Tag: Featured

Published on

2023-07-28

in

Manifestos

Slow Larp Manifesto

By
Sara Kannasvuo

Opening Remarks

There are larps that are not action-heavy, that don’t try to offer maximum amounts of drama or complicated plots. These larps are designed to encourage players to ponder. They tell different stories than the hero’s dramatic journey. These larps rely on quiet downtime, deep immersion, and the gradual, iterated unraveling of character relations — all those small things that often get lost in big drama.

Lack of action or drama in a larp is often regarded as a design fault. We think Slow Larp should be recognized as a valid design choice that deserves more attention.

This manifesto is intended to promote serious and respectful discussion. While it is written in a generalizing, even provocative manner, we recognize that its subject matter is nuanced and open to various conflicting interpretations. The authors all share a background in Finnish and Nordic larp traditions and acknowledge that this fundamentally shapes our understanding of the subject.

What is Slow Larp?

These are the main attributes of Slow Larp. The points raised here will be explored in more detail later.

1. Less is more. Slow Larp is all about the negative space of larp: the quiet moments, the small gestures, the downtime.

2. Immersion over action. Slow Larp aims for immersion into character that is strong enough to evoke real feelings. With strong immersion, the smallest elements can become meaningful. What is often called “downtime” becomes not just lack of action, but a time of reflection, of making memories, of longing, grieving, falling in love.

3. Subtlety in play style, setting, and design. Slow Larp focuses on human-sized drama. By design, Slow Larp is more about small slices of life, status quo, and everyday stillness than about epic, life-changing drama. Slow Larp explores what it is like to simply exist as these particular characters in this particular setting. Characters are played in a naturalistic way and players trust each other to catch subtle hints about their emotions and intentions.

4. Offering potential for emergent play instead of ready-made plots. The idea of Slow Larp is to explore and iterate rather than play a plotline ”from start to finish.” Instead of plots—”what must happen”—Slow Larp offers players ”potentials”—possibilities for play. Potentials are designed elements that have the ability (the potential) to induce play, a way of offering meaningful content without forcing a chronological, designer-driven narrative on the players.

5. Slow Larp revolves around a limited set of thematic elements. These carefully chosen themes—such as “loyalty”, “environmental crisis”, or “what is a family?”—are woven into both the macro structure of the larp as well as in every character. When everyone plays on the same themes, everything happening in the larp has the potential to be meaningful for every character. Themes act as potentials and create playable content. They suggest topics to discuss and things to do, and they can create tension between characters who approach the same theme from different viewpoints.

6. Slow Larp is built on iteration and layers. Players explore the themes of the larp, their own characters, and their characters’ relationships through repeated interactions. Conversations are started, halted, and picked up again. Conflicts are not resolved in one scene and then forgotten. Instead of solving a conflict to achieve a certain goal, the unresolved conflict itself can be the main content of play. Through iteration, new insights can emerge.

7. Players create Slow Larp. Slow Larp requires time and effort from its players and is not for everyone. It is the player’s duty to navigate the game in a way that feels meaningful to them and to seek play that allows for and increases immersion. This often requires extensive preparation before the game, both to find personal relevance in the shared themes and to establish contacts and create enough trust between the players to make immersive play feel safe. Careful preparation also helps to ensure that immersion into character doesn’t lead into disruptively individualistic play.

How to Design a Slow Larp

Here are some suggestions based on our observations both as players and game designers on how to approach the creation of a Slow Larp. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list but a starting point for reflections about what the idea of slowness might look like in practice.

8. Design your larp around a limited set of themes. These are the central ideas and questions your larp explores. Ideas like “found family” or questions like “What is courage?” or “What gives life meaning?” are good examples of thematic elements that create infinite possibilities for play and reflection while funneling action in a common direction.

Everything in your larp should be designed to support the selected themes. The themes should be made visible in the macro structure of your larp—explicitly in the design document and implicitly in all diegetic materials—and integrated into every character. They are a major source of playable content and dictate the overall mood of the larp. Focusing your larp’s design on a few carefully chosen thematic elements and communicating these clearly helps in making sure the larp stays cohesive, without the need to force plot-like structures or excessive meta instructions on your players. Strong themes are also a way to bring focus to player-created content.

Avoid giving your players direct answers to the thematic questions and instead encourage reflection, exploring and curiosity. Try not to limit the ways in which your players are allowed to explore the chosen themes, unless they threaten to derail the whole larp. Discussions and workshops beforehand are a good way of making sure the focus of your larp stays clear.

Choose the themes to work together with the desired ambiance of your larp. Note that a slow design approach doesn’t have to limit the milieu of the larp to naturalistic, contemporary settings, but these often suit Slow Larp best.

9. Favor mundane and robust settings. Slow Larp settings should emphasize continuity and familiar everyday life over exceptional situations in temporary places. The illusion that the fictional world will continue after the runtime is what allows players to immerse themselves in slow and iterative play. Tight-knit communities with familiar routines offer a natural setting for exploring complex character relationships in the continuum of everyday life.

While a Slow Larp can be set in any time and place, keep in mind that the more background fiction and meta information your players have to memorize, the less mental energy they will have left for exploration and spontaneous play. The same applies to set design: suspension of disbelief always takes energy, as does being mindful of fragile props. A strong degree of realism helps with immersion and subtle roleplaying, as it allows players to reference our collective understanding of the world and convey meaning with even the smallest gestures. Aim for your location and props to offer a near 360° illusion and to be robust enough for your players to interact with without too many limitations.

The setting should always support the play, not hijack the attention of the players by being too unrealistic for immersion. This doesn’t necessarily imply that speculative elements (e.g. futuristic technology, magic, fantastic creatures) have no place in Slow Larp, but care should be taken that the wondrous does not drown out the everyday.

10. Offer your players potentials instead of plots. A “potential” is a designed element in the larp that has the ability (the potential) to induce play. Almost anything can function as a potential: thematically relevant world-building, an existing conflict between two characters, an NPC-character, a prop, a piece of news delivered during runtime, an ingame activity…

What makes potentials different from plots and meta instructions is that a potential is something a player can choose to ignore if it doesn’t seem to offer them anything. The larp as a whole benefits from players interacting with the offered potentials, but it will not crumble if some of them are ignored. Plots that must happen—and rely on player actions to do so—are usually incompatible with a Slow Larp design that encourages character immersion, iterative exploration, and focusing on player-found meanings.

While almost anything can function as a potential, they should always be closely linked with the larp’s chosen themes. Potentials should funnel and focus play towards these themes and towards shared experiences. Only very rarely should they stay secret or known by just a single character.

11. Give it time. Time is at the center of Slow Larp. The slow passage of time allows players to revisit and re-examine thoughts and ideas, to witness and reflect upon gradual changes in themselves and their environment, to notice how their experiences progressively change the way their characters think and feel. The best way to allow this to happen is to have a long, often continuous runtime.

Long runtime together with the illusion of continuity helps to eliminate the common feeling of “being in a hurry” during a larp. With a long runtime, players will have time to do almost anything they wish, and they can better choose the right moments to do those things, instead of being forced to act immediately for fear of losing the chance forever.

When designing for a long runtime, it is important to give players some structure to help them organize their time, while being mindful of not restricting them too much. Structures that come in the form of daily routines familiar to the characters are often a good choice, especially in larps that center around an established community. The routines should fit the setting and themes of the larp and have some pre-designed activities for the characters to participate in. But they should also give the players some leeway to seek out personally meaningful play, and plenty of downtime in between activities to encourage emergent play and reflection.

Designing larps with a long runtime and a lot of downtime or ”negative space” can feel intimidating. Preplanning content for every minute might seem like an easy way to make sure that everyone has something to do during the larp. But the aim of Slow Larp design is not to give players a lot of things to do; it is to facilitate immersion—experiencing what it feels like to be this other person in this other setting—and reflection—coming away from the larp with new insights.

There is no true substitute for time when aiming for deep familiarity between characters, between the characters and their surroundings, and between a player and their own character. However, if for practical reasons actual runtime is limited, these connections can—to a certain extent—be simulated and supported with careful groundwork (with active participation from the players) beforehand, and/or with workshops at the location. To ensure that players get an equal and consistent experience, this preparatory work should be viewed as an essential part of the whole, not as optional.

12. Support and trust your players. When players are expected to be in charge of their own experience, the larp designer must support that effort. Developing the experience together with players can require much more work than designing a pay-to-play larp with pre-written plots and fully-developed characters. It should never be confused with “sandbox” design, where players are often expected to navigate the larp and create play without much help from the organisers.

Be open from the beginning about the design choices of your larp and what they demand from your players. Communicate the desired play style clearly on your website or through other channels, especially if your player base is international. Encourage questions, reflection, and being okay with incompleteness—this will help familiarize your players with the iterative style of play which is central to Slow Larp.

Have your players participate in the creation of their own characters, their characters’ relationships, and the ingame world. Offer platforms and spaces for the players to discuss the larp with the designers and with each other. Do this weeks or preferably months before the larp. Meetings and workshops where the players get to know each other, develop their characters, and discuss the themes of the larp can help create the sense of familiarity that Slow Larp aims for. These meetings and discussions can transform the group of designers and players of a single larp into a temporary mini-community, which helps foster an atmosphere of safety and mutual accountability.

All this demands time, effort, and engagement from your players—resources not all of them will have in equal amounts. Like expensive “pay-to-play” larps, Slow Larp as a genre is not equally accessible to all. Instead of money, players are expected to invest their time and effort in creating the best possible foundation for the larp. If a player is not pulling their weight, the whole design or community might suffer, especially in smaller larps. For this reason, player selection is often necessary. Emphasis should be put on choosing enough players who are capable of and enthusiastic in participating in extensive preparation and creating content for themselves and others.

Since much of the emerging experience of a Slow Larp is up to the players—and to some extent chance—the quality of the design can be hard to test beforehand. This can be terrifying for a designer, but here also open communication helps to manage everyone’s expectations. Trusting your players to do their part is essential. They need your guidance when navigating your larp, but in the end they are the ones creating the experience for themselves.

How to Enjoy Slow Larp

Designing for slowness is only half of creating a Slow Larp—the rest is up to the players. Here are some ideas on how to get the most out of Slow Larp as a player.

13. Create a well-rounded character. “Becoming” and then “being” your character are crucial elements of Slow Larp. The preparation process for a Slow Larp emphasizes becoming familiar with the inner life of your character as well as with their connections to other characters. Ideally you will be able to co-create your character with the larp’s designers, but no matter if the character is mostly pre-written or self-created, becoming familiar with them takes time and care.

Often it is easier to engage in subtle play and to find natural ways of reacting when the character in some key ways resembles yourself. Preparation is partly about choosing which different ways of being you want to explore in any given larp. Do you want to challenge yourself to be more active, physical, courageous or aggressive? Is your character filled with love or compassion? Are they naïve or ignorant? When you have these pillars of their personality down, communal preparation—and the larp itself—is about exploring how other characters react to these ways of being in different contexts.

Try your best to reserve enough time and mental resources for the communal preparation phase. It is crucial for generating a sense of community and tight relationships. Often there is shared history to be planned together with other players. Try to come up with ways to foster a feeling of deep familiarity. For some players, long storylines with specific years and dates might be important, but often it is better to focus on creating a few emotionally laden details and memories.

