Nordic Larp

Tag: design

  • Emotionally Pacing for Larps – How To Get the Best Rollercoaster Ride

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    Emotionally Pacing for Larps – How To Get the Best Rollercoaster Ride

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    Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.

    We larp because we want intense emotional experiences. We want to shiver with fear, cry over tragedies, give in to the rage, and laugh with joy. Yet such feelings are not sustainable without crashing afterwards. Intense emotions might come in waves, but they leave exhaustion in their wake.

    In contrast to those feelings we also need less intense, more subtle feelings. Worry, annoyance, companionship or gentleness for example. Less intense feelings offer just as rich play experiences and are needed to contrast and complement the more intense emotional spectra.

    In addition we need emotional downtime, to reflect, recover, and rest – particularly during a longer larp – as larping is emotionally, mentally and sometimes physically demanding. This enables players to have the energy to really engage with the story.

    This article is about how you both as a player and organizer can plan and execute your larp for maximal emotional impact as well as emotional sustainability. So how do you do it?

    My suggestion is that you draw a squiggly line, but we will get to that later.

    How intense do you want the larp?

    First, consider how emotionally intense you want the larp. As a designer this is a big choice that will affect all players. Choose baseline intensity to fit the overall design, but be aware that there will be players both above and below whatever baseline you chose. When you make this choice as a player, you make it in relationship to whatever baseline the larp design aims for. Some larps are low-key by nature, and some larps strive for the most intense experience possible. No matter what, I think all larps benefit from some variation in intensity. Even a low-key experience about baking bread needs some variation, even if it is just an acknowledgement that some stages of baking bread are more stressful than others.

    It is easy to imagine that “more intense = better”, as if larp was an extreme sport about always climbing the tallest mountain possible. It is not. Sometimes you might want to climb a tall mountain, but sometimes you just want to go on an easy hike and enjoy nature, and sometimes you might want to visit a specific site. Striving for maximal intensity is a valid agenda, but only one among many.

    Decide what you want for the larp you are going to, or the larp you are designing. What mix of high and low intensity play do you want? What range of experiences would make you happy? This might be a bit hard to think about, so let me help you.

    Four levels of intensity

    One way to think about this is dividing the emotional intensity into four rough levels, and that is how I am going to talk about it for the rest of the article. This scale is not absolute but relative to the playstyle at the larp. At a very low-key bread-baking larp “high intensity” might mean harsh words being spoken, while at a super-dramatic save-the-world larp it might mean the possible end of humanity.

    High intensity

    These are the most intense scenes. If a character is angry they are as angry as they get, if they are sad they are a heartbroken mess, and if they are happy their joy couldn’t be greater. The absolute highs and lows.What this looks like might differ, as we as people express and experience emotions differently. But this might be weeping uncontrollably over your father’s lifeless body, or the primal scream of rage and betrayal, or absolute fucking panicked horror.

    Mid intensity

    In this one emotions and activity level might be a bit heightened, for example your character might be pissed off, but they are not raging. A character might be curious but not desperate in their search for knowledge, for example. Much of a larp might be happening on this level, because many of us want to spend most of our play at this level.

    Low intensity

    Here things are even more chill. There will be emotions, but the emotions are not pressing. Here you find characters that are relaxed, or a bit thoughtful, or “meh”, or displeased about something. A lot of meaningful play can be found here in the form of deep and meaningful conversations. They are just not emotionally intense.

    Recovery

    At this level players are actively resting. Either in character, or out of character. It might mean having a nap, doing some task like chopping firewood or going on a walk to clear their head. Or doing some very low-key relaxing play, for example I had wonderful scenes laying half-dozing in a tent next to my in game companions listening to musicians play. Some players might need to go out of character (at least mentally) to disengage from the feelings of their character to recover, either because they can’t fully relax in character or because what is going on in character is too intense to allow them to relax. As a designer you don’t always plan for this level, because this is something the player must choose to do for it to happen. But you can communicate to players when they have a chance to rest without missing out. It might be something as simple as communicating “after meals there will be a bit of a lull, so if you need to rest or go out of character it is a good time to do so”.

    Check out other media

    One way to help you with this analysis is to watch a movie, especially a movie with a lot of intense feelings, and try to keep track of the emotional tension in the scenes that play out. You will see that the emotional intensity comes in waves. Even a horror movie that is all about causing intense feelings will have low intensity scenes interlaced with the more tense ones, as contrast and to not exhaust the watcher emotionally and make them disengage. Try to identify where on the scale different scenes fall.

    Length of the larp

    Secondly, consider the length of the larp. The shorter a larp is, the less of an issue emotional sustainability is. All larps can benefit from giving some thought to emotional pacing, but a short larp faces less risk of exhausting the players. For an 1-2 hour larp many of us can maintain maximum intensity and come out on the other side of it without ever having to pull on the brakes. You probably won’t need to recover emotionally during the larp because the experiences will be over soon and the natural ebb and flow of the game will offer enough micro pauses in itself.

    The longer a larp gets, the more you have to think about emotional sustainability. Already at a 3-5 hour larp you probably need some variation in the intensity of play, because very few of us can keep playing the same level of emotional intensity for hours. We want and we need some variation at this point.

    Anything longer than that, especially multi-day events, larps need an emotional pacing to create the best possible experience. We will want high intensity, mid intensity and low intensity scenes and some chances to recover to be able to best engage with the story.

    Draw a squiggly line

    Thirdly, draw a squiggly line. Do it before the larp as a player, or during the design stage as a designer. Divide a paper into two axes. One is time, and one is intensity. On the intensity scale divide it into four zones. High intensity, mid intensity, low intensity and recovery. Then map out the larp roughly.

    You are striving for waves of intensity. Ebb and flow. The map should look like a mountain landscape with peaks and valleys, where you switch between the different zones (high, mid, low and recovery) and don’t stay all the time in one zone. Like this for example:

    Diagram by Elin Dalstål
    Diagram by Elin Dalstål

    As an organizer

    Depending on the style of larp it might be possible to make a very detailed outline or a very rough one. For a sandbox larp, where you have a lot of factions acting independently, it can be very hard to guess what and when things are going to happen both as a player and as an organizer. Just make a rough guess based on what you know. It is helpful to plan around meals, as their timing is something you generally know. Often you can make an educated guess at the meal’s intensity as well. (Breakfast is usually a low intensity meal, while a banquet with entertainment might be a high intensity scene.)

    On the other end of the spectrum you can, as an organizer, plan the curve almost down to the minute, if you have a lot of planned events and probable outcomes. Here I zoomed in on the Friday in the previous example to show what a very detailed curve might look like, dividing the two big waves into even smaller ones.

    If you have a different group of characters at a larp that will have very different larp experience with different timings, draw separate curves for those groups and see how they play out.

    Diagram by Elin Dalstål
    Diagram by Elin Dalstål

    Of course, whatever line you draw, it won’t work out that way. There will be delays and things happening out of sync. Every individual player will on top of that follow their own dramatic curve due to all the small events and interaction that make up a larp. Also they will find different things emotionally intense. That is natural. Going through the trouble of having drawn this squiggly line will help you troubleshoot your larp design and create at least a rough plan for the pacing.

    Try to pace the low intensity scene so that if the players want to withdraw to rest they can do so at those occasions without missing out on much.

    As a player

    When you are a player, there are usually a lot of unknowns. You might have no idea what the organizers or your co-players are planning. I still think it is best that you draw a squiggly line to make a rough game plan. For example, try to kick off strong on Friday, round off with some calmer play late at night, head to bed, start out strong Saturday morning, try to find some time to rest on Saturday afternoon, go hard again until you head to bed and go for low or mid intensity play on Sunday because you have a long drive home.

