Nordic Larp

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  • The Art of Steering – Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together

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    The Art of Steering – Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together

    By

    Markus Montola

    The rhetorics of Nordic larp often imply that role-players play in an intuitive fashion guided by the character, rarely or never contemplating their actions during the game. In reality, however, we are often keenly aware of what we are doing as our characters and why. This paper explores the practice of making in-character decisions based on off-game reasons – also known as steering.

    In discussions about role-playing, there is a tendency to treat the character as an entity separate from the player. While we need some kind of separation to understand the contextual difference of killing an orc and adjusting a name-tag, this separation also obscures some important processes of roleplaying. As the participants in a larp enact their characters, the choices they make as characters are not always driven by diegetic (in-game) motivation. The rhetorics of immersion, character and coherence would have us believe that characters in role-playing games, at least when played by “good” role-players, do not let extra-diegetic motivation invade the game world.

    In the actual practice of roleplaying however, player motivations seep into the game constantly. The player of a tyrant might choose to play in a more benevolent style when interacting with beginners, or a vampire character might leave an interesting scene because the player needs to find the restroom. These are basic examples of steering, of doing things in a game due to the player’s reasons – rather than the character’s.

    While the idea of steering complicates some ideals of what players ‘should’ do, we consider it a critical player skill in most larps. We hope that by naming it, we can provide players with a useful tool to discuss their craft.

    We define steering as follows:

    Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.

    In other words, while the player’s character is an entity within a game world, the behavior of a steering player is motivated by reasons outside the game world. To manage this contradiction, steering players almost always attempt to maintain the semblance of coherence in their character’s behavior.

    Specifically, players attempt to ensure that characters maintain the outward appearance of coherence for the character’s actions, from the perspective of other characters first and other players second. In other words, a player who is steering strives to maintain the illusion that the actions of her character make sense as a whole.

    Whenever possible, players also attempt to maintain the internal coherence of their understanding of the character. In the above example of the vampire player looking for a restroom, the player undoubtedly fails to preserve internal coherence, but she still seeks to maintain the outward appearance of coherence for other players.

    Steering is often subtle and nuanced. As an example, the player of a prison guard might be considering whether her character should pursue a love interest or fulfil her character’s guard duties. In deciding that pursuing the love interest will make for a better game, she subtly decides to heed the pull of the romantic interest more strongly, maintaining her internal coherence while actually influencing her play based on a non-diegetic decision on how to generate better play.

    By definition, steering is always intentional. Thus, you can never steer by accident, and it requires conscious choice and effort. The behavior in the above example would not have counted as steering if the player was just deeply focused in the romantic affair and would have never considered the effect on the larger game before deserting her post. Instead, she consciously evaluated the impact of her actions, and then acted towards deepening the romance. This can happen quickly and semi-consciously so that the player can stay in the emotional flow that inspired the choice – but it is still a marked moment the player can identify afterwards. Of course, we do steering decisions so often and so quickly that we often forget about them before the larp is over.

    Steering can be used to create good or bad play. Usually such definitions depend on the play culture and the overall dynamics of the game: In a gamist aesthetic, playing to win can be seen as acceptable, while in games focusing on a play to lose aesthetic, the players are expected to steer towards failure. Steering can even be immoral or unethical, for example if a player uses her character as a pretence for stalking another player.

    Not all character actions result from steering – only those actions intended to guide the character to a specific effect for reasons that exist outside of the character’s conception of the world. At a minimum, we consider the reflexes and unconscious reactions of the player as external to steering. An example of the difficulty of establishing a line between steering and not-steering is player attraction toward other players: If a character’s choice to pursue a romance is influenced by the desire of the player it could be seen as steering – but only if the player is aware of this.

    It is also important to note that steering is something one does to one’s own character. There is by definition no such thing as ‘steering others’. However, through steering her own character, the player can also change the way others are playing and influence the direction of the larp as a whole. Indeed, that is often the goal.

    Dual Consciousness

    We believe that knowing how to steer properly is one of the most important player skills.

    Since steering breaks down the division between the player and the character and exposes the moment-to-moment reality of play, it is a useful tool in taking a brutally honest look at what happens in the practice of larp.

    Most of the time during larp runtime, players have the dual consciousness of looking at the event both as diegetic, and as non-diegetic, as play and as non-play. This dual consciousness, or bisociation, informs most of their actions. It is an important part of playing and games; standing with one foot within the border of play and another outside it can not only be powerful, but also instructive.

    Viewing something both as play and as non-play not only teaches the viewer about the thing she is looking at, but about the overall structure. This helps in understanding the socially constructed nature of reality as a whole, but specifically it helps in understanding how a game functions. This competence at reading situations on multiple levels is a skill that can be developed in play and applied when steering.

    Steering Examples

    Practical

    Physical needs. Food, sleep, warmth, etc.
    Looking for someone. Searching for another player to play a scene or to get the car keys.
    Documentation. Posing for or avoiding a camera. Filming in characer.
    Logistics. Entering hostile territory because that is where the toilet is.
    Physical safety. Not running in the pitch-black forest even when your pursuers do.

    Smooth Play

    Coherence. Preserving the external coherence, even at the expense of your internal coherence.
    Legibility. Overplaying emotions to make sure they are conveyed to other players.
    Game mastering and fateplay. Pushing the game towards some direction as required by larp design.
    Retrospective rationalization. Smoothing over the plot holes of earlier bad steering.
    Post-hoc player vetting. Mitigating the perceived damage to the game caused by a ‘bad’ player.
    Theme. Accepting that vampires are real in two minutes.

    Aesthetic Ideals

    Narrativism and dramatism. Making a better story for yourself or others.
    Gamism. Winning conflicts, gathering power.
    Immersionism. Avoiding heavy game mechanics that might detract from character immersion.
    Bleed. Seeking maximally intense emotional impact.
    360° illusion. Avoiding the sight of the parking lot in fantasy games.
    Play to lose. Sharing secrets loudly for eavesdroppers to hear them.

    Personal Experience

    Boredom. Looking for stuff to do. Picking up fights.
    Staying in game. Not leaving the haunted mansion even when two people are dead.
    Relevance. Getting closer to the perceived core of the game, or seeking more agency.
    Overcoming disabling design. Deciding that your character wants to become a revolutionary only after you realize that most characters only talk to revolutionaries.
    Avoiding the same-old. Not rebelling against the tyrant in two games in a row.
    Attraction. Getting to play with skilled or cool players.
    Player status. Doing things likely to increase one’s status as a player.
    Shame. Not wanting to do or to be seen doing certain things, even as a character.

    Ethical and Unethical

    Consent. Observing a slow-down safeword such as “yellow” or “brems”.
    Trust. Creating a safe situation in which to play demanding scenes.
    Inclusiveness. Including characters that have nothing to do at that moment.
    Harassment. Using the larp to stalk another player.
    Revenge. Killing your character because you killed mine in an earlier game.

    There is nothing mysterious about this process. It simply means that a player is able to see at the same time both the cheerful friend who gave her a lift to the larp wearing old army surplus clothes, and the frightful commander of the space station her character could never approach. Both of these things are true at the same time. Recognizing the difference between the diegetic and the non-diegetic is the difference roleplaying is built upon. However, that separation is not actual, but rather one made in interpretation.

    The idea that one realm, the non-diegetic, is allowed to influence the other realm, the diegetic, may seem wrong, even immoral. Indeed, the idea of steering may seem like anathema to roleplaying. Is not the key tenet of roleplaying the idea of portraying a fictional being in a fictional setting – without the petty motivations a player may have outside roleplaying? Yet steering is not a bad or an undesirable thing to do. In fact, many players steer almost all the time when they are playing. The diegetic world of fantasy never maps completely on the physical world, nor does the body of the player completely become that of the character. The draw of larp is that it is not-real and that it feels real.

    Steering and Immersionism

    The concept of steering – and the criticism of motivations originating with the player – emerge from a tradition that values character immersion as an ideal. Immersion is perhaps most frequently defined as moments when player forgets herself – when the dual consciousness of simultaneously being a player and a character fades away and player only focuses on being her character. This experience has been characterized, for example, as the player pretending to believe that she is her character (Pohjola 2004) and as bracketing the everyday self (Fine 1983).

    It has been compared to ideas such as flow (Hopeametsä 2008) and wilful suspension of disbelief (Pohjola 2004).

    In the Manifesto of the Turku School, Mike Pohjola (2000) argued that character immersion should be seen as the ideal aesthetic of the larp. But with an ideology that forbids dual consciousness comes some baggage – it prohibits steering:

    Sometimes it might be fun to do something that is not in strict accordance with the character, but – unless the GM has specifically asked you to do so – THAT IS FORBIDDEN.

    Mike Pohjola, Manifesto of the Turku School

    The psychological idealism focused on immersion has faded since the turn of the millennium. It is now commonly acknowledged in the Nordic larp discourse that even when player’s focus is on her character she still does not become the character. The idea that someone could use character immersion as a moral justification for punching another player in the face would universally be found ridiculous.

    But even as full character immersion has been found impossible, this rhetoric of playing true to the character has persisted. The dogma of character fidelity can be seen whenever players discuss whether it is realistic that the king fell in love with the peasant girl, or whether it was credible that mortal enemies joined forces in order to win the war against orcs.

    However, as the player cannot psychologically transform into her character, the problem of Pohjola’s statement is that it is impossible to determine which actions are in “strict accordance with the character”. Even as a player, one can determine several credible courses of action for almost any situation the character can be in.

    This uncertainty and ambiguity about what would be fitting for a character is what makes steering possible. If there was always one right choice for a character to make, steering would be meaningless. It is this very uncertainty that is the site for steering – the minute choices a character makes. Steering is rarely about making major life choices and often about pushing a discussion gently in a new direction.

    Indeed, the skill in question is not entirely dissimilar to the skills one needs when steering conversation away from difficult topics in an everyday social situation like a polite chat with colleagues over coffee. When you understand that you have a potentially inappropriate joke that is perfect for the situation, you still decide whether or not to tell it. Sometimes that decision may be done very quickly, subtly, or half-unconsciously.

    The strict reading of immersionism presented above appears to be incompatible with the idea of steering. However, contemporary immersionists do not argue that character immersion is an overwhelming and persistent state. Rather, it is seen as an aesthetic ideal and a goal to strive for when playing.

    From this perspective, we actually argue that some amount of steering is even a requirement for immersionist play. The immersionist player seeks to ignore and forget the fact she is larping while doing so. This wilful suspension of disbelief requires the player to maintain internal coherence of her character: It might be hard to forget yourself and become a medieval queen if you are standing on the balcony with the clear view to the parking lot. Getting a powerful immersionist experience of committing a tragic suicide is more likely if you consciously choose to commit one.

    Or, as Pohjola wrote himself years later:

    Whenever we see interesting developments that will enhance our story, our experience and our character immersion, we have to jump at the chance to engage with them. Otherwise we’re not doing anyone any favors. In a larp you should be your own game master and help your own character immersion by building a better game for yourself.

    Mike Pohjola, You’re in Charge of You

    The reason why the idea of steering is sometimes seen to be at odds with The Manifesto of the Turku School is probably historical. It was written at a time when player motivations were seen to be influencing Finnish roleplaying too much.

    Although it was a response to Dogma 99 (Fatland & Wingård 1999), it was actually directed against gamism (steering to win), dramatism (steering to create interesting scenes and stories), and bad roleplaying (for example, steering on the expense of coherence).

    The idea of steering shows how rare moments of real immersion and flow are. By lifting the dogmatic ways of talking about the play experience tinted with the idea of immersion, it helps account for many of the actions a player takes during runtime. By shifting emphasis from the ideals of playing to the actual practice it illuminates what we really do while roleplaying.

    Designing for Steering

    The idea that larps contain characters that are there to direct the play is as old as larping itself. This is what the non-player characters and other game master controlled actors have been doing since the beginning of larping (cf. Stenros 2013). However, player characters have done this since the beginning as well – even if it was not always directly discussed.

    Explicit steering instructions have been a part of the tradition of Nordic larps at least since the emergence of fateplay (see Fatland 2005), a style of making larps where players are given some instructions on how to behave in certain situations – the character Claudius, for example, was fated to die in the larp Hamlet (2002).

    More recently, larps such as The Monitor Celestra (2013) have introduced the idea of having large amounts of characters with pervasive and persistent steering duties. In the Celestra, which featured strict naval and military hierarchies, higher-ranking officers were expected to generate play for their subordinates. For example, the commanding officer of the Colonial Navy was instructed as follows:

    As the Major in charge, your foremost duty is to act as a game master for bridge and CIC personnel, generating interesting play and putting flavor into the tasks of running the ship […] Always keep in mind that your job isn’t to be an effective Major, but to be a good player/game master, and enable interesting action for others.

    Character material, The Monitor Celestra

    While all players had similar duties, the higher the character was in a hierarchy, the stronger the expectation of steering was. This was of course a practical solution: By having the Major to steer hard the game masters could alter the course of the entire larp, as she could use her diegetic authority to impact the game for all her subordinates, shielding them from the need to steer.

