Larp is a broad-ranging hobby, covering a plethora of subjects and every situation and scenario under the sun, with participants aged from 8 to 80. It is often stated that imagination is the limit – that anyone can play any role – but is that the reality?
We rely on the alibi of larp to allow us to play different roles, the acceptance that the reality of the characters and the setting may diverge from our perceptions. Young can play old and a school can be a spaceship, because we agree it is so.
However, while in a fantasy larp the difference from our reality applies equally to all characters and their players, for larps set in the recent past this disconnect may be less clear-cut. One player’s fictional reality may be something that other players have actually lived through. In these larps, the player’s age and/or experiences may alter their experience and thus the actions of their character.
Are age and generational experience something players and designers need to take into account, and if so, what impact do such factors have on play experience?
Emotions and knowledge
The 1980s and 1990s serve as the backdrop for a number of larps. In some, like Just a Little Lovin’ (aka JaLL, Norway 2011), which is set in the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the era is an integral part of the game narrative.
For many designers and players, these years are just a retro era that provides a cool setting, something they have heard of from older members of their family, seen in TV shows like Stranger Things (USA 2016), or played in tabletop role-playing gamess like Tales from the Loop (Sweden 2017). But older players may have actually lived through these events, so their significance and the emotional associations older players have with them may greatly vary from those of younger players. Such associations may alter the play experience, leading to a bleed-in of personal experiences and emotions that in turn shape the character’s responses.
A personal example from the UK run of JaLL: a 20-something co-player said the music of the early 1980s was cool and retro, but to me it was the music of my teenage years. It brought back personal memories and emotions of the era and its events and wasn’t just a piece of atmospheric set dressing. Another example is The Sisyphus (UK 2018), set in the early 1980s during the Falklands War. Many Brits experienced the conflict first-hand – I was a teenager and recall the news coverage – but for younger co-players, or those from overseas, it was a more abstract idea. My personal experience, my familiarity with the themes and events of the conflict coloured my perceptions of some aspects of the larp.
In both JaLL and The Sisyphus I had prior knowledge of and an emotional connection to the setting that went beyond the material provided by the larp designers. In some regards that helped deepen my immersion – I didn’t need to imagine my response to these events and could draw on personal experiences to shape my character’s actions.
However, the players’ personal connections to the events – e.g. knowing how they played out in the real world – can also be a distraction to the actual game. From a player perspective, the ideal would be to play only off what the character knows. But separating what the character knows (e.g. from briefing notes or workshops) and what the player knows (from personal experience) may not be a straightforward process. It’s also worth noting that strong emotional resonance with the setting of a larp isn’t limited solely to older players, but deeply personal associations are often more difficult to prepare for.
Designing a larp set in a near-contemporary setting may require some consideration of the impact on players who actually lived through that era. Conversely, some larps may seek to exploit this personal connection. One example is the larp Reunion (UK 2023), which is set in both the late 1990s and modern day, with middle-aged players and characters. In such cases, the challenge may be to create an even experience between those players who lived through this particular period and those for whom it is a more abstract piece of history.
The social and technological changes even within the 21st century can also lead to wildly different perceptions and experiences among players. Players in their 20s and 30s have had easy access to such modern technologies as mobile communications, the internet, and digital music their whole lives, which is not necessarily the case for older players. Going back even 25 years involves a massive shift in the availability of these technologies, making some near-contemporary larp settings almost an alien world to younger players. By contrast, older players may still recall those days and the challenges and activities associated with them, such as postal orders or cheques to send money, collect phone calls, dial-up modems, and library index cards.
If these kinds of older technologies are to feature in a larp, designers may need to take steps to bridge the knowledge gap between younger and older players. Much like workshops explaining the social etiquette in a 1920s high society larp, there might need to be workshops for using the now obsolete technologies in retro-modern larps. A good example of this is Midsummer Disco (Germany 2023), set in the eighties, which had workshops explaining how to use some technologies of the era, such as how to use a cassette player – and how to rewind cassettes with a pencil!
Physicality
Player’s age has yet another impact on their play experience through their physical abilities. In school larps, such as College of Wizardry (Poland 2014), many play characters that are significantly younger than themselves. When larps have major physical elements such as sports matches, the players’ physical abilities may become a factor to consider. Can all such obstacles be cleared by imagination?
In some larps, such as Legion: Siberian Story (Czech Republic 2014), this is clearly not an option. The physicality of marching and fighting in hostile conditions is an integral part of Legion and the physical reality of the player is the physical reality of the character (a significant challenge for this 50+ year old).
But in other larps, imagination can be used to circumvent physical reality. In Avalon (Poland 2018), teenage characters raced to the top of a hill, fighting monsters, to capture a flag. Many of my younger co-players ran up the hill, but as a fifty-year-old player less physically capable of that feat, I instead slowly ambled up the hill. My 17-year-old character would have raced up that hill, and when asked about it later, no one disputed it when he said he had. Similarly, at Sahara (Tunisia 2020), some players did not participate in a long desert march but instead travelled to the next location via modern transport. It was agreed by all that these characters hadn’t vanished and miraculously reappeared, but had always been there with the others.
Conclusions
We should acknowledge that age can be a factor in play, be it because of differences in knowledge and experience or in the physical capabilities of the players. The ideal that anyone can play any role is a good aspiration, but it may not always be attainable. As a broad generalisation, it would be good to accept that older players may have more real-world experience to draw on in near-contemporary settings, whereas younger players may often be more physically capable. The ideal larp will blend the two, allowing players of all ages to combine their knowledge and experience into something greater than the individual parts.
Ludography
Avalon Larp Studio. Avalon. Poland, 2018.
Carcossa Dreams. The Sisyphus. UK, 2018.
Chaos League. Sahara. Tunisia, 2020.
Dziobak Larp Studios. College of Wizardry. Poland, 2014.
Edland, Tor Kjetil and Hanne Grasmo. Just A Little Lovin’. Norway, 2011.
Hintze, Nils. Based on the art of Simon Stålenhag. Tales from the Loop. Sweden: Free League Publishing, 2017.
Duffer Brothers, Netflix. Stranger Things. USA, 2016.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Hartford, Chris. 2024. “Experience vs Imagination – Effects of Player Age.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
I vividly remember the first time I played a villain. After years of always opting for and being cast as the sweet and innocent characters, I signed up to a larp with a group of friends and dared ask the big question: “Can I try playing the villain?”
Thus started my travels down the road of larp villainy – a travel filled with plenty of bumps in the road! Already during the larp, I started feeling increasingly bad. And after the larp concluded, I became riddled with guilt. I felt physically sick from what I had done to people I cared about, being the manipulative and scheming horror of a person behind many of the transgressive actions of the larp.
I started doubting myself: Since I had been capable of playing that character, did it mean I was secretly a terrible person? After all, it might have been imaginary, but it was my brain that imagined it – every thing I said and action I took came from somewhere inside of me. Not just the character, me.
Now, many years later, my minor identity crisis has subsided, and I have managed to not only come to peace with playing a villain, but to enjoy a good antagonist story.
As a part of that process, I developed a strategy (or a series of steps) to help me play an antagonist in a way I find both manageable and rewarding, as well as help with the potential negative emotional effects both during and after the larp:
1. Don’t be the lone villain.
It can be an isolating experience playing the antagonist, so team up beforehand with someone you trust. If you are able to create an in-game relation to the person, make sure it’s one that provides positive interactions and doesn’t fall apart immediately, when confronted with your actions. If you can’t establish such an in-game relation, make sure you at least have the support off-game, e.g., someone who checks up on you, makes sure you take care of yourself, someone to brainstorm horrible actions with, or confirm you are indeed not a bad person in reality.
2. Know your boundaries.
A villain can be and do a multitude of things. Consider what kind of villainy you are capable of and interested in portraying – and what you should steer away from. An antagonist can be everything from the physically and emotionally violent spouse or schoolyard bully, to the disengaged leader causing the suffering of hundreds with their actions (or lack thereof). What kind of play, themes, or actions are difficult or impossible for you to do? What is a soft limit you might want to explore, and a hard boundary you shouldn’t cross? It is as essential for you as the pretend-perpetrator to know and respect your boundaries, as it is for the pretend-victim.
3. Understand your character’s motivation and beliefs.
Unless you play an evil cartoon villain, most villains don’t perceive themself as evil. They act according to their moral compass, however flawed that might be. Consider how your character justify their actions and explain away their behavior. What is at the center of their decisions, driving them forward, and what brought them to this point? It’s both easier being antagonistic if you feel excellent – or righteous – doing it, and potentially horrifying to everyone else observing it.
The author in the larp Høstspillet. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen. Image has been cropped.
