When cast in a relationship with another player, — meaning any kind of relationship, such as family, friendship, enmity etc., as well as romantic/sexual relationships — it is customary (but usually not mandatory) to reach out and calibrate before the larp. At times like these, there are a few questions I usually ask my co-player. A friend recently mentioned that she found my questions very helpful, and always used them when calibrating. At first I thought that they were nothing special, probably everyone used questions more or less the same? But, pre-game calibration definitely is a skill that can be developed and refined, just like most other parts of larp. So, perhaps in this text you can find some tool that will help you in your pre-game calibrations.
These questions are based on a larp designed with a Nordic, collaborative playstyle, prewritten characters and prewritten relationships. Usually, characters are available for all players to read, and it is common to read at least parts of your co-players’ character descriptions. The questions work for other design choices as well, but may have to be adapted accordingly.
It is of course not necessary or expected that you always ask all of these questions every time you do pre-game calibrations with someone. They are to be considered as a tool-box, and you yourself will notice which ones will seem most useful, depending what larp you are going to, what kind of relationship you have been cast in, and what you know about your co-player beforehand.
Question: How much time and energy do you have for calibration, and what methods of communicating work best for you?
Why it is useful to ask: Some people have very busy lives, and many larps lined up. Others have a lot of time, and want to spend weeks or months planning and discussing play. Calibrate this first, and try to find what works for both of you. If there is less time and energy, you might have to focus on only the most important questions.
Question: What are your hopes and wishes for this larp?
Why it is useful to ask: This will give you the chance to understand your co-player better: their playstyle, why they signed up for this particular larp and what kinds of scenes they enjoy. It may also offer insights into how you can create rewarding play for them within the character relationship.
Question: What is your understanding of the relationship between our characters?
Why it is useful to ask: An important early step is to have a shared idea of what kind of relationship you are going to be portraying. This is especially relevant if you have not been reading the same texts (e.g. if you have only been reading your own character descriptions, and the relationship described from their point of view). But even reading exactly the same texts, interpretations may vary. If you do not have the same idea about what the characters’ relationship is (at least at the start of the larp), it may make things much more frustrating, both to calibrate and play.
Question: What themes and aspects of this relationship are most interesting to you?
Why it is useful to ask: Partially, this question allows you to delve deeper into the relationship, to analyse it deeper. But, more importantly, it is how you start to make the relationship your own, focusing on the things that appeal to you both. Hopefully, you have shared interests, and want the same things – but if not, this is also a good time in the discussion to politely tell your co-player if you are uninterested or uncomfortable with certain areas of the relationship. This can be hard, but hopefully you will be able to create something that appeals to you both, and fits in the framework of the larp and relationship.
Question: What are your worries and fears going into this larp?
Why it is useful to ask: Playing together is also taking a level of responsibility for one another. If you know what your co-player worries about, you might help make sure that their fears do not come true – especially if this relates to the relationship between your characters. And, if doing anything about them is out of your power, then it can sometimes be good to just share your fears with someone.
Question: Do you have any triggers, or anything else I should be mindful of?
Why it is useful to ask: This one is self-explanatory. We do not want to distress our co-players off-game, if it can be avoided.
Question: What level of physical play are you generally comfortable with?
Why it is useful to ask: If there is a possibility that we might play scenes with violence, romantic/sexual intimacy or platonic closeness, having a rough idea of what to expect is a good thing. However, this reply is not about how you will be playing (see below).
Why it is good to ask in this particular way: We usually know what level of physical play we are normally comfortable with, and if we have any boundaries that we never cross. However, I do not think it is good practice to decide beforehand, days or weeks before the larp and with someone you have not played with before, what is ok and what is not. What might have felt good when planning, might not seem at all good when the larp is about to start. It might be due to how you are feeling on the day, how it feels when you actually meet your co-player, or some other reason. I therefore think it is best to not commit to anything, but rather talk about what usually works, and then do more calibration on the day of the larp.
How not to respond: If your co-player says ”I don’t have any boundaries, you can do anything!”, I think it is fully reasonable to say ”Oh, okay, so can I break your arm?” We all have boundaries of some sort. Some people who do not state boundaries simply have not considered things that might happen at the larp. Personally, I only feel safe with co-players who state some sort of boundaries – at the very least, ”Don’t do anything that leaves lasting damage on my body”. You might think, ”But this is obvious, you shouldn’t have to say that!”, but that’s just the thing. There are very different cultures and norms in different larp communities. To some, it may be just as ”obvious” that you would never play out a realistic-looking sex-scene, or do things that are actually painful to others; those are common elements of some larps. So, try to be explicit, think about what your boundaries are, and be comfortable communicating them.
Question: What level of emotional intensity do you generally prefer?
Why it is useful to ask: Some larpers want to feel deeply when larping, and feel that larp is best when it breaks their heart, and they can immerse deeply into feelings for the entire larp. Others have a playstyle focused more on cool scenes, interesting plots, or simulating an alternate reality, and are not very interested in having their hearts roughed up in the process. Although it can be difficult to specify what is a high or low level of emotional intensity, it might be relevant to calibrate if you are unsure.
Why it is good to ask in this particular way: Just as with physical play, we can never know for certain what we want or need during an upcoming larp. It is also not always possible to plan how intensely you are going to feel during the larp.
Question: What is your preference when it comes to transparency?
Why it is useful to ask: Transparency refers tolearning the other characters’ thoughts and motivations, or possible things that might happen at the larp. Since it is part of the tradition I larp in, I think transparency is a very good thing. Lack of transparency usually just makes it more difficult to pick up on things. The transparency of reading others’ characters is generally very useful. However, I do love a good curveball from time to time. If my co-player springs an unexpected scene on me, or reveals a hidden corner of their character’s mind, it can be a very impactful experience. However, not everyone enjoys this. So, discuss with your co-player what level of transparency you prefer.
When to ask: This question might be one you want to ask very early in the conversation, or it might only feel relevant later on. This, of course, depends on how many non-transparent secrets there are that might become relevant, and you should be able to assess this based on the information you have. Ask before disclosing in-game information that is most likely unknown to your co-player!
Question: What are your preferences on if/when/how to be off-game?
Why it is useful to ask: We have very different needs in this regard. Some players want to be in-game all through a larp, while others have a need for little breaks to decompress, laugh a bit, or rest. If larping in very close proximity with someone (for example, sharing a room) and having very different styles, this can prove problematic – especially if unaware of your different needs beforehand. If you find that you have differing needs, discuss how to deal with this.
There are of course countless more questions that can be asked, focusing on the specifics of the characters and how they relate to each other, and it is probably neither possible nor useful to try to list them all here. These questions usually tend to arise as the conversation continues, and your shared understanding deepens.
Why do pre-game calibrations?
Do you have to do pre-game calibrations? No, you don’t. Some people do not have any need or desire for it – others simply don’t have time. Usually, it works out alright. However, pre-game calibrations have many potential benefits.
Building trust: Having talked to someone, getting an idea of them as a player and person before diving into the larp and your characters, makes it easier to feel comfortable and trust them. You have an idea about the person behind the character, and have established an atmosphere of wanting to collaborate for a good experience.
Being careful: It happens from time to time that one is cast in a relationship with a person we don’t click with, or whose style of communicating, larping, or similar is incompatible with our own. Sad as it is, it happens, and it is better to notice this before the larp, than in the middle of it. You can then decide how to work around it, or if you need help dealing with it.
Less stumbling in the dark: Without calibration, the risk is greater that we spend valuable larp time not quite feeling like we’re getting our money’s worth. We might spend time doing small-talk, not quite knowing where the scene is going, or be brought out of immersion because we are confused about important parts of the characters’ shared story. Good calibration means that we are more likely to know how to engage with the relationship from the beginning, and what to focus on for an enjoyable and impactful experience.
Get to know your own character: Talking about the relationship isn’t only about the relationship. It also gives you plenty of opportunity to think about your own character – how they think and feel, how they behave in various situations, and so on. Getting to know and understand your character makes it more likely that you will feel connected to it during the larp.
A final word on responsibility (and feminism)
Many women larpers of my acquaintance mention that they are usually the ones who initiate calibrations with male co-players, and that they are the ones that take responsibility for asking questions and directing the conversation. This is an experience I definitely share. Although there are of course many great and responsible male larpers, the trend is there. I would like to encourage men to take on more of the responsibility, to take initiative and to be the ones asking questions. With the toolbox provided in this text, perhaps it might be slightly easier.
Cover photo: Players at Fairweather Manor: The Titanic Prelude (2024). Photo by Nadina Dobrowolska.
Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in Together At Last, February 15-18, 2024 in Berg en Dal, the Netherlands. Together at Last is a larp focused on romantic play by Reflections Larp Studio, designed and organized by Karolina Soltys, Patrik Bálint, David Owen, Lu Larpová, Marie-Lucie Genet, and Phil D’Souza. Based on the Black Mirror episode “Hang the DJ” and, to a lesser extent, the film The Lobster, the larp is set in a governmental facility in which volunteers are matchmade three times in order to find their Perfect Match. The larp originated online during the pandemic and was run 15 times as Together Forever, then transitioned to in-person play for 4 runs, with 2 additional runs planned for 2025. This run of the larp had 40 players, including 4 organizer-run characters.
The original setting made use of the actual pandemic and social isolation conditions players experienced to maximum effect; in this near-future scenario, humans cannot leave the house or socialize with others outside of hazmat suits without facing instant death from the mutated virus unless living in the same household as a family. Once a person decided to leave home, they must live alone, as proximity was too risky. As physical contact and companionship was deemed necessary by the government for human thriving, the Together Forever program was designed in order to allow people to date. At the end of the program, the system decides which characters are matched together, as well as which characters will remain unmatched. The matched participants are married in a perfunctory mass ceremony. Participants must choose to marry their “forever match” assigned by the algorithm at the end of the program; otherwise, they forfeit their right to ever go through the program again. Their alternatives were to beg this person to reject them or to run off into the wilderness to become part of the Banished, a group of people living in dangerous conditions outside of society. Divorce was possible long after the match was made, although that was deemphasized in play.
A once-per-lifetime vaccine giving 3 day immunity neutralized the virus enough to allow the participants to temporarily be physically co-present with multiple people, which for most characters meant the first time they had ever experienced physical intimacy in-person instead of VR; in other words, even if VR technology had become advanced in this near-future world, most characters were physically virginal for all intents and purposes. This chip was “new,” as previous versions of the program occurred online. In practice, this meant that play was punctuated by the strangeness of being physically co-present with so many people, able to go outside without a hazmat suit for the first time, etc. We actually started the game with a hazmat suit and mask on, waiting in line to be sanitized and processed, before we could change into our first “date” clothes and experience our first match. This contrast between the sterile government facility and the nightlife vibe was also emphasized in our costuming requirements for daytime, in which we were only permitted to wear white, grey, or light pastel comfortable clothes, including the optional Together at Last t-shirt with the program’s logo.
The sanitization process. Photo by Marlies. Image has been cropped.
The characters were jointly designed by the players and the organizers through an extensive in-game and off-game online form. The majority of the character’s personality arose from player inputs, with the relationships designed for us to link these disparate characters together. My character, Hope Novak, was one of the few who had experienced the program before, having been successfully matched for twelve years before her husband died.
While much could be said about the design of Together at Last, this article will focus upon several tensions I noticed — some which are embedded in the design and some I consider byproducts of it — which I will label paradoxes for dramatic effect. To be clear, none of these paradoxes are bugs of this brilliantly-designed larp, but rather features when exploring the difficult nuances of interpersonal intimacy. I enjoyed myself immensely at the larp and had incredibly powerful experiences with my co-players, in part because of the brilliant design. That being said, I think foregrounding these tensions is important due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter, especially when discussing a larp framed as aiming for play on a spectrum between absurdist comedy to realism to melodrama.
Photo by Bianca Eckert.