    That is still a plan that might help you get the best possible experience out of the larp. If you made a plan you can also figure out if there is anything you want to communicate with your coplayers. In this example you might want to tell them that you plan to take it a bit easy on Sunday because you have a long drive home, so the big dramatic confrontation might happen on Saturday evening instead.

    Diagram by Elin Dalstål
    Diagram by Elin Dalstål

    Go for variety

    While we larp it can be tempting to just go for the high drama, the high intensity all the time both as designer and as players.. Chasing the next high until we run off a cliff or into a wall. Unless the larp is very short, don’t do it. Be a boring adult and pace yourself. Remember that less intense play is just as meaningful and rewarding. It is not always the most dramatic scenes that are the best ones. On top of that you need some less intense scenes to give meaning and contrast to the dramatic scenes. Unless you establish your character’s relationship by having scenes where you just hang out and talk about nonsense, your friend’s dramatic death won’t mean as much to you if it happens later. The low-key scenes are instrumental to give the high intensity scenes meaning.

    At the same time others have a tendency to hold back. Always staying at low to mid intensity, playing it safe and never getting into the strong feelings also means that they are missing out. Having a squiggly line plan can help some players actually go for more intense play without being afraid of crashing afterwards.

    Either way, pace yourself and go for variety in the emotional intensity.

    Abandon the squiggly line!

    Lastly, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Once play starts, throw your carefully made plan out of the window, or at least revise it. You never know how things are going to play out during a larp.

    Revise your plan and create a new squiggly line. As a player, if you had low intensity play, jump at the next chance to up the intensity. If you had very intense play, seek out something more low key or go have some rest. Feel your energy levels and plan ahead.

    As an organizer feel out the pacing of the game. If things just unexpectedly exploded, then create space for more low key play. If there has been a long lull, see if you can turn up the heat.

    Closing words

    Pace yourself and pace your design. Intense emotional experiences become more available to you and more sustainable if you have variety to the intensity of your play, both as a designer and as an individual player. Enjoy the whole intensity range, low intensity scenes can be just as beautiful and captivating as high intensity scenes.

    Draw a squiggly line to create a plan for the larp, and abandon your squiggly line when it doesn’t work out but still try to pace your play based on the new circumstances.

    I hope this mindset helps. Pace your larps however works for you, because variety in how we design and play larps is just as important as any other type of variety.

    Cover image: Photo by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay.

  • Games Never Played: or Composting ‘The Antarcticans’

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    Games Never Played: or Composting ‘The Antarcticans’

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    Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.

    In her book of essays Death By Landscape, Elvia Wilk (2022) describes why she decided to adapt the novel she was working on into a larp. She says she was driven by a desire to give the novel a life outside of herself, to “explode” it to see how its characters would change or stay the same (2022, 186), and to see whether there was a happy ending in the story after all, one that she herself had not been able to unravel. I recognize this desire as my own. When I create larps I am often curious to see how players will inhabit the roles that I have scripted, and more specifically, how they pick up or resist the genre conventions many of my larps experiment with. For example, in The Kids Are Not Alright (2023), I was interested to see what would happen when the creepy, horror-movie cliché of the haunted child met the underpaid and overworked social worker who has just stepped out of a Ken Loach film. For the child, monsters are real; for the social worker, evil is systemic. To explore the result of this genre-clash, the game needed to be played.

    If larp is a co-creative practice, one that cannot exist without its players, what do we call larps that were never played? And what do we do with them? Can we still give them a life outside of ourselves, and enjoy their unpredictability? As will become apparent, this is a self-serving question that I nevertheless hope will chime with many readers. Who hasn’t had ideas or plans for larps that never came to fruition? Staging a larp is not easy. It requires time, money, access to suitable spaces, as well as a network of players and collaborators. In the Knutepunkt books you can find post-mortems of successful larps as well as practical how-to-guides for budding designers, but there is no discussion of designs that were never realized.

    With this article I’d like to start such a discussion, and to do so I turn, again, to Wilk who concludes her essay with another metaphor for the creative process. She argues that rather than explode her novel, what she really did (and continues to do) with the story is compost it, recycling the material and using it “as soil for new seeds” (2022, 192). I like this metaphor. There is value in a good concept; dreaming and ideation are worthwhile. They are like nutrients that need to be kept in circulation, otherwise creative ecosystems get depleted. This is a call to start composting your ideas. I will try to lead by example by composting a solarpunk larp that never got off the ground: ‘The Antarcticans.’ In the block quotes below, you’ll find excerpts from an initial pitch, beyond which the idea was never developed. This is the raw material that I offer back to the soil in the hope that from it new ideas may grow.

    Project description
    The Antarcticans is an imaginative excavation and worldbuilding experience. We will design a larp for 20-40 players to be played this summer, casting players as citizens of a solarpunk society living on a deglaciated West Antarctica. Over the course of play, we will generate customs, rituals, and artifacts, to be embedded in displays for future guests of the museum to find. These will reflect the values, politics, technologies, and lifestyles of the Antarcticans.

    I have been walking around for years with the ambition to design a solarpunk larp. In the summer of 2023, I came pretty close when, together with a glaciologist colleague, I applied to an open call put out by an NGO currently overseeing the reopening of the massive, saucer-shaped museum of technology in Eindhoven. They were looking for creators to contribute to the museum’s exhibition. Long story short, we did not secure the funding.

    The call to which we replied was named ‘Spaceship Earth,’ after a phrase coined by Buckminster Fuller: a futurist and innovator known for popularizing the geodesic dome and other icons of the techno-hippie counter-culture. Ironically, one of Fuller’s many projects was a kind of larp that was also never fully realized. The World Game provided instructions for a real-life, resource management simulation played on a massive map of Earth (Stott 2021). Players were charged to solve global problems by collaboratively itemizing and allocating resources. The game was supposed to be supported by a high tech knowledge infrastructure composed of screens that would display live data from around the world. Alas, the infrastructure was not developed in time and so the game was never played, though it did spawn several smaller-scale seminars and workshops.

    This example shows that games that get stuck in phases of ideation or development can have interesting afterlives. In his book Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and its Legacy, Timothy Stott (2021) traces the transformation of the utopian, technocratic blueprint for the The World Game as it was delivered by Fuller, into the more delimited actualized versions that spun off from it, which, although different in format, were similar in spirit. The Antarcticans too might find its way into different forms and formats. It was conceived believing that if we gathered the right people in the right place, and gave them a context conducive to self-organization, we could engender more intimate and more sustainable ways of relating to energy, to technology, and to the changing environment of Antarctica. This assumption might still be tested using different exercises of the imagination.

    Why do you consider this project to be a meaningful project for Spaceship Earth?
    This project combines science, the arts, and humanities to generate a lived experience of the future, contextualizing new technologies through their social and cultural use. West Antarctica’s extreme environment serves as an analogue for the post-Anthropocene, requiring its society to confront energy scarcity during polar nights, bio-hack their bodies for warmth, and explore new socio-political practices. Thus the project launches a method of participatory futuring, harnessing player creativity.

    In scholarly terms, solarpunk is a “sociotechnical imaginary” (Jasanoff 2015, 4); these are science fictions that emerge within institutions or communities, detailing desirable visions of the future. In more familiar language, solarpunk is a kind of online “mood-board” of sustainable futures growing on Tumblr, Reddit, and Instagram (Williams 2019, 7). I come to solarpunk from the study of ‘petrocultures’—a body of work that investigates the way our reliance on fossil fuel impacts society by fostering certain kinds of narratives, aesthetics, politics, infrastructures, and social practices. By extension, ‘solarcultures,’ or societies powered sustainably, might look and operate very differently. Solarpunk fiction runs with this idea and imagines whole cities transformed by a more intimate relationship to energy production and collectively organized according to a postcapitalist ethos that is attentive to more-than-human interests.