4. Prepare your play and potential interactions.
Playing a villain puts you in the role of the aggressor, often having to generate new ideas for transgressive actions towards multiple co-players. It can be tiring and draining, both regarding energy and capacity for new ideas. First step is to consider what your low effort villainy is like. What can you always do if low on energy? Some mean bullying, hateful glaring, or sabotaging someone else’s life and relations? Secondly, can you plan some (inter)actions ahead? Either pre-calibrated scenes with other players (especially good for the start of a larp, as it kicks everyone, including yourself, into action and sets the tone) or “a catalogue of evil ideas” you can draw inspiration from during the larp.
5. Let your victims be creative.
See if you can make your victims come up with the perfect transgressive actions towards them. After all, they know what would hurt them the most. It can both be done in-game, which might even add another layer to the scene, making them tell you how to hurt them, or as a part of an off-game calibration, with the player of the victim brainstorming or suggesting ideas to you. Do, however, make sure you don’t end up as a facilitator of their larp. Their ideas might not match your character’s motivation and beliefs (no.3) or even more importantly, it might be against your own boundaries (no.2).
6. Steer for a conclusion to your character.
Consider what kind of ending you want your character to have. Do you want your villain-self to suffer for their actions? To experience redemption and forgiveness? To ride off into the sunset, preparing their next villainy deed? You might not be able to decide yourself, and it might change throughout the course of the larp, but steering for catharsis of your antagonist story arc, can add value to your experience – or be a full stop separating you from your character. It is especially relevant, if you are suddenly facing an ending you are not comfortable with, e.g., revenge from your victims. Remember to consider your boundaries. You might be comfortable playing the perpetrator, but not comfortable ending as the victim. And that is okay.
7. Check in with your victims – and yourself!
Checking in with your victims is necessary to make sure they are okay, the larp is safe for them, and the interactions aren’t crossing their boundaries. But it is equally important to check in with yourself, especially after hard scenes! What do YOU need? A comforting hug? A cup of coffee? A nap or a positive interaction-break? Being behind the transgressive actions can be just as emotional and taxing an experience as being on the receiving end. Use your support-person (no. 1) if necessary; your victim might not be the one wanting to hug you right after the scene – and that’s okay too.
8. Plan for larp aftercare.
Consider what do you need after the larp has ended, after all, villains might need aftercare too. Your needs are valid, even if they might not be possible to fulfill. You might want to change out of your costume to distance yourself from the character – or stay in costume to reconnect it with yourself. Maybe a hot shower is at the top of your list, or a sit-down conversation with your victims? Maybe you want to sit by yourself and digest the experience in peace? Some of it you can plan for, like packing your favorite snack and a soft sweater, other things require specific facilities or interactions with co-players. Be mindful of how you can best take of yourself, while also being mindful of your co-players and their needs. Sometimes you might need a little more help, especially if you find yourself cast as a main antagonist at a larp. In that case:
9. Collaborate with the organizers.
Villains don’t exist in a vacuum, and what seemed like an excellent plan prior to the larp, might fall short as soon as confronted with the runtime reality of the game. On location organizers can often help improve, steer, or brainstorm solutions with you, if you find yourself and your character stuck in a bad situation and/or dynamic.
Cover photo: The author in the larp Høstspillet. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen. Image has been cropped.
“Everything is a designable surface”, as the larp designer, writer and theorist Johanna Koljonen (2019) says. This means that every single aspect of larp can be designed for particular effect: scenography, characters, workshops, communications, costumes… Even the absence of design can be designed. You can make the conscious design choice to leave a particular aspect of the larp open to the chaos of emergent play.
In many larp productions, the designer of the larp is visible to the participants. Perhaps they post about the larp on Facebook, run workshops or chat with players arriving at the venue.
If we take Koljonen’s maxim seriously, we have to conclude that the person of the designer is also a designable surface: how they dress, talk, come across. Is the designer stressed and angry or relaxed and reassuring?
The Second Run
In 2021, we made two runs of the larp Redemption (Finland 2021) and in 2022 we did two runs of another larp, 3 AM Forever (Denmark 2022). I was working with different teams but there was a subtle yet noticeable phenomenon in both larps: the first run had a nervous edge and the second run was more relaxed. This is one of those qualities that’s hard to quantify but when you run a lot of larps, you learn how to read the energy of the crowd. Running the larp twice back to back makes it possible to subjectively compare the vibe of two sets of players.
So what could cause such a difference?
For the players, the run they played was their first experience of the larp. Although there were minor adjustments, neither larp underwent substantial revision between runs. It was just the same larp, played twice.
However, one thing was different. Me. Us. The organizers. Talking with participants preparing to play the first run of both larps, I was nervous. We’d never run the larp before! Would it work? Of course I tried to keep cool but humans are often very good at picking up subtle social cues, especially in groups undergoing an intense process of socialization.
At the workshop of the second run of both larps, I felt relaxed, buoyed by the knowledge and experience gained from already running the event once before.
I started to wonder: was the nervous edge of the first run caused by the nervousness felt by us, the organizers? Did the players pick up on our emotional state and mirror it, the way humans often do?
Designable Surfaces
What are the different areas that can be designed for in terms of how the participant interacts with and experiences the designer?
Examples are social media, workshops and runtime, and discussing the larp after the event, for example at conventions or on messaging apps. There’s also a difference whether the organizer who’s interacting with a participant is someone tasked to do that, or a team member whose main function is something else.
Social media. In many larp productions, the first interactions are online. Social media posts, answering questions on Discord and Facebook. Maintaining a friendly persona is easier when communications are not immediate. If a prospective participant gets on your nerves, you can take a break, breathe, and then respond instead of going with your first reflexive take.
It’s a good idea to agree in advance who speaks with the voice of the larp in public, online spaces. This can be done by one person only, or several, depending on your chosen communications strategy. What matters is that everyone who speaks to participants projects a friendly persona and knows what they’re talking about. You should avoid disagreeing with each other in public as that damages the credibility of all communications very quickly.
The tone of online communications also matters. Going full corporate can backfire because it makes the larp feel sterile and unfriendly, not the communal experience so many larps strive to be. The question of the right tone varies by the individual but I usually try to go for a personable but somewhat official persona.
To be official, it helps not to reply to messages late at night and to keep the language and syntax correct instead of casual. You should avoid sharing personal emotions unless they’re positive ones related to organizing the larp: “I’m so excited to meet you all on site!”
To be personable, you can share carefully curated personal emotions related to the running of the larp: “I love seeing player creativity bring the larp to life!” You can empathize with individual players in a positive way and share updates from the larp team’s process: “We’re meeting with the team today!”
You have to find a way to use your own personality in a manner that feels natural to you, otherwise you risk sounding fake and alienating. If your communication feels forced to you, it might be a good idea to re-evaluate it.
On location. I recently played in the larp Gothic (Denmark 2023). The venue was a mansion in the Danish countryside and each run had only ten players. t. When we came to the venue, there were organizers busy making the larp run but always also someone whose job it was to talk to us. To sit down with us in a relaxed manner, asking after how the journey to the larp went. The workshops all followed this pattern, leveraging the larp’s limited number of players to make each interaction friendly.
This is an example of designing the designer.
When players arrive, they often feel nervous and jittery. They haven’t yet settled into the flow of the larp and they’re worried about all kinds of things, from their own play to food or accommodations. It’s enormously helpful if there are relaxed organizers present.
Chatting with the players is an organizer task. It should fall on those team members who have slept properly and maybe even enjoy talking to players. Meanwhile, the stressed-out scenographer should be allowed to build in peace.
Workshops are an obvious area where organizer presentation matters a lot. The energy projected by those running the workshop carries over to the larp. It’s important to feel that the experience is in safe hands, that you can trust the people you’re with and that everyone is friends here.
In situations like that, designing the designer means sending out the team member who can put on the most convincing facade of reassurance to talk to the players.
After runtime. The period after the larp event is the trickiest one in terms of designing the designer because of the question of how to set boundaries. When does the responsibility of the larp designer end?
Excess
It’s easy to be idealistic when designing the designer: we should always be accessible to participants, respond to every need and be available for emotional support forever even after the larp has ended.
The problem with this approach is the limited nature of the human being. If we demand everything of ourselves, we risk exhaustion and burnout. Because of this, part of the process of designing how you come across is about boundaries.
Before the larp, perhaps you’re only reachable via a specified channel, such as an organizer email address. You won’t do larp business on Messenger in the middle of the night.
During the larp, perhaps issues related to the wellbeing of individual participants are handled by a dedicated safety person. This way, the stresses of running the larp won’t cloud handling the needs of individual participants.
All of these design choices are about the wellbeing of the organizer. That too is part of how to design the designer. The best way to appear relaxed and cool in front of the players is not when you learn to fake it, but when you’re genuinely not suffering from intense stress. When you feel good, your participants feel good.
Bibliography
Johanna Koljonen (2019): Essay: An Introduction to Bespoke Larp Design. In Larp Design, edited by Johanna Koljonen, et al. Bifrost.
Ludography
3 AM Forever (2022): Denmark. Juhana Pettersson, Bjarke Pedersen, Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo & Johanna Koljonen.
Gothic (2023): Denmark. Avalon Larp Studios.