The Paradoxes of Consent, Rejection, and Monogamy
Like many Nordic-inspired international larps, Together at Last normalized queer play, as many of the matches would end up being queer in terms of gender and sexuality. Such a rule is not controversial in this play community, as many players identify as queer and/or polyamorous, or at least identify as allies. However, diegetically polyamory was not permitted in the program and was stigmatized, although the designers explained afterward that the intention was for this stigma to arise from logistical reasons based on the “laws of virology” rather than the “oppressive society.”
As players can sometimes experience discrimination due to physical appearance in such games (van der Heij 2021), we were not allowed to play upon lack of physical desire for the other person, but were instead given an impressive list of other playable reasons to reject them. This list ended up super helpful as a personal steering and mutual calibration tool, to the point that I think an article about “how to reject a character in a mutually beneficial way for players” is warranted. Furthermore, the larp was explicitly framed as not erotic (Grasmo and Stenros 2022), meaning that we were not allowed to be nude or engage in overly physical play during sex scenes. While players could ultimately choose their level of contact, the organizers recommended calibrating different representational modes of physical intimacy, e.g., using stage kissing and exaggerated movements; fading to black; or discussing what happens. Ideally, the scenes would be short and obvious, letting others clearly know what happened so they could react dramatically.
Photo by Lea-Maria Anger.
Diegetically, in-game pregnancy was not possible due to contraceptives in the water supply, although in my run, one character was permitted to join the larp pregnant somehow by another character. Instead, the government would assign a certain number of babies, which would be vat-grown and delivered via drone to the married couple’s home at some point in the future. This conceit allowed play on sexuality to be a bit more free. Instead of traditional conception, the algorithm determined if a character was permitted to have children based upon their behavior in an in-game parenting workshop; they were assessed based upon their care for a pretend baby made of flour over several hours, among other factors.
Furthermore, during each date, each match was made to fill out a form in which they discussed important topics related to marriage, including how to decorate their small government-provided apartment, how many children to have, what types of sexual kinks they would like to explore, etc. Diegetically, these forms all contributed to the “data” that led to the final “perfect match” selection. Thus, while engagement with childrearing was technically optional in-game, in practice, the theme became pervasive throughout the larp, e.g., topically in the forms, visually with play around the flour babies.
The larp emphasized consent-based play and consistent calibration. We engaged in bullet-time consent (Koljonen 2016a) for physical play and were encouraged to calibrate liberally off-game with other participants. Workshop time was devoted to calibrating with each of our three matches, which was extremely important, because we spent the better part of an entire day playing closely with each of them in turn. However, once runtime was happening, I would have preferred to have time reserved for calibration with matches before each date off-game rather than relying on ad hoc side discussions.
While we had other social connections and plots, we were under instruction in-game and off-game to make sure we interacted with our dates the majority of the time (80%). This rule was in place explicitly to avoid an issue that sometimes arises in larp: some players will ignore romantic plotlines that are central to play because they are not attracted off-game to the player, which can lead to a terrible experience for the other person. Furthermore, players should avoid filling up their “dance card” with known relations ahead of time and should be open to playing with unknown players, especially when the larp relies upon it (Tolvanen 2022). This principle was especially important in Together at Last, as we did not sign up in pairs, a recommended practice in other larps featuring dyadic play, see for example Helicon (2024), Daemon (2021-), Baphomet (2015-), etc.
Parenting class.
However, consent becomes a bit tricky in situations like these. Yes, we technically opted-in to playing closely on romance with three people — likely off-game strangers. But chemistry can be a difficult thing to predict even when not considering physical or emotional desire (Nøglebæk 2016, 2023); for example, incompatible playstyles can be a bad fit in such close, mostly-dyadic play (Bowman 2024). We are essentially responsible for another person’s positive experience in ways that can feel a bit like labor (Koulu 2020), which is not an inherently bad thing for me: I often prefer to play characters with a support role (Fido-Fairfax 2024, in press), which is why I played one of the game’s few in-game coach/counselors.
But that responsibility for another’s play experience is quite heavy especially when engaging with romantic and sexual intimacy. In such games, we expose some of the most vulnerable parts of ourselves to others, even through the alibi of the character. We may think the alibi is strong for many reasons — trust among co-players, a rather light-hearted and sometimes absurd setting, strong distinction between player and character personality, etc. But the emotions we experience are often all-too-familiar, and may have spectres of previous relationship memories attached to them, reemerging unbidden before, during, or after play. From a transformative play perspective, these emergences can be viewed as positive, in that they show us areas that need healing in ourselves (Hugaas and Bowman 2019), but not everyone attends leisure larps interested in or prepared for intensive personal transformation.
Emotions around rejecting others or being rejected are especially potent and are inherent to this setting. Needs for love and belonging and fears of ostracization drive much of human behavior as matters of survival, and are especially sensitive with romantic and sexual relationships. These themes were inherently present in the larp, whether or not each individual player experienced them or not.
Polaroid photo by Karolina Soltys.
The first date was meant to feel like an evening. Then, the chip went into “Turbo mode,” meaning Dates 2 and 3, which were only one day in this run, felt to the character like a several month relationship. This design combined with the enforced monogamy meant that rejection would likely happen in-game on some level. For example, while we could still pine for our last match, diegetically we risked being reported and kicked out of the program if we did not adhere to the rules, such as not talking to our exes without a “chaperone.” While off-game, we were encouraged to bend the rules, in practice, this rule meant that at least some of the time, many of our characters were likely to feel insecure or rejected as we watched our potential “perfect match” playing closely with others.
The angst around these feelings was also tied to the fact we had no actual power to choose who we married in the end or whether we got married at all, leaving our fate up to the “algorithm” and for us to “trust the process.” Interestingly, as players, we had much more influence over the outcome than our characters; we were instructed to fill in calibration forms at the end of each match, sharing our in-game feelings for our current match (and others at the program). We were also permitted to share our personal desires for an ending as an off-game request; some players wanted a happy ending, others wanted a terrible match, and others let the organizers decide the ending. This last option seemed the most risky to me, as unsuspecting players might be sideswiped by emotional (Montola 2010) and romantic bleed (Boss 2007; Waern 2010; Bowman 2015; Hugaas 2022) from past triggers or current desires dashed.
The HelpBot.
Furthermore, the game setting itself was inherently murky consent-wise. While were instructed not to play on sexual violence of any kind, there were in-game consequences for rejecting our current match. Yes, technically we all opted-in to the program, but we had literally no other choice if we wanted to live with another person. We could live alone or with our families, some of which we wrote to be highly dysfunctional and even abusive. We were not required to engage in sexuality with our matches, but we would be forced by the program to live with them for a certain length of time before divorcing, or be alone. And since polyamory was forbidden, we were expected to somehow make it work with this person. Off-game, this rule was here in part to provide angst for the characters, who would likely have feelings for multiple people, but also to try to prevent the players from solving their character’s dilemmas in this not-quite-dystopia by becoming poly. The HelpBot, a non-sentient robot who helped run the program, who played by one of the organizers, would inform us that 97.5% of matches ended up “perfect”… even if it took 10 years for the couples to realize it.
My character Hope was a 45 year-old intimacy coach who made her living by teaching people ways to connect in online environments. She also had the visceral memory of living harmoniously with someone for much of her recent life; indeed, her “perfect match.” However, Hope was also polyamorous, which was highly frowned upon in this setting, meaning she was one of the few people critical of what she viewed to be compulsory monogamy forced upon the program participants. Indeed, one of the reasons her previous husband, Paul, was “perfect” was that he supported her online relationships with other people and provided stability while she was on the turbulent rollercoaster of dating.
The game had an overarching Panopticon feel, as all interactions were fed through our chips to the system as “data.” Our matches were read over a loudspeaker by a robot voice each time they occurred, with dramatic pauses for us to react within our Support Groups, which were set up for us by the program. Almost all of us were matched with one or more exes. For Hope, this practice was initially problematic, as her ex had left because she wanted a monogamous relationship. While we were instructed by our character sheet and the rules to be excited to see these exes at the program, Hope immediately worried if this forced interaction would be unwelcome, which thankfully it was not.
Furthermore, Hope found out in-game that her ex was almost twenty years younger than her and a virgin (like most characters), while my character had previously been married and had many online relationships. (Note that before the game, I asked the organizers to be paired with players closer to my age to try to avoid these issues, which thankfully was arranged). This fact led to extensive discussion between our characters about the ethics of such a relationship, a conversation also echoed in Hope’s second match, Serena, who Hope believed was her soul mate. Serena had been married before but had never experimented with polyamory. In both cases, my character’s polyamory could be experienced as non-consensual non-monogamy by the other characters, leading to rocky emotional waters in-game and discomfort for me off-game.
Siblings preparing for the mass wedding. Photo by Linnéa Cecilia.
Another oddity was the inclusion of family members in the setting. As players, we were expressly directed not to engage in incest. Yet, in practice, to engage in group activities such as the sex education, burlesque, and neo-tantra workshops (which I ran), characters were asked to consider sexual themes in close proximity with their parents, siblings, or cousins. On the plus side, this factor also led to deep play around protectiveness and family-building; two of the Dates featured a Meet the Family meal, in which various configurations of participants found themselves testing the waters of each new family constellation.
Finally, while the setting enforced monogamy, it was also paradoxically a polyamorous — or at least serial monogamist — environment. As an intimacy specialist, Hope found this setup to be irresponsible at best and sadistic at worst. Not only were characters forced into relationships with their previous exes, but they also had new exes after every match all together in the same space. They were forbidden diegetically from openly loving or desiring others, although of course transgressions of these rules were off-game encouraged. No one had any time to process the relationship they just left and were forced into another relationship immediately, a recipe for drama and dysfunction — which, of course, makes for excellent larp fodder.
Inherent to this design was the “Singles Night” embedded in the program after Date 2, in which characters were temporarily single. While they were discouraged from interacting with their exes, of course this rule was repeatedly broken and new connections were formed, many of which did not align with Date 3 the next day. Hope interpreted this more licentious setup as entirely intentional on the part of the program — any connections that night fed the algorithm more “data” regarding who might actually make a good match and how characters might behave given liberty.
Serena and Hope before the wedding.
Thus, the compulsory monogamy of the program was challenged at each stage of the process in fascinating ways. Regardless of how each character felt about their previous matches, they were likely to have strong feelings of some kind that caused complications in the future relationships. Hope viewed these complications as a test of her integrity as an openly polyamorous person: could Hope have compersion and be happy for her soul mate if she fell deeply in love, had incredible intimate experiences, or ended up married to someone else? Wrestling with this inner dilemma was intense enough for me to feel that I had not “solved” the larp through poly as a player.
When the robot voice announced who Hope would marry — thankfully, her second match and “soul mate,” Serena — the joy Hope felt was immediately tempered when she considered the feelings of her two exes in the room, including her third match, who also happened to be in her Support Group watching her reaction. Fortunately, the two had come to a mutual understanding, but still the drama of the moment was high for all characters. Furthermore, Hope had difficulty feeling joy when her other loved ones in the room were visibly distressed by their matches. The Group Wedding final scene was bittersweet, as the matched characters lined up in their fancy wedding clothes for the mass ritual, while the Unmatched watched on in their hazmat suits, preparing for more time physically separated from intimacy with others. Conversely, some characters were devastated by their pairings, yearning instead to be with someone else.
Again, this complicated ending was engineered for maximum larp drama, and even steered toward by many of the players to get their desires met for their version of good play (Pettersson 2021).