    Much of solarpunk fiction is unabashedly utopian. It often imagines the problem of energy scarcity solved by the sun’s natural abundance. While I believe literature that fosters hope is important, the more gratifying solarpunk stories for me are those that face issues of energy head-on; The Weight of Light for example illustrates the different social and political implications of urban, rural, big, and small solar architectures (Eschrich and Miller 2019).

    In the Antarcticans, I was interested to explore the challenges of a very particular energy culture, one characterized by polar seasonality. Can you do solarpunk without the solar? When six months out of the year are claimed by darkness, what does that do to the utopian imagination? With batteries struggling in subzero temperatures, and maintenance jobs complicated by inclement weather, this vision of a solarpunk community is a far cry from the garden-cities imagined in most popular fiction. To simulate these polar nights I wanted to create spaces of total darkness, and use sunlight therapy lamps in the staging, as they make concrete the difference between light and warmth, and because they put in stark relief the importance of light for psychological wellbeing.

    Beyond its reluctance to deal with the nitty gritty of energy infrastructure, there is another concern with solarpunk fiction. As Cindy Kohtala argues, “The emphasis on storytelling and either narrative, literary forms or visual illustration […] lends the impression that ‘solarpunk’ is a genre that is rarely actually practiced or used as a motif in eco-social making and prototyping” (2024, 4),  even though the genre often imagines “a ‘maker-hero’ as counterpoint to the hacker-hero of cyberpunk: an archetype who embodies various ingenious maker, fixer and grower skills” (1). I too initially understood solarpunk as something to engage with narratively, but because the call for submissions spurred us to think of objects or experiences that could be installed as part of a wider exhibit, the design of The Antarcticans became much more centered around making things.

    My collaborator and I geeked out over independent printing techniques as well as our shared appreciation of the garish color palette of Antarctic clothing and shelter design—chosen because it stands out against the snow. We talked about the need for customizing clothes so that people could be individuated in dark and stormy weather, and even planned for one of the larp workshops to involve (loom) knitting a high-vis beanie with reflectors. In this way, the Antarcticans re-centered for me the place of creative making-practices in larp. Already I can sense that in composting this project, I am nourishing other ideas, my own, as well as, hopefully, yours.

    The first aim of this open call is to commission works that demonstrate a clear link to either the geosphere, the biosphere, the technosphere or the mindsphere. How does your proposal meet these requirements?
    The game and its artifacts will engage all four spheres. We involve the geosphere through artifacts related to geology and soil–fossilized plastics, nuclear legacies, and mineral deposits; the biosphere through animal domestication–records of selective breeding and biohacking; the technosphere through new methods of communication and sensing; and the mindsphere by involving Antarctican politics, kinship relations, and cosmologies, which will have to account for polar days and nights.

    I sometimes feel like I read more games than I get the chance to play; I purchase interesting TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games) that I never find the time to run; and because of my reluctance to travel by plane I also don’t get to play as many larps, though I read about them quite a bit. What brings me consolation is that there is experience to be gleaned from merely reading games, and that, in fact, not all games are meant to be played.

    Lyric games, or game poems, are typically brief texts formatted like TTRPGs. They generally don’t require you to go through the motions of play, but instead ask you to engage with the game’s instructions hypothetically, as yourself and (often) by yourself. Writing about this nascent genre—big on itch.io—Lin Codega (2021) argues “Lyric games are not for playing but, rather, for recontextualizing common experiences in order to challenge the game-playing process… [they] are experiments in pushing the boundaries of guided, immersive experiences.”

    With the power of retrospection, some Fluxus artworks of the sixties and seventies could be identified as lyrical games. Dick Higgins’ Piece For Meredith Monk’s Apartment (1968, see Figure) has struck me, since I first read it, as a lyrical game poem. At first glance it looks like a location-based larp script, of the dancerly, non-verbal kind that you might find programmed at Grenselandet or Blackbox CPH. But the hyper-specificity of the language evokes a context and a history that is not physically replicable. Blurring media borders in this way (between poetry and larp), creates new audiences for both artforms, and makes us appreciate aspects like brevity, and control of language.

    Piece For Meredith Monk’s Apartment, by Dick Higgins
    Figure: Piece For Meredith Monk’s Apartment, by Dick Higgins

    Larp designers have also experimented with extremely short, lyrical formats. Matthijs Holter (2017) calls his 15 minute games “role-playing poems.” I don’t believe they need to be played for them to generate wonderful insights. For example, in The Elf archaeologists are saying hurtful things about your skeleton (2017) you play yourself, dead on the floor, for at least 1000 years while the other players say hurtful things about you based on your remains. To me this is funny. I imagine that there is barely anything you could say about a person’s skeleton that would be seriously offensive. Our skeletons don’t reflect our personalities at all. And why should we mind the opinions of elves anyway?

    Since lyric games are not scared to ask for the impossible, featuring instructions that may be vague or impractical, perhaps it’s an appropriate format for an idealistic solarpunk larp. Step 1: gather strangers. Step 2: create a better world. Step 3: keep at it. Or, as this article’s reviewer Markus Montola suggested, larps written specifically for communities out of (our) time, whether in the past or the future. I would welcome such thought-provoking hypothetical larps, or larp poems, in publications like the Knutepunkt books, offering a healthy counterbalance to the discourse’s otherwise pragmatic focus (with its emphasis on tips, toolkits, and nitty-gritty design talk).

    The second aim of this open call is to commission unconventional ways, yet tangible experiences that invite the audience to discover, unfold and engage with the next stages of evolution; the project must include an interactive component in which the audience can discover, learn and grow in their own personal ways. How does your proposal meet these requirements?
    Museum visitors encounter artifacts through printed, audio, and AR prompts designed to feel like a paleo-anthropological study.

    I would love to reframe The Antarcticans as a larp to be read, rather than one that needs to be played. I certainly feel that the strict character limit for the submission forced a condensation of the concept so that the result is ambiguous and evocative in the way that lyrical games often are. Unlike the detailed larp scripts I produce, The Antarcticans is mute on things like staging requirements, workshop exercises, rules and mechanics. I hope this muteness invites speculation. How would you simulate a deglaciated, future Antarctica in a museum space in the Netherlands? How would you involve participants in the hands-on processes of making and co-design called for by the larp?

    More than a poem, of course, it reads like an academic abstract, which is why, rather than a poem, then, I should frame The Antarcticans as a piece of design fiction. Design ethnographer Mark Blythe (2014) describes design fictions as stories or semi-working prototypes that function a little like conceptual art, or speculative design. He writes, “Conceptual art or installation art is an art of ideas […] It is not of the utmost importance that critical designs actually function, neither, perhaps, is it necessary for them to exist” (2014). Design fictions may be provocative or ironic, or they may help tease out flaws or  consequences in the design. For example, Blythe presents a series of imaginary abstracts for design journals that describe prototypes or media installations that were never actually developed. He finds that writing these abstracts “questions and explores a design space without committing too much resource. It allows for a number of possible outcomes to be generated and forces the imagined prototype into a research context” (2014).

    Too few people get the chance to design larps. I think we can do more to onboard new designers. The formats that I have mentioned in this chapter: game poems and design fictions, provide templates for larp writing that are efficient and provocative. They also allow us to generate ideas and to share them with others more rapidly. Moreover, being more upfront with our failures (failures to get funding, failures to get games off the ground), and sharing unrealized concepts builds up the soil for other ideas to take root. It means being more transparent about the creative process of larp design, which does not always bear fruit, but which might, in talking about it, might scatter seeds of inspiration anyway.

    Acknowledgements

    Big thanks to Elizabeth Case with whom I co-wrote the application for The Antarticans. Thanks also to Jana Romanova and Sophie Allerding for co-signing the application. Thanks to the editors, reviewers, and proofreaders.