Redemption (2021): Finland. Maria Pettersson, Juhana Pettersson & Massi Hannula.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Pettersson, Juhana. 2024. “Designing the Designer.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Cover photo: Photo by John Hain. Image has been compressed.
In this article I outline the methodology behind the creation of the film Jyrkänne – The Cliff (2022), which is the artistic part of my doctoral thesis, Näkymä ajan ulkopuolella. Maiseman apokronia ja valokuvallinen affordanssi elokuvassa (2023, Eng. Beyond the Temporal Horizon. Apochrony and Photographic Affordance of the Landscape Image in Film), from Aalto University. The production of The Cliff played a pivotal role in shaping the methodology of my artistic research. Specifically, it explores the distinctive temporal aspect of landscape imagery within the realms of photography and film. Artistic research, by its nature, is an open-ended process that often necessitates the development of innovative methodologies, unique to the artist’s work and research. To bring The Cliff to life, I harnessed immersive techniques borrowed from larp, integrating them into my artistic photography process.
Introduction to the Work
The Cliff is a nine and a half minutes short film, consisting mainly of black-and-white photographs. Categorized as an essay film, it features a narrative composed of fictional notes and letters. The film’s narrator is also its creator, or rather, the creator’s alter ego – a common feature of essay films (e.g., Rascaroli 2017, 183) which often lean on the filmmaker’s subjective experiences. The textual inspiration for The Cliff draws from the films Trans-Siberia – Notes from the Camps (Cederström 1999) and La Jetée (Marker 1962/64). Additional sources for the text include films Le Sang des bêtes (Franju 1949, Eng. The Blood of Beasts), Night and Fog (Resnais, text by Cayrol and Marker 1956), Lettre de Sibérie (Marker 1957, Eng. Letter From Siberia), Hiroshima, mon amour (Resnais, text by Duras 1959, Eng. Hiroshima, My Love), India Song (Duras 1975), and Two Uncles (Cederström 1991).
The inspiration for The Cliff stemmed from the political situation of 2015, labeled as the “Refugee Crisis” in Europe. This crisis saw the number of asylum applications in the EU more than double compared to the previous year (Pew Research Center 2016). In response, Finland tightened its asylum policies (Finnish Government 2015, 1; Bodström 2020). The Cliff was born out of the need to address a situation where human suffering was dehumanized into a “refugee crisis,” turning those in need of help into a faceless mass, an “unmanaged flow” (“hallitsematon virta” in Finnish) in the government’s program (Finnish Government 2015, 1). In Europe, especially in Northern Europe, there is a prevalent expectation that others – labeled as the outsiders – would seek help from us. I wanted to imagine, even on a superficial level, what it would feel like to be in a situation where I had to flee for my life. Using methods often used also in larps I contemplated being a refugee in a foreign land, where I didn’t understand the language, and a situation where I had lost contact with my loved ones. I read first-hand experiences from refugees and began creating a character of myself – writing simple notes about my background and about the character’s feelings and thoughts.
Photo by Katri Lassila
The film narrates the journey of a woman compelled to leave her homeland due to an unspecified crisis, leaving her beloved behind. She ends up as a refugee in a foreign land that they have previously visited together. Traveling by train with a group of fellow refugees, she writes letters to her partner, yet never receives a response. Upon reaching a bustling city, she breaks away from the group and stumbles upon an ancient pilgrimage route. Overwhelmed by the smoke from sacred fires, she loses consciousness and experiences a vision of her spouse. Moved by this apparition, she resolves to embark on a journey to a cliff etched in her memory from a prior visit to this same country with her partner. On the way to the cliff she experiences the landscape becoming alive around her. Finally reaching the destination she sees herself and her spouse kissing on the cliff. The last image shows a partially exposed film frame of just the cliff, with the couple disappeared.
In my dissertation, I propose (Lassila 2023, 162–163) an interpretation of the ending in which the woman realizes that she is looking at her own memory. She understands that interfering with the memory would shatter it, so she decides to stay on the cliff, becoming a part of the landscape, and preserving the memory to maintain a connection with her beloved, whom she will never meet in the real world again. In line with Deleuze’s (2005 [1985], 66–94) philosophy of the time crystal, time fractures at the cliff, branching in different directions: into the past and the future, cyclically complementing each other.
The Inspiration for The Cliff
A significant source of inspiration for The Cliff was Chris Marker’s iconic short film, La Jetée (1962/64). La Jetée unfolds in a post-Third World War dystopian future. The victorious faction conducts experiments on prisoners of war from the defeated side, seeking to harness a new source of energy from the future for the world’s reconstruction. With the aid of a serum, time travel becomes possible, and the film’s protagonist is first sent back in time, guided by his vivid memory. The memory from the man’s childhood features a young woman at Orly Airport in Paris, with a terrified expression. Using this memory as a temporal anchor, he embarks on multiple journeys into the past to reunite with her, ultimately also succeeding in traveling to the future and accomplishing his mission. Instead of remaining in the future, he yearns to return to the past to be with the woman. As he arrives at Orly Airport to meet her, armed enemies who followed him shoot him before he can reach her. It is revealed that the powerful memory of the woman’s horrified expression represents the man’s own death, etched into his childhood recollections.
La Jetée is composed of photographs, with only one brief sequence featuring moving images. Most of the film’s images were captured in a single afternoon, according to Chris Marker (Darke 2016, 25–26; Film Comment 2003) himself:
“It was made like a piece of automatic writing. I was filming Le Joli mai, completely immersed in the reality of Paris 1962, […] and on the crew’s day off, I photographed a story I didn’t completely understand. It was in the editing that the pieces of the puzzle came together, and it wasn’t me who designed the puzzle. I’d have a hard time taking credit for it. It just happened, that’s all.”
Upon closer examination of La Jetée‘s production process for my dissertation, I found reproductions (Bellour 2018, 218) of its contact sheets. These sheets not only revealed to me the type of camera used but also suggested the method employed to capture the images. Marker was already an experienced photographer during the production of La Jetée, specializing in documentary-style photography. Upon examining the contact sheets, it became evident that Marker’s shooting technique for La Jetée closely resembled that of a documentary photo essay or a picture story (Lassila 2023, 105). In a photo essay, the photographer commits to the theme by photographing often several images of the subjects, thus treating the issue from various angles (Monteiro 2016, 495). In La Jetée‘s photographs, the characters’ movements and expressions flow seamlessly from one frame to the next. For instance, the film frames used in the scene where a woman witnesses the man’s death depict the woman in several photographs in nearly identical positions. This led me to conclude that these shots were captured rapidly, one after another, without lifting the camera from the eye between frames. Rather than instructing the woman in individual photographs, Marker seemed to have encouraged her to immerse herself in a specific emotion, which he then captured through multiple consecutive shots.
This shooting technique, combined with Chris Marker’s account of the filming process of La Jetée, suggests an approach more akin to an alternative art form than traditional cinema. I interpret the creation of La Jetée as a collective immersion into the characters and a form of larping documented through photographs, rather than traditional filmmaking.
Photo by Katri Lassila
The Production Process of The Cliff
Artistic research has been actively developed in Finland since the 1980s, with that specific term gaining prominence instead of “practice-led” or “practice-based research” (Arlander 2013, 7–8). Artistic research typically revolves around the artist’s own experiences, art, and insights generated throughout the artistic process. The first artist-written doctoral thesis in Finland was accepted at the Sibelius Academy in 1990 (Arlander 2013, 9), coinciding temporally with the rapid growth of role-playing and larping culture in Finland. Despite being a relatively recent addition to institutionalized academia, artists have been conducting research long before it was part of degree programs. Similarly, the roots of larps extend further back than the 1990s, and may be traced to performances, 1960s happenings, and artist-driven immersive events, even though these cannot be fully compared to larps (Stenros 2010, 304).
The production process of The Cliff employed larp techniques to immerse the participants, myself and my spouse, into the narrative. Larps often emphasize emotional engagement with characters and their feelings. Jaakko Stenros (2010, 306) notes that, “While books tell and theatre shows – the experience is conveyed through sympathy and empathy – larps make you enact and experience first hand.” In my own experience, weighty and emotionally charged themes especially benefit from collective exploration within larps, fostering understanding and emotional acceptance within the game and beyond. Themes such as fear, uncertainty, war and societal upheaval, inequality, and disasters have inspired for instance the larps Ground Zero (Finland, 1998), Europa (Norway, 2001), 1942 – Noen å Stole På? (Norway, 2000), Halat hisar (Finland, 2013) and Seaside Prison (Finland, 2022) to address topics like refugee experiences, impending nuclear war, the Palestinian conflict, and humanitarian crises.
Photo by Katri Lassila
The production process of The Cliff was unconventional for a film production. It was designed to immerse the participants into the experience of a refugee, fusing larp elements with filmmaking and photography.
Here are some key aspects of the production process:
Larp-Inspired Immersion: A fundamental element of crafting the film involved the use of larp techniques to immerse both myself and my spouse in the narrative. This immersive approach aimed to evoke authentic emotions, deliberately blurring the lines between fiction and reality.