The Paradoxes of Physicality, Tone, and Genre
A game like Together at Last is difficult to classify in terms of traditional larp genres. While we the genres of romantic comedy and drama are well-known in film, such genres have yet to be established fully in larp. In part, this limitation is due to taboos historically in more traditional play communities around romantic, sexual, and physical play, which often lead play groups to deny acknowledging that romantic bleed is a natural phenomenon that can happen to anyone (Bowman 2013). Even in the Nordic community, larps focused on oppression dynamics are far more common than settings focused entirely on romance, to the point where the designers had to explicitly signpost on the website to manage player expectations (Koljonen 2016a) that Together at Last:
is a story about attempting to have romantic relationships with a variety of people, some better suited to you than others, about growing as a person and looking for true love, whatever that means. It is not intended to be ‘misery porn,’ though there may be some difficult themes in the character backstories (e.g. depression, bullying, emotionally abusive parents). (Reflections Larp Studio, 2024)
That is not to say that larps centered upon romance do not exist; notable exceptions are Regency-based larps such as Fortune and Felicity (Harder 2017; Kemper 2017) and many UK freeforms, but rather that they are not nearly as common, and thus the play culture surrounding them is not fully solidified in terms of conventions around physicality and tone. Therefore, I would say that romance-based larp is an emerging genre — one that is developing alongside erotic larp, but is not necessarily synonymous, just as sexual and romantic attraction do not always coexist (Wood and D 2021). I would say JD Lade’s Listen 2 Your Heart (Bowman 2023) also fits the romantic genre, whereas larps like Just a Little Lovin’ (2012-) or Helicon (2024) may or may not depending on the way the characters are written and enacted.
Former members of the Banished reintegrating into the main society through the program. Photo by Marlies.
As a developing genre, norms need to be established and made clear by the organizers about what the game is and is not. Otherwise, players tend to rely on their larp muscle memory (Bowman 2017), unconsciously driving play toward genre expectations that are more familiar to them, or inserting genre conventions that were not intended as themes. This tendency is not in itself necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to wildly different expectations of play, interpretations of content, and spreading of themes that were not necessarily intended by the designers. For example, as I have described with Listen 2 Your Heart (Bowman 2023), the last minute addition of vampires to an otherwise romantic game might lead some to find the content appealing, whereas others might find it troubling (e.g., Edward’s problematic behavior in Twilight).
As mentioned above, at Together at Last, we were instructed to play along a spectrum of absurd comedy, realism, and melodrama. However, I noticed people bringing in conventions from the gothic horror and noir detective genres, which caused a bit of cognitive dissonance for me. For example, behavior that might be gritty and normative in a noir film (or even in a BDSM context) might be considered abusive in a light romance context without calibration. A normal reaction to psychological terror in a gothic horror book may look like a psychotic break in another context, something my counselor-type character found especially concerning. In both cases, I was able to successfully calibrate with the players in question, which was a relief, but the experiences were jarring. It can also be difficult to tell if such actions were fully calibrated off-game with other players involved, which can lead to concern, especially when role-players are very immersed in the drama and convincing. We were encouraged to break game to check in with other players, but I found myself wishing we had workshopped the Okay Check-In (Brown 2016) or something similar to practice in an embodied fashion.
I often noted what I could only describe as “hate walking”: characters experiencing something emotionally upsetting and hate walking away up and down the halls, sometimes in packs, with one or more characters hate-walking alongside as emotional support. Of course, larp is a physical activity, and such behavior added to the dynamism of the environment, but it also added a sense of volatility. At the afterparty, the organizers shared that this run was particularly “dark,” with the previous one ending up far more “wholesome.” I suspect part of the shifting dynamics between larp runs has to do with the player-written characters, as different inserting kinds of content can radically impact the game, i.e., the domino effect (Bowman 2017).
Interestingly, I have noticed that these romantic larps that have been run several times tend to develop a devoted following, especially if the setting allows for a unique experience each time the game is played. Both Listen 2 Your Heart and Together at Last had an active Discord before, during, and after the game. Such channels lead to an intriguing blend of in-game and off-game light-hearted banter and pre-game play (Svanevik and Brind 2016) that often impacts dynamics in-game. The character sheets were all transparent, meaning we could read them before play, leading some players to have a strong in- and off-game familiarity with all of the characters; some even seemed to ship some duos over others coming into the game, meaning they had preferences for who should end up together and not. The Together at Last Discord was active many months before the larp and though I could not participate in it due to time constraints, I found it oddly reassuring to see people connecting so excitedly around larp. The Discord also became a needed lifeline after play, as we emerged from this 3-day experience back into life (see e.g., Bjärstorp and Ragnerstam 2023). Now, in the post-larp transition, it feels good to continue to be connected to my co-players.
Diegetically, the Discord was used in interesting ways as well. We all had our own in-game social media timeline upon which people could post, as well as several channels for special interests our characters would have had online, e.g., simulators for farming or raising AI children. One of the reasons this run was particularly intense was that many of the characters were celebrities, so actions that happened in-game would become news stories on Discord, thus raising the stakes. The organizers also used the Discord to communicate key logistical things that we were expected to do, such as filling out the forms. Many players fluidly switched between the online engagement on their phones and the in-person play, but I found it difficult not to get sucked into my off-game responsibilities, so I used it sparingly until after the game. Ultimately, the larp was a paradoxical hybrid of virtual and physical, especially considering the newness of physicality compared to the relative comfort the characters had with virtual encounters.
In-game celebrities made for an active Discord with extensive online play.
Romantic Realism
I appreciated that Together at Last made space for happy endings for players who wanted to have that experience (as I did). I also really enjoy being part of the ongoing online community around these intense romantic larps. I have had some deep and potent scenes, as well as debriefs, with the players. I feel very lucky to have been a part of these experiences. Each larp had moments of brilliance in its design, leading to a feeling of safety when playing with these emotionally fraught themes.
That being said, after each of the larps in this series, I keep wondering what it might look like to play a multi-day romantic larp focused entirely on a realistic exploration of healthy intimacy. I have played several short Nordic freeform scenarios on romantic relationships, although they usually focus on issues of breakups (En kærlighedshistorie, Ellemand and Nilsson 2012), infidelity (Under My Skin, Boss 2010), and other critical issues rather than on trying to develop and maintain a functioning loving relationship. I realize that content might be boring for some players, but in my view, even relatively healthy relationships have plenty of inherent conflict to work through — for example, insecure attachment styles or trauma recovery.
Hope and Serena.
If larps help us develop skills in a deeply embodied way, which I believe they are capable of doing, what are we practicing when we return to dysfunction as a source of drama? What lessons are we experiencing in our bodies about love in times of conflict? What catharsis is happening? And what takeaways can we distill from these dynamics that we can infuse with our daily lives afterward, whether as cautionary tales or breakthroughs, our own intimate relationships, or our relationship with our own vulnerable, human hearts?
Together at Last
Designed and organized by: Karolina Soltys, Patrik Bálint, David Owen, Lu Larpová, Marie-Lucie Genet, and Phil D’Souza
Cost: 300€
Location: Berg en Dal, the Netherlands
Players: 40
Bibliography
Bjärstorp, Sara, and Petra Ragnerstam. 2023. “Live-action Role Playing and the Affordances of Social Media.” Culture Unbound 15, no. 2: 66-87.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2018. “The Larp Domino Effect.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 161-170. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.
Fido-Fairfax, Karolina. 2024, in press. “Strings and Rails: NPCs vs. Supporting Characters.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas et al., 38-40. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Koljonen, Johanna. 2016b. “Toolkit: The Tap-Out.” Participation Safety in Larp, September 11.
Koulu, Sanna. 2020. “Emotions as Skilled Work.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, and Mia Makkonen, 98-106. Helsinki: Solmukohta.
Svanevik, Martine, and Simon Brind. 2016. “‘Pre-Bleed is Totally a Thing.’” In Larp Realia: Analysis, Design, and Discussions of Nordic Larp, edited by Jukka Särkijärvi, Mika Loponen, and Kaisa Kangas, 108-119. Helsinki: Ropecon ry.
So Karin Edman published a wishlist from the ladies of the Swedish Larp Women Unite (LWU), who wished more men would be interested in playing romantic relationships with them, which has spawned a lot of interesting discussion in the larposphere on Facebook.
I’ve had a lot of fun out of romantic storylines in a lot of different larps, it’s a really powerful area to explore. There’s so many possibilities for intense emotions and meaningful stories:
I’ve played Romeo and Juliet in a prison camp, a can’t-live-with-you-can’t-live-without-you story in utopia, been set up in an arranged marriage doomed to tragedy and been magically drawn back to life by my true love.
I’d like to share my observations on what I think makes for good romantic play (or any intense interpersonal drama, really).
Just to be catchy and bloggy, I’m basing it on four pillars: Context, Consent, Communication and Chemistry.
Context
No man is an island; neither does two make an archipelago. So if you are making the romance from scratch, explore the context of the whole larp to see what relationships are possible and encouraged. Find an angle that supports the intended experience of the larp; don’t just go for fulfilling your personal fantasies.
Also make sure the play has room in between the other stuff you’re doing, I’ve seen so many romances neglected by players too busy to focus on them and an equal amount of players stuck with only the romance to play on and no one at the other end.
Find someone to play with who has a genuine desire to be the other half, who has the possibility to prioritize the play with you, so you don’t end up disappointed.
Oftentimes your character comes with a romantic story attached and you just have to make the best of it. Here the best approach is to try and see what function the plot has in the larp and where you get to decide yourself in the relationship.
The players around you are also an important part of the relationship. Find ways for your relationship play to contribute to their experience as well, and see that they have meaningful positions in regards to the relationship. Romeo and Juliet are boring without the Capulets and Montagues.
Consent
I have this thing where I cannot engage with play if the other person is not actually into it – call it neurotic. If I sense they are not enjoying themselves, my body has ways of shutting it all down.
Seriously though, consent is a basic requirement for me. If I don’t feel that the other person is excited about playing romantically with me, I steer clear of that play. I don’t just want a lukewarm “okay, that sounds fine.” I need enthusiastic consent and shared ownership if I am to play it at all.
I’m also aware of giving my own enthusiastic consent early and often; I’d rather be overbearing than not get the conversation started. You should at least have a vague idea about your personal lines. Saying “I’m not sure exactly where my lines are with physical play” is a good start; “I don’t have any lines” shows that you are an idiot.
Personally I have used the last many larps to develop an elevator pitch about my personal limits, to get started:
I really enjoy bringing physicality and touching into play, so I’m good with most normal stuff as long as you stay away from groping the swimsuit area. You can give me a slap or light physical molestation if that becomes relevant. I have a weak immune system, so anything with mucus membranes and bodily fluids is out, that means actual kissing, spitting, fingers in the mouth and such. But Ars Amandi works wonderfully for me, so I suggest that for intimacy, but if you prefer something else, I’m sure we can make that work too.
I also need to have consent reaffirmed during play. Especially when thing get heavier. If I can’t tell that you are enjoying play, I’m not going to take it further. This means we go off-game and check in, and preferably also talk about where we want play to go. Blackbox scenes are a good excuse.
If you fail to build the relationship on mutual off-game consent, you’re bound to end up in territory where you or someone else feels violated or unsafe. The stuff we play with in romantic scenes is the natural habitat of trauma, so we need the extra care not to trigger old scars or create new injuries. Sometimes we do so by accident, in which case it is going to be a lot less horrible to work out, if you have already shown that you care about consent.
Communication
Talk. With. Each. Other. A lot. You can’t really consent if you don’t know what is going on. Also there’s a lot of layers and meanings we might miss when it comes to intense relations, so it’s good to know what the other side is focusing on and what is making them excited. Talk about the type of scenes you’d be into. Talk about the kinds of stories you love. Talk about the kinds of affection that work for you. Talk about your characters. Talk about what you want to go wrong. Talk about which songs you could have as theme song for the relationship. Make up pointless bits of backstory.
And once play starts, you keep the lines open. You take time to listen to each other and sense what works for the other. You go off-game and check in. You tell how you feel as a player.
I’ve enjoyed using meta room or blackbox play to calibrate with my partner, we’ve done abstract scenes with stuff like inner monologues and free association to communicate our thoughts and feelings in ways that open up for new and more nuanced play afterwards.
I nearly always follow the basic model of mutual escalation in order to keep it feeling safe all the way through. Make a move, wait for the other to respond and reciprocate before moving on. If you get positive feedback, move up the intensity, if not you step back to a safe place and try something else.
If you want to be discreet, you can do things in-game and then check if the other player plays into the move or around and get useful info. If someone isn’t actively playing reactions to your play, you’re better off going for something else. You can tell a lot from the level of engagement.
