one can clearly distinguish a victim and an abuser.
The following pattern is common especially in communities using a lot of social media: A person commits, often without realizing it, an act that makes some members of the community feel hurt. These people share their pain, unease or dismay with other members. As more and more people become aware of the situation, the initial feelings flare up and reach a level where the status quo can’t hold, inducing a crisis.
At this point, it seems like nothing can be done: sides are taken, the community becomes polarized, and a stable state is only reached through splitting the community or shunning the wrongdoer. When this process targets public figures, it can take the form of “canceling,” an attempt from an active minority to deplatform a creator by publicly denouncing, slandering, and threatening them and their supporters.
Issues concerning the building of a safe space are involved in such crises. Designating a space as safe leads to the passive exclusion of people who do not know, or feel they know, enough, and the active exclusion of people thought to threaten the safety of the group. By creating a space that is viewed as separate, different from “the rest of the world,” and validating it through a feeling — safety —, those attitudes may lead to creating a critical differentiation between “us” and “them,” and to posit otherness (difference, disagreement, strangeness, etc.) as a threat. As a consequence, it becomes difficult to treat others with the same care as we expect to be treated as rightful members of our community. A Finnish larper who had been part of a recent community crisis as one of the wrongdoers told me: “You heard about the Week of Stories? We didn’t even have five minutes.”
The “Week of Stories” is a short period of time after an event (generally a larp) in which the participants withhold their criticism to give the organizers an opportunity to recover — and let the steam cool down.
As the actions of the organizers of this particular event were deemed outrageous, many attendants reacted by expressing their shock and indignation immediately. These feelings were, of course, legitimate: all feelings, in fact, should be acknowledged — although not always acted upon. In that case, though, the immediate outburst caused the organizers to feel hurt and disregarded in turn.
The rules and norms of care and attention in larps are largely there not to be used: they are there in case of need, but their primary purpose is to support a feeling of “safe enough” to participate — much like a lifejacket or a seatbelt. But when those rules, like the Week of Stories, could come in handy to address a particularly difficult situation, we are not always able to resist the initial flare of emotion.
Unfortunately, social media encourage us to react immediately to stimuli, and facilitates emotional outbursts at the expense of caution and reflection. As the authors of the Living Games’ Crisis Management Workshop put it:
While many communities and events are working hard to make their spaces safer, it’s not enough to have a Code of Conduct. You need to practice it.
Stavropoulos and Steele 2016
Speaking about safety is not enough. Imagining safety measures is not enough. We need to practice understanding why we made those rules.
Violence happens. Conflict happens. But violent reactions, even verbal, even righteous, even targeted at the people who wronged us, are unlikely to lead to positive outcomes in a community. There are other ways than exclusion to support a safe and inclusive space, and resorting to it too often may weaken the space we try to preserve.
We frequently use the metaphor of the missing stair to describe an individual that we know to be “problematic” in a community, yet carefully avoid instead of confronting (putting at risk those who are unaware a stair is missing). It could have provided a nice basis for understanding how to address detrimental elements in a community, but this metaphor was built on a logical error: we don’t fix a stair by removing it, but by safely replacing faulty parts, adding safeguards, and making sure the stair doesn’t put people at risk anymore.
If shunning can be a temporary solution to address a potential danger in the short term, it is not likely to support understanding of the harmful behavior, for the perpetrator or the community.
Being denied the right to speak, the perpetrator can experience a strong feeling of unfairness and rejection. This won’t help them listen and understand the consequences of their actions. As for the community, it cannot reach an adequate comprehension of the sociological causes of the harm done without facing the perpetrator and hearing them too. As a consequence, the community renders itself incapable of preventing similar behaviors in the future. Furthermore, enforcing safety rules using the fear of shunning encourages perpetrators to hide and deny their actions instead of acknowledging them and trust the community to resort to transformative justice.
Transformative justice is a comprehensive and non-legal approach to problem solving and peacemaking that doesn’t seek to punish the perpetrator, but to collectively reach a new state of balance through educating, supporting, and encouraging dialogue. It doesn’t mean that we are responsible for fixing people: in some cases, that would simply be impossible. However, “sacrificing” members of the community who are known to misbehave may be beside the point. In fact, punishment for the sake of righteousness is often beside the point. I believe that it is our individual and collective duty to try to understand the etiology of a crisis. Otherwise an appropriate response remains impossible.
Reaching Past the Choir
By keeping us from reaching more people, building our communities as safe spaces fails to allow us to fully benefit from the educational and transformative powers of larp (e.g. Bowman and Hugaas 2019). To change that, we need to be inclusive towards other kinds of people, to be able to extend the safe space in ways that allow anyone to step in and benefit from the kind of awareness we’ve had.
The para-larp environment is awfully technical, albeit for good reasons: in general society, something as widespread as e.g. sharing one’s pronouns is mostly unheard of. Being for once in a space where people won’t misgender you is priceless — that’s also why I’m not rejecting inclusivity as we usually conceive of it, simply pointing at some of its dark spots.
Most people quickly become allies when they are placed in an environment that is appropriately forgiving with their missteps, yet encourages their efforts in learning and being included. On the contrary, hurtful reactions to honest mistakes can create more anger, confusion, and a feeling of rejection that fosters resistance and hatred. Getting angry happens, of course: but offering the other person an explanation for our reaction can help bridge the difference, and slowly bring them to our side.
Shunning hurts us. When addressing community issues, violence is almost always detrimental. If inclusivity is synonymous with purity, we are not protecting ourselves from harm, but ensuring it happens.
As it stands, the community requires specialized knowledge and legitimacy to talk about many sensitive topics. As a consequence, it is more difficult for newer and low-status members to achieve social recognition, while older and high-status members benefit from a kind of indulgence that might result in unhealthy power relations (especially in the event of a crisis). Muriel Algayres’s article about social capital in larp offers a detailed account of the effects of status differences on play opportunities and social dynamics (Algayres 2019).
The Nordic larp community is inclusive, but not all the time, and not to everyone. In fact, inclusive is, in my opinion, not the right term to use for the larp community: instead, it is queerfriendly, with (white) feminist values, and an education to difference. Not bad, but with a few fixes, we can do better. By understanding that the need for safety may come into contradiction with the ideal of inclusivity we can move to an increased awareness of how to address and support differences in our community. Here are a few steps:
Acknowledging feelings, while at the same time recognizing that feeling alone cannot be the baseline for acting upon a conflict situation.
Ensuring the persons who felt hurt receive appropriate care, but remaining careful in assuming the intentions of the wrongdoers or initiating punishment.
Keeping in mind that being inclusive means making space for different people and opinions to coexist.
Holding the space to hear all parties involved in a crisis, and offering or asking a neutral community member or entity for mediation.
Refraining from immediate social media exposure.
Instead of projecting our expectations based on a unilateral understanding of a given situation, we need to assume the best of others (at least provisionally) and create the space for reasonable dialogue to occur.
A lot of good can arise from constructing a safe space around positive tenets meant to cancel, or compensate, behaviors at play in general society. However, we need to be wary of the risk of seclusion and insularity. Indeed, such a state of affairs would give way to distorted thinking about the state of the world and the intentions of the people who don’t belong. In wanting to defend the group from harm, insular communities may thoughtlessly replicate harmful behaviors such as bullying, shunning, and rejecting difference. In doing so, community spaces become less resilient to change and dissent and thus more precarious.