Improvisation: I left the narrative storyline open and undefined in advance, allowing room for improvisation. Filming locations were not meticulously planned, enabling the surroundings and landscapes to naturally shape the final outcome, rather than the other way around. I looked for natural and constructed surroundings which would remain ambivalent. I wanted the places to remain somewhat detached from time and space, so that the viewer couldn’t deduce right away the filming year or specific location. I wanted the film to look like it could have been photographed at almost any time, either in the past or in the future. The film was shot in remote locations across China, Tibet, and Finland, accentuating the characters’ isolation and the uncertainty they faced.
Temporal Experimentation: The utilization of black-and-white analog film introduced a temporal dimension to the project. I opted for a 35mm Leica M3 to capture rapid sequences of images, in contrast to my usual camera, a Rolleiflex, which could only fit 12 negatives on a single film roll. The only moving image sequence in the film was recorded with a digital camera and deliberately slowed down to blur the distinction between still and moving images.
Narrative Structure: The Cliff incorporated narrative structures influenced by La Jetée to delve into the subjective experience of time. The film’s structure, particularly in the final scene, mirrored the disorienting nature of the characters’ journey and blending of the reality with memories.
Methods of Immersion in The Cliff
In the production process of The Cliff, I embraced the shooting method of La Jetée, capturing a significant portion of the film through the same continuous shooting technique. The pivotal scene of the film features the main character’s spouse walking across a frozen lake, pulling a heavily laden sled behind him. It’s a scene that the main character envisions on the pilgrimage route. I directed this scene by asking my spouse to immerse himself in the character’s experience, portraying a war-weary individual leaving the battlefront in search of his beloved. The journey is long and fraught with peril. My spouse, also an experienced role-player, wearing my grandfather’s military coat from the Winter War era, effortlessly channeled the desired atmosphere. We did not rehearse the scene in advance; instead, we sat silently in a dimly-lit old smoke sauna, allowing ourselves to absorb the atmosphere and prepare mentally before venturing onto the ice.
The Cliff was primarily an emergent creation, devoid of a polished script or detailed shooting plan. In the film I reversed the gender roles compared to La Jetée, following the Adventure Romantic ethos (Lassila 2008, 110–116; see also Kalli & Lassila 2010) developed by myself and Laura Kalli in the early 2000s. The film’s main character is a woman – an agentive figure who decides to break away from her group of refugees and embark on a journey to the cliff of her memories. I immersed myself in the story and continued to develop it throughout the filming in China and Tibet in 2016. My immersion was primarily based on observing the landscape and recalling genuine memories while studying it. I summoned shared memories with my spouse, reimagining our moments together and approaching the landscape with fresh eyes, as if I were a refugee rather than a tourist. My inability to understand the language spoken around me added to my sense of alienation. The long train journey from Xining to Lhasa facilitated the deepest immersion into my character. During the multi-day train ride, especially on the brink of sleep, I sometimes lost track of time, uncertain about the time of day, the day of the week, or even the year. It was as if I were slipping out of time and place. Altitude sickness, causing nausea and dizziness as the railway reached altitudes of over 5000 meters, may have contributed to this disorienting experience.
The development of the final scene of The Cliff was shaped by the landscape where it was set. The concluding scene unfolds by Nam-Tso (གནམ་མཚོ – The Heavenly Lake) in Tibet, situated at an altitude of nearly 5000 meters. We spent the night in a small shack by the lake, but during the night, I began to feel unwell. I didn’t know yet that I was pregnant, and maybe because of that I experienced severe altitude sickness, to the point where I could not stand upright on the morning of the shoot. Eventually, I was unable to walk to the chosen filming location. The final shots of the film were shot by my son Aarni on a low hillock, before our concerned guide insisted we leave. Immersing myself in pain, loss, and conflicting emotions during the final scene of The Cliff was simultaneously straightforward and challenging. Physical discomfort intermittently severed my immersion in the narrative, but at the same time channeled these intense emotions as part of my immersion. Ultimately, the experience and its unforeseen circumstances emerged as a more potent story in real life than in the one I had written for the film. Our daughter Meri entered our lives like a miracle during this journey. In the end, this expedition transcended its role as a mere component of my doctoral thesis — it became a voyage during which we brought our daughter home from the Heavenly Lake of Tibet.
In conclusion, The Cliff is an artwork that explores the convergence of three art forms at their intersections. It is a film composed of photographs with one short sequence of moving image, and its fictional-documentary narrative was conceived using larp immersion techniques. An essential facet of the narrative’s development was the natural environment and landscape where it was shot. The process of creating The Cliff ignited new artistic inspirations, not solely within the realms of photography and film, but also in the domains aligning landscape and larp. The environment in larps, which is often scrutinized primarily for its temporal incongruities with the fictional setting, can also be a powerful source of immersion and engagement.
In my doctoral dissertation, I introduced the term “apokronia” (Eng. apochrony) derived from the Greek words από (apó) and Χρόνος (Khronos) (Lassila 2023, 73–74). Apochrony signifies the positioning of something outside of time. In my dissertation I explored apochrony in the context of landscape imagery in film. According to my interpretation, an apochronic landscape image in a film can depict any possible time or even all times simultaneously. Since an apochronic landscape image typically lacks discernible signs of a specific moment in time, it can be utilized to represent any time. The application of similar apochronic landscape utilization is also achievable in larp. If a landscape lacks clear signs of a specific moment in time, the landscape seamlessly functions as the event environment in connection with any possible time: the present, the past, or the future. However, the role of apochronic landscape in larp, as in film, goes beyond being just an event setting. It may be argued that internal immersion may be catalyzed by the external world so that the surroundings have a strong effect on the player’s overall ambience during the larping experience. This however may be experienced even further so. During the filming of The Cliff I felt the ambience of the surrounding world and the landscape to become one with my inner experience. This, in turn, changed the way I experienced my surroundings.
Photo by Katri Lassila
The apochronic landscape opens the path to interactive immersion in a setting where the landscape is akin to one of the characters in the larp. Engaging with the landscape in larp allows interaction not only with other players’ characters but also with the landscape itself, offering a unique reflective surface for immersion. The “rückenfigur” or “back-figure,” an image often used in films, stemming from the art of Caspar David Friedrich, provides one fruitful model for interaction with the landscape. When positioning myself to view a landscape unfolding before me from a high vantage point, I can direct my emotions towards the landscape and let them reflect back to me, thus fuelling, for instance, the feelings of longing, sorrow, anger, or love. In the spirit of Deleuzian time crystals, immersion may flow in multiple directions simultaneously, with the surrounding landscape serving as both a source of inspiration for immersion and a reflective canvas for its expression. In this understanding, the post-humanistic agency of the landscape extends the repertoire of larp techniques, promising novel possibilities for future immersive experiences.
Erna Bodström (2020): Viisi vuotta pakolaiskriisin jälkeen. Politiikasta. Retrieved 10.09.2023. https://politiikasta.fi/viisi-vuotta-pakolaiskriisin-jalkeen/
Chris Darke (2016): La Jetée. London: British Film Institute & Palgrave.
Gilles Deleuze (2005 [1985]): Cinema 2. The Time-Image. London: Continuum.
Film Comment (2003): Marker Direct: An interview with Chris Marker. May–June 2003 Issue. Retrieved 10.09. 2023. https://www.filmcomment.com/article/marker-direct-an-interview-with-chris-marker/
Finnish Government (2015): Hallituksen turvapaikkapoliittinen toimenpideohjelma. 8.12. 2015. Valtioneuvosto. Retrieved 10.09.2023. https://valtioneuvosto.fi/documents/10184/1058456/Hallituksen+turvapaikkapoliittinen+toimenpideohjelma+8.12.2015
Katri Lassila (2008): Adventurous Romanticism. In Playground Worlds, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 110–116. Helsinki: Ropecon Ry.
Katri Lassila (2023): Näkymä ajan ulkopuolella. Maiseman apokronia ja valokuvallinen affordanssi elokuvassa [Beyond the Temporal Horizon: Apochrony and Photographic Affordance of the Landscape Image in Film]. Espoo: Aalto Arts Books, Aalto University.
Laura Kalli and Katri Lassila (2010): Silmäpuoli merirosvo. In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 182–191. Stockholm: Fëa Livia.
Charles Monteiro (2016): History and photojournalism: reflections on the concept and research in the area. Revista Tempo e Argumento, Florianópolis 8(17) s. 489–514. jan./abr. 2016. Retrieved 10.09.2023.
Pew Research Center (2016): Number of Refugees to Europe Surges to Record 1.3 Million in 2015. Retrieved 10.09.2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2016/08/02/number-of-refugees-to-europe-surges-to-record-1-3-million-in-2015
Laura Rascaroli (2017). The Essay Film. Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments (2009). In Essays on the Essay Film, edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, 183–196. New York: Columbia University Press.