Chemistry
This is actually the most important bit: You need personal chemistry to play love. Without chemistry, play becomes a sucky chore. You need at least a spark of connection. And it better be mutual. Also, it has infinitely less to do with what makes your pants tingle, than it does with subconscious trust and genuine interest in the other person.
You can’t force it. But you can grow it, if both of you are willing to open up – it takes a little work and communication to build up mutual trust and connection.
Chemistry is also awfully fragile. So many things can ruin it, so you have to put in the work, to be someone people can connect with. A lot of the points in the list from LWU is personal deal breakers that ruin the chemistry. You can’t guarantee that it works, but you can start it up.
Also, chemistry is impossible to detect without meeting in person. You might have great fun on skype before play, but once you meet a wrong pheromone can break the spell. Likewise, sometimes you build up an incredibly meaningful thing out of 15 minutes at a workshop. It’s a bit of a lottery really, so you just go to try an up your odds and hope for the best.
If you’re stuck larping a romance without any chemistry, you’re gonna want to minimize the damage. A good place to start is to acknowledge the awkward with your partner and talk about what to do about it. If possible, simply play the relationship to a breaking point and end it. Go your separate ways. Otherwise see if you can transform the relationship into something you’re both comfortable with. Going through the motions should be a last resort.
How to Get Started
You ask. Ask out aloud in the Facebook group of the larp, if anyone is up for a romance. Suggest it to someone personally. Be prepared for rejection, so don’t just aim for one perfect relationship – that is a losing strategy. Be open to whatever comes up and be prepared to shape it yourself.
The big problem is that for a lot of us, asking someone to play out romantic stuff is pretty much the same terrifying prospect as asking someone on a date in real life. The rejection is very much the same punch in the gut. There’s no big trick here, but to make it start out as low stakes for everyone involved. I’d suggest starting out talking about play in general, move onto your characters relationship potential in general, before asking about adding a romantic layer. Worse case scenario is you might get a rejection, but still an interesting potential for play.
Be honest about what you want. Don’t just go along with what you get offered, take ownership of your half of the play. It’s a lot more attractive when it comes to building the intense stuff we all want. Romance is really not that different from most other play, at the end of the day.
And my pet peeve:
Don’t you dare hook up with the other player. You’re failing to larp if you do. You’re putting your own base needs ahead of community safety.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to give up on opening romantic play, because the other person assumed I was only into if to get into their pants. I usually make a point of mentioning my off-game partner during introductory talks, to discreetly position myself.
The reason I’ve managed to get to some insanely intense levels of intimacy in larp, is the simple fact that off-game there is nothing but friendship awaiting us. Even if we feel like we connect on soul-level or hormones rage during Ars Amandi. Off-game we’re not going to pursue this further. That’s part of the contract and the magic circle.
At least keep your pants on through play and the after party, if you can’t wait that long, you are not grown up enough to larp.
We step into the ritual chamber wearing our ceremonial robes, the hoods on our heads. We’re at a beautiful estate in the Danish countryside, secluded enough to feel the outside world only as a distant concern. The larp is Baphomet (2015-) and I participated in it in 2019. It details the fall of a vintage era Hermetic cult as they connect with the dark gods Pan and Baphomet.
As the ritual goes on, we huddle in the middle of the room, backs to each other, facing the walls. A High Templar circles us and intones the ritual while we hum a low, collective sound that feels bigger and deeper than any individual.
The experience goes beyond the typical boundaries between fiction and reality that superficially define larp. The outwards-facing huddle is a simple formation but it means that my back is physically against other players. I feel the sound vibrate in their bodies. Someone shorter than me is in front and their voice is indistinguishable from mine.
Our collective hum changes. There are vibrations, emotions, dissonances and shrieks. It feels like an auditory summation of the larp’s emotional state at that point. There are moments of terror and warmth. It’s a profoundly positive experience of togetherness but the larp’s horror themes shine through and fear makes itself manifest.
The seemingly contradictory experiences of human connection and inner darkness are present at the same time, not as a contradiction but as complementary elements. This is a common theme in a family of larps of which Baphomet is one.
Others in the same genre are Pan, House of Craving, Inside Hamlet, Libertines, Conscience, and End of the Line. They are defined by an aesthetic of sordid indulgence, dark emotional content, and playground-style design creating opportunities for participants to sin creatively.
Baphomet Run 2. Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Communities of Sin
As is typical of larp, these games create small temporary communities, microcosms in which the participants enable each other to experience the thrills and terrors that draw them in. In my personal experience, the communities of play especially in the smaller larps such as Baphomet and House of Craving (2019) are unusually warm, supportive and positive.
Indeed, so much so that participants joke about not wanting to go back to the real world and its hierarchies, anxieties and daily oppressions. While the larp’s fictional landscape is full of degradation and injustice, the off-game community is humble, constructive, and ready to listen.
Of course, no larp experience is homogenous across its player space. There are surely other player experiences as well, especially in the bigger of the larps mentioned. Still, when I’ve left for the airport after the larp, the positivity of the play community has been a topic of conversation with other players in a way that differs from most of my other larp experiences.
After one of these larps, I lamented with another male player the fact that the easy physical closeness between men would slowly fade in the outside world. It would become more awkward to hug as the repressions of society wore away at us.
This experience of closeness and community doesn’t happen by accident. Larps all about characters doing terrible things to each other function best when the workshops are geared to build trust and intimacy. When the players feel safe and comfortable they can go to emotional extremes that would otherwise be inaccessible to them.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
When I think about other types of larps that have featured a similarly close, warm community experience, they’ve tended to be small games which have workshops with similar goals. One such is the Brody Condon larp The Zeigarnik Effect (2015) in Norway. We played characters undergoing gestalt therapy and the workshops were needed to get us accustomed to the game’s unusual mode of communication and interaction.
Because of the positive nature of the overall emotional experience of these larps I’ve started to wonder whether they’re horror larps at all. The one I worked on, the Vampire: the Masquerade larp End of the Line (2016-), was explicitly conceived as a horror-themed playground designed to enable each participant in a dynamic, personal way. The aesthetic was from horror but the actual experience was made so you’d get to do fun things you can’t do otherwise.
Designed for Transgression
There are a few design choices that make this sort of larp possible. They tend to be typical of Nordic larp design in general but are often implemented in specific ways to enable the players to transgress in a fun and safe way.
Workshopping together to build intimacy, trust and a shared sense of the social space is crucial. The players have to feel that the play community of the larp supports them and is open to their ideas. They have to feel free to express themselves and take creative risks. This is achieved with workshop exercises that build trust and intimacy. In some larps, player selection also plays a part.
Safety or calibration mechanics that allow the player to stop or adjust play on the fly also play an important part. The presence of such mechanics makes it possible for participants to feel like they can trust their fellow players and the play situation.
These mechanics can be used for many different reasons, not all of them dramatic. When they work well, they allow the player to navigate around issues that make transgressive content difficult for them to access, whatever those issues might be.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
While not present in all the larps mentioned in this article, transparency is great for enabling the players. In Inside Hamlet, Pan, Baphomet, and House of Craving, every player can read all characters if they so choose in the preparation for the larp. For some players this makes it easier for them to instigate transgressive game content with other players. They know from their reading that the other player’s character is just as fucked up as their own.
All together, these design choices work best when they give the player the tools to take responsibility for their own larp experience. A player who feels enabled and in control can more easily engage in play where the character is in the opposite situation.
Cruelty is Fun
There’s an overlap in themes, techniques and player base between these larps and BDSM culture. They allow us to enjoy feelings, sensations and emotions that are taboo in normal conversation and polite society. Things that are ordinarily considered wrong, debased, or evil become playful, fulfilling, and fun when enacted within a consensual, supportive context.
BDSM often features role-play and I don’t think that’s categorically different from larp with erotic or sexual themes. Rather, there’s a sliding scale of different designed experiences from an abstracted larp experience to a fuck session with a light sheen of fiction.
One example of a thing that’s bad in real life but often fun in play is cruelty. In the right context and with the right people, cruelty can be tremendously sexy.
Everyday life has limited opportunities to enjoy cruelty in an ethical way because it tends to require a victim. In larp and BDSM the victims are there consensually and they can enjoy the thrill of being subjected to cruelty, safe in the knowledge that they control their own play and can exit it as needed. In this way, being the victim of cruelty can become a fulfilling, profound experience. For a player of a masochistic or submissive bent, all the more so.
The design of these larps supports the playing of cruelty in much the same way the culture around BDSM scenes supports it. Safety mechanisms and workshopping provide a framework in which taboo impulses can be explored. Character writing and other design elements provides alibi for being cruel. However, personal experience suggests that the most dynamic scenes of cruelty in a larp are expressions of player creativity and energy enabled by the design but not necessarily originating in it.
Members of the Voltemand noble family at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
In Baphomet, there was a scene where another character threw me to the ground and kicked me in the balls. Following the rules of the game, the hits and kicks connected only lightly and I play acted to make them seem real. I fell to the ground, groaned, moaned, whimpered. I remember the scene very well because there was a release of energy, a spontaneous burst of power animating those present. Even for someone like me, who’s not masochistic by nature, it was a fun larp scene to be in because of the intensity and release of emotion.
The over the top spectacle and transgressiveness of cruelty makes it interesting and dynamic even when it doesn’t satisfy a personal kink.
Sex
Did I ever tell you about that time I was fucking my dead wife’s sister while moaning my wife’s name in her ear? It was funny because my son was there too. I remember him drawling: “Go Dad!”
There was also a ghost who was touching his crotch through his pants but that was normal in House of Craving.
Sex is a huge component of these larps. Sometimes there’s so much fucking that players complain of it becoming boring. It’s larp sex of course but the playstyle is physical. You might not actually engage in genital penetration but you’ll probably end up kissing people, groping them, getting groped, caressing, touching.
It’s amazing how quickly this sort of sexual interaction becomes normalized. Once everyone has collectively adjusted their perception of what’s normal you find yourself casually grinding with people as easily as you ordinarily shake hands. The way we’re socialized, sexual and flirtatious contact always matters. It always means something. Except after a morning’s larp workshop, it suddenly doesn’t.
Although this has the effect of banalizing sexual interactions, it also makes it possible to reach new types of sexually inflected play that would otherwise be out of reach. It also feels liberating: It’s fun to be part of a community that has temporarily decided to let go of standards of sexual behavior.
A courtier at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
Of course, the role of sex in your experience depends on the specific larp and how you choose to play it. In Inside Hamlet (2015-), about the last days of the degenerate court of King Claudius, I played a judgmental priest. I participated in many sex scenes but my role was to denounce the sinners for their moral turpitude. Other times, like in House of Craving, sex becomes such a basic element of the larp’s landscape that you won’t even remember all the fucks you participated in.
House of Craving is about a family who gets together to remember the dead mother and wife. The malevolent house starts to affect them, ghosts guide them, and finally they fall into an everlasting state of mutually destructive degeneration. As the characters’ sense of reality collapses, so does the need for the larp’s fiction to be coherent. The higher truths of the emotional journey take precedence.
I have never participated in so many debased larp scenes as I did in that game but it felt quite straightforward when it was happening. The workshops had glued us into a cohesive social unit and we could brutalize each other with casual ease. The play was intense, so much that I took frequent breaks in the off-game area to gather my wits. Often someone else was there too and we enthused together about how great the experience was.
The approach to sex in the design of these larps is coy despite the graphic nature of the stories they generate. It’s all about the tease, not the actual act of fucking for real. You don’t have sex, you dryhump. From the purpose of larp dynamics this works much better as sexual flirtation drives action but sexual fulfillment doesn’t. The character may be sexually satisfied but the player isn’t and that keeps the player in motion.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Prey
Baphomet and Pan (2013, 2014, 2020) feature a signature piece of larp design: the necklace mechanic. The way it works is that a player who wears either the Pan or Baphomet necklace is that god. Other characters will worship their god, falling on their knees in manic adoration. They do everything the god says.