Inclusivity has to meet a double logic. First, the creation of a safe space allows, from the outside to the inside, to take in people whose identities do not meet the dominant social norms. Second, from the inside to the outside, larp and larp communities can create opportunities for educating people to difference and provide alternative social models that contribute to the struggle against all oppression — a purpose the seminary The State of the Larp in Oslo in December 2018 explicitly pursued.
However, neither the one nor the other should be taken for granted or implied: what makes a space safe is far from obvious, and the power of larp is only as great as the people it reaches. In the design of our larps and communities, we must explicitly ask ourselves: what do we think we are doing, and what do we want to do in practice? To put it provocatively: to make a better place in the world for ourselves, or to make the world a better place.
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989): Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum.
Elizabeth Fein (2015): Making Meaningful Worlds: Role-playing Subcultures and the Autism Spectrum. Cult Med Psychiatry, 39(2), pp. 299-321.
Kat Jones, Mo Holkar and Jonaya Kemper (2019): Designing for Intersectional Identities. in Johanna Koljonen (ed.), Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost, 2019.
Every time the bandwagon “tell me about a strong memory we shared” runs through my Facebook feed, a big amount of the memories told are from larps. Strong immersive larp experiences stay with us. Lending out our physical bodies and our real emotions to tell stories will of course make these stories stay with us players, as memories integrate with our own pasts, tying us together as a community.
Because this transition from larp to everyday life can be messy sometimes, it may require aftercare. And because larp is what brings our community together, I think more of aftercare as a collective than an individual issue.
The term aftercare is borrowed from the BDSM community, and basically means taking some time after a BDSM scene to recover, transition from intense play back to normal, and take care of each other’s physical and emotional needs. Larpers sometimes talk about the same thing as defucking (Bindslet and Schultz, 2011) or debriefing.
The idea to use the term aftercare in a larp context is hardly new (Grasmo 2011), but after listening to two related talks at Solmukohta 2020: Sarah Lynne Bowman’s keynote on integration and Julia Greip’s talk on safewords for brave spaces, I came to think about it again and wanted to write something on it. So in this text I will share some thoughts on aftercare in a larp context: how to do it and why.
When we larp together, we are responsible for each other’s experience. We have the capacity to give each other very strong positive emotional experiences and to mess each other up quite badly. In my opinion we can absolutely apply the Campsite Rule to larping: “You should leave your co-players in the same, or better, condition than you met them in.”
I learnt the Campsite Rule from sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who coined it about relationships with big age or power differences, as a responsibility the older person has towards the younger. This aspect of it can be meaningful in a larp context as well. Differences in age, larp experience or social status can create power imbalances when we larp, and we have to take them into account whenever we talk about safety and consent. This is perhaps extra important towards young or new players, or players from marginalized groups.
Any participant that leaves a larp disappointed, traumatized, or hurt will have an impact. Both personally — these feelings can be hard to get over and haunt someone for a long time — and for the community as a whole, since these things often end up as inflamed conflicts, or with players leaving the hobby.
Another important aspect to me is that this care primarily is a player responsibility — nothing we should demand as a service from the organizers. They will have their own aftercare needs. Take care of your organizers and prevent them from burnout, and we will get even more amazing games.
Photo by @thiszun from Pexels. Photo has been cropped.
Designing for Leaving the Magic Circle
But when do we actually leave a larp? We enter a magic circle and establish a social contract when we larp together, and for successful aftercare, we need to find common expectations of how far this social contract extends.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been through “the train station scene” after multiple larps: the larp is over, the venue is cleaned out, and the participants are about to scatter off to their respective travels home. And we pretty often just end up standing aimlessly and confusedly in a big group of people, reluctant to leave. Most larpers are used to ritually leaving the first layer of the magic circle — going from characters back into players. But I still haven’t been to one larp where leaving this second layer of the magic circle has been smooth or thought out. Transitioning from a player group sharing trust and care for each other into our everyday selves at many different places is often really confusing. And this is one area where many aftercare needs could be acknowledged and handled better if we knew when and how our social contract ends. When do we actually leave the magic circle?
I have experienced a multitude of ways this social contract confusion makes people feel bad after a larp. I have been the player who desperately wants to talk more with my bleedy larp crush, but feels too needy and clingy to ask them. I have been annoyed that my co-player wants to talk with me much more afterwards than I do with them. I have felt bad for not wanting to engage in post-game group hugs, meetups, and lovebombing, and I have felt really alone and believed no one wanted to hang out with me after larps.
I know I’m not alone in having had these kinds of feelings. And I think we could save ourselves a whole lot of trouble if we talked more often and more openly about aftercare needs and where to go from here before we leave the magic circle of a game.
Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels. Photo has been cropped.
Aftercare Needs: There is No One-Size-Fits-All
So, ok. Aftercare is important. But how do we implement it? Well, unfortunately there is no one-size-fits-all for aftercare. But predicting one’s own aftercare needs and being able to communicate about them is a great player skill to have. And it is a skill that we can get better at with more experience and practice.
Most importantly: Yes. Some larps will require aftercare. Sometimes predictably and sometimes in unpredictable ways. This is normal and this is ok. There is a great deal of useful further reading about different aftercare needs and moods. Some people get post-larp drop, feeling intensely sad after leaving a game (Bowman and Torner 2015). Sometimes it’s post-larp charisma — being filled up with intense positive feelings after a larp, maybe getting braver, bolder, or filled with self-confidence. Many of us have experienced bleedy larp crushes on our co-players, great love and sense of community with people we just met and shared a larp with, the Knudeblues when we have to leave our new amazing friends, or strong feelings of rejection and alienation when “everyone else had a great larp and I didn’t” (Harder 2018; Nilsen 2015).
Over the last 16 years of larping, I have learned a few things about my own general aftercare needs and patterns. Preparing for aftercare beforehand makes me feel better and more safe when I larp.
I know that I usually have a strong need to write down my thoughts or story after the larp, so I make sure I’ll have time and equipment to do that. I also know that I often want to be alone or choose my company very selectively right after a game, so I usually book train tickets in the silent compartment where I won’t feel forced to talk with anyone. Even though I enjoy international larps, another need I usually have after an English larp is to speak my native Swedish, so another comfort is the ability to do that with other players or friends.
Back home, I often make post-game playlists where I mix music related to the game experience with my own soundtrack, as a way to integrate the larp feelings in my own memory. I also generally have a need to indulge in the story told afterwards. For example, I spend lots of time in the participant Facebook group, starting lots of threads and sharing memories and experiences. It does help me to feel safe and really engage during a larp if I know there will be a possibility for me to have these aftercare needs met after the game is over.
Most texts I’ve read on the subject of taking care of oneself emotionally after a larp naturally has a self-care focus. And while self-care comes first, and also is much more predictable and valuable to learn to do than waiting for someone else to take care of us (Dalstål 2020), I also want to share some thoughts about how to aftercare as a player ensemble.
Here, once again, although many good articles have been written on post-play activities and debriefing, there is no one-size-fits-all. Cry it out, do physical labor, tell epic stories, cuddle pile, get drunk together, or dance the night away — any one strategy might be what someone needs and someone else really doesn’t. I assume the keys to good post-play is to base the activities on consent and opting-in, and not try to cast all players’ aftercare needs or wants into the same mould.
One thing I want to advocate for, though, is to communicate about how we want the social contract to extend afterwards before we leave the game site. Maybe decide with co-players when and how we will talk the next time, and try to be open about it. For example, tell your co-players if you feel a need for some distance and to go back to your everyday life without engaging in post-larp discussions. Tell them if you are likely to be very emotional and want to connect a lot. It could be a good idea to talk with people you will be playing close with about your aftercare needs even before the game.