Jaakko Stenros (2010): Nordic Larp: Theatre, art and game. In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola. Stockholm: Fëa Livia.
Films
Two Uncles (1991): Kanerva Cederström (Director).
Trans-Siberia – Notes from the Camps (1999): Kanerva Cederström (Director).
India Song (1975): Marguerite Duras (Director).
Le Sang des bêtes (The Blood of the Beasts) (1949): Georges Franju (Director).
Jyrkänne – The Cliff (2022): Katri Lassila (Director). Aalto University.
La Jetée (1962/64): Chris Marker (Director).
Lettre de Sibérie (Letter From Siberia)(1957): Chris Marker (Director).
Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (1956): Alain Resnais (Director) & Jean Cayrol and Chris Marker (Text by).
1942 – Noen å Stole på? (2000): Margrete Raaum & al. Herdla, Norway.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Lassila, Katri. 2024. “The Cliff – A Case Study of Interdisciplinary Larp Methods for Artistic Research Practice.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
“Gijs, they’re plotting a coup against you,” Anne said on day two of the Serious Larp we organized for 30 managers of the United Nations in Geneva.
A few months earlier, a director at the UN had asked us to design a training with the learning objectives of ‘showing more creativity’, ‘taking risks’, and ‘thinking from the end user’s perspective’. To achieve those goals, we created a Serious Larp. In other words, a larp where the first question you ask as an organizer is: “How do we ensure that the participants learn something from it?”
Serious Larps are one of the types of Serious Games that we design as ‘Live Action Learning’ (www.liveactionlearning.com). Larp is a form particularly suited for learning in social situations; about teamwork, navigating complex organizations, or as leadership training. Essentially, anything where a group of people tries to achieve something together. For some forms of training, larp is a better method than other methods of (role) playing because:
All participants are involved simultaneously instead of watching.
Making it safer and easier to participate
You can mimic an entire organization or social system
The learning effect is greater because your body is also involved, not just your mind
Participants have much more influence on the story
People can experiment more with learning points because they have an ‘alibi’ as they are playing a character.
Back to the United Nations: We started with an empty primary school and 30 heads of department from the Geneva office. Two days later, we ended up with 30 actively engaged ‘parents’, a coup, and an innovative new school. And the participants had come up with the coup entirely by themselves. How did we get there?
Setting up the playground and hiring teachers
In that empty primary school, with two acres of playground around it, we created a new reality. A reality in which 30 parents were opening a new, innovative school. The fictional parents were tired of the current system and wanted the ideal school for their children. We set a clear metaphor for their work and also chose a setting that is light-hearted & recognizable.
Teambuilding for the parents, while designing their own school. Photos by Philippe Hug & Gijs van Bilsen
In the story, the parents had to make difficult choices together about the new school they envisioned. Hiring teachers, deciding on a grading system, and the layout of the school and playground. All with the children’s interests in mind. Of course, the school inspection has requirements before the school can open. But how do you, as a parent, deal with those requirements if they don’t necessarily contribute to your child’s happiness?
30 children, specially designed for this scenario
Because ‘thinking from the end user’s perspective’ was the main learning objective, we wanted a compelling metaphor for that end user. So, we ‘designed’ 30 children. Of course, there were no real children present. We wrote 30 profiles, with photos and children’s drawings made by Artificial Intelligence. These fictional children were very different from each other. From clever inventors to mindful philosophers, from eco-warriors to new peace negotiators. In this way, we ensured different interests, symbolizing the interests in their work, without burdening the fiction with the real-life problems of the participants themselves.
One of the children (left) that we created, displayed on large posters throughout the building. Photos by Philippe Hug & Gijs van Bilsen
Everyone can participate in their own way
When we create such a Serious Game, especially if it’s a Serious Larp, we ensure that participants feel comfortable and can easily participate. We also always provide space to step out of the game and have roles in which people contribute to the training but play less of a character. So, we create a two-day event in which everyone can participate in their own way. You can dive in deep, but even if you don’t, you’ll still grasp the learning objective.
In extensive workshops, the participants got to know the fictional children we had prepared. The characters the participants played were the parents of those children. This means that the participants created their own character, deciding for themselves whether they wanted to resemble their child or play something else. We gave the participants a lot of freedom to decide how they want to participate. If you wanted to play a more extreme type, you could. If you wanted to play a character you could learn something from, that was possible and if you just wanted to be yourself with a different name, that was fine too.
Feel free to have fun with this
It’s important for people to give themselves permission to play. One of the most fun ways we help people with this is the prologue. In the prologue, we play out a piece of the game that the participants only need to watch while they are already in their role. The facilitators, actors, or a few pre-informed participants ensure that something interesting happens.
At the UN, we asked a few participants beforehand to actively participate in the prologue. In this case, we asked them to, in their role, put pressure on the ‘director’ (played by Gijs) during the opening speech. Suddenly, the rest of the room sees participants standing up and actively participating. It’s incredibly fun, especially when these participants also start ‘arguing’ among themselves. This gave a wonderful signal: ‘This is the level of participation that is completely okay. Feel free to have fun with this.’ In larp, some people use the term ‘herd competence’ for this.
What did it yield?
This scenario was created to challenge the participants in a fun and accessible way to be creative, take risks, and think from the end user’s perspective. During the extensive debrief at the end, it turned out that the participants had indeed picked up on these learning objectives. Other results we received from the participants were:
They had a shared experience that they won’t forget quickly (they even organized an ingame reunion a few months later).
They connected with each other on a much deeper level, making them more supportive of each other.
They had fun playing out conflicts between characters. They said they learned that they could see a business conflict more as something you ‘play from your role or function’, while being able to see the person behind the role as more sympathetic.
By playing innovative parents, they learned that they were more creative than they thought.
They simply had a lot of fun together.
And what about that coup?
And what about that coup? Well, on day 2, the school inspection was scheduled to come. That meant there was still a lot to be done. On day 1, we, as facilitators, still helped to make it easy for people to get into the story. We did this as NPCs: the school principal and the gym teacher. On day 2, we wanted to put as much responsibility as possible on the participants by having the ‘director’ say, ‘I don’t see how we’re going to make it, I’m at my wit’s end.’
That worked well; the participants had already had fun in their roles and felt so involved with the school and the children. And as those parents, they were soon whispering amongst themselves, ‘Why is he even the director? Shouldn’t we hire a capable person for that?’. And so it happened that we, as game masters, found an organized coup in the coffee room, where Gijs was deposed as the fictional director, and the parents of the primary school ‘International School De Genève’ took matters into their own hands.
Of course, all with a big wink and a lot of laughter. Because nothing binds people together as much as having fun together.
We really want to promote larp further, also as a serious learning method. For more information about our activities, please contact: www.liveactionlearning.com
Cover photo: The main entrance of the school we were allowed to use. Photos by Philippe Hug & Gijs van Bilsen
If you are a larper with any kind of limitations that affect your ability to play, the first thing you may think of when you see a listing for a new larp is not whether it is exactly your kind of thing, but whether you would be able to participate in it at all. Not for reasons of schedule clashes, but because of these other limitations.
Players with limitations, be these physical, mental, psychological, or something else entirely, will often feel like they are missing out on the full experience of the larp they are attending. Many larps – even larp as a hobby in general – are known to be physically, mentally, and psychologically demanding, and players need to know in advance if they will be able to engage with the larp to the same extent as everyone else, or to an extent that they are happy with. Transparency in larp design is what makes it possible for players to judge these things, which is why, for us, it is one of the most important tools for accessibility.
Accessibility is about looking out for people. Players come to your larp because it looks interesting and they want to have a good time. Thinking about accessibility and disability from the very beginning of your larp design, as well as communicating it clearly from the beginning, signals to players that they are explicitly included and that the designer has put thought into the wide range of people who might want to play it. Accessibility is about showing responsibility for players and the player experience as much as you can and should as a designer. Of course, you can never be wholly responsible for everything that might happen within a game, but to paraphrase Maury Brown (2016), you have power over what your larp allows, prohibits, and encourages. You control what the larp expects from players and whether this is reasonable for everyone who might want to play.
Ideally, accessibility should be proactive, not reactive. Disabled players often have to do the work themselves to figure out whether a larp will be accessible to them, rather than being able to rely on clear accessibility information from the organisers. This can be very draining and can make disabled players feel discouraged from larping at all. When accessibility information is not included, disabled players can feel that they haven’t been considered and that their experience at the larp is bound to be lesser than their abled co-players. Implementing accessibility proactively into your larp means that you consider what is and is not absolutely essential to how your larp is run, and you consider what you need to implement to make sure people with varying levels of ability and different limitations can participate in the larp to the greatest extent that is possible. A side-effect of this, as an organiser, is that your vision for the larp becomes much clearer.
Accessibility in larp is (and isn’t!) many things, depending on what your larp is about. If your larp’s foundation is about players being in the dark and all unable to see, lack of light would not factor into your larp’s accessibility in the same way as it would if the larp was not based on physical darkness. However, if a fantasy larp is set in a fairy glade with dim lighting, and if this would pose a problem for larpers with reduced vision, the lighting could be increased since this is not essential for the larp’s vision.