In a typical Slow Larp, there is little need for visually impressive costumes and character props. Often normal everyday wear chosen with the character’s personality in mind is enough. This frees you to focus more on finding an emotional repertoire for your character: their expressions, gestures and mimetics. A good way of doing this is thinking of memorable moments from your character’s past and playing them out in solo mode to generate emotive memories to use during runtime. How did the character breathe when they were surprised? What did it feel like when they made a fist and their nails pressed into their palm? These personal ways of reacting bring your character to life during the larp. Repetition helps make them more automatic for unexpected situations.

14. Be prepared to create your own experience. Slow Larp is closer to “sandbox” than “amusement park” design in that while the designers provide you with a framework, it is ultimately up to you to find personally meaningful play inside that frame. Preparing well is part of this process, but your responsibility as an active participant does not end when the larp starts.

A Slow Larp will usually have a certain amount of pre-planned content that will give structure to the larp and offer potentials for play. But what happens inside this framework is not decided beforehand. There are no character-related plots that must be advanced—like a secret that must come to light, or a betrayal that must happen. Most of what your character does during the runtime is freely improvised based on your preparations, the offered potentials, and what emerges organically from the characters interacting with their environment and each other. The ability to improvise fluently comes largely from being familiar with your character’s thoughts and reactions, but also from having listened to your co-players’ wishes beforehand. Incorporating these into your character encourages immersive play that lifts others. Aim at being so embedded inside the skin of your character that their reactions come to you naturally, without thinking.

Don’t be afraid of ”downtime” or even occasional boredom. All players have downtime and it offers a chance to either start creating play together or letting it rise naturally from the moment. Don’t stress about ”being active” or ”achieving” or ”completing” stuff. Embrace simple chores like cooking or crafting, sitting and talking. Doing “nothing at all” can be very enjoyable. Slow Larp is more about being than doing. Immerse yourself in the setting and the character. Wait to see what happens, and just be that other self in their everyday life. React to the world and its other inhabitants as your character would—that is essential and enough.

15. Be open to exploring emergent themes, ideas, and feelings. While the main themes to be explored in a well-designed Slow Larp are known to everyone in advance, what each individual player will end up focusing on might come as a surprise—even to that player. Be open to this emergent content. It might lead you to new and unexpectedly profound experiences.

Pay attention to thoughts and sensations that arise during the game, be they large or small, and try to integrate them into your play. If you are feeling frustrated, maybe your character is, too. If your shoes chafe, make that a part of your character’s day. Strive to find meaning in character interactions that are not spelled out in your character sheet or other pre-larp materials. Be curious about the other characters and don’t be afraid of steering yourself towards those interactions that feel exciting and meaningful. Be influenced by other players’ choices and paths during the game, but also stop to take the time to ask yourself how your character feels about what is going on around them.

In contrast with many other genres, a Slow Larp will not have a clear list of predefined objectives for your character to achieve, or a straightforward character arc to play out. Instead, you start with the knowledge of who your character is and what they want—or think they want—and a firm grasp on the inner workings of their emotional landscape. Your understanding of your character will deepen during the larp, but you will often have to feel your way gradually towards what constitutes the most essential content for you to play on. It might not always be what you expect.

During the larp, completely new directions might emerge that will become relevant for you. Because there is nothing your character absolutely needs to do, you are free to explore these new directions without having to worry about neglecting an important plot line elsewhere.

16. Play subtly. What exactly constitutes “subtle play” varies from culture to culture. For one player, subtle play might mean conveying your character’s emotions with small facial expressions. For another, a full-blown shouting match could still be subtle, as long as it feels authentic.

Subtle play in Slow Larp means playing in a way that feels natural and genuine. Characters behave and talk in a way that would not be out-of-place in everyday situations outside the larp. Conversations are not built of theatrical one-liners, but remain meandering and ambiguous. Let your character’s reactions arise naturally from who they are and what they feel in that particular moment. Trust your co-players to understand subtle hints about your character’s thoughts and feelings. Instead of proclaiming, “You have betrayed me and I hate you!”, let this sentiment seep into your character’s every word and gesture: Will their words turn cold and poisonous? How will their body-language change? What actions could they take that will let the other character know how they feel?

Instead of choosing an action with the most dramatic effect, in a Slow Larp it is usually best to steer towards the most meaningful effect. What this means in practice inevitably varies from situation to situation and character to character. With good character immersion, these choices become nearly automatic. If you do find yourself having to make a choice, think of what your character would most naturally do, or what action will lead to the most meaningful play for you.

17. Be okay with incompleteness. Subtle play also usually means a less formalistic dramatic arc for your character. The concept of a story arc is deeply ingrained in us by our culture’s long history of dramatic fiction. It might take some practice to leave that concept behind. When you give up the idea of a rigidly-defined plot with a clear start and finish, you gain more room for exploration and sideways movement.

In a Slow Larp, not every thread needs to be tied during runtime. If your character’s story is left open-ended at the close of the runtime, you can continue processing it and find even more relevance and meaning post-larp. In real life, events don’t always come together like pieces of a puzzle, nor is this necessary in a larp.

It is natural to second-guess the choices you have made during the run of a larp. There are usually so many opportunities and possibilities that something is always left undone or unsaid. By choosing one activity you inevitably miss out on another. An important part of Slow Larp is being okay with this, of understanding that the things you end up doing make up the unique whole of your experience. You can ascribe your own meaning to the events, interactions, and feelings you experienced during the larp. Because there are fewer dramatic markers (no coup, no zombie invasion, no final battle), you have more freedom and also more responsibility to make up your own interpretation of what were the most essential experiences for you. Because there are no static plot lines, there are few if any things you absolutely have to accomplish for your larp experience to be complete.

18. Know what you want and don’t want. Like any other genre, Slow Larp is not a good fit for everyone. Players who like to hold immersion for a long time and enjoy being profoundly immersed in their character benefit from Slow Larp design. Players who like philosophical pondering might enjoy a Slow Larp for its thematic content. Players who prefer a reactive playstyle over an active one may find the more relaxed pacing of a Slow Larp more comfortable for them.

If, on the other hand, you are looking for an adrenaline-fuelled experience, where dramatic actions follow each other in quick succession, other genres may better suit your preferences. It is not useful to persist in trying to fit into a play style that does not come naturally to you, or that you have no interest in exploring. Looking for dramatic adventures where there are none to be found may, in the worst case, turn out to be detrimental to the experience of others.

Still, many players are versatile and like variety, and so will sometimes choose a Slow Larp and other times a more plot-oriented or action-filled one. Be curious and find out what genres and styles of play work best for you.

In Closing

Much of the trouble in seeking out or running a Slow Larp successfully comes from our lack of shared vocabulary around them. How can you find out about or discuss something that doesn’t have a name?

We want Slow Larp to become a well-defined genre in its own right. We want larp designers and players to be able to talk about this genre, about its defining elements, its strengths and its weaknesses. We want people participating in Slow Larps to know what to expect in regard to design elements and stylistic choices, the better to enjoy the rich layers and rainbow palettes of emotions Slow Larps can offer.

With this manifesto, we want to give Slow Larp a name.

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

Kannasvuo, Sara, Ruska Kevätkoski, Elli Leppä. 2021. “Slow Larp Manifesto.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt.

Photo by Samar Patil on Pexels.
Published on

2023-05-24

in

Documentation

Adding Larp to a Drama Teacher’s Curriculum – Year 1

By
Lindsay Wolgel

Lindsay Wolgel is a professional actor and edu-larp enthusiast. She is currently the middle school drama teacher at a charter school in NYC. Learn about the ways she incorporated larp into her curriculum this past year, via in-class parties, a classroom podcast, creative writing prompts and more!

Here’s a pdf of the slides: 1-Year-As-a-Drama-Teacher-Slideshow
Published on

2023-01-21

in

Documentation

The Spirit of Christmas

By
Juhana Pettersson

My mother has always believed in having a big family Christmas. The director of a circus by profession, she brought that same organizational and creative energy into the way we celebrated the holidays. The way I remember Christmas from my childhood, it was really quite the perfect family occasion, thanks to significant collective effort.

I come from a secular family of Finnish socialists and the Christian connotations of Christmas were foreign to me when I was growing up. In Finnish, Christmas is “joulu”, a word with no inherent religious meaning. When we decorated our Christmas tree, the pride of place at the top went to the red star of communism.

Our Christmas consisted of a series of rituals. Going to the Christmas tree market with my stepfather and siblings and carrying the tree home. Bringing out the box of decorations and hanging them on the tree. The traditional Christmas breakfast, rice porridge. If you found the almond, you got to make a wish. One year my mother decided to cut down on sibling infighting by putting in enough almonds for all four of us.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. Photo has been cropped.

In Finland, we open the presents on Christmas Eve. That’s also when the most significant family dinner takes place. Nobody in our family played the role of Santa. Instead, my Mom would pretend that she’d seen Santa fly across the sky with the reindeer from a window in the furthest room in our apartment.

We ran over to look.

As we did this, my parents quickly took the giant burlap sack of Christmas presents into the hallway outside our apartment and silently closed the door. As we returned, my Mom would knock on the underside of the dinner table and say: “Did you hear that? It must be Santa at the door!”

We ran to the front door, opened it, and sure enough the presents were there!

As I grew older, my mother remarried and our group of siblings grew. I switched teams, helping my stepdad carry the sack of presents outside while my youngest siblings rushed to see Santa from the window.

The relationship I have with Christmas is positive and is not complicated at all, thanks to all the work my mother and the rest of the family put into it over the years.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

The Training Center

In December of 2022, I played in the long-delayed Helsinki run of the larp Midwinter Revisited, with Anni Tolvanen as the project lead. The original Midwinter was created by Avalon Larp Studios and played in the U.K. in 2020, led by Martine Svanevik. Revisited was mainly created as a Finnish international production, expanded to twice the size of the original with new, redesigned and broadened content.

Midwinter Revisited is set in Santa’s Workshop. The characters are elves and Christmas is just around the corner, with everyone making sure the last gifts are produced so children everywhere will be happy and full of joy. The elves love their work and throw themselves at their long shifts with jolliness in their hearts.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

Or put another way, the Workshop is a sweatshop where a workforce of elves is forced to endure long hours of tedious work while having to pretend they’re happy. Smiling is mandatory and those who are insufficiently jolly will be punished. Santa Claus isn’t really present in the daily lives of the elves and the Workshop is instead run by the Krampus.

The character I played was a part of this somewhat anomalous group in the larp’s structure. The word Krampus denoted an individual character, the principal villain of the larp. It also meant the collective group of characters working under her, of which I was part of. Finally, it acquired an emergent meaning as the physical location where we took recalcitrant elves for retraining. Officially called The Training Center, it was often also called just The Krampus.

The elves all dressed in Christmas gear: Lots of reds, browns and greens. The Krampus were dressed all in black, creating a striking visual contrast. Collectively, we were a cross between the wealthy family depicted in the TV show Succession and the staff of a torture facility.

There were severe class distinctions between the different elf families in Midwinter Revisited. They were made concrete by the living arrangements, with the physical location of the family’s domicile showing how wealthy they were. Still, for me as a Krampus character these distinctions were less visible because the design placed us above all of it.