I like the idea of sharing hopes and fears with one’s closest co-players or group before the game. A central part of building a safety to culture is finding trust to be honest and open about what we want to experience in a game and part of that is also communicating about what we fear will happen (Friedner 2019). Talking through the experience afterwards and reviewing those hopes and fears might also be a good debriefing exercise. Many of my larping friends have mentioned this in the context of playing evil or antagonistic characters. A common fear is that people will be afraid of or hurt by you out-of-character, and then it becomes even more important to get picked up and aftercared by co-players.
Also remember that for many players the aftercare needs doesn’t come only two hours after the game, but two days or weeks later. For this reason I like the idea of assigning everyone debrief buddies, because they are a predictable extension of the social contract after the larp has ended that doesn’t depend solely on one’s own ability to reach out and ask for a check in.
To summarize, I think aftercare is a collective, not just an individual issue. Leave the magic circle consciously and honor the Campsite Rule. If we make some shared efforts to make sure larp experiences integrate with the players in a positive and meaningful way, we build trust in the community and get more chances to be bold, brave, safe, and wonderful together. Let’s do that.
Photo by Arthur Brognoli from Pexels. Photo has been cropped.
This article is partially a complement to the recent ”The Brave Space” opinion piece, but is more generally fueled by long standing discussions regarding status and social dynamics in larp communities, both at the local and wider international scale. It represents my opinion alone and does not mean to establish a universal truth regarding these issues. I will first present a definition of safety and expand it using the notion of zone of proximal development, an education theory proposed by Lev Vygotsky. I will then reintroduce the notion of social capital to argue why imbalances of power between participants should be taken into account while discussing safety and player negotiation of boundaries. I conclude with the idea that you can’t discuss a culture of trust without addressing social capital and the imbalances of power between all people involved.
The Ideal Purpose of Safety
Safety techniques as they exist at the time of this writing provide means to both opt-out of sensitive issues of scenes or to opt-in to certain types of play. Furthermore, communication around safety has become essential to establish the role and positioning of the larp organization on safety and inclusion of all players. We can admit that talk of safety mostly focuses on opting out mechanics, such as clear author statements with explicit trigger warnings, safewords, white zones, stating boundaries, etc. However, opt-in mechanics also exist, such as the signal light colors (red/yellow/green), okay check-in, pre-scene negotiations, opt-in color ribbons, and the more recent zoning, which creates opt-in spaces within the physical space of the larp. While the possibility to calibrate opt-out and opt-in is obviously central to giving participants the opportunity to experiment and step out of their comfort zone, each participant has different needs and boundaries in that regard.
Photo: Laflor for Getty Images/iStockphoto.
In education, Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (Harland 2003) is considered the ideal space to learn. The zone refers to the space between the comfort zone of what you already know and a yet unattainable zone where the difficulty would discourage or overwhelm you (see Figure 1). We can apply this frame to understand how players can develop skills in larp, such as speaking in public, brawling, handling sensitive issues or emotionally charged conflicts, and even intimacy or sexual scenes.
Let’s keep in mind that the zone of proximal development is unique to each individual, in the same way as triggers and boundaries are (Brown 2014). As in education, if a player stays too much in their comfort zone, they might miss the opportunity to grow, experiment, and learn. And in larp, some people explicitly prefer to stay within their comfort zone for a variety of reasons, such as escapism, socialization, or love of a certain genre, all of which are absolutely valid. Furthermore, pushing someone out of their zone of proximal development too quickly can be damaging to the players’ development by forcing them to engage with problems that they are not ready for or that could be triggering for them. Brown (2014) especially underlines how triggers exist on a wide spectrum, and how they can be detrimental to their player’s whole experience and impact the player’s agency.
Therefore, the core idea is that you need a solid comfort zone before you can expand it. The scope of your zone of proximal development is completely personal and calls for personalized handling. Another educational parallel can be drawn here with the notion of scaffolding in education, where progress is built through progressive steps, support from educators, and interactions with other learners. Applied to larp, in order for a person to feel brave and explore out of their comfort zone, they need to feel safe and supported by their environment, which is not a given in larp communities for many players.
Figure 1: The Zone of Proximal Development. Figure by Dcoetzee (CC0).
There is no denying that larp can provide powerful transformative experiences. Jonaya Kemper (2017) coined the term emancipatory bleed to reflect on the process of steering towards a specific type of play that would reflect one’s own life experience of oppression. Players should be allowed the opportunity to steer towards that kind of play, and designers can support emergent play along those lines. However, how can we support transformative play and exploration while still ensuring safety for those players who most need it? This question usually brings up issues of consent, pre-game or in-game negotiation, and personal boundaries.
We are Not Equal in Setting Boundaries and Tone
In the international larp community, we usually remind participants that the players are more important than the game, make sure that enthusiastic content is given and can be revoked at all times, and support negotiation and opt-in mechanisms. Our goal is to build a collective culture of trust. However, to build such a culture, we need to be able to negotiate it as equal participants. I don’t believe that every negotiation and every discussion is carried on an equal footing.
Games going through reruns and several iterations can sometimes be played more violently or intensely from one session to another. Framing the game experience with hard limits or requirements for consent negotiations in such a way that it sets up cohesive boundaries for the whole experience remains an organizers’ prerogative. However, I would contend that the collective level of intensity is also influenced by the players through their collective interactions. Since we tend to take cues and ideas from other players, I believe that participants are unequal in influencing the tone and intensity. Outspoken participants with a wider comfort zone can influence the game atmosphere more, sometimes for the better, by inspiring others and creating unexpected interactions.
On the other hand, a single or small group of participants who decide to play for their own agency and to disregard the collective buildup of the game can just as easily derail the tone and cohesion for the whole larp. These are rare occurrences where the domino effect can negatively impact the experience of many players (Bowman 2017). My previous article (2019) on the depiction of rape scenes in larps showed how the introduction of scenes featuring sexual violence used to be the province of a dominant group who used it for power play. Only the introduction of restrictions and safety regulations enabled the minority group — women players in this instance — to refuse playing these scenes if they were not negotiated. Further down the line, we found women participants were willing to play rape scenes for dramatic purposes or to support intense narratives because they feel empowered to choose to do so. This empowerment, though, was entirely contingent upon a corrective intervention upon the social imbalance that had originally prevented these players from voicing their discontent. Thus, safety culture was the crucial thing that allowed these women to feel comfortable to play this content.
Social Capital in Larp
Social capital is a notion popularized among others by Pierre Bourdieu as the product of resources conferred due to integration into a certain network and the capacity to act in society (Siisiainen 2003). The chart below illustrates social capital as an aggregate of these resources that allows an individual access to favors or greater resources.
Figure 2: A synthetic representation of social capital (Algayres 2019).
Since larp groups or organizations are part of society, they are also prone to the same biases that affect us in daily life. Although efforts have been made to support the integration of minority or marginalized groups in larps, some players still accrue social capital by virtue of being or passing for white, straight, cis-, or because of their class and education level. Another major point in the international context is their mastery of English, which will confer advantages to native English speakers and players from countries where English proficiency is especially high, as well as highly educated and internationally-integrated professionals. Finally, social capital as we will discuss it is also dependent on larp-specific criteria: being geographically anchored as Nordic, clout as an organizer and/or larp theorist, visibility on social media, participation at international larp conferences and conventions, playing high status characters, and involvement in high-profile games with a lot of hype.