    This mechanic worked rather well for members of those hierarchies, especially compared to older and more selfish play styles (see Fatland & Montola in this book for a detailed discussion).

    Although the top brass was expected to steer the most, Celestra explicitly encouraged following the philosophy of play to lose, which basically expects everyone to steer in the larp. The following play instruction was given under the heading “Rules” in the briefing materials:

    You are expected to play to lose, prettily. In a game where experiencing the journey is the whole point, winning is moronic. Losing, on the other hand, is dramatic and cool since it puts a spin on the story and contributes to emotional impact.

    The Monitor Celestra Briefing

    These games have established a new steering norm along the ones such as gamism, dramatism, immersionism and bleed: In these games, players are expected to steer in order to play to lose. This anti-gamist stance can arguably contribute to many other play aesthetics, as it “puts a spin on the story” for dramatists and “contributes to emotional impact” for immersionists and bleedhunters.

    Obligatory and Heavy Steering

    Sometimes it is every larper’s obligation to steer. Barring some unusual arrangement, role-players share an almost universal implicit obligation to steer for coherence. Different game styles have different conceptions of what coherence is, yet internal logic of some kind is valued in all larp cultures.

    In some roleplaying games, especially larger larps with less-tightly organized plots, what would be seen as a significant coherence conflict in another game may be glossed over by all players concerned as they acknowledge tacitly that a conflict has occurred by choosing not to fix it, as it would require too much work on the part of disparate groups of players.

    In other games, often smaller or more tightly plotted, it would be seen as a serious problem for such a breach of coherence to occur to start with, requiring either heavy steering by all parties to fix immediately or possibly (in some play cultures) a break of play so the ‘truth’ of the situation can be decided directly by the players off-game. Usually, when coherence cannot be achieved by steering, the next solution is to ignore the problem; to steer play away from the mess.

    Two examples can help clarify this. In long-running campaigns the character arcs can become increasingly improbable. Like in soap operas and superhero comics, certain ancient acts may be de-emphasized by those character’s players.

    In larps this works particularly well, as no one can go back in time three years to check and nitpick what actually and specifically happened. In larps that use them, mechanics like experience points can also shift balances between masters and apprentices or parents and children, if players put in different amounts of play time.

    Another example comes from the second run of The Monitor Celestra, where at one point the key to the hyperdrive was stolen, and a dozen characters got involved in recovering it from the characters who used it as leverage in a negotiation. Problems arose because the game organizers held that no such key existed, as some player had improvised it up. As the characters raced to solve the issue the gamemasters ignored it; as far as they were concerned, this plot did not exist.

    The game masters could still not solve the problem simply by issuing a decree, because too many characters were involved with the key.

    In the end the issue was solved twice in the game – once very rapidly due to game master pressure and again by some characters not being aware of the first time – and only then were all the characters able to move on. No equifinal understanding on what actually happened can be produced.

    When characters are forced to steer hard, it causes wider ripples in the play. Specifically, one player steering hard may leave another player confused about the steerer’s character’s identity, her relationship with the second player’s character, or the events of the larp. This is sometimes unavoidable, especially when a player is forced to steer in a character-breaking way. This is a specific kind of game incoherence associated with steering that many players, especially heavily immersionist players, may consider unacceptable.

    Steering can be characterized as character-breaking steering when the player cannot maintain her internal sense of coherence. For example, if the player is executing a game master directive that is important for the larger plot of a game but finds their character has moved away from the gamemasters’ expectations of who they would be when the instructions were originally specified, they will need to steer their character to ensure they fulfill their obligations to the game, but will do so knowing that this action does not make sense for the character.

    Likewise, a player may realize part-way through a game that they have played themselves into a corner, and if they wish to continue playing or return to the main plot of the game, they will have to simply reinvent part of their character. While to be character-breaking, this shift need only be incoherent to the player, when done poorly (or under extreme circumstances) it will often result in the character also appearing incoherent to other players.

    In order to repair the disruption created by heavy steering, players sometimes engage in retroactive rationalization, wherein they decide on the thus far unvoiced rationale for choices they have already made to maintain the appearance of coherence. For instance, a player who forgot their character’s sidearm may later steer, deciding that their character was feeling especially secure that morning, and thought they would not need it.

    If the player discovers that this will cause a coherence problem with other players expectations, they may engage in retroactive rationalization retconning – if they have not already told the other players, they can changing their prior retroactive rationalization. In this example, the player might decide that instead of being supremely confident, their sidearm was actually stolen, allowing them to integrate with a game mood of suspicion and paranoia.

    The roleplay agreement (Sihvonen 1997), the social contract that participants treat the player and the character as separate entities and refrain from making judgement about one based on the other, is a cornerstone of roleplaying. Without it establishing trust amongst players to also engage in anti-social behaviors, like playing a villain, can be hard. The concept of steering does not obliterate the role-play agreement. However, it needs to be modified; the separation need not be between player and character, but diegesis and non-play. Indeed, it is the character that acts as an alibi for steering. The player can choose what she wants to do or what best fits the larp, and as long as it somehow makes sense in relation to the facts of the character thus far established, it is acceptable.

    Conclusion

    Sensitivity to other players – knowing when and how to steer – is a key player skill. A considerate player can create play for others, pace drama, include others players, support beginners, and avoid hogging plots and secrets. A good larper steers in a nuanced way that is invisible to other players and does not damage the coherence of play. Steering is not a bad thing to do in a game, and most of us steer much of the time while we are playing.

    Just like good steering contributes to the game, refusal to steer can detract from it. If one player does not steer, her fellow players may be forced to steer even harder to sustain the game. It is not rare to encounter a selfish player in a larp with a preference to avoid steering who expects other players to accommodate her play style. The other players may end up steering hard to maintain play and allow her to preserve the immersive flow instead of caring about the overall game.

    Steering is a skill and not all players are good at it. Steering coherently and reliably requires thinking and performing simultaneously on two, three, or more levels while maintaining an accurate model of both the perceptions of both other characters and their players.

    Players holding on to an ideal of playing entirely without dual consciousness may even argue that the expectation of steering ruins their game. Steering is perceived by some players as distancing them from their character. In part, the degree of distance perceived may relate to how quickly players are able to slip between different levels of play.

    It is not necessarily the case that more intense emotional experiences require less movement between levels of player consideration, but this appears to be true for some players. Some players and some game contracts may consider steering to be cheating, as in those contexts, only diegetic concerns are considered to be acceptable as motivations for player choices. We believe that such contracts are often self-deceptive, and that acknowledgement of the role of steering in play is critical to designing for character immersion in the context of a coherent, functional game.

    Acknowledgements

    We would especially want to thank Juhana Pettersson as well as other organizers and participants of Larpwriters’ Winter Retreat 2014.

    Ludography

    • Hamlet (2002): Martin Ericsson, Christopher Sandberg, Anna Eriksson, Martin Brodén, with a large team. Interaktiva Uppsättningar and riksteatern JAM. Stockholm, Sweden.
    • The Monitor Celestra (2013): Alternaliv AB, with Bardo AB and Berättelsefrämjandet, with a team of 85 people. Gothenburg, Sweden. www.celestra-larp.com

    References

    Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.

    This article was initially published in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Theory jam at the Larpwriter Winter Retreat 2014, by Johannes Axner, is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

  • Murder in Helsinki

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    Murder in Helsinki

    By

    Juhana Pettersson

    Tonnin stiflat is a Finnish larp campaign played in Helsinki in 2014. Consisting of three games, it was organized by the veteran city game designers Niina Niskanen and Simo Järvelä.

    Photo from Tonnin stiflat by Tuomas Puikkonen.The setting is Helsinki in the year 1927, and the subject matter crime, prohibition, working class life and the violent legacy of the civil war. The characters were bootleggers and policemen, struggling artists and their sybaritic patrons.

    Niskanen and Järvelä have edited and published a documentation book about the larps in English. It’s downloadable here, for free, and definitely worth a look.

    The book is especially welcome as Finnish larp has traditionally been something of a poor cousin in the milieu of Nordic larp. There have been interesting games aplenty, but documentation has been scarce and Nordic attention usually limited to the games that Finnish writers have pushed the hardest, like Ground Zero.

    City games played in an open urban environment have traditionally been a Finnish strong suit, and Niskanen and Järvelä are masters of this form. It’s especially nice to see this type of game documented in book form and in English, as the games that tend to receive this treatment are usually one-weekend affair played in a closed environment, such as Kapo and Mad About the Boy.

    Photo from Tonnin stiflat by Tuomas Puikkonen.Tonnin stiflat (the title is an expression for very expensive shoes in the traditional Helsinki slang) benefits greatly from the fact that it’s been documented by the Finnish larp photographer Tuomas Puikkonen. His photos are all over the book, and you can see the full set here.

    There are many good larp photographers in the Nordic countries, but Puikkonen distinguishes himself by his ability to be in the moment and capture the subjective feeling of the player.

    The only real complaint that I have for this book is that it’s so short. I could’ve read more about this stuff.

    Cover photo from Tonnin stiflat by Tuomas Puikkonen. Other photos by Tuomas Puikkonen.

  • Saint Summer – A 60’s Tale of Music and Hope

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    Saint Summer – A 60’s Tale of Music and Hope

    By

    Olga Shovman

    Genre: Rock opera
    Theme: Utopia and its Fall
    Setting: Rock’n’Roll festival in the late 1960’s, US
    Sources: Aldous Huxley ‘The Island’, Jesus Christ Superstar, Platoon, Hair.

    The Armageddon: Visions of nuclear war (Play, Roman Vorontsov).The Messiah has been gone for two millennia. The times of rock star messiahs ended half a century ago. We have mass communication galore, but the same questions still stand. In this larp we hoped to find some answers. Many say Jesus Christ Superstar is the best rock opera ever written. Perhaps that’s because the USA of the 1960’s was very much like Judea of the 0’s. In both, the paradigm of the System, the Society, the ‘You are what you do’, the Leader, was being replaced by the paradigm of the Individuum, the Human, the ‘I Do What I Am’, the Messiah. Both approaches have their pros and cons, and Russia nowadays is a battleground for the two (again).

    In JCS, the story of Christ is rewritten as a story of the individual; a story of a idealistic madman who dies, not for idea(l)s but because of other people. By his death he declares his ideals, becoming the iconic representation of these ideals in the minds of people. His personality and deeds are erased, replaced by him as a personification of his ideals. Incidentally, this is as true of Judas as it is of Christ. That story of sacrifice and ascension has been retold in innumerable stories: Hair, Platoon, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest, etc. and played out in many larps. In our larp, we wanted to create a rare opportunity to “strip away th e myth from the man”, experience them in their full complexity, play their stories, and see how myths are created.

    Visions of Utopia

    Vietnam was never far away (Play, Roman Vorontsov).In a sense, the game was set in the USA of the end of the 1960’s and the start of the 1970’s, at a hippie festival; at the same time, it was also set in biblical Judea, and, in more than one sense, in modern day Russia.

    The game space was centered on The Stage. Before the Stage the Saint Summer community radiated out in a rainbow of seven groups. Behind the Stage stood the Wall, beyond which was the System. Between the Stage and the Rainbow, there was a large open space. Completely by accident, in the middle of that space stood a single apple tree, which became, more or less by itself, the Tree of Eden. We placed a toy snake in it. The players then put a haystack under it, and it became the place of much merrymaking.

    There were seven character groups, representing the colors of the rainbow. Each group was historically accurate as to 1960s USA, and each strove towards a different ideal of Utopia.

    This, on one hand, created the conflict, and drove the game forward. On the other, all these teams fit together and, between them, fulfilled every need a society could have.

    • Red was the New Left and Socialists. For them, Utopia was social justice, freedom and human rights.
    • Orange was Brahmins. They sought Utopia through personal transformation, enlightenment through study, meditation and the teachings of gurus.
    • Yellow, the Diggers, were the smallest group. They saw Utopia as the absence of suffering and hunger, and they fed, clothed, and cured everyone.
    • Green, the largest group, were the Free Communes, the Flower Children, the iconic hippies: Utopia as eternal childhood, Never-Never land.
    • Cyan were gonzo journalists. Utopia was the Truth, and all the truth. For everybody.
    • Blue. Bikers. Utopia as freedom. Urban nomads.
    • Purple were the followers of Timothy Leary and Ken Keasy, they called themselves the Brotherhood of Happiness. They saw Utopia as a transcendence, and the freedom to do whatever you desire with your consciousness.

    This rainbow was opposed by the Grays and Blacks of The System, a grotesque, cynical, and very efficient instrument of oppression: Police, Army, State Propaganda, and The Asylum. They, of course, had their own vision of Utopia: order, conformism, stability, sanity, victory.

    Tools and Rules: Sex, Drugs and Rock-n-Roll

    After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

    Aldous Huxley, Music at Night

    Our game, as many Russian larps, was relatively rules heavy. Still, all the rules were carefully tailored to produce the theme and style of play we wanted. Without going into all the details, we’d like to outline the central game design elements that, in our eyes, ‘made the game’:

    Sex, Drugs and the Space Beyond the Wall.