You can wear a necklace for a maximum of half an hour after which you should pass it onto another player. This way, the necklaces travel the larp, organically causing chaos.
Wearing the necklace is a power trip. It’s fun to be worshiped. There’s more to the experience, however. As a larper, you’re very well aware that the god has to provide content for their followers. It’s fun to tell people what to do but it uses up material pretty fast. There was a moment when I was standing in the middle of a room with perhaps ten people kneeling all around me, waiting expectantly. I drew a complete blank. Couldn’t think of a single thing for them to do.
Suddenly I heard one of the players vocalizing like you do in that situation, just speaking whatever seems kind of appropriate. They said: “We want to eat you.”
Blessed inspiration! Feeling great relief, I proclaimed: “Eat my flesh!”
The others thronged at my feet and started biting my flesh, especially my arms since they were exposed. Not very hard, but hard enough to leave a mark. Still, it was a small price to pay for being spared the terror of failing to provide playable larp material for the expectant crowd.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Most players pass on the necklace much faster than the 30 minute limit. I don’t think I ever had it for longer than fifteen minutes. That’s just enough time to do one scene.
The necklace is a wonderful symbol for how these larps work because it shows the fun of both sides of the power equation: the experience of wielding power and of being subjected to power. When players play these scenes, they support each other’s experiences. Neither the god nor the worshippers can experience that role without the other.
There’s a distinct difference in the power equation in terms of how many people there are in a scene. When I have the necklace and I’m surrounded by ten other people, ostensibly I have the power. However, their expectations as players place great demands on me, effectively constraining how much I can use my game-granted authority. In contrast, when the scene is small, it’s much easier to start choreographing other people. In a smaller scene, I can safely assume that there’s enough to do for the other players, giving me freedom to think about what’s fun for me. Perhaps because of this, my best necklace scenes were small.
When we made End of the Line, we focused on the basic vampire theme of predator and prey. In the design, we strove to make as many of the characters as possible into both. Depending on the circumstances you could hunt other characters and be hunted in turn.
End of the Line (Finland, 2016). Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
The thrill of being hunted is an essential part of the experience, indeed possibly even more integral as that of being the hunter. You can zoom out from this assertion to a wider characteristic of larp design: Often in larp, villains, enemies, and oppressors are used as supporting characters to generate play. The player characters are the victimized whose experience is subject to a lot of design thought. Against this background, the design in End of the Line was an attempt to systematize this dynamic while also giving the hunter an autonomous play experience that didn’t feel like playing a supporting character.
After the larp, one player compared the design to primal play found in BDSM culture, where predator and prey-dynamics similarly provide a foundation for the fun.
Pure Experience
In many of these larps, especially in Baphomet and House of Craving, the design foregrounds immediate emotional experience and interaction to an extreme degree. As Baphomet comes to a close, the lights are dimmed. This makes it harder to see who has the necklace and who doesn’t. The social dynamics of the game have been running for two days and the participants have fused into a collective madness where elements like character or story become increasingly meaningless compared to the immediacy of the interactive moment.
In these last moments, we don’t need the game design crutches of the necklace or the fictional frame. We are free floating active agents with full agency to let the impulses created by the larp’s social dynamics dribble out. We don’t play as individuals but as a collective.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
As the larp ends, we gather in the ritual room. The atmosphere is hysterical, people falling to pieces all over the place. Yet as a player it doesn’t feel dangerous at all. Quite the opposite: It feels like a place where you can safely allow the expressions of the experience to flow through you.
Huddling together, making the ritual hum, feeling it in our bodies, feeling our breath, voice, collective spirit start to tear as the gods Baphomet and Pan manifest. As players we know how this moment goes. We know the meaning of these choices on a game design level. We are mentally prepared to deal with the chaos even as it pulls at us from every direction.
The larp has two endings, the Pan ending and the Baphomet ending. As a player you can choose which god to follow depending on the themes of your game experience. I followed Pan in a horde of people running to the mansion’s spa area, tearing our clothes off as we went, plunging into the pool.
We’d had instructions that we should submerge ourselves in silence, without speaking or making a sound, and as we rose from the water we would be out of the game.
This didn’t happen. Instead as all the followers of Pan were standing in the water we started screaming. I have no idea who started it but suddenly the sound was swelling from inside us in an impersonal collective furor, a meaningless, inhuman wall of noise echoing from the walls of the pool chamber. As we became exhausted by the sound we went underwater and out of the fiction.
Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
War Stories
The larp Inside Hamlet had a rule that after the game you were allowed to talk about your own experience but you shouldn’t talk about what other people were doing. It was okay to say: “I crawled and licked another player’s boots,” but not: “Gustav crawled and licked Annie’s boots.”
The purpose of this rule is to enable people to play freely with kinky, dark, and extreme subjects without getting outed with non-players who might not understand the context. It’s a community safety mechanism making it easier for players to relax.
This rule and other similar ones has left us with the result that these larps are often talked about in an euphemistic manner, eliding many of the more outré things that happen in them. Players talk about them face-to-face or in small, closed online groups.
When it’s only one larp, it doesn’t matter too much, but it’s become a hallmark of the genre. From the outside they’re decidedly opaque, which is especially obvious if you’ve gone to them and witnessed the discrepancy between the reality and the discourse. This is why I chose to write this essay: I wanted to make an attempt at mapping the emotional landscape of these experiences in an open manner without undue coyness.
Some of the larps mentioned in this essay, especially the bigger ones, feature complex, nuanced narrative elements. Conscience (2018-) modeled its storyworld on that of the TV series Westworld, and our End of the Line used a well-known role-playing game as its basis. Inside Hamlet is based on a famous play.
Ophelia’s Funeral at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Bret Lehne.
You can play each of those larps without engaging with the kind of sordid activities celebrated in this essay. Because of the breadth of their design, they can support many different kinds of playstyles.
This is why I think that while the tendencies of this genre are present in each of those games, they reach their fulfillment in Baphomet and House of Craving. In a sense, these two are not larps of the mind at all. They function on a more primitive, submerged emotional level where the nuances of the fiction don’t matter nearly as much as the emotional landscape of a beautiful larp scene.
Those moments of emotion are why I’ve played so many of these larps. Those and the warmth of their temporary, fleeting communities.
Cover photo: A Stormguard and a Companion at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Bret Lehne.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Pettersson, Juhana. “Terror and Warmth.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
Imagine this: It’s the afterparty of a larp, and you run up to a co-player who facilitated a scene that was the highlight of your larp to rave about how cool it was, and they just shrug and say, “Well that’s great, I just wanted to make sure you all had fun.” Doesn’t that kind of suck? Wouldn’t you rather have them go, “I know, right? It was SO cool when we all pooled our powers to get that MacGuffin.” Players shouldn’t just create things solely for the sake of other players. Such an approach is for organisers; I want players to be selfish creatures who take care of their own experience first and foremost. That will lead to better play for everyone.
And yes, there are exceptions and caveats and all those things. Do I want players to steamroll each other in a sort of ego-driven cage fight? No, of course not. I still think we should be considerate, open, and generous as players, but we can be all those things while still keeping our own wants and needs in mind. I sometimes hear players proudly state that they’re mainly at a larp to create play for others, or that the plot they created was mostly for the sake of other people’s enjoyment. Honestly, I think it’s bad form for players to approach plot in that way. It’s a hollow feeling to know the people you had a wonderful time with weren’t really enjoying themselves that much. I don’t want to play with those people; I want to play with people who are enthusiastic about it and loving the experience as much as I am. If I’m a part of a player-created plot I want all players to enjoy it, including the creators.
It is of course great to be considerate of your co-players while playing or planning, but make sure to create an experience that you will enjoy yourself too. If you want to be the hero, you absolutely should get that opportunity; just make room for other people to be heroes along with you. I think the best plots are the ones everyone is excited for, and so I think we should shift our focus when creating play from “making cool things for other people” to “making cool things for myself with room for other people.” Excitement can be felt, and it rubs off on other people. The best things I have done in larps have often been things I did chiefly for my own benefit and then dragged other players into. The passion and the enthusiasm for some play you truly want to have yourself too: that’s what makes co-creation come to life; that’s where the magic happens. Taking responsibility for other people’s fun is for organisers; as players we need to take responsibility for ourselves. I want my co-players to trust that I know what I want, and I extend that same trust to them. To butcher an old cliche: Create a cool scene for a new player, they have one cool scene. Help a new player create their own cool scene, all their larps will be cool (and you can get to enjoy their work as well).
The art of saying no covers some of the same territory. I want to play with people who want to play with me. When I approach people I never think to myself, “I really hope they say yes”; I think, “I really hope they want this.” It’s a subtle difference, but it is a difference, and too often we fall into the pitfall of saying yes just to be polite or inclusive. “No” is a very difficult word, but I really think we need to practice both saying and receiving nos. A no doesn’t have to be a closed door, you can still come up with compromises and alternatives. It could be, “I’m not up for romance, but I would love to be old friends” or “Saving the world isn’t really my jam, but I’ll totally be there for interrogating the bad guy” or whatever weird thing you have going on. A “no” should, in many cases, be an invitation to work out a solution together. “No, but” is just as powerful for creating play as the famous “yes, and.” We should talk more about that. It’s easy to say yes to someone just because you don’t want to hurt them, but ultimately a mismatch in engagement and enthusiasm can hurt even more.
Co-creation is such a beautiful aspect of larp. All of us are creating something together, for all of us, but that means everyone has to be creating for themselves too. It demands openness and flexibility, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your own fun. I believe that the best thing you can do for other people’s fun is to have fun yourself. In most larps we’re all adults; we can take care of ourselves. Trust your coplayers to build great experiences for themselves and others, and do the same for yourself, then everyone will have great experiences!
Cover photo: Image by Kulbir on Pexels. Photo has been cropped.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Kyhn, Mia. “In Defence of Selfishness: And the Beauty of a No.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
Description of role-played and simulated rape scenes. Graphic or suggestive images of rape, assault, and trauma. Minor spoilers for some French-speaking games.
Foreword
This article is the amended translation of a piece that was originally published in French within the context of internal discussions within the French-speaking larp scene regarding emotional safety tools and calibration. I have since come to consider that it could be of interest to a wider audience. However, It should be noted that many of the examples that I will present may only be understood within the context of the French local scene. Furthermore, this article will only focus on rape depiction and simulation within the game’s fiction, not off-game incidents of assault.
Introduction
Why is rape such a specific issue in larp?
Depicting rape in larp is often used as a prime example to demonstrate the importance of organizer communication and emotional safety in larp. When we role-play violence in larp, physical violence can be more easily dissociated and put at a distance. As horrible as the perspective of murder can be, it is rare enough in most of our daily lives that we can accept it as part of the fiction and, in most cases, without thinking that it might happen to us.
Rape or sexual assault, however, remains a very real risk to women. We might discuss specific numbers and statistics, but it can be said with certainty that among the participants of a larp, there will be former victims of rape or sexual assault. Most women have been confronted with the fear of sexual assault, including a whole series of measures meant to prevent it, from the way they dress to thinking about how they will manage returning home in the evening. And this is not limited to women either: men, trans, and non-binary people may also have lived through sexual assaults in their past or have reasons to fear assault in the present.
Consequently, depictions of rape in fiction — and for the purpose of this article, I will consider larp as a form of media — can be more impactful to a significant part of the audience than other forms of violence. As such, choosing to depict or allow role-playing rape scenes inevitably has a stronger impact, and will often fall under close scrutiny, owing to the fact that it is still an issue that impacts a lot of people.
I have found it interesting to observe the way that organizers and participants have handled allowing — or not allowing — role-playing rape scenes in larp. I have found these decisions to be emblematic of cultural changes both in larp writing and social perceptions surrounding rape. I will try in this article to present an overview of this evolution, and how, in my opinion, it can inform us of the interconnection between larp, media, and cultural representations. However, this article will only represent my own experience as a larper and creator, and does not aim at being exhaustive or impartial.