I would claim that larpers with higher social capital are in a position to influence their co-players’ choices or leverage their own desires when boundaries are negotiated. Has anyone ever been accidentally pushed out of their comfort zone for fear of missing out certain parts of the game or the opportunity to hang out with this cool larper they’d read a lot about? Could peer pressure and “hardcore larp culture” ever push some people to willfully step out of their zone of proximal development because that’s what a “good larper” would do? I would contend that this can happen, and that it is very easy to be blind to your own social capital, as it can intersect with other forms of oppression. For example, as a woman, I have to contend with sexism and have even been the subject of sexual violence. However, since I hit almost every other marker of status, I have often been in situations where I benefited from my higher social capital and I was sometimes blind to it to my own detriment. I believe it is important for us to acknowledge our own degree of social capital and how it may influence our relative abilities to push play in our desired direction. It is also important for us to listen to people with lower social capital when they request greater safety culture around sensitive topics.
Regarding the Creation of Safe Spaces and Trust Culture
I think that safety must be used both as a way to opt-out and opt-in of specific themes and scenes. However, safety also has been used to protect minority groups and players with specific triggers and limits from play that would be oppressive to them, and is especially beneficial to players with lower social capital (Kemper 2017). In larp scenes where safety was introduced more recently, resistance to safety techniques usually comes from the more dominant and entitled groups of players. These groups sometimes feel that safety techniques are not necessary because they feel safe enough not to need them. They may have sufficient trust and familiarity within their local communities of play to feel safe without negotiation, which is a form of privilege that is not afforded to many in the international larp community, who may enter larps without the benefits of established group trust. Only active communication by the organizers compensates for this imbalance of power between groups that feel confident to play without safety rules and those who need to be sure of the implementation of safety structures before they will even sign up for the larp. In other words, players with this social capital privilege may not realize that lack of safety culture in a larp may be actively dissuading players from marginalized backgrounds from ever signing up, which further contributes to issues of inclusion in the international larp community.
I don’t believe we can discuss expanding our boundaries, reducing the need for scene negotiations, or exploring out of our comfort zones without taking into account imbalances of social capital, influence, and power. Discussion around opt-out safety was once framed around the protection and benefit of marginalized groups and players most in need of it. I would therefore wish for discussions around trust culture to be built around this issue: how can we build a trust culture that will above all benefit players with the lowest social capital and the greatest need for it?
I hope that we will develop tools that can enable players to explore and expand their comfort zone. However, when we develop these tools, we should measure their value on how much they actually empower those with the lowest social capital and facilitate a sense of psychological safety. I believe that our capacity to build a collective sense of trust will only be as big as our capacity to compensate for these imbalances and support all players to feel safe doing so.
In the last 12 months, a number of high profile articles and discussions about safety in Nordic larp have been published((From high profile articles explaining how to deal with harassment and sexual predators, proposed approaches to safety by committee to the appointment of semi-diegetic counsellors. There were lengthy (and sometimes heated) discussions about the effects of alcohol, threads about physical intimacy, and some disparaging comments about the so-called ‘cult of hardcore’.)). We were interested to find out if this represented a turning point for the community. Is safety the primary concern now and has this come at the expense of the ‘edge’ that the form once had? Or are new approaches to safety actually allowing Nordic larp to push the limits further and to explore the extremes of the human condition?
To answer these questions, we conducted a series of email and video interviews with current designers, some who are associated with safety in larp and others who design extreme or challenging larps. This article is a summary of these interviews.
We have tried to give equal space to different opinions, but have discovered a significant overlap in the approach to larp design and safety in larp design between what we assumed were diametrically opposed camps.
Where our respondents have used larp specific jargon or terminology we have given a brief definition or explanation in the footnotes.
Is larp dangerous?
Simon Svensson
The normal world is more dangerous than nearly any larp. I think that going out on a Friday night is almost in every way more dangerous than going to a larp. So of course, I don’t really think that larps are psychologically or socially dangerous in any way that normal life isn’t.
Maury Brown
Dealing with other people creates dangers, and pretending to play a character is also a radically dangerous activity. We give in to emotions that we may repress in our daily lives, and we allow the character to bleed into our ego.((Bleed refers to something that passes from player to character or vice versa. In larp this is often (but not always) an emotional response or an emotional memory.)) This is fundamentally dangerous and this is not a bad thing. It’s a core part of larp. The harm from this danger can come, however, if we are not prepared to experience things like bleed, or cathartic emotions, or the tearing away of communal bonds built through the collaborative storytelling.
Johanna Koljonen
In my design practice, we talk very much about the distinction of being safe versus feeling safe. If you are not safe, you are in danger. But if you do not feel safe, you certainly might be in danger, but many other conditions also produce that feeling–for instance, being socially uncomfortable, or not knowing what to do next. And those things are not dangerous at all per se, but they do prevent one from engaging with the larp fully. A core challenge when we talk about larp safety is that maybe 80 % of what we refer to is about feeling safe to play rather than being safe from harm.
Peter Munthe-Kaas
Dangerous is a heavy word to use. Dangerous for what exactly? And compared to what? It is definitely less dangerous physically than many sports. Psychologically, I guess that you can consider larp to be dangerous, as it potentially can change what you believe to be you and how you see the world around you.
Charles Bo Nielsen
It is a bit naive to claim that experiencing hardship for a day, on the level with what others survive a lifetime of without dying, should break you as a person. Where you even know that this hardship is temporary of a day or a weekend and is fake or an experiment. To be honest, I believe that the human mind to be stronger than that. As I see it, larp can trigger traumas, not develop them.
Are there limits to the themes you can explore through larp? Should there be?
Maury Brown
The crux of the issue is not whether the theme should be explored, but whether it is explored with respect and honesty. We have to be very careful that we don’t trivialize or reduce complex human beings and complicated situations into playable elements or caricatures, and that we don’t reinforce harmful tropes. And we do have to be careful about co-opting identities that are not our own and allowing role-play to perpetuate stereotypes and opinions that continue to marginalize, oppress, and other individuals and groups.
Johanna Koljonen
It’s very weird to assume that any theme would be unsuitable for any medium. Just like all the others, the larp medium is better at some things and worse at others. Factors such as the skill of the designers, the play culture of the participants, and what kind of larp we’re talking about also play a big part–just like they would with lm, comics, or anything else.
In larp cultures which have a collaborative baseline and are focused on ‘play’ rather than ‘competition’, larp is often conceptualised as closer to theatre and other arts, and both players and the people around them are more willing to accept that it’s possible to create appropriate frames for difficult topics.
Simon Svensson
I don’t think it is a good thing to explore themes like bullying each other for our real life looks or using racist stereotyping without exploring it as an active or discussed part of the larp. But almost any theme can be explored in respectful ways. The limits are context dependent. If you make a larp specifically about the tradition of using blackface as a racist stereotype then absolutely it can be included in that game, but the limit to most games would be, for example, to use blackface as a way of signifying that you were of a different ethnicity. If a game is specifically about our real life bodies and that is what we explore, then maybe a larp can be made with that.
With safety in mind, how do you design larps that let you push your boundaries in interesting ways?
Peter Munthe-Kaas
I try to make sure that my players feel that they have agency to stop an interaction if they don’t want it; work extensively with workshopping((Workshopping: tools for informing players, developing in-game relations, or practicing techniques used in the larp, usually occurring right before play starts. A workshop can help you find your character and show you how to play within the game.)) to create a co-creative atmosphere where everyone agrees on how the larp should be played, and try to create a safe space to land in after the larp has ended, so there is time for taking in the experience.