    Game logo: The Wall, The Eye and The Light (Promo material, Dalia Kochneva).Music was the central medium of the game: everything, all the game rules, from sex to fighting to drugs, involved music. In contrast to other games with a musical engine, e.g. Дом в котором Мир звучит/Dom v Kotorommir Zvuchit/The House where the World Sounds… (2012), where every character was enclosed in their own soundtrack, we made music a uniting experience. It was loud, coming from The Stage, as well as being created by the players, and it was as ”Woodstocky” as we could make it.

    Free love was of course an indispensable part of Saint Summer. Russian larpers are quite shy, and most larp restrict diegetic sex or make it taboo. But not here.J

    To express the pervasive nature of free love, the rules defined that anything creative done with music could be considered as having sex, if the participants so decided.

    To express love as sharing, after the deed the players were told to exchange tokens of affection. These depended on the character’s group: hippies gave bead bracelets, leftists pin buttons with slogans, bikers tattoos, etc.

    Drugs came in three types of in-game drugs (we did not count the other stuff). The simplest, weed, was simulated by incense sticks, and it was everywhere. To ‘light up’, one put some appropriate music on, and lit the incense, and anyone could join if they wanted. The players were expected to behave more emotionally and be more emphatic when high, but also to react more emotionally if things went bad. Personal chemical hallucinogens were modeled using play buttons; small MP3 players that looked like pin-buttons with the game logo. Each play button contained a 10-30 minute story that guided the player down the rabbit hole.

    About a dozen such tracks were recorded: a combination of music, sound effects, descriptions of what a character sees, as well as direct orders to do something, and a ”post/after” effect. Everyone could get a button from a Purple group dealer.

    Lastly, every night a shared trip on the Stage, led by the GM’s and joined by everyone, set the atmosphere and, in some sense, agenda for the next day. The first night’s trip, “Celebration of Misbehaving”, was all about breaking free from The System.

    It started as a humiliating lesson in a boarding school, and then morphed into a concert, where four deities: Jesus (accidentally female but it worked perfectly), Shiva, Bacchus, and a native American spirit, led the crowd in a Beatles singalong, sharing wine and chocolates.

    The second shared trip, “Armageddon” focused on the fears of the 1970’s. It started with everyone playing a competitive game of tag, with loud, somewhat aggressive music playing.

    Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll under The Tree of Knowledge (Play, Roman Vorontsov).Gradually the game changed: the ones tagged were told to play dead, and increasingly violent clips were projected onto the Wall: Disney cartoons, then 1970’s street riots, then Vietnam war, and lastly nuclear explosions. At the end everyone dropped dead, the video showed the aftermaths of nuclear war, and the theme song from the Requiem for the Dream was playing.

    Whenever a character crossed the Wall, they momentarily left the game and went into a meta-game ‘limbo’ where player, as an actor, decided with the GMs, as scriptwriters, where to take the character.

    That was done because, in our experience, when the game changes drastically to the worse, many players either drop out of character or lose their motivation to play, and we wanted to give the players a moment to stand back, reset, and look at their character from a narrativist, not simulationist, perspective. We think it worked, because there was very intense game-play beyond the Wall. Some players, however, hated this ‘limbo’, partially because a similar system was used in the larp Стоимость Жизни / Stoimost’ Jizni / The Value of Life (2011), a powerful art-house larp about consumerist society that left many players with a very bad aftertaste.

    Prison, Asylum and Vietnam, locations beyond the Wall, were run by the GM team, providing “Passions”; hard moral choices for the character, pushing them to become either a Messiah or a Traitor (or, in one rare case, both). Those who chose sacrifice got a white rose and died; those who chose betrayal got a red rose and returned to Saint Summer. Players who did not choose at all returned as well, telling stories.

    Of those, especially Vietnam was successful. We invited a dedicated group of players who, for the last seven years, have run a Vietnam war larp. They brought with them full Vietnam war kit, but more importantly, they brought the right atmosphere; the war mentality, the disgust of the hippies. From the start in the ‘Fort Summer’ boot camp, heavy use of obscenity in marching songs stressed the harsh, masculine, polarized world of the war as opposed to the soft and inclusive Saint Summer.

    Endspiel

    At the end of the third day, the police raided and razed Saint Summer; the bulldozers mowed the Wall and the ‘art installation’ barricades. Many left before that. Most groups had traitors. Others stayed. The overt message of the larp was that Utopia is impossible because humans are made to fall. But the victory of the Utopia starts from its ruin. Messiah crucified, paradise lost, Woodstock ended, but in their destruction they create the dream, and the seed of hope.

    To make the players feel this victory from the ruins, to feel this faith that is stronger than facts, we made the ending ambiguous: in-game, in the finale the police laid down their weapons, while the last news flash, released after the game, said that the police shot down everyone who stayed in Saint Summer. Many players did not believe the news flash, and argued passionately. That is exactly the moment we were driving for. The moment of belief that there is no death, that Jim Morrison still sings, that once in history, the Summer is forever.

    The Summer vs.The System (Play, Roman Vorontsov).

    Святое Лето/Sviatoe Leto/ Saint Summer

    Credits: Olga ‘Shaggy’ Shovman, Ekaterina ‘Freexie’ Godneva, Elena ‘Mirish’ Khanpira, Anna ‘Shakty’ Shekhova, Maria ‘Lotta’ Grubaya, Dmitry ‘Mityaj’ Gruby, Xenia ‘Xenyaka’ Kuznetsova, Seraphima ‘Arnaksha’ Melnikova, Mark ‘Qwerty’ Shovman.
    Date: June 13-15, 2014
    Location: Empty field in the Moscow Region.
    Length: 3 days
    Players: 97
    Budget: ~€2,000
    Participation Fee: ~€25

    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: “Roses are blue, violets are green / where will you be when the acid kicks in?” (music drugs) (Play, Roman Vorontsov). Other photos by Roman Vorontsov and Dalia Kochneva.

  • Steering for Immersion in Five Nordic Larps – A New Understanding of Eläytyminen

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    Steering for Immersion in Five Nordic Larps – A New Understanding of Eläytyminen

    By

    Mike Pohjola

    The concept of character immersion has been a cornerstone of Nordic larp discussion for fifteen years. I was surprised by how much the concept of steering introduced last year brought to my understanding of character immersion (“eläytyminen”). In this essay I look at five specific experiences with steering towards immersion, some successful, some not.

    More specifically, I have usually tried to steer towards immersing in cathartic emotional experiences experiences through my character. Most often this has come through experiencing Saturnine melancholy.

    The character immersion definition I work with here is this one:

    Immersion is the player assuming the identity of the character by pretending to believe their identity only consists of the diegetic roles.

    Pohjola, 2004

    In The Art of Steering (2015, Montola, Saitta, Stenros), which is in this volume, steering is defined like like this:

    Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.

    That is, out-of-character motivations guide the character in some direction. In my case, the out-of-character motivation is that of delving deeper in the character, and guiding the character towards experiencing strong emotions.

    Saturnine Melancholy

    When watching movies, I’m most typically moved to tears when the scene deals with generations passing, time moving on, sons becoming fathers, mothers becoming grandmothers, hints of new babies eventually becoming unrecognized names on graves.

    I’ve heard this feeling is called “Saturnine melancholy”, as in melancholy related to time; from the Roman time god Saturn who eats his own son.

    Scenes like the one in The Thirteenth Warrior, where the vikings going to battle recite: Lo there do I see the line of my people, back to the beginning. Lo, they do call me, they bid me take my place among them.

    Or the wedding scene in Fiddler on the Roof, where they sing Sunrise, Sunset: Is this the little girl I carried? / Is this the little boy at play? / I don’t remember growing older. / When did they?

    Why I am particularly prone to Saturnine melancholy is perhaps a topic for another essay. But I have experienced it enough times to know to steer for it.

    Käpälämäki X – Kesäyö

    The Käpälämäki series is a Harry Potter larp series set at the uncanonical Finnish magic school Käpälämäki. I attended the tenth episode.

    My character was Severi Saraste, a bureaucrat from a well known family of dark magic users. He wanted nothing to do with his family, but knew his job and connections depended on them.

    Severi’s job in the larp was to be part of a Ministry envoy overseeing the Käpälämäki school and to make sure the Pureblood kids in the school had everything they needed.

    During the course of the larp, Severi and some students were imprisoned by Aurors (magic police) because of their ties to a secret cabal of pureblood extremists.

    After a few hours the students were released. Neither Saraste nor the conspirator students had said anything. The immersion was mostly to the situation of being in a damp cellar, being interrogated, trying not to be found out. Exciting, but not exactly cathartic.

    Saraste was moved to the attic and left alone to ponder upon his actions.

    After a while of sitting alone in the attic, I noticed my thoughts started to drift away from the larp, into matters of real-life work, family, art, food, and so on. I was running out of inner monologue for my character! I had to steer my larp ship out of these low shoals into the high seas of immersion! But I had no chart.

    I pulled out my Finnish-style lengthy character description detailing Severi’s childhood, contacts, plots, background, dilemmas, tasks, everything. I figured I would have hours to sit alone, so I read it with care.

    Severi only has two choices, neither of which are appealing: he can leave the pureblood extremists and gain freedom but lose everything else, or continue as before, and remain a prisoner of his community.

    But wait… Was he actually offered a third choice now? Come clean to the Aurors, and rat out his whole family? They would go to prison and have no power over Severi Saraste or his career anymore. But did Severi have it in him?

    This was just the sort of emotional hook I was hoping to find by re-reading the character description. It provided the lengthy alone time with the perfect inner monologue. Severi stared out the window, thinking about what to do. On the one hand, this, on the other hand, that…

    And then the in-game radio started playing a sad wizarding jazz song downstairs. Severi could just hear the melodramatic tone, and then the tears came. After I had enough of crying, Severi demanded to see the Aurors again.

    “I wish to change my statement.”
    “In what way?”
    “I want to confess.”

    After that the game took a whole new direction for myself and for many other players, including the Aurors and the other conspirators.

    I had not planned for this in any way, and neither had the character writer Lissu Ervasti. But by chance, steering, and character immersion, I received the full Aristotelian experience. First, an insoluble dilemma (act one), getting into trouble because of it (act two), then a recognition of some inner truth (anagnorisis), and a complete turn of direction (peripeteia), resulting in an outcome that at first would ha ve seemed impossible (act three). (See also Pohjola, 2003)

    The immersive experience would have been just as strong without the turning point, but in this case it happened to serve as fuel for more game content.

    Monitor Celestra

    Monitor Celestra was a big Swedish larp set in the world of the reimagined TV series Battlestar Galactica. The larp was set in the time of the pilot episode, where almost all mankind has just been destroyed by the Cylon machines. Only a handful of spaceships survived and formed a fleet, which included both the military museum ship Galactica, political ship Colonial One, and the research vessel Celestra.

    I played the surgeon on board the Celestra, Dr. P. Albert. (The larp was played three times, and all characters were non-gendered. I named myself Pavel.)

    The written character mostly consisted of group briefs, like Cultural Affiliation: Tauron, Group: Celestra Crew, Subgroup: Medical Staff, and Other Affiliations: Cylon Sympathizers.

    Before the group briefs I had a small chapter summarizing my character as a Cylon loving doctor. Then at the bottom of the description this Cylon loving doctor idea was extrapolated and imbued with playing directions, and out-of-character duties (such as determining the severity of wounds and illnesses).

    The Cylon loving doctor might seem like a fun character to play, but in the actual larp, the understandable lack of cylons and limited space for medical practice made this almost irrelevant. So I was left with very little of the pre-made material being useful.

    We were told to flesh out the characters ourselves, as is quite often the case in Swedish and Danish larps. In Finnish larps the larp design is communicated mostly through the characters, so the “make your own character” style seems strange even for me after a decade and a half of larping abroad.

    In this case we were given a forum, and told to develop inter-character relations there. Fine.

    I fleshed out my character by giving him a wife and family on one of the planets that was destroyed. I made Dr. Pavel Albert a long-haired hippie with a California drawl in his speech to very clearly mark him a civilian and thus contrast him further with the military personnel I knew would be manning the Celestra at some point.

    I decided P. Albert had worked on the Celestra to pay his med school loans, but was now almost done with it, and would get to return to Tauron next week. And I developed some low-key relationships with other players, but unfortunately nothing that would become truly essential in the larp. And, assuming this was a sandbox type larp, I decided the character would try to take over the ship from the eventual military occupation, if push came to shove.

    Like the Cylon loving doctor description, all of these, too, became void in the course of the larp. I ended up having to do a lot of impromptu steering in order to get something out of the larp.

    The aftermath of humanity being destroyed would have been perfect material for character immersion, and even Saturnine melancholy: I am the last member of my family. My wife has just died. My parents had died. 99.99+ % of humanity has died. But during the course of the game (as of the TV pilot), we would be given new hope of a secret thirteenth colony of mankind: Earth.