Jacques Stella, The Rape of the Sabines, mid-17th century.
Trivializing Rape
During my second larp, back in October 2001, which was part of a now-terminated Drow campaign, my character was knocked out by two other characters and robbed. Fair enough. That situation was written in the rules, and, as a beginner, I hadn’t learnt to walk with my back against the wall at all times. After that scene, right before leaving, one of the two participants in the scene added, “And before leaving, we rape you.”
As in many games of the time, there were no simulation rules for sexuality. In campaign games such as this one, sexuality was mostly managed off-game to produce offspring that could become playable characters if your own character died. Games that offered rules for sexual simulation usually used mechanical rules: dice; cards; marbles, oftentimes with some random draw that would determine the quality of the relation; and sometimes a “pillow talk” mechanic, in which sharing intimacy could lead a character to share an important secret to their partner. However, the issue of sexual violence or coercion was rarely broached explicitly — except in rare cases of complete prohibition, more on that later — and was considered, therefore, possible.
Here is another emblematic example. In the mass larp campaign La Faille (or The Rift, which ended in 2007), the orc faction would organize fictionalized rape of female characters. They would mark the victims’ clothes with green at the buttocks to signify what had happened to the character. While some of these scenes might have been discussed beforehand, it is certain that negotiation and consent was neither written into the rules nor systematic.
In the context of these early games around 2000–2005, integrating sexuality rules was an answer to the objective of creating a 360° realistic representation and mostly “sandbox”-type game. In this style of game, players had to be able to do any action they wanted. Rules only came into play when an action was considered impossible (e.g. magic) or dangerous (e.g. fighting). Physical contact was completely prohibited. In that context, depictions of rape simply represented something “that could happen,” just like in real life. The practice was acceptable because there was no physical contact and because rape was usually only mentioned verbally.
Rape scenes were usually performed by characters that could, in this manner, display their violence and could establish their role-play as a “villain.” Rape usually had no consequence in-game.
Rape as a Narrative Device
Meanwhile, we could also observe games that, while prohibiting rape in-game, used it as a narrative device in the game’s backstory. Rape, in this case, has consequences that take the form of in-game conflicts and dramatic outcomes. As illustrations, I will mention three examples from the so-called romanesque style. I played witness to the plot in the first game and the rape victim in the last two.
In Greenaway’s Feeling (played in 2007), a Victorian-era game, I played as the governess to a wealthy family. One of the secrets of the family is that the lady of the house was raped before her wedding by a friend of the family. The game ended with the rapist being killed in a duel. In the second game, Spirits (started in 2008, played in 2013) I played as Maggie, a girl from the working class falling in love with an upper class aristocrat. Maggie was then raped by her lover’s cousin in what constituted clearly a punitive action on the rapist’s part. This storyline was lifted directly from the novel that inspired the game, A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Fowlett, published in 1993. In the run I took part in, the rapist also got killed in a duel. The final game, Noces de Cendres (The Ashen Wedding, 2012), was set in Argentina in the years following World War II. My character was a famous socialite, raped as a young woman by her wealthy patron, and bent on getting revenge. The game invites a resolution where she poisons her rapist. In my run, he was shot to death by another of his enemies.
It must be noted that, in two out of these three cases, the resolution of the storyline resulted in a duel between two male protagonists, taking away the agency from the female victims, and that the “rape-and-revenge” trope was invoked in the last one. Furthermore, due to the historical context, a significant part of the story revolved around the victim being shamed and forced into secrecy.
Important note: I still consider these games to be good and I generally had strong experiences playing them. However, these games are a reflection of the fictions that inspired them – sometimes picking plots directly from books used as inspiration. In these stories, rape is the traumatic inciting event that kickstarts the narrative arc for the female characters or drives the conflict. However, It feels important to point out that, in spite of their qualities, these games reproduced some of the stereotypes around rape that also can be found in certain media.
Conscience 2.0. Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee.
The Criticism and Rape Prohibition
I think that criticism and changes in the way rape is depicted in larp appeared in conjunction with criticism regarding the depiction of rape in media and fiction, as well as demands for changes in that regard. The subject is regularly broached in the media, mostly regarding the use of rape as “shock value.” Regarding larps, two arguments were at the forefront of discussions: imposing rape scenes without the participants’ consent and using sexual assault as a cheap plot device.
First and foremost, some members of the community argued that imposing rape in the storyline was neither agreeable nor fun for many participants for the reasons already mentioned in the introduction. In cases where the possibility of rape was left open on the grounds of realism and 360° immersion, some argued that even a larp with an ambition for immersion has to enforce limitations on its players and some degree of abstraction, if only to accept, for example, that fake weapons will be real and wound the characters. Some participants claimed that letting players impose rape scenes upon others went against their own enjoyment of the game and sense of safety. Even a competitive player vs. player game could find ways for players to act against one another, including violence, without making rape part of the arsenal. Of course, in real life, rape is indeed a tool for humiliation and a weapon of war. Larp, however, remained a fiction, and even the most historically accurate larp makes choices in terms of what it can represent. Therefore, it was possible to contend that taking away rape from the larp wouldn’t change the narration in most cases, but would make the game experience safer and better for all.
The second argument criticized rape as a cheap and somewhat overused plot device. That critique was not as severe, but pointed out the fact that rape was too often used as a cliché, either to justify a dramatic conflict or to illustrate the cruelty of a character or the world. So it was not so much the existence of rape narration that was at stake as its treatment and recurring aspect, e.g. making it a staple of most pre-written female characters. These critics underlined that there should be other ways to establish the unforgiving quality of a world or set up a character as an antagonist. Additionally, it was important to diversify female narratives using other angles than rape. The use of rape as a “shock factor” to show how dark a situation is, if not used to bring an interesting narrative, tell a good story, or deconstruct prejudices, can simply become derivative; these stories can contribute to trivializing rape; perpetuating stereotypes about rape and sexual assault; or invisibilizing survivors’ experiences.
Because of these issues, larp design choices and communication surrounding rape depiction has significantly changed in the 2010s, with an acceleration in the wake of the #metoo movement. Sexual assault is frequently forbidden in games, with some games even banning any role-play around sexuality at all. If rape appears in the backstory, it will be explicitly communicated and only played with the participants’ consent.
Due to these changes, communication and participant consent have improved. Most organizations now present a design document stating which themes and issues can be expected in their games, explicitly asking participants to write down issues they don’t want to play. It must be noted that, when I have handled participants’ sign-ups as an organizer and what they didn’t want to play, I had many male players requesting not to play a rapist. I also know many people who prefer to pass on any game mentioning rape, which in my opinion is a perfectly valid position.
Can Rape Be Responsibly Depicted in Larp?
This last question will of course be open to debate. Many people state that rape should be forbidden in larp altogether, which is a very understandable position. However, I would like to give a couple examples of games that, in my opinion, use rape in their scenarios in such a manner that it brings a real narrative depth, avoiding the issues that I addressed previously.
The Swedish gameLast Will (2014) presents a not-so-distant dystopian future in which big corporations have re-established legal slavery. The game fiction takes place in a modern gladiators’ arena and depicts teams of fighters and the arena personnel. One of the categories represented in game is the Pleasers: sex slaves whose purpose is to exclusively serve the needs of the fighters. This game is a Nordic larp with clear expectations in terms of safety: the themes are clearly communicated well in advance, the character distribution is done according to participants’ requests, violent scenes must be negotiated, and any scene can be interrupted with safe words. Arsamandi was used to simulate sex and was practised beforehand during workshops.
My character was a fighter called Sol. She was forced to perform sexual acts in front of the medical examiners charged to evaluate her. As a reaction, she became in turn abusive to her own Pleaser, Eden. She was then forced to witness Eden’s rape by one of the guards as a punishment for her repeated insolence and transgression. In this game, the presence of sex slaves and the possibility to play rape scenes was part of the construction of a dehumanizing environment for the characters. After the game, discussions among participants and the viewing of a documentary on modern slavery were used to contextualize the whole experience.
My own gameFlowers of Maytakes place in a Parisian brothel in 1910. One of the prostitutes, Violette, is there against her own will. She has been locked up and blackmailed into accepting it before the beginning of the game. The game doesn’t allow the depiction of rape with violence, but the character being threatened and coerced means that she undergoes at least one rape scene over the course of the game. Using inspiration from Last Will, the game also uses ars amandi and follows along the same lines in terms of safety and communication. Sexuality and sexual violence are a central theme of the game. This character is used to show that rape happens any time there is coercion, not only through direct threat and physical violence. The game in general explores the interconnection between sexuality and power.
Finally, Conscience 2.0(2018, created by NotOnlyLarp in Spain, is another recent example. The game was inspired by the TV series Westworld and is set in a Western theme park populated by extremely realistic robots. Sexual violence and nudity were possible, but only in certain predetermined spaces, also called zoning. This practice has been recently introduced as a means to set up boundaries and allow players to steer towards or away the most intensive forms of role-playing (more examples in “The Larp Domino Effect”). As always, communication was extremely explicit about sensitive themes, with workshops and safe words. Participants who wanted to play on physical or sexual violence had to signal it by wearing a small white (physical) and/or red (sexual) ribbon over their costume. Sexual scenes were simulated in full clothing, while real intercourse was explicitly prohibited. Any scene of sexual violence had to be negotiated following a pre-scripted discussion. Here again, integrating sexual violence against robots sets up the action within an abusive context and, the more the robots were gaining consciousness, to question what makes a human being. Between characters who treated the robots as literal objects and those who wanted to defend their humanity and rights, the visible and brutal depiction of sexual violence could be a catalyst in these conflicts.
In that larp, I played an abusive character who was intended to enable others in engaging in violent interactions. My characters very routinely organized collective rapes and torture sessions. The strict safety rules of the game allowed me to constantly check the well-being of the players who performed as my victims. Playing as an oppressor was way out of my comfort zone; it was indispensable to me to know that playing these violent scenes improved the game experience of other players and was not only there to show my character’s menace and physical superiority.
I cited these examples because they have, in my opinion, common aspects. They all use sexual violence to show how the environment dehumanizes the victims of violence. They all try to deconstruct the way this violence operates, in particular how it can be trivialized. I believe that an essential difference from the examples I treated in the first paragraph is there: the rapists in these examples don’t see themselves as the “villains” and the characters themselves are not written as such. They simply consider using other human beings’ bodies as their right, whether as a client or simply from their position of privilege. Rape is not used for the mere “shock factor,” but to serve as a discussion about the type of society that renders the banalization of rape possible. I believe that the stories created in this context are all the more poignant for that.
In-game photo of the author’s character in Conscience 2.0 (2018).
Discussion
I originally wrote all of the above in a French context as a means to promote the importance of safety rules and mechanisms. My goal was to underline the necessity of building a culture of explicit consent whenever sensitive issues are portrayed. I especially wanted to debunk the all too common notion in my local community that implementation of emotional safety structures would condemn any game depicting violence or abuse by highlighting some games that treated such issues while putting participants’ well-being first.
However, the discussion surrounding that piece of writing and the general handling of controversial themes have also led me to the following reflections:
1. Larp doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Larp, among other things, exists as a medium and is therefore inspired by societal representations and the media we consume, sometimes explicitly by directly using existing franchises as a setting (e.g Wizarding World, Vampire, etc.) Even with a small audience, a larp will be part of the construction of a certain discourse and representation and should be analysed as such. The criticism that was levied against the abusive use and representation of rape in French larp stemmed from such media criticism approaches.
2. Change takes time. The evolution that I present in this article stretched over years. I can also personally recount how I deconstructed my own internalized prejudices over those years before taking a more active role in promoting emotional safety rules, creating guidance for prevention of harassment, and defending a culture of consent. Increased global exchanges and digital communication may accelerate some of this process of acculturation, media criticism, and change of opinion, but they still take time nonetheless.
