Imagine this: It’s the afterparty of a larp, and you run up to a co-player who facilitated a scene that was the highlight of your larp to rave about how cool it was, and they just shrug and say, “Well that’s great, I just wanted to make sure you all had fun.” Doesn’t that kind of suck? Wouldn’t you rather have them go, “I know, right? It was SO cool when we all pooled our powers to get that MacGuffin.” Players shouldn’t just create things solely for the sake of other players. Such an approach is for organisers; I want players to be selfish creatures who take care of their own experience first and foremost. That will lead to better play for everyone.
And yes, there are exceptions and caveats and all those things. Do I want players to steamroll each other in a sort of ego-driven cage fight? No, of course not. I still think we should be considerate, open, and generous as players, but we can be all those things while still keeping our own wants and needs in mind. I sometimes hear players proudly state that they’re mainly at a larp to create play for others, or that the plot they created was mostly for the sake of other people’s enjoyment. Honestly, I think it’s bad form for players to approach plot in that way. It’s a hollow feeling to know the people you had a wonderful time with weren’t really enjoying themselves that much. I don’t want to play with those people; I want to play with people who are enthusiastic about it and loving the experience as much as I am. If I’m a part of a player-created plot I want all players to enjoy it, including the creators.
It is of course great to be considerate of your co-players while playing or planning, but make sure to create an experience that you will enjoy yourself too. If you want to be the hero, you absolutely should get that opportunity; just make room for other people to be heroes along with you. I think the best plots are the ones everyone is excited for, and so I think we should shift our focus when creating play from “making cool things for other people” to “making cool things for myself with room for other people.” Excitement can be felt, and it rubs off on other people. The best things I have done in larps have often been things I did chiefly for my own benefit and then dragged other players into. The passion and the enthusiasm for some play you truly want to have yourself too: that’s what makes co-creation come to life; that’s where the magic happens. Taking responsibility for other people’s fun is for organisers; as players we need to take responsibility for ourselves. I want my co-players to trust that I know what I want, and I extend that same trust to them. To butcher an old cliche: Create a cool scene for a new player, they have one cool scene. Help a new player create their own cool scene, all their larps will be cool (and you can get to enjoy their work as well).
The art of saying no covers some of the same territory. I want to play with people who want to play with me. When I approach people I never think to myself, “I really hope they say yes”; I think, “I really hope they want this.” It’s a subtle difference, but it is a difference, and too often we fall into the pitfall of saying yes just to be polite or inclusive. “No” is a very difficult word, but I really think we need to practice both saying and receiving nos. A no doesn’t have to be a closed door, you can still come up with compromises and alternatives. It could be, “I’m not up for romance, but I would love to be old friends” or “Saving the world isn’t really my jam, but I’ll totally be there for interrogating the bad guy” or whatever weird thing you have going on. A “no” should, in many cases, be an invitation to work out a solution together. “No, but” is just as powerful for creating play as the famous “yes, and.” We should talk more about that. It’s easy to say yes to someone just because you don’t want to hurt them, but ultimately a mismatch in engagement and enthusiasm can hurt even more.
Co-creation is such a beautiful aspect of larp. All of us are creating something together, for all of us, but that means everyone has to be creating for themselves too. It demands openness and flexibility, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your own fun. I believe that the best thing you can do for other people’s fun is to have fun yourself. In most larps we’re all adults; we can take care of ourselves. Trust your coplayers to build great experiences for themselves and others, and do the same for yourself, then everyone will have great experiences!
Cover photo: Image by Kulbir on Pexels. Photo has been cropped.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Kyhn, Mia. “In Defence of Selfishness: And the Beauty of a No.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
I wrote my first poem when I was seven or eight years old. It was during a late dinner, I had just seen Carmen at the opera and was bored during dinner with my mother and my grandfather. On a napkin I scribbled a short poem. Thinking back, I don’t believe it was a coincidence that the creation of this first poem happened in close relationship to a very strong theatrical experience. Of course I had been in love with language long before that. Making up poems before I could even write, enjoying the feeling of stringing words together, making something beautiful. That this first actual written creation happened after my child self had experienced a very strong artistic performance made sense. I was filled with emotions I hardly understood, that needed to be expressed, and in that vacuum, poetry happened.
As I grew older I would write poetry based on my own strong emotional experiences, a way of process perhaps? I would change my creative outlet from poetry to larp creation. Sometimes letting years go without writing a single poem. But it was always there as a way to gather my thoughts in moments of emotional turmoil, and strong emotional dissonance.
Thankfully my life is not that filled with traumatic emotional experience these days, so my poetry writing has become much more rare. The most drama I experience these days is as a character at larps. However, I missed writing, and so I started experimenting with playing characters that expressed themselves through poetry. I quickly noticed that this was not only an excellent way to fuel my creativity, it also made my voice different. I might be the same person, but my style of poetry is not the same style as that of my characters, even if some similarities are unavoidable.
Even more interesting, writing as a character, in-game meant I could sit alone in a room with a notebook, completely immersed in my character. Finally, I understood Finnish immersion closets; all I needed was some paper and a pen!
I started to wonder, what happened there, in the meeting between me as a creator and the character? Could the written text change and influence play, but maybe more interestingly, could my character influence my own writing and creativity? Was this something more than I had experienced?
In this little essay I will both use examples of my own writing, case studies of characters I played and how the diegetic poetry influenced the larp, but also of how the character influenced the writing style. I have also collected testimonies from other writing larpers or larping writers, since I wanted to know if this was more than a personal experience, asking them to reflect around their own diegetic writing experiences.
Lastly I will talk a bit about larping through text, and how – if at all – using the writing medium changes the way we can interact, and the importance of writing style in our play.
Below I will give three examples of larp characters I played and poetry they created. My focus will be on how creating these poems:
Felt in the moment
Changed the projection or story line of my character
Differed from my ordinary writing style
I will also ask:
Did the larp experience change my normal writing?
Did design choices affect my use of writing in the larp?
The Princess
At Harem Son Saat (2017), I played the princess Samara. The larp designed by Muriel Algayres in itself did encourage writing. As a part of the larp all players got a small diary in which we were told to write either as our characters, or make small off game notes if needed. For me playing the sheltered young princess of the Harem, poetry became a natural way of self expression within the frames of female culture portrayed in the Harem of 1913.
Harem Son Saat is a larp of the Romanesque tradition mixed with techniques from nordic larp. The romanesque larp style is much more narrative in its design elements, Muriel explains:
[In] the French romanesque tradition . . . characters are quite frequently given as subjective diaries (and almost always written in the first person). This is in keeping with the literary origins and inspirations of this specific scene (tapping a lot in serialized novels of the XIXth century and Victorian melodrama), and also presents the characters through their subjective views, which allows for misunderstandings, play on prejudice, different readings of situations, etc.((Nast Marrero. 2016. “The Last Hours of the Harem.” Medium, June 26.))
As a part of the design the players received a small diary for their character. It both contained subjective notes prewritten by the organizers but did also contain empty pages for the players to fill out in character during the larp. It was also to be saved afterwards as memorabilia of the larp experience if you wished.
That we were given this physical artefact that encouraged us to do diegetic diary entries made it an easy choice for me to also start to write poetry in it, since poetry was one of the acceptable ways for my character to self express in a more or less safe way. The art of poetry became an alibi for her to speak her mind.
Preparing for the larp I also read a lot of Rumi, a famous mystical Turkish poet from the 13th century, to try and get some of the flavour of Turkish and Ottoman poetry, a style very far from my own personal writing. I also wrote poems in advance, marking important situations in her backstory.
As the story of the princess born into a Harem longing for modernized western society progressed the poetry she wrote started to tell her story in it’s own way. Pivotal scenes documented in-game by her poetry. As a woman in the Harem she had limited possibility to communicate with men, even her father. She did however have the possibility to declare poetry or sing a song after dinner. This she did, as a way to communicate with her father and brothers.
These are some examples:
I am but a tool in my fathers hand
Please God make me sharp and strong
I am but the fruit of my fathers land
Please God keep me sweet and young
My heart is a sparrow small
It flutters when I hear his call
I step with care on burning coal
Please grant me peace within my soul
Purge my yearning, purge my dreams
Drench this restlessness in my fathers streams
Samara (A poem written earlier the same evening after a serious talk with her grandmother about Samara’s impending marriage, read out loud to her father the night of the 19th)
A daughter’s duty is a rock in the ocean
I will not be carried on the waves
Your mightiness will overflow me
Your current guides my night and days
Samara (trying very hard to write a nice poem to her father for the competition 20th of June)
But sometimes when the moon shines
A lost ray will wander and shed some light,
Reminding the rock that time
will surely return it too the world
Inayat, played by Jean-Damien Mottott (Answering by finishing Samara’s poem for her. She carried that close to her heart afterwards.)
In this example Samara tries to make amends after some arguments about her future with her father, by writing this poem to declare to him during a poetry competition. Her secret lover Inayat, touched by her feeling of hopelessness, continued the poem with a verse of his own which he smuggled to her. A lot of this love story took its place in smuggled poetry and hidden glances.
To sit and write the love poems, or the poems to my father in character helped me channel my character. It was a truly immersive experience helped along by the game design in itself that encouraged this type of diegetic writing.
Another example of a larp were writing poetry in character had a huge impact both on my way of understanding my character, my characters self expression and my immersion is The Quota that ran in the UK in 2018, organised by Avalon Larp Studios and Broken Dreams larp. The larp takes place in a dystopian future where refugees try to get from England into Wales. It is set at the holding facility for refugees seeking asylum in Wales.
In The Book of The Quota: A Larp about Refugees,((Elina Gouliou, ed. 2020. The Book of The Quota: A Larp about Refugees. Avalon.)) you can read more about the projects as well as several texts written by players both in and off game. There you can find all poems I wrote in character as the political poet, alcoholic Amanda Marks. Signing up for the larp, you got to choose between different archetypes, then one I got was “The Poet.” In preparation for the larp I knew I wanted her to try and leave England in the dystopian future the larp portrayed because she had written political poems, so I did create a couple beforehand. However the bulk of the poems were written ingame, drawing inspiration from what I saw and experienced there. I noticed how sneaking out for a smoke by myself (a moment that usually brings me off game and makes me reflect on the experience) became deeply immersive as what I saw while smoking would inspire poems I then would hurry in to write.
The poetry also became acts of rebellion, creating play for others. I would hang them on the walls of the venue, and others would read them and get emotional. At one point I even delivered a poem to the overseer of the holding facility who responded with an intense scene of physical and emotional violence. Still most of the poetry was written for me. I would spend down time in the larp (which there was a lot of since it circled a lot around waiting and feeling powerless) writing and expressing myself through my poetry. At those moments I could become even more immersed than in actual scenes were I played with other larpers.
I count the days until judgment
Knowing the odds are against me
There must be a better way out he said,
Fresh eyes, hopeful smiles
The key to survival is to survive the boredom
and when you cannot wait anymore find a quick death
Not too messy, think of the cleaners
You can count many things in a prison
Your friends, your enemies, your sleepless nights
your pointless fights
And when you run out of counting
spread your wings and fly into a grey sunset
without regret
The silent scream is the loudest
The yawn of desperation
“You are not a good mother” they said
Well you are not a good motherland
I mean not to offend, but you need to amend
Your view on humanity
Bring back a little sanity
A little decency, a little love
I am not fooled by your rethorics
I know your true nature mother England
You eat your children, I only left mine
Amanda’s poetry was a way for her to process her experience and after the larp I felt very little need for debrief writing, something I often do otherwise during an intense larp experience. I believe this was because I had already been processing the experience through words as it happened.
The language also is a bit harder than in the case of Princess Samara. The subject is quite similar, both characters were women confined in space, by circumstances outside their control, and both characters had a rebellious streak, using poetry to not conform. Still Samara operated with her poetry within the confines of her situation, and it is in a way seen in the way her poetry is more bound by rhymes and rhythm, where Amanda’s poetry is more like spoken word, and flow rather than a set form.
When Covid-19 made larping in real life impossible this year, I started up a letter larp called My Dearest Friend (2020), running from the 1st of April to the 30th of November 2020. The setting and the idea was simple. Taking place in the middle of the First World War it centered around a boarding school for girls, and the men in their close acquaintance, many of them off at war of course. The parallels between the feeling among people during the beginning of 2020 and the characters in 1916 were deliberate. There was a feeling of life being thrown upside down. A new strange normalcy, the eager following of the news for updates. The feeling of being separated from loved ones as we practiced social distancing. For many participants the letters sent became something to look forward to in the dull normalcy of self isolation, much in the same way they would have been for the characters. In this larp I play several different characters but one of them, Millicent Struthers, writes poetry. This was something that I started on a whim, but as the larp has progressed the poems of Millicent have been a great way for me to process intense feelings of bleed in character.
Though the format is low intensity, since you only are in character in your head while writing the letters it has for many become an intense experience where the borders between character and player easily get muddled due to the longevity of the larp. On top of that, many of the players, including myself, have introduced chat play as a part of the larp experience. It is not unheard of that I play my character on low intensity in these chats for weeks on end, without much break. This means that the immersion into character, although low in realism, becomes very emotional. By writing a poem when my character has a strong emotional response to a letter she received, or a situation in a chat, I can sort of debrief continuously while still in character.
The style of Millicent’s poetry is romantic, on verse, and a bit naive just as her character is. One example is “I Have to Try and Go Alone,” written as an homage to her twin brother missing in action.
Where are you; my brother now?
In foreign land an unmarked grave
In mud and rain and twilight gloom
Where only foreign flowers bloom
They cannot whisper any tales
Of dear old britain’s glens and dales
Where is that little daisy pray
I gifted you to make you stay?
Where is your smile, your beating heart?
Your liquid tongue always so smart?
Why were we so torn apart?
My darling where are all your jokes?
Your teasing and your ruthless mind?
Where is that soft and tender side
That so sorely hurt your pride?
How am I to now be strong and bold?
To laugh and live and then grow old?
How am I to learn anew
to be a person without you?
I hear your voice as you scold me
You are alive, you are set free!
I am wherever you will be!
But darling brother, life is hard
When every step you ever walked
Was hand in hand with you so dear
Together always brave no fear
Those unsaid words that still you knew
Those dreams you wanted to come true
Your reckless way of always running
You complete lack of thought or cunning
Your way that made me feel allowed
To be strong, and clever and proud
To stand tall and be unbowed
I know you want for me to smile
To live and love for both of us
I try to find my heart again
A tender voice a loving friend
I listen to your voice these days
You scold me in familiar ways
And wild grass grows above your head
And all the words we left unsaid..
Your dear beloved smile is gone
I have to try and go alone
I have to try and go alone
These poems were very different from my personal writing style, and much more dramatic and filled with adjectives.
In the larp the poetry has been a good way to address hard subjects without saying things straight out, subtlety being much harder in a larp only taking place as a written media. The poem about the dead brother was for example sent to another character whose brother was missing in action, in an attempt to get him to open up about his grief.
Summary of my Experiences
In all three examples above gathered from my own larping experience there are some common threads. The writing was all influenced by the character and the setting when it came to both style and quality.
The moments I wrote diegetically made immersion stronger, sometimes creating a feeling of flow more pure than while larping with other people. At times I felt like I was more channelling the character’s voice more than anything else, and seldom did I have to consciously alter my writing style to fit the setting or the character’s voice.
I do believe that the diegetic writing has in all instances influenced the narrative of my larp, albeit not changed it completely. With Samara the ways she could communicate through poetry with her father and her love interest definitely steered the overall narrative arc in a certain direction. With Amanda her poems being put up on the walls of the prison became a way to rally the other detained refugees, but also created a sub plot of conflict between her and the management that created an even stronger tension and friction between her and the confines she was living under. I don’t believe the poetry has been as strong an influence in the letter larp with Millicent. Perhaps because it is hard to see what effects a choice like sending a poem has with your co-player’s story when you don’t see them react to it. Instead it becomes more like all the other letters sent out into the void, a way of communicating equal to any other mean used.
I don’t think in-game writing influences my off-game writing much except for being an inspiration to write more. As a way of processing emotions created by bleed, or as a way to use the allegory of the larp to process my own emotions in real life. However I do believe it does make me a better writer, as the skill to intuitively change voice in your writing is very useful.
How a larp is designed can also of course influence how useful ingame writing is in developing narrative or deepening the relationships between characters.
In Harem Son Saat, not only were we given diaries and encouraged to use them, but the way female and male characters were separated and forbidden to communicate with each other that then in very structured ways meant that the use of poetry as secret communication was a natural development. Having a prompt to make the character creative, such as the archetype Poet that was given in The Quota also makes it a natural choice to make the character creative.
However I was interested in finding out if other larpers who write diegetically had the same experience or if this was just me.
Preparing to write this article about diegetic writing and its power for immersion I asked any larper that wanted to send in their answers and reflections around my basic questions of reflection as well as these four questions:
In what way do you write creatively as yourself?
How many larps have you on purpose incorporated your writing into your character?
Did writing diegetically change how you immersed into your character?
Did your style of writing change in regard to the type of character you portrayed?
My real question was of course, does writing diegetically change your larping experience, and does your larping change your written expression? It seemed like this was the case. Out of the ten people that replied some common denominators could be found.
All but one stated they wrote different kinds of lyric or fiction outside the larp realm as well, many in a professional capacity as poets, authors or journalists. It makes sense after all, that people who already express themselves through writing would feel inclined to use that medium to bot process and create emotional intense experiences in-game.
Writing is how I as a player process my feelings and observations, so writing in-character brings me closer to my character. Writing in-character fosters a more introverted style of playing, as otherwise I might pour my feelings more outward; it produces a less extroverted character interpretation.
Elli Leppä
For others it wasn’t so much the writing in itself that contributed to the larp experience but more the act of embodying a writer with the added alibi for interaction that gave ingame:
Did writing diegetically change how you immersed into your character?
Not, I think, so much the writing as much as being the writer, whose driving force in both instances became a) meeting the deadline and b) finding the next thing to report. Interviewing people for colour pieces was good for engaging with new people and the newspaper was good for disseminating information of major events to people who weren’t there.
Jukka Särkijärvi
How often was more varying, some had only consciously done it once, others had a hard time remembering the amount of larps where diegetic writing had been a prominent part of their experience. Sometimes this had been designed into the characters, and helped propelling the plot. At other times it was a private decision. In some instances it is actively used as a tool for deeper immersion into the character:
I find it easier to immerse through the written word, so the act of writing as my character diegetically – particularly as an introspective act – helps to cement who they are within the diegesis.
Simon Brind
I found that sitting with my notebook made me feel more comfortable sitting alone and also made it easier to sit near people and join the conversations. Writing lullabies for rain – her dead and then returned daughter made the grief and longing and the need to believe in her being there far more real and immersive.
Laura Wood
[I]t makes it seem [a] bit more ‘real’ if you write a report, a ritual, a letter a story, song, poem etc as your character.
Woody J. Bevan
I felt that having this extra dimension of immersion into the character was very effective. When writing as them, I could think as them and feel as them, perhaps more powerfully than I could have done without it.
Mo Holkar
This was not true for everyone though. Toril Mjelva Saatvedt said that the writing in character didn’t change the way she immersed herself. However the act of writing, and the product of that writing added to the character embodiment and became a tangible part of who they were. It was something that could be performed in character, or something that could be shown to other players, a way of portraying the character’s thoughts and feelings.
Another part of diegetic writing is when the larp in itself takes place through a written medium.. In some larp communities pre-larp in text chat is implemented. Another example of larp performed in the written medium is letter larping, a genre that is quite common and has had an upswing during the Covid-crisis when physical larps have had to be cancelled or postponed. Chris Hartford talked about the impact of pre larp in order to get a stronger connection to characters and plot:
I think writing helps to embed the character in yourself — you get a feel for their reactions and limits – as well as providing an emotional connection, both for myself and co-players. Often there is an off-game chat alongside the text RP, and on more than one occasion I’ve had co-players say those scenes solidified the game and concepts. For example, at one [College of Wizardry (2014-)] a co-player said, ‘and if you wondered, that was the point [the character] thought it could work” and before Odysseus, a short (600 word) preplay scene turned a dry on-and-off-relationship into a living and breathing (but challenging) romance.
Chris Hartford
However it is an important distinction here. Preplay is not diegetic writing. It is written in a meta space, where you describe actions and conversations in written form. It is not written from the headspace of the character. The resulting text is not a prop that can be used ingame. Letter larps on the other hand is a larp solely played out through diegetic writing. Where the words filtered through the characters is the only means of communication between characters and therefore play. In this format the diegetic writing becomes the playing, and the creations of poetry or diary notes outside of the letters might be a way to develop your own emotional connection to the character. Especially since the letters written diegetically might not always be as honest as a conversation, since the character has time to filter through what will be said, and how it will be said.