    Unfortunately most of this emotional potential was made void by the heavy emphasis on action plots, and the breaks in the game.

    The plot model Brute Force Larp Design is discussed in the article The Blockbuster Formula (2015, Fatland & Montola).

    The game was divided into four acts, with a break between each. Sometimes the break was short, at other times we would leave the location for the hostel. There was always a time leap for the characters. Fine. But the dramatic structure that works for television, does not always work for larps: the big information with the potential emotional impact (“Earth exists!”) was always delivered at the very end of the act. Meaning that we never got to play characters reacting to them.

    Similar problems prevented focus on the “everyone you knew is dead” aspect of the setting.

    There were plots elements in the larp, too. Is the ship controlled by the original civilian crew or the military visitors? What side is the Presidential representative on? Does Celestra contact the Cylon ship or the refugee ship? Do we have Cylons onboard?

    I do not know how well these “main plots” worked in other runs of the larp, but in the second one that I attended, the whole system was unfortunately broken (see also The Blockbuster Formula). A bunch of players who had contributed to the larp via crowdfunding and made the whole thing possible were promised a “special plot,” which turned out to be that they were all members of a secret spy organization.

    Their characters were then divided into various groups in high positions, meaning they essentially controlled most of the main plots. During the course of the larp I realized it was not built like the sandbox I expected, and the main plots seemed strangely impenetrable.

    What was left was more like an amusement park, and I started steering in that direction to get some enjoyment out of it.

    It worked like this: Dr. Pavel Albert went to a location, event or person (such as the AI lab, the bridge, the mutiny, the murder, the Presidential Aide, or the Cylon prisoner), and interacted with everyone as much as possible.

    When the situation had exhausted its dramatic potential, he went to a new location. This was most apparent when interacting with GM-played supporting characters, such as the Cylon prisoner. Eventually dialogue with the prisoner started to repeat itself, like talking to non-player characters in a video game.

    These emergency steering maneuvers eventually lead to meaningful, emotional content, too, as Dr. Albert, the Presidential Aide (played in a wonderfully enabling manner by Christopher Sandberg), and a few others started hatching a plan to steal a shuttle and flee from Celestra together.

    Halat Hisar

    Halat hisar was set in an alternate reality where the Palestinian situation had happened in Finland. The fictional Ugric people had been given parts of Finland, and had conquered even more. Many Finns lived under occupation in “South Coast” (corresponding to West Bank) or the Åland Islands (corresponding to Gaza Strip). It was played in Parkano in November 15–17, 2013, and organized by a Palestinian-Finnish team.

    The larp was set at the Finnish University of Helsinki, in divided Helsinki. My character Tuomas Kallo, described as “The Conflicted Realist,” was running for the head of the student council as one of the Social Democratic Liberation Party (“Fatah”) candidates. Other parties were the Party of Christ (“Hamas”), Pan-Nordic Liberation Front, and the Socialist Resistance Front.

    My dramatic function was explained in the character description: “You represent the establishment, and through you, maybe the radical roots of today’s ruling party can be seen.” In this reading I was essentially a younger, Finnish version of Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority.

    Early on in the larp soldiers from the Ugric Defense Forces occupied the university and placed it under curfew. Students and faculty were arrested, interrogated and tortured. During the larp rumors started spreading that my character was somehow in league with the UDF, perhaps giving them information. It was impossible to refute such accusations, but they essentially cost Tuomas Kallo the election and some friendships.

    The big turning point, and cause of emotional turmoil for Tuomas Kallo was a student demonstration against the UDF soldiers. I took the megaphone and lead the group in singing nationalist songs. Some people yelled slogans, others threw stones.

    The other megaphone was held by a fellow candidate, the Socialist Marie Isola (played by Jamie MacDonald). She was the de facto leader of the demonstration, and got into a shouting match with one of the soldiers.

    Things got aggressive, and the UDF soldier shot Marie.

    Somebody called the ambulance, which drove towards the demonstration, but was held by the soldiers at the road block, and then forbidden to get close to the bleeding student. When the medical professionals eventually got to Marie, she was already dead. After the larp we found out this was all pre-written by the organizers.

    Marie’s death was such a blow that it effectively ended the demonstration. We went back to the university building, everyone full of emotions: sadness, shock, bitterness, anger, fear…

    I was ready to let the emotions wash over me. It was time to steer towards Saturnine melancholy!

    For that, I found the perfect Turku-style location for solitary immersion: a lookout tower with a very small room on the top, and in every direction windows to the blackness that is Finnish November. There was even one chair there. Just one, as if it was designed for being alone. Perhaps it was.

    I stared out the window into the dramatic darkness, seeing soldiers marching on the campus. How horrible…

    Had I chosen the right path? Would we avenge Marie? Would we hold a vigil for her? Should I be more radical? What would my father have done, had he not been killed by UDF soldiers? Perfect Saturnine melancholic material for emotional immersion.

    But then I, the player, remembered something! This larp used the Black Box technique, and I had decided to try that. I imagined the emotional potential triggered by Marie’s death would be prime material for Black Boxing, so I took the wheel, made a quick U turn, and walked the stairs down to the Black Box room.

    Unfortunately the Black Box was taken. Many players had scenes to play with Marie: flashback, dreams, “what could have beens”, and so on. Marie’s player would soon play something else, so all this had to be done now. Mohamad Rabah, the Game Master in charge of the Black Box, asked me to wait.

    This called for complex steering: I had to hold on to the emotional potential but not tap into it. To do this, I walked around the building trying to avoid any contact with others who might inflict me with dialogue or plots that would dilute the emotional potential.

    Eventually I made it to the Black Box and played a dream sequence where Mohamad played Tuomas Kallo’s father. After plenty of “What would you do, dad?” and “My son, you already know what you have to do” we concluded the scene. I found it difficult to fully utilize the emotional potential I had come in with, perhaps because I lacked mechanisms for steering Mohamad, or because Mohamad had some other aim with the Black Box scene.

    Some time after the Black Box scene we held a small memorial event for Marie. We raised the Finnish flag, sung some sad songs about how we join our ancestors in Heaven and one day, we, too, will fade from memory. That was what finally made Tuomas Kallo (and me) cry.

    KoiKoi

    KoiKoi was a larp about stone-age hunter-gatherers played in Norway on July 1 – 5, 2014. The larp was played in numerous Scandinavian languages, and us Finns played strangers from a neighboring tribe who had become humans, that is, members of this tribe. My character Duskregn was a loincloth-wearing warrior married into the Bear Family.

    The larp was only a little about any single character’s individual dilemmas and dramas, and quite a lot about the society going about its business. Children becoming men, women and nuk, young men and women traded to other families to bear new children, and the old dying and being remembered. It should have been a perfect opportunity for some Saturnine melancholy, but somehow I never got there.

    All the instances of transformation were ritualized, which made perfect sense for the larp and could easily have added to the atmosphere. So we had a ManRit for children becoming men, a KvinnRit for children becoming women, a NukRit for children becoming nuk, a DödsRit for old people dying, a MinnsRit for remembering those who had died after the previous KoiKoi meeting, and several family rites for leaving one family and joining another. Some families even had washing rites and such.

    Between all those rituals and the getting ready for them, the content of my larp was mostly about hanging with my family, sleeping with people from other families, and dancing and telling stories in the big tent-like house.

    In a modern-day larp I would have brought a book for my character to read during downtime. In this case, the storytelling took that part.

    I listened to stories, performed in stories, and told stories of my own. As a professional writer coming up with stories is something I enjoy doing, and I am quite experienced at it. Unfortunately I ended up steering too much into coming up with stories for others to hear, instead of steering for getting everything out of whatever situation I was in.

    Most of the time I didn’t realize this was a problem, until after the larp. But after the MinnsRit where we remembered the dead, and everybody told stories about their loved ones, I was disappointed to not have really felt it.

    All the elements were there: generations passing, everyone having lost their loved ones, us becoming aware of our mortality and of the fact that others will eventually take our place and tell stories of us. We even had a few ancestors (nuks with masks) watching us. It should have been a cry-fest for me, but it was not.

    During the MinnsRit I spent too much brain-power on trying to come up with a story to tell. I was a recent addition to the AnKoi, but maybe I’d killed one of them earlier when I was still a Stranger. That might be a powerful, emotional twist. But who, and how? And why did they only die now? Or are there actually too many stories, and it’s getting kind of boring, and it takes too long to get through the mandatory memories without me adding new ones?

    What I should have done is steer for experiencing this full on, seeing us in the millennial line of people coming there to hear memories, share memories, and become memories. It is possible that due to my character’s outsider and barely developed past, I lacked points in which to attach such emotions.

    At times during the larp I felt not as my character but only as myself as a hunter-gatherer. Then I tried to figure out a more complex personality or back-story for my character. Maybe I was a spy from the strange tribe who was examining this tribe for weaknesses to exploit.

    One of the designers of KoiKoi, Eirik Fatland, has spoken about how Aragorn in the Prancing Pony would be a horrible character, since he would have no connection to any of the other characters, or the plots amongst the other visitors. But he would have an inner monologue Fatland parodizes as

    I am Aragorn, I am so cool. I am Aragorn, I am so cool…

    Fatland, 2014

    An inner monologue of that kind would ha ve been preferable to having no inner monologue at all.

    For me KoiKoi was a very powerful experience and an excellent larp, but in this sense a failure in steering for emotional immersion.

    College of Wizardry

    College of Wizardry was a Danish-Polish larp played November 13 – 16, 2014, at Czocha Castle in Poland. The larp was set at a magic university in Harry Potter world, almost twenty years after the books.

    I played Bombastus Bane, Professor of Dark Arts. Defence Against the Dark Arts, I mean. Essentially the Snape of Czocha. The professor characters were more or less created by the players themselves, but the organizers were quick to react to our ideas about contacts and plots.

    Bane’s whole family (mother, father, wife) had been in the wizard prison Azkaban since the war portrayed in the books. Bane’s wife had been pregnant at the time of imprisonment, and had given birth to their son Vladimir in prison. Vladimir had grown up in Azkaban surrounded by Dementors and criminals.

    Friday at lunch Bane received a letter informing him that his wife had passed away at Azkaban. I realized this is prime material for heavy emotions washing over me, and immediately steered towards this. I left the dining room for the Dark Forest in order to wallow in these emotions alone. Very Turku School. While I was in the Dark Forest, I realized the playing style of this larp would actually benefit from me making this as public as possible, and decided to make a steering turnabout.

    I returned to the dining hall to attack the Auror Bane assumed to be responsible for killing his wife. The private emotion became a public spectacle. Essentially this meant that I suppressed the emotional potential in the death of Bane’s wife, and created a dramatic scene instead. A scene, which would later on bring more emotional potential to be explored.

    When the immediate conflict was resolved the Auror took Bane to a private location, and explained what had happened.

    “Professor Bane, your wife didn’t die naturally. She was killed.”
    “By whom?”
    “By your son Vladimir.”

    Horrible news for Bane, but great material for emotional immersion! He was very distraught, but didn’t cry his heart out, yet.

    What finally broke Bane’s heart (and mine) was the Sorting Ceremony on the evening of that day. Looking at all the new juniors walking to their houses, and being cheered, Bane suddenly realised Vladimir was nineteen, and this year he would have been a junior.

    My thoughts briefly touched on this idea while observing the Sorting. It immediately triggered a strong, sad emotion. The kind of emotion one normally steers away from in real life. But a larp is a safe space for experiencing them, so I steered right into it. One never knows what one finds when exploring these subconscious emotional triggers, but in this case, my larp ship crashed into an island of gold!

    I started thinking that if Vladimir hadn’t grown up in Azkaban he would have been sorted into House Faust, and Bane would have been so proud. Or sorted into some other house, and Bane would have had petty arguments with his son.

    And Vladimir would be so excited about all those student crushes and initiation rituals and all the ordinary life of the nineteen-year-old wizard. Which would never happen.

    And maybe his mother Miranda would have been there on the balcony with Bane watching him. Which would never happen.

    I cried in and off for an hour about this, first looking down at the ceremony, then afterwards when a student witch took Bane aside and he poured his heart out to her.

    Even though the larp College of Wizardry itself was far from tragic or sad, it provided the backdrop for a great experience of cathartic Saturnine melancholy.

    Conclusion

    Steering is a very useful way for a player to analyze their behavior after the larp. By understanding the idea behind steering, the player can also realize when they are doing it during the larp, and it can make it steering easier, and more fruitful.

    Steering does not need to happen in speech or actions, it can also happen inside the player, guiding for more interesting thoughts.

    I have given five examples of trying to steer towards emotional experiences within character immersion. Some of them were successful, some not: and in the case of Monitor Celestra, I had to abandon that goal mid-game, and steer for something else.

    Only the two last larps mentioned (KoiKoi and College of Wizardry) happened after the introduction of the concept of steering. The concept allowed me to better understand even the larps I had played before it: but in the case of College of Wizardry, I remember actively thinking about steering as I was doing it.