3. Managing resistance. The cultural shift that is described in this article took time, and was met with quite a lot of resistant comments, one of the most frequent being that depicting rape was just “realistic.” In fact, I have yet to see any safety technique or communication that wasn’t met with some form of resistance. In this instance, change was brought about by a combination of communicating about the subject (e.g arguing why trivialized depictions of rape are problematic), valuing good practices (e.g organizing or promoting games with a clear safety policy), and, in some cases, avoiding games that do not have clear communication on these issues. I also believe that the issue with rape depiction was a good example and gateway to discuss safety issues, since the line between organizers’ freedom of creation and players’ safety was pretty clear in that case: trivialization of rape led players to feel uncomfortable or unsafe in the game, or even to avoid larping entirely. Taking the subject away didn’t hurt the structure of most games. Creators who wanted to handle rape as a sensitive issue could still do it, only with a better knowledge of the kind of communication and careful management that it requires.
Conclusion
By writing about the depiction of rape in larp, I hoped to highlight some important cultural changes that occurred in the media around these issues and subsequently in larps as well. Through these examples, I tried to show that you can absolutely handle sensitive issues in larps, but that a clear communication and safety policy is necessary. I used the example of depiction of rape to show how a design choice (or lack of consideration of it) could create a disagreeable, or even hostile environment for some players. Additionally, changes in communication and techniques have made the practice safer and more inclusive. Finally, I opened the discussion by affirming my belief that there are probably other issues and techniques that are still to be explored. My hope is that discussion on these issues will continue.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2018. “The Larp Domino Effect.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Companion Book. Edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner. 161-169. ETC Press. https://nordiclarp.org/2018/02/14/larp-domino-effect/
We acknowledge that our larps are not safe for everyone. In particular, women, queer people, people of color, young and/or inexperienced players, and differently abled players and organizers continue to report that they have been sexually harassed, assaulted, and physically or emotionally abused at larps. Their voices have mostly been dismissed. They have been told that their concerns are invalid, proof of their own weakness or unfitness to play, or something they need to deal with themselves. People who insist that their larps are safe and do nothing to address the concerns of other players do so from a privileged position. Just because a larp is safe for one person does not mean it is safe for all people. Race, gender identity or presentation, sexuality, body size, conventional beauty, age, and experience are factors that affect how safe someone is and feels at a larp event.
Larps must encourage edgy play! Larps must seek to transform participants through the experience. Larps must explore societal norms and taboos. Larps must encourage collaborative co-creation. Larps must be designed as art. Larps must face difficult content. Larps must make us uncomfortable and encourage us to grow! Not every single larp must (or should) do these things, but larping as a whole must continue to do so.
Community Safety allows for better larps. Community Safety among the players, staff, and organizers is a prerequisite for the transformative, immersive experience of larp. Community Safety allows us to trust, open up, feel vulnerable, explore new options, step outside our comfort zones, face our demons, and share experiences. Community Safety makes the boundaries between character and player more clear, allowing for more intense in-character interactions. Community Safety gives us tools for dealing with bleed and intense emotions, and gives power to individuals to make choices for themselves. Without Community Safety, larps harm some players.
Community Safety is multi-faceted. Community Safety is much more than taking measures to ensure that participants are not physically hurt by others or elements of the site. Community Safety is more than having evacuation plans, medical teams, and emergency response protocols. It is more than weapons checks or a single stop word, such as “cut.” Community Safety is a state of mind that stems from trust, support, and shared responsibility. When larp participants feel safe at an event, they are able to take the risks and vulnerabilities inherent in roleplay. Some players need more to feel safe than others. This is normal.
Community Safety is designed. When organizers do not design for Community Safety, their communities are inherently not safe for some people. This is because dominant off-game norms, which may include misogyny, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, racism, and other oppressive ideals, are repeated or established within the community, where they marginalize those less powerful. This process is seldom conscious and is the result of entire lifetimes of socialisation. It can only be countered by designing for Community Safety.
Community Safety is both bespoke and universal. Each larp community has its own norms and needs. Community Safety policies and procedures must be designed for the size, composition, and norms of individual groups. However, certain situations are always problematic for Community Safety. Off-game abuse, harassment, or assault of community members can never be tolerated.
Community Safety is ongoing. In other words, it is continuous, dynamic, and must be maintained. Community Safety is not achieved by establishing a policy and posting it. Community Safety must be recursively examined, tweaked, evaluated, reiterated, taught, reinforced, and upheld by members of the community and its leaders.
Community Safety is everyone’s responsibility. 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.
The 10 Principles of Consent and Community Safety
People are more important than larps. Larp organizers and communities must value the safety of their participants as their number one priority.
Each person’s body is their own. They alone may set their boundaries and say what makes them comfortable.
Larps should be designed with transparency of themes, content, and player lists so that people may make their own choices about whether and how to play.
All larps should have a Code of Conduct, harassment policy, designated safety officers, and reporting procedures which suit the larp’s design and are respected and enforced.
Off-game harassment, abuse, or assault of any participant – or using the alibi of character to harass, abuse, or assault a player – should not be tolerated in any larp.
Each participant is responsible for their own actions; for reading, understanding and abiding by the community Code of Conduct; and for the consequences of their actions to others.
Consent must be freely given, vocalized, and considered inviolable. The expectation of consent must be addressed in pre-game workshops and enforced by organizers.
No one should ostracize or retaliate against any community member for setting a consent boundary or for making a report of harassment or abuse.
When someone is harassed, assaulted, or abused at a larp, they must know who to seek out to make a report; be heard with compassion and trust; be given the benefit of the doubt; have their privacy and wishes respected; and have swift and appropriate action taken to solve the problem.
Larps and larp communities that condone off-game harassment of others or that protect known abusers are part of the problem and do not deserve support.
The 20 Statements of Support for Community Safety
I will give a clear and honest “yes, please” or “no, thank you” when I am asked for my consent, and negotiate more specifics if I feel they are needed.
I will respect the boundaries another person sets and accept that my boundaries may be different from someone else’s.
I will not touch another participant in-game or off-game, without their consent.
I will not tease, gossip about, ostracize, or retaliate against someone who has set a consent boundary.
I will recognize that my life experience differs from another person’s experience, and that they may make different decisions than I would as a result.
I will accept another person’s decision about or expression of their comfort or safety as valid.
I will support those who have come forward with a report of harassment, abuse, or assault by listening, trusting their experience, and offering my assistance.
I recognize that I may harm another community member, whether I intend to do so or not, and that my behavior is my responsibility.
If I am informed that I have harmed someone, I will reflect on my own behavior and seek to change it.
I will not deflect, blame, or become defensive if I am informed that I have harmed someone.
I will confront another community member if I witness them behaving in a manner that is against our community’s Code of Conduct.
I will ask other community members about their well-being if I observe them being sad, distraught, angry, unusually quiet, or otherwise upset.
I recognize that some people have invisible mental or physical disabilities that affect their experience.
I will not continue a behavior that I have been asked to stop.
I will not use alcohol as an excuse for my poor behavior towards another.
I will not use the alibi of roleplay to harm another player.
For character-to-character interactions involving sexuality, romance, or violence, I will negotiate consent with the other player either before or during the larp.
I will not force my feelings, ideas, or desires upon another community member.
I will not use my size, voice, body, or power to deprive another community member of their autonomy or consent.
I will be an ally of victims, an advocate for respectful behavior, and a voice for those who are unable to come forward themselves.
The 10 Larp Designer Commitments to Community Safety
With my community, I will create and maintain a Code of Conduct that outlines expected, encouraged, and prohibited behavior.
With assistance, as needed, I will create a harassment policy and reporting procedure for my larps which condemns harassment and establishes a clear and confidential way for participants to come forward if it is violated.
I will designate one or more people on my organizer team as Community Safety Coordinators and give these people the resources and respect they need to conduct Community Safety business.
I will require that players of my larps adhere to the Code of Conduct and harassment policy to continue to play.
I will enforce the larp’s Code of Conduct and harassment policy consistently and judiciously, taking into account the facts and context of each situation, but without playing favorites or excusing behavior for some but not others.
I will list content and themes prior to my games, and will make player lists available to other players.
I will support the decisions of my Safety Coordinators and back them up within the Community of my larp and the larger larping Community.
I will ensure that a Safety Coordinator is present and accessible at my larps, and that there is a designated space set aside for people experiencing distress.
I will create appropriate mechanics for players to opt-out of scenes for any reason during the larp. These mechanics will not penalize the player for using them.
I will be a model of behavior for my larp community, I will take seriously any reports of harassment or abuse, and I will advocate for Community Safety within the larger larp community.
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Of central interest in many of these discussions is the rise of consent-based play, where actions within larps must take place according to a collaborative agreement between players. This style of play has gained recent popularity in games such asCollege of Wizardry,New World Magischola,End of the Line, andConvention of Thorns, although earlier precedents certainly exist. For many participants, consent-based play provides greater degrees of trust between players, personal autonomy over one’s story, and collaboration in the larp community.((See for example Maury Brown, “Creating a Culture of Trust through Safety and Calibration Larp Mechanics,” Nordiclarp.org, last modified September 9, 2016.))
In consent-based resolution magic systems like College of Wizardry, the recipient decides the effect of a spell. Photo courtesy of Dziobak Larp Studios.
Controversy around Safety and Consent-Based Play
Participants in some larp communities express resistance and scrutiny in consent and safety discussions. In the past, any discussion of the social and psychological effects of role-playing was a taboo subject, as religious extremists groups and the mainstream media often portrayed the hobby as psychologically damaging. During the so-called Satanic Panic, many non-players worried that larpers would “lose touch with reality,” commit suicide, or become drawn to the occult.((Lizzie Stark, Leaving Mundania (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2012).)) Thus, many role-players prefer to downplay any social or psychological effects, instead emphasizing the alibi of “it’s just a game” and “it’s what my character would do.” Additionally, role-players often claim that their communities are far healthier and more inclusive than mainstream society as a result of many participants feeling marginalized as “geeks” or “nerds” throughout life.((See for example, Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010).))
In the Nordic vampire larp End of the Line, players use scripted consent negotiations before enacting intimacy. Photo courtesy of Participation Design Agency.
Meanwhile, academics have begun to study these effects in detail, investigating the ways in which role-playing impacts individual consciousness and community dynamics. For example, I have studied qualitatively the ways in which larp communities are negatively impacted by conflict and bleed, and am conducting a follow-up quantitative study with Michał Mochocki.((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Social Conflict in Role-Playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study, International Journal of Role-playing 4: 4-25.)) Diana Shippey Leonard has examined the sociology of larp groups, including their life cycles and the ways in which creative agendas lead to conflict according to Larp Census 2014 data.((Diana Leonard, “The Dynamic Life Cycle of Live Action Role-playing Communities,” in Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek (Los Angeles, CA: WyrdCon, 2013); Diana Leonard, “Conflict and Change: Testing a Life-Cycle-Derived Model of Larp Group Dynamics,” International Journal of Role-playing 6: 15-22.))
Similarly, Brodie Atwater has examined the ways in which marginalized people in larp communities report feelings of exclusion and alienation due to their social identities. Gender, sexuality, and race are also at the forefront of the academic conversation, as people from marginalized groups do not always feel that their identities are respected or represented appropriately in role-playing communities. These conversations spill over into discussions on social media networks and are often the cause of much divisiveness when perspectives differ. Some players believe that sexism, racism, and homophobia no longer exist in contemporary society or are not problems in role-playing communities, whereas others cite personal experiences to the contrary. For example, members of some larp groups insist that plots should no longer feature sexual assault or rape in order to avoid triggering abuse survivors in the community, whereas other participants feel that such content is appropriate to the setting and, therefore, permissible.
While these debates will likely continue for years to come, many designers find their game spaces less accommodating than they would like and are working to develop strategies for more consensual play. Some role-playing groups have methods for players to opt-out of content that they find uncomfortable, such as safe words, whereas others discuss ways to make content more opt-in. For example, some larps feature trigger warnings, content advisories, or ingredients lists to warn players ahead of time about the sorts of themes they will likely encounter.((Organizers like Karin Edman advocate for such lists, also called Content Declarations. See for example “Content Declarations,” Nordic Larp Wiki, last modified October 8, 2015 and the Ingredients list for the Dystopia Rising network.))