Johanna Koljonen
Be super clear about the types of experiences players will encounter. Be very coherent, reliable, professional, respectful and courteous in all your communications with your players to demonstrate that you can be trusted.
Sanity check your larp content with other people, especially if your organiser group is very homogeneous – someone I know just came back from a larp with a lot of dead baby plots and I think that’s a topic that looks very different to players of an age where they or people close to them are trying to have kids than to, say, a single 25-year old who has never been in a committed relationship. They can be a great writer and just not realize how personally painful a story like that can be to a couple in their forties.
You need to design the process whereby the players start to trust each other enough to be able to play at all, let alone anything heavy.
If you start by picking safety mechanics((Safety mechanics: The methods, techniques, and rules that are put into a larp by the designers in order to keep the participants from doing actual long term harm to themselves or one another.)) off you’re doing it ass backwards. The OK check-in((OK Check-in: A specific technique to check with another player that they are enthusiastically okay with what is going on right now. Any response other than thumbs up means the player needs help. See further Brown, this volume.)) will not make your larp safe. An off-game room((Off-game room: A place to go to rest, recover, or just to centre yourself prior to returning to the larp. Some offer a quiet space for reflection, other support, hot drinks and a hug.)) won’t make your larp safe. Larps are complex systems and the tools interact with everything else in the system. If the design elements are not aligned in support of the goals of the work, then a consent mechanism((Consent mechanism: A way of confirming prior to an interaction or scene that the other participants want to run with it. Sometimes an off-game negotiation, sometimes a meta technique.)) can actually create a false sense of security, through signalling that you take safety seriously when in fact you don’t even understand how it works.
Caroline Sjövall
Make a larp about pushing boundaries. Be clear about it. Don’t mix it or cover it up with something else.
Simon Svensson
The most important part is expectation management. Make sure that people know what they are signing up for. Don’t try to make it sound cooler or less serious or more serious than it is. Try to find a clear vision to describe what kind of play is available at this larp.
Charles Bo Nielsen
The first and most important part is communication. You need to be honest to your potential players what kind of experience you want to make. Is the larp about pushing the envelope of what is possible in a physical or psychological matter? Then label it with trigger warnings and designed intentions of pushing people’s limits.
Do your research if your physical conditions are risky. Your players will play down your content for their own safety–so make sure that the conditions are safe enough to actually be able to push yourself. Making a mortal combat fighting larp on a huge hilltop with limited space to move around without being plunged to certain actual death, will result in players making very fake punches and getting less injured than in a fight club larp in a basement.
Is it morally acceptable to create a space for players to break themselves?
Maury Brown
Yes, but. It is only morally acceptable if you have the systems in place to allow them to calibrate((Calibration: the process by which larpers discuss the uncertainties between their expectation of a larp and that which is actually happening. That which is calibrated can intersect with safety, for example calibrating the intensity of physical interactions between players, ‘I am happy for you to go harder’. We argue that calibration is a meta-technique rather than a safety technique because it is often used in act breaks as a method for calibrating story and character interaction as well as player safety. See)) the level of breaking, to assist them as they break and begin to repair, and to respect their privacy about their own experiences.
Johanna Koljonen
Here’s the thing about larps in which people can break themselves: I think all larps have that potential. Let’s say I run a concert venue instead of a larp. Some people will come in and drink very heavily and then listen to a band they loved during a particularly difficult breakup. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask the venue’s designer or manager or the band’s promoter to stop people from doing this–but sometimes it will happen, and they will be a wreck, and may require some help.
I will say, however, that I find it morally dubious for players to use larps to break themselves. Or even to explore how far they can go before they break. I think you should aim for a level where you won’t break, and then if you overshoot by accident and have a strong reaction, then that is within the normal range of What Larp Does.
Simon Svensson
I think it is absolutely fair to design larps that could break people as long as you tell people about them and say exactly what they will entail. Then people going there are saying: ‘Okay, I am willing to do this and if it ends badly then that is on me.’
Should some larps come with a ‘strong content’ advisory sticker?
Charles Bo Nielsen
I would say ‘could’ instead of ‘should’, but if you don’t make simple trigger warnings, you should be quite open and frank about the actual content, so that people can decide for themselves if it becomes too strong for them.
Maury Brown
People should know what themes and content a larp is designed to explore. They should know how the larp organisers will handle emergent play and content and themes the players bring in. They should know that they are safe at the experience, that organisers have guidelines and procedures in place to ensure that participants handle the content responsibly and respect the rules of the community. They should know what physical and emotional demands will be made of them. In short, they need information to decide if this larp is for them at this time.
Simon Svensson
Absolutely. And a very specific one. Not just that this larp could contain offensive material, no, ‘if you go to this larp you are likely to play out acts of sexual abuse’ for example.
Caroline Sjövall
Better with a clear vision instead. Information: this is what we want to have in our larp. You will be naked at this larp. You will not have coffee.
Do you think there is still a space for risk in larp design?
Maury Brown
Absolutely. Larping itself is risky–you’re taking on a persona that is not your own, you’re engaging in new activities with new people, and in some cases, you’re participating in an activity that dominant society may marginalize. It’s important to note that safety is not the absence of risk. Safety (and by that we mean a broad category of physical, psychological and emotional safety) is definitely about considering how to mitigate risk, but no amount of safety procedures and tools will ever fully remove all risks.
Safety and calibration tools are more about being transparent about the risk–letting participants know the dangers that might happen and giving them the choice to take those risks and to consider what level of risk they are ready for. Part of the fun and thrill of many activities, including some larps, is about taking a risk and overcoming it. But you want that sweet spot of knowing the risks, wanting to confront them, and feeling capable of dealing with them, and you want the support system in place to be prepared to help participants for whom the risks are too great, and they require assistance. I would never advocate removing risk from design (nor do I believe it is possible). In fact, I believe that transparent safety and calibration tools allow larp design and larping to tackle even greater risks, because they are critical to creating spaces of trust, agency, and autonomy.
Johanna Koljonen
Yes of course; that is why I do this work. I don’t want games to be bland, I want them to be stronger. This always implies an element of risk, in the sense of social risk, or the risk of learning something about yourself, or the risk of experiencing something painful as part of a learning process. We can’t do that kind of role-playing if we’re not safe as well.
Where does safety feature in your design process?
Charles Bo Nielsen
I aim to include my players in the safety process as much as possible, since they are the ones who have to go through the experience. Some designers like to test their design extensively until they feel safe, I like to engage in dialogue with my players about what they are okay with and build the larp around that.
Johanna Koljonen
Everywhere. Not every second of design time of course, but in each iteration of each element it’s there. It’s one of the basic questions–just like we ask ‘how does this serve the intention of the piece and how does it produce or inspire the player actions we want to see?’, we also ask ‘how does this affect the interaction system between the players?’
Simon Svensson
We usually start off with a ‘fuck safety’ perspective, just in order to get the wild ideas out there. We want to design interesting larps; we want to make something cool for our own sake but then afterwards we sort of ad-lib safety onto the larp to see what we need to change to realize our vision, to get players in, and to be able to communicate our vision in a sound way.
I think that sometimes, people are too wary or careful with their own experiences and that people too often use safety valves and like going off-game instead of experiencing a larp the way they could have. Their experiences would have been deeper and more meaningful if they had not gone off-game, or if they had not laughed it away or taken breaks.