    Bibliography

    Eirik Fatland anmd Markus Montola (2015): The Blockbuster Formula, in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book.

    Markus Montola, Eleanor Saitta and Jaakko Stenros (2015): The Art of Steering, in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book.

    Mike Pohjola(2003): Give me Jesus or give me Death! Published in panclou #7, 2003.

    Mike Pohjola (2004): Autonomous Identities – Immersion as a Tool For Exploring, Empowering and Emancipating Identities, in Beyond Role and Play, 2004, ed. Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola.

    Ludography

    Helinä Nurmonen, et al (2012): Käpälämäki. Finland.

    Alternaliv AB, with Bardo AB and Berättelsefrämjandet, with a team of 85 people (2013): The Monitor Celestra. Gothenburg, Sweden. http://www.celestra-larp.com

    Fatima AbdulKarim, Kaisa Kangas, Riad Mustafa, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson and Mohamad Rabah (2013): Halat hisar. Palestine, Finland.

    Eirik Fatland, Tor Kjetil Edland, Margrete Raaum, et al (2014): KoiKoi. Norway.

    Charles Bo Nielsen, Dracan Dembinski, Claus Raasted, et al. (2014): College of Wizardry. Poland.

    Videography

    Eirik Fatland (2014): What is a Playable Character? Video, 07:30-09:40.

  • Processing Political Larps – Framing Larp Experiences with Strong Agendas

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    Processing Political Larps – Framing Larp Experiences with Strong Agendas

    By

    Kaisa Kangas

    Thanks to it I turned my communist friend into a patriot. And I realized who I really am. This is how a respondent, according to Mochocki (2012), described the Polish tabletop role-playing game Dzikie Pola (“Wild Planes”) in an online survey. The game was set in a period of Polish history dating to 1569 – 1795, and it apparently spawned a vibrant larp scene dedicated to re-enactment.

    The era is referred to as the Sarmatian period, and Mochocki appears to see it as a golden past central to all Polish culture. He gives the quote in a positive tone, to portray the “liminal quality” of the experience of “sarmatization” that the players had when living a nationalist construction in the games and related activities.

    In larp, the asymmetric power relation between the “authors” and the “audience” seems to manifest more concretely than, say, in cinema. One (but by no means the only) difference is that film spectators rarely discuss their experience with the directors.

    However, the contact between organizers and players does not usually end when a larp does. Much of the “sarmatization” described by Mochocki happened outside the actual game events. Often larp organizers have an active role in post-game discussions, which can change the player experience after the game.

    In System Danmarc (2005), a game set in a cyberpunk future, the players experienced living in a slum. At the end of the game, they were shown a documentary where real-life Danish prostitutes, drug addicts, homeless people, researchers and social workers talked about social exclusion and inequality. It turned out that there were people in Copenhagen already living the future dystopia.

    According to Munthe-Kaas (2010), one player described the film as follows:

    I was ready to cry watching it. I wanted to help all those people. Because my character was that way, only now the filter was gone, and it was me wanting to help.

    Munthe-Kaas writes:

    Generally the ending was received very well and many participants afterwards mentioned the film as a central part of their experience. On the other hand, some participants found the ending to be manipulative and politically colored.

    A different example is provided by De tusen rosornas väg (2000) (“Road of the Thousand Roses”). It was a medieval fantasy larp about a war between two nations. On one side, the players sang battle songs provided by the organizers, which created a strong patriotic feeling. At the end of the game, the organizers revealed that the songs were in fact translated from the Hitler Jugend songbook and that many other aspects of the game fiction were also adopted from Nazi Germany.

    Apparently, some of the participants were quite upset by the announcement. But many also said they had come to a whole new understanding of Nazi Germany. (Englund, 2013, p. 44; see also Fatland, 2011)

    In both cases, revealing the connection to reality reframed the larp experience. Perhaps the players felt that the fiction they had collectively created was taken away from them. We met a similar phenomenon with our game Halat hisar (2013). It was set in a fictional occupied Finland that mirrored real-world Palestine. The players knew this beforehand, but some of them were troubled by the way the correspondence to reality was treated in post-game discussions.

    One player brought up the feeling of not being in control of her/his experience anymore.

    One aspect that made the game feel real and intense was that we had Palestinian players. Their presence served as a reminder that the occupation really existed. After the game, many players wanted to know which parts of the fiction were based on reality and which were made up. Upon their request, I wrote a text that clarified the connections and provided references. We put it up on the website. According to some players, this greatly helped the processing.

    Games Without Agenda?

    It is sometimes argued that larps should not have a political agenda or that political topics should be treated in a “neutral” manner. However, every text is written and every larp is designed from some kind of a political perspective. Selecting a topic is already a political choice. When something is referred to as “neutral”, it is usually because it reflects the default assumptions in the society.

    There have been some larps about the Finnish civil war of 1918. To my knowledge, the most recent one was Viena 1918 (2014) (“Viena Karelia 1918”). The head organizer, Mikko Heimola (2014) wrote that he wanted to equally portray both parties of the conflict as farcical, oppressive, and stupid. However, this is a political choice as much as presenting one side as better than the other would have been.

    Games can be political even when they don’t seem to be. What if the organizers of De tusen rosornas väg had never told the players that the songs came from Hitler Jugend, so that they would have been left to believe the game was a harmless fantasy adventure?

    The game would still have been political, just in a different, rather frightening way. Now imagine that the songs were not direct translations from the Hitler Jugend songbook, but had similar themes. Imagine they were really written by the organizers. Imagine that the organizers had never read the Hitler Jugend songbook and were unaware of any connections.

    Doesn’t the case of De tusen rosornas väg demonstrate that the Hitler Jugend songs embodied something that is rather commonplace in “harmless” fantasy? If there had been elements that felt out of place or disturbing, would the players have been so surprised after the game?

    Thinking through the post-game discussion When designing games, the organizers should take into account that they can affect player experience even after the game, in particular if there is a strong connection to reality. Debrief is often viewed as part of the design. Maybe post-game discussions should be seen in similar light, especially as online groups provide a means to continue collective processing for an extended period of time.

    Organizing larps is stressful. When making Halat hisar we did not give much thought to what would happen beyond the after-party. The game turned out more intense than we had dared to hope, so we created a Facebook group for the players to process their experience. The game was an emotional experience for us organizers as well, and in the beginning, I thought I could freely express myself in the group the same way the players did.

    I quickly realized this was a mistake. As an organizer, I was in a position of power and I could not discuss with the players on an equal footing. My posts were interpreted differently, and things I said could be seen as attempts to reframe player experiences.

    Some players felt that participating in the game had forced a political agenda on them in the eyes of the organizers and other players. They felt that everyone in the group was assumed to be, in the words of one player, a pro-Palestinian activist.

    Now that I read the posts again after a year of distance, I am almost surprised at how little controversy there was. Nevertheless, the discussions made me emotional at the time. To correct my mistake, I decided to refrain from commenting as best as I could. Sometimes I did not even dare to “like” comments of others because I didn’t want to steer the discussion.

    However, trying to stay away from all political discussion was a mistake, too. It’s a good idea to give the players space to think for themselves and not to flood them with explanations and information. But nothing happens in a void. There is a political context outside the online group, and it, too, affects the discussion.

    Sometimes it is the organizers’ responsibility to take a stand. For instance, some players criticized Halat hisar for being “one-sided”.

    We made the choice to take the viewpoint of the occupied because the oppressors and the oppressed are not two equal sides. To present them so is to take the side of the stronger party, the oppressors. Some of the members of the processing group were Palestinians who live their daily lives under occupation. Taking this into consideration, I feel that it would have been my responsibility to point out the real-world power imbalance that we wished to tackle by concentrating on the experience of the oppressed.

    In summary, as a part of the design process, larp organizers should think about how they will take part in post-game discussions. A player debrief group is not a debrief group for the organizers, who should be conscious about their positions of power.

    It is important to leave the players the freedom to discuss the game content. However, real-world political context and the diversity of players should also be taken into account, and the organizers have the responsibility to moderate when needed.

    Bibliography

    Tindra Englund (2013): Lajv, ett möjligt verktyg för konflikttransformation? Malmö University. http://muep.mau.se/bitstream/handle/2043/15868/lajv, ett  m jligt verktyg f r  konflikttransformation.pdf?sequence=2 (accessed Jan 10, 2015)

    Mikko Heimola (2014): Viena 1918: Punaisia, valkoisia ja purkmanneja Karjalan laulumailla, Loki. http://loki.pelilauta.fi/?p=2139 (accessed Jan 10, 2015)

    Michal Mochocki (2012): Reliving Sarmatia: National Heritage Relived in the Polish Larp Scene, in States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World, Helsinki: Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

    Peter Munthe-Kaas (2010): System Danmarc: Political Action Larp, in Nordic Larp. Stockholm: Fëa Livia

    Juhana Pettersson (editor), (2012): States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World. Helsinki: Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

    Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola (editors) (2010): Nordic Larp. Stockholm: Fëa Livia.

    Ludography

    De tusen rosornas väg, 2000, Boss, E., Hjorter, J., & Jonsson, S. Sweden. Performance: Larp.

    Halat hisar, 2013, AbdulKarim, F., Kangas, K., Mustafa, R., Pettersson, J., Pettersson, M. & Rabah, M., Parkano: Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura. Performance: Larp. http://nordicrpg.fi/piiritystila/ (accessed: Jan 10, 2015)

    System Danmarc, 2005, Copenhagen: Opus. Performance: Larp.

    Viena 1918, 2014, Heimola, M. & al. Sipoo: Harmaasudet. Performance: Larp. http://www.helsinki.fi/~mheimola/ viena1918/index.shtml (accessed: Jan 10, 2015)

    Video Sources

    Eirik Fatland (2011): Can Playing Games Teach Us About War, Nordic Larp Talks. (accessed Jan 10, 2015)

    This article was initially published in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Students and foreign visitors demonstrate against a visiting dignitary from the occupying government. (Halat hisar, play, Johannes Axner) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

  • Nemefrego 2014 – Old School Fantasy with New Ideas

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    Nemefrego 2014 – Old School Fantasy with New Ideas

    By

    Morten Kjærgaard Tellefsen

    Since 1995, the Danish non-profit organization Einherjerne has made one large fantasy larp in the summer with 100-300 participants. Every larp has built on the experiences of the earlier years, with core elements of the larp being a village surrounded by a magical forest inhabited by mythical creatures. This is the Nemefrego larp series, that is continuously being rewritten with each new instalment, and which functions as a melting point between organizers striving to renew and participants trying to replay the previous game. An organiser using the brands “Einherjerne” or “Nemefrego” sets certain expectations. This can be a two-edged sword. The story of Nemefrego 2014 is about four of those edges.

    Nemefrego 2014 Overview

    A mercenary is happy because he won a competition, but surprised since he for once did not cheat... (Play, Christian Niclas)The Nemefrego 2014 storyline was centered around the election of a king from five great families. Nemefrego larps happen in roughly the same setting and family names are often reused, but just about everything else changes. The reason for this is to make new players feel that they’re entering a brand new larp instead of “the middle of a series”. Some of the larps aren’t even called Nemefrego, though they are part of the tradition. This time, the players were divided into two distinct geographical locations. Most players lived in the town and the tents near it, while a portion of the players were in the forest portraying various mythic creatures. And when we say town, we actually mean something quite close.

    A Pre-fabricated Village

    The people in Einherjerne have built pre- fabricated larp houses, that can be stored in large ship containers since the early 00’s. These can be stored in containers and then quickly be assembled when needed for a larp. This has been perfected to a point where a whole village, including a two-story building and several buildings the size of dining halls are neatly fitted into 40’ ship containers, packed tight from floor to ceiling.

    The containers can be moved by truck and sometimes they are leased or lent to other projects such as Aarhus Medieval Festival or other larps. A mobile medieval town is quite a resource, and several other larp organisations – including the Danish boarding school Østerskov – ha ve copied the Einherjerne idea and now have their own pre-fab buildings.

    Intrigue Play vs. Status Play

    Trading House Cabello posing just before game start. (Pre-game, Christian Niclas)One of the central pieces of Nemefrego 2014 had to do with getting conflicts and plots out in the open, where they would include as many people as possible. This could include gift spending, intimidating, great speeches and the like. The goal was simple: steering the characters towards slowly escalating conflicts and tension, while avoiding resolve until the final hours of the game where conflicts would play out and conclude as publicly as possible.

    We call this play style; “status play”. The opposite, which we call; “intrigue play”, is a style where problems are resolved as quickly and discreetly as possible.

    I empty my mug and placed my purse on the table. “How about a game of dice?” My fellow soldiers encourage the closest prey to participate. A man is about to stand but we all look at him with piercing eyes.“So you think our game is not good enough for you?”. He hesitates and then replies: “but I have no dice”. I smile: “No problem, I have dice you can borrow.”. He sits down, and I extend my arm around his shoulders: “by the way, there are a few special rules concerning the borrowing-dice. Nothing much…”. He stiffens but notices I have a hand on my dagger, and lets go of a sigh.