Other larps build consent-based play into the mechanics of the game. For example, in College of Wizardry and New World Magischola, the recipient of a spell determines its effect, not the rules or the initiator. Similarly, End of the Line, New World Magischola and Convention of Thorns have instituted a script for consent negotiations, in which organizers instruct players on how to calibrate with one another when enacting specific physical and verbal content around intimacy, violence, romance, bullying, and other sensitive topics.((For an example, see the consent mechanics from Convention of Thorns: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yTgK4ZKqg9H9opBKau7nKZC3y5jOqwlo7D4PWCKPB5s/edit?usp=sharing))
Players in Convention of Thorns must negotiate intimate scenes off-game before engaging. Photo by Przemysław Jendroska for Dziobak Larp Studios.
Originally developed by Participation Design Agency, these consent negotiations require discussion of specific actions rather than generalities in order to ensure each player understands the agreement. Consent negotiations adjust to the comfort level of the person with the strongest boundaries rather than expecting them to become more flexible with their limits. For example, in a romance, if one player is comfortable kissing, while the other prefers only to verbally flirt, the negotiation would resolve with flirting as the agreement.
Another emerging aspect of consent-based play is the development of safety and calibration mechanics that allow players to communicate their levels of comfort during the larp. The Okay Check-In is a non-verbal signal for making sure a player is comfortable in a scene; it involves one participant flashing the Okay symbol to another, who can respond with thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or so-so hand gesture. This mechanic, originally developed in the Los Angeles area by Rob McDiarmid, Aaron Vanek, and Kirsten Hageleit, has seen significant recent adoption in New World Magischola, End of the Line, Hidden Parlor Austin, and the Dystopia Rising network. Another new mechanic is the Lookdown or “See No Evil” signal, developed by Trine Lise Lindahl and Johanna Koljonen. With Lookdown, a player shield their eyes with one hand in order to exit a scene at any time without explanation or request that others pretend their character is no longer present. With these tools, the emphasis is on the comfort and emotional safety of the player rather than the importance of the continuity of the scene. The common refrain for these mechanics is, “Players are more important than larps.” Koljonen’s Participation Safety blog features additional information on these tools and others.
Fairness, Immersion, Competition, and the Cult of Hardcore
Violence is prenegotiated ahead of time in Convention of Thorns. Photo by John-Paul Bichard for Dziobak Larp Studios.
While many players laud these innovations as affording them a greater level of comfort to explore sensitive content, common complaints against consent-based play emerge in larp communities. The first centers upon the traditional emphasis on rules in role-playing games, where any form of conflict – including many social interactions – are arbitrated by a rules system and an authority figure, such as an organizer or game master. Many players feel that such rules level the playing field by providing a non-arbitrary method by which a character can succeed in a scenario. These players may perceive the introduction of consent-based play as threatening to their preferred style, as it opens the door for individuals to “avoid consequences for actions” or act unfairly. In spite of these claims, as Planetfall designer and organizer Matthew Webb explains, “In three years of using emotional safety techniques, we’ve never had a complaint of dodging consequences though we explicitly say we will deal with that situation if it arises.” While any rule can be abused, including consent mechanics, few players actually manipulate consensual play to impose their will upon others or “cheat.” On the contrary, many players use consent negotiations in order to orchestrate playing to lose — where something dramatically terrible happens to their character — by planning the scene ahead of time through collaboration. John Wick advocates for this “friendly enemies” approach in his Houses of the Blooded setting.
Another common complaint against consent negotiations and safety/calibration mechanics is that they negatively impact immersion. Immersion itself is a widely-debated term, with many schools of thought emerging regarding what experiences the concept actually describes.((For recent theories on immersion, see Sarah Lynne Bowman and Anne Standiford, “Enhancing Healthcare Simulations and Beyond: Immersion Theory and Practice” International Journal of Role-playing 6: 12-19.)) For the purposes of this article, immersion will refer to the sense of feeling highly engaged in the narrative, world, or character of a game. Since checking for consent requires brief off-game negotiations, some players protest this practice as “breaking their immersion.” However, immersion is best viewed as a spectrum rather than an on-off switch. A brief check-in may lessen someone’s immersion, but will rarely impede their ability to re-engage. Similarly, discrete off-game consent negotiations that are designed to run smoothly tend to proceed quickly, often without other players noticing. As opposed to disrupting the intensity of play, brief consent discussions can allow larpers to feel more comfortable playing deeply with one another, taking chances they might normally avoid because they established a greater sense of trust.
Satirical comic about some American boffer larpers’ reactions to the Okay Check-In system. Copyright by Paul Scofield.
Some proponents of competitive play, such as Matthew Webb, suggest that competition brings out the best in people when conducted in a fair manner. Through competition, players are challenged to greater levels of achievement and agency, potentially training social skills in the meantime. Competition also provides motivation for many players, as the system, mechanics, or scenario encourages achievement through challenge and the desire to win.((Matthew Webb, “Let’s Fight – In Defense of Competitive Play, Part 1,” Nordiclarp.org, February 2, 2017.))
These potential benefits make strong arguments in favor of competitive play in certain contexts. For example, students in edu-larp scenarios may find competition inherently motivating, especially in classroom environments where achievement is already encouraged through grades and social status. For players living in what sometimes feels like an unfair world, knowing the rules in a larp space and learning how to succeed in a clear manner are deeply rewarding.
However, in order for one person to succeed, other components of the larp environment must fail, whether they are the scenario objectives, organizer-generated antagonists such as non-player characters (NPCs), or other players within the game. The latter two styles of play are often called player vs. environment (PvE) and player vs. player (PvP) respectively, although some prefer the term “character” here to distinguish between on- and off-game antagonism. Such a loss is not always perceived as negative; indeed, playing to lose can often feel fun for larpers. Also, losses in the short term can provide learning experiences for winning in the future.
On the other hand, if a player in a larp has invested a significant amount of time and energy into their character and another person socially humiliates or physically harms that character without consent, the experience can feel unbalanced, unfair, and alienating. Therefore, while competitive play holds risks that some may find acceptable, these risks can be ameliorated in large part by consent negotiations. Indeed, consent discussions can often enhance antagonistic play, as both parties feel that they have opted-in to the experience. Thus, cooperative competition is also possible as a middle ground approach.
In End of the Line, the recipient decides how to react if a vampire enacts a Discipline. Photo by Participation Design Agency.
Finally, a potential problem in role-playing groups of all sorts is the cult of hardcore. Whether in a competitive or collaborative play environment, the cult of hardcore refers to the group imposing a certain degree of emotional intensity or mature content onto its members. In a competitive larp group focusing on interpersonal politics and backstabbing, the cult of hardcore often manifests as pressure to engage in socially antagonistic play. Such antagonism sometimes results in simulated violence or emotional hazing. Even players who attempt to opt out of the political part of such larps may be subject to aggressive play such as economic warfare, the arbitrary use of political power, or forced interactions through role-play.
In cooperative larp groups with scenarios based on serious themes, the pressure of the cult of hardcore is somewhat more insidious, in that players are often expected to push their own emotional limits in order to preserve the immersion of the rest of the group or keep the story moving. In both competitive and cooperative larps, players can feel coerced into accepting situations that make them feel uncomfortable. The logic of this playstyle is that if a player enters the social space of a larp, they are implicitly accepting the social contract of that space: anything that occurs within that environment is acceptable as long as it adheres to the rules and setting.
While the cult of hardcore style can produce high intensity, cathartic experiences for many players, it calibrates group play to correspond with the participant who has the more flexible boundaries. In other words, the player who is able to tolerate the most emotional or physical intensity becomes the baseline for the rest of the group, as they will likely play to their own limits. If other players experience discomfort or distress, the common response in hardcore play cultures is that the larp is “not for them.” This statement begs the question: who, then, are cult of hardcore larps for? In general, such larps are designed for people who a) do not often experience emotional distress, b) are willing to experience distress as a means of “toughening up,” or c) are unwilling to risk losing their social status or connections by expressing their distress. Thus, these environments are often problematic for people who are trauma survivors, neuro-atypical, from marginalized groups, or simply prefer lower intensity play.
New World Magischola students participate in an academic case study competition, trying to earn a job at a major corporation. Competitive play can co-exist with consent culture in larp. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
Consent-based play does not negate the possibility for high intensity play to exist within the larp space. If the lessons learned from the BDSM subculture are any indication, consent negotiations actually facilitate more intense brink play, as both parties can discuss limits and steer toward the desired experience. The cult of hardcore can ratchet up the intensity for one another without level-setting the larp for everyone else. Similarly, competition is entirely possible within consent-based spaces as long as limits are discussed between the parties involved. Thus, the notion that consensual play will eradicate intensity or competition is a false dichotomy.
More Accommodating Spaces
Diablerie scene from Convention of Thorns. Photo by John-Paul Bichard for Dziobak Larp Studios.
Ultimately, the goal of consent-based play is to make larp spaces more accommodating and enjoyable for participants. Instead of calibrating the group to the playstyle of the person with the most flexible boundaries, consent-based play allows people with multiple backgrounds and degrees of sensitivity to engage. For example, a veteran with PTSD triggers may have difficulty playing a larp with flashing lights and pyrotechnics. Organizers can make the space more accommodating by disclosing ahead of time that such effects will take place and by limiting them to a particular physical location where players can opt-in to that experience. Thus, organizers can pay careful attention to the scenography and design of the space in order to facilitate different levels of engagement.
Organizers can also disclose themes by providing content advisories, ingredients lists, or trigger warnings, making the specifics clear to participants ahead of time. Knowing that content will be present in a larp enables players to make informed decisions about their participation. For example, many people feel uncomfortable playing themes of sexual violence due to personal experience or object to designers using the theme as a plot device. However, when these themes are discussed respectfully beforehand with a clear understanding of how the larp will address them, players often feel more comfortable opting-in. Therefore, consent negotiations can engender greater trust within the community and enable more people to feel comfortable participating.
Finally, thinking about consent-based play as a spectrum rather than an on/off speech is likely to prove more fruitful. In other words, a group need not redesign their entire larp to include consent. Instituting calibration mechanics that seamlessly communicate comfort levels — such as safe words, the Okay Check-In, and the Lookdown signal — can help existing spaces feel more consensual for players. Brief off-game negotiations for sensitive scenes, pre-planning antagonistic interactions, and discussing physical boundaries can enhance trust in even competitive larp environments. Ultimately, as Troels Ken Pedersen has suggested, the techniques themselves do not increase feelings of safety, but the safety culture established within the community does.((Troels Ken Pedersen, “Your Larp’s Only as Safe as its Safety Culture,” Leaving Mundania, August 4, 2015.)) Workshopping and modeling these techniques help establish the safety culture by indicating that the group takes the emotional needs of the individual seriously. The more that players can learn to empathize with one another and adjust play according to one another’s needs, the more cohesive and strong a larp community can become.
Cover photo: Students dance at the ball at New World Magischola Yuletide Escapade 1. Photo by Learn Larp LLC.
The original setting made use of the actual pandemic and social isolation conditions players experienced to maximum effect; in this near-future scenario, humans cannot leave the house or socialize with others outside of hazmat suits without facing instant death from the mutated virus unless living in the same household as a family. Once a person decided to leave home, they must live alone, as proximity was too risky. As physical contact and companionship was deemed necessary by the government for human thriving, the Together Forever program was designed in order to allow people to date. At the end of the program, the system decides which characters are matched together, as well as which characters will remain unmatched. The matched participants are married in a perfunctory mass ceremony. Participants must choose to marry their “forever match” assigned by the algorithm at the end of the program; otherwise, they forfeit their right to ever go through the program again. Their alternatives were to beg this person to reject them or to run off into the wilderness to become part of the Banished, a group of people living in dangerous conditions outside of society. Divorce was possible long after the match was made, although that was deemphasized in play.
Baphomet Run 2. Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
End of the Line (Finland, 2016). Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