Peter Munthe-Kaas
I think it is usually an ad-on that comes after the core experience design has been made. It is more based on ‘what could potentially be unsafe/ uncomfortable’ for the players and then figuring out some ways of dealing with that.
Where is the sweet spot between responsible design and danger?
Johanna Koljonen
The sweet spot is zero danger but enough social and emotional risk that you have to be a little brave to engage. As a designer, you enable that bravery through taking care of real safety and designing player culture, calibration and consent mechanics right.
Peter Munthe-Kaas
I think transparency((Transparency: Some larps have no secrets. For players who are interested, everything that could happen or will happen in the larp is made available to them in advance. Simply put, there are no surprises and participants are fully aware of what they are getting into.)) is a very important part of any ‘extreme’ larp design. The ability to describe the experience that the players are going to have (or at least what you as an organiser are designing for) in an open and honest way, makes it easier for potential players to choose if this is an experience they want.
Simon Svensson
I don’t think every larp should be super hardcore nor that everyone should always push themselves to the limit in every larp they play, but if we are making a larp where they are supposed to push themselves then I think the sweet spot is the moment when they can start trusting that other people want them to do these things to each other.
There is a sweet spot when the safety techniques put the responsibility on the one who thinks they cannot handle more, not the person who is doing things and is still comfortable with them. In my personal opinion, I do not want to design or play larps that constantly force you to check in with people to make sure what you are doing is good, because it won’t be good larping.
Conclusion
Safety plays a part in every larp design process, even though the focus on safety might differ from designer to designer.
All the designers we interviewed believed that an important part of designing for safety is about expectation management and clear communication. Telling the players what the game is about, which boundaries they were going to push, and how far they would be expected to go, is key. Players need to know what the larp is about to see if it is for them.
One other interesting finding was that vocal proponents of safety in larp design still want to make larps that explore difficult and potentially painful themes. And, as importantly, vocal proponents of larps that do push the limits of the form still care about safety and still consider it a key element in their larp design. As long as the themes and tools are clearly communicated up front, everyone agreed that larp could, and even should, explore themes that are uncomfortable.
There is still room to explore the darker and more difficult aspects of the world through larp. We can legitimately explore the extremes of the human condition, as long as we do it with informed consent from all participants, and to do that we must clearly communicate what each larp is about.
The larp designers interviewed for this article
Maury Brown has navigated the legal labyrinth of bringing large-scale Nordic larp to the famously litigious North America as the author and lead organizer of New World Magischola, Immerton, and Beat Generation. She regular publishes and speaks about safety in larp and roleplay, and believes that safety systems are a prerequisite for these inherently emotionally risky activities.
Johanna Koljonen is behind the most significant work and writing on safety in larp. She coined the term calibration and has contributed safety design to intense larps such as Inside Hamlet.
Peter Munthe-Kaas is one of the minds behind KAPO, a larp that did not so much as play on the edge as redefine what the edge actually meant.
Charles Bo Nielsen has a reputation for designing and playing hardcore larps. The most famous being What Are You Worth, which featured on a Discovery Channel documentary about Nordic larp. During the larp participants were told that events would continue to escalate until they called cut; this led to both rectal examinations and mock executions.
Caroline Sjövall is a larp designer whose work includes the 2017 game Gården (The Farm), a larp about a religious re-education centre where no meta techniques were used to simulate violence, sex or any other type of interaction.
Simon Svensson is behind larps such as The Solution, Do Androids Dream? and Echo Chamber, all of which explore dark themes and have a reputation for pushing the limits of players emotionally and psychologically.
References
Maury Brown. Safety & Calibration Design Tools & Their Uses: OK Check-In, Lookdown, Pronoun Correction. 2018. In “Re-shuffling the Deck” Edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner. ETC Press.
Alex Rowland and Brodie Atwater as counselors Watson and Whipple, New World Magischola 7.
The counselor role is considered both diegetic and non-diegetic. In other words, a safety team member is embedded in the fiction as a character. Depending on the type of fiction, this role may be called a “counselor” — as in New World Magischola, Event Horizon, — or may be renamed something else appropriate to the fiction, such as “bartender” or “goddess.” Similar to a Storyteller or non-player character (NPC), while these individuals are immersed in the story, the counselor can also step out of their role in order to tend to the emotional needs of players in distress and help with calibration of play styles. They can help overwhelmed players find the off-game room, Sanctuary Space, or other members of the safety team on staff. Therefore, the counselor role requires a strong degree of sensitivity to the needs of others, flexibility to switch in- and out-of-character with ease, deescalation skills, and willingness to perform emotional labor for the player base and other organizers.
Counselors are especially useful at bigger larps that are spread over a large area. While the role is present in other larps, such as Lindängen International BoardingSchool, we are describing the counseling role that we first developed for Run 1 of New World Magischola (2016), where 160+ players were spread over 100+ acres. Since then, Magischola has featured embedded counselors for all eight runs, as well as two Yule episodes. Event Horizon (2016) adopted the role, as has the U.S. run of Just a Little Lovin’ (2017). Ideally, the counselor job is compensated if the larp budget allows, e.g. expenses, lodging, food, and/or stipends for travel.
Optimally, counselors serve other roles on the safety team such as leading workshops, de-roling, and debriefing sessions. The staff should introduce costumed counselors at the opening of the game if possible. That way, players can easily identify them as trained safety team members in play. Embedded counselors make safety both visible and pervasive in a larp culture. However, counselors are only one part of the safety culture of the larp. Ultimately, we hope to encourage a community of care, where other players feel motivated to provide support for one another, rather than relying on staff to handle all problems that arise.
Distinctions from Traditional Therapy
While we use the generic term “counselor,” we would like to make clear several core distinctions between this member of the safety team and a traditional therapist. While counselors may provide advice for players in- or out-of-character, they do not perform therapy as a psychologist would in an office setting. The counselor’s job is more akin to crisis management than therapy. In a therapeutic setting, a client enters into a relationship with their psychologist in which trust is built over time and personal information is revealed in order to produce meaningful change in the client’s life. In a larp, that relationship has not been established, and neither the space nor time needed for traditional therapy are present. Indeed, such intensive analysis of a player’s psychology could work against the goals of individuals in this role.
Instead, a larp counselor’s role is to provide players and organizers in need with the following:
Immediate support when distressed, triggered, alienated, or overwhelmed
Help in re-establishing a feeling of safety
Problem solving for emotional difficulties arising from the larp itself, such as plot-related issues and social conflicts
Calibrating play in order to help players adjust to one another’s comfort levels
Snacks, water, a quiet place to relax, and any other basic comforts
In extreme cases, crisis management for abuse, harassment, mental illness episodes, and other serious issues.
Thomas Whipple (Harrison Greene) in New World Magischola 1.
Thus, the counselor’s primary goal is to help establish a sense of emotional well-being in the hopes that the participant can re-engage with the larp and social environment with minimal disruption to their experience. Unlike a therapeutic session, where upsetting or traumatizing personal information is often unearthed, the larp counselor only engages with such content if the player spontaneously discloses personal information.