    References

    Blythe, Mark. 2014. “Research through Design Fiction: Narrative in Real and Imaginary Abstracts.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 703–12. CHI ’14. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557098.

    Codega, Linda H. 2021. “A Game Without Players Can Still Be Played.” Medium. June 2, 2021. https://immerse.news/a-game-without-players-can-still-be-played-bdc1af283b54.

    Joey Eschrich and Clark A. Miller, eds. 2019. The Weight of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination. https://csi.asu.edu/books/weight/.

    Higgins, Dick. 1968. Piece for Meredith Monk’s Apartment. Intermedia theater piece. (© Estate of Dick Higgins.)

    Holter, Matthijs. 2017. “The Elf archaeologists are saying hurtful things about your skeleton” Nørwegian Style. 27 April 2017. https://norwegianstyle.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/the-elf-archaeologists-are-saying-hurtful-things-about-your-skeleton/

    Jasanoff, Sheila. 2015. “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity.” In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, edited by Sang-Hyun Kim, 1–33. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo20836025.html.

    Kohtala, Cindy. 2024. “Solarpunk as a Maker Imaginary.” In Fab 24 “Fabricating Equity.” Puebla, Mexico, 3-9 August 2024: Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.13221345.

    Op de Beke, Laura. 2023. The Kids Are Not Alright. https://lodbeke.itch.io/the-kids-are-alright 

    Stott, Timothy. 2021. Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and Its Legacy. Routledge.

    Wilk, Elvia. 2022. “A Book Explodes.” In Death by Landscape, 180–92. Soft Skull Press.

    Williams, Rhys. 2019. “‘This Shining Confluence of Magic and Technology’: Solarpunk, Energy Imaginaries, and the Infrastructures of Solarity.” Open Library of Humanities 5 (1): np.

    Cover image: Photo by Pixabay.

  • Improv Larp: How to Organize a Larp with the Least Amount of Effort

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    Improv Larp: How to Organize a Larp with the Least Amount of Effort

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    After the world started opening up post-pandemic, many of us were eager to reconnect and larp together again. But when restrictions allowed us to meet in small groups, we faced a dilemma: no one had designed a larp ready to be played. With many pre-COVID games cancelled and organizers burnt out from the uncertainty of future lockdowns, we decided to improvise—a full weekend of larping, made up on the spot. It sounds like a wild idea, but surprisingly it worked better than expected. Since then, nine different improv larps have been organized in various countries with more coming up. But what exactly is an improv larp, and why should you consider running or playing one?

    The improv larps we’ve run were for a small group of about a dozen people. This small size made the experience adaptable and accessible for the individual needs. Who are we? Rumo played one of the international runs and made this article happen. Gijs thought of the idea 4 years ago and has participated in 10 improv larps so far. 

    What is an improv larp?

    An improv larp is a live-action role-playing event that’s designed and played within the same weekend. There’s no months of pre-planning, intricate world-building, or character sheets written in advance. Everything is created in the moment and on location. This method was purposefully invented to be easy to organize, removing the pressure of long-term preparation. It’s a collaboratively built experience co-created by all the participants together.

    While improv larps are designed to minimize effort, they do come with some compromises: Everyone has their own preferences, so naturally, expectation management is very important. There is no thoroughly pre-designed game, so there is a risk that the larp will fail. This process can lead to wonderful experiences full of unexpected larp magic but is no guarantee for it. Sometimes, things don’t go exactly as hoped.  

    With the tendency of bigger, more thought out designs and the professionalisation of larp organising, improv larp is a way to go the opposite direction (and quite possibly away from orga-burnout): minimal effort, no scripts, no huge logistics, just a group of people with a shared desire to play. While the logistics need to be facilitated, everybody gets to play the game equally. As soon as the larp starts, there is no organiser role. 

    Photo of people gathered together
    Photo from Guardians of the Dawn.

    All the improv larps so far

    There have been 11 improv larps so far. 7 of them were initiated by Gijs van Bilsen, with a small returning group of Dutch players. 2 of them were initiated by Miriam Dik, recruited from a large group of players. And 2 were international events, in Germany and Denmark, initiated by Gijs and with a changing cast of players. These are the names and short descriptions of the events.

    Dutch, initiated by Gijs 

    1. For the Order!: About a failed mission by a secret society of eco-activists.
    2. Everybody Happy?!: About a start-up that has to test its own relationship matching algorithm.
    3. The Union: About a correctional facility in a collectivistic society, aimed to get rid of individualistic tendencies of the inmates.
    4. Joa: About a family of flamboyant refugees from the big city, in hiding at a very traditional farmers family in the second world war.
    5. The Film Crew: About the making of a movie in 80’s Hollywood.
    6. Guardians of the Dawn: About two families who have been kept apart from society by their fanatical father. The larp started with the father introducing the two families and then disappearing, forcing these two families to live together.
    7. Dittlinger’s Glory: About the last days of a dictatorial family. They know it is their last day alive, as the rebellious masses will find them in the morning. Only, the masses never come and the family has to deal with all the things they said and did when they thought it was their last day.

    Dutch, initiated by Miriam

    1. 8 days, 8 months, 8 years: About a group of astronauts who were supposed to spend 8 days in the international space station, but ended up spending 8 months. Now, 8 years later there is a reunion for a Netflix documentary, where all the old secrets surface.
    2. Immortals: A group of immortals needs to pull off a heist in order to decide who gets to be immortal. 

    International, initiated by Gijs

    1. The Gay-triarchy: What if there actually was queer revolution? A queer utopia turned dystopia by a government that now oppresses straightness.
    2. What about Maria: A wholesome larp about strangers who inherit a lovely house together, bonded by their respect and love for the former owner, Maria.

    How to facilitate an improv larp

    In the following 10 steps we explain how the improv larps have been successfully run.

    On Trust and Collaboration

    Here are some basics about improv larps that you should keep in mind for it to work: It’s a collaborative process. The whole game is co-created and a lot of decisions are based on compromises. For this to work, you need trust among the players. They don’t necessarily have to know each other before but focus on building trust in the group from the very beginning. It also helps to have a shared vision of the type of larp you want to play. It’s best to have some idea of the type of game you want early on and communicate this to everyone so the group has a common base to start off on. 

    Proposed schedule

      Step   Time estimate
      STEP 1: Invite the people for the game you want   2-6 months before
      STEP 2: Preparation   1 month before
      STEP 3: Pre-meeting   2 weeks before
      STEP 4: Coming up with setting   Day 1, 16.00h
      STEP 5: Deciding on game techniques & safety   Day 1, 21.00h
      STEP 6: Coming up with characters   Day 1, 23.00h
      STEP 7: Character relations   Day 2, 10.00h
      STEP 8: Get dressed and go play   Day 2, 13.00h
      STEP 9: Half-game calibration   Day 3, 10.00h
      STEP 10: How it ends   Day 3, 19.00h

    Step 1:  Invite the people for the game you want

    An improv larp works best with 8-12 people. That’s big enough to have several stories going on at the same time and small enough to do the brainstorming session effectively. You want to invite people who like the same kind of game. You decide if it’s going to be a modern day larp in a luxury villa or a fantasy setting in tents. However, the kind of story that works best is one where the dynamics within the group are interesting enough. Improvising a larp where the problems come from ‘outside’ (such as the horde of orcs that invade a village) will not work as well.

    Other types of play such as puzzle plots or rituals that you want to be guided by a game master are not ideal, but possible. In that case, there must also be people who like to take on that facilitating role and can come up with it on the fly.

    In terms of which players to invite, aim for herd competence (see Lundqvist 2015): meaning that in the group as a whole, you need to have enough people who bring skills with them that are useful for improvising a larp. Skills like: 

    • Being able to generate play for others
    • Pacing the story
    • Knowing what a scene needs
    • Play to lift (see Vejdemo 2018).