    Player

    We had many great examples of status play that worked and players who enjoyed it. One thing we experienced however, was that without a central town square, we saw status play reduced to only include small segments of the participants, rather than the majority. A town crier was implemented at some point in the game and made a big difference, since this brought information of various conflicts to many more people. Utilizing a central square seems optimal for this type of play, though. And however much we tried to get conflicts out into the open, we still encountered an old friend of a problem; sleeping bag murders.

    The Sleeping Bag Murder Paradox

    In Danish larps where conflicts are sometimes resolved with violence, and in which the players sleep on location, there is a risk of characters being killed during their sleep. This is a time-honoured (but despised) tradition in Danish larps known as “sleeping bag murders”, due to the fact that most players sleep in sleeping bags. At Nemefrego 2014 it was explicitly stated in the written game material that this was forbidden, but one player did it anyway – bringing several other characters down with him in the vendetta that followed.

    I remember slowly becoming aware of my surroundings. I heard steps and instantly knew someone was in the tent. I also knew I slept with an in-game dagger just out of old habit. But just before I opened my eyes I hesitated. I thought this is stupid. The rules were specific; no sleeping bag murders. Then someone shakes me and I open my eyes and see the weapon in his hand. Seconds later the whole family including us guards were slaughtered.

    Player

    Organizers and participants, whose roles were dead, had a constructive dialogue afterwards and players were reinstated where it was a agreed the story needed it the most. When play styles and rules/ participants clash, having a short break followed by open dialogue including all sides can prove fruitful, as it did in this case. The optimal thing is if things don’t happen when they’re not supposed to, but sometimes it’s also good to have a “what if” plan if going up against tradition.

    A Mythic Forest

    Tension between great families reach a boiling point in the narrow streets of Lidris. (Play, Mai Isager Nielsen)Surrounding the town, in which the majority of roles lived, was a magical forest, inspired by dark mythological folklore. It was meant to spawn stories of gloomy tragedy as well as heroic deeds. Unlike many other Danish larps, which utilize an organizer controlled NPC group – the creatures inhabiting this forest were portrayed by a group of players, with great freedom to incorporate magic and mythic creatures in their stories and roles (some even played multiple roles).

    There were no rule restrictions on the group, and the forest group would continue playing in the forest whether town players would come out or not. Forest creatures would not always agree amongst themselves and they had many power struggles – something town players often ended up being pawns in.

    The forest group’s goal was simple; the creation of great stories featuring a small selection of the other players: Namely those who would understand the genre and play along with the terms set by the forest. The majority of players did not interact directly with the forest- but only hear rumors – creating a mythic feeling of insecurity and a lack of knowledge of what actually happened in the woods.

    Some players were frustrated by this and felt left out because the forest play was not easily available to everyone, but many liked the uncertainty and enjoyed not directly interacting with the magical elements of the forest. Those who entered the forest and actively contributed to the mythic storytelling had a wonderful experience. The town and the forest were in effect two play zones with different visions, rules and narrative styles, even though they were very much part of the same larp.

    Trade in the forest would be conducted in magical promises rather than in coin. Receiving help from the forest meant that you would be bound by a magical promise – something the characters were not always aware they had accepted, even though the players knew it. These could be small actions; accepting a gift could mean you had also accepted a price, even if nobody had you informed of the “cost” of the gift. The price would always be high (relative to the one having to pay it) and the forest would make sure you never forgot your promise. The consequences for breaking a promise were devastating.

    The forest witch and I stared intensely at each other while one of her kin played a flute to keep the faun enthralled in it’s trancelike state. The witch drew a knife (a really nice one, one from this swiss army knife list) from her pocket and offered it to me. I broke eye contact and looked at the metal knife. She asked me if I needed it for my first knight trial. I hesitated but knew she was right.

    I had to bring some of the fauns beard to pass the first test. I took the knife and gazed at the blade reflecting the playful light from the nearby bonfire. The witch cracked a gruesome mocking laughter and only then I realized that by taking the knife – I had also accepted a bargain. She could ask whatever she wanted since I had already accepted. My first born was now promised to the forest…

    Player

    The forest was primarily active at night and most creatures did not go near the town. This enhanced the mystery surrounding the forest. There were certain unwritten rules when entering the forest. The most prominent was that you should not bring metal into the woods since many otherwise peaceful creatures would react aggressively to weapons – and some of these creatures were beings of pure magic and thus immune to mundane steel.

    Ironically one type of creatures would always be hostile – and could only be handled with weapons. This greatly supported the vision of the forest being a dangerous place far outside any town character’s comfort zone.

    This was especially the case for members of the five great families who had to leave their status symbols – swords, which they were the only ones who were allowed to carry – behind. The end effect was of a seducing, intriguing and mystical forest, and those characters who went there never came back unchanged.

    Scenes and characters from the larp (Play, Christian Niclas)

    Nemefrego 2014

    Credits: Einherjerne
    Date: July 17 – 20, 2014
    Location: Forlev Spejdercenter, Skyggelundsvej 3, 8660 Skanderborg, Denmark
    Length: Afternoon Thursday to evening Saturday.
    Players: 112
    Budget: €13,000
    Participation Fee: €110
    Game Mechanics: Status play, simple combat rules,
    Website: http://nemefrego.dk/

    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Bakker-Hviide, one of the great families plotting to seize the crown. (Play, Mai Isager Nielsen). Other photos by Mai Isager Nielsen and Christian Niclas.

  • Painting Larp – Using Art Terms for Clarity

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    Painting Larp – Using Art Terms for Clarity

    By

    Jacob Nielsen

    When I design scenarios, I try to use the terminology from the Nordic larp discourse. But many of thes styles “available” confuse me and my players instead of clarifying what the larps are actually about.

    One of the problems is that many styles are defined by what they are not, instead of what they are. Because of this, I would like to introduce a new way of thinking about larp terminology. The hope is to make my design choices clearer and open my mind to new ways of designing larp.

    I chose terminology from visual art, since that’s (also) about taking something intangible and turning it into something concrete.

    First we need to unmuddle the picture as we know it today. This means that I will try to use only only the necessary terminology that we know from roleplaying today.

    In art we talk about form, media, style and genre to define the work of art. These are the definitions I will go through and try to convert into terminologies that can be used for larp (and roleplaying in general).

    Form and Media

    An artform is defined by its shape or artistic expression, which often is defined by its media.

    Examples of different kinds of shapes in visual art: painting, sculptures, crafts, photography, film and architecture.

    Roleplaying doesn’t have shapes, but is defined by its artistic expressions of interaction. At one end of the spectrum, we find tabletop RPGs, and at the other we find larp. In the middle we find a lot of more or less recognized bastard children; freeform, semi-larp, etc.

    Style

    The style of art depending on the artform. As mentioned before, I will refer to visual art, but to make it even more concrete, I’m referring to styles of paintings in this and the subsequent section.

    The style is a way to frame the art. For an artform as roleplaying the style makes the expression more understandable. To exemplify I’ll go through some painting styles.

    Naturalism and realism seem similar to many, but have their differences. Where realism tries to capture the reality as it is, naturalism beautifies reality. It’s legal to remove or add something from a naturalist picture. This would be prohibited in realism. Also, realism usually focuses on the harsher aspects of life.

    Realism in roleplaying consists of simulations of reality. An example on a scenario which tried to achieve this is the danish larp U-359 from 2004. The larp took place in an actual (decommisioned) submarine. Not only were historical reproduction uniforms included in the participants package, the organizers also clearly stated that the larp would be more simulation than drama.

    Naturalism in roleplaying focuses on the good experience instead of the authenticity.

    A naturalist larp might be a historical depiction of a rural medieval village (like the larp Brakowitz from 1998 did); but one where everyone cared a bit more and where everything was a bit more rosy (unlike in Brakowitz, where things were horrible).

    Impressionism in roleplaying is where the simulation is comprised to make the important part of the game stand clear.

    An example is the danish larp Uden guds nåde from 2009. The important elements were lighted with stage lighting and the rest of the game area was darkened when not in focus.

    In cubism the artist describes an object or scene from multiple perspective at once.

    Cubism roleplaying uses different perspectives simultaneously that are later combined so that each player gets an experience of several viewpoints.

    An example is be the Danish freeform game Circus Without Boundaries from 2013. Here, the main mechanic is that each scene has one or more main characer(s) and several supporting players. The main character(s) can only talk, and must be moved around by the supporting players as lifesize dolls.

    The physical position shows the thoughts of the main characters where the dialog is what the characters actually are doing. A scene could be that the main characters are doing the dishes, and the supporting players change their positions so that one of the main characters tries to strangle the other one.

    Expressionism is about recognizable feelings, and not reality.

    The larp White Death from 2012 was designed for Black Box play. In the game the players are pioneers climbing a mountain, but the climb is too harsh, and they die one after each another until nobody is left. The players can only make special mechanic movements that make it hard to move. They can only speak incomprehensible sounds, but when a character dies, the player shifts to playing the soul of the pioneer, and can now move freely and help the pioneers left to die. Since there is no dialogue, the experience and context is constructed in the heads of the players; in a very personal way.

    There are many styles of art out there, and it’s not like I have definite answers. Some art styles can be compared with roleplaying and can be useful to us – others can’t.

    Hopefully some of these art styles will inspire us to make new kinds of larps, just like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism.

    Genre

    To round off, a few words on genre. In paintings the genre defines the theme of the picture. It can be landscapes, portraits etc.

    These are unaffiliated of the style or form. In roleplaying we normally use literary genres to describe the game. These are normally fine to use, but can give problems regarding sandbox-games. The genre is often confused with style because its rarely these are split in literature. In art we have seen both naturalist and cubist landscape in a painting, but what about a cubist fantasy larp in roleplaying?

    What can you imagine?

    Do it!

    This article was initially published in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: “Museum of Modern Art” by Ingfbruno is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

  • Morgenrøde – A Game at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

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    Morgenrøde – A Game at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

    By

    Anders Ebbehøj

    Morgenrøde (Morning Red) was our take on the Danish hippie movement. Through three acts, 31 players portrayed the peak of the Danish hippie community and their endeavors to establish Denmark’s first grand commune: Morgenrøde – the utopia of their dreams.

    Spanning the late 60’es and the early 70’es, the game showed the communes rise and fall. From an initial summer of love to the grinding frustrations of clashing ways of life to a final collapse, when the distance between Marxist revolutionary and flower power protagonist became too great.

    Our aim was never to re-enact the heyday of the Hippie, or give the players an experience of actually being there. Rather, Morgenrøde was focused on the overarching story. We tried to sketch out a social movement and – more importantly – the consequences for the people who lived that movement.

    A Dialogue with Parents and Traditions – Making Morgenrøde

    Three building blocks of Morgenrøde - beer, Maoism and revolution (Play, Jonas Trier-Knudsen)We had many reasons for making Morgenrøde. First and foremost, we shared a fascination of the time. Most of our parents were young when the rebellion against everything established was driving the counter culture forward. Some were a part of the struggle. Others watched from the outside.

    But none of them can escape the influence stretching from The Summer of Love over the hazy days of Woodstock and all the way to the present. In all their handicraftiness, the hippies made a permanent mark on our culture, which we wanted to explore with equal parts love and critique. We love living in a world of freedoms won by the pioneers of past generations, but we do not agree with all their ways of changing the world. In that way, Morgenrøde was a personal game for all of us.

    Furthermore, we were very much inspired by both recent larps from the Nordic scene – such as Just a Little Lovin’ – and by the Danish free-form tradition, as it is seen at the convention Fastaval. We did not start with the intention of making a hybrid between the two scenes, but that is more or less what we ended up with. The game was split into acts with workshops before, after and in-between, something that has been seen many times before in the Nordic scene.

    We started two of the acts with a free-form scene, meant to capture the vibe of a joint meeting in the commune, where every minute detail of daily life was discussed and voted on. These scenes were run by an organizer who assumed the role of a game master not present in the fiction of the game. By mixing and matching the two traditions, we sought to make a game with the narrative focus of a Fastaval free-form game and the immersive and physical qualities of a Nordic larp.

    Morgenrøde was thus created as a dialogue between both the world of our parents and the present, and between different schools of larp and role-playing.

    Love, Liberation and Revolution – The Themes of Morgenrøde

    Having a toilet window next to the yard provided for excellent scenes (Play, Bjarke Pedersen)The more we dug into the time period and the counterculture the more we realized that the hippies were far from one group. It was a far-ranging movement of everything from Marxist revolutionaries over flower-power spiritualists to bra burning feminists fighting for women’s right to equal opportunity.

    Most spoke about a revolution, but what that meant ranged from the violent seizure of the means of production to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and New Age of spirituality. We chose to limit the themes of the story to love, liberation and revolution, which still gave a number of different interpretations of the purpose of Morgenrøde. The characters were all pre-written and the themes – and clashes between them – were thus worked into the very core of the game. In the end, it was these differences that tore the commune apart.

    One Pill Makes You Larger… – The Mechanics and Design of Morgenrøde

    Trip-master Ole, who was in charge of mind exploration via drug use at Morgenrøde (Pre-game, Jonas Trier-Knudsen)We tried to make our triad of themes as pervasive as possible. We kept love, liberation and revolution as the guiding principles for all design decisions. In our game design, this led us to designing a series of mechanics, which should enable the players to act out the three themes.

    One common thread with these mechanics was a high degree of voluntarism. The players could choose which mechanics to use when, which in turn helped them steer their game experience towards one of the three themes.

    For the political theme we applied house rules for Morgenrøde which the political characters could enforce, mostly via self-criticism, inspired by a quite vicious form of social control, practiced by the Maoists of the time.

    We tried to give the die-hard political a micro society to shape and manipulate. The rules were modified during the free-form scenes of the joint meetings and applied to the inhabitants of Morgenrøde as guidelines on how to live their lives. The three basic rules, which we wrote pregame, were:

    1. Love your fellow inhabitants of the commune.
    2. Fight capitalism in all its forms, together with your comrades.
    3. Expand your mind, and always be ready to experience new things, together with the rest of the commune.

    Seeing as hallucinogenic drugs became somewhat popular among the hippies, we chose these as the game mechanic backbone for the spiritual theme. In our experience, pretending to use drugs during a larp, whether it is snorting powdered sugar or eating candy that symbolizes pills, and trying to fake the high afterwards, never really works all too well. Thus we needed a way for the characters to take LSD without the players having to fake the following high. This became the Drug Box.

    We decided that marijuana and anything like that was recreational and as such would have no effect on the characters, just as drinking a beer (which was nonalcoholic). All other substances were equal to LSD, symbolized by small squares of eatable paper with a white rabbit print on it. Taking LSD was never done alone and affected the relationship between the two or more characters taking part.

    Players remarked afterwards on how natural partial or full nudity had felt. (Play, Bjarke Pedersen)The trips themselves were played out in the Drug Box – a black-box with a white sheet wall which had psychedelic visuals projected on to it and a matching soundscape. An organizer played a spirit guide and game mastered the session.

    The essential thought was that a trip could be good or bad, and that the nature of the trip would decide how the personal relation which the players brought into the trip, would be affected. The art for the spirit guide was to match the psychedelic story of the trip to the changing relationships. This ended up including, but far from limiting itself to: Deer grassing in a grove, two souls trapped in a cellar being flooded, a mother-of-the-revolution carrying her child across the ocean in a train and some forty-odd trippier scenes.

    For the theme of personal liberation we implemented two game mechanics. One was the option for the players to be undressed during the game (with some limitations). This was very optional and not treated as a game mechanic as such. Rather, we tried to create a safe atmosphere, where it was possible for those who wanted to explore that part of the movement. Then there was the “love room” where characters could always go to have sex.

    Many of the original hippie communes actually had these love rooms and as such it seemed like the obvious choice, but it also provided a way for the players to play out sex scenes in relative public, without it being frowned upon. As such we hoped for the sexual liberation to add to the stories.

     

    Three Things We Learned from Morgenrøde

    To us, Morgenrøde was a success. We were happy with the outcome and loved the look and feel. But that, we suppose, is what most organizers would say. So instead of the usual anniversary speech-style finale, here are three things we learned as game designers:

    1. Continue to explore the crossovers. The free-form and Nordic larp-scenes have been merging for some years now. Find the interesting interactions and try the impossible. For us, this meant free-form scenes with thirty players and a highly specialized (and we dare say awesome) way of simulating drugs.
    2. Remember that history is also last year. Historical games are hard and demanding when it comes to gear and accuracy. Games about contemporary cultural history are easier and the players’ knowledge can be a lot more nuanced than is the case with most of the medieval counterparts. We are certainly not the first, but more and more games are exploring recent history. It’s worth it.
    3. Clash of playing culture should concern you. Perhaps the Nordic larp scene is becoming so homogeneous, that we’ve stopped to consider it. But a lesson is that you should always be very clear about how a game is played, the characters should be read and what can be expected when combining players from different national and/or international scenes.

    The cast of Morgenrøde (Pre-game, Jonas Trier-Knudsen)

    Morgenrøde

    Credits: Anders Lyng Ebbehøj, Astrid Andersen, Silas Boje Sørensen, Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo, Søren Lyng Ebbehøj, Klaus Meier Olsen and Jonas Trier-Knudsen.
    Date: August 12-15, 2014
    Location: Græsrodsgården, Kalundborg, Denmark
    Length: 2 days
    Players: 31
    Budget: €6,900
    Participation Fee: €110
    Website: http://morgenrode.dk/

    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: One of the joint meetings where everyone was present to discuss everything from buying a saw to taking away the right of individuals to their own body (Play, Jonas Trier-Knudsen). Other photos by Jonas Trier-Knudsen and Bjarke Pedersen.

  • On Publicity and Privacy – or: How Do You Do Your Documentation?

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    On Publicity and Privacy – or: How Do You Do Your Documentation?

    By

    James Lórien Macdonald

    In 2014, I conducted a survey about attitudes towards photography and video in larp. I got nearly 500 responses from many different countries, and while I would love to publish the full results here, they’re a bit long for the scope of this KP book. The numbers are available at ars-amandi.se instead, and they’re really quite interesting, so I suggest you take a look if you’re organising or photographing any time soon. What I will do here is outline some of the different arguments and thought processes concerning the way we play and the way we document.

    Images and the Nature of Larp

    For good, bad, or ugly, we’ve all been photographed in larps. Someone has managed to catch that moment where your costume looked brilliant and you’re screaming at someone, and damned if you don’t look like a movie star. As organizers, we’ve also probably felt the crushing stupidity of not having recorded anything at a larp, and about three months later finding out that nobody cares about our larp if there aren’t pics.

    We take images, share images, store images, publish images, broadcast images, and print images, in both still and moving form. So we should talk about images in larp.

    Particularly in larp, because as it happens, larps are semi-private (and sometimes transgressive) events. One feature of larp that allows us to play some very interesting things is that the larp is a contained and (ideally) safe space, both physically and temporally.

    Our collective understanding seems to be that transgressive play is at times fun and desired, so we make it possible through a space that is contingent – it only exists here and now, and in the context of a game. You might even wonder whether larp is safe so it can include transgression, or if larp became transgressive because it was “safe”.

    The contingency of a larp is an important feature for many kinds of play, but also for many kinds of people.

    What one player considers transgressive may be less remarkable to another player, and this may simply be a matter of life experience or taste, but can also relate to one’s situation in real life. A schoolteacher may want to play a murderer; a politician might want to play a coked-up rock star; a person in a committed relationship may want to play a fantasy romance; a judge might want to play a slave owner. Larp can offer some freedom of expression and play not only for transgressive or illegal acts, but it offers this to people whose real world lives impose restrictions on what they’re publicly allowed to consider “fun”.

    We like to ask “what if” our world had different norms – for violence, sexuality, social structure, or pretty much anything else we can imagine. I, for one, am an artist and frankly can be photographed doing pretty much anything and it will only help me.

    But I have seen people do things in larps that, if taken out of context, would ruin their career. I have seen people standing next to other players who were doing things that, if photographed, could ruin that person’s career. A third of the survey respondents reported that some in-game photos could cause trouble for them.

    (Speaking of standing next to someone, one of the reasons why Facebook’s own facial recognition software is more accurate than the CIA’s is because Facebook knows who you know, and recognizes who you’re likely to be standing next to.

    Just a fun fact for anyone who thinks that not tagging people by name on Facebook is sufficient to protect anonymity.)

    Larp, as we have been doing it, is not a public performance; everyone present is complicit in the course of action and has both interest and agency in where the story goes. When you sign up, you might have a ballpark idea of what you’d like to do and what kind of activities you’ll indulge in, but I think most players would agree that if you knew beforehand exactly what was going to happen, there would be no point to larping at all.

    Combine this with larp’s famous alibi for indulging in things we can’t do in real life, and this makes most players likely to do or say things that they can’t vet beforehand, and which might not be palatable if taken out of context – in part because the whole point of the larp was to create a context that would not be possible or morally defensible to live out in our real lives. This makes organizers responsible for at least some degree of privacy.

    It’s not exactly a completely private event, either: we trust others – some of them near strangers – with our play. We work towards building this trust in person. And yet, we trust people who are potentially hostile with our images. Images do a great deal of violence to the safeness of a larp. They bring something from within the frame of the larp, outside that frame. They are objects that expand the agreed safe space in a way that is not predictable.

    They have the potential to expand it very far geographically as well as temporally, and they very quickly collapse the context. They take a private-ish event and bring it into public consumption.

    One recent example of this is the Czech larp Hell on Wheels, the first few runs of which included players who darkened their skin to play characters of African descent. This was largely unremarkable until photographs reached the larp community in the United States, where putting dark makeup on white skin to play a black person is inescapably racist and very offensive indeed.

    The ensuing conversation saw accusations of racism towards the Czechs, imperialism toward the Americans, and rather a lot of publicity for the larp in a way that the Czech organisers likely never even considered.

    Was the dialogue useful? Hard to say. On one hand, it often takes an outsider to an in-group to point out where your blind spots are. On the other, can the piece be condemned on the strength of its images alone, without hearing how the topic was handled in-game? Expect this issue to show up again:

    72% of respondents said they’re okay with photos of themselves playing a different social group, class, or culture.

    The Public Image of Larp

    It’s curious that photographs from a larp get taken out of context so quickly – it almost seems as though people are waiting to find something. But perhaps that’s human nature. A photograph of the larp only recalls the event for someone who was actually there; for anyone else, the context stands only on the weight of what is visible in the picture.

    The public does not (yet) understand larpers to be like actors. If Brad Pitt plays a Nazi, we all understand that Brad Pitt is a very cool guy for playing such a hardcore character; in interviews he can even discuss the humanity and interestingness of that role, and we will still understand Brad Pitt to be a pretty cool guy. However, Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi to go to a costume party is apparently a problem, because for some reason the public feels that it sends an ambiguous message as to how he feels about Nazis; after all, he dressed up as one for fun.

    Larpers seem to fall somewhat more on the Prince Harry side at the moment. If you are photographed playing a person dying of AIDS, or wearing black-face, the photograph does not in itself convey any information as to whether this photograph was cultural production (i.e. art) or “fun”, and the overwhelming impression seems to be that you will give off an air of endorsement. And then there’s the Daily Mail (see below):

    Sharp, Aaron. (2013, October 19). It's not exactly Trivial Pursuit. The Daily Mail. Retrieved from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2467492/PanoptiCorprole-playing-craze-Denmark-players-50-hours-straight-pretending-coke-snortingadvertising-executives.html Sharp, Aaron. (2013, October 19). It’s not exactly Trivial Pursuit. The Daily Mail.

     

    Ironically, headlines like this one are exactly why photographs and videos from larps are also needed. The popular view of larps (sorry, ‘LARPS’), which to this day retains the hint of Satanism it’s enjoyed since the 1980s, is one in which a bunch of well-meaning but sadly broken people get together in the woods and push each other psychologically until they can’t tell what’s real anymore.

    Then someone dies, and it’s the plot of a blockbuster movie.

    There will always be a misrepresented “popular view” for those who are outsiders of any activity, just as there is one for contemporary art (“My six year old could’ve painted that”) or sport (“Team sports are just a sublimation of the war impulse”). All of these are created by a combination of images and ignorance. Larp could benefit from having more images in the public – good images, attached to positive advocacy.

    Interestingly, Cosmic Joke’s teaser and 18 min. documentary about College of Wizardry (2014) seemed to attract the “right” kind of press: admiration for a job well done, cool costumes and setting, and respect for the sheer crazy guts to put 120-200 people (depending on which article you read) in a castle for 2-5 days (depending on which article you read) to play as Harry Potter/in Hogwarts/in the Potterverse/in the Polandverse (depending on which article you read).

    It appears to be the first single larp to get global media attention – and what’s more, positive media attention. The trailer and teaser combined had over one million hits on YouTube, among them Warner Brothers execs who had a few words to say about intellectual property – but that’s another essay entirely.

    It should be noted that even the “wtf-type” attention garnered by the documentation of Panopticorp (2013) also caught the eye of people internationally who were interested in running the game; so clearly larpers know how to read between the lines of the Daily Mail. It seems that video documentation in particular is useful for getting media attention, and media attention is, we assume, good for the larp scene. It is certainly helpful for getting venues, financing, and interest for one’s next big project.

    What to Record, When, Why, and How

    It’s quite clear that players love photographs of themselves and their friends; particularly in the 48-or-so hours directly after a larp, players cry out for the visual proof that tells them yes, they were really there and they looked beautiful with all that snot running all over their faces after all their friends died and they had a desolate epiphany about their own existence. Most of us are guilty as charged here.