In this regard, while having trained psychologists on staff is desirable in larp settings, we recognize that emotional distress and even crisis can arise in any social situation. Larp can be particularly intense and place emotional demands upon players in terms of focused attention and intensity. In some cases, larpers experience physical strain, lack of sleep, or insufficient food or water, whether by personal choice or the event’s design. These demands can lead to powerful larp experiences, but can also add psychological strain. These issues can arise even in larps with presumably light-hearted content. In our experience, having a system in place to aid in these situations is important, as other players may not be able to provide care and organizers may be overwhelmed. The counselor serves as a safety net to help player’s process this strain and receive immediate help.
Thus, while we advocate for counselors to obtain professional development around emotional safety, crisis treatment certifications, and psychological training, we recognize that these requirements are not always practical. We believe the primary skills needed for a larp counselor are empathy, active listening, patience, and the willingness to help others through immediate emotional issues. Counselors should also work well in a team with other safety committee members and organizers, reporting often about the events occurring in the larp and any emotional difficulties that arise in the player base.
While counselors should strive toward confidentiality, they may need to report serious issues that arise to the larger team, especially if action needs to be taken to stop problematic behaviors such as harassment. Counselors are not subject to the same strict rules of confidentiality that a licensed professional may be, as they are working in service to the larp organizers. However, ethically, restricting who is exposed to sensitive information is extremely important. In issues of alleged harassment, legal repercussions could ensue if counselors reveal the details of a claim. Retaliation against reporters is also a possibility, which reinforces the need for discretion. Counselors should make clear to participants who they will inform about safety issues, particularly in the case of violations, before participants reveal personal details. Counselors can also disclose potential actions the safety team might take. Ideally, such information is contained in their Code of Conduct, Internal Procedures, or other design documents. If your larp needs help developing these procedures, we encourage you to borrow with attribution from the Living Games Conference safety documentation, which also includes professional development exercises for crisis management and empathy training.
Psychic twin sister counselors Winnie (Alex Rowland) and Raindrinker (Sarah Lynne Bowman) in Event Horizon. Photo courtesy of Event Horizon.
Ultimately, counselors work to try to resolve issues that happen during the larp, as well as keeping their fingers on the proverbial pulse of the events unfolding, often reporting back to the rest of the staff. We believe that dedicated counselors whose only role in the larp is to provide in-character and out-of-character assistance can not only assist players in need, but can relieve some of the pressure from other organizers, who are often overtaxed by logistical concerns. Thus, safety members in this role should also offer support to other members of staff in need, including each other, in the case of a larp with multiple embedded counselors. While counselors can double as physical safety staff trained in CPR and first aid, the skills required for these two jobs are often different and should not be conflated. Unless a larp is seriously understaffed, we suggest another organizer handle physical safety issues.
Advantages to Embedded Counselors
Having a member of the safety team embedded in the larp has several advantages. They are involved in the fiction and can better understand the references made by the characters and players. Counselors may even be present for key scenes and know which events have unfolded. This practice makes it less alienating for the counselor when hearing about larp events, as they understand the context.
Counselor Whipple (Brodie Atwater) with the Dean (Maury Brown) in New World Magischola 7.
For example, in New World Magischola, counselors are part of the staff of the school. They have in-character reasons to run administrative events, connect with faculty, and be available for students to express their career or personal issues. In the fiction of Event Horizon, counselors were hired by the corporation hosting the event. These counselors were telepathic twins with empathy powers. In both cases, magic can enhance the in-game counseling role, e.g. by providing flashbacks or future sequences, as one would in a black box, to help process character emotions. Embedded counselors can also work in a socially realistic setting. In the 2017 run of Just a Little Lovin’ in the United States, Joani, a New Age self-help guru character, was adapted to have counseling training.
The fiction influences the way counseling is portrayed, but provides a convenient reason for players to steer toward emotional processing or a satisfying resolution without breaking immersion. We term these strategies diegetic interventions, or ways to solve in-game problems through magic, psychic powers, role-played therapy sessions, or other creative solutions. Diegetic interventions are powerful because they redirect players to the fiction and that resolution becomes canonical, not just imagined. Players feel like they are getting a special scene, which can raise spirits and help them reconnect with the larp.
Additionally, embedded counselors can:
Monitor the emotional well-being of a person, e.g. with the Okay Check-in System. For example, if a character is crying alone, the counselor can clandestinely check-in and help if needed.
Remove a distressed person from play and take them to a safer space, e.g. another in-game location or an off-game room. Ideally, a larger larp has a Sanctuary Space for such a purpose, while small games may have an off-game room.
Model checking-in for other players in order to encourage a community of care, such as using the Okay Check-In System, Lookdown, Pronoun Corrections, Largo/Break, Cut, and any other safety mechanics. While players can bring distressed participants to a counselor as needed, we want to encourage participants to care for one another.
Serve as the eyes and ears on the ground to help the lead organizers calibrate the game.
Coordinate with the team when dispersed over a large play area.
Make story adjustments as embedded NPCs with in-character reasons for doing so.
Guide players back into character when needed.
Help players solve larp-related issues while in play when possible, such as overstimulation, difficulties engaging with plot, uncertainty how to move forward with a storyline, boredom, etc.
Offer emotional care while in the fiction, which may allow enough of a release valve that the player need not break in order to regroup.
Allows player alibi to seek help, particularly in play cultures where breaking immersion is discouraged.
Ideally, each larp has at least two counselors, which enables them to tap out if necessary, as well as to emotionally process with one another. Sometimes, counselors may need to check with one another to figure out a course of action. If a participant feels comfortable, having both counselors present to address an issue can be helpful, although some players prefer one-on-one private interactions.
In the most recent runs of New World Magischola, all counselors were coordinated through the use of walkie talkies, so that they could communicate regardless of their location in play. The Sanctuary Space also had a walkie talkie, which allowed players to page a counselor if needed. Counselors listed their schedule on the door of the Sanctuary Space to identify their approximate location. Sanctuary Spaces also feature water, snacks, blankets, soft music, and coloring books when possible. Ideally, Sanctuary Spaces have a door that can close for privacy. These logistics allow embedded counselors to slip smoothly in and out of play to address issues as they arise.
Drawbacks to Embedded Counselors
Embedding counselors into the fiction does have some drawbacks, which we will address in turn. They are:Active counselors in the play space are not always easy to find.
Active counselors in the play space are not always easy to find.
Walkie talkies and other forms of communication such as text may help, assuming the technology is working and counselors regularly monitor these devices.
Counselors can serve in shifts, where some are in-character while others remain in the Sanctuary Space or off-game room. Downtime may be necessary when performing emotional care, although boredom and alienation may arise if off-game shifts are too long.
Counselors can become involved in major stories or plots through emergent play as part of the fiction.
Counselors can become central figures to the play of others due to the emotional bonds formed through the act of sharing, which can lend to player comfort.
This engagement can also become negative, if players associate the counselor with a particular plot, player, or social clique that they find undesirable or alienating.
Counselors should strive to maintain neutrality and objectivity in plots and social groups when possible as a best practice. Non-embedded members of safety teams are less biased in general, so counselors may direct players to these individuals in specific situations.
When immersed, counselors may show a range of emotions outside of their “professional” role.
Counselors should strive to play characters who have a pleasant, welcoming, and empathic demeanor. Preferably, the characters’ default personalities are both engaging and emotionally available. However, these traits are not always possible to maintain when engaged in intense stories or moments.
Players should not be afraid to show other ranges of emotions during role-play, but when interactions focus on counseling, this default personality should predominate.
Counselors Raynar and Traquility Whipple explore a mystery with a Divination professor in Magischola 4. Photo courtesy of Learn Larp LLC.