    You can invite people you think are a good addition to the group or let the people who are joining also invite one or more players. In this way, more people already have a relationship of trust with at least one of the participants. Doing this with an established group of friends also works very well.

    Photo of people in historical clothing
    Photo from Joa.

    Step 2: Preparation

    The logistical arrangements — date, location, food, clothing and props — are all made together as much as possible. 

    You first decide on a date with the people you have invited in Step 1. Then you can decide on a location together that fits the financial and geographical needs of all participants. Because it is a small group, many cottages or small group locations are possible. Keep in mind that a good larp location needs some privacy from non-participants such as neighbours. 

    The chores for the weekend get divided: Everyone who wants to cook prepares a meal, someone does the grocery shopping, and the rest take care of the other tasks such as washing dishes and cleaning up. Cooking or doing the dishes can be done in- or out-of-game, depending on setting and characters. 

    Instruct everyone to take as many clothes and props as they can manage (especially the people who come with their own car). It’s best to loosely agree on a time period to play in, so that everyone can bring costume pieces accordingly. 

    Step 3: Pre-meeting

    If the people in the group do not know each other well, do an (online) meeting beforehand. People can introduce themselves; they can talk about what kind of game they would like to play and what they are hoping to get out of it. If the expectations are too far apart, you can already pick a direction, so people can get used to the idea or make the conscious choice to drop out.  For example, if some people want ‘feel good’, Type 1 fun and others are hoping for more darker Type 2 fun (Nordic Larp Wiki 2023), pick one of those. In the pre-meeting, you can already come up with some ideas for settings, but these meetings are just to get the creative juices flowing. Do not choose the setting yet; leave that to the weekend.

    If you have enough time during the weekend, you can also do this on the first day together, but we’ve found a pre-meeting to be very fun and helpful.

    Step 4: Coming up with a setting

    Take some time for everyone to arrive on the first day. After the group has settled, start a brainstorm session to come up with a setting. Start with wishes and boundaries, e.g., what types of play would you want and what type of play do you absolutely not want? Then start brainstorming. Settings can be short, one sentence larp ideas, like:

    • A group of terrorists meet after a failed attack, 
    • Hippies try to live together unsuccessfully, or 
    • Astronauts stuck together on a spaceship. 

    A good brainstorming technique is brainwriting. Write down different ideas for a setting on a piece of paper for a couple of minutes. Then pass around the paper so you can read another person’s ideas and associate more ideas from that. Repeat until you’ve passed all papers around once. This technique works because people have already read most ideas and it doesn’t depend on all participants being verbally quick and spontaneous. 

    You can also use other creative methods to generate even more ideas. You then select the ideas with the most interest with green stickers for the best and red/orange for a veto/preferably not. Pick the three most popular ideas and have three smaller groups each work out the details of one of these different one sentence ideas into a longer format of what the larp could look like. Include at least:

    • Who will be playing, 
    • Where will the game take place, and 
    • What is the central conflict of the larp.

    Pitch these longer settings to each other. After this process, choose the best one and try to incorporate ideas from other popular ideas to create the full larp you are going to play, e.g., what do you like about this idea?

    This process can take 1.5 – 2.5 hours and will probably have a moment where you think, ‘We’ll never get out of this,’ but eventually you’ll get there. Being open to each other and trusting in an idea, even if you don’t quite understand it yet, are important qualities to have. It is good to have someone who is experienced in facilitating group meetings or brainstorming sessions. Having one person keep an eye on time and group dynamics, as well as being able to make decisions, is good.

    Step 5: Decide on game techniques and safety

    Once you have chosen the setting, you can start detailing it out and think about game techniques. Game techniques that are important are ways to give in-game and off-game input. This can be anything that suits your game, e.g.,  a flip chart at the toilet for off-game questions and requests, a laptop with in-game news messages on it about how close the police got to the terrorists, or on which emails come in from the investor behind the start-up. You can use anything you know from previously played larps or come up with new mechanics. 

    Finally, safety in the group is very important. You are even more dependent on your fellow players to make something of the story than in a pre-designed larp. And where you can avoid another player within a larger group, it is much more difficult in a smaller game. 

    Fortunately, safety in a smaller group is also easier to achieve, especially if you agree in advance what kind of game you want. Talk about what safety mechanics you want to use in your game and adjust them accordingly; as with other techniques it’s easiest to use mechanics from other larps the participants have already played. 

    Calibrating on the emotional and physical intensity you are aiming for and sharing personal boundaries in the group is important. Talk about how intimate you want the larp to get — especially in regard to sexuality and violence — and what tools you want to use to steer this in-game. For us, the safety discussions also gave us the space to look for more intense play than is possible in many other larps. This is one of the reasons why these larps meant so much to a lot of us. 

    Photo of people in colorful clothes
    Photo from The Gaytriarchy.

    Step 6: Coming up with characters

    After this, you’re going to think about the characters that each would like to play in the setting. As it’s probably late in the evening now, some people will go to bed and others will stay up. People can think about who they want to play on their own or brainstorm together, but it’s important to not decide on any relationships between characters if not everyone is present. For the first ideas of who you want to play, you don’t have write anything down, as the idea might evolve over time. Everybody thinks about characters until after breakfast on the next day, when we move to relations.

    Step 7: Character relations

    Start with everyone together and have them describe their ideas about their characters. After this you can either do an unstructured period of time where people will develop their mutual relationships in groups of two or three, or you can do a structured exercise. This could for example be standing in a circle of people who point to others to indicate they have an idea about a potential relationship with that person, throwing a ball of yarn to make the relationships visual (see Hernø 2019), writing the relationships down or doing a ‘Hot Seat’ where every person is asked questions about their character.

    One example of a structured exercise that we use is based on ‘systemic constellations’ or ‘family constellations’, inspired by the work of Sandy Stiles Andersen (‘Storyweave workshop, Knudepunkt 2023), in which, without speaking, we make a visual representation of the relationships between characters in the room. In short, it goes like this:

    1. Everyone stands to the side of the room.
    2. One person steps into the middle of the room. Possibly a character who might be central to the group such as ‘the mother’ or ‘the leader’.
    3. The next person joins in and determines how they will stand in relation to the first person. Will they stand close by or far off? Facing the other or with their back towards them? Touching or not? Standing up or sitting down, etc. 
    4. After every new person, the people already standing in the middle or the room get a chance to move slightly, if they prefer.
    5. Continue doing this until everyone is in the middle of the room. This can take quite some time and that’s okay. In the original ‘systemic constellation’ moving around is based on intuition (‘Do I feel like moving?’), but this can also be done based on thoughts like ‘where would my character sit in relation to the others’).
    6. After everyone is in the middle, have everyone explain why they are there in that specific position and what the main relationships are. 
    7. Then move into talking in twos and threes to flesh out these relationships.

    Step 8: Get dressed and go play

    You put all the costumes everyone brought in one room and use them to dress up as characters. If everybody takes some things, you end up with heaps of stuff that people can sift through. Usually this leads to fun, communal dressing up, with people getting clothes for each other, using each other as mirror, and getting costume advice.

    And then? Then you play! Let your imagination go wild, go with the flow and most of all: have fun! 

    Step 9: Half-game calibration

    About halfway through the game — in our time schedule, just after breakfast on Day 3 — take a moment for off-game calibration. Pause the game and do a quick round: How do you feel about the game? What do you still need today? During the calibration, you also agree on what seems to be a logical moment for the end — before or after dinner — and how you will announce it. We use music that lasts half an hour and builds up to crescendo, so that we know that the final phase has begun. After this process, continue with the game.