    No organizer I spoke to would dream of letting a larp go un-photographed. For grant money, for pitches, for clout, for academic research, for being able to contribute to the ongoing creation of the Nordic larp canon, evidence is simply essential. It’s participation.

    Video is a bit more fraught. Most respondents are okay with or enthusiastic about video so long as they know beforehand that it’s going to be there. My biggest beef here is that video crews and larpers aren’t used to each other – the boom operator will put a mic in the middle of a scene, and half of the larpers will shut up because it suddenly feels like filming a TV show and they don’t want to mess it up, or they’ll move out of the shot because they don’t want to be on camera. Video crews can literally alter the plot this way.

    But either way, larp documentation is here to stay. So I’ll finish up with a little bit of advocacy and again invite you to check out the survey.

    Should I Have In-game Photographs?

    Yes, in general. People love them. If you want to be a bit sensitive and avoid affecting play, only photograph public scenes – or have your photographers playing characters, so we can interact with them, pose for them, or tell them to go away.

    Should I Have Off-game Photographs?

    Even better. A surprising number of people (67%) reported they were willing to recreate scenes afterwards for the purposes of photography. I would love to see an organizer design for this – it’s opt-in, and to anyone who wasn’t there, it’s not likely to make a lick of difference. Also, players are often quite happy with one or two decent character portraits.

    When Should My Photo and Video Plans Be Communicated to the Players?

    Before sign-up. A quarter of respondents reported they’d been photographed in-game without knowing there would be cameras present. The same amount agreed that we need photography policies as part of the sign-up process.

    How Many Photographs Do I Need for Documentation?

    I think there’s such a thing as too many photographs. If you want to make a film, go make a film. If you want to make a larp, for goodness’ sake leave players alone and let them play.

    Should My Photographers and Video Crew Be In- or Off-game?

    Respondents slightly favor in-game, by a factor of about 20%.

    Can I Photograph Sensitive Scenes?

    Ask your players. Maybe agree that interrogations or sex scenes won’t be photographed. Don’t assume everyone has the same common sense. Players (60%) reported their immersion gets really interrupted by the presence of a camera in a tough scene.

    Is It the Player’s Responsibility to Tell a Photographer to Go Away?

    Tricky. Some players will not want to go off-game to do this. Some will be playing characters of low agency, and this can affect the agency they take as a player.

    Can I Use Hidden Video Cameras or Gopro’s to Be Less Intrusive?

    Merlin’s Beard, no. Unless you’ve communicated it to your players and they either know where the cameras are, or they are totally okay with playing with hidden cameras, don’t do this. Always allow players to review hidden camera footage.

    Can I Post to Instagram During Run-time?

    No. Unless it’s part of your design, no no no.

    Do Players Really Need to Vet Pictures Before They’re Published?

    It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s their face you’re using, and you might not know what’s okay for them. It’s polite to do so.

    But I Want to Do a Larp Where Photography Is Part of the Meta/rules/world!

    Of course! Most players (78%) would love to play something where photography works as a game mechanic.

    Photos and videos have the power to delight us, make our larps better, improve the scene and help us convince outsiders to take us seriously. Because of the nature of what we sometimes do together, photos and videos – and even just the act of taking them – have the power to violate the trust we place in each other. Larp is not a public performance – 69% of you agreed with this statement. It’s up to us to find ways to keep our hobby dangerous while we show it to the world.

    References

    1. Sharp, Aaron. (2013, October 19). It’s not exactly Trivial Pursuit. The Daily Mail. Retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2467492/PanoptiCorprole-playing-craze-Denmark-players-50-hours-straight-pretending-coke-snortingadvertising-executives.html

    Ludography

    1. College of Wizardry (2014). Charles Bo Nielsen, Claus Raasted, Dracan Dembinski et al. Played in Czocha, Poland.
    2. Hell on Wheels (2013). Filip Appl et al. Played in Czech Republic.
    3. Panopticorp (2003). Irene Tanke, Norway. Documentation from the 2013 re-run, produced by Claus Raasted/Rollespilsfabrikken in Denmark.

    This article was initially published in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Player documenting at Inside Hamlet (Denmark, 2015) by Petter Karlsson is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Retrieved from Facebook.

  • Moon – A Firefly Larp Not Exactly about Firefly

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    Moon – A Firefly Larp Not Exactly about Firefly

    By

    Jindřich Mašek

    How we created a Firefly larp, not exactly about Firefly

    One day the world became too small for all of us. Then we started to settle other planets. Terraformation begun. Things changed. Lot of us became adventures, seeking freedom and independence. But with great power comes great responsibility… None of us had an idea of what the “Alliance” would be capable of…

    Take my home, take my land,
    take me where I cannot stand.
    I don’t care, I’m still free,
    you can’t take the sky from me…

    Words from The Ballad of Serenity, the Firefly theme song.

    What is Moon?

    Moon is a chamber larp (3 hours + 1 hour debrief) for 10 players, situated in the Firefly universe. But the essence of the game lies in something else than in a cool sci-fi/western setting, and knowledge of Firefly is not necessary for playing the game.

    After nearly four years of running Moon, we have decided that it’s time to capture moments from the life of this game. From the first idea that came to mind, to the last weekend when we put our grown-up child in the hands of other teams. This will not be a complete walk-through of the game, but an outline of useful tools for other game designers. We’ll try to describe features in enough detail that anyone can copy them.

    Game Design & Tricks

    Hard decisions have to be made. (Play, Kristýna Nováková)

    First of all, we wanted to write a game not only to entertain people but also to make them think about a certain topic. That is why the whole Firefly setting is just scenery for our metaphor. Beyond a cool surface there is a very-much-discussed topic; the decision made by the Czechoslovakian president Edvard Beneš after the Munich Conference in 1938 (where he decided not to fight against Hitler and to let the country be occupied).

    We wanted to show this difficult decision- making process as it applies to everyday life (“Would I risk the life of my spouse?”) at macro-level political circumstances. Players were not aware of the parallel before playing the game.

    This is also the backbone storyline of the larp which drives the flow of the game and makes it cohesive, but it is followed by a number of smaller relationship-based plots. There were also three time points in the game which served as bottleneck for the players.

    All of these were speeches, which redefined the situation and focused characters back on the main story plot. In the last one, the governor could choose one of the pre- written texts to decide whether the Moon colony would go to war or accept the occupants. That is the way we ensured a dramatic ending of the larp.

    To make the game more authentic all the speeches were based on real historical materials (the Munich Agreement for example). It was a kind of easter egg for players, just like the names of the characters, which referred mainly to important Czechoslovak politicians or characters from well known books of the given period. This was surprisingly highly appreciated by a number of players afterwards.

    The second interesting game design aspect is the storyline itself.

    The whole scenario contains five smaller compact chapters linked together mainly by interpersonal stories and the history of the Moon colony itself.

    Each character took part in 4 of 5 chapters. From the game designers’ perspective it worked well. It was easier to indicate if a certain character had enough content to deal with during the game, and the plot lines were logically coherent.

    We accomplished coherence by a quite simple trick. There was a rule for adding any object or person to the plot: It has to be connected to as many characters as possible. So, for example there were messengers who were carrying important medicine and some message was given to them. But they were killed by another character, who stole both: the message and the medicine.

    There were also someone ́s friends, who were furious about their death. Finally, the fate of the messengers was important for every character. And this brought to the game a sort of complexity where unintended conflicts and links between characters emerged (we used this technique in a more developed way in our newer games).

    However, the chapters and connections were used only as a game design tool; for the players they were invisible. We wrote all the characters in the form of a story. As they were quite long (about 5 – 10 pages), each storyline or important information was repeated at the end of the text.

    Meta-techniques in Moon

    Our intention wasn’t to have a game full of rules, but some game tricks were necessary. After some discussion we picked three (four, after few reruns) of them.

    First of all, there was an “intro” made of three scenes, which were written by us, and so became more like coordinated drama scenes. The reason, why we have decided to use this was in our experience of slow booting of chamber larps in that period and we didn’t want to have a game with a slow beginning.

    This sadly proved that we probably weren’t able to manage them in the right way anyway, because in almost every run of the game, there was someone, who failed to do what was asked. It is possible that just writing a set of non-specific instructions on a piece paper and leaving the rest to the players wasn’t such good idea. The basic problem was probably in the strong chain of specified actions spread among different players.

    A second meta-technique was special costume props. Aside from flags, hats, and so on, we had grey berets and brown pelerins. According to the Firefly universe (and our intention) there are two opposing sides of the conflict, and we needed players to have the possibility to show their affinity to the Browncoats or the Alliance explicitly. Anyone, who was wearing one or another, was for that moment publicly declaring “I am on side of…” This was also used to escalate conflicts between players subconsciously (and was also pretty and cool).

    A third special rule was using a bit of music. For the whole runtime, there was music playing in the background (we’ve spent a significant amount of time picking music that would be fitting – surprisingly using the “shuffle” mode during the first few runs came up with mind-blowing scenes combining tough situations with precise lyrics). And when we wanted to intervene in the game (like radio broadcasts and booting scenes) we’d just turn the volume up, which intuitively made the players listen up for what would come next.

    A fourth added technique was the rule of non-specific informations. It turned out, that players were forced by the large amount of information we had given them to investigate issues in detail. But that wasn’t our intention. So we added a simple rule of “the character who is the expert in a certain field is always right in discussions about that field”. So when the players were talking about something we did not write into the game, it was up to them. We wanted a dramatic game, not an investigation of specific actions in an exact time and space.

    The last specific thing was running a beta test of Moon. We weren’t sure, if everything would go right or not, so we needed feedback to improve the game.

    We picked a group of selected players we knew and ran it in small clubhouse. These players were chosen to fit the characters we’d written and also by their ability to give us the feedback we needed. Thus we were able to improve the game after the beta test.

    Reflection / Feedback

    "This looks photoshoped" - review of the characters. (Play, Kristýna Nováková)The structured feedback was divided into two parts. The first was rather quick. Each player got a chance to briefly summarize their current impressions and emotional state. This simple step helped the players to concentrate themselves on the next parts, as they were given space to express what was close to their hearts.

    This step also served as the first psychological safety check for organizers. More detailed questions followed. We focused on the highlights of the game:

    ”What was the most interesting scene that they did not take part in?”, “When did the character reach the final decision?”, “What was the key argument?”.

    The second part reflected the topic of the game. We created a line, where the ends represented the two poles of a decision: war against a much stronger enemy or acceptance of occupation. Participants were at first asked to choose their character’s place and then their own. Usually it was followed by a spontaneous (but mediated) discussion where a lot of arguments and points of view were mentioned. The last activity was a structured discussion in couples to ensure everyone got time to formulate his or her opinion.

    Afterwards the participants responded that this experience was far away from the prevalent rational historical discussions about what Edvard Beneš should have done at that grave moment of Czech history. It brought before them a completely new perspective to the problem, as they were forced to make a decision themselves in the context of arguments which were all around them. We ha ve never mentioned it explicitly, but as you could see above we implemented a number of indices into the game.

    Moon Release Session

    After approximately 30 runs of Moon we came up with an idea of releasing the game to the public. When we started out, we had decided not to, but time changes things.

    We had been enthusiastic about doing more and more re-runs of the game. But at some point the next year this enthusiasm left us. So we decided, that we’d send it into the world, but not just by uploading it online. That was the birth of the “Moon release session”.

    The idea was to get some fans and capable promoters together and teach them how to work with Moon. We had written an article about what we were up to, and published it on the website larp.cz (and of course pushed it through Facebook).

    We had enough applicants to choose from. Finally, there were 12 people from across the whole of the Czech Republic who learned how to promote Moon. The whole thing took place in a cottage, where we had prepared several activities. From learning the story background, to diving into the game mechanics; both game design and technical stuff. And partying, of course!

    We did not have any proper timetable for running the game, so the participants also had to make their own notes about timing, and how to do it all (the fact that there was no timing for the game was one of the reasons, why we did the weekend session, since none of us wanted to write that terribly long instruction manual).

    Costumes were discussed, and now there is more than one set of the props in existence in the republic. After this session, there have already been several re-runs of Moon not done by us. Which means we’ve reached our goal – the game lives on.

    Conclusion

    We are proud that Moon is still able to compete with newer chamber larps, because the Czech chamber larp scene is evolving a lot and dozens of chamber larps have been written in the last four years. So far, more than forty runs have been done.

    And it’s still flying.

    John Raw, old badass waiting for fulfilment of his old mission (Play, Martin Buchtík)

    Moon

    Credits: Martin “Pirosh” Buchtík, Jindřích “Estanor” Mašek, Petr “Drrak” Platil, Filip Kábrt and Roman “Gordhart” Čech.
    Date: February 2011 – till now (more than 40 runs in total)
    Location: Various
    Length: Game 3 hours, debriefing 1 hour
    Players: 10 per run
    Budget: ~€6,500
    Participation Fee: €2 – €7
    Website: http://moon.madfairy.cz/

    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Despair and frustration. That’s the impact of those situations. (Play, Martin Buchtík). Other photos by Kristýna Nováková and Martin Buchtík.