Counseling and Self-Care
Counselors are not superheroes. They cannot help every player or be emotionally available at all times. Just like any member of the safety team, counselors should maintain boundaries with regard to their time and energy. A good rule of thumb is to help a person for a maximum of one hour. Players should not feel that they have unrestricted access to the emotional labor of counselors, so good boundary and expectation setting are necessary. Ideally, these boundaries are mentioned in workshops and enforced by the organizer team.
Counselors must be extremely vigilant about their own self-care regimen, including getting enough sleep and food. If necessary, a co-counselor, another member of the safety team, or another organizer can relieve them of their duties if self-care is needed. Counselors should feel enabled to self-advocate. For example, they can say,
“I feel that I have addressed your issue as best I can. I’m not sure how to proceed from here. Can we figure out a way to help you get back into play together?”
“I wish I could help right now, but I am going to need to get something to eat. Do you mind if I introduce you to our other counselor, who may be able to help?”
Note that while two counselors may decide to help the same player at once, they should avoid enabling players to monopolize their emotional resources by coming to different counselors with the same issue.
Divination Professor Ziegler (Kat Jones) and Ethics Professor Hassinger (Evan Torner) also served as counselors at Magischola Yule.
Additionally, counselors should also remain vigilant of their own emotional capabilities throughout play. Some counselors have their own mental health challenges or trauma triggers. They should make sure that they feel sufficiently rested and comfortable addressing certain issues before engaging. They should also be upfront about their own limitations. For example, a counselor can say,
“I don’t deal well with angry people. Do you mind handling this situation? I don’t think I can be of help.”
“I just helped six people in a row and am emotionally depleted. Can you take over while I take a nap?”
“I am having anxiety today. I should probably avoid crowded rooms. Do you mind covering for me while I eat outside of the main play space?”
Counselors should not feel responsible for players during off-duty hours. Therefore, it is preferable to set boundaries around when counseling shifts are, e.g. 8am-1am, with breaks in between. The exception to this guideline is in cases of harassment or other serious mental health issues, where counselors may be needed when off-duty.
Finally, counselors may wish to make themselves available before and after the larp over social media and personal message. Sharing links about bleed, post-larp depression/blues/drop, debriefing, and other resources is helpful, especially the during 72 hours after the larp, or the bleed window, where players are often still transitioning back to their default lives. However, counselors should not feel required to perform additional emotional labor above and beyond their role in the larp unless they wish to do so. Again, boundary setting is necessary. Counselors are not community managers. They should decide upon how much post-larp emotional labor they are willing to provide. Some suggestions:
Allowing a player the opportunity to share a bleed issue, but limiting communication to one conversation.
Only discussing issues during the bleed window and declining overtures for conversation that occur more than 72 hours after the larp.
Redirecting participants to Facebook groups or their co-players for assistance, further reinforcing a culture of care.
Common Counseling Issues
Counselors Tullamore and Tranquility Whipple attempt to guide a student away from a dark path in New World Magischola 5.
In our experience, these problems arise in larp settings, although some are far more common than others:
A player needs help figuring out what to do next in-game, due to boredom, frustration, or a character dilemma.
A player has anxiety about their own play ability, their own plots, whether they are doing it right, or being good enough.
A player feels overwhelmed by the amount of plots or emotional content happening and has trouble deciding which thread to pursue.
A player feels shut out of play from other groups due to an exclusive plot, a social clique, or another participant refusing to play upon an established connection. The important thing here is to listen, empathize, and figure out solutions. Embedded counselors can provide play for the person if needed, or introduce them to other possible social groups/plots.
A player feels emotionally overwhelmed due to the intensity of a particular scene, be it romantic, violent, embarrassing, etc. The important thing is for the player to be able to express their feelings without feeling judged. Embedded counselors may have been present for the scene and/or able to offer some additional context, advice, etc. Reframing the event together through a more favorable perspective can sometimes be helpful. Note that, later, players might view these scenes as the best parts of their larp when properly reframed and put into context.
A player feels uncomfortable with another person’s playstyle, attention toward them, or level of aggression. Focusing on how to help the player feel most comfortable is optimal here. The counselors may want to suggest ways to remove the two people from proximity if possible and suggest in-game reasons for such a change.
A player is experiencing bleed due to the fiction connecting to real-life emotions or events. Allowing the person to express themselves without judgment is key. Sometimes, the bleed can be used for positive growth, but a player should not feel obligated to continue to play on a theme or relationship that they find distressing. Give options.
A player feels personally harassed by another player or staff member. These issues should be handled on a case-by-case basis according to the Code of Conduct and Internal Safety Procedures. If a larp does not have these resources, the counselor should follow the guidelines established informally in their local larp culture, although we highly suggest establishing a Code of Conduct and set of Internal Procedures. Confidentiality is extremely important in these situations. The player may not want to report the harasser officially and their comfort should be respected as tantamount. Ask questions and offer options, but do not pressure them to make a decision or take action.
A player is unable to fulfill personal goals, gain closure, or steer toward their desired trajectory. This problem does not usually led to an agitated state, but rather a deep sense of disappointment or loss. In this case, the goal is not to deescalate, but rather deflate the issue by doing solution-based counseling or introducing a diegetic intervention.
Diegetic Interventions
The structure of New World Magischola, with its player-driven scene requests and consent-based play, meant that counselors could take the tools available to players and use them with proficiency. Diegetic interventions allowed players not only to return to the larp, but to resolve their issues through play. Counselors could cancel scenes, make new ones, plan for plot events, or encourage negotiation with other players about closing or opening up storylines. They could use freeform scenes to create canonical content that could have happened in a story in order to justify a new character direction. While anyone can create this content, an embedded counselor can demonstrate proficiency in how a player might use it to transform their play.
Counselor Winnie at Event Horizon
Some example diegetic interventions are:
Scene requests
Player: “I had a lot of ambitions for this storyline about my family, but the person playing my sibling brought a bunch of people to the scene and took most of the spotlight.”
Counselor: “Well, what if we put in a scene request for your character to meet one of their family members again, but on their own this time?”
Player: “Can I do that?”
Counselor: “Of course, and you can also talk to that other player to see what they’re trying to get from the plotline, so you can discuss expectations of where the play should lead.”
Freeform
Player: “I was really hoping that my character would get arrested before the ball so they could break out of prison to see their date. But there won’t be much play after dinner.”
Counselor: “What if we checked with the NPCs to see if we can make that scene? If not, we can take some time to act out the scene together, with us playing the marshals who arrested them.”
Plot Knowledge
Player: “I’m feeling exhausted by being around so many people.”
Counselor: “There’s going to be a big scene that draws everyone out into the forest in about an hour. What if you just focused on being in the common room or resting, then looked for other quiet people who weren’t out at the scene, and tried to play with them? There will be someone drawing people to your character’s common room about an hour after they get back, so you can make plans to be gone by then.”
Future Steps
While not all larps may require a counselor, we believe that they provide communities with a distinct advantage. For this reason, Brodie Atwater and Alex Rowland — experienced larp counselors, academics, and therapists-in-training — are developing a guide for counselors. This manual will serve as a touchstone for people who want to begin contracting and training counselor roles for their game. Starting from a standardized crisis counseling model, this work will also examine ACA Compliance in order to start synthesizing larp communal wisdom with wider psychological standards. Ultimately, we hope that this work will serve as a foundation for increased professional development and more nuanced safety team design in larps.
Figure 1: The Zone of Proximal Development. Figure by Dcoetzee (CC0).