    Step 10: How it ends

    End the game in the way you agreed on in Step 9. Take some time to come down, have some food, maybe debrief however you feel the need to. Have a nice off-game evening together and clean the house together before leaving the next day. 

    References

    Hernø, Nór. 2019. “Your Alternate Relation Narrative (YARN).” Nordiclarp.org, March 29.

    Lundqvist, Miriam. 2015. “Making Mandatory Larps for Non Players – Miriam Lundqvist.” Nordic Larp Talks, February 12.

    Nordic Larp Wiki. 2023. “Type 2 Fun.” January 26.

    Vejdemo, Susanne. 2018. “Play to Lift, not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143-146. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.

    This article will also be published in German on teilzeithelden.de and in Dutch on larpplatform.nl.

    Cover photo: Photo from For the Order.

  • For Design

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    For Design

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    A recent article entitled “Against Design” (Nordwall and Widing 2024), republished here from this year’s Solmukohta book Liminal Encounters (Kangas, Arjoranta, and Kevätkoski eds. 2024), was the inspiration and provocation for this article, and whilst naturally I thank its authors for their frank and lively debate, I have to resoundingly disagree with just about everything said in it.

    Naturally, I would encourage you, my dear reader, to give it a read here, and then perhaps come back to read the thoughts of one who proudly claims the mantle of “designer”.

    Firstly, my most important point: designers are not the enemies of artists. In fact, I would go a step further, and say that there is no real line between designers and artists, which is one of the things I most profoundly dislike about the article. No person, filled with the spirit of the muses, is sitting in a pine forest somewhere, hewing larps from great pieces of monolithic marble. Every person who writes, weaves, conspires, or conceives of larps is doing so considering their audience, to the materials, the spaces, the minds, and to the resources they have available to them. Whether it be decisions about communicating the message of a larp, the ways it is expected to be run, or even (and hopefully so) the ways to keep their participants safe and happy.

    We create larps for human beings, real people who dwell on this earth with fears, and delights, and backstories, and jobs, and houses, and a preciously limited time to share with us. So the thought that “design”, spat out as a dirty word, as the antithesis of art, as the enemy of the artist, is in any way a bad thing, quite frankly baffles me. It would baffle me in just about any medium, be it painting, or cinema, or music, but most profoundly does it baffle me in larp.

    Because unlike all those other mediums, larp is entirely unique. I might ask the philosophers to leave the room for a moment while I say this: a sculpture remains sculpted even when no one is looking at it, paintings do not cease to be when the gallery closes for the night, the cellulose in a film doesn’t melt if it hasn’t been watched in a decade, and the air still bends to the plucking of a violin even if that air should touch no person’s ears.

    But a larp? A larp as a medium, as an artform, only exists, and can only exist, in the fleeting moments amongst a group of people, playing it, living it, creating it, in real-time, and only for as long as those people are there and building that story together. You can write the most fantastically beautiful, upliftingly soul-wrenching larp that has ever been conceived, but unlike a painting that may well be considered complete at the final stroke of the artist’s brush, a larp is not complete until the last word passes a player’s lips, until the last breath of someone, inhabiting the life of another, is taken.

    I’m sure some may argue over whether trees falling in the forest make a sound, (and perhaps by some assessments as a mere “designer” I could be seen as unfit to have those discussions). But regardless, for now I believe it can stand without question that a larp is nothing without its players, and that we have in this medium of ours possibly the most collaborative, the most actively participatory medium that has ever been devised.

    And I’d reckon that the authors of the article would agree with me, at least in broad principle, and they seem immensely passionate about protecting what they see as this special and unique medium. They might wish to hide it away, shelter it from the corrupting influences of capitalism, of commercialisation, keep it sacred, tucked away in the hills, whispered of only from the lips of ordained monks raised from birth to know the meaning of “true larp”.

    But alas, I don’t live in those hills, I live in capitalism, I live in commercialisation, I live in a society, with grit under my nails, a cheap keyboard at my finger-tips, and smog in my lungs. And don’t get me wrong, sometimes I dream of running off to those forgotten places of the Earth and rejecting the modern world and all its trappings. If I didn’t need the medicine that this modern world creates to even stay alive, maybe I would’ve done so already. But for now, I still live amidst the concrete, where money talks, and the traditional ways of living have been gutted by the gods of industry.

    And so when I can, I escape. I escape into TV, I escape into video games, I escape into movies, and even on occasions I have the brain space to escape into a book. I don’t think that’s too rare, all in all. But when I am escaping, sometimes I feel like I want to escape just a little bit more, y’know? To push that boundary just a smidge further, to immerse myself just a little bit more, in another life, in another place, in another reality…

    And on occasions, I do.

    Me and a group of my friends will get together in some field somewhere, or a scout hall, or some community centre, and dressed in cheap costumes, maybe a prop or two, and some garishly written characters, and together, we escape. And in those times, I am very glad that somebody was being a designer, because unfortunately I don’t come from a country with centuries of tradition in collaborative storytelling, at least not any that survived the Industrial Revolution. I didn’t have the opportunity to immerse myself in this artform from childhood. I don’t even generally have the luxury of knowing half the people I am playing with most of the time.

    In the article, the authors make a reference to the Norwegian term for larp creating, lage, meaning ‘to make’, and reference it being the same word as used for when one makes soup. Now I realize at this point I am committing the sin of media analysis and introducing a food metaphor, but I hope you’ll forgive me. But it does seem as though the authors feel that everyone should only be eating soup. A carefully crafted, small home-cooked larp soup, made from fresh home-grown ingredients, lovingly cultivated in some little farm somewhere.

    And I’ll be honest, that sounds delicious. But I don’t have a little farm somewhere; I live on a council estate in Manchester. My food comes in packets and tins, and sure, I could maybe spend lots of money on trekking out to produce markets, and then lots more time on making a beautiful fresh soup every day, and sometimes I do. But I can’t do that most of the time. To do so is a privilege that I, and most of the people I know, are not afforded. And so, when I am tired from work, when I am poor, when I am lonely, and when I am above all else: hungry, I’ll go get a burger.

    And that’s what we designers are: we’re burger-flippers. We make things people can get easily, as cheaply as possible, have a good time doing it, and get value for their money. And sure, it ain’t the healthiest, it ain’t the best for us, hell it ain’t even probably the cheapest most of the time. But it’s meeting people where they’re at. Because far too many people I know are tired, poor, lonely, and hungry for a bit of respite from this world that was built around us.

    So we design mechanics that allow people to jump into games without weeks of prep. We write games based on popular properties so that everyone has a baseline understanding of tone and content. We build safety systems so people can feel alright having deep personal conversations with strangers. We craft experiences that can run and give people an immersion in someone else’s world for a little while. We flip burgers. We “design”.

    And when it comes to making larps that can run, I think it’s about time we talked about the elephant in the room: selling tickets. It’s a dirty business, I’d reckon there’s no larp writer in the world who really likes it, but we have to face the facts. People only have so much money, they only have so many days off work, they only have so much time they can take away from children and pets and families, they only have so much energy at the end of the working week. And larps cost money.

    You combine these two facts, what do you get? The nemesis of my existence, the boss-fight at the end of every larp development process, the big bad horrible beast: the break-even number. How many tickets do I have to sell to cover my budget? How many butts in seats do I have to reach to allow this project to be a reality? Now you can have all the artistic craft in the world, you could craft the most effervescently perfect creation in larping history, but if you don’t get the people, you ain’t got nothing.

    And so I do marketing. In the first few months of a larp’s creation, I’m not writing characters or doing world building or thinking up mechanics, no. I’m building a website, I’m calculating budgets, I’m pricing up venues, I’m designing graphics, and I’m figuring out how to say to people, “Hey, this is a cool larp that you should come to.” And I hate it, oh boy do I hate it, and I reckon the authors of that article hate it too, if they’ve ever done it.