The core themes of Midwinter Revisited were Christmas and capitalism. What is the meaning of Christmas? What does work mean under the demands of capitalist production? In the cosmology of the larp, the production of gifts created magical power which was hoarded by the Krampus and used to maintain control over the entire operation.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

Sincerity

The simple genius of Midwinter Revisited lies in the way it treats Christmas with the utmost seriousness, while also leaving space to be playful. Christmas-themed movies and songs are often schmaltz or parody but this time, you as a player are really invited to consider what Christmas means for you. And not just from a political perspective, but in emotional and cultural terms as well.

What does the spirit of Christmas mean for me?

Sincerity is always difficult to pull off because it’s so close to cringe. Yet when it works, it’s very powerful. It was nice to be able to reflect on Christmas in a context that’s not saccharine, schmaltzy, or a parody, yet not without a critical edge either. What is this thing that permeates our society every year?

The way schmaltz was incorporated into Midwinter Revisited was particularly ingenious. All the tackiness of Christmas was right there, in songs, physical props, costumes and even the language we used. However, the critique of capitalism inherent in the larp’s design positioned the schmaltz for critical appraisal while also allowing us to play with it. A rare case where you manage to have your cake and eat it too.

Each of the characters belonged to a family, a work group, a club and a secret society, with the exception of the Krampus whose family was the same as the work group. This is classic larp design of course, making sure each character has a variety of social contexts.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

One of the groups was dedicated to spiritual exploration of the meaning of Christmas. Every time I walked past the group and their collective gatherings, I felt a deep sense of larp envy. It looked so warm and communal! I considered joining in but felt that their play might be damaged by one more Krampus character.

The last hours of the larp were a chaotic, magical time. The revolt against the sweatshop capitalism of The Workshop Inc. had started but a new order was yet to form. Some were afraid, others freed by disorder. A crown of light seeming to represent the spirit of Christmas moved in the crowd creating a repeating scene of wonder and magic that felt surprisingly genuine. I had a moment with it too but I’d played a cynical Krampus character too long to be able to immediately shift gears convincingly. I felt sad afterwards because I wanted to explore that part of the larp’s emotional range more fully and didn’t entirely succeed.

When the signal for the last work shift of the larp sounded, most of the workers were on strike. Managers had to go down to the workshop to make toys, creating one of the most eerie sights of the entire larp. They were too few, too shocked, stooped under the harsh lights trying to keep the workshop running when the power they represented had already failed.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

O Christmas Tree

Christmas is celebrated in many different countries but these celebrations are not uniform in style. What’s normal in one country is strange in the next. Midwinter Revisited was an international larp, meaning that players came from many different cultures and brought their own assumptions with them.

The variety of Christmas customs wasn’t to the detriment of the larp. Each of the three acts started with the song O Christmas Tree, the English version based on the German original, called O Tannenbaum. I felt the song worked wonderfully as an anthem for the whole larp despite the fact that it had never been part of my own Christmas tradition.

The song shares the same tune as “The Red Flag,” the U.K.’s Labour Party’s anthem, which will become relevant later.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

The concept of jollity was central to a lot of the larp’s rhetoric. The elves were constantly exhorted to be jolly, to be happy and enjoy their work. This was a key part of the larp’s critique of modern capitalism. It wasn’t enough that you had to work. You had to enjoy it, and if someone didn’t seem to be jolly enough, that was reason to punish them. There was a department called Jollity Assurance tasked with ensuring requisite levels of jollity at all times.

I can make the connection between jollity and Christmas in the context of Anglo-American Christmas culture but not really in my own. Finnish Christmas traditions have a somber quality, meaning that in the context of our Christmas you can be happy or sad.

One of our most famous sad Christmas songs is called “Varpunen jouluaamuna,” which tells of a little bird flying, hungrily looking for food in the frozen snow fields of the Christmas morning. A little girl gives the bird a seed, only to discover that the bird is her dead brother.

Adapting to the larp’s version of Christmas wasn’t as simple as adapting to the Anglo-American version of the holiday because it had more cultural depth and variety than that. It felt like we as players from different countries were looking for a Christmas shared across our particular cultural boundaries.

The larp’s soundtrack came with an interesting twist. It wasn’t limited to English language Christmas songs but also included a Finnish song and other non-Anglo ones. When I first heard a Finnish Christmas song on the soundtrack, I experienced a moment of cultural confusion, like I was shifting from one Christmas paradigm to another.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

This wasn’t to the detriment of the larp at all. Rather, I experienced it as a moment of reflection on what the larp meant for me. What did it mean to navigate the different conventions of my own culture and that of Anglo-American cultural imperialism? What did that mean in the specific context of Christmas, with tram stops all over Helsinki decorated with ads celebrating Coca-Cola Christmas?

The Torture Queue

Oppression play has a long history in Nordic larp. Systems of oppression create action and emotion, making for powerful and dynamic larp. If you’ve ever organized a larp with a significant element of oppression you’ve probably found out that it’s hard work. People don’t oppress themselves! You have to put in the work to really make an oppressive system run.

One facet of this is when you create a system where a police force (The Reindeer Guard in this larp) arrest people and drag them to a punishment center. This can be a torture chamber, a prison, an interrogation or what have you, depending on the larp.

Running one of these centers in a larp is an art unto its own. There are many difficulties to consider. Experienced Nordic larpers often regard being interrogated or tortured as interesting larp content. Many steer their play purposefully towards it. In some larps, this has resulted in what is colloquially known as the “torture queue”. Because torture capacity is limited, characters and players have to wait before they can be tortured.

This is just simple logistics. If there are two torturers and a single torture scene lasts for an hour, this means that the larp can only accommodate torture scenes for two players every hour. If the larp has 100 players, this creates a significant bottleneck. Some players will miss out on the torture.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

To resolve this issue, Midwinter Revisited’s design gave us in the Krampus our own space, the Training Center, a big classroom-like area with chairs and desks as well as a raised platform where we had our own luxurious Christmas tree, piles of presents and a table full of interesting knickknacks. The idea was that the Krampus characters were the only ones to be able to enjoy a luxurious family Christmas, and the elves being re-educated had to watch.

The point of the classroom setting was to do big oppression scenes, where one Krampus player could handle as many as six or even ten characters simultaneously. This way, the torture queue would not happen because scenes could roll all continuously, for as many characters as needed.

In practice, it didn’t really work out like this. For much of the larp, the Training Center wasn’t training anyone. We had the opposite problem from the torture queue: Often it was difficult to get people to come in at all.

I figured there were a few different reasons why this was. There were a lot of first time players at the larp and maybe it wasn’t obvious to them that playing oppression scenes is fun. That’s more of an experienced Nordic larper thing. Some players and characters may have tried to avoid getting tortured, as amazing as that sounds.

Some may have wanted an intimate one-on-one torture scene, and when that wasn’t in the cards, lost interest.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

It was very difficult for us in the Krampus to draw victims in. The process involved tasking the Reindeer Guard with arresting individual elves and bringing them to us. Because we wanted to make larger scenes of oppression, the arrest lists we drew up often had five or six names.

The problems this situation created were many. Because the Krampus was somewhat separate from the rest of the larp, we often simply didn’t know what was happening. Because of this, it was often difficult to know who needed to be arrested.

It was very difficult for the Reindeer Guard to arrest multiple characters quickly. I’ve seen this issue in other larps as well. Going around the larp with a list of names and trying to find the right people takes time and often fails entirely due to larp chaos. Thus, I ended up giving the Reindeer Guard tasks that were either very difficult or actually impossible for them to fulfill.

The logistical problems of oppression play are absolutely not unique to Midwinter Revisited and many great scenes were played. The structural idea of scaling up the machinery of oppression was a good one.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

Red Christmas

In the larp’s third and final act, it was clear the revolution was upon us. The question was which way would it go. Will the old status quo be restored, will a paternal figure like Santa Claus (or a maternal figure like the Krampus) emerge or will the revolution lead to a workers’ paradise?

For my character, this was rather anxiety-inducing as I was part of the machinery of oppression. My character was a medical doctor of sorts and I spent much of the larp dispensing and withholding Jollity Pills, an all-purpose drug that could be amphetamines, antibiotics or a miracle cure. As a medical torturer, at first glance it didn’t look like I’d fare very well under the new worker-led regime.

I had a scene with another Krampus character where we talked about our worries for the future and the line we held onto was this one: “No matter who ends up in power, they’ll always need people like us.” Of course, the fiction of the larp ends when the larp ends, so the future of our characters remains unknowable, as it should be.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

Midwinter Revisited had a mechanism where players could mark which Christmas ideology their character subscribed to at the end. White for a corporate option where Christmas is controlled by a company or a foundation run by the elves. Green for a religious or royalist wish to see a figure like Santa Claus or the Krampus returned to the top. Red for a Christmas not controlled by any one entity, but instead owned collectively.

White would have been the obvious choice for me but I decided late in the larp that I needed a bit of character development to keep things interesting. I felt that my character was a born lackey so in a situation where the old order was crumbling, the green option was the most promising one. It still suggested that there would be power to serve.

The way it would work was that the central visual motif of the larp, the grand Christmas tree, would be lit one of the three colors, depending on which way the larp went. The moment when the song O Christmas Tree played, only to suddenly switch to The Red Flag as the tree was bathed in red light was very powerful. The musical switch was rather elegant because the songs shared the same tune. And of course, the red Christmas was familiar to me from my childhood already.

As a player, it was the ending I wished for, despite my character’s royalist hopes. A Christmas we can all believe in!

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

Credits

Midwinter Revisited is a redesigned and extended edition of the larp Midwinter, originally run by by Avalon Larp Studio in Birmingham, UK, in January 2020. The original design was envisioned and directed by Martine Svanevik.

Midwinter Revisited is an independent piece based on the original work.

The Workshop, Inc. Helsinki Division

Production and design lead, sound design: Anni Tolvanen

Narrative and character design: Simon Brind

Narrative and runtime design: Johana Koljonen

Character design, production coordination: Irrette Melakoski

Scenography: Katie Ballinger, Mikko Asunta, Tina Aspiala

Lighting: Eleanor Saitta

Kitchen: Paula Susitaival, Kristiina Prauda

Player support: Juha Hurme

Photography: Tuomas Puikkonen

Writing and runtime facilitation: Kol Ford, William Hagstedt, Char Holdway, Torgrim Husvik, Jamie MacDonald, Maria Pettersson, Rebel Rehbinder, Jørn Slemdal, Kaya Toft Thejls

Cover photo: Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. Photo has been cropped.
Published on

2023-01-10

in

Theory

Living the Dream: Larp as a Transformative Practice

By
Kol Ford

Regardless of your level of ability, there is an expectation that young people from poor backgrounds will fall into certain patterns in their lives. The dream of social mobility relies heavily on people’s ability to imagine being able to take the first step in that direction. Young people playing football against a wall in their council estate have aspirations towards playing for a major football club one day. If they have a hunger and a talent for the game, they find out everything they can about the process. They know all about talent scouts and training schedules and what level of ability is required in order to be considered to have a chance.

The same is true for music. Young musicians are encouraged to get their music out there and be heard. They know about A&R, talent scouts and recording studios. They know the names of the people who managed to make a name for themselves from a background of poverty and imagine themselves doing the same. It is clear that for some people it becomes possible to turn that dream into a reality. The ability to imagine it coming true fuels the desire to pursue it to its fruition. The overwhelming majority do not make it, but for the few who do, it started with a passion and a dream.

Every part of the larp process functions as a safe place to try out new experiences and see for ourselves how comfortable they can be. When we research a new role, we expose ourselves to new ideas and new concepts. We purchase and try on the clothes and paraphernalia associated with a new role, and get a chance to see how comfortable we are with the image that portrays. We get the opportunity to try out the mannerisms and activities that are associated with lifestyles that we would otherwise never get to see, and discover for ourselves if this is something that we can do.

Larping provides us with a first step on the road to pursuing our dreams. It extends the idea beyond wistful thinking and idle daydreams, and starts the process of turning ideas into a physical manifestation. We can experiment with new concepts and see how easily they come to us, and if it does not work out the way that we intended, larp enables us to brush off the old character and try on something new. Along the way, we can choose to keep the aspects of the characters that we enjoyed, while discarding those elements that are unhealthy or unappealing.

From the moment of casting, we are encouraged to open our mind to new possibilities and stretch ourselves. We look at roles that seem interesting and exciting and wonder what it would be like to live in those shoes for a few days. Larp gives us an alibi to explore areas of research that we may not ordinarily know where to begin to access. If you grow up in an environment where everyone is involved in the same line of work, or where many of the people you know do not work, it can be difficult to understand where to even begin finding out how to do something different.

Once the process of researching the role has begun, we also begin to see how well we look when we try to fit into that role. There is something wonderful about standing in a locked, run down bathroom with the sounds of shouting and construction just outside while trying on a tuxedo and black tie for a high class larp. When I did this I guarded that bag containing my tux with my life! It was mine, it fitted me and it fitted well. The last thing I needed was someone throwing up on it or running off with it.

What this meant was that when invited to places where tuxedos were worn, I already looked comfortable in it and I already fitted in. I don’t need to perform my poor background in real life, its truth is self-evident. When attending black tie dinners for charitable organisations, it was clear that I was already comfortable in those surroundings. This made it easier to help potential others feel comfortable when discussing the issues affecting my neighbourhood because I wasn’t tugging at my bow tie every three minutes like I was at the larp.

Perhaps more importantly, when I was at a Black Tie larp, other larpers who were no strangers to wearing tuxedos were more than willing to help me wear it properly. All of the things that would have social impact in a real world situation were managed and helped in a supportive and safe environment. Everyone wanted to help me play my role well, and I did what I could to reward them with a well played role. The larp environment proved to be a much more supportive environment than the reality of making an impression at a charity dinner.

When we take on a role it is far more than simply dressing up. By interacting with other people in character, we have an opportunity to experience what it feels like to live the day to day life of those characters. The small rituals and activities that are associated with different lifestyles become key parts of the characterisation and have a profound effect on how comfortable we feel performing them in other aspects of our life. We get to contextualise the activities and learn how to apply them in different situations.

While the technical skill of a character role is often abstractly represented, knowing when to apply those skills is not, and by having the opportunity to play these characters, we can become more confident in our ability to apply these skills in the right environment. Even if we do not play the character convincingly, we can at least appreciate whether or not we enjoy the activity itself. If it is something that we can do and that we enjoy doing, we can look into the prospect of incorporating it into our lives.

Practical experience and enjoyable memories of that experience give us the confidence to try new things and explore new possibilities. Even if we do not go on to explore in real life any of the characters that we have played, the activity of exploration through play is a transformative one in and of itself. We develop our ability to imagine ourselves in alternative situations and in doing so can become more open to alternative life choices. We no longer need to be defined by our family and immediate society and can choose which aspects of life we want to explore more fully.

Being able to imagine yourself in new situations lets you realise what parts of your life are in your hands to change, and gives you the confidence to change them. In addition to this, larp provides you with a safe space in which you can explore aspects of yourself that you wish to try on for size. This is not limited to occupations and class, but also to sexuality, gender expression, and how you engage with the world around you. Once you realise that you can change the way you engage with the world, you are one step away from being comfortable making the changes needed to transform your circumstances.

Cover photo: Photo by Hani Pirzadian on Unsplash. Photo has been cropped and filtered.

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

Ford, Kol. “Living the Dream: Larp as a Transformative Practice.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
Published on

2022-11-07

in

Opinion

Imagining a Zero Carbon Future: Environmental Impact of Player Travel as a Design Choice

By
Alex Brown

Perhaps this conversation has been had before, perhaps it’s an elephant in the room. Since seeing a gaping hole in articles addressing environmental sustainability on Nordiclarp.org, I want to bring this topic into awareness to specifically address one topic, potentially a convenient and uncomfortable blindspot of the larp community: aviation emissions in international larp.

Climate breakdown is the most prevalent and urgent threat to life on the planet. In another year of record breaking extreme weather events — heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires — the atmospheric effects of global warming are tangible across the globe, and show no sign of slowing. The worst of it, floods in Pakistan practically submerging the country, killing thousands and displacing millions. Heatwaves in Europe created droughts so bad that ancestral carvings below a safe water level were revealed on the banks of the River Elbe in Czechia, complete with the inscription “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine” (If you see me, weep). The World Health Organisation reports that climate change is responsible for 150,000 deaths per year and that figure is set to double by 2030.

There is some hope. Nothing is inevitable and it still remains possible to keep the rise of global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees, as is the goal of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty agreed at the COP Summit in 2015. A transition to a decarbonised economy is essential, and the demands set out by a Green New Deal fight for environmental justice propose critical intervention on a local and international scale, at the same time as tackling widespread inequality across the globe. Alongside halting fossil fuel production in favour of carbon-free energy sources; transferring skilled labour to transport infrastructure; zero-carbon housing and environmental reconstruction projects; and sequestration of utilities into collective ownership; the area in which I wish to highlight is a sustainable model of how we reorganise our time to move away from production and consumption, towards a more fulfilling existence including more time for leisure activities. The Green New Deal puts forward the case that a collectively owned future allows more time spent with access to nature, sport, artistic activities, and play.

Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash.

Playful Futures

In a decarbonised future, jobs and activity in these fields is plentiful. In combination with the prospect of an ageing population, the focus for decarbonisation must shift away from a production economy to one organised around care and leisure. Zero-carbon cultural activity is integral to the survival of the planet and investment in its wider sense — education, funding, jobs, infrastructure, time — has to be escalated on a mass scale. Playful activity sits at the core of this, the very essence of play in its most rudimentary form is a zero carbon activity, borne of the imagination. In comparison to other forms of culture such as film, the average production releases 500 tonnes of CO² emissions into the atmosphere, play is a future-proof and sustainable activity.

Larp (live action role-play) occupies a unique cultural space where its activity is collectively generated by players. This sets it aside from the industrial production and consumption of the film industry (notice how these words are highly compatible), and to an extent visual arts and theatre. The way that larp activity liberates culture from passive consumption because of its active player agency is the reason that I fell in love with larp. Its adjacency to DIY cultural forms is incredibly exciting for me, designers and players collaborating to create a meaningful experience through their shared imagination. As a designer, you can start with an empty page. Of course, it’s useful to have setting, characters, prompts, and techniques for players to fill in that page, but in theory, you can start with incredibly little as the play is co-designed and improvised by players. And those players have the capacity to feel as if they are on a spaceship or Wild West saloon bar by tapping into their collective imagination. They do not need specialist skills to play, everything needed in order to understand and play the larp is communicated and learned in a short amount of time. At its core, the most basic description of chamber larp is people in physical or digital space using their imaginations to create, and immerse themselves in, fictional worlds. This doesn’t come at the expense of cultural relevance, but quite the opposite: through its collective storytelling we are able to experience a deeper contemplation of the questions society asks us, today and tomorrow.

International and Local Inequality

Not all larp looks like this. Categorisation of role-play activity is a network of interlinked forms and design methods, but for the purposes of this article, I want to highlight the distinction between international long form larp and local chamber larp. These are intricately linked; without the international connections of events such as Knutepunkt and Larpwriter Summer School, many local scenes could not have flourished in the same way. Many local communities contain an international diaspora and chamber larp festivals programme international designs, arguably very important for the upkeep of local scenes. But nevertheless, I will try to draw an imaginary line in the sand between: long form larp — usually higher production values, with international participants, a relatively high financial cost to participate, lasting for multiple days — and chamber larp — usually DIY production values, with local participants, low cost, lasting a number of hours.

Firstly I want to clarify, this is not an attack on designers or players who enjoy long form larp. This is an attempt to advocate for forms of larp practice and design which should be celebrated and elevated for a zero carbon future. It feels necessary to highlight my feeling of incongruence between what I consider to be a highly environmentally sustainable practice and how this fits within a wider landscape of the international larp community.

Photo by Ben Neale on Unsplash.

Designing Sustainably for Climate Justice

I would imagine that on some conscious level, sustainability of larp design is an aspect of organising that is considered by most if not all designers. In a community with a progressive culture of compassion for those playing, the emotional and physical safety of players is usually a built-in priority throughout all stages of a larp. It is present in design, pre-game communication, workshopping, in-game safety techniques, and post-game briefing. In comparison, sustainability appears absent from design. I am not quite suggesting that sustainability requires parity by articulating design choices throughout; however, it needs a more careful consideration if larp can make a claim (or I can on its behalf) to have future-proof and sustainable credentials.

It is very difficult to analyse the whole larp landscape without empirical data so it should be made clear this is an anecdotal perspective. We can look at data for comparable art forms and the comparison to global visual arts activity is a useful one; however it has to be acknowledged in terms of scale, larp is a much smaller community. The estimated greenhouse gas emissions of global visual arts is 70 million tonnes; for context this fits into a global list divided by country between Romania and Morocco. This figure of 70 Mt of emissions falls dramatically to 18 Mt if visitor travel is removed. According to these figures, visitor travel accounts for 74% of total emissions from visual arts globally. This is a very sizable proportion of the sector. I understand that larp is comparably tiny compared to the proliferation of visual arts, and without having data to analyse, it’s an analysis based upon anecdotal evidence. For what it’s worth, here’s my hot take: in the case of larp events, the ratio of carbon emissions from travel is likely to be much higher.

From my own experience of facilitating sustainability activity for an arts organisation producing international work, land travel was sometimes not feasible; the delivery of the project required aeroplane travel for an artist and a producer. In these instances, aviation emissions tended to dominate the carbon footprint of the project, merely for 2 return flights. In the case of larp, even though there isn’t an audience per se, as players have an active role in the co-design and its “performance,” they are integral to the larp design and it really matters how they travel.

In larp design, I feel there is a blindspot to carbon emissions from international travel. This article isn’t a flygskam hex; players can make their own choices about travelling to events and it’s likely that many choose an international larp event as their way of taking a foreign holiday or seeing close friends. For larp designers, this is as much of a design choice as your setting and characters. Multi-day larps designed with higher production budgets and higher costs to play are very often designed for an international set of participants attending so have a disproportionately high environmental cost, in comparison to chamber larp events with local participants. If the number of players is up to 100, 50 of them taking international flights is not an unreasonable figure to estimate, generating 18.9 tons of carbon emissions from plane travel alone. This is around the same as 75,000 public transport journeys of 7km each. As designers we have agency to choose our venues or locations, the length and structure of the larp, and who attends. The last point is a salient one; if there aren’t local participants for the larp then the audience becomes an international one, consciously or unconsciously, in the design process. (I’m writing this from Oslo, where I moved nearly 2 years ago; chamber larp hasn’t really recovered from the shadow of the Coronavirus hiatus, a collective effort to nurture new players and designers only seems to be emerging now). Likewise if the price to play is one that only engages experienced players then I can’t see how new local players are able to access, nor new designers to flourish. This creates exclusions because of lack of affordability and divides potential players on the basis of class and race, something I believe the larp community wishes to avoid.

Flight emissions are a socially unequal source of emissions, a huge global disparity with the wealthiest taking a disproportionate amount of flights. Whilst aviation currently accounts for around 2.5-3% of global emissions, the proportion and total is set to increase as other sectors of the economy — electricity generation and transport — move towards renewable sources of energy. Unlike these sectors where existing solutions can be scaled up by urgent government action, the aviation industry does not currently have these technological solutions. Climate breakdown is disproportionately caused by emissions from the Global North, disproportionately affecting the Global South. The Global South is more vulnerable to extreme weather events as a direct result of historic colonial oppression leaving them with the least resources to cope with rising temperatures, sea levels, flooding, and drought. The compassion shown for human safety in larp design ought to extend to outside of those playing, by climate justice being ingrained in designs.

I have considered how I access information about larps, primarily through social media which may play a factor in how my perspective is shaped. It may be that I mostly hear about larps on a large scale because those are the organisers shouting the loudest, with the biggest promotional reach. I am less likely to come across information about local chamber larp scenes, or groups of friends quietly organising through Whatsapp to meet and play in living rooms on the other side of the world; (please make my day and tell me about this)! Larp designs can be digitally sent and received by facilitators in another part of the world; it is one of the few artistic mediums where international travel is not required in order for the larp to be realised.

Photo by John McArthur on Unsplash.

The Pyramid

There is a comparison I can make to my other playful love, football (*waits for Google Analytics to tell me half of all readers stop here*; please don’t, you’re almost done). In football, the elite leagues occupy the most media attention at the professionalised level of the game. Football as business has infected the game, players earning grossly inflated salaries and charging eye-watering entrance fees which has, at least in England, priced out the working class. However, the wider picture of the entire league structure, the football “pyramid,” named as such because the lower amateur leagues far outnumber higher, professional leagues. The lower leagues at the base of the pyramid are organised regionally, furthest from the top are organised with the closest geographical proximity. Below this, the number of games played informally in the park or on the school playing fields are even more numerous, and even though the difference in player skill and production values is notable, it’s the same game, enjoyed at its fullest by those participating. As an ecosystem, football as a comparison is not perfect, especially as financial resources are distributed incredibly unequally, but the football pyramid does provide an interesting model for redistributing a better balance between local and international.

In a sustainable decarbonised future, the network of larp design has to take the shape of a pyramid with a greater proportion of larp activity organised at a local level. I’m not saying whether or not the elite international leagues ought to exist; this is at the discretion of the reader. Besides, larp is not a competition, it’s a supportive and inclusive community. In spite of this, perpetuation of larp design which is reliant on wide scale carbon emissions from aeroplane travel without larp infrastructure existing at a local level, makes it a fantasy to claim that the imagination is without a substantial cost to the environment.

On a practical level, I would be interested to see evidence of designers working on sustainability of larp events in the future, sharing best practice, and continuing the discourse. To keep specific to the topic of flight emissions, this starts with data collection, as boring as it sounds. Knowing where participants are travelling from and most importantly, how they travelled, is fairly easy to implement with a travel survey as part of player sign-up or on-site. This shouldn’t create barriers along national borders for players travelling internationally, but rather, give a fuller picture of the carbon emissions for your larp event. By knowing this information, designers are able to see the environmental cost of the larp, identify gaps on local scenes if the event is mostly accessed by air travel, and adjust their designs and promotion accordingly. In this way the pyramidal structure does not become top heavy and avoid the danger of toppling over. A follow-up to this article could address some smaller scale sustainable design choices, however — serving vegan meals to players who have travelled thousands of kilometres to eat it — is like trying to put a fire out with a thimble.

Cover photo: Ross Parmly on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.
Published on

2022-11-03

in

Documentation

Healing

By
Wanja Neite

Your pulse is racing. Your hands are shaking. This is your last chance:

HEALING

The most glamorous entertainment show in the world.

For some it’s a new beginning. For some it’s the end.

Make yourself at home. Just be yourself! We, Falcon Eye, will be watching every step you take.

That was exciting! That was moving! That was magical! Those are real emotions!

Once more it is time for the part of the show we all adore the most: the scoring round! We love scores. You and I, all of us – we live for the scores!

Rags to rags? Not in The Nation. Let’s have some fun fun fun and get you back in shape.

We have seen you give your all. But you can do better, sm_741.

Your scores are consistent. …consistently worse. That’s -30 points in resilience. And -40 in sociability and responsibility. Not long and you will end up in the Farewell.

The Larp

A bunker in an undefined future called Healing Facility-A13 is the place-to-be / last resort for beings who fell out of the middle of society by having a too low LIS-Score (Social Score). As longtime clients in a game show called Healing destiny now is in their own hands, again. Can they impress the “The Tribunal” (online players playing in a specially designed 2D world interconnected with audio and video in real time with the bunker) to lift their LIS-Score and go back in the heart of “The Nation” (society) or do they finally have to go to “Farewell”…

Creation

Summer 2021. An international team of role-players, performers, scenographers, activists, hackers, and creative coders tries to create a larp about a technocratic fascist world inside a bunker. Outside a not-so-fictional but appallingly similar world is waiting: Schweinfurt in Bavaria, Germany. The city is flooded with bored cops and their civil minions. So the team from the network denialofservice.fail holes up even deeper to the bunker to create a unique hybrid game.

Healing was played online and offline at the same time. Beings from all over the world played online with beings located in a World War II era bunker in Germany. The larp was played six times, open to the public, took 10 hours of your time and was designed for beings without any larp experience, with accessibility in mind and ran solely on open source software.

More Information

Check out denialofservice.fail or visit healing.dos.fail on the net to get more information about what happened to the clients in Healing Facility A13.

All photos © Simon Salem Müller VG Bild-Kunst Bonn denialofservice.fail

Cover photo: All photos by Simon Salem Müller VG Bild-Kunst Bonn / denialofservice.fail. Cover photo has been cropped.

This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

Neite, Wanja. 2022. “Healing.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 124-128. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

Published on

2022-10-31

The Chinese Hotpot of Larp

Shuo Xiong

After the explosive growth of the last five years, China now has the biggest larp business in the world.

The emergence of pervasive games in China, the largest game market all over the world, was very fast and drastic. The most popular examples, escape rooms (ERs), and murder mystery games (MMG) called jubensha (剧本杀, script murder) quickly conquered China’s urban youth.

The Short History of Chinese Murder Mysteries

Chinese crime genres like gong’an have entertained their readers with horror, suspense, and mystery solving for a long time and created the conditions for murder mystery games in China. Some sources say that deductive games like Werewolf were already part of the Chinese underground gamer scene when escape rooms entered China around 2012.

Then in 2013, a murder mystery boardgame named Death Wear White was imported into China, which some see as the origin of jubensha. Soon, a steady stream of original Chinese ‘script murders’ (e.g., the excellent The Magnificent Ambersons series) were produced. But they did not drawn mainstream attention until 2016, when Mango TV released a variety program named Who’s The Murderer, a South Korean reality TV import. Watching celebrities play jubensha became the coolest thing for Chinese youth.

During the pandemic of Covid-19, online jubensha applications became a popular form of social interaction and entertainment. Not restricted by time and space, it was a very convenient and efficient way to kill time and solve loneliness during quarantine periods.

Meanwhile, the booming escape room industry started to fuse jubensha with immersive spaces. During its first decade, Chinese escape rooms became more interactive and technologically enhanced, adding large-scale and high production value environments, narrative elements, player roles, and professional supporting characters to the mix, while allowing the players to influence the story and its ending. As a result, live-action jubenshas became very similar to North American and North European blockbuster larps, and an important link in the Chinese entertainment industry chain.

image of Chinese players in period clothing in a decorative setting — There’s a wide variety of commercial larp venues in China. Photo by Shuo Xiong.

Jubensha 101

Online and offline jubenshas have a very similar process. You can buy tabletop murder mystery games to play at home.

Most of the scripts are about a murder, but other genres like espionage, survival, and rom-com are slowly gaining ground. The players choose (or are assigned) a character with a detailed background. The studios and the app’s AR features usually provide authentic costumes. A Game Master facilitates the experience.

A jubensha usually involves three player roles: suspects, detectives and real murderers, with possible accomplices. Some complex scripts even have a mastermind behind the plot.

➔ Innocent suspects need to clear themselves and complete their own side quests;

➔ Detectives must investigate the case and find the murderer;

➔ Murderers must find a scapegoat and plant suspicion to escape the detectives.

The game usually contains two rounds of detecting. Players can search the crime scenes looking for hidden clues, then exchange information and discuss the mystery during a roundtable meeting. Finally, they vote on who is the murderer and conclude the game.

	2016	2019	2021
Number of studios	2000+	12000+	30000+
Industry	?	1.5+ billion USD	2.5+ billion USD

The jubensha industry supports 2000+ script writers.

Image of players in the dark around a table lit by electric candles — Atmospheric candles. Photo by Jingyu.

Advanced Form

A quite complex, larp-like jubensha that Ruoyu Wen experienced in Wuhan was themed after Dying Light, a famous video game about post-apocalyptic survival. The game site was set into a two-storey mini town, where every player character had different main storyline missions.

During “daytime,” players could walk around the town and get quests from supporting characters who would give water and food in return. These resources were recorded on smartphones and without them your character would die. During “nighttime,” players had to hide in houses to avoid zombies.

Just like in other open-world games, the players could chat freely and interact with each other and the NPCs. The immersive environment (uniforms, sound effect, supporting character actors, and scenery) made it a high-fidelity game experience.

From “Acquaintance” to “Stranger Entertainment”

On the surface, jubenshas are task-oriented. Solving the case is the core experience of the game. However, many play murder mystery games for social purposes.

Socialization in China was traditionally limited to acquaintances. Stranger socialization also relied on mutual acquaintances. However, social attitudes are changing among China’s youth. Anonymous social apps like TanTan (Chinese Tinder) made online stranger socialization more acceptable, and this had a profound effect on pervasive games.

Ten years ago, people only played escape rooms with their friends. They had to invite 6-8 of them to play. It was an obstacle. Today, apps and organizers bring together prospective players who don’t know each other. Pervasive games are an efficient and unembarrassing way for young people to meet, socialize and find common topics. The temporary set of social relationships and the dark and scary atmosphere helps to create trust between strangers, meanwhile the alibi provided by playing a character allows for safe ways to experiment with your behavior.

A Recipe

Immerse the following ingredients in a simmering pot of Chinese culture for a few years:

➔ Gong’an (or other Chinese crime genres)

➔ Death Wears White (or other murder mystery boardgames)

➔ Period dramas

➔ Werewolf (or other social deduction games)

➔ Escape rooms

➔ Hanfu fashion

➔ TV reality shows

➔ Role-playing

Image of Chinese players in period costumes — There’s a wide variety of commercial larp venues in China. Photo by Shuo Xiong.

Larp In China

➔ Xiong’s previous survey of 292 players showed a balanced gender ratio and 83.3% of Bachelor’s degrees or above.

➔ The quality of scripts on the market is quite uneven, and intellectual property rights are often ignored.

➔ Some designers theorize that the majority of players still prefer simple murder mystery games and escape rooms to complex jubenshas because most people feel safe knowing that there is an answer and a disclosure. Freeform roleplaying is too social and too uncertain.

➔ Chinese companies started to use pervasive games not just for teambuilding, but for HR assessment and leadership development purposes.

➔ In 2022, state regulations on content of scripts appeared.

➔ Ruoyu predicts a renewed interest in pervasive games when AR/VR technologies and metaverses reach the next technological level.

Image of players around a table raising cups toward a skeleton prop on the wall — Toasting the dead. Photo by Jingyu.

Cover photo: The cast of a Chinese larp. Photo by Shuo Xiong. Image has been cropped.

This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

Xiong Shuo, Wen Ruoyu, and Mátyás Hartyándi. 2022. “The Chinese Hotpot of Larp.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 86-89. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

Description of Larps using Textual Parameters

Published on

2022-10-27

Tools

Description of Larps using Textual Parameters

Laura Wood

One of the big problems for organizers of larp festivals – particularly those that bring together larps and larpers from different cultures, and/or people with little or no larping experience – is: how to describe the larps in ways that will be meaningful to participants who may come from a different larping background, or from no larping background at all?

This is something that the organizing team of The Smoke: London’s International Larp Festival tried to tackle. At The Smoke we always had a huge variety of content and an even huger variety of participants. We found quite quickly that asking designers and GMs to write descriptions of their larps, while essential, was sometimes of limited value to people who either didn’t understand the terms being used, or who understood them to mean different things to what was actually intended.

We decided to add a requirement that people submitting larps to the programme should, as well as describing the larp discursively, answer a set of questions that sought to establish firm and unambiguous statements about what taking part in the larp would involve. Asking this at submission allowed us to ensure a mix of larps on the programme, as well as making them clear to prospective participants.

Hopefully this will not only be useful for festival organizers. It may also be helpful to anyone who’s organizing a run of a chamber larp for their friends, or seeking to recruit participants for one: and perhaps also for participants who want to examine a little what it is that they do and don’t enjoy doing in larps, etc.

An example

This is taken from the website of the 2022 edition of the festival, for the larp 4–3 (Alessandro Giovannucci and Oscar Biffi):

ABOUT THE LARP

The city stops, gathered around the stadium. The derby splits it in two. In the locker room, eleven players prepare for so much more than just another game. On the other side of the wall, their long-time rivals. A ritual, a sacred space for the length of the match, only extinguished by the referee’s final blow on the whistle. And in between, some sublime moments and many ridiculous episodes.

In a word, football.

4–3 is all about teamplay and the match is a non verbal ritual of gestures and movement. But the result is determined by what happens in the locker room. As the athletes prepare to face yet another epic challenge, their stories and decisions interweave like a web of passes. Will they miss or score a goal?

PARAMETERS

Physical contact	Not relevant for this larp; e.g. just standing in a room and talking
Romance and intimacy	Not relevant for the larp
Conflict and violence	Shouting and other intimidating actions not involving contact
Communication style	Half of the game is verbal, half non-verbal
Movement style	Jogging on the spot at your own pace and pass a ball
Characters	Players play facets of a personality, or something else that is human but less than a full character
Narrative control	There are random mechanics to establish the final score of the match
Transparency	Fully transparent – players will, or at least can, know absolutely everything in advance
Representation	The fictional space looks very unlike the play space, but players will use their imaginations
Play culture	Players are collaborating to achieve joint aims
Tone	Moderate

Not the Mixing Desk

This approach is related to that of the Mixing Desk of Larp (Martin Nielsen and Martin Eckhoff Andresen), which uses a set of sliders to describe a larp design in terms of various properties.

The Mixing Desk itself was conceived as a design tool; and although it also has value in communicating the nature of the larp to prospective participants, this is not what it was designed to achieve. Also, the Mixing Desk is aimed at people who already have some understanding of the Nordic larp design space: the sliders are not necessarily going to be meaningful to people from other communities, or to newcomers.

We considered preparing a ‘mixing desk of submitting larps to international festivals’ or something like that, using a similar model but with sliders that were chosen to be clear and meaningful for our specific explanatory purpose. We decided not to go down this route, because we felt that a choice of textual parameters was more useful in this situation than a numeric/visual position on a slider.

This was partly in order to gain clarity – the difference between 4 and 6 out of 10 on a slider is not obvious, while the difference between ‘walking’ and ‘running’ is more so.

And it was partly because it allows possibilities that aren’t just along one linear direction. If there was a slider for ‘Level of physical activity’, should a larp that involves dancing set the slider higher or lower than one that involves running? Perhaps they are similar enough that the slider would be the same: but they are sufficiently different as experiences that we wanted to represent them separately.

Participants at The Smoke 2022, photo by Oliver Facey

The parameters

The questions asked, and the options offered for each, have evolved somewhat over the years that The Smoke has run, as we gradually refined the initially-crude system in the direction of being clearer and more helpful. No doubt there is still a lot of room for improvement, and perhaps readers will have thoughts of their own about what they might like to see changed, added, or removed.

We always took into consideration that we didn’t want to put too heavy a burden on the people who were submitting these forms. Otherwise, one could add any number of questions… There has to be a balance between usability for submitters, and usefulness for eventual participants. We don’t know if we’ve struck that balance in the right place.

Here are the 11 parameterized questions that were asked for The Smoke 2022, the explanatory text that accompanied each, and the options available. All include an ‘Other…’ option, to allow the submitter to write in something that’s not covered by the available options.

Of course, if your audience is different to The Smoke’s audience, some of these options (or even some of the questions) may not be applicable to you: or some may be missing. We’re explaining this here as our particular approach for this event; we’re not trying to say that it should be universal.

Physical contact

If relevant, the level of physical contact participants should generally be comfortable with to play the larp.

Not relevant for this larp; eg. just standing in a room and talking
Light contact; touching hands or forearms
Moderate contact; eg. hugging, formal partner dancing
Moving in contact; eg. rolling around on the floor together, contact improv, very close dancing
Intense contact; intimate or forceful
Other:

Romance and intimacy

How the larp handles themes of romance and intimacy. Put the level participants should generally be comfortable with to play the larp.

Not relevant for the larp
Romantic themes but no player contact; eg. discussion of romance, illicit glances
Demonstrations of affection; eg. hugging, holding hands
Symbolic kissing or sex; eg. stage kisses, abstractly representing sex
Actual kissing or simulated sex; eg. dry humping
Other:

Conflict and violence

How the larp handles conflict and forceful play, if relevant. Put the level participants should be generally comfortable with to play the larp.

Not relevant for this larp
Themes of conflict, but not enacted by players; eg. quiet threats and vengeful stares
Shouting and other intimidating actions not involving contact
Pushing, grabbing, latex weapons, or other safe physically-forceful actions
Other:

Communication style

How will participants be communicating with each other during play? If it’s a mix, choose ‘Other’ and explain.

Silent
Non-verbal sounds
Minimal speech
Lots of speech
Singing or chanting
Other:

Movement style

Choose the minimum level required, ie. participants can run but also it’s ok to walk, choose ‘Walking’. If it’s too complex for one choice, choose ‘Other’ and explain – this is primarily to gauge how accessible your larp is to people with restricted movement.

Sitting or lying
Walking
Dancing
Running or other vigorous movement
Other:

Characters

Who creates the characters, and what are they like? Choose the nearest; or If it’s too complex for one choice, choose ‘Other’ and explain.

There are no actual characters; participants play abstract entities, or similar
Participants play facets of a personality, or something else that is human but less than a full character
Participants create their own characters, in a workshop
Participants build their characters around a predesigned skeleton or archetype
Characters are fully predesigned
Other:

Narrative control

Who is responsible for the direction of story? Choose the nearest; or If it’s too complex for one choice, choose ‘Other’ and explain.

There is no story as such, it’s more like abstract activity
The shape and direction of the story is entirely, or almost entirely, determined by participant choice
Participants have some influence over story, but there is basically a script or structure that they’re within
Intensely plotted and designed, but participants have freedom as to how to achieve their goals
Heavily scripted, perhaps with predefined scenes whose outcomes are known
Other:

Transparency

How important are secrets? Choose the nearest; or If it’s too complex for one choice, choose ‘Other’ and explain.

Fully transparent – participants will, or at least can, know absolutely everything in advance
Transparent design, but participants can create secrets during play and keep them from each other / reveal them when wished
There are predesigned secrets that participants will have from each other
There are predesigned secrets that the organizers will have from the participants
There are predesigned secrets the organizers have from the participants , and also that the participants will have from each other
Other:

Representation level

How does the physical reality of the room relate to the fiction? Choose the nearest; or If it’s too complex for one choice, choose ‘Other’ and explain.

What you see is what you get: the space and fixtures etc are exactly as they seem
The fictional space is pretty similar to the play space
Scenery and props will be used to make the play space look something like the fictional space
The fictional space looks very unlike the play space, but participants will use their imaginations
The fictional space is so abstract that its physical representation isn’t important
Other:

Play culture

How will participants be playing together? Almost all larps are collaborative to some extent, so take that as a given. Choose the nearest; or If it’s too complex for one choice, choose ‘Other’ and explain.

Players are in direct opposition, p vs p
Players are individually trying to achieve goals, such that not all can succeed
Players are in rival factions, teams, etc, which are in some sort of competition for success
Players are collaborating to achieve joint aims
The concept of rivalry or cooperation between players doesn’t really apply
Other:

Tone

What is the general tone of the larp and of the themes it covers? An ‘Intense’ larp might not be misery all the time, but will require participants to engage with serious or heavy material. Choose the nearest; or If it’s too complex for one choice, choose ‘Other’ and explain.

Comedic
Light-hearted
Moderate
Dramatic
Intense
Other:

In review

The Smoke’s organizing team built up the current set of parameters, as described here, over time, as we discovered what it was that people wanted to know about a larp. For example, the initial set of parameters didn’t include physical contact, romance and intimacy, or conflict and violence: these were added later, after feedback from festival participants and reflection from the organizers.

It is unavoidable that there is still an amount of subjectivity in the answers, based on the designer’s own larp experience. The difference between a moderate, dramatic, and intense tone is a matter of perspective: and the tone of the design doesn’t necessarily indicate the nature of the experience. If there is bleed-in, a relatively low key larp can feel intense. Similarly, quiet threats with a feeling of realism can feel more violent than an abstract fight with latex weapons: and whether this is the case might not always be in the control of the designers.

As a compromise between not asking for too much labor from people submitting larps (and indeed from those reading the resultant descriptions), and allowing participants to get a clear understanding of what they were likely to experience, our perception is that this system has been largely effective.

Cover photo: by Thomas Stephan on Unsplash

Published on

2022-10-24

in

Theory

Wielding the Magic of Anticipation

By
Olivia Fischer

Maximizing the emotional impact of anticipation for better play.

“I see you shiver with antici-

-pation”

– Rocky Horror Picture Show

The sweet moment when you close your eyes full of expectation while your lips get closer and closer to another person’s lips for the first time. So close that you can already feel their breath caressing your cheek… when you can sense the warmth of their body close to yours. This seemingly endless moment when your heart starts beating a tiny bit faster and when you do not yet know if your and the other’s lips are really going to touch.

Isn’t this moment of sweet anticipation often more intense than the kiss itself?

Or the last moments of a desperate bunch of rebels before the attack of an overpowering group of stormtroopers. Waiting to stand their ground for the last time and defend their base with their lives. The last glimpses they might exchange, someone patting a friend on the shoulder. Fear and hope in conflict with each other. Final encouraging words by a leader.

Isn’t this moment of gloomy, yet heroic anticipation much more interesting than the following fight?

Is it not those moments when events are yet to happen that spark our excitement and that send our emotions on a rollercoaster ride? No matter whether can foresee the outcome or not, these moments of anticipation hold a bewitching power.

Skillful authors use these moments to build up suspense in their novels and also to forge a stronger bond between you, the reader, and the novel’s characters. Screenwriters use them to hook you to their shows and movies while displaying their characters’ virtues and flaws.

Some of us larp folk instinctively use moments of anticipation to develop intense scenes during larps. However, not all larpers and larp designers are aware of the magic of anticipation, let alone of how to wield this magic. So let us quickly look at one or two things that you can do to start using the magic of anticipation to enhance your own experience as a player.

First – and this is the most important rule of all – don’t rush to the anticipated event!

Learn to relish moments of anticipation. Like in the first example with the kiss, you might be eager to take the next step in a chain of events. Maybe you feel like you cannot wait until the anticipated event is going to happen but learn to endure this suspense! Dive into this sweet kind of excitement in order to fully unlock its potential.

Second, use those moments to delve into your character’s unique personality!

Use the moment of anticipation to dive even deeper into your characters’ hopes and fears. In these moments the anticipated event is like Schrödinger’s cat. Every outcome is possible which allows you to portray and experience different aspects of your character’s personality. Imagine the worst possible thing to happen and let your character react to it! Or let your character dream of the best possible outcome and share it with somebody to play on hope! Maybe old memories from your background story surface or maybe something that happened earlier during the larp acquires new gravitas.

Third, let your emotions flow!

Moments of anticipation are often moments when emotional waves become massive, when feelings can’t be held back anymore. Use your whole body to feel and portray those emotions. This might be a shivering breath before you kiss or shakily grasping your best friend’s hand before you storm out into battle. It might be a long thankful smile at your mentor before you climb the stage to hold a speech.

Fourth, focus on your co-players too!

As we all know, larp is a co-creative medium and we all want to have a good experience when playing. So try to find a good balance between exploring your character during moments of anticipation and giving the floor to other players. Those moments of anticipation are a perfect opportunity to learn more about others’ characters and to develop your character’s relationship to them further. You can also use the things you learn from such moments about others’ characters later in the game to create intense personal scenes.

Now, let’s briefly take the designer’s perspective.

If your larp is a complete sandbox, you probably don’t have much influence over moments of anticipation. However, if you have at least some rough cornerstone events planned for your larp, then you should definitely add enough occasions and time for your players to savor the anticipation.

Of course, sudden surprises and unexpected turns of events have their own magical charm but don’t forget to add opportunities of anticipation. Let your players wait before a big event is finally happening and give them hints about what they can expect to spark the flame of their imagination. You can drop allusions with the help of supporting characters or in-game materials such as a newspaper. Or you can simply use transparent design where your players know off-game where the story arc is going.

The imagination of your players is a powerful tool! Just think of a horror movie as an example – usually, we are far more frightened when we haven’t seen the monster. When we know that there is something lurking, some eerie imminence, our imagination fills in the gaps and often our imagination does it far more effectively than any creature designer.

Give your players time to envision the worst or the best before you actually let it happen. If you want, you can even guide their imagination by using sound effects, music, lighting, and so on. Just read up on how to use those things when designing larps to get some inspiration. A good starting point is the article “The Fundamentals of Sound Design in Larp” by Anni Tolvanen and Irrette Melakoski (2019) published in the book Larp Design.

No matter if you look at anticipation from a player’s perspective or from a designer’s – relishing moments of anticipation can definitely create intense scenes. Let’s all be more aware of the magic that lies within anticipation and let’s use it more consciously!

References

Tolvanen, Anni, and Irrette Melakoski. 2019. “The Fundamentals of Sound Design for Larp.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.

Cover photo: Illustration by Nina Mutik.

This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

Fischer, Olivia. 2022. “Wielding the Magic of Anticipation.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 105-107. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Published on

2022-10-21

in

Documentation

The Online Larp Road Trip

By
Ylva Otting

With: Sandy Bailly, Brian Bors, Debbie, Raúl Peña Fernández, Evie Hartman, Steve Hatherley, Sydney Mikosch, Will Osmond, Inge-Mette Petersen, Gerrit Reininghaus, Amalia Valero, and Wibora Wildfeuer

The pandemic was catastrophic for physical larp but also acted as the catalyst for the development of online larp.

Larp has been heavily affected by the pandemic. For a long time physical larps weren’t an option so people started trying online experiences. It felt like we were taking a (digital) road trip to see what was possible, tourists in this thing called online larp.

And what a trip it has been already! Obviously, online larps existed way before the pandemic hit, but it still felt like witnessing a creative revolution. With little to no experience in running games online in the case of most, designers started experimenting and creating new games.

Even the name seemed to be up for discussion. The artform has been called “laog” (live action online game), digital larp and online larp, among other things.

Game For a Year

The experiments resulted in a wide range of games. For example, games were created with a playtime ranging from one hour to months (continuously). You could be sitting behind a laptop, or walking around, or be guided through the story through music, or lie on the ground in something akin to guided meditation. It could be video, with or without sound, or text only or voice only, or a combination of these options.

The creators of the larp could send emails before the larp, or use websites, or send letters or complete packages to your home address. The themes could be anything: serial high-fantasy, dystopian future, or current day slice of life. It could deal with very serious matters, or could be comedy and slapstick. The player could be the same as the character so what you see is what you get, or players could be represented by an avatar with a fake background. You could create art, or cook and eat together, or take a bath, make music, solve puzzles, and write fiction.

It made for a wide range of options available for interested players.

Elina Gouliou playing the online larp Meet at the Tavern, by Omenstar. Image by Elina Gouliou.

Lessons For Designers And Players

It was a lot of experimenting, and not everything worked. The players learned how to dress up when your costume is only visible for the top half and from the front. Some people would stay behind their laptop unless there is explicit room to take a break, so bio breaks needed to be specifically added. It’s not easy seeing if someone is ok if they’re only visible on a screen, or not visible at all, so safety became more important. And having an online larp with 25 people in the same call for a longer period of time is not the best option, so designers created smaller groups.

The tech and internet wouldn’t always work properly, and drop offs needed to be taken into account. And not all technology could be used by everybody, so people were limited in what to use.

Of course, technology created part of the experience and took a huge leap during the pandemic as well. The amount of new apps becoming available, or existing apps changing or adding new features, meant a whole lot of new options. Discord, Teams, Zoom and Jitsi were used to create online worlds. Proximity chat apps like Gather and SpatialChat were used to mimic the feeling of walking around and talking to other players. Adding a virtual background became a thing. Snapchat was used to alter player appearance.

Online larp has come a long way the last couple of years. So let’s see some of the sights we have witnessed along the way!

A screenshot from a run of Make Up Moments. Image by Gerrit Reininghaus.

Sightseeing 1: Start From Home

From offline to online.

Gerrit Reininghaus started with online larps when he moved to Central America because no other options were available. He started by translating physical larps like Winterhorn to the online larp format.

Converting from off- to online is something that happened a lot at the start of the pandemic. Debbie joined the online version of the larp Empire. When the pandemic started, they were playing tabletop roleplaying games but found it lacked the connection with the character. They also missed the interaction with the players from Empire.

The bards from Empire, basically the musicians who would perform during Empire in the live games before the pandemic, created online evenings for song and story time. Everybody could join, in costume, and act like they would normally do at the physical larp around the campfire. A couple of people could sing or tell a story, using Twitch, and the audience could listen or comment using text.

Regular evenings would have 20 to 30 performers. It was a great reminder of what the characters were about, although it was less playing a character and more hanging around. People did get creative and did things that wouldn’t have been available during the physical larp. For instance, a performance with a green screen and puppets, including recordings of the puppets which were played during the song.

Bots

Steve Hatherley turned the physical games he designed into online games at the start of the pandemic. He discovered that the usage of bots is an advantage for running games.

Murder mystery was already a usable format for online so it didn’t need must adjustment. People were starting to get together using Zoom and freeform games could be played the same way. It did have limits for the amount of people that could play and the length of the game. Normally a weekend game with 60 to 70 people was possible but the online format meant adjusting this to a maximum of 25 people. The duration had to be capped at a couple of hours.

Debbie also joined the Glasgow Vampire larp, their first time larping online. It was a physical larp campaign turned online, mostly using only voice and a picture of the character but no video. Separate channels represented physical rooms.

The channels contained a description of the location and made it possible to play in a wide range of places. For Debbie, online made it possible to join the game because they don’t live near the physical game location. It was easier to join the campaign as an online player.

After adapting physical larps for online play, Reininghaus started thinking about the real possibilities of online. One of the online larps Reininghaus created, Make Up Moments, was first run in 2018 and uses the camera as a mirror. It’s for up to four players, and lasts one to two hours. Players put on makeup while talking to other players, in preparation for a big event.

Players see themselves in a mirror and other players can see them through the video. It ends with a selfie shared with others. This is something that wouldn’t have been possible in a physical larp, and there are other technical and safety possibilities to explore as well. Reininghaus says he enjoys the accessibility, being able to do things you couldn’t or wouldn’t do offline. It’s empowering.

Online turned out to be a safe environment where you can get a larp experience.

A screenshot of players playing The Space Between Us. Image by Elina Gouliou.

Sightseeing 2: The Space Between Us

Designed to be replayed.

The Space Between Us is, without a doubt, the most run online one shot larp during the pandemic. The designer Wibora Wildfeuer created a complete design document which made it easy for others to run the game, and they have.

With translations into many languages, people playing it multiple times, the estimate is that it’s been run over 50 times. Wildfeuer herself ran it 17 times. Sydney Mikosch ran the larp 15 times, and described the experience as shutting your mind off for a couple of hours and being in another world with other people. They found it to be a very immersive larp, offering the possibility to create an experience together that sticks.

Wildfeuer didn’t have any experience with online larps before the pandemic and played just a couple before she created The Space Between Us. She guesses that its success can be attributed to replayability and the pandemic.

“It wasn’t written for Covid on purpose, but it has themes that coincide with Covid. Everybody wanted to larp, and it mirrors all the stuff that was happening in real life.” The basic story has five family members, each in their own spaceship, trying to find a new Earth. The players don’t have to prepare except by reading their pre-written character which includes a separate secret role and the setting background. The larp contains a couple of different scenes and starts out without much interference by the organizer. Just the characters interacting with each other.

Wildfeuer designed the larp so that players as well as characters interact only via video. The larp is limited to five players and has a fixed amount of scenes. This created a structure and a setting where each player got the same amount of play time, but wasn’t on screen the whole larp. Wildfeuer explained that she designed the characters as a family to make sure that the players felt a close connection, so the larp is mainly about the relationships and their past.

More

You can learn more about Wibora Wildfeuer’s work here: Instagram.com/wiborawildfeuer

The Space Between Us is available here: wiborawildfeuer.itch.io

Sightseeing 3: I’ll Have What They’re Having

Let’s eat.

It’s special to have dinner together eating the same food, face to face or online. I’ll Have What They’re Having was a larp where you are eating together online, created by Sandy Bailly. The dinner wasn’t brought to your table, you still had to cook it yourself, but all players were having the same dinner and were eating together. As member of the larp’s crew Amalia Valero explained, it had a physical component while still being a digital larp.

The larp was a slice of life story with prewritten characters for 16 players set in a near future dystopia. You couldn’t eat in a physical restaurant so you had dinner online with the food being brought to your home. The players got the recipes in advance and could cook the food between the in-game acts

You formed a duo with another player and had dinner together with another duo. The people in the group swapped so you would have dinner with different people each time. It used Discord with different channels to simulate different restaurants.

The recipes gave people an option to try some new things. Players Will Osmond and Sydney Mikosch both still cook the food that was part of the larp. Osmond considers it a great experience, going beyond the obvious. Mikosch thought it was great fun to cook the food with the recipes provided during the breaks, and says cooking it now still brings up memories from the larp.

Bailly got the idea for the larp while watching the tv-series Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories. Its stories revolve around food, and seemed really larpable. Eating food together forms a connection between people, even when you’re not at the same location. The food you were eating could always be a subject to talk about. Unintentionally, it turned out as a feelgood larp.

The breaks were used to cook food, but also made sure that screen fatigue wasn’t a thing, with enough time between two dishes.

The result was a low key slice of life larp, which brought people together and let them co-create the story. Just eating food together and having a good time.

A collage of the food made by the players during I’ll Have What They’re Having. Photos by Elina Gouliou, Patrik Bálint, Will Osmond, Andrea Vaghi, and Ylva Otting.

Sightseeing 4: Hack From the Damn

Hack the planet.

Hack From The Damn was an online larp based on the idea that in the near future quantum computers allow quantum hacking. It centered around a broker server where four different collectives could join an auction every week to bid on jobs and then have the rest of the week to prepare and run the jobs by hacking a server.

The mechanics for hacking were based on the board game Space Alert, and were basically a puzzle that needed to be solved in 10 minutes. The jobs generated cryptocurrency and a better reputation when they succeeded, and cost money and reputation if they didn’t. The collectives could also interact with each other, the client who provided the job, or just hang out on the server.

The larp used Discord, with different channels for the different groups and clients. It had 2 bots, to keep track of the money and skills for every player, and to run the actual hack. Github was used to set up the challenge with a random generator. People communicated through text chat and voice on Discord. Google Drive was used to share all documentation.

Brian Bors came up with the idea and started the larp after the first lockdown began. All physical larps he was running or playing shut down so he had nothing to do all of the sudden. He started asking people to form a larp team before having an explicit design. This resulted in a huge organizer team since other people didn’t have much to do either.

The setting and rule system were created in a couple of days, with the expectancy to run the larp for a couple of weeks. Instead, the larp ended after six months.

Both players and organizers worked together creating the bots, the story, the background and the jobs, making short films and writing characters. After a couple of weeks the game was set up and the first auction and jobs were run. It wasn’t part of the design to let the game continue 24/7. There was just the idea that the servers didn’t have to be shut off after the auction and the hack. The result was that the players continued playing when they wanted. The game ran continuously from April 2020 to June 2020, then introduced breaks until it definitively ended in September 2020.

Bors said that the game was a joy to run and play, but wouldn’t set up something like this again. The fact that the game ran continuously for so long made it too heavy for the organizers.

Part of the message inviting players to Hack From The Damn. Image by Ylva Otting.

Sightseeing 5: So Much To See, So Little Time

An explosion of creativity.

As with any road trip, there is so much more to see but not enough time to see it all.

Tavern Quests

Each Tavern Quest game is titled according to the same format: Meet At the Dungeon, Meet at the Space Station, Meet at the Shipwreck and so on. They have different formats but the same design and tech. The story and characters are different for every meet, so characters can be meeting in a dungeon, or a tavern, or a space station. The play time is a couple of hours, and it’s run on Discord, with the different channels being used for different rooms. It’s a lighthearted drama where, as player Will Osmond explains, you try to do the worst thing possible and want to create as much chaos as you can.

The Loop

The Loop is a weekend long larp where you play a character, or a catfish that is played by a character. It is a contest where characters are voted to leave a couple of times during the larp and then can reveal if they were who they said they were. It is text based, played on Discord. Player Amalia Valero commented that: “People are completely free to play whatever they want, not limited by their bodies.”

After Dark

After Dark is about people sitting behind their webcam trying to communicate with each other without making noise, since it seems that noise is what attracts monsters that roam the streets. It can be played with for instance Zoom, and lasts a couple of hours. The relationships in the larp are a family, so it’s easy to feel a deep connection with the other players.

Together Forever

Together Forever has different formats but is basically a weekend larp on Discord. You create a character, the relationships are created by the organizers, and you have a date in a near future dystopian future where you can’t meet other people in person so you have to meet online. An AI will decide who you should be matched up with. Inge-Mette Petersen played most of the formats and thinks the larp is easier to play online than offline. It’s a co-creative world where ideas from the players are incorporated into the story.

Zoe’s Christmas Task Force For Personal Betterment / Zoe’s Easter Egg Experience

A weekend larp inspired by TV series like The Gilmore Girls. It’s a romcom. People find love, get married, break up, get sick. It used Discord and had channels to represent all the different locations: the bar, character’s houses, the park and so on.

Props and background for Elina Gouliou playing Zoe at Zoe’s Christmas Task Force For Personal Betterment‘s first run, by Karolina Soltys, Patrik Bálint, Will Osmond and David Owen. Photo by Elina Gouliou.

The Road Ahead

Beautiful things to come!

Now that we’ve seen the sights along the road that brought us so far, it’s time to look ahead at what we might expect in our future travels.

We can start with the question of what are we going to call the opposite of online larp? Offline larp? In person larp? Physical larp? Or bluntly flesh larp, as suggested by Will Osmond.

In person, offline games are back on the table and up and running again, which has already resulted in declining interest in online larp. There are fewer online larps available, fewer players want to play online larps and fewer new larps being created. Online larp designer Gerrit Reininghaus expects online play to continue because the financial advantages and the option to play internationally are such obvious advantages. Designer Sandy Bailly suggests it will experience a resurgence in winter when there are less physical larps.

The Advantages of Online

Online larps still have the same advantages as before, being more accessible for people with physical issues, affordable, easy and environmentally friendly because players don’t have to travel. You can meet players from all over the world.

Osmond thinks that relationships during online play can be very intense, more so when the story is congruent with sitting behind a screen. Using channels or other options only available in a digital space also means that it’s easier to switch between conversations, leave chats when things get overwhelming while still being able to continue to play.

Digital representation can make it easier to create a world and digital effects can be used. It can be just as immersive, or immersive in a different way, as in-person larp. Sydney Mikosch discovered that the online larpers seemed to have formed a strong community and think it will keep going. It can be fun to just play a more lighthearted short online game, when you want to socialize with other people. As Amalia Valero pointed out, online larp tells stories you can’t tell in a physical medium: “It’s not going to be the huge thing it was during the pandemic, but it is its own medium and will tell its own story.”

Inge-Mette Petersen playing Marina Daulnoy in The Loop. Photo by Inge-Mette Petersen.

Hybrid Forms

One interesting avenue of exploration is hybrid larps, where parts of the larp are in person and parts are online. The in-game experience can be divided between in person and online, as seen in the German larp Healing, where some participants played online and others in person.

The same larp can have an online and an offline version, such as in the case of Together Forever. It started as an online larp, but has a physical run coming up in 2023.

Some things work better online than offline. Switching rooms, finding people, creating a spotlight for everyone, watching people without them watching you, turning your screen upside down, using bots to count money, creating spaces that are accessible for specific groups, asking for play and a ‘dear diary’ mechanic where you can explain to other players what your character is feeling.

The technology which will also advance. Evie Hartman is working on a website to compare the different options available (gvguide.com) and is also working on ways to compare the 150+ different (proximity) chat options available. According to Hartman, the spatial chat options are not yet perfect but they’re getting there. The experience from the past couple of years is that platforms can be changed if people want it. She wants us to be louder as a community so we can help change the platforms. As she explained it: “Things developed for games will develop because people think it’s fun.”

Hartman thinks that the tallest mountain top to climb will be Augmented Reality (AR), when it becomes possible for instance to find objects in AR and not have to look for cards or other representations of those objects.

Online larps were an option before the pandemic, the pandemic caused lots of new stories and options to be added to the online experience and now we’ll see where the artform goes next.

Cover photo: Players using backgrounds to great effect in The Space Between Us. Image by Amalia Valero.

This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

Otting, Ylva. 2022. “The Online Larp Road Trip.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 100-104. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

Tag: Featured

Opening Remarks

What is Slow Larp?

How to Design a Slow Larp

How to Enjoy Slow Larp

In Closing

The Training Center

Sincerity

O Christmas Tree

The Torture Queue

Red Christmas

Credits

The Workshop, Inc. Helsinki Division

Playful Futures

International and Local Inequality

Designing Sustainably for Climate Justice

The Pyramid

The Larp

Creation

More Information

The Short History of Chinese Murder Mysteries

Jubensha 101

Advanced Form

From “Acquaintance” to “Stranger Entertainment”

Larp In China

An example

ABOUT THE LARP

PARAMETERS

Not the Mixing Desk

The parameters

Physical contact

Romance and intimacy

Conflict and violence

Communication style

Movement style

Characters

Narrative control

Transparency

Representation level

Play culture

Tone

In review

First – and this is the most important rule of all – don’t rush to the anticipated event!

Second, use those moments to delve into your character’s unique personality!

Third, let your emotions flow!

Fourth, focus on your co-players too!

Now, let’s briefly take the designer’s perspective.

References

Game For a Year

Lessons For Designers And Players

Sightseeing 1: Start From Home

Bots

Sightseeing 2: The Space Between Us

More

Sightseeing 3: I’ll Have What They’re Having

Sightseeing 4: Hack From the Damn

Sightseeing 5: So Much To See, So Little Time

Tavern Quests

The Loop

After Dark

Together Forever

Zoe’s Christmas Task Force For Personal Betterment / Zoe’s Easter Egg Experience

The Road Ahead

The Advantages of Online

Hybrid Forms