When you design a larp, it does not have to be accessible to absolutely everyone. For example, Legion (Czech Republic 2014), a Czech larp, takes place over a 25-kilometer hike over two winter days and, according to the larp’s website, hunger and tiredness are at times an “inevitable” part of the larp. This means that someone who uses a wheelchair, or someone with a chronic illness, would very much struggle with the essential parts of the larp and would not necessarily be able to participate. This does not make Legion a bad larp or brand it “inaccessible.” No larp can be accessible to absolutely everyone, whether that be due to themes of trauma, the amount of physical activity it requires, or something else. But designers should be intentional about their design. It is ok to exclude people if the heart and goal of the larp simply would not ever be able to accommodate people with certain limitations – such as someone with severe asthma trying to play Luminescence (Finland 2004), a larp in a room full of flour. But if designers are able to open up their larps to people without compromising what the larp is actually about, they should bake that accessibility into their design.
You should be able to explain the state of your larp’s accessibility to yourself – what is it about the heart and soul of your larp that means some people will not be able to play it? Ideally, the people that your larp excludes are the same people who would not want to participate in your larp anyway and would agree that the larp would always be inaccessible to them, such as how Legion necessarily requires walking 25 kilometers as an intrinsic part of its design. Accessibility in larp is not about making every larp accessible for every person, but making them as accessible as their designers’ intrinsic visions allow them to be.
Of course, navigating player limitations takes different forms depending on the medium of the larp, whether it is played in person or online. Some people may experience severe concentration fatigue when larping over video chat, meaning that live-action online games are inaccessible to them due to the nature of the medium. Others have a much better experience larping online in the comfort of their own home, and find that they are less able to concentrate or larp “well” when attending an in person event.
We would be remiss to not also explicitly acknowledge psychological safety in this article. Accessibility is also about what a player can expect to experience during a larp, which becomes difficult if the larp has hidden features. In our opinion, knowing a secret beforehand will not diminish the ingame experience of keeping it or having it exposed. At Høstspillet (Denmark 2023, Eng. The Autumn Game), every character’s background and all lore material was open to everyone – their secrets, traumas, deals, alliances, ambitions, relations and topics. During sign-up, people could tick off boxes with what topics they didn’t want to play on. At the briefing, the organisers emphasized that “a safe larper is a good larper.” We believe that by helping players manage their expectations and giving them the agency of playing within the framework but also around individual pitfalls, you create not only safer larps but better larpers too.
There are as many limitation combinations as there are larpers. Ultimately, the decision on whether the larp is not accessible for someone comes down to the individual larpers themselves. People love knowing exactly what level of control and agency they do and do not have, and transparency in design choices will help each larper decide if a larp is accessible to them. Accessibility is not binary, even for one person. People can have different limitations at different times, and they have to make the choice on whether they can or cannot participate in a larp for themselves. Players want to be able to get everything that they can out of the larp experience, and satisfying play is achieved by having the access and agency you need to get the play you want, within the constraints of a larp that could allow for that play. Disabilities complicate this, but if the organisers have given thought to accessibility and how to support players in different ways, it will be much easier for all players to participate in the larp to the extent they wish to.
As a larp designer, it is not your responsibility to make your larp accessible to absolutely everyone. But you should try to make it as accessible as its core vision allows it to be. If the larp excludes someone, it should be because the heart of the larp truly cannot be realised in a way that allows them to participate, not because their needs were not thought about at all in the design process. Hopefully, the future of larp is one where the only reason someone would forgo a larp is because they simply wouldn’t want to participate in it in the first place.
Legion (2014): Czech Republic. Rolling o. s. et al.
Luminescence (2004): Finland. Juhana Pettersson, Mike Pohjola, & Mikko Pervilä.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Livesey-Stephens, Beatrix & Gundersen, Bjørn-Morten Vang. 2024. “Player Limitations and Accessibility in Larp.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
At the end of 2019, I wrote an article on the commodification of larp (Seregina 2020), suggesting that larp has become a commodity and analysing the activity from a commodification point of view. The topic felt timely and sparked a lot of interesting and important discussions. In this article, I return to the topic of larp as a commodity, taking a look at it in a context that is defined by numerous crises. We are at a point in time where financial resources are becoming scarce for many, while a need for communal activities is high.
Before delving any deeper, it is central to note that the development of larp into a commodity is, in many ways, a logical development within contemporary society, a society which largely functions around consumption-oriented logic. This forms what is commonly referred to as consumer culture (see Slater 1997; Baudrillard 1998; Bauman 2001; Cohen 2003). Hence, the commodification of larp, in itself as a development, is neither good nor bad. It merely follows the development that has become commonplace within contemporary society. In fact, commodification comes with many positive aspects.
For example, a commodified larp becomes more accepted and legitimised in wider society, as it takes on familiar legal and financial forms, as well as clearer producer and consumer roles. Thus, in reflecting structures common in society and taking on a financial element, larp becomes a more ‘acceptable,’ ‘worthwhile’ use of one’s time. Commodified larps also gain more streamlined production processes, as elements become optimised and repeatable. Hence, creation and production of larp can become easier and faster (for more on this, see Seregina 2020). However, it is important to be aware of what these developments do to larp as a practice in its entirety, as the positives do not come without the negatives (no matter how hard we try).
The terms consumer and commodity can often feel cold and removed, and hence larpers often do not want to think about their beloved hobby as part of the market economy. However, ignoring the fact does not address any of the issues that the development of larp into a more commodified form brings with it, and may potentially even make them worse. While I do not believe commodification in itself is bad, I do believe that it can result in negative outcomes for our community if left unchecked. Hence, I would like to re-address the topic of larp as a commodity and reflect on what it means for larpers to become consumers.
Co-Creation of a Commodity
What exactly does larp as a commodity mean? Commodification is often incorrectly equated with paying money for something, as well as with passively interacting with something. However, it is more about the form of and attitude toward a thing (Campbell 1987; Slater 1997): larp becomes a commodity, as it becomes a resource within the exchange economy. In other words, it becomes valued not for what it is, but for what capital (whatever form this may take) it provides in exchange for people engaging in it. This capital is aimed at fulfilling a want or need, and can be financial, but also cultural or social capital, such as status or experience. The latter would be more common in the context of larp.
Following the above, co-creation or active participation does not exclude something being a commodity. Commodification rather becomes an issue of what participants (or now consumers) expect from the activity, and what their attitude toward it is. In fact, many traditional commodities are becoming co-created or gamified, as it has been shown that an actively interacting consumer is more engaged and thus more invested (for example, Oli Mould (2018) talks about the commodification of creativity overall). In that sense, larp fits perfectly into how contemporary markets are progressing.
As I explain in my 2020 article, larp has developed into a commodity via various characteristics and circumstances, including increased media coverage, rising growth and demand, as well as inclusion of elements from the market economy (such as catering, cleaning services, etc.). The latter ties into the idea of us ‘buying back’ our leisure time in order to use our time and resources more efficiently (following Frayne 2015). In essence, many convenience commodities, such as microwave meals or cleaning services, allow us to free up the time we would normally use to engage in their creation (such as cooking or cleaning). While ‘buying back’ time allows organisers and participants of larps to focus more on the larp itself instead of all the chores that come with it, it also means that we engage less materially with the practicalities of the event, thus tying larp into consumerist norms. In other words, as we ‘make’ less of the larp ourselves and together, it becomes created for us and thus removed from us as a commodity functioning through forms and structures of consumer culture.
Another important aspect of how larp becomes a commodity is rooted in how we talk about it. The past years have seen us change a lot of terminology and description of larp toward a more commodified and consumerist logic. Society in general is extremely performative, in that social meanings exist merely because we have decided to collectively give them these meanings, repeating the same meanings over and over (following Austin 1962, Turner 1987). Coming from this logic, things have meaning and status and value because we actively give them that meaning and status and value. For example, something is posh or stylish only because we have collectively decided that these things are posh or stylish. Hence, when we call larp participants “customers” or when we call sign-ups to larp “ticket purchases”, we further instill the essence of consumerism onto larp through wording it as such.
Photo by Pixabay, Pexels
The Customer is Always Right
If an activity becomes approached as a commodity, its user naturally takes on a consumer or customer role. This is a role that we are extremely accustomed to in today’s society, as we are acculturated into it within consumer culture, and take it on in many contexts (such as service and shopping situations, but also governance, education, and culture). Hence, we slip into the role of a consumer very easily, without necessarily recognising it as such.
The consumer role comes with its own preset modes of interaction with the service provider (in this case, the larp organiser), other service users (other larp participants), and the product itself (the larp). A consumer is driven by their wants and needs, and fulfills these by consuming products (Campbell 1987). While attending a larp may have a multitude of underlying goals (which I will not go into here), we could roughly sum these up as the want to have a good experience (whatever that is classified as). However, the consumer is only driven by their own needs and wants. This does not mean consumers become passive or exclusionary: as I mention above, a consumption experience can be very interactive and co-created. However, the end-goal of such an experience will always be one’s own experience, with other participants becoming a part of the background or potentially even seen as service providers along with the larp organiser. The co-creation will thus not be on equal terms, but rather as a consumer and producer, with the former holding a lot of power over the latter in terms of expectations and demands.
At the same time, the consumer relinquishes any responsibility over the product (following Slater 1997; Ritzer 2001; Cohen 2003). The product is created by the service provider, and hence its value is created during its production. However, the complex issue with larp is that its production and consumption are, in many ways, overlapping processes that cannot be distinguished or disentangled. We create larp as we consume it; forever an ephemeral process. As I noted in my 2020 article, in the long run, this loosening of responsibility may lead to collapse of communal larping as everyone merely focuses on their own experiences.
In itself the consumer role is in no way problematic, as long as it does not undermine the organiser and the other players. However, one big issue I see arising is what happens when someone has a bad time. Obviously, if it’s a safety concern or another similar matter, these need to be dealt with properly by the organiser. But what happens when someone does not have an experience that has lived up to their expectations? Or they don’t feel they’ve got their money’s worth? From a commodification point of view, the organiser should be fully responsible for the consumer having a good time, yet this is not necessarily feasible in the way larp is set up now. I address this further below.
Moreover, who will be seen as the producer? A larp organiser naturally falls into this role, even as they may not have as much power in it as a producer would traditionally. But what about the crew and the volunteers? And potentially even more active players participating alongside? This set-up may result in some players falling into the role of a service provider without actually having anything to do with the organisation of the larp, skewing power relations in dangerous ways among participants.
Pressure to Professionalise
Photo by Albin Biju.
There has been a strong push to organise larp more professionally and to view larp organisation as work (not to be confused with labour). This is, once again, a very logical development in contemporary consumption-oriented society, in which work is the ultimate form of status and legitimisation. No matter whether we like it or not, work is how we largely define our identities and our value within contemporary capitalist society (Frayne 2015; Mould 2018). Consequently, many fields such as larp that are initially not commercialised see a movement toward ‘careerisation’ of their practices (Seregina and Weijo 2017). When something becomes work, it also becomes more productive and profitable, and hence a more legitimate use of time. Simultaneously, the product of this activity also becomes more legitimised and a valuable use of one’s resources in the eyes of others. It is important to talk about professionalisation of an activity in the context of its commodification because consumption and work are two sides of the same coin, with one pushing the other.
Professionalisation can be seen in a few main ways within larp. Firstly, many directly want to turn larp-organising into a job. Secondly, professionalisation emerges in higher production value and use of support services. This includes a higher level of scenery, lighting, catering, and costuming, among other things. Lastly, larp is more and more often documented and merchandised. A lot of events are photographed and sometimes even filmed, and we also see a rise in possibilities of buying add-on products like t-shirts that advertise the event and/or can be used in-game. Such elements solidify what is otherwise an ephemeral performance, making it more of a produced material entity.
The result of professionalisation can be higher-value events, which can create amazing experiences for participants and organisers alike. The processes involved in it can further help make larp organisation easier, putting it into an easily and conveniently reproducible form.
At the same time, professionalisation of larp in many ways presents the activity as a commodity to those planning to attend. This means that (mostly indirectly) participants are getting the message that they should be approaching the event as a commodity, altering their expectations and attitude toward it. If larp organisation is presented as a for-profit job and larp takes on easily reproducible, mass produced characteristics, we cannot expect participants not to approach the event as something with which they have customer expectations and consumer rights. As a result, it becomes natural for the participant to focus only on their own experience and demand that the experience matches what was promised, cementing larp’s place as an element of market exchange within a capitalist system.
Professionalisation further requires streamlining and standardisation of activities, repeatability of events (or elements of events), as well as higher larp ticket costs in order to become economically viable. The first characteristics are central for pushing down costs for the organiser in order to attempt to make a profit, but run the risk of changing the nature of larp as quite ephemeral, interpersonal events. The latter is necessary to be able to pay organisers and crew for labour that is now their work. In reality, however, organisers and crew are rarely paid a wage, especially a fair one, often because of budgeting reasons. Hence, even for-profit larps largely rely on volunteers or low-pay workers, which, in turn, creates ample possibilities for misuse of labour (as well as potential legal issues with taxation and labour laws), once again skewing power relations within the community.
When organising a larp, it is important to reflect on how the event itself as well as the forms of production that it has involved impact larp as a community. The professionalisation of specific larp events reflects on the community as a whole, raising standards and expectations for all future events. This growth and expectations that come with it puts an immense amount of pressure onto larp organisers to provide events up to par, potentially creating organiser stress and burnout (something discussed a lot previously; see e.g., Lindve 2019, Pettersson 2022).
The Value of a Larp
In the above described context, monetary value becomes extremely complicated and potentially problematic. To begin with, higher cost of a larp easily becomes interpreted as the event providing a ‘better experience’ to the larper. In a consumer culture context, higher cost is generally associated with higher value and higher demand in our society. Moreover, limited access to larp in general makes the activity a scarce commodity, immediately making it intrinsically more valuable. This results in higher expectations on personal experience: participants feel that they are investing more financial capital and hence are entitled to reap more social and cultural capital from it.
The issue for larp specifically in this setup is that the organiser, in the long run, has limited capacity in making sure the player’s experience is of high value, as I’ve already noted. A good larp experience can depend on a large number of ever-changing elements, including but not limited to personal investment, engagement, and preparations; other participants and their contribution; weather, terrain, the venue, and associated travel. In a professionalised set-up, the service provider becomes responsible for all of this despite having little control over many elements that feed into a good experience.
Moreover, because larpers as consumers relinquish much of their responsibility over the event, they are more likely to focus on their own experience rather than aid others’. Hence, the inherent value that we gain from larp in some ways can be seen to actually go down in a commodified form because a good experience in larp largely relies on the interaction among and support of other larpers. In focusing solely on our own experiences, we expect more, but also give less. Other larpers easily become seen as a part of the commodity we are consuming, while organisers as well as any crew, volunteers, and NPCs will become seen as service providers.
Financial Inaccessibility
Photo by Evgeni Lazarev.
With raised costs of larping, a big issue that arises is financial inaccessibility. This is an extremely difficult subject, especially in light of everything else discussed, such as fair labour, and thus easily becomes the elephant in the room. Moreover, we, in many ways, have little control over rising costs, as overall rise in cost of living undoubtedly has its effects on larp organisation as well, reflecting in the prices of venues and catering to name a few things. Yet because any inaccessibility is viewed as bad, we seem to steer away from this conversation as a community.
It is important to stress that a costlier larp should not in any way be seen as bad. Most of the time, the attendance costs are merely covering any investment organisers have put in, which is only fair to ask for. However, if someone’s choice of whether or not to attend a larp is mainly or even solely dependent on the costs associated with that larp, that is, indeed, textbook financial inaccessibility. And we should not ignore that.
Many support systems already exist for financial inaccessibility, such as discounted and tiered tickets or payment in installments. These are definitely helpful and make larp more accessible to those with lower means. However, costly larps will remain costly (and most likely become even costlier); oftentimes even discounted tickets remain inaccessible. Sadly, there is little we can do about high costs, as I already noted. What we can do and what we need to do is be able to discuss these issues.
In line with a commodity point of view, a more expensive larp easily becomes viewed as better. Following this, those attending costlier, larger, better advertised, and thus ‘higher value’ larps can easily become seen as ‘better larpers,’ which creates problematic hierarchies and power structures within the community. Larps with higher production value also come with more hype, more discussion, and more coverage in media and social media, and thus, inadvertently, more social and cultural capital. Simply put, those who go to costlier larps and those who create costlier larps accrue more capital within the community (be it cultural, social, financial). Thus, while the fact that we pay more for larp does not directly make it a commodity, the fact that we reap more capital from costlier larps and use that capital within our community does.
At the same time, we see a certain subsection of larpers becoming priced out of the activity. More and more people are having to limit how many events they attend, or even stop going to larps entirely, due to financial reasons. We also see more and more of those from lower economic strata crewing and volunteering at events. While this is a great way to make an event financially accessible, if these roles are seen as service provider roles that attendees can demand from and take their frustrations out on, it will further skew power relations among larpers. Hence, financial inaccessibility runs the risk of creating wildly different ways people with different economic means can access larp, and they may be unable to access it at all.
Concluding Thoughts
Following my brief analysis of larp as a commodified activity, I’d like to wrap this article up with a few thoughts and suggestions. I want to begin by reiterating what I stressed in my 2020 article. Commodification in itself is not good or bad. However, we cannot reap its positive qualities without its negative characteristics, as many seem to try. Hence, we should question why we structure things the way we do – as larp organisers and as larp participants. As organisers, we should consider: what kinds of audiences do we reach, and what audiences will be able to access our larp? How are participants viewing the larp? How do they view their own role as part of the larp, and how do they view others attending the larp? What does commodification of larp bring to the event specifically? Is it valuable to you? And to the players attending, as well as the wider larp community?