    So what’s the solution? Well I could just stop. I could never build another website, never create one more fancy graphic, put Facebook away, and just whisper the existence of my purely crafted larp into the breeze. Cool, well now I have a larp with no players, which as we’ve said before is less than worthless.

    Alright, so we’ll appeal to the hearts of our players, implore them to stop being so picky. Why do you have to be so demanding? Just sign up to every larp you hear about, go to them all, give us all your money! Now wouldn’t that be nice, but I won’t belabour the point, it’s not really feasible, is it.

    So what do we do?

    Well the authors of that article have a suggestion: “stop designing”. Stop making larps that haven’t been grown organically in the forests by sustainable larping communes with at least forty years of pedigree and blessed by Idunn herself. Retreat into the wilderness and just, please, stop making larps for people. Well, I’d say that’s just about as impractical as the previous two.

    Now, as said, I would love to go live in a forest for the rest of my life, with a small group of fellow larpers who I’ve known for decades and only create and share together, and let the rest of the world go kick rocks. But unfortunately for me, I was born in a failed industrial town where the smog is baked into the bricks, and where that was never really an option for me. My culture has a vibrant tradition of storytelling, mostly through song, and I am very proud that I get to carry it on into the future, and do genuine work in preserving and sharing it.

    Because contrary to the implication of the article there, we aren’t all godless barbarians in these cities, we aren’t all traditionless, religionless heathens bashing rocks together for entertainment. We have a culture, we have a history, and we want to share that. And part of the way we share that is through larp.

    This is very much close to my heart, as the sort of larps that I predominantly write are historical and theological larps, where I try and give people an opportunity to experience the lives and the beliefs of those that came before us. I feel it’s essential to understanding yourself and your world to be able to relate on a personal level to the lives of others, be that others who live with us now, or others who lived in the past. And larp is of course an unsurpassed tool for this, to allow someone to immerse themselves in the feelings, the life of another person. If that isn’t art, then I don’t quite know what is.

    And even if we’re not making the world a more harmonious place, even if we’re not giving people the opportunity to develop empathy and all we’re doing is giving people an escape: that’s okay too. I am so proud to see this medium of ours grow ever larger. It fills me with such profound joy at every event we run where there is someone who hasn’t larped before and gets to take their first steps into this brilliant community. And I love it even more when those people get a chance to contribute to the story, to bring in their experiences and their knowledge and their feelings and ideas.

    In the article, the authors accuse design of stifling innovation. They claim that designing one’s larps and focussing on the experience of participants leads to stagnation and intellectual decline. And I again, frankly, could not disagree more. Design lowers the bar to entry, it brings people in, from more places, from more backgrounds, from more peoples, and from more cultures. And that is how you innovate. By offering more people a seat at the table, from learning, and growing, and sharing, and mixing, and giving everyone you possibly can a voice to contribute and create something beautiful.

    We have in our hands an artform that is unique, because it relies on the hands, the hearts, the voices, and the souls of everyone in the audience to make it what it is. Not only to experience it, but to craft it along with us. Most of the people I play larps with or make larps for wouldn’t consider themselves artists, and yet that’s entirely what they are. And so are we, the designers. Because we are making art, by getting people there, by giving them the tools to engage with the game, to play with other people, to feel safe and supported and free to create according to where they are at. If a larp is an artistic medium, then making a larp happen is art, designing a larp is artistic.

    And I shall come at last to the final paragraph of that article, in the penultimate of my own. Therein they say, “Larps can happen through community building, collaborative creation, or even serendipity.” And in this I agree, larp and collaborative experience-centred design can come from anywhere. But I am led to another quote I once heard, by Plutarch, saying, ”No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as though there would be bricks by chance and fortune.”

    Well, I and my fellow designers aren’t gonna just wait around for larps to pop out of the ground, or be handed to us on gilded tablets by our Scandinavian cousins. We are the brick-makers, and we are working very hard, with the clay we have, to build a community of wonderful players and incredible experiences, out of those bricks.

    Cover image: Photo by yazriltri on Pixabay. 

  • Against Design

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    Against Design

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    Larp in general, and Nordic style larp in particular, is often claimed to be an artistic practice, a frontier of participatory arts. However, discourse on larp by larp organizers, larp participants and game studies researchers has, in recent years, started to frame larp making primarily as a design practice. By that logic larps are now designed by larp designers using larp-specific participatory interaction design methods. Discussions on these design methods have become the mainstay of larp conferences such as Knutpunkt/Solmukohta. Let’s discuss what this hegemony of design thinking does to our practice.

    The overall project of design thinking is constructive. Design has lowered the thresholds of participation as well as enabled and structured larp organizing. In the best case, larp designers evaluate best practices and share methods. Although every step in this direction seems like a small success of self-understanding and self-improvement, we argue that the long-term consequences do not necessarily benefit larp as a culture nor as an artistic form. The current hegemony of larp as design does the groundwork for an ongoing reification and commodification of larp. Design transforms larp participants into larp consumers.

    New larp projects are now pitched to participants with methods catering to various larp audiences (or rather intended target groups). Post-mortems of past projects serve the function of user experience (UX) evaluation examples to optimize the design of future projects. The design methods are reevaluated based on past successes in relation to informally segmented target groups (such as fantasy-chillout, dystopian-play-to-lose, or post-apocalypse-over-the-top larp consumers), combining setting with interaction style to form specific and recurring audiences. These target groups can then be matched to tried and tested larp design methods to successfully form an iterative and recursive feed-forward UX loop. In practice, this leads to repeating ideas and design elements that have proven to be successful, at the expense of new innovation.

    In their marketing, larps can “attach” themselves to commercially successful and well-known IPs and franchises to pitch projects with similar names, using brand recognition to drive participance, forming a secondary volunteer-run streaming service experience. The success of this strategy indicates an environment where even the overall set and setting for a larp is purposefully used as a design method to drive interest in and communicate intended participation. Adopting commercially successful mass media culture is the optimal strategy for producing predictable participance.

    There was a time when mass media enviously glanced at the rich culture and engagement surrounding Nordic larp. By now, the roles are reversed. When larp designers take turns riding on various commercial successes in mass media, larp becomes a cecum of Hollywood film and streaming culture. Such an approach would be highly unusual in artistic fields, where originality merits artistic value.

    We argue that larp as a form is being restricted by its own success as a participatory design practice and that innovation in larp is over (other than sporadic and local). We see several reasons why larp as design practice hampers larp innovation.

    Firstly, design thinking avoids conflict at all costs to deliver a product. Any kind of conflict or disagreement is considered a failed interaction design. But culture can be nurtured by conflict, and we would argue that Nordic larp developed through cultural and subcultural clashes, not through consensus-based “everything is okay as long as you know what you want” design thinking. Bring back dialectics; it’s not smooth, but it’s also not harmful.

    We are concerned that larp as a field at this point is emulating some of the worst aspects of experience design commodity culture: start-up ambitions among organizers (including burn-out syndrome) and reification of participants’ social interactions: social interaction becomes a “product” that is delivered by the larp through strategic employment of larp design methods.

    The idea of clarity of purpose that design brings makes larp a “readerly” practice – a practice where interpretation (and interaction) is “prepared” for the participant, rather than a “writerly” or artistic-oriented practice, open for the plurality of interpretation (and potential conflict). Clarity of interpretation is optimal for designing and delivering predictable and serviceable interaction for a defined target group. This results in predictable and shallow cultural practices and artifacts.

    Remember, there are many ways to make larps. Norwegians use the word lage, a verb that could be utilized for larp making as well as for cooking a soup. Larps can be written, created, organized, dreamt up, or they can be born from artistic practice. We want to encourage a plurality of ways of creating larp.