In the interviews Lolv Pelegrin addressed a very important question when it comes to diegetical writing on the international larp scene. When discussing if the writing style changed in regard to the type of character they played, they reflected that it did, but that the change was bigger if they wrote in their native language. However, with English being their third language meant that the nuances in the writing were less prominent. This is an interesting point that is important to note. In our international community, fluency of language does create an invisible barrier between player and immersion. Not only in diegetic writing, but in larping in general. If you are not comfortable with the English language the fluidity of immersion will always be hindered as the player will need to struggle to formulate themself in a foreign language. Diegetic writing will therefore naturally not be as beneficial for immersion as it would be for someone fluent in the language.
Writing diegetically at larps seems to be a way to enhance immersion and get closer to the characters inner feelings for most of the people who have done so. Most likely this would not be true for players who aren’t naturally inclined to write in their everyday as well. It takes a predisposition to express oneself through the writing medium for this to be a seamless action that enhances play. However, for those that already use the written language to process emotions and thoughts, writing as a character will often not only immerse the player on a deep level but also inspire the player to create in a different way than normally. In many instances the act of writing in itself can create meaningful moments for the player, even without the input of other players in that moment. It also is useful as a way to communicate a character’s emotion openly even when the setting or the character traits means that such displays of strong emotion are inappropriate. Diegetic writing can also when done as an active choice and displayed to the other players as in Jukka’s journalist that gave him an alibi to interact with other players, or in my own examples described above, influence the larp on a bigger level. Creating moments of emotional connection, and meetings between characters who might not have communicated in that way with each other without the written text.
Even though diegetic writing is something you as a player easily can implement in almost any setting, there are things that will make this choice more natural. Characters that are already written as prone to creative writing is of course a motivator to take that route. Perhaps more so is when the organizers themself press upon the written medium as a way to communicate and self reflect continuously through the larp experience such as the diaries and the poetry competition at Harem Son Saat.
When it comes to larp that singularly takes place through the written medium, such as letter larps, this creative writing might be a good supplement to process emotions within the character that cannot be expressed in letters addressed to others. It might help in immersion and in processing emotions diegetically although letter larps by nature have low levels of immersion due to the format.
The skill of larping in your own head, the finnish immersion closet is hard for many players that need the input from others in order to completely let go of their off-game meta reflections. By forcing oneself to write in character you engage your character’s thoughts and feelings in a lonely environment. It’s a tool that can help you get to grip with what the character really is feeling and thinking that can enrich both your own larp experience and by extension, in spreading the written text, the larp experience of others.
As a writer, or someone who enjoys writing in their everyday life it can also act like a motivator to explore different formats and styles of writing. By channeling the character’s voice you push yourself to experiment with tone, format and voice. It is a playful act in and of itself, in stretching your creative muscles. The writing itself becomes its own kind of documentation of the larp experience, and a memorabilia of an experience that often is hard to capture by other means. Although pictures are a good way of capturing the larp from the inside. The written text becomes a documentation of the larp from the inside, and can be saved and relished for a long time afterwards as you as a player look back at the larp experience.
However it is a tool that is not easily accessible to all players. It depends a lot both on the aptitude for writing in the player as well as their comfort level with the language used at the larp; something you might want to keep in mind if you want to try it out yourself.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Sandquist, Siri. Immersion through Diegetic Writing in Character. In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
In the summer of 2018, I signed up for a feminist spinoff of College of Wizardry (CoW, 2014) called Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft (HAW). Since CoW usually aspires towards a gender-neutral setting, I was interested in seeing what a specifically feminist and female-focussed version of the larp and the magic college might look like. How would the concept of magic academia be changed if we were to imagine it as developed mostly by and for women? Would magic itself become something different? What would gendered magic look like? And importantly, would there be room for magic expressions outside of the gender binary?
Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft was the brainchild of Agata Świstak and Marta Szyndler, and it was described as a “world where feminine means strong, powerful and unyielding’ and a “safe haven where witches can study magic without the risk of being burned at the stake.” The spinoff larp was marketed for “women, for non-binary pals, for anyone with a feminine experience, and for men who want to try something new.” ((College of Wizardry. “Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft”. Facebook video. 22 June 2018. Accessed 31 August 2020.))
Having played as a professor at CoW before, I immediately knew that I wanted to teach again at HAW. Especially the new subjects of Moon Magic and Blood Magic sparked creative visions in my head of witches gathering in a circle under the full Moon to celebrate their womanhood. (Since I identify as a queer feminist, a witch and a cis woman, ideas for magic rituals centred on and celebrating female empowerment come easily to me). However, I was aware that I needed to make anything I did accessible to characters and players of all gender expressions and identities – and this honestly seemed quite the challenge. For instance, if Blood Magic or Moon Magic connotes a focus on “the female cycle” and menstruation, how would I include female bodies that don’t menstruate, non-female bodies that do, cis-gendered male bodies and people who might feel dysphoric about the subject? Is it possible to separate menstruation from the notion of a female biology? In general, how do we celebrate female power and magic in any larp setting without simultaneously reproducing binary gender thinking? How do we avoid cis-hexism?
The special feminist run of CoW was eventually cancelled, but it left me with a lot of unresolved speculation about uplifting the stories of women through elements of female power and magic while striving to make room for all players, including trans*((In this text, I will use trans* as a signifier for all non-cis people (such as transgender, non-binary or genderfluid people, etc.). In other words, I will use trans* for brevity as a signifier for anyone who identifies (always or sometimes) outside of the gender they were assigned at birth. This is a common practice in writing about trans* experiences that I first came across in Ruska Kevätkoski’s work in the 2016 Solmukohta Book (Kevätkoski, 2016).)) players and characters. My goal here is not to provide the perfect answers (I don’t have them), but to share my thoughts and hopefully inspire others to gender their magic systems with awareness and intention.
The Social Construction of Binary Gender
Let’s have a quick talk about the gender binary and how our implicit biases about gender might influence larp design. The gender binary is the historical and current notion (particularly in Western culture) that there are two – and only two – distinct and separate genders. Biological sex is often invoked as a reason for upholding the gender binary, with proponents arguing that individual gender expressions spring ‘naturally’ from inherent biology – a view that is sometimes called essentialist. An alternative view (and the one I hold) is that the binary division of gender is a social construct, i.e. a socially constructed and culturally fluent set of expressions and behaviours that are implicitly taught, learned and sustained.((See e.g. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Vintage Books, 2011. Originally Le Deuxième Sexe. First ed. 1949; Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990, Tandon Neeru. Feminism: A Paradigm Shift. Atlantic, 2008. Accessed 23 September 2020.)) In the following, I will presuppose that gender categories are fluent, malleable and socially constructed – and that it is therefore possible to bend, break and rebuild them in larps and other fictional settings.
It is crucial to understand that just because something is a construct, this does not mean that it doesn’t exist. National borders are a social construct, but they are enforced by laws and sometimes maintained with violent force. Currency is a construct, but the numbers typed on a piece of paper or inside a computer still represent influence and agency in society. The male/female division of colours such as blue and pink or the idea that only women may wear skirts is obviously culturally constructed, but the negative consequences for transgressing outside the expectations of your assigned gender category can be substantial. Even when we resign ourselves to the restrictions of whatever gender category we were assigned at birth, there is still implicitly trained internalised and externalised social policing in place to ensure that we perform((“Perform” here not in the sense of “playacting” but meaning to present yourself through a set of implicitly trained and socially acceptable gendered behaviours.)) whatever behaviours have been designated as sufficiently “feminine” or “masculine” by our culture. This is true for both of the binary gender categories, because although white, straight cis-men are often viewed as a dominant group and as the “norm” (compared to whoever is being “othered” through normative discourse), their potential for self-expression is equally restricted by the rules of the gender binary. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains:
We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves…
Although the binary categories of “male” and “female” are constructs, they have tangible and material effects on our lives. We live within and around these identities and categories every day. Many people perform their expected gendered behaviours without even thinking twice about it. Our assigned gender roles are implicit and systemic, and therefore they become the norm. Anyone who exists outside of this norm, either because they resist binary thinking, or simply because they don’t fit easily within the two established categories, often risk being shunned, oppressed or overlooked. The consequences of not “fulfilling” your assigned gender role can be harmful. Exclusion from communities or being marked as “other” have very long histories as forms of social punishment intended (consciously or subconsciously) to correct behaviour back towards the culturally normative expectation.((See e.g. Munt, Sally R. Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (p. 32). Ashgate Publishing, 2007.))
When we understand the mechanisms behind gendering and othering, and when we recognise the binary gender categories and their associated expressions as constructs, we are better able to anticipate and play with these concepts in larps during world building and in the development of gendered or ungendered((Since the gendering of people, expressions and behaviours is the accepted norm, the decision to omit gender altogether also become a gender-conscious choice.)) magic systems.
Illustration by Marie Møller
Gendering Magic
When we create worlds and settings for larps, we are deconstructing and reconstructing reality. Most larps, however abstract (with a few exceptions), still tell the stories of connected or disconnected human beings and their communities. Nothing comes from nothing, and the stories we tell are reflections of the human experience.
When it comes to gender, this means that we might unwittingly be reproducing binary stereotypes. That is why gender awareness matters, and why it is important to make conscious decisions about gender and to include trans* characters and narratives. Because of the historical erasure of trans* narratives, examples of trans* historical figures are not easy to find,((Sharma, Ayesha. “Transgender People Are Not Included In Mainstream History.” Everyday Feminism, 2018. Accessed 24 September 2020.)) and it takes deliberate effort to search them out and include them((Preferably without ascribing trans* identities onto historical figures whose personal gender identities can’t be ascertained.)) or to create fictional historical trans* characters for players to portray.
Likewise, when we create magic systems that celebrate female power (or any gendered magic), we must take care not to conflate magic and biology, thereby insinuating that e.g. femininity and female magic spring from a “female biology”((I.e. a female gender assigned at birth based on physical characteristics.)) rather than from the female cultural experience. If we create a system which states that female magic comes from such a “female biology” (i.e. from having a womb or from something more abstractly female but concretely connected to the physical), we are reproducing the essentialist idea that gender is biological. If gender is a construct, then gendered magic is also a construct. This is true for the actual construction of gendered magic systems when we create them out of game, and that must be true inside the diegetic reality of the larp as well.
The great thing about this is that if gendered magic (such as a female witch’s potential connection to the Moon) is a social construct, then this gendered border within magic can be explored and transgressed just as the boundaries of gender can be explored and transgressed in real life. We can (and should) embrace and empower the female minority exactly because it is a minority((“Minority” here not signifying a numerical minority but rather any social group that is subordinate to a dominant group with more power and/or privilege regardless of group size, see e.g. https://www.britannica.com/topic/minority.)) – but we can do that and also make space for other minorities. We can do it without doing unto others what has been done to women for so long.
Gentlemen Magicians and Wild Witches
There is so much potential for stories about gendered magic, so let me offer an improvised example: Imagine a world historically reminiscent of our own where men go to school and learn magic while women are denied access to both magic and learning. In this world, girls are taught magic in secret by their grandmothers in the woods. Their magic grows wild and intuitive while the boys are taught structured and formulaic spells – both branches of magic equally effective, but each with their restraints and specialities. In this world, the cultural division between boys and girls has created a gender binary. It has also created two separate forms of magic according to gender – not because only two genders exist but because only two genders have been allowed to exist.
Now in this world, there are male magicians who will never learn (or even want to learn) what the wild witches know. But there are some among them who yearn for the magic of the Moon and the forests and who turn out to excel in intuitive magic. There are those who were told they were girls, but who now live as boys to attend classes and surpass their peers in every way. And there are those who can master both branches of the craft and combine them into new kinds of magic.
Of course, several things could happen next within this world when people break the social expectations. I would love to see a story where combined or gender-transverse magic is celebrated to empower trans* characters and where it begins to dissolve the gender binary. Alternatively, backlash, banishments or cover-ups of all non-binary magic could mirror the transphobia, ostracism and the erasure of trans* narratives in the real world. This is where it is especially important to consider the purpose of the gendered player experience you are shaping and to remember your trans* players. While I firmly believe there must be room in larp for people to explore lives and identities outside of their own, and while some trans* people will appreciate seeing cis players struggle with the same institutionalised challenges they face every day, others might find it hard to watch someone else live out their most difficult real life moments.
With no direct experience in larp development, I don’t claim to be an expert, but I have made note of some good advice and best practices: Make it very clear in your scenario description if your gendered magic system will lead to play involving gender discrimination and/or trans* discrimination. Create trans* or ungendered characters to make space for all players interested in playing trans* narratives. Acknowledge the existence of your trans* players in advance. Don’t wait for them to initiate the conversation, but make it clear from the start that you anticipate what you can and are ready to listen.
When it comes to magic in a historical setting, it is interesting to imagine how the two (culturally constructed and segregated, but very real) genders might perform magic differently. But it is not enough simply to declare that there is male and female magic. We need to know why that is and what it entails. Stories of gender segregation have value when they investigate the gender binary in order either to teach us something about the lived experience of all genders at that time and place or to explore and transgress the gender boundaries they establish.
Gender-Neutral Witchards and Agender Fae
At College of Wizardry, it has become custom to call witches and wizards by the universal gender-neutral portmanteau “witchards.” No one seems to recall the exact origin of the word (a reflection of the largely community-sourced gameplay), but the term functions well to support the gender-inclusive tone that the larp aims for. In the player handbook for CoW, there is a passage on equality and inclusivity which reads:
Witchard Society is different though: magical ability can surface in anyone, and that makes everyone equal regardless of their looks, body, sexuality, gender, beliefs or ethnicity […] and genderqueer and transgender individuals are common and wholly accepted.((College of Wizardry. Player Handbook. Company P, 2019. Version 3.0, ed. Laura Sirola and Christopher Sandberg. Accessed 23 September 2020.))
I imagine this rule stated clearly and directly (and repeated in pre-larp workshops) makes a difference for many players, although I can’t speak for them. I can say that it means a lot to me when portraying a female professor of age and authority, and it matters in the gameplay I have sought to create for other players. At CoW, there are also pronoun badges for players to show clearly whether their characters identify as they/them, she/her or he/him. This enables me to use the right pronouns for the characters I meet (something I very much appreciate), and then promptly ignore their gender because at CoW, gender doesn’t matter – but it matters a great deal that gender explicitly doesn’t matter, because this stands in such clear contrast to the importance implicitly placed on gender in the real world.
In-game: The author teaching magic through music at College of Wizardry 22. Photo by Przemysław Jendroska, Horseradish Studio.
The upcoming larp A Harvest Dance((A Harvest Dance, set for October 2021.)) by Lotta Bjick and the team at Poltergeist LARP features another kind of magical creature that has transcended (or rather never had) the need for gender. The site describes: “Fae society is not human and the concept of gender is bewildering and strange to them, therefore all characters will be written and played without gender.” The vision is that all players will portray genderless fae characters and use they/them pronouns about each other at all times. As fae, the participants will be able to play with – or rather completely disregard – gender in fashion and demeanour because the fae are bewildered by the silly human mortals’ constructed gender binary.
Of course, although characters might be written as unbiased or genderless, it doesn’t mean that players are able to enter into the fiction and immediately abandon their subconscious biases. It takes effort, and that effort takes awareness and intention – and even then, we might still slip up. (For instance, in spite of best efforts, I have personally experienced both sexism and sexual harassment at CoW.) But it matters that we get to try, and that we get to enter into a world where concepts such as gender-equality or the total lack of gender is explicitly stated as the norm and the expectation.
The organisers of A Harvest Dance are aware that players bring their trained normative behaviours with them into the event whether they want to or not. The act of using they/them pronouns for everyone around you is a new experience and a social exercise. It is stated clearly on the website that players should avoid gendered pronouns and not use words such as “man” or “woman.” But, the organisers say, “We are aware that this is not what most of us are used to in off-game real life and we might mess up. That is ok!” (A Harvest Dance).
Although our ingrown biases are hard to shed, larps give us the option to try. The trying is important in itself because it shows us that the established social norms of the real world are transmutable and replaceable constructs and are not the only ways to exist and interact. Even when we try and fail, we learn something about ourselves and the pervasive condition of our subconscious preconceptions. Through the narrative device of magic (and the actual magic of larping), we are able to construct, inhabit and investigate alternate realities that can show us a glimpse of what a truly unbiased community might look like, or experience what a genderless society feels like. The creators of A Harvest Dance say that they “are excited to see what characters we all can create together without the boundaries of gender!” And so am I.
Menstruation Magic
I would be remiss if I didn’t at least attempt to include a discussion on magic and menstruation. After all, it was the notion of Moon Magic and Blood Magic as magic school subjects that set my thoughts in motion exactly because they made me think of menstruation rituals and the potential for accidental gender-based exclusion. Menstruation is historically and implicitly connected to womanhood, but it is not something all women experience, and it is not something only women experience.
Menstruation is connected to womanhood because it has historically been associated with the physical characteristics ascribed to ‘female biology’. Not only that, but menstruation has been marked as something unclean or impure by the patriarchy and is still abused as a reason to subjugate and disfranchise the female minority and keep women subdued.((UNFPA. “Menstruation and Human Rights.” UNFPA, 2020. Accessed September 27, 2020)). Women have been called hysterical (from the Greek “hystera,” meaning womb or uterus), and the menstrual cycle is continually cited as a reason why women should not hold positions of power.((See e.g. Robbins, Mel. “Hillary Clinton and the clueless hormone argument.” CNN, 2015. Accessed 24 September 2020.)) In some cultures and traditions, women are kept separate from their communities during menstruation, and they must undergo cleansing rituals before re-entering society. The loss of dignity and agency that women face through the stigma of menstruation is exactly why it is an important act of resistance for women to celebrate it. Menstruation celebrations and rituals can and should be used as a tool to empower the female minority and break this age-old taboo.
However, as I said above, not all women menstruate, and not only women menstruate. Some women are post-menopausal, some have medical conditions that disrupt or prevent menstruation, some have reasons and medical means to opt out, and some women don’t have a uterus. Some trans* people menstruate but do not identify as women, including a number of men. And some people are dysphoric about their menstruation (or lack thereof) because it doesn’t correspond with the (socially constructed) physical expectations of their gender identity. So how do we celebrate menstruation through magic without risking the exclusion of bodies that don’t fit neatly into binary gender categories?
I’m sad to say I don’t have the answer. To be honest, I thought about not including this segment at all because I have more questions than answers. But in the end, I believe the question merits being asked. My ultimate intention is not to provide a ready-made solution but to inspire further contemplation in others. Two brains are smarter than one, and larps are the perfect playgrounds to ask the “what ifs” together and experiment with subversions of social norms. But I do have one final thought to share on the matter.
While womanhood and menstruation are historically related issues, they are not actually the same thing. When we look beyond the conflation that patriarchal history has made of women and menstruation, we see that the connection is yet another social construct. Some bodies menstruate. Some of these bodies belong to people who identify as women. Some of them do not. Menstruation is a thing that some bodies do – not a thing that just women do. So maybe it’s possible to separate the two.
Perhaps in the right story and the right setting, rituals celebrating menstruation could be something different and apart from rituals celebrating womanhood. The great thing about magical world-building is that we are not limited by mundane maxims. We are free to imagine and inhabit alternate realities that are partially or wholly different from our own. We can create worlds where menstruation is celebrated in all bodies regardless of gender, or where menstruation talk is commonplace and not taboo, or where menstruation represents something else altogether.
As I said, there is good reason to celebrate menstruation specifically in order to re-empower a female minority that has been disfranchised directly through menstruation stigma. That can and should be done in larps that focus on the gender binary and the concomitant limits it places on everyone – larps that hopefully also consider the injustices done towards trans* people through the same social system.
The Power of Gendered Magic
Whether you believe in magic or not, gendered magic will always be a social construct because gender is a social construct. When we create worlds and social settings for larps, we are either reconstructing or deconstructing the gender binary. Once we realise that genders are social categories that have been culturally constructed over time, it becomes easier to reframe and reimagine them, which we can then do with intention and awareness of the ramifications it will have for players and characters of all genders, including trans* players and characters. We should not accept an implicitly essentialist approach to gender simply because it is the norm of the real world.
Larping – and especially larping in fantastical settings – gives us the power to decide to try something new, or to question the status quo by reproducing it for the purpose of closer scrutiny. We get to imagine worlds not only where “feminine means strong,”((College of Wizardry. “Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft.” Facebook video. 22 June 2018. Accessed 31 August 2020. )) but where masculine means being sensitive to the needs of others and expressive about your emotions. We get to break the cages and the restrictions placed on all of us through the binary construct of gender. Whatever choice we make about gender categories in our world-building and magic systems, it should be done with intention and for good reason because it has the power to change someone’s frame of mind.
Gendered magic has the power not just to include but to uplift gender minorities. With Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft, the idea was to reframe and celebrate women and female magic in exact opposition to the historical persecution of female witches.((Even though men were also persecuted for witchcraft, and although there are examples of countries where more men than women were executed, women were the main target of witch-hunts and executions in Europe and Scandinavia. (Guillou, Jan. Heksenes forsvarere: en historisk reportage. Modtryk, 2012. Orinally Häxornas försvarere – ett historiskt reportage. First ed. 2002).)) At A Harvest Dance, there will be an absence of gender, which is in itself a gender-aware choice and a social construction, and it will probably teach the participants something about their own perspective on and relation to gender. In my own example above about boys schooled in magic and girls learning magic in secret (where gender segregation has resulted in two different types of magic), we can imagine how characters that are able to combine the two gendered forms of magic might become revered for the very fact that they see through and transgress the implicitly binary system.
In larps, we get to do the telling – but narrative power also means responsibility. When it comes to creating space for trans* narratives in larp, cis people still hold the most power. By stepping up and making sure to include trans* characters in our stories, and by asking the right questions when we create gendered worlds and gendered magic systems, we begin to counteract historic and current trans* erasure. When we create realistic or historically inspired settings, we need to work towards including those stories that are too often erased, overlooked and forgotten. When we write alternate, fantastical and imaginary worlds and settings, we are free to reimagine gender, or its absence, for everyone.
Although I don’t have all the answers, I hope that sharing my thoughts and speculations on this issue might have inspired some further play with gender, magic and gendered magic in larps. There are already a number of larps with rich explorative ideas about gender (e.g. Brudpris, Sigridsdotter and Mellan himmel och hav), and I hope to see even more larps in the future with a deliberate focus on gender in their world-building in order either to investigate or remedy the gendered injustices of the real world. I especially dream of more larps where gendered magic – or the explicit absence of gender in magic – is applied as an allegorical device to illustrate and illuminate the fundamentally constructed condition of the binary gender categories of the real world in order to uplift and celebrate gender minorities. To me, this would be true magic.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Møller, Marie. “Gendered Magic.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
Disclaimer: In this text, the word “relationship” never purely alludes to romance. It could be any connection between characters: from co-workers to soldiers and commanding officers to siblings or bitter enemies. This article compiles discussions with dozens of people spanning hundreds of hours in total. It is very possible that I quote something verbatim and not even remember that you gave me that idea. No harm is intended in any way.
I was at a beautiful international larp. A big, raucous party was in full swing. People were flirting, drinking and fighting. And somehow, no matter how hard I tried, I could not find a way into the play. My attempts at provocation were brushed off, and my attempts at flirting fared even worse. My character was supposed to be powerful, but I certainly did not manage to evoke that feeling.
After a while, I noticed that several other people were also drinking wine in chairs in the corner, all by themselves. Most of them seemed, like me, otherwise outgoing participants who had seen most of their relations fall flat. The one thing I had in common with my fellow wallflowers was that all of us were either older, overweight, or both. It is possible this was a coincidence. It did not feel like it.
Later, at the 2017 Knutepunkt, I was dragged into a large conversation about casting and in-game status, and how those things are often determined by the way the participants look, either consciously or subconsciously. This discussion resonated with me, and, during that event, I asked many people about their personal experiences with their real life appearance influencing how they were treated at larps.
The year after that, I hosted a programme item about appearance-based prejudice with a very diverse panel. This panel received a lot more attention than I had expected, and I kept getting approached about it during that Knutepunkt and long after. There were tears and powerless anger, loss of faith in co-participants and in the community, and so many stories. Once the stories started coming out, they never stopped. And I realized that discrimination based on physical appearance was even more commonplace than I thought. I also realised that we do not speak about it often enough.
Larp usually strives to create settings, situations and relations, often involving total strangers, that feel completely real on an emotional level from the moment the larp starts. Most people will tap heavily into lived experiences and emotions to achieve this. That also means that unless the participant is very good at keeping themselves separate from their character, bleed((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character,” Nordiclarp.org, March 2, 2015.)) will happen and those same instincts, preconceptions and frameworks that we use for fast immersion are also applied to our co-participants and our perceptions of them.
In itself, this is not a problem, but it can turn ugly very fast when those perceptions are built on negative biases. Gender, ethnicity, age, able-bodiedness, body type and many more aspects of our co-participants influence how we interact with them at larps. Most people are hardly, if at all, aware of these biases, as they are often unconscious.((Much has been written about this, but Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald’s “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People” (2013) is an accessible read. You can test your own implicit biases at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html)) For example, we may associate middle-aged people with being less active, overweight people with being less smart, or people with mobility issues with being frail, and adjust our interactions based on that. The good news is that once we are aware of our biases, we can train ourselves to actively work against them.
This piece is mainly written to put a spotlight on a problem that many of us are only too familiar with from personal experience, so that it becomes something we can keep addressing as a community. I have mainly spoken to people who have experienced fatphobia, ageism, and rejection based on perceived attractiveness, and have personally experienced the same. Most of my examples will thus be based in those types of prejudice.
Of course, many other biases exist. PoC and queer writers have been writing about appearance-based discrimination for years, for example in last year’s KP-book with Jonaya Kemper’s excellent “Wyrding the Self” and Kemper, Saitta, and Koljonen’s “Steering for Survival” in the same volume.
What Forms Does Appearance-Based Prejudice Take?
The people I have spoken to over the years mainly report the following behaviors of other participants based on their out-of-game looks:
(Aspects of) their characters not being taken seriously, reactions being different from how the character should be treated, for example when playing leaders, soldiers or famous people.
Rejection from in-game relationships, especially romantic ones.
Not being involved in the plot or other aspects of the larp. This is for example often the case with older or less able-bodied participants when the plot involves action.
These behaviours allow us to discern several forms of rejection.
Rejection Surrounding Desirability
This mainly happens with romantic relationships, but can also pertain to certain types of characters, for example being the ingenue at a party that everyone wants to be around according to the game material.
Rejection Surrounding Status and Fame
This mainly happens with people portraying celebrities, heroes or people of importance to a setting, when they are not treated as such by their co-players.
Rejection Surrounding Authority and Power
Shorter participants for example are often not taken seriously in commanding positions and have to work harder to be listened to, as do younger and/or female-presenting participants.
Rejection Surrounding Expertise
Skills that are not taken seriously, for example with older participants portraying hackers.
Rejection Surrounding Athleticism
Less able bodied or heavier participants may be given a hard time when portraying athletes or soldiers.
Of course, we can never know why certain play did not happen for a certain participant. Maybe there was something else going on: it is always best to assume that people do not operate from bad faith. But for quite a lot of participants, the problems they encounter are too systemic to dismiss as bad luck.
As said before, most people are simply unaware of the many cognitive biases they have. So when we engage with complex and stressful social situations like larp, it only makes sense that those biases partially take over. But not being deliberate does not make discrimination any less of a problem.
Why This is Everyone’s Problem
Lifting the characters in a larp is a collective responsibility, because the quality of the larp depends on it. Lifting the participants should also be a collective responsibility, because the quality of our communities depends on it.
People who larp are vulnerable. We open up to other participants in many ways, and we have expectations of the experience that are often directly tied to aspects of our out-of-game personality.
This close connection can make in-game rejection, mockery, or being left out of parts of the larp very hurtful, even more when the rejections are based on aspects of the participant’s appearance that are also a struggle or sometimes even a source of trauma in real life. This can create very bad bleed situations or triggers that may cause people to drop out of a larp (or even out of the community altogether) and perceive it in a very negative light afterwards.
The loss of confidence can be long-term. For example, it took me years to regain the confidence to play a severely underprivileged character again after being mocked for “certainly not looking hungry” over and over again during a larp.
This downward spiral will lead those rejected participants to be skeptical towards others attempting to engage with them, and to approach any new in-game relationship very warily. Consequently, they can come across as closed-off, resulting in even more rejection from the other participants for seeming passive. Internalised oppression is powerful, and negative feedback loops are easily entered. Many people I have encountered see themselves as a “lost cause” for certain types of play, for example playing on romance or leadership, and they will self-cast themselves away from it, even when they would find it interesting. It will take conscious effort and support from the community to undo that.
Apart from the personal pain, basing in-game reactions to certain characters on the way the participant looks, as opposed to what would make sense for the character, will often hurt the larp as a whole.
This has to do with the responsibility to play to lift.((Susanne Vejdemo, “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press, 2017.)) When we do not treat our co-participants in a way that makes sense for their characters, we are not lifting. Not only that, but the human tendency to copy social behavior will mean that others may follow suit, and eventually everyone is rolling their eyes as soon as the Duchess gives an order – no matter how competent and powerful she is established as being in the fiction. Sidelining character agency in this way undermines the plot and setting for all participants.
Rejected relationships can be equally damaging to a larp, especially if the relationship is very central to the plot: if nobody wants to marry the king’s eligible bachelorette daughter, a lot of the tension will drop for the whole story, and not just for the participants involved.
Counterpoints
A counterpoint that has some merit to it is that you cannot force people to play with certain co-participants. First and foremost: you should of course never have to play with participants who make you uncomfortable, for example romantic play with a significant age gap, or participants you have a bad history with.
However, if you are likely to refuse certain types of play due to out-of-game preferences, it is best to not rank those types of play as high priorities on a casting form – because you’re choosing not to play the pre-scripted relationships may threaten not just the experience of your co-participant but the structure of the whole larp. It doesn’t mean that you have to renounce (for example) playing romances, as it is usually possible to create that type of connection with someone you feel comfortable with during the larp itself, but you will avoid being cast in a huge dramatic romance with someone you will end up ignoring.
That being said: try not to let yourself get away with your biases. As with everything in life, it is important to acknowledge our prejudices in larp and actively try to work against them. We should take a chance on playing with someone we do not immediately feel drawn to every now and then. They usually turn out to be awesome.
Another good point is that chemistry is elusive and cannot be forced. Of course chemistry is real and valid, and a wish to play on that chemistry equally so. But chemistry is a somewhat vague concept, and we often decide too soon that it is absent. I think part of the reason for that is that chemistry is often confused with attraction, especially physical attraction, and players may decide there is none based on that. Chemistry is definitely something that can be built on and created to some extent. A famous example of “artificially” created chemistry are the “36 Questions” that will cause people to fall in love.((Arthur Aron, et al., “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (1997): 363-377.))
For individual larpers, it can be a delicate task to balance the need to play with somebody with whom they feel chemistry with giving all co-participants a fair chance at the interactions they need to play their character. Like with many things in larp, being conscious of why we play in a certain way is half the battle: when we favour play with someone we know we have chemistry with instead of working to build that chemistry with a newcomer (or someone that we might not feel immediately drawn to), this should be a conscious decision.
Many larpers have told me over the years that it is immersion-breaking for them when people look different from how they would expect their character to look. The key here is, of course, in the word “expectations.” Expectations are learned and cultural, and very much a product of the other stories we consume through media. And because they are learned they can also be unlearned, and adjusted in the fictional worlds we create so that larps can be more inclusive and empowering.
But even in cases where there is an objective physical disconnect between participant and character, such as older participants portraying teenage characters and the other way around: people are always more important than larp. Nobody wants to be limited by their body and only be allowed to play certain characters because of it. It is sometimes telling how the same people who easily accept that someone with green paint on their face is a goblin struggle to treat the 50 year old participant as a young princess.
Another Way of Thinking: Individual Participant Responsibility
I believe that larp is full of unwritten social contracts. As a community, we should keep stressing that in-game relationships are an example of such a contract, whether written by ourselves in pre-play or by the larpwrights.
Doing our best to approach other participants based on their character’s attributes instead of their real life attributes is also a social contract.
People can be very dependent on their co-participants for enabling their play, and we are all at least partially responsible for each other’s larp. If we abandon a relationship during the runtime, or if we ignore the behaviors we should embody towards a character, there will usually be very little opportunity for that person to replace it. In other words, their larp will suffer immensely from our rejection or passivity.
So my opinion is that when we create larps as well as when we play, we should keep in mind that:
You owe it to your fellow participant to at least try to play the relationships as designed, of course barring safety issues.
You owe it to them to communicate clearly and early if you really cannot play on the relationship as designed any further for whatever reason, so they do not waste their precious playtime needlessly pursuing it.
You owe it to them to try to play something with them. If it turns out there is no way to be a loving, caring father-figure to them, is there anything else they could use? Could the relationship turn harsh and bitter? Could you become an ideological advisor in their political career? This way you at least spend some of your play-energy on co-creating their experience, which is part of what the relationship is about.
You owe it to them to take them and their characters seriously.
Managing the way participants interact, and finding solutions when something goes wrong, is a shared responsibility between the individual participant, the co-participants and the organizers. If one of these three does not do their part, the problem will persist.
Of course all these things also apply to lifting others’ play in general and not just to people struggling due to the biases of co-participants. But if we all try to make it cool to play on the character instead of the participant, those biases will get way less of a foothold.
Now that we have outlined the issue, let’s look at what we can actively do to improve our larps and behaviour. The following sections are a compilation of advice and ideas gathered over the years, both for organizers and for participants.
Tips for Organizers: How to Limit Physical Discrimination at Your Larps
Design and Casting
When designing a larp, think about the form that concepts like being important, being in charge, and being desirable take in your fiction, and how that may be expressed. It is very possible that this form will roughly be the same as in current Western society (youth is beautiful, being loud is being powerful, etc.) but it should not be an automatic choice.
Maybe being quiet is seen as being thoughtful and thus important in your setting. Maybe age is attractive because it shows experience as a lover.
If you have ideals about making the larp empowering for everyone, changing some of these expectations may be a tool to achieve that. It then must become an integral part of the design: if this is not clearly communicated before the larp and in the characters, and the active expressions related to it are not workshopped, participants will probably default to what they know.
When casting for a larp, take a chance on certain participants. It is tempting to cast people who seem like a perfect fit appearance-wise, but try to focus on who really wants to play on the character’s attributes. This precaution won’t help the people who have grown too afraid to even ask for certain types of play, but it is a step towards being more inclusive. If you find it hard to keep biases out of the picture, consider enlisting help to blind-cast based purely on participant motivations. When the organizers ignore participant appearance in casting, this will stress that inclusivity is a value of the larp and the participants are more likely to follow suit. Your casting has the power to be hugely empowering for participants, not in the least because it will provide the alibi they may need to take a leap of faith and play a challenging character.
The promotional materials should reflect the desired situation. If all photographs from previous runs that are picked for the website only show conventionally attractive participants, the idea that the larp is mainly meant for them will settle in the minds of the participants and make the larp harder for those that do not look like that.
Organizers should make it explicit in all aspects of the design that participants are expected to lift each other. Luckily, it is increasingly common to include a clause against discrimination based on out-of-game features, or texts like on the Inside Hamlet (2014-) website:((Participation Design Agency, “Is this Larp For Me?” Inside Hamlet, last accessed January 20, 2021.)) “All genders, sexualities and bodies are invited to act wicked and be beautiful at this larp.”
However, a single written mention is not enough. Consider: are you also bringing attention to this issue in the workshops? Do people know if it is something they can contact the organizers about, and how? In short, how is the ideal “enforced” during the larp itself?
Remember that most of the time, participants’ behavior is way more subtle than outright discrimination, and is often not a conscious decision. As an organiser, you have the power to raise your participant’s awareness by reminding them that the group expects fair, non-discriminatory play, and that they ought to keep an open mind.
Keep in mind that certain play cultures can greatly value “realism” in looks. When creating a larp with participants from many different cultures, this may influence their attitude towards other participants right from the beginning of the larp. It then becomes even more crucial to manage expectations and clearly communicate your values, especially when the designers’ own play culture is more aimed at inclusivity, which can lead to unspoken norms.
Make sure to also (or mainly) design platonic relationships. If romance and desire are not central to the themes and story of the larp, do not make it the central vector of the relationships you write.
Another tool for larpwrights, if workable with the design, is to refrain from defining the relationship too precisely. A way to do this is to stress what the characters do together instead of what they are to each other, and let them fill in the blanks: is the relationship romantic or a different form of closeness and intimacy?
This freedom makes it much easier to make the relationship work. This method has been successfully used at larps like the Androids trilogy.((Do Androids Dream? (2017), When Androids Pray (2017), and Where Androids Die (2018) by Atropos Studios.))
Make sure to write multiple relationships with enough variation in their nature, both so participants have sturdy fallbacks when facing potential rejection, and so that the participants have examples of other types of relationships that do work for them, and that they can possibly turn the one that is not working out towards.
Communicate to the participants that playing a type of relationship (romance, for example), can take many forms. Romance doesn’t necessarily mean physically close or overly affectionate, and can always be shaped in a way all participants are comfortable with.
Workshops and Preplay
Good workshops are essential, especially if a larp is strongly based on pre-written relationships. Line-up workshops can help to make participants alert that for example character age does not always match participant age. If your larp involves a lot of authority relationships, practice how to play those. Even if romance is not central to the larp, it is still a good idea to create workshops around romance and, if applicable, touch.
This will give people a chance to get to know their co-participants and get comfortable with each other. It is an opportunity to discover chemistry with strangers and to discuss expectations. If people are more relaxed with each other, they are more likely to try to make the larp better for those co-participants.
If you really cannot integrate those types of workshops, at the very least make certain that there is sufficient time before the larp to get to know each other, and encourage your participants to talk to each other about their expectations.
Whether it is an informal conversation or part of a workshop, explicit discussion among co-participants on what they expect and want to play creates confidence and makes it easier to hold each other accountable.
Chemistry is definitely something that can be workshopped. There are many workshops in use to build levels of comfort and understanding for larp, though not all of them well-documented. WILT (2019)((WILT (2019) by Karete Jacobsen Meland and Mads Jøns Frausig.)) is a larp with good examples of these workshops and is available online.
If you want to invite your participants to develop physical chemistry, you can workshop around finding beauty in one another: for example to take one thing they find attractive about the other person and focus on that. Including these types of workshops stresses the fact that chemistry and play compatibility are to some extent malleable, and giving the participants ample time to find that connection increases the chance it will work out.
On the Styx,((On the Styx (2019-) by Evolution Events.)) a relationship-heavy larp, is another example of a game with a set of workshop-exercises specifically dedicated to creating chemistry between the participants of characters in intense relationships. They involve a combination of extended eye contact, physical touch, and looking at and appreciating things about the other, and participants have reported a lot of benefit from those.
If you want to invite your participants to develop general chemistry, you can workshop around what makes the characters fond of each other. For instance, as someone taught me, you can create a workshop to develop character relationships based on statements such as “you like/love me because…” (i.e. “You love me because I always remember to buy you a present after a business trip”). This is a technique that I now personally use in my own larps.
I found that it neatly works around the physical because participants are the ones making decisions about their own characters’ desirable traits, which ultimately makes it easier for them to steer the focus away from their looks.
If your larp is more of a sandbox, be aware that your participants are likely to be more nervous to step out of their typecast due to lack of alibi, and that many, if not most, will revert to personal preferences when picking co-participants for relationships and allegiances.
Unfortunately there is no perfect way to create inclusive relations: having pre-written relationships means there is a chance for lack of chemistry or outright rejection that can hurt a lot, and letting participants make relationships during the workshops or preplay will make for more comfortable play but usually favor the well-connected and conventionally attractive participants.
Keep these things in mind when designing and running team- and relationship-building workshops or other pre-larp activities. Try to take steps to mitigate this effect and address it directly, multiple times if needed: ‘it makes sense to write your character with your friends in mind, but please keep an open mind and involve participants you do not yet know as well. Do not underestimate the power of explicitly communicating values such as openness and personal responsibility to your participants.
Using badges, ribbons or other markers to opt in or out of play types has become somewhat commonplace over the years.
Consider also using physical signifiers for characters to visibly convey meta-information about for example desirability or fame, so the participants are less likely to fall back on their own opinions instead of those of their character.((For example in Dangerous Liaisons (Muriel Algayres, 2019), where a ribbon signified physical attractiveness. For added fairness, the participants were unaware which characters had the physical attractiveness trait when choosing them.))
Be available to mediate if needed. Participants should know that being ignored by their relationships is something the organizers and/or safety persons are here to help with. Making sure there is a culture of trust on your larp is always important, but because voicing these types of concerns feels incredibly vulnerable, it will be tougher for them to trust you with this. By actively checking in with participants and asking them how it is going and how the relationships are working out, you can make it much easier for them to talk about difficult play rejections.
Try to find a sweet spot between helping people change relationships that do not work for them, and making sure they give it a fair chance.
Tips for Participants: How to Be a Decent Co-participant to Everybody
Once the larp starts, the responsibility mostly switches to the participants. Here are some tips on creating positive and inclusive play.
During Runtime
Keep calibrating and communicating with your co-participants. By expressing that a situation makes you nervous, should it be because you are afraid you will not be cool, smart, or pretty enough to do it justice, you can make people more alert and supportive. Give them a chance to help you.
If you do get rejected, take a step back and get support from your co-participants or organizers. Try to not let the feeling fester, and focus on the fact that the rejection says more about them than about you, even if it often doesn’t feel like it: try to actively bring to mind larps in which a similar relationship went well for you.
Then get help from the organizers to find the play aspects you needed from that person in another participant (for instance respect, someone to bully in-game, someone who admires you, etc.), or go to a trusted friend. If you wait until after the larp, it is too late to turn the experience towards the positive again.
Co-participants: be on the lookout for ways to be a fallback for what others drop. I am a big fan of the article “Do You Want To Play Ball” by Josefin Westborg and Carl Nordblom (2017), and even though this framework mostly addresses narrative play propagation, it is applied to characters as well.
When looking for someone to swindle during the soiree it makes sense to immediately go to the charismatic boisterous man in the centre of attention, but is there also someone more in the fringes and does their name tag peg them as a wealthy industrialist? Not immediately going for the easy option is also a skill that can be trained. You can make someone’s larp and who knows, maybe you will discover your new favorite co-participant?
If bad chemistry persists, it can be a good choice to just play the relationship as written anyway, of course depending on the larp specifics and how much it will negatively influence your own larp. Sometimes, making a relation more performative and less intimate can work: the relation can be publically played out, which will lift your co-participant without putting you in a setting that might make you uncomfortable. You might be able to trick your mind and discover that, through performing the relation, you can actually develop an emotion or chemistry, even if it is not entirely based on the other person.
Remember that it is alright if some things just don’t fully work out, as long as you give everybody a chance to have enough good play. We sometimes put so much stock in building that overwhelming, highly immersive experience, that we forget that it doesn’t have to be perfect.
What if the participant of, for example, your very important boss, simply can not pull it off? It is important to still give them the appropriate reaction and lift them as far as is needed for their character to work. If you were really looking for a certain type of play from the relation, for example having an authority figure to look up to, you can then seek some of that play with other characters, rather than undermining your predesigned relation by counterplaying. If we are never given a chance to play something, we are never given a chance to grow and learn.
Depending on play culture, immersion can be valued over co-creation, or the other way around. And when different play cultures come together, misunderstandings arise. Do not assume that the other character understands you are, for example, ignoring them because your character is depressed and you want to immerse in that. It is better to have an extra out-of-character check-in than to have them wonder if your in-game lack of enthusiasm has to do with one of their perceived out-of-game qualities. This can also be a good moment to check how you can help them find other play, which is in this case even more a shared responsibility.
In a panel discussion, one of the participants suggested workshopping a non-intrusive phrase, similar to how we use and workshop safety- or escalation phrases. This phrase should communicate to a co-participant that they seem to be interacting based on the participant’s attributes instead of the character’s, or that they are ignoring an aspect they should lift. Their suggestion was to interject with the sentence “Don’t you know me/them, I am/they are…”, and remind them of the attribute they are ignoring. For example, “Don’t you know me? I am the commanding officer of this unit!” This, or a similar phrase, can be a way to make people aware of their behaviour without interrupting the larp
In larps that use a physical messageboard of sorts to request certain types of play, that board can be made explicitly available for asking people to adjust their attitude towards your character.
It is not always easy to differentiate between what people would like (“I would like to have more torture scenes”) and what they need to be able to play their character (“people need to stop disobeying my orders or I can’t play the general”). However, it is essential to train that skill and stress the difference during workshops: the first is a soft offer that can be negated by, for example, the oppressor participants being out of energy, while the second is quite essential to the larp and should not just be dismissed.
After the Larp
Like with many other aspects of the larp, debriefings are important. Talking after successful in-game relationships in terms of what worked for you and why, can change future larp relationships for the better. You can use this information to get valuable insights in how you personally create chemistry with your co-participants and how you can turn the play around when you are struggling. As part of your individual after-larp process, try to reflect on what made it easy or hard to respect certain roles in terms of status and expertise. Be honest with yourself if that was (partially) to do with how the participant looked.
In Conclusion
Recently, the discourse about larp seems to shift from being very design theory-focused to putting more thought towards participant skills and what happens when we play. I think that is for the better for multiple reasons, not in the least because it stresses that a good larp is a shared responsibility between participants and designers.
To find appropriate tools to approach a complex subject such as participant exclusion, we need to keep talking. We need to keep talking as participants, so that the fear and experience of being excluded can be something that is openly discussed, and so that we can watch out for each other. And we need to keep talking as designers, and make the existence of appearance-based prejudice one of the parameters when making design choices for our larps.
By communicating clearly about desired behavior and values, we can work to truly make our larps as welcoming and empowering as we always hoped they were.
Banaji, Mahzarin R., and Anthony G. Greenwald. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Delacorte Press, 2013.
Kemper, Jonaya. “Wyrding the Self.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta, 2020.
Kemper, Jonaya, Eleanor Saitta, and Johanna Koljonen. “Steering for Survival.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta, 2020.
Meland, Karete Jacobse, and Mads Jøns Frausig. 2019. “WILT.” Google Drive, last accessed April 24, 2021.
Participation Design Agency. “Is this Larp For Me?” Inside Hamlet, last accessed January 20, 2021.
Vejdemo, Susanne. 2017. “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.
Westborg, Josefin, and Carl Nordblom. “Do You Want To Play Ball?” In Once Upon a Nordic Larp, edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand, 130-142. 2017.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
van de Heij, Karijn. “We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps for Participants and Organizers.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
Rules for larps have traditionally been framed as having two purposes; safety and simulation. It is time to move beyond that. Rules are magic.
In this essay, we argue that rules are an essential design element that can be used to fuel player experience rather than define its limits. We will do this by analyzing the design of pen and paper role-playing games (RPGs) that put story rather than simulation at their core, and exemplify how these games frame in-game interactions in terms of rules. We will explore how RPGs use rules to drive particular narratives, and promote specific emotional experiences, and compare and contrast this to how similar effects are achieved in classical larp design.
We conclude that the application of simple rules, such as those found in narrative RPGs, can be used to create the emergent narratives and the emotional experiences many seek in larp. Finally, we propose a design tool for creating larp rules with this focus.
The Narrative Revolution
Traditionally in RPGs, the game master invents a story to lead the players through. They will adapt underway to respond to player actions but, in essence, a so-called ‘adventure’ is planned out ahead of time. This way of thinking about narratives is challenged by RPGs emerging from the American indie scene, such as the ones we will highlight below: Apocalypse World,((Baker, D. Vincent, and Meguey Baker. 2016. Apocalypse World 2nd Edition. Lumpley Games.)) My Life with Master,((Czege, Paul. 2003. My Life with Master. Half Meme Press.)) and Ten Candles.((Dewey, Stephen. 2015. Ten Candles. Cavalry Games.)) These games shine a light on the way rules can be used to support and create narratives. Collectively we will call them narrative RPGs.
The traditions of RPGs and larps have developed side by side, and we believe that by studying narrative RPGs, we can gain insights into how to design experience-centric rules and meta techniques for Nordic larp, where the rules themselves are fundamental in forming the player experience. Narrative RPGs furthermore form a lens through which rules may be more easily studied: firstly, the rules are written down and explained in a way that a person previously unfamiliar with the game can understand. Secondly, since the designer is, in general, not present to explain how the game is played, they lean less on culture and more on the written rules themselves; in laying the groundwork for the experiences they aim to create.
What is a Rule?
We need rules in order to find beauty in playing together, as “they provide a framework for moments of delight to emerge.”((Stenros, Jaakko, and James Lórien MacDonald. 2020. “Beauty in Larp.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by In Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, and Mia Makkonen, 296–307. Solmukohta.)) Stenros and MacDonald make the analogy of football. The rules of football do not call for specific acts of athleticism, but they provide the context in which those acts can occur. In the same way, rules structure play in larp, to a degree where without explicit or implicit rules, play would not be possible.
We need rules for a number of reasons. One, is to know what the boundaries of play are, rules for physical, emotional, or psychological safety. A typical rule of physical safety is that you are not allowed to hit your co-player in the head with your boffer sword. These types of rules will not be discussed in this essay. The second type of rules forms the foundation for how we play together. They can often be boiled down to statements of, when A, then do B. For example, when you have been hit two times with a boffer then act as if you are injured or dying. Or, when you touch hands with someone in front of the face, then interpret the action as kissing. Making conscious decisions about these types of rules are crucial to a good larp design.
This is especially true because, not only do rules dictate what should happen when a particular event occurs, they also make these things happen by forming affordances for interaction. That is, guiding the players into which actions are possible, and expected to be taken within the game. Rules may be diegetic or non-diegetic, the consequences of which have previously been explored by e.g. Nordgren((Nordgren, Andie. 2008. “High Resolution Larping: Enabling Subtlety at Totem and Beyond.” In Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 91–101. Ropecon ry.)) and Dahlberg.((Dahlberg, Johan. 2019. “High Resolution Larp Revisited.” August 28, 2019. https://nordiclarp.org/2019/08/28/high-resolution-larp-revisited/))
In this essay we focus on rules that are intended to create particular narratives and promote emotional experiences. Rules have been discussed in the context of larp before, but under different headlines. A snapshot of the current understanding of rules from a larp design perspective is gleaned in Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences.((Koljonen, Johanna, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, eds. 2019. Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost.)) Two chapters in this book are of particular interest: “Designing the Mechanics You Need”((Wilson, Danny. 2019. “Designing the Mechanics You Need.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen. Landsforeningen Bifrost.)) and “Meta-Techniques.”((Westerling, Anna, and Anders Hultman. 2019. “Meta-Techniques.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, 262–68. Landsforeningen Bifrost.)) Both these texts take a practical perspective on rules, and see rules as a part of the design. We are interested in how rules can form the core of the design. “Being a game designer is painting with rules and with causality to limit the possible choices that the players and their characters can make.”((Koljonen, Johanna. 2011. “On Games: Painting Life With Rules.” Nordic Larp Talks Copenhagen. March 1, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOVf06NCBGQ.)) This quote by Johanna Koljonen goes to the heart of the scope of rules as we explore them in this essay. Following Koljonen’s painting metaphor we might say that we are interested in how motifs emerge depending on the colors and tools used by the painter.
We do not aim to provide a definitive definition or theory of rules as they apply to larp. Rather, we will explore the topic and conclude with a method of rule design that can be used as part of the larp designers’ toolbox.
Rules and Meta-techniques
To a large extent, the foundation of rules as they are used in larps can be found in RPGs. These, in turn, emerged from strategy games simulating military combat. The goal of this type of rule set is to simulate a set of circumstances (to a degree deemed pleasurable by the designer). This provides a form of ‘physics engine’ for the fictional world. In a larp context, rules initially served roughly the same purpose: to simulate that which was not possible to be fully enacted by the players, in particular, combat. From there, they have evolved to serve a wide number of functions.
Historically, many larps in the Nordic tradition have opted for a rules-light approach, relying on a shared cultural understanding of ‘the way the game is played’ to dictate the activities possible within the game. There are however exceptions to this; in particular, games based on the popular RPG Vampire: the Masquerade((Rein•Hagen, Mark, Guy Davis, Jason Felix, and Leif Jones. 1998. Vampire: The Masquerade. White Wolf Game Studio.)) and its derivatives, have (at least in a Swedish context) integrated RPG-like character sheets with attributes, skills and powers marked down.
In this essay we will consider rules as a term both for what has traditionally been presented as rules (e.g. combat rules), and what Nordic larp calls meta-techniques. The difference between the two is mostly one of context.
The term meta-techniques was introduced around 2007.((“Nordic Larp Wiki – Meta-Technique.” n.d. Nordiclarp.org. Accessed August 28, 2020. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Meta-technique.)) There is no generally agreed upon definition, in the Nordic larp community, of what a meta-technique is. In general, it refers to any action in a game that is not fully present inside the diegesis. The widespread adoption of meta-techniques leads to an understanding in the larp community that this type of construct could be an essential design element. Much of the innovation of rules as a vehicle of narrative has happened in this space.
One reason that the term meta-technique gained such popularity, over the more general term rule, might be that it felt less “gamey.” This allowed larps with higher artistic ambitions to set themselves apart from their lowbrow cousins in both larp and RPG. Thus, the term rule has mostly been reserved for things like combat simulation. The presentation of certain types of rules in conjunction with the presentation of the larp, for example, the presence of meta-techniques or extensive combat rules, sends a strong cultural signal of what type of larp is being presented and consequently which players it tries to attract.
Building Narratives through Rules
Many different types of stories can be told in both larps and RPGs. While these narratives can emerge from pre-game materials, active runtime game-mastering, and player actions; rules in themselves can be made to shape the character actions and thereby create the narratives.
Apocalypse World (AW) is a narrative RPG that takes place in a largely undefined post-apocalyptic setting, leaning on the player’s shared understanding of post-apocalyptic tropes to set the scene. It is a world inhabited by characters such as the Angel, the Hardholder, and the Gunlugger. The general feeling conveyed by the game is that of high octane post-apocalyptic drama in the vein of Mad Max.
Rules Directing Fiction
The rule set of AW is centered around the concept of “moves.” These are made by the game master (GM) as well as the players. Moves are rules that are triggered when certain narrative conditions are met. They focus on fictional outcomes, as opposed to the simulation of the success or failure of a particular action. An example of what a move might look like is: if you meet the wasteland prophet, they will tell you an uncomfortable truth about you or someone you love.
Cover of Apocalypse World 2nd Edition. Photo courtesy of D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker.
The role-playing conversation thus flows back and forth between the players and the GM, mediated by the rules. The type of narratives that emerge from this conversation comes from the players’ shared understanding of the tropes of the genre, as well as from the way the rules are written. An example of a player move that steers the fiction is the one associated with the character archetype “the battlebabe” and is called “visions of death.” The rules state that, when they enter battle they have to roll the dice, and, on a success, they get to name one non-player character who will live and one non-player character who will die. Note that this rule puts constraints on the fiction: the player that has rolled successfully does not get to choose to not have someone die, nor can the GM overrule the decision on who lives and who dies. When the battlebabe fights, there is always a risk that people will die. In this way, the rules show us that in the fiction of AW, life is cheap.
In current Nordic larp design, rules are sometimes used to direct narratives, or enact a particular storyline. The most direct way being to use a script; having a specific set of scenes that are played out, one after the other. Another way of achieving this, meanwhile hiding the script from the player, is through the concept of Fate.((“Nordic Larp Wiki – Fate.” n.d. Nordiclarp.org. Accessed August 19, 2020. https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Fate.)) The fate mechanic involves providing players with instructions for what their characters should do at certain points in the fiction, for example, “when you meet your arch-enemy, you will challenge them to a duel.” These fates can be interconnected into a fate web, where one fate depends on the previous activation of a fate, in an effort to shape a specific storyline.
A similar effect is found in the larp A Nice Evening with the Family (2007), in which a number of theater plays are re-interpreted in larp form. Here, players read the play’s manuscript before the game starts, and decide together on how to play out the story. However, no explicit rules are in place here other than the instruction to interpret the original play: the larp leans on the players’ shared improvisation to ensure that the story is enacted in the spirit of the original play. How far from the original manuscript this deviates is up to the player’s decisions prior to, and during, the game.
The reason why it is interesting to compare the fate mechanic, A Nice Evening with the Family, and AW, is because of their different approaches to the concept of story. Fate mechanics try to steer play in a particular direction without revealing the big picture to the players beforehand. In A Nice Evening with the Family the narrative is firmly directed by the scripts, in such a way that players can roughly know beforehand what will happen, and can help each other steer in that direction. In AW, neither players, nor the GM, knows beforehand what the story will be. Still, the rules allow the player to make some probable assessments of what components the narrative will contain.
Co-Creation through Rules
In fact, AW goes beyond the moves detailed in the previous section, when it comes to not planning a particular storyline. The game master is specifically instructed not to plan neither a world nor a storyline, but to let it emerge from the characters’ in-game actions, and from the rules. A core concept of the game is presented as part of the GMs “agenda,” and that is to “play to find out what happens.” This tenet of the game separates it from many other RPGs, and indeed also from many larps, as it expressly states not to use the game as a way of telling a set story, but to let the narrative emerge from playing the game.
One way this agenda is enacted is through game rules. Part of these rules are the GM “principles”, including things such as:
“Barf forth apocalyptica”
“Name everyone, make everyone human”
“Look through the cross-hairs”
These rules have different functions. For example “barf forth apocalyptica”, is an aesthetic instruction formulated not as a suggestion, but as a rule. The game should be filled with the stuff of apocalyptic imagination. Barren landscapes, grotesque cults, and broken souls.
Other rules take a more direct role in shaping the narratives. Let’s for example consider the interplay of “name everyone, make everyone human” and “look through the cross-hairs. The first rule instructs the GM that every NPC should be a human of flesh and blood, with motivations of their own and a name. The second instructs the GM that nothing is permanent in the world of AW. Places and people should perish, and the GM should be liberal with letting them go down in flames. These two rules, together, create narratives where there is a real sense of loss when the characters eventually lose those that they desperately try to hold on to. Note again that these are presented as rules. This way, decisions are transferred from the GM to the rules. It pushes the GM clearly into a certain narrative style, while still allowing them to “play to find out what happens.” This way, the rules even out the co-creative balance between players and GM.
In larp, co-creation outside of the actions of the characters has mostly been seen either in allowing players to create their own characters or factions within the game world, or by directed workshops prior to the game. The first approach is common in sandbox larps, where the designer only aims to provide a canvas for the players to fill with their own ideas. This is for example the case in the Swedish madmaxian post-apocalyptic larp campaign Blodsband Reloaded.((Blodsband (2014-).)) The second approach has been used by games such as Turings Fråga (2013-) (eng. Turing’s Question), a game about what it means to be human, centered around the exercise of distinguishing humans from artificial intelligence proposed by Alan Turing.((Turing, A. M. 1950. “I.—Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind: a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy LIX (236): 433–60.))
Some close larp-cousins to the principles of AW, where narrative co-creation is framed in a rule-like manner, can be found in general play-style instructions such as play to lose((Piironen, Willer, and Kristoffer Thurøe. 2014. “An Introduction to the Nordic Player Culture.” In The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen, and Jon Back, 33–36. Knutpunkt.)) and play to lift.((Vejdemo, Susanne. 2017. “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.)) While sometimes these are explicitly presented as part of the instructions provided to players prior to a larp, they are often taken more as an implicit part of Nordic larp culture.
This approach to stories in narrative RPGs questions the GMs role as the main director of the game. Instead, it encourages all participants (GM and players alike) to be equal contributors to the activity. A similar view does exist in larp: the designers may set the implicit and explicit boundaries of the game, but the players themselves are equally important – if not more- informing the actual experience.
By understanding the role rules play in forming fiction, we can both turn players into more active co-creators within the narrative framework, and form a bridge between ‘anything goes style’ sandbox games and the more tightly controlled “scripted” larps. The affordances provided by explicit rules make the narrative direction of the game clearer, and might be a way to fulfil the agenda of “play to find out what happens” in the context of larp design.
Rules Deconstructing Genre
Cover of My Life with Master. Photo courtesy of Paul Czege.
One way of understanding the role of the RPG or larp designer is as an interpreter of genre. By deconstructing the type of narrative they want to create, they may use this understanding to make rules from which the desired type of stories emerge.
In the RPG My Life With Master,((Czege, Paul. 2003. My Life with Master. Half Meme Press.)) the players take on the roles of minions to an evil mastermind, in a Victorian horror setting. The game is intended to play out as a story of gothic horror, as understood by the movie genre.((Costikyan, Greg. 2003. “My Life with Master.” Internet Archive. September 22, 2003. https://web.archive.org/web/20120716191105/http://costik.com/weblog/2003_09_01_blogchive.html#106427832498370748)) The minions live a life of fear and self-loathing, and because of that instill fear in the town folk, until one day they, through their love for the people in town, find the courage to overthrow and kill their master.
Instead of using the rules to simulate a realistic world, the attributes and rules are based around a literary deconstruction and understanding of gothic horror narratives. Each game begins by creating the “master,” an evil mastermind that everybody fears.((Darlington, Steve. 2003. “Review of My Life with Master – RPGnet RPG Game Index.” September 8, 2003. https://www.RPG.net/reviews/archive/9/9681.phtml)) The master is created through a step-by-step system, and once the master is created, the player characters and local townspeople can be created in a similar fashion and in relation to the master.
The player characters are torn between their fear for their master, and their love of the townspeople. This is mirrored in game, through the main character attributes: the only attribute of the master is the ‘fear’ they cause, while the townspeople are represented by the single attribute of “reason.” Meanwhile, the players use the three attributes of “self-loathing,” “weariness,” and “love” in different combinations, depending on whether they try to resist their master, follow through on their commands, or seek out the love of someone in town. These attributes fluctuate during the game depending on successful or failed dice rolls, naturally climbing towards a situation where the player’s character can finally dare to oppose and kill their master, thereby ending the game. The game attributes thus become a representation for the feelings of the player’s character, and the rules work to naturally create a narrative that follows the genre format.
While it is common for larps to replicate literary or movie genres (e.g. Fortune & Felicity (2017), College of Wizardry (2014-)), this is usually accomplished through written larp visions, descriptions of the inspiring genre, and suggested inspirational reading and movies. This can often lead to a lot of reading for the players, while still risking to be ambiguous in how the players interpret the material. Even though it is often non-explicit, and arguably often non-intentional, these suggestions are mirrored in the game through rules, with different degrees of success. One successful example can be seen in how the deliberately short healing time and impossibility to die in the post-apocalyptic Blodsband Reloaded.((Blodsband (2014-).)) leads to fast and fierce pulp-battles where it’s easy to choose the violent solution.
A more explicit deconstruction of literature, and reinterpretation as rules can be found in Inside Hamlet (2014-), where the game wanted to recreate a classic revenge-tragedy, beginning slowly but where a majority of players die at the end. The rule system for making this happen was quite simple: The game was separated into three acts, where different levels of violence were acceptable. In the first act guns could not be drawn, and violence would not happen in public. In the second act guns could be drawn but not fired, and violence would lead to injury but not death. In the third act all conflict needed to end in at least one death. This explanation through rules leads to an understanding of risk for all players, and also to an understanding of the intended pacing of the game. Even if you would not pick up on the intentions, the rules forced all players into pacing their life-death choices according to the designers’ intention.
While the examples above discussed re-implementations of older rules, a new rule system can open up completely new forms of play, sometimes echoing well beyond their original use case. While not explicated as rules, the development of Ars Amandi((Wieslander, Emma. 2004. “Rules of Engagement.” In Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, edited by Markus Montala and Jaakko Stenros, 181–86. Ropecon ry.)) for the larp Mellan Himmel och Hav (2003) was an important part in opening up the game to romantic and sexual narratives. Previously, these types of scenes had been performed mainly as off game discussions or awkward semi-out-of-character roleplaying. In making and presenting a rule system for romantic touch and sex in a way that could be agreed on beforehand by all players, the game made it possible to use this as a central theme of the larp. In this way, a rule created the possibility to play in genres such as explorations of gender roles and Jane Austine romance, and also opening up the larp design discussion more broadly to topics such as romance, sexuality, and gender.
Emotional Experiences through Rules
Both RPGs and larps aim to create powerful emotional experiences. There is no silver bullet to achieve this, but rules can form a crucial part in enabling these experiences. While the rules themselves do not create the experiences, they can actively set the stage to coax them forth.
Rules that create a feeling of tension are found in most RPGs, where the outcome of a dice-roll can determine if the dragon is slain or not. What about rules that conjure up other emotions? One example of a rule set that in itself creates a sense of tragedy, horror, and hopelessness is found in the narrative RPG Ten Candles.
Cover of Ten Candles. Photo courtesy of Stephen Dewey.
Ten Candles is a tragic horror RPG meant to be played in one session in a dark room around ten tea candles lit by the players at the beginning of the session.((Dewey, Stephen. 2015. Ten Candles. Cavalry Games.)) The world has been bereft of light, and some time ago “they” arrived out of the darkness. This is a game without any hope of survival.
A simple dice mechanic determines the outcome of challenging and oppositional situations. Anytime a dice-roll is failed, one of the candles are darkened, and the game moves on to the next scene. Additionally, if a candle is darkened accidentally, the scene also ends. This continues until there is only one candle left and the characters meet their final fate. At character creation, players write down traits associated with the characters on index cards. These are then literally burned in order to allow for the re-rolling of dice. At that point, the trait in question is to be played out in the scene, for good or ill.
This connection between dice-roll mechanics and the physical manifestation of the encroaching darkness serves to create a very strong feeling of tragedy and horror. The random element creates a sense of agency for the player, even if the odds are stacked against them in the long run. Establishing this sense of control over the situation is crucial in building to the final end of the mechanic, namely gradually removing agency as the situation becomes more grim.
In larp, an example of coupling a randomness mechanic to an activity with the potential for great emotional impact is the “lottery of death mechanic” used in Just a Little Lovin’ (2011-).((Waern, Annika. 2012. “Just a Little Lovin’, and Techniques for Telling Stories in Larp.” June 12, 2012. https://annikawaern.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/just-a-little-lovin-and-techniques-for-telling-stories-in-larp/)) This larp builds its narrative around the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s New York LGBTQ+ community. In the lottery of death players get to pick a number of tickets to place into the lottery based on the sexual risk taking of their characters. The more risk they perceive that their character has taken, the more tickets. Waern (2012) describes the meta-scenes in which the lottery takes place as “among the most emotional in the game.”
Why is the emotional impact of this scene so great? From a rules point of view, the agency of the players (deciding how many tickets to pick) coupled with the chance element in who lives and who dies creates a strong emotional engagement in the scene. Had the outcome been pre-planned, it is possible that it would have been easier for the players to anticipate it and prepare for it emotionally, thus limiting its emotional impact.
A game using similar rules when it comes to character creation as those seen in Ten Candles, and that couples this to a gradual loss of humanity in crisis, is The South Will Rise Again (2018). This is a larp based on the tropes of zombie-survival; the characters struggle with each other, putting them at peril to the outside zombie threat. In this larp, the characters are created by writing down things like the names of friends, things you love, and your connections to other players on index cards. In the rules, the players are instructed how to write this down in a way that imbues each thing with backstory and emotions. Throughout the game, these are then used as betting chips to win conflicts and survive the zombie threat. The player(s) with the most cards wins the conflict, but all betted cards are lost. In a meta-scene, each lost card is read, and in quiet contemplation, dropped to the floor. That way, all characters gradually lose their humanity in order to survive, and the rules drive the feeling of loss in the game.
These examples highlight how rules can be used to elicit specific emotional responses. The excitement that randomness mechanics elicit is one that we see in many RPGs. The quintessential moment of, “will we slay the dragon or not?” But the examples above show how other emotions, such as sorrow, horror or loss of one’s humanity can also be targeted. Where the rules guide play towards inevitable defeat but create emotionally resonant narratives along the way. A stronger understanding of how rules and emotions interact should prove a worthwhile effort for the entire larp community.
A Design Tool for Narrative Rules
In this essay we have discussed how rules go beyond simulation and safety in Nordic larp. They can direct narratives and enable emotional experiences. We have done so through the lens of three narrative RPGs, with which we have exemplified different aspects of this topic. We have shown how the rules of Apocalypse World direct the game towards particular types of narratives. With the example of My Life With Master we have explored how its rules deconstruct genre and provide a framework for the construction of novel emergent narratives of the same type. Finally, we have demonstrated how the rules of Ten Candles give rise to specific emotional experiences of horror and tragedy.
We believe this understanding of rules as a narrative device can be useful for making larps. One suggestion for how to design larp rules is the following method:
Decide on the type of story you wish to tell with your larp. Then deconstruct it into its basic elements. Focus on how and why things happen, not on where and when: avoid thinking in terms of set scenes that should occur during the course of the game.
For every element of the deconstruction, make sure to connect it to at least one rule. Try to make the basic assumptions of how the game is played explicitly instead of leaning on a shared cultural understanding.
Iterate, polish and minimize the rule set to only contain that which actually drives the narrative. While at the same time taking care not to place an unnecessary cognitive load on the players in remembering and following the rules.
Let us apply this method to a small example. Let us say that we want to make a two-person game about a background checker interviewing a political candidate to find out if they have any skeletons in the closet (which of course they have). We want to create a sense of tension and a feeling of playing a game of cat and mouse.
The elements that we find in deconstructing this situation are:
an increasingly tense conversation
Secrets being laid bare, one by one
An emotionally escalating situation for both parties: for the interviewer a sense of revelation, for the interviewee shame and a fear of being found out
What rules may we construct that connect to the things we describe above? We may decide to set the following rules. Which element they connect to is denoted in parenthesis.
The game is played sitting on opposite sides of a table, and takes place as a conversation. (A)
Before the start of the game, decide who is the interviewer and the interviewee. The interviewee decides on three secrets for their character. They write them down on index cards, and place them face down on the table. (B)
Anytime your character lies during the game, you must cross your fingers in a way clearly visible to the other player. (B)
When you lock eyes, a staring contest is initiated (C). Whoever looks away first loses. If the interviewer wins, a card is revealed (B). If the interviewee wins, a card is torn, and the secret will consequently not be revealed.
The game ends when every secret has been revealed or torn.
Our intention here is not to give you a fully playable game, but to illustrate the method described above. Using this method, and the example, we encourage you to experiment with larp rules and invent your own methods for creating them!
Rules, Rituals, and Magic
While rules can certainly constitute almost the entire design of a game, of course, there are many other factors that also play a part. For the sake of argument, in this text we strip things down to their base components. In reality, a complete and enjoyable game, most often, needs more than rules.
When Stenros and MacDonald discuss beauty in larp, they highlight that the larp as played is “emergent play” arising in the present, and how “larp magic” often arises from serendipitous moments. This magic cannot be decided on in advance. In fact, we argue that it is counterproductive to do so. The role of the designer is more akin to that of a gardener than that of a playwright. A key part of growing the garden of larp is putting its rules into place. Can you walk on the lawns of this garden? Are you allowed to eat the fruit? Is it mandatory to take your shoes off and walk in the stream?
Conjuring up larp magic is not an easy task. Like a ritual, it requires the chalk circles to be drawn just right. The right words need to be spoken precisely at the stroke of midnight. If you follow those rules, then, finally, you might just get a glimpse of it.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank our editor Nadja Lipsyc for her helpful feedback in the development of this text, and Sara Engström for reading early and late versions of the manuscript and suggesting improvements.
References
Baker, D. Vincent, and Meguey Baker. 2016. Apocalypse World 2nd Edition. Lumpley Games.
Koljonen, Johanna, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, eds. 2019. Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Nordgren, Andie. 2008. “High Resolution Larping: Enabling Subtlety at Totem and Beyond.” In Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 91–101. Ropecon ry.
Piironen, Willer, and Kristoffer Thurøe. 2014. “An Introduction to the Nordic Player Culture.” In The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Marie Holm-Andersen, and Jon Back, 33–36. Knutpunkt.
Rein•Hagen, Mark, Guy Davis, Jason Felix, and Leif Jones. 1998. Vampire: The Masquerade. White Wolf Game Studio.
Stenros, Jaakko, and James Lórien MacDonald. 2020. “Beauty in Larp.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by In Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, and Mia Makkonen, 296–307. Solmukohta.
Turing, A. M. 1950. “I.—Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind: a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy LIX (236): 433–60.
Vejdemo, Susanne. 2017. “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.
Westerling, Anna, and Anders Hultman. 2019. “Meta-Techniques.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, 262–68. Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Wieslander, Emma. 2004. “Rules of Engagement.” In Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, edited by Markus Montala and Jaakko Stenros, 181–86. Ropecon ry.
Wilson, Danny. 2019. “Designing the Mechanics You Need.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen. Landsforeningen Bifrost.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Dahlberg, Johan, and Jon Back. 2021. “Rules are Magic: What Larp can Learn From Narrative RPGs.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
In this article, I present a categorization of LAOGs – depending on how they make use of the communication channels in place. I identify three different forms: The Diegetic Call, The Invisible Call, and The Metaphorical Call. Let me take you on this journey of design exploration. Then make up your own mind how your experience fits or does not fit into this picture.
Three forms of LAOG, illustration by Gerrit Reininghaus
LAOG stands for Live-Action Online Game. As the name indicates, this is a category of games which have a strong live-action component and are designed for online play. LAOGs have dramatically increased in popularity due to the pandemic of 2020 / 2021 when many larpers turned online to find an outlet for the grief for the loss of their hobby in the time of social distancing. Many people also use the terms online larp, digital larp or LORP (Live-Online Roleplaying) for more or less the same thing. It does not matter that much how it is called.
However, LAOGs have the distinct claim that they are designed for the online space and are not a mere replacement for something else. Moreover, as the author of this piece is personally coming from a TTRPG background, the word LAOG nicely combines these worlds: taking the LA from larp, the G from RPG and then merging the two and their design world in the O for the online space.
The concept existed already before. The LAOG manifesto was published in early 2018, first as a collaborative Google Doc, then later on the larp theory website nordiclarp.org. The first LAOG in existence though at that time was already a few years old. ViewScream by Raphael Chandler came out in 2013 and already had all the ingredients in place.
The Golden Cobra freeform / larp competition recognized the existence of the design framework first in 2019 when the jury made LAOG its own category to win a Golden Cobra. The 2020 competition of the Golden Cobra was then already all and only about LAOGs (plus epistolary games).
With the plethora of LAOGs now in existence, it is time to take a step back and see if they can be categorized in a meaningful manner. Categorization is not to be understood to once and forever put ideas and designs into a box and never let them out again. It will also inevitably fail to recognize the beauty of imagination of game design and how it slips out of any attempt to pin it down on one definition. Quite the opposite, the following categorization shall be an invitation to break it. Designers, please look at this and prove it all wrong!
The video call – communication kernel of LAOGs
The core of most (not all, more about exceptions later) LAOGs is the video call. Google Hangout was the first and most prominent service for many years in which RPGs could be played in a video call for free (well, paying with your personal data in your Google account, that is).
In a video call you have many ways to express yourself: there is your voice, with all its nuances, your face expression, your background, i.e. what is behind you, the side chat. In some services you see yourself as a group (gallery view), other services provide an AI controlled speaker focus, most modern services allow you to choose whatever you prefer.
Virtual backgrounds add another dimension (thanks to AI identifying your upper body that even now works without a proper unicolored background – aka green screen). Many side chats allow for direct messages to other participants, allowing for secret communication. You can mute yourself and switch your video off. Hosts often can do so for others.
Features, fancies and the future
Every platform has its own set of features beyond that – allowing for very different design surfaces. However, as a designer it is a big bet to rely on a non-standard feature. Not only will the game be less likely played if players are forced to use a platform they are not on yet. More so, if the service your game relies on switches that feature off or goes completely out of service, your game is dead.
Another array of video platforms has arisen in 2020: 2D or spatial chat services like gather.town or spatial.chat imitate a two-dimensional landscape one can wander on. A video call is established as soon as people are in a certain proximity to each other. For some services, the sound volume depends on how close you are to somebody.
Finally, Discord is until now the most elegant way (though by far not the most elegant video call service) to connect many video, voice and chat channels together in a meaningful way. Games designed for a Discord use channels to imitate real world places or thematically separate players and their in-game-abilities.
Forms of LAOGs
Yet, the dominant play form still is the video call in one version or another.
Given this preset, what forms of LAOGs have we seen emerge in the last years? The following is the attempt to categorize some of the games we have observed and how to set them into position to each other. A disclaimer right at the start: no form is better than the other. However, I have to admit that I personally am more excited by some forms than by others at the moment. You can probably guess which.
Cover of The Space Between Us, composite image by Wibora Wildfeuer
The Diegetic Call
The first category or form of LAOGS, diegetic video calls, has been around since the very beginning. This is about LAOGs where the video call is a video call in-game or something very close to a video call for the characters.
Already in 2013, ViewScream was published and immediately a success in TTRPG circles (not in larp circles interestingly). ViewScream, by Raphael Chandler is a space drama to be played fully in-character about a crashing spaceship with just not enough tools to rescue everybody. Players are connected via video call which is interpreted as the board communication system. The call is a call. Characters are at different locations. They connect through a video call – just as the players do.
Another example is So Mom, I Made This Sex Tape. This game by Susanne Vejdemo came out in the #feminism anthology in 2016. The LAOG variant was first played in 2018. In the original game, female family members meet for coffee and cake to discuss the involuntary publication of a private sex tape. In the LAOG variant, the setting is naturally modified to have the family members only be connected through a video call. Bad connection, grandma not finding the unmute button, etc: you can build all your technology troubles into your game play.
The same principle applies to Winterhorn by Jason Morningstar. The LAOG variant was first played only a week after the game was published in 2017. A group at the Gauntlet Community, which is known for being at the forefront of work on online play, played the game as a LAOG. In its original version it is supposed to be a series of office meetings of secret agents and state policy to sabotage a group of political activists. Obviously, these meetings can equally be held in online meetings – as the rest of the world learned in the pandemic of 2020.
There are plenty of games now using the video calls in this diegetic manner. The Space Between Us by Wibora Wildfeuer, maybe the most often played LAOG until now, and winner of the prestigious German larp award FRED as the Best Mini-Larp 2020, is returning to the video call as a remote connection between spaceships as did ViewScream seven years before.
There are games which go a bit further in the diegetic interpretation. For example, games in fantasy settings consider the video call as “magic crystal balls of distant communication.” But in the end, the call is a call.
This seems important to many people coming from a physical larp background. I have heard voices who claim that their immersion fails if games consider the video call in other ways. It seems difficult to imagine doing what you did before out in the world, face to face, now disrupted by screens, headsets and microphones.
However, I would suggest thinking about this: wasn’t it equally difficult to imagine at the beginning of your larp career that you could ever take foam swords or foam fireballs seriously? That people with crossed arms on their chest can be ignored as if they were not there although they obviously are? Suspension of disbelief is a difficult beast. But I ask myself why it should stop at a video call but has not for other meta techniques.
This especially goes for safety techniques. I still remember the days when safety techniques were considered as making our games lame. The disruptive nature of the X-card or an out-of-game check-in if somebody is ok with certain content seemed problematic. But safety techniques did not take away the fun, instead quite the opposite. People got over it. We now have a widened repertoire of techniques and more games available than we had before. The same goes for LAOGs in which video calls are not diegetic. Which brings me to the next form of LAOGs.
The Invisible Call
Second-generation LAOGs did not mind about the video call. The call stayed invisible in the background. That you and the other players could not interact physically was considered as much of a fact as that you would not hurt or sexually interact with other players in a physical larp although your characters would possibly do that.
They might have taken inspiration from freeform RPGs like Witch: Road to Lindisfarne or Fall of Magic, which were already played freeform widely online without trouble and often enough pretty much all in-character within a scene. More likely though they were inspired from the Nordic Larp tradition of chamber larps or black box larps.
Digital Black Box cover from The Election of the Wine Queen, illustration by Gerrit Reininghaus
The first was The Election of the Wine Queen which started as an adaptation of a physical larp but quickly turned into its own beast. It was labelled as a “digital black box larp” back then (that was before the LAOG manifesto was published) and it delivered on these terms: The game ignores the video call. Players who are not in a scene switched off their camera. As this game is about a competition in a wine region (a bit like a beauty queen contest), players not in a scene are invited to make wine drinking noises, like pouring water or wine close to the mic, or letting two glasses clank. This is purely for ambience. Between acts, each consisting of 4 to 6 scenes, players step out of character to plan scenes and discuss the progress of the story. Then scenes are played without further breaks.
Inner monologues are part of the game: while everybody else has their camera off, the monologuing player talks to themselves as if they are alone in the room. Sometimes this can be interpreted as a video diary. Sometimes it is seen as talking with your mirror.
LAOGs with invisible calls might be designed to be about people sitting together at a table (like in The Wizard’s Querulous Dram or in the Society of Vegan Sorcerers) over the whole play time, and so by design not interacting physically. But, like in The Election of the Wine Queen, they can also focus simply on the dialogue. Aspects of the surrounding can be brought in easily as direct speech, in the same way that an audio play would do it: “How do you like my new green dress?” establishes smoothly what your character is wearing. “Shut up, little sis’, I’m now talking to mom” introduces an NPC without ever hearing an actual word from them.
While Diegetic LAOGs have to care less about the limitations of an online connection compared to being physically present in the same space, Invisible Call LAOGs have more freedom in the design.
Another important thing is tone setting: Diegetic LAOGs inherently emphasize the isolation between the players. We are not in the same space and this fact is part of the game. Invisible LAOGs allow us to forget the physical distance for a moment. We can feel like sleeping together in a room with bunk beds, focusing on hearing the others breathing: in the flow of play, we can forget about the fact we are bound to a computer screen and a keyboard. Especially in times of a pandemic, many people consider games an escape from feelings of isolation. So Invisible LAOGs might be a better choice for them.
The Metaphorical Call
Finally, the call can be a metaphor. This goes beyond coming up with a different interpretation of what the call stands for. Instead, what I mean by the metaphor is that the call is stripped to its essential ingredients, re-interpreted in some of its elements and transformed into an integral mechanic of the game. This might become clearer after some examples.
The communication setup of Last Words, illustration by Gerrit Reininghaus
Last Words is a three-player LAOG about a deceased and a living person who still has unresolved business with each other. The Living frequently comes to the grave of the Deceased and tells them what is changing in their life. The spirit of the Deceased is responding but cannot be heard by the Living. An Angel, the third player, is instead communicating for the Deceased by sending images into the Living’s dreams. This is all realized by a video call in which the Living is putting their volume to zero as does the Angel. If the session is recorded, which is especially recommended for this game, the player of the Living can later listen to what the Deceased had to say. The Angel still can hear what the Deceased has to say but not what the Living says, as Angel and Deceased are connected through a separate voice-only call. The dream images are sent through a shared Google Drawing. If you want to go full in, the Deceased can play the game from their bed, in the dark, emulating the feeling of lying in a grave.
As we see, the call is dissected into its communication components: who sees whom and can hear or express themself is limited by the game’s logic. The Metaphorical Call feels much less like a call than an intermittent medium subordinated to the meaning of the in-game equivalent.
Other games do not go that far and yet turn the video call into something new. In Makeup Moments players are a group of friends or colleagues preparing for a big event, by putting up makeup on together. Players actually put makeup on in the game and are asked to use their webcam view as a mirror. The intimacy of caring about your appearance is literally mirrored by the secret not so secret observer who can look at you as if they are behind the mirror. The webcam as a mirror is a powerful re-design of a tool which is in its original design meant to look at others, not yourself.
In The Batcave players play a family of bats hanging from the ceiling of their cave to figure out which cave to inhabit next. Feeling like a bat is achieved by putting a blanket around your shoulders – and by turning the camera view upside down – a feature Zoom currently offers and which can also be reached through the OBS video processing software. That way, players look like they are hanging from the ceiling. While in the game, one gets quickly used to that view – a group of people in a call all upside down is absurd enough – and players turn fully bat in their body motions and noises they make
Screenshot from The Batcave, by Gerrit Reininghaus
What’s next
I have given a short introduction into the art of LAOG and offered a categorization on what forms a video call can take in a LAOG. The LAOG manifesto will present to you more important stuff I could not pack into this article, like talking about the many aspects of inclusivity LAOGs are providing or discussing safety issues in LAOGs.
More and more sources about the potential and interpretations of this design framework are getting published. Scholars also discuss questions around accessibility of the format, extending on what has been laid out only roughly in the LAOG manifesto. The best place to stay in touch with the latest developments currently is a Facebook group called Remote, Digital Larp and Live-Action Online Games. There, you will also find out how many other forms LAOGs can take, far beyond the expected video call.
Playing a LAOG through sending songs to each other alone (Radio Silence by Hannah J. Gray) or a text chat based LAOG accompanied by its own pace setting soundtrack (Alice is Missing), playing through Instagram by sending euphoric and supportive comments to each other’s best yoga poses (#instayoga) – there are more options that “Online” can provide to us.
Give it a try. LAOGs come in all kinds of flavours and forms.
She strode down the stairs, purpose forgotten in the new surroundings. She had done what she had never expected to do: signed up for the kind of event she had never been part of before, and travelled to Poland on her own. Until now it had been an amazing experience, perhaps the first of many.
I have always thought of my body as my own, not something other people could own. Often it seems that I have more control of my body than my mind. Maybe that is why I have marked it with wolves and birds, lines and symbols. But the body is a canvas that can be filled out. At the time I played my first larp it almost was.
Being part of a larp is an exhilarating experience. For a few days of your life you can be a queen or a pauper, a whore or a nun. But as you play more games you start to realize there is a price to pay, rules you must follow, parts you must play. As time passes you learn, and you start to make choices. And when you become as old as I am, your life’s experience and the knowledge you have achieved will be part of your game.
And so, it begins.
The author at Fairweather Manor 4 (2018). Photo by Dziobak Studios.
Memory
They came for us in the early evening. We were hurled into a bus; they only gave us time to collect the most necessary things. We were not told where we were going, why this was happening to us. After some time, the bus stopped, and we were unloaded. The officials processed us and led us into the stadium. I am here now, looking at faces I have seen before and faces I do not recognize; waiting for the next move, the next atrocity.
I remember the real faces of the refugees from Pinochet’s Chile and the coup d’etat in 1973. I met them in 1978 just after I had moved to Copenhagen, young and without even the trace of an idea of what they had been through. I lived at Øresundskollegiet with the guy I would later marry. Just down the hall from us lived a famous Chilean harpist. We could hear her play when we came home.
As time passed some of the refugees stayed. Others went to other countries or back home when it became possible. But their memory stayed with me. A memory, something that is part of your personal life or history, can be the trigger that allows you to realize the true horror of being lost in a situation you cannot control, whether it is a detention center on the Welsh border or a prisoner in Villa Grimaldi in Chile. You start to recognize the same patterns in society today. This is part of the magic.
Larping can be an incredibly self-indulgent experience, even the very unpleasant scenarios. Fulfilling my dreams and desires has never been enough for me. Hugaas and Bowman (2019) write in their “Butterfly Effect Manifesto” that bringing a personal experience into your character can have a profound effect on your game. You may think that being an older person also means that this transformative experience is no longer possible. You are wrong. No matter how old you are, it is never too late. So use your experience to create change in your life and your community.
The author in Desaparecidos by Terre Spezzate (2019).
Weakness
She had failed them all, her husband, her daughters, her family. For years she had been silent, never complaining, always supportive of her husband, even when they had to leave their grand home in the country to live in this shoddy apartment in the city. Why had she let it come to this? Why had she not said ‘no’ a long time ago? Now everything was gone, everyone had left her.
Families are perhaps the most complex organism to use as the background for a larp. That complexity also makes them the perfect place for murder and mayhem, either symbolic or real. I have met and recognized parts of me that are different from how I normally perceive myself. I have met and played with amazing sons and daughters. Not just as the maternal figure who always supports her family, but sometimes also the monster. Sometimes you meet your own bad personal choices, your weakness in personal relationships, your failures in connection with your children or your family. I certainly did when I met this character.
I always wish for an older character given the choice. I larp because I want to learn about myself and maybe change the person I am now, warts and all – not the person I was a long time ago. Some of your choices in life may be wrong. As a human being, you constantly lie to yourself about your life and your relationships. In larps, you are sometimes forced to confront the bad choices and the lies. Often they will bleed into your character and be part of how you react to your “family.” You may not realize it until later, but they will come back to haunt you.
The author at A Nice Evening With the Family (2018) by Anders Hultman and Anna Westerling. Photo by Caroline Holgersson.
Choices
My dear daughters,
I think this will be the last letter I write to you. As you have probably already seen, I am now part of the Countdown Show, waiting to be killed. There is only one survivor and I very much doubt that it will be me at the moment. We are slowly being decimated person by person, but the violence has been hidden away, only visible in short outbursts. But enough about me – how are you doing? I hope my mother is looking after you both. If I am lucky, you now have her fame and are living in a nicer neighborhood. So, this will be my final goodbye. I hope you may have a better life than me and make better choices. — Your always loving Mum.
In this game I am a woman who is caught in a reality show from hell. Her every move is seen by a whole nation, including her mother and her children. Every move she makes is on a knife’s edge. She is incredibly lonely even in the crowd. Every choice she makes will be recorded; the future of her children will depend on these choices.
Children are important and having children is a joy. Even when you reach my age you will still be apprehensive. As time goes by you will also learn the fear of losing them, of not being a good enough parent. And you will make mistakes. I used this knowledge to give strength to my character, to make her into a fighter. Love is often part of larps, but mostly as romantic love. The love between parents and children is different. It can be strong or weak, and is often accompanied by loss and misery on both sides. It is dangerous territory but if you want to dive deep into your character it is an interesting place to explore. You can dive into the magic of fairy tales and mythology and be a good mother, a bad stepmother, or a fairy Godmother – your choice. But when you meet someone like me – remember that being old also means that I have been all of these and more.
Gluttony and Greed
Menu for the summer party at a country estate around 1800
Lunch
Vegetable soup
Salad
Pie (meat, vegetable)
Cold meat and fish (ham etc.)
Bread and butter
She was up early because the bread had to be prepared for the guests. Next she had to prepare the vegetable soup that his Lordship always insisted had to be served at lunch. An old friend had told him that it was good for the stamina required for the excesses experienced during the evenings and nights. This was the best time of the day. She enjoyed the quiet, the music and the occasional guest coming down for a cup of coffee.
Sometimes you can use personal work experience and knowledge collected through a lifetime as part of a larp. I know a lot about historic food. I was the cook at the summer party of Lord Mander at his country estate for the two runs of Libertines. The food had to be solid country fare, appropriate for keeping up the stamina of the house guests, something required of a true Libertine. The food was based on recipes from the era and served a la francaise, with all the dishes on the table at the same time. Luckily, I was blessed with a great kitchen staff, without whom this would not have been possible. But this was a larp, not reenactment,((As an old reenactor I agree with Harviainen (2011) in his differentiation between larp and reenactment.)) the food was not the center of the play and I was the cook, not a player – or was I? An old woman will have a certain role in this scenario: the undesired but all-knowing procuress or mother.((Angela Carter writes about this in The Sadeian Woman (1979).)) As the days went by, the line blurred.
I used my experience to create the meals, but not the play around the dinner table. Still, the meals were part of the different acts of this play, almost like a ritual. The outcome is prewritten, but the participants create their own story using their own knowledge and experience just as I used mine. It created a special and safe magic circle, where you can take risks. Libertines did just that – and I like to play with fire.((More about this in Bettina Beck and Aaron Vanek’s (2018) “Let’s Play with Fire! Using Risk and its Power for Personal Transformation.”))
The author at Libertines (2019) by Atropos Studio. Photo by Carl Nordblom.
Age
Love was easy for you; you had always known that you were beautiful in the eyes of others. When you looked in the mirror you saw what others saw. But now you are beginning to see another person in the cracked mirror, a skinny and haggard woman hiding beneath the doll’s face and dress. Will you always be loved even when you are no longer beautiful? And will you be able to connect and love anyone but yourself – and who are you?
(Trial for a larp character in a larp not yet written)
Larp is magic. If you dare to invest yourself and use your knowledge you can be part of the magic no matter how old you are, how broken your body.((But there is a physical limit that you must respect.)) I have presented you with ephemera from some of the larps I have attended since I started in 2016. Each piece represents an aspect of my journey, a piece to the puzzle. Together they represent aspects of what I already am, what I already know. They are also tools to be used in a personal journey. Jonaya Kemper (2020) talks about “wyrding the self.” She describes it like this: “When one does wyrd the self, they seek out emancipatory bleed, steer for liberation and investigate themselves through the lens of play.” But you can not do this by yourself.
I am one of the wyrd sisters, forever toiling, forever looking for trouble.
Carter, Angela. 2015. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. Virago, November 5.
Harviainen, J. Tuomas. 2011. ”The Larping that is Not Larp.” In Think Larp: Academic Writings from KP2011, edited by Thomas D. Henriksen, Christian Bierlich, Kasper Friis Hansen, and Valdemar Kølle. Copenhagen, Denmark: Rollespilsakademiet.
Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard, and Sarah Lynne Bowman. 2019. “The Butterfly Effect Manifesto.” Nordiclarp.org, August 20.
Kemper, Jonaya. 2020. “Wyrding the Self.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta. Available at: https://nordiclarp.org/2020/05/18/wyrding-the-self/
Cover photo: Photo of the author at Countdown (2019) by Not Only Larp. Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien. Photo has been cropped.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Petersen, Inge-Mette. 2021. “A Ramble in Five Scenes.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
A version of this article was originally published by Pelgrane Press, in the Honey & Hot Wax anthology edited by Lucian Kahn and Sharang Biswas.(more…)
Coming out of pandemic mode after twelve months in isolation is no small thing. Surely, we aren’t the only ones who have been fantasizing about (while simultaneously being terrified of) grand fetes in historic mansions with commedia dell’arte performances and bubble machines.
But if we’ve learned one thing from our decades of participation design, it’s that the human psyche doesn’t have a simple on/off switch for anything — we need transitional spaces to move out of extreme situations, like say, a worldwide pandemic. Easing the transition from isolation to small events and hopefully someday to bigger ones is something participation design can help you think through.
In other words, good parties can be designed, not just thrown. As vaccines have become available, so have our hopes of once again meeting in small groups in person. And yet, all that time without social contact has changed many of us, leaving us with wonders about how it will feel to gather: Will small talk be awkward? What’s the best way to acknowledge loss? What if I freak out a little mid-gathering?
While we aren’t qualified to answer safety questions like “how big is it safe for my party to be?” we can absolutely give some ideas on how to handle the social angle of things. Here is what we are thinking about as we start to ponder a return to social life.
The Three Commandments of Post-Covid Parties
Health First
Don’t gather unless it’s safe to do so. Understand the risks of gathering in small groups by checking national and local guidelines before hosting a gathering. (As of the time of writing, the US’s CDC says that it’s safe for vaccinated folks to meet each other in small unmasked and indoor groups). But the infection landscape changes fast, so stay up to date. Ask your guests whether they are vaccinated and be transparent about the guest list. You may have friends who cannot have the vaccine, and accommodating them is also an issue for which you must refer to the experts.
Health first also means that you, the host, should take care of your own mental health. You might find yourself tempted to go stressfully elaborate. Try to resist this impulse. Take it easy and find the option that is most fun for you.
Finally, regardless of official guidelines, if you remain anxious or uncertain about gathering, give it some time.
Photo, Jason Morningstar
Start Small
In general, the more intense the experience, the longer the return to normality takes. Many of us have been locked down for 12 months! So, go slow while returning to regular social life. Start with small, short gatherings. We suggest limiting to five or six participants tops, assuming that’s OK in your locality, and keeping it to two hours or less.
Keeping it small reduces logistics (and thus headaches for you). It also prevents folks from getting overwhelmed with a sudden social marathon, and primes you for when it’s safe to scale up to bigger groups.
Set Boundaries
Boundaries can take many forms, from physical boundaries (we only hang outside), to social ones (masks on, please). It may seem obvious, but whatever you do, we recommend a start time and hard ending time at which the party closes. We suggest a starting point of two to three hours — long enough for meaningful conversation, but short enough that you won’t get too socially exhausted. Having a set duration for your event helps reduce social pressure on hosts and guests. You may wish to set other boundaries like “don’t come unless you’re vaccinated,” or even “we don’t talk about my cat.”
Your Goals
Knowing what you want to achieve helps you get half of the way to a great gathering.
Design elements to consider:
Who is it most important for me to see in person? Who is it safe for me to see in person?
Am I emotionally ready for this?
What would my group most enjoy?
Although progress has been made against the pandemic, things still feel tentative. It’s easy to believe that the restrictions could come back at any moment. So think about who it’s most important to see in person, everyone’s risk factors, and everyone’s vaccination status. In other words, health first, and make your gathering count.
Take a beat to consider what your own boundaries might be. Are you ready to have people in your yard? Your house? Eating and drinking together? Do you end up socially exhausted an hour into a Zoom call? This will help you set up the terms of the event.
Lastly, know your guests. Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight, and don’t whip out a complicated board game for a friend who just wants to talk extensively about their Warhammer 40K army (or, on second thought, maybe that’s not such a bad idea). As we always talk about while we’re designing games, what are the verbs of the situation — the things you will be doing. Will it be “sitting and talking,” “watching a movie,” “making friendship bracelets,” or something else?
Photo, Jason Morningstar
Designable Surfaces
Our friend Johanna Koljonen refers to “designable surfaces” when talking about games, and that terminology feels particularly relevant here. A designable surface is any part of the experience that can be designed, and that list is much longer than we usually think it is. Here are some of the problems — meaning surfaces we can design on or around — that we anticipate with post-COVID parties:
2020 Was a Hell of a Drug
Last year brought a worldwide pandemic, police killings of people of color, protests, armed sedition, a tumultuous election, wildfires, widespread unemployment, and general chaos. Your friends may have experienced everything from the death of loved ones to job loss. They might want to talk about it. They also might not want to! There’s no real way to know how your friends will react.
Design elements to consider:
Should I include a physical memorial?
Should I offer a memorial activity?
Should I build in a quiet space?
Memorials
Memorials and associated rituals exist to help us process confusing and difficult experiences, and we’ve all had a few of those recently. It’s worth considering including some ritual in your party to acknowledge, recognize, and memorialize. Sometimes silence is the worst possible response to death and trauma. Your guests may be craving the chance to articulate their feelings about 2020, and perhaps move past them in a meaningful way. Of course they may also want to forget it and get drunk instead, and only you know where to strike that balance. Tread carefully, because a less-than-thoughtful memorial is going to absolutely wreck your party as surely as a thoughtful and heartfelt memorial will elevate it.
If you decide to include some memorial, you basically have two options. The first is some casual opt-in experience. This could be a “remembrance corner” with candles to light, a memorial book, a simple guided meditation or similar focused individual or small group activities. You could also arrange for guests to arrive with a memory and leave with a wish.
One of our favorite rituals is artist Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree, which asks participants to write down a wish and attach it to a tree that already carries the many wishes of others. It is simple, powerful, and can be deeply meaningful to see your own desires subsumed in a flurry of others.
The second is a more structured memorial for the entire group. This has the potential to get very intense, so approach it with caution and the full consent of your guests. Let them know well in advance that you plan on a formal memorial, and what it will entail. Once you have the enthusiastic consent of your guests, you can leverage the power of a group in solidarity. Share stories, sing, make noise to shake off the bad old times, or even set something on fire together. If you choose this approach, consider letting it start your party — end the ritual on a celebratory note that energizes your guests and sets the tone for the rest of the evening.
What Is Small Talk, Even?
A lot of folks avoided physical, in-person groups like the literal plague for the last 18 months. Getting used to being around other humans is going to take some time. Small talk isn’t going to be easy. In fact, a lot of people (hi fellow introverts) may find it more exhausting than usual.
Photo, Jason Morningstar
Design elements to consider:
What is the right theme and dress code for my party?
Should I include structured activities, and, if so, what?
What’s the optimal length for my party and how do I gracefully enforce it?
Themes offer party-starved guests the opportunity to anticipate the event, by asking them to think about outfits or potluck food that fits with the hosts’ vision. Choosing an obscure holiday to celebrate — or inventing one — is a good bet. A theme that includes outfits can help get folks out of their heads and into party mode. Change the outsides to change the insides! Keep it simple and broad enough to accommodate the most theatrical diva and the guy who can just get it together enough to show up. The most reliable party theme of all time is “wear a hat.” But if your friends adore costuming, feel free to go hard with a pirate party, an eighties prom party, or something else ambitious and delightful and sure to generate lots of photos. Whatever the theme, make sure you keep a few extra bits around to offer a guest who doesn’t prepare.
Structured activities are very effective at dissolving social awkwardness. A schedule, some advance warning, and an opt-in attitude can also lower the pressure for your anxious friends. You might want some passive-but-pervasive elements, like a movie or sporting event, as comforting background noise. An engaging and perhaps immersive activity that is easy to just observe or, if necessary, step away from, can be great. Party games, dancing, or karaoke all fit the bill. Host a tasting of something — traditionals are wine or cheese, but you could also do chocolate, water, or pizza. Finally, if you know your friends would welcome it, consider more formal activities. This could be a structured experience like a larp, a rave, making a craft or art object as a group, or doing some public service work.
Things can only go so far off the rails in two hours. If you sharply limit the duration of the party, you are lowering the pressure for yourself and your guests. It may seem counterintuitive, but a clearly communicated and concise timeframe will improve… well, everything. When your guests know they need to be out by eleven, they will use the available time to everyone’s best advantage.
We Don’t Know How To Act
It’s been a long time since most of us have been physically close to other people. Is it OK to hug? To take our masks off? Boundaries are unclear and not knowing can make us insecure, anxious, or even at risk. Over and over again, we have heard that it’s not a good idea to hang out outside of your bubble or pod, if we are able to avoid it. Getting together in cross-pod groups will likely provoke some anxiety.
Design elements to consider:
How do I keep my guests informed and set their expectations?
How do I help my guests behave the way I want them to?
Where can I bake in kindness and inclusivity?
Tell your guests what will happen, what is expected of them, and what can be expected of you. Then tell them again, because they will forget. Stating “we will follow CDC guidelines, which you can read about here” is never a bad move — see commandment one. Ask them about their uncertainties and fears and share your own. Talk about your plan for reducing the spread of COVID with the group beforehand, so folks aren’t surprised with it when they get to your place.
The single most effective way to engineer social behavior is through modeling. Your guests will naturally look to you for cues on what is appropriate and what is out of bounds, and you can leverage that. Design your event in a way that allows you to model good, safe, appropriate behavior. Have a plan for reinforcing it and gently correcting your friends who didn’t read the email — or who have forgotten how to behave. Offer hand sanitizer, discuss what the mask etiquette will be, particularly if you are in a group of mixed masked and unmasked folks, and default to the preferences of the most anxious person.
You may have guests who find themselves anxious or uncertain, and it’s a good idea to plan for that. A shared activity that is individual, like, say, adult coloring books, may help to reduce anxiety. So will communicating in advance.
Photo, Jason Morningstar
Enthusiasm, and Why It Is Bad
What we all want and what is safe and sane are not necessarily well-aligned. Resist temptation. Yes, you want to see all your friends. Yes, your heart races at the thought of a grand, elaborate event where dozens mingle and laugh in their best pirate costumes before descending into sweaty debauchery. No, this is not the first party you should have post-COVID.
Design elements to consider:
What is just right for my party, and what is too much?
How can I design this to meet my own needs?
What can I learn to make my next gathering even better?
The right size for your party is right there in the second commandment — small. That’s a relative term, of course, but a good rule of thumb is to make it more intimate than you want to.
Putting your own needs first ensures that you will have fun and also allows you to obey the third commandment by setting boundaries. Be selfish. Make sure to design a party that will be a pleasure for you to attend. Delegate details to trusted friends. Don’t stress about cleaning. Be kind and patient with yourself.
Considering this a test run for future festivities and collecting informal data on what works and what doesn’t may seem excessively dorky, but it’s another way to lower the pressure and embrace the unexpected. It will also make your next party better, and we all want that.
The fact that larp has psychotherapeutic and transformative potential is certainly not an arcane knowledge in the larp world. Many, if not all, larpers know experientially that even the kinds of larp that are designed to be strictly recreational contribute to one’s growth and personal development. Through larping we get to know ourselves better, we develop our creative and innovative thinking, we become better problem-solvers. We enhance our empathy, improve our social and communication skills, learn teamwork, and increase our sense of community. We explore different values, beliefs, ideologies, ways of behaviour and expression. We develop multidimensional artistic skills and gain better understanding and handling of the physical world. Through larp, we develop holistically: on a physical, mental, emotional, creative, and social level.((Elektra Diakolambrianou, “The Use of Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) in Personal Development, Therapy and Education” (presentation, Smart Psi National Conference, Bucharest, Romania, 24/11/2018).))
Yet how does the psychotherapeutic magic of larp work? What are the mechanics behind this transformative experience? Are the processes and elements at play different when personal development happens informally in a recreational larp, as to when a larp is formally designed for psychotherapeutic purposes? What makes larp a valid and effective methodological tool in the hands of a mental health professional?
The current article will make an attempt at answering these questions by:
(a) exploring characters and stories in larp as psychotherapeutic material,
(b) analyzing the role of empathy in the embodiment and function of larp characters, as well as
(c) the connections between larp and some of its most adjacent psychotherapeutic methodologies (psychodrama-sociodrama, dramatherapy, narrative psychotherapy).
Finally, it will conclude in:
(d) discussing how techniques of the above-mentioned approaches can be used to design and use larps as tools in psychotherapy.
Photos from a mixed-media art project on personal development through creativity. Photo by Elektra Diakolambrianou.
Stories and Characters as Psychotherapeutic Material
Humans create and share stories in order to make sense of their world. Every story told in the world – be it a folk tale, a bedtime story, or a personal narrative – is a participatory experience and a journey of inner and outer exploration for both the teller and the listener.((Alida Gersie and Nancy King, Storymaking in Education and Therapy, (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1990), 23-24.)) Psychotherapy as a process could not be any different; storytelling is a core element in the therapist’s room, as clients present themselves in various characters and roles, and share their stories in order to make sense of themselves, their problems and their lives.((Kevin Burns, “The Therapy Game: Nordic Larp, Psychotherapy, and Player Safety”, in Wyrd Con Companion 2014, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman, (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2014), 28-29.)) In fact, what essentially differentiates the various approaches of psychotherapy from one another is the lens through which they interpret, understand and use these stories and the characters within them in order to understand the client and facilitate his transformation and change. So, from a psychological point of view, where do these stories and characters come from, and what do they mean?
Larp literature has often used the Jungian perspective of archetypes to answer this question. Carl Jung defined archetypes as universal symbols and personality patterns, deriving from shared “archaic remnants” and “primordial images” within our collective unconscious.((Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols, (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 27-59)) Whitney “Strix” Beltrán has examined in great detail the relationship between larp, archetypes and depth psychology in her work “Yearning for the Hero Within: Live-Action Role-Playing as Engagement with Mythical Archetypes,” where she analyzes and discusses larp as an answer to the societal need for myth in the Western civilization.((Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, “Yearning for the Hero Within: Live Action Role-Playing as Engagement with Mythical Archetypes,” in Wyrd Con Companion 2012, edited by Aaron Vanek and Sarah Lynne Bowman (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2012), 91-98.)) Sarah Lynne Bowman similarly studies immersion in role-playing games through the perspective of the Jungian theory.((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Jungian Theory and Immersion in Role-playing Games,” in Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-playing, edited by Evan Torner and William J. White (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 31-51.)) Kevin Burns discusses active imagination (a technique developed by Jung to explore the archetypes in the realm of the collective unconscious) as a process closely related to larp, and highlights how the exploration of archetypes through larp can facilitate personal growth and cultural richness.((Burns, “The Therapy Game”, 29-37)) And lastly, Beltrán has beautifully used the Jungian perspective as a lens for understanding the complexes and group processes in larp communities.((Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, “Shadow Work: A Jungian Perspective on the Underside of Live Action Role-Play in the United States.”, in The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2013), 94-101.))
Given the extensive work already existing in the field of Jungian theory, I will not revisit ground already covered, but will instead attempt to discuss the issue at hand from a different perspective: that of the person-centred approach to psychotherapy. By doing so, I am not proposing an alternative to the archetypal paradigm, but rather suggesting a supplementary view, more focused on the self-concept and its phenomenological representation in the here-and-now of the individual experience.
Configurations of Self: A Person-Centered Perspective
The person-centred approach, developed by Carl Rogers in the early 1940s, views the person as an organism, a holistic entity where the biological, psychological and social aspects of existence are intertwined and inseparable. Each organism is believed to have an inherent actualizing tendency, an internal force that promotes the organism’s survival, differentiation and evolution.((Carl Rogers, ”Theory of Personality and Behaviour”, in Client-Centered Therapy – Its current practice, implications and theory, (London: Constable, 1951), 481-533.)) The concept of self (our sense of who we are) within this framework is just a part of the organism; it consists of the elements of our internal and external experiences that we view as relating to us. This self-concept, however, is often distorted by our conditions of worth (our perception of what our environment and the important “others” in our lives expect from us to accept us and regard us positively); and this can lead to us only allowing parts of our real genuine self to enter our self-awareness and get integrated into our self-image, while other parts of us (the ones that are negatively regarded or not acceptable by our environment) are suppressed, distorted or denied.((Carl Rogers, “A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships, as Developed in the Client-Centred Framework”, The Carl Rogers Reader, ed. Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Henderson, (London: Constable, 1959), 236 – 257.))
In addition to that, the concept of personality is not viewed by the person-centred approach as an entity that is stable, unidimensional and harmoniously integrated. On the contrary, according to later theorists like Mearns and Thorne,((Dave Mearns and Brian Thorne, “The nature of configuration within self”, in Person-Centred Therapy Today, (London: Sage, 2000), 101-119.)) the self is a mosaic of configurations: a range of differentiated self-concepts (alternative personalities, if you wish) that appear in different circumstances. Each of these configurations of self represents a coherent pattern of feelings, thoughts and behaviours, and each one has different needs, desires and views of the world. According to the situational circumstances, different configurations arise within us, even in the course of a common day, without us necessarily being aware of the process. The coexistence of these configurations within us can be harmonious and functional, or a cause of constant conflict and distress, depending on many factors relating to our life experiences, personality structure and levels of self-awareness.((Dave Mearns and Brian Thorne, “Person-centred therapy with configurations of self”, in Person-Centred Therapy Today, (London: Sage, 2000), 120-143.))
Taking all the above into consideration, we can develop a view on characters in larp that is not far from the Jungian perspective, but slightly more focused on the here-and-now experience of the player than on their collective subconscious: When we create characters and stories that are consciously more on the close-to-home scale, we are essentially staying closer to our self-image and our symbolized experiences. Although we do not drift far from our comfort zone, this may still hold therapeutic value if it allows us to explore our self-concept and our internalized behavioural patterns (i.e. the behaviours that align with our conditions of worth). And most importantly to gain more insight and understanding as to how and why these have been formed within us, in what instances they arise, and how they influence our interactions with others. The further we drift away from our comfort zone and into a range of characters and stories that (at least seemingly) appear to be far from our self-image, the therapeutic value of the “material” is increasing, as we may be exploring the uncharted waters of parts of our real self that have been suppressed or denied, or we may be experimenting with alternative ways of being that can more easily arise in the safe environment that alibi provides us with during larp. Essentially, according to the person-centred perspective, what we will be portraying and exploring will always be some configuration(s) of our self, which can either be more close to our awareness and self-image or further away from it, depending on the level of challenge we chose to present ourselves with each time.
The Role of Empathy in Larp
Although there is a broad range of definitions of empathy as well as various empathy types recognized by theorists (cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, somatic empathy, situational empathy),((Hannah Read, “A Typology of Empathy and its many Moral Forms”, Philosophy Compass 14 (10), (2019) https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12623)) I will be here referring to empathy as our ability to understand another person’s feelings and/or experiences from within that person’s own frame of reference – in less scientific terms, our ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes.((Carl Rogers, “Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being”, in A Way of Being, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 137-163.)) Studies in developmental psychology,((Martin Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).)) as well as neurobiology,((Mbemba Jabbi, Marte Swart and Christian Keysers, “Empathy for positive and negative emotions in the gustatory cortex”. NeuroImage, 34 (4): (2007), 44–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.10.032)) show that all people are born with the inherent capacity for empathy (as it is linked with neuronic systems in our brains called “the mirror neuron system”), although the level of its development can be differentiated by parameters such as upbringing, life experiences, personality structure and psychophysiological factors. Thus, to some extent, every one of us can potentially perceive the world as another person sees it,((Jerold Bozarth, “Beyond Reflection: Emergent Modes of Empathy”, in Client-Centered Therapy & The Person Centered Approach, eds Ronald Levant and John Schlien, (NY: Praeger, 1984), 59-75.)) and that is why we can all larp.
Indeed, the role of empathy in larp is to a certain degree self-evident, as it is our empathic ability that allows us to impersonate a character; the extent to which we can empathize with our character will determine the depth of our immersion and our ability to roleplay as that character. But at the same time, larp is also enhancing our empathic abilities; theatre and theatrical techniques have been used as an essential part of empathy training for at least two decades now in the fields of medical, clinical and activist communities, with relevant studies showing that theatre as a medium not only produces, induces and grows empathy for the actors, but also for the spectators.((Maia Kinney-Petrucha, “The Play’s the Thing: Theater as an ideal Empathy Playground”, (2017). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317318081_The_Play’s_the_Thing_Theater_as_an_Ideal_Empathy_Playground)) In other words, the more we impersonate larp characters that are seemingly different from us, and the more we interact with other players impersonating such characters, the more our capacity for empathy increases. The importance of this needs to be emphasized, as it goes beyond the simple development of a social skill through larp but is indeed a factor of mental well-being on its own.
To better understand its significance, let us revisit the person-centred psychotherapeutic approach. According to Carl Rogers, there are six conditions in the context of a therapeutic setting that are necessary and sufficient to bring about therapeutic change: psychological contact, incongruence (on behalf of the client), congruence/authenticity (on behalf of the therapist), empathy, unconditional positive regard, and sufficient communication of the latter two. Therefore, from a person-centred perspective, in a setting/relationship where all these conditions are present, the person can safely grow, examining his self-image and its conditions of worth, broadening his perceptual field, increasing his self-awareness and positive self-regard, and thus becoming more functional and open to experience.((Carl Rogers, “Conditions which Constitute a Growth Promoting Climate”, in The Carl Rogers Reader, ed. Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Henderson, (London: Constable, 1986), 135-147.))
One could argue that in some larps all the above-mentioned therapeutic conditions can potentially be present (and we will revisit this in the section about ‘larp design for psychotherapeutic purposes’). For the time being, I will focus on empathy as one of the therapeutic conditions, even in the case of a larp where the remaining five conditions are not occurring. The development of empathy will, even in the absence of the other conditions, enhance the personal growth of the player in numerous psychotherapeutic ways:
Empathy dissolves alienation, by connecting us to others and to the human experience as a whole.
Empathy promotes inclusion and related values, as it is very difficult to enter the perceptual world of another without valuing it, or without ending up valuing it.
Empathy reduces judgmentalism (towards others and self), thus raising the person’s acceptance and self-acceptance.
An empathic internal environment will create more safety for self-exploration, thus fostering the ability to integrate more configurations into the self-concept.
Empathy allows the flow of experiencing (for self and others) to be unblocked, thus unblocking essentially our actualizing tendency.
Empathy is a vital element of effective communication in interpersonal and intergroup interactions.((Elisabeth Freire, “Empathy”, in M. Cooper, M. O’Hara, P. Schmid & G. Wyatt (eds), The Handbook of Person-Centred Psychotherapy and Counselling, ed. Mick Cooper, Maureen O’Hara, Peter Schmid and Gill Wyatt, (New York: Palgrave Mc Millan, 2007).))
Connections Between Larp and the Psychotherapeutic Process
Although every psychotherapeutic approach could potentially be linked to larp,((Eirik Fatland, “A History of Larp – Larpwriter Summer School 2014,” Fantasiforbundet, published on August 3, 2014, Youtube video, 48:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf_gej5Pxkg)) I will here refer to the ones whose techniques are, from my viewpoint, more closely linked to larp as a process. Given the theatrical nature of larp, the most obvious connections would be to the approaches of psychodrama-sociodrama and drama therapy. Added to that, I will also discuss its affiliations with narrative psychotherapy.
Psychodrama – Sociodrama
According to Eirik Fatland’s lecture on the history of larp, the lineage of modern larp can be linked to the invention of psychodrama by Jacob Levy Moreno in the early 1920s. Psychodrama probably does not need long introductions; it is a widely used and known psychotherapeutic approach, and more precisely a method of exploring internal conflicts by dramatically reconstructing them in a group setting, usually under the direction of a trained psychodramatist. In his own words, Moreno describes it as “an action method” and “a scientific exploration of truth through dramatic art”.((Jacob Levy Moreno, Psychodrama Volume 1, (New York: Beacon House, 1946), 37-44.)) His improvisational and political approach to theatre (rooted in his earlier groundbreaking work in his Theatre of Spontaneity) is evident not only in his theory of psychodrama but also in his later work on sociodrama, a method used for groups to reenact and explore social situations of conflict and oppression (which would in the 1970s become the cradle for Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed).((Beliza Castillo, “Psicodrama, Sociodrama y Teatro del Oprimido de Augusto Boal: Analogías y Diferencias,” Revista de Estudios Culturales 26 (26), (2013), 117-139.))
Theory-wise, the strongest connection link between larp and psychodrama is Moreno’s approach of the dramatic role as an acting and interacting entity, something that humans actively embody and not passively wear, contrary to the paradigm of his time that viewed dramatic roles cognitively, as a part of the self that has been absorbed by the mind.((Robert Landy, Persona and Performance: The Meaning of Role in Drama, Therapy and Everyday Life, (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1993), 52-54.)) On the other hand, a major difference between larp and psychodrama can be located in the methodological directivity of the latter; although spontaneity is necessary and desired in the content that participants bring and the way they engage with it in the psychodramatic session, the director (psychodramatist) is leading the process by instructing and guiding them through selected exercises and techniques.((Sue Jennings and Ase Minde, Art Therapy and Dramatherapy: Masks of the Soul, (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1993), 28-31.))
I would, however, argue that many of the techniques used in psychodrama and sociodrama occur in larp as conscious or unconscious player choices, despite the usual lack of directivity of larp as a medium. Let us take a close look to a few of the most commonly used psychodramatic techniques((Ana Cruz, Celia Sales, Paula Alves and Gabriela Moita, “The Core Techniques of Morenian Psychodrama: A Systematic Review of Literature”, Frontiers in Psychology 9 (1263), (2018) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01263)) and give some input to when and how they can be observed in a larp framework:
Role reversal: The participant steps out of their own role/self and takes on the role of a significant person in their life.
Mirroring: The participant becomes an observer while auxiliary egos (other participants) reenact an event they have previously described or acted out, so the participant can watch.
Doubling: Another group member adopts the participant’s behaviour, expressing any emotions or thoughts that they believe the participant has.
Soliloquy: The participant shares inner thoughts and feelings with the audience.
Role reversal can often be observed in larp when players end up creating or receiving a character that shares personality or backstory characteristics with a real person in their lives. As in psychodrama, this can build empathy and shed light on obscure relationship dynamics, as the player moves a step closer to perceiving the world through the eyes of that person.
Mirroring and doubling are “services” that, knowingly or not, other characters can provide to the player during a larp. Without necessarily intending to or even realizing it, other players may as characters embody personality traits that the player portrays out-of-game, may create scenes that are close-to-home for the player’s real-life experiences, or may express emotions that the player can relate to. When this happens, it can provide the player with an opportunity for self-awareness, self-compassion, as well as constructive self-analysis through a safe distance (see also next section: drama therapeutic empathy and distancing).
Lastly, soliloquy often occurs during the game when characters decide to open up to others in-game, but most importantly is a crucial element of the debriefing. As in psychodrama, this sharing, and generally the time allocated for group discussions about the in-game events, gives the opportunity for the meaning of the feelings and emotions that have come to light to be processed, thus essentially allowing transformation to occur.
Woman leading her companion through the Wieliczka salt mine in Poland. Photo by Nikola Sekulic.
Drama Therapy
Drama Therapy is a broad term, referring to the application of the art of drama in various frameworks and settings with the aim of creating a therapeutic, remedial and useful experience for the participants.((Sue Jennings, Introduction to Dramatherapy: Theatre and Healing – Ariadne’s Ball of Thread, (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998), 39-40. )) There are countless exercises and techniques used in dramatherapy, as it serves more like a methodological framework than as a concrete therapeutic paradigm; however, there are certain concepts that apply generally in its various implementations, and here we will focus specifically on those. In his book “Drama as Therapy – Theatre as Living,”((Phil Jones, Drama as Therapy – Theatre as Living, (London: Routledge, 1996), 166-196.)) dramatherapist Phil Jones identifies and describes nine core processes that occur in dramatherapy, thus explaining its psychotherapeutic effectiveness. I will shortly discuss each of them, arguing how all of them can be found in a larp, therefore rendering it a therapeutic medium:
Dramatic Projection
Dramatic projection is the process through which people project aspects of themselves and their experiences onto theatrical and dramatic material, thus externalizing internal conflicts. This way, a relationship is built between their deeper internal states and the external dramatic formation, rendering self-exploration and therapeutic change possible through the dramatization of the projected material. Dramatic expression creates a new representation of this material, mediating a dramatic dialogue between the material and its external expression, providing the person with the opportunity to create a new relationship with it and reintegrate it within that context.
In larp, dramatic projection of inner material can happen consciously when we intently choose to play close to home, or subconsciously when we end up in one way or another portraying some configuration of ourselves. Following the argumentation of the person-centred approach, some level of dramatic projection is inevitable, and what varies is the degree to which we are aware of our process of projection.
Therapeutic Performance Process
The therapeutic performance includes the process of identifying the needs for expression of specific aspects that a person would like to explore. Turning that material into a performance is in itself therapeutic, as the person may take on different roles in the process, changing their viewpoint on the situation and allowing themselves to experience their creativity and relate to their issues through it. Thus change can occur through engaging with the problematic material from a different perspective, experimenting, and breaking the feeling of being trapped in the problem.
The identification of our needs for expression starts at the moment we choose to participate in a larp, or choose to play a specific character in it. Again, the extent to which this process is a conscious or subconscious one may vary, at least in larps that would be categorized as recreational.
Drama Therapeutic Empathy and Distancing
Empathy and distancing in drama therapy are two distinct but correlating processes, that refer both to active participants and to “witnesses” of the dramatic material. In accordance with the previous analysis of empathy, dramatherapeutic empathy encourages the resonance of feelings and the intense emotional involvement, making the development of empathic responses therapeutic for people in and out of the drama therapy room. Parallelly, distancing encourages a way of involvement that is orientated more towards thinking, reflection and opinion forming. It allows the person to engage with the material using critical thinking, and therefore to form a meta-perspective on it. The two processes can occur interchangeably or simultaneously, creating a dynamic of therapeutic change through their interaction, and giving the person the opportunity to develop holistically.
Essentially, when we are talking about drama therapeutic empathy and distancing, we are talking about immersion and aesthetic distance / meta-reflection. Their degree may vary depending on the larp and its design, but the balance and shifting between them is in the end what allows the player to develop and achieve self-growth through larp.((Hilda Levin, “Metareflection”, in What Do We Do When We Play? The Player Experience in Nordic Larp, edited by Eleanor Saitta (Finland: Solmukohta 2020), 62-74.))
Personification and Impersonation
Personification (representing personality characteristics or aspects using objects in a dramatic way) and impersonation (creating a persona by adopting and portraying characters and roles) are two techniques through which people can express their inner material while exploring the meaning these processes have for them during and/or after their development. They provide a concrete focus point for expression and exploration: the participants have the possibility to experience how it is to be someone else or themselves while playing someone else. Opportunities for the transformation of the inner material are created, as the fictional world that is being built can allow the freedom for explorations that would be judged or denied in real life.
Both processes are necessary for any kind of larp to take place, with the importance of each to vary according to the type of the larp and its design. They are the psychological processes that explain how characters, costumes and props function in larp, and provide the safe frame (alibi) in which larp (and transformation through it) can happen.
Interactive Audience and Witnessing
Participants in drama therapy can become an audience to others but also themselves through a framework of deep self-awareness and development. Thus they start to witness their experiences, empowering their ability to work on issues in a different way and from a different angle. To be witnessed can be therapeutic in itself, as it can be experienced as acceptance and reinforcement. Moreover, projecting part of themselves or the experience on others in the audience can assist the drama therapeutic process by providing more opportunities for material expression. The witnessing process is interactive, without formal boundaries between actors and audience, leading to a powerful dynamic in the group experience and support.
Although interactive witnessing in dramatherapy may seemingly look very different from a larp on the surface, it is essentially the same core process that lies within the interactivity of larp as a medium. Playing together with others makes us constantly shift from witnessing to being witnessed. Other players’ larp performances can be equally valuable for our personal growth; and their interacting with our performances functions as an accepting environment in which we can explore ourselves.
Embodiment
Embodiment refers to the (actual or envisioned) physical expression of personal material, and generally to the connection that the participants form with that material in the here-and-now. The relationship between the body and the identity of the person makes the body use in drama therapy of vital importance for the nature and the intensity of the participant’s engagement. The participants can engage themselves in the development of their bodies’ capacities; they can unleash powerful therapeutic dynamics by adopting a different body identity; and they can explore the personal, social and political forces that influence their bodies.
The significance of the role of the body in larp is increasing in the last years, rendering the process of embodiment more important, recognized and discussed. The power of embodiment can especially be witnessed in larps where players can, through their characters, explore playing with age, gender and disabilities. However, it can be also witnessed in the most common Anglo-Saxon larp, where the players need to physically and accurately embody their characters’ abilities or inabilities.
Playing
Through the element of play, a playful atmosphere and a playful relationship with reality are created, in which the attitude towards facts, consequences and dominant ideas can be flexible and creative. This offers participants the ability to adopt an equally playful and experimental attitude towards themselves and their life experiences. Play, as part of the drama and the expressive continuum, becomes a symbolic, improvisational and creative language. Its therapeutic value also has a developmental aspect, as play can, on one hand, promote the cognitive, emotional and interpersonal development, while on the other hand, it can also be a means of returning to former developmental stages, in order to revisit an obstacle or trauma through different eyes.
The element of play needs no introductions when discussed in the context of larp. Play, as a context and process, allows us to be someone else during a larp, as well as to explore what being this someone else means for us. The larp setting and alibi create a framework where this play can be more or less free, and certainly free from real-life consequences, thus allowing us not only to transform but also to reconnect with our inner child.
Life-Drama Connection
The connection between drama and life can be evidently direct or seemingly indirect, and it can be a conscious process for the participant, or a more spontaneous and unaware one. Often the life-drama connection only becomes evident after the dramatization is over. For some participants, it is the experience of the drama itself (and not a cognitive realization) that becomes the link between dramatization and life, and this can also happen (consciously or unconsciously) during the dramatization itself. It is of utmost importance that the drama therapy framework can be connected to real-life without being a part of it; this is what brings freedom for real action in the drama therapy space.
The life-drama connection process can sometimes happen within playtime, with meta-reflection allowing for revelations and aha moments to occur while we are playing. However, it is mostly facilitated and supported during the debriefing, thus rendering the debriefing a vital part of any larp.
Transformation
Transformation is the end result, as well as a multidimensional process itself. Life events are transformed into dramatized representations. People are transformed into roles and characters. Real-life experiences and patterns of experiencing are transformed through the language of drama into an alternate experimental reality. The participation in the drama itself, and the emerging artists in the participants, lead to a transformation of identities, perceptions and emotions. And real-life relations are experienced as transformative in the here-and-now of the drama therapeutic group and framework.
This transformation, closely linked with bleed processes, is what essentially renders the player a changed person after taking part in a larp. It is the result of all the above-mentioned processes, actualized through the immersive experience, and rendered possible through the alibi of the fictional world. The potential of self-growth may vary on many factors already mentioned, as well as on the quality of the debriefing. However, even a slight or subconscious transformation is still something the player leaves the larp with, knowingly or not.
Narrative Psychotherapy
Taking a few steps outside the realm of expressive art therapies, let us visit another psychotherapeutic approach that can be connected to larp as a process: Narrative therapy is a form of psychotherapy, developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Michael White and David Epston, that focuses on the stories (narratives) we develop and carry with us through our lives. Through these stories, we give meaning to our experiences, life events and interactions, while at the same time they influence our self-perception and world views.((Catrina Brown and Tod Augusta-Scott, Narrative Therapy: Making Meaning, Making Lives. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 2007), 18-22.)) According to the narrative therapy perspective, reality is not objective but socially constructed, and thus having narratives is our way of maintaining and organizing our personal reality and making sense of our experiences. Although our narratives are usually multiple and multidimensional, we often carry one that is more dominant over the rest. When our dominant story is problematic, in the sense that it is becoming an obstacle to our personal growth and change, this can be the cause of emotional pain, distress and dysfunctionality. Such a dominant story may derive from judgemental and/or negative external evaluation that has been internalized, as well as from societal and systemic sources of influence and pressure. This internalization may make us perceive our problems/issues as personal defining attributes and lead us to think we “are” the problem, while at the same time unwillingly following behavioural patterns that reproduce the dominant story in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy.((Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, (New York: Norton, 1996), 22-41.))
To help achieve emotional and mental well-being, narrative therapy focuses on people’s stories, with the aim of exploring them, understanding them, and eventually challenging them with alternative healthier narratives. This is achieved with a range of techniques (often referred to as conversation maps) that aim to separate the person from their problem, to deconstruct unhelpful meanings, and to give the person the agency to construct their own narratives and ways of being and experiencing:((Michael White, Maps of narrative practice, (New York: Norton, 2007), 9-144.))
Putting together the narrative: A primary task in narrative therapy, that helps the person become aware of their stories, explore their origin and identify the values and meaning they carry.
Externalizing conversations: To separate people’s identities from their problems, narrative therapy employs the process of externalization, which allows people to distance themselves from their relationships with problematic narratives and become observers of themselves.
Deconstruction: It is used to help people gain clarity about their narratives, especially in cases where a dominant story has been carried for so long that it overwhelms the person and creates overgeneralizations.
Unique outcomes: When a narrative is experienced as stable and concrete, it can overshadow many aspects of our lives and render us stuck in it and unable to consider alternative narratives. A narrative therapist can assist by challenging the story, offering alternative views, and exploring information that is within us but is not allowed to gain value if it does not fit into the dominant story.
Re-authoring identity: People are assisted by the therapist to create new narratives for themselves, more genuinely meaningful and accurate to their own existential experience.((Michael White and David Epston, Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, (New York: Norton, 1990), 58-82.))
All these processes are relevant to the character and story creation that takes place within a larp. Players are constructing a narrative when they create content in larp, with dominant stories often being reproduced through bleed and its many aspects.((Ane Marie Anderson and Karete Jacobsen Meland, “Bleed as a Skill”, in What Do We Do When We Play? The Player Experience in Nordic Larp, edited by Eleanor Saitta, (Finland: Solmukohta 2020), 53-58.)) The game play itself can function as a kind of narrative psychotherapist at this point; the embodiment of character can function as an externalizing conversation, often also providing unique outcomes, as we are not playing alone but with other people who may at any point challenge our dominant narrative, knowingly or not. Moreover, a transformative larp experience can on its own provide us with revelations that allow us to become aware of our narratives and deconstruct them, leading to one or more re-authored identities (essentially any character embodiment is to some extent a re-authored identity). However, the role of the debriefing in facilitating the actualization of all these processes and their therapeutic potential is crucial, also often supported by pre-larp workshops for character creation (see next section for more details).
Photos from a mixed-media art project on personal development through creativity. Photo by Elektra Diakolambrianou.
Larp Design for Psychotherapeutic Process
I would like to start this section by pointing out something that is often not obvious: When designing a larp for psychotherapeutic purposes, it is vital to have at least one mental health professional in the designers’ and/or organizers’ team. As Maury Elizabeth Brown very thoroughly analyzes in her article “Pulling the trigger on player agency: How psychological intrusions in larps affect game play,”((Maury Elizabeth Brown, “Pulling the Trigger on Player Agency: How Psychological Intrusions in Larps Affect Game Play”, in Wyrd Con Companion 2014, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman (Los Angeles, CA: Myrd Con, 2014), 96-111)) larps can contain triggering content even if they do not intend to do so, and this is something that needs to be carefully handled by organizers. Particularly in the case of psychotherapeutic larps, where the triggering is intended, the contribution of a professional will be essential both in designing / curating the larp within a theoretical and practitioner-oriented framework focused on mental well-being and relevant processes, as well as in providing emotional safety and emergency care if needed during its implementation (briefing, gameplay and debriefing). Moreover, especially in case the psychotherapeutic larp in question is aimed to address specific mental health issues / themes (e.g. grief, abuse, trauma etc), or is targeted at specific participant groups (e.g. people with personality, anxiety, mood disorders), a deep scientific understanding of these issues and/or participants is a necessary element of the larp design.
Having said that, this section aims at providing some ideas and potential guidelines either for mental health professionals that would like to use larp as a psychotherapeutic medium, or for larp designers that wish to collaborate with a mental health professional to direct their larps towards the field of psychotherapy. Keeping in mind all the psychological and psychotherapeutic processes previously analyzed in the article, I will attempt to indicate the points of the larp design process that can transform the larp into a formal psychotherapeutic tool.((Elektra Diakolambrianou, “Larp as a Tool for Personal Development and Psychotherapy” (presentation, PoRtaL 8 Interntational LARP Convention, Zagreb, Croatia, 8/3/2020).))
Designing the World
When the intention is to immerse participants in a specific psychological theme, the setting is there to serve the purpose of the alibi. To ensure the optimal balance of drama therapeutic empathy and distancing (see section about dramatherapy), the created world should effectively mask into a fictional setting a situation that may, for many of the participants, be close to home. The distance between the real-life situation and the fictional situation should be carefully evaluated, and playtests are essential for receiving feedback on whether a functional and meaningful balance has been achieved, or whether the setting should be “moved” closer to reality or further away from it. Essentially what has to be decided at this point is the appropriate level of immersion that the designers intend the players to experience, with emotional safety in mind.
Within the designed setting, the scenario / plot of the game has to be designed carefully to portray the desired processes that the larp intends to bring to the surface. This can be achieved either by a more railroaded design that provides direct mirroring of a real-life situation, or by a more abstract and/or sandbox design in which the intended situations / themes can be enabled or facilitated. At this point, it is essential for the larp designers to decide how much they would like the players’ experience to be guided or freely created (this may also vary according to the psychotherapeutic approach they want to adopt, with some approaches being fundamentally more directive or non-directive than others), and make design choices accordingly.
Props and scenography should be there to support the above-mentioned design choices, as well as the level of immersion that is considered as desired and healthy for the specific larp purposes. A 360` illusion approach with rich costumes and props will increase the immersion and drama therapeutic empathy. A more abstract, blackbox or chamber larp approach will probably provide more drama therapeutic distancing. Another thing to be taken into consideration is the potential need for stimuli management in the case of a player target group with relevant difficulties.
While an indoor larp venue can provide more possibilities for managing the space and its use and function (also for purposes of safety), the therapeutic potential of the outdoors needs to be taken into account and possibly considered. Experiential data from adventure therapy,((Michael Gass, Adventure in Therapy: Therapeutic Applications of Adventure Programming in Mental Health Settings, (Boulder, CO: Association for Experiential Education, 1993), 153-160.)) wilderness therapy,((Keith Russell, John Hendee, Dianne Phillips-Miller,. 2000. “How wilderness therapy works: an examination of the wilderness therapy process to treat adolescents with behavioral problems and addictions”, in Wilderness Science in a Time of Change Conference Proceedings – Volume 3: Wilderness as a Place for Scientific Inquiry edited by Stephen McCool (UT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2000), 207-217.)) and outdoor experiential therapy((Alan Ewert, Bryan McCormick & Alison Voight, “Outdoor experiential therapies: Implications for TR practice”, Therapeutic Recreation Journal 35(2), (2001), 107–122.)) underline the added therapeutic value that nature and the outdoors can offer.
Mechanics and Rules
If game mechanics and rules exist generally in larps to provide safety, this needs to be furthermore emphasized in the case of psychotherapeutic larps. Careful design choices need to be made about whether specific actions will acquire a deeper psychological meaning if embodied more physically, or if the emotional safety requires them to be portrayed through more gamified mechanics. Playtests can once more be valuable in fine-tuning these elements.
Special attention should be generally given to elements of physical touch, intimacy, acts of violence (of any form). In the case of specific player groups, these elements may expand to other areas, like stimuli management or specific actions / situations that are potential triggers.
The rules should therefore be very well-curated, specific and player-friendly when it comes to consent (in and out of game), emotional and physical safety words, emergency handling, and trigger warnings.
Characters and NPCs
The designers have a choice to make about whether the larp will better serve its purpose with the characters being pre-written, or created by the players. This may depend on logistical and organizational factors, but also on the intended player target group. In both cases, there are ways to foster emotional safety as well as the psychotherapeutic effectiveness of the larp, as described below.
In case the characters are pre-written, it would be useful for their backstories and backgrounds to be created and/or curated using real-life relevant material (e.g. real-life stories and/or case studies, diagnostic criteria and experiential research data).
Proper assignment of pre-written characters to players can be assisted by the use of short personality questionnaires or similar tools that the players need to fill in before the larp. The use of such tools can provide the organizers with information regarding the players’ profiles, as well as how much they are willing to step out of their comfort zone, or what kinds of situations and/or emotions they are comfortable with experiencing in-game. If the larp design allows it, it would also be useful to give each player the opportunity to choose from 2-3 characters that match his profile and/or survey choices.
In case the characters are to be written by the players themselves, it would be good for this to happen during a pre-larp workshop, facilitated ideally by a mental health professional who will assist the players to make emotionally safe but meaningful choices in the character creation. In this process, it is essential to keep in mind the already mentioned balance between drama therapeutic empathy and distancing, as well as the narrative psychotherapy processes of narrative construction and deconstruction, externalization and unique outcomes.
When it comes to NPCs, in psychotherapeutic larp they are expected not only to serve as plot-pushing mechanisms, but to also act as facilitators in a setting of expressive arts therapy. Given that it may be difficult to recruit mental health professionals for all the NPC roles, a functional solution would be to have at least one GM in the game who is a mental health professional, and have the NPCs carefully trained and/or briefed by this person before the game runs. It is also useful to have another mental health professional as an emotional safety arbiter (in-game as an NPC, or in the off-game area), so that the GM can monitor the whole process and game dynamic, while the arbiter can tend to individual needs if they occur, or intervene to ensure emotional safety.
Depending on the larp theme and the players’ profiles, the briefing should be extensive, carefully facilitated, and possibly involve relevant pre-larp workshops. It is essential for the rules to be well-understood to ensure emotional safety, with special attention given to elements mentioned before.
Generally, one-off events are more functional than campaigns in psychotherapeutic larp, as it is essential for the experience to be framed in a safe environment that downtime between events cannot securely provide.
Depending on the game duration and intensity, it may be useful to have off-game breaks, either by having intermissions in the playtime, or by providing the players with the opportunity to spend some time in a quiet room / off-game area when they feel they need it.
Careful attention should be given to deroling, as it is important for the players to disrobe themselves from their characters, especially in the context of a psychotherapeutic larp. It would be good to include here some deroling exercises, possibly in the form of rituals. Particularly in the case of specific player groups, one has to take into consideration that they may need more time and further facilitation to successfully transition from their characters and the game back to reality.
The debriefing is namely the most important part of the whole larp experience from a therapeutic point of view. It is where the players are supported to gain a psychological and critical distance between the extra-ordinary and the ordinary self, and make the desired life-drama connections. At this point, a mental health professional with experience in group therapy and/or facilitation would be well-equipped to lead a debriefing session that provides the participants with therapeutic value. Through stimulation for self-reflection and facilitation for verbalizing thoughts and feelings, the potential intense emotions and/or cognitive dissonances can be mitigated, the revelations and self-exploration outcomes symbolicized and outlined, and their meaning clarified. This way, the participants can become aware of their configurations of self, reauthor their identities and narratives, and consider new possibilities of being by allowing the transformative experience of the larp to be actualized.
It is at this point significant to revisit the necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic change, previously described at the section about empathy. These conditions very likely will not all occur during the larp, but they have to exist during the debriefing in order to form the therapeutic climate and safe environment where all the above-mentioned meaningful outcomes can take place. The debriefing facilitator needs to not only embody and model these conditions, but also carefully guide the participants into being themselves empathetic, congruent and non-judgemental during the discussion and feedback that the debriefing may include.
Photos from a mixed-media art project on personal development through creativity. Photo by Elektra Diakolambrianou.
Epilogue
This article intended to contribute in deciphering the psychotherapeutic magic of larp, and I hope it has offered the readers some theoretical and practitioner-based frameworks through which to better understand the therapeutic processes and elements in larp and larp design. However, I hope it did not kill the magic; science often does that, and we are often witnesses of the ever ongoing battle between science and magic in larp as well. We all need magic, and that’s essentially why we larp. Therefore, I hope that the readers will be able to compartmentalize all the knowledge gained from this article in the meta-reflection corner of their brains, while allowing the immersion to fill the rest of their minds with transformative magic.
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Cover photo: Girl with a leaf on her hair overlooking a river in South Poland. Photo by Elektra Diakolambrianou.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Diakolambrianou, Elektra. “The Psychotherapeutic Magic of Larp.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