As participants, we should similarly reflect on our role within the event. How am I taking part in the larp? How am I taking into consideration the organisers? The crew? Other players? What do I want to get out of the experience, how am I obtaining that, and who do I think is responsible for that?
We should also reflect on why we are pushing for professionalisation and thus commodification of larp. What is the purpose of this? Is it to create better events? Is it to gain legitimisation within wider society? Is it to create jobs?
Photo by Sora Shimazaki.
In 2020, I noted a fear of fragmentation of our community. Today, I definitely see more economic, social, and cultural inequalities within larp, as well as a growing divide between high cultural capital and low cultural capital events. I think we need to push hard for giving value to different kinds of larp, independent of their cost and production value or ‘type’ of larp (be it so-called Nordic larp, boffer larp, international larp, or localised larp groups, among various other types). We are running the risk of creating a hierarchy of larps in terms of what are seen to be ‘better’ larps than others: something that, at this point, often coincides with the market and production value of the event. In other words, costlier larps are currently associated with being higher culture and thus better than lower culture, cheaper larps.
Along with this divide, we bring growing class differences and potential skewed power relations among those attending and those who are organising; among those attending different types of events; among those who are attending on different terms (be it different ticket types; as volunteers, crew, players). We are already a very white, very middle-class activity, but with the cost of living crisis we are becoming even more so. Hence, it is critical to be aware of, reflect on, and aim to address these issues in organising larp. What’s more, all of the discussed issues will further tie into the acculturation of new larpers. What kind of community are we welcoming them into, and what kinds of roles will they be learning to take on?
Reflecting on one’s roles and actions can be difficult, especially for topics of commodification, which come to us quite naturally and unintentionally, yet can feel alien and cold, with people tending to push away or disassociate from them. But denying these issues does not remove consumption as a central structuring force of contemporary society. Its ideology remains, reinforced by our own actions. The aim of the reflexive actions I am suggesting is not to judge anyone, but rather to get larpers to understand their own choices when engaging in larping. Perhaps the reflection will not change anything, perhaps it will only change things a little, and perhaps it will change someone’s approach entirely. But I believe that by being conscious and aware of what we are doing as well as how our actions affect the activity of larping and the larp community as a whole, we will create a more inclusive and communal entity.
Bibliography
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This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Seregina, Usva. 2024. “Readdressing Larp as Commodity: How Do We Define Value When the Customer Is Always Right?” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in Together At Last, February 15-18, 2024 in Berg en Dal, the Netherlands. Together at Last is a larp focused on romantic play by Reflections Larp Studio, designed and organized by Karolina Soltys, Patrik Bálint, David Owen, Lu Larpová, Marie-Lucie Genet, and Phil D’Souza. Based on the Black Mirror episode “Hang the DJ” and, to a lesser extent, the film The Lobster, the larp is set in a governmental facility in which volunteers are matchmade three times in order to find their Perfect Match. The larp originated online during the pandemic and was run 15 times as Together Forever, then transitioned to in-person play for 4 runs, with 2 additional runs planned for 2025. This run of the larp had 40 players, including 4 organizer-run characters.
The original setting made use of the actual pandemic and social isolation conditions players experienced to maximum effect; in this near-future scenario, humans cannot leave the house or socialize with others outside of hazmat suits without facing instant death from the mutated virus unless living in the same household as a family. Once a person decided to leave home, they must live alone, as proximity was too risky. As physical contact and companionship was deemed necessary by the government for human thriving, the Together Forever program was designed in order to allow people to date. At the end of the program, the system decides which characters are matched together, as well as which characters will remain unmatched. The matched participants are married in a perfunctory mass ceremony. Participants must choose to marry their “forever match” assigned by the algorithm at the end of the program; otherwise, they forfeit their right to ever go through the program again. Their alternatives were to beg this person to reject them or to run off into the wilderness to become part of the Banished, a group of people living in dangerous conditions outside of society. Divorce was possible long after the match was made, although that was deemphasized in play.
A once-per-lifetime vaccine giving 3 day immunity neutralized the virus enough to allow the participants to temporarily be physically co-present with multiple people, which for most characters meant the first time they had ever experienced physical intimacy in-person instead of VR; in other words, even if VR technology had become advanced in this near-future world, most characters were physically virginal for all intents and purposes. This chip was “new,” as previous versions of the program occurred online. In practice, this meant that play was punctuated by the strangeness of being physically co-present with so many people, able to go outside without a hazmat suit for the first time, etc. We actually started the game with a hazmat suit and mask on, waiting in line to be sanitized and processed, before we could change into our first “date” clothes and experience our first match. This contrast between the sterile government facility and the nightlife vibe was also emphasized in our costuming requirements for daytime, in which we were only permitted to wear white, grey, or light pastel comfortable clothes, including the optional Together at Last t-shirt with the program’s logo.
The sanitization process. Photo by Marlies. Image has been cropped.
The characters were jointly designed by the players and the organizers through an extensive in-game and off-game online form. The majority of the character’s personality arose from player inputs, with the relationships designed for us to link these disparate characters together. My character, Hope Novak, was one of the few who had experienced the program before, having been successfully matched for twelve years before her husband died.
While much could be said about the design of Together at Last, this article will focus upon several tensions I noticed — some which are embedded in the design and some I consider byproducts of it — which I will label paradoxes for dramatic effect. To be clear, none of these paradoxes are bugs of this brilliantly-designed larp, but rather features when exploring the difficult nuances of interpersonal intimacy. I enjoyed myself immensely at the larp and had incredibly powerful experiences with my co-players, in part because of the brilliant design. That being said, I think foregrounding these tensions is important due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter, especially when discussing a larp framed as aiming for play on a spectrum between absurdist comedy to realism to melodrama.
Photo by Bianca Eckert.
The Paradoxes of Consent, Rejection, and Monogamy
Like many Nordic-inspired international larps, Together at Last normalized queer play, as many of the matches would end up being queer in terms of gender and sexuality. Such a rule is not controversial in this play community, as many players identify as queer and/or polyamorous, or at least identify as allies. However, diegetically polyamory was not permitted in the program and was stigmatized, although the designers explained afterward that the intention was for this stigma to arise from logistical reasons based on the “laws of virology” rather than the “oppressive society.”
As players can sometimes experience discrimination due to physical appearance in such games (van der Heij 2021), we were not allowed to play upon lack of physical desire for the other person, but were instead given an impressive list of other playable reasons to reject them. This list ended up super helpful as a personal steering and mutual calibration tool, to the point that I think an article about “how to reject a character in a mutually beneficial way for players” is warranted. Furthermore, the larp was explicitly framed as not erotic (Grasmo and Stenros 2022), meaning that we were not allowed to be nude or engage in overly physical play during sex scenes. While players could ultimately choose their level of contact, the organizers recommended calibrating different representational modes of physical intimacy, e.g., using stage kissing and exaggerated movements; fading to black; or discussing what happens. Ideally, the scenes would be short and obvious, letting others clearly know what happened so they could react dramatically.
Photo by Lea-Maria Anger.
Diegetically, in-game pregnancy was not possible due to contraceptives in the water supply, although in my run, one character was permitted to join the larp pregnant somehow by another character. Instead, the government would assign a certain number of babies, which would be vat-grown and delivered via drone to the married couple’s home at some point in the future. This conceit allowed play on sexuality to be a bit more free. Instead of traditional conception, the algorithm determined if a character was permitted to have children based upon their behavior in an in-game parenting workshop; they were assessed based upon their care for a pretend baby made of flour over several hours, among other factors.
Furthermore, during each date, each match was made to fill out a form in which they discussed important topics related to marriage, including how to decorate their small government-provided apartment, how many children to have, what types of sexual kinks they would like to explore, etc. Diegetically, these forms all contributed to the “data” that led to the final “perfect match” selection. Thus, while engagement with childrearing was technically optional in-game, in practice, the theme became pervasive throughout the larp, e.g., topically in the forms, visually with play around the flour babies.
The larp emphasized consent-based play and consistent calibration. We engaged in bullet-time consent (Koljonen 2016a) for physical play and were encouraged to calibrate liberally off-game with other participants. Workshop time was devoted to calibrating with each of our three matches, which was extremely important, because we spent the better part of an entire day playing closely with each of them in turn. However, once runtime was happening, I would have preferred to have time reserved for calibration with matches before each date off-game rather than relying on ad hoc side discussions.
While we had other social connections and plots, we were under instruction in-game and off-game to make sure we interacted with our dates the majority of the time (80%). This rule was in place explicitly to avoid an issue that sometimes arises in larp: some players will ignore romantic plotlines that are central to play because they are not attracted off-game to the player, which can lead to a terrible experience for