    Think about larp as a culture. It has been said that design is “the opposite of tradition.” Then maybe it’s time to value some of our subcultural traditions, the mutual knowledge of gathering and making stories come alive through our community. Here, we have to understand the limits of design thinking. For example, one of the key features of Nordic larp is trust. We have developed trust in our subculture by nurturing it for many years and events, to the point where we can say trust is part of our tradition. This makes some scenarios possible that would otherwise not be possible. However, you can not replace the tradition of trust by design. The harder you try, the further you fall when something goes wrong.

    We argue that larp should not be reduced to a streamlined, well-designed experience product, but rather nurture an aesthetic field, an artistic form in dialogue with the participants as well as the culture at large. The reason larp fails to claim a culturally relevant position is because the primary focus on design optimization reduces our capacity to form an aesthetic or artistic field in dialogue with the wider culture. As an artistic form, larp makers should look for autonomy and integrity in our practice.

    Stop using experience product delivery as the primary factor when evaluating larp projects. Instead, focus on how it innovates the form and how it can reshape culture by doing so. The latter is not necessarily realized through “good design”, but through good art.

    Know that there is a difference between feedback and critique. We know how to give and get the former, not the latter. When engaging in society, larp will become criticized for how it, as a participatory form, approaches important issues. Be ready for, welcome, and enable criticism, not just on how well participatory methods worked out or whether the experience delivered quality time, but on how the form of larp itself can interpret and address cultural issues relevant to society in a wider context. Instead of targeting cultural and societal matters, larp has become a recursive product design improvement loop that is increasingly optimized for a decreasingly creative field.

    If we consider larp-making as an artistic creation process, it does not necessarily involve problem-solving or a user-centered approach. Larps can happen through community building, collaborative creation, or even serendipity.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Nordwall, Andrea, and Gabriel Widing. 2024. “Against Design.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Image by Andrea Nordwall.

  • The Hated Children of Nordic Larp – Why We Need to Improve on Workshops and Debriefs

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    The Hated Children of Nordic Larp – Why We Need to Improve on Workshops and Debriefs

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    In Nordic and Nordic inspired larp, we do love our workshops. However, it feels like there’s a trend to workshop for the sake of workshopping. At the same time, there seems to be a lot less love and attention for debriefs. Both in workshops and debriefs, we tend to stick to the same exercises without giving it any further thought. Instead, we could come up with some specific exercises that fit the larp and the experience we want to create. Workshops and debriefs have the potential to become more valuable elements in our game and experience design than they currently often are.

    Workshops as building blocks

    Workshops are principally used as tools to familiarise our players with the techniques and playstyles of our larps. Because this is their main purpose, we tend to easily resort to known formulas and fixed ways of workshopping. However, I hope more of us would dare to step out of this almost traditional way of doing things and think about designing a flow of workshops that would also contribute to setting the mood of the game. Then, the workshops would become a seamless part of the larp experience and at the same time help the participants get into the right mindset for the larp. A good example of this is how the workshops for the larp Daemon (Denmark 2021) gradually build up the intensity and trust in the connection between the pair of players who would be playing two parts of the same character together. This was done through different exercises that varied in physicality and emotional and physical intimacy.

    Additionally, setting the mood like this can be an integral part of managing the expectations for a larp. Workshops have the advantage of offering a moment of direct dialogue between the facilitator(s) of a game and its participants, which is an opportunity for making sure expectations are set and mitigated. In addition to explaining the setting and the intentions of a game, workshops can be used to create a space where expectations are shared and negotiated, and where feedback is shared with an open mindset. 

    Finally, workshops can also be used to make a larp more accessible. The tendency to fall back on known formulas for workshops bears the risk of falling into the trap that we keep designing workshops for the same returning audiences. This raises the threshold for people from outside of that audience. For example, line-up exercises can seem easy to many larpers but they are not simple for people who do not know them. When I used them in coachings, I at times had to do more explaining than I expected. Moreover, it seems that they are sometimes added to larp workshops just because they are seen as one of the “standard” exercises, while they are also easily taken over by the participants and turned into overly long discussions instead of the planned five minute exercise. So, honestly, does your larp really benefit from yet another line-up exercise? 

    Simple and easy to understand workshops that contribute to the game and absorb the participants into the whole of the larp should be an aim, and not just an option. Moreover, accessibility for larps can easily be increased with simple measures, like having a moment of stating the agenda of the entire larp before starting the rest of the workshops, or by having a short moment to put people’s minds at ease if they are non-native speakers playing a larp in English or if they are playing a Nordic style larp for the very first time, etc.

    Debriefs as tools for closure

    To the same extent in which we overuse workshops and at times make them redundant by resorting to well-known workshops which don’t necessarily fit the intentions behind our larps, we tend to underuse and underdesign debriefs in our larp design. Debriefs have the potential to improve the experience as a whole, as they can become anything from a soft landing spot to a space for venting and leaving behind negativity, or a last resort for expectation calibration. 

    If we want to consider framework design an essential part of larp design, then it is a logical consequence to consider closing that framework in the form of a debrief as essential. This doesn’t mean that we should (re-)turn to extensive debriefs with a whole array of exercises, as that risks falling into the same trap as we do in our workshops. However, leaning on some basic exercises that are repeated and never questioned neglects giving the experience a sense of closure.

    In the same way workshops are the building blocks in shaping the larp experience, debriefs are the place where we give the experience a sense of closure, and hence, where we wrap up and tie everything together. It serves to look at debriefs as more than just an optional emotional safety tool. They can serve as a tool for making the flow of the larp end coherently and in a way that fits the whole of the experience, rather than leaving the participants hanging in a space of tension and unfinished business.

    If we neglect our debriefs, we not only neglect the emotional safety of the players but also fail to hold on to our engagement to design the entirety of an experience for them. We have brought our participants to a high point by bringing them to the end of the game and the story but we are not catching them after. We have to be there to offer them a way and a space to land, and to wrap up their experience and take home only the parts they wish to.

    For the chamber larp Equinox Retreat (United Kingdom 2021), I designed a slow visualisation and breathing exercise that gives players time to digest emotions and to remember a positive moment in the larp experience. Such an exercise can be a valuable last part of a debrief and help people get in an energy and mindset to step out of the larp and into the everyday world again. Hiding ourselves behind optional debriefs with the same exercises that are constantly repeated and never improved or designed specifically to fit the design and experience of the game does not serve our players and their experience.

    Workshops and debriefs as evolving toolboxes for designing the larp experience

    If we want to employ workshops and debriefs as elements that help building the larp experience as a whole, we need to rethink how we tackle them and put adequate care in designing the right workshop and debrief tools that fit our larp, instead of leaning on our current perceived traditions of doing things and instead of going for the hype of the moment. We shouldn’t just be maintaining our existing toolboxes, but we should strive to also make them more accessible and easy to find. Moreover, we have to dare to add to them and to experiment more with the format, and to be more open to new approaches. 

    If we want to attain this point of creating big workshop and debrief toolboxes for designers to roam in freely for the creation of their larps, we also need to be more open to share and exchange best practices and lessons learned. We need to have more willingness to share as well as to reflect about what worked and what didn’t, as well as an openness to take inspiration from each other and to offer this inspiration to others. Moreover, we need to accept that these tools can be tweaked in function of the designs that are being created instead of holding on too rigidly to already established formats.

    Workshops and debriefs shouldn’t become inert holy houses that we stick to for the comfort of it. They have the potential to be an engine of creativity, care and change in the larp design process. 

    Ludography

    Daemon (2021). Denmark. Katrine Wind.

    Equinox Retreat (2021). United Kingdom. Sandy Bailly.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Bailly, Sandy. 2024. “The Hated Children of Nordic Larp – Why We Need to Improve on Workshops and Debriefs.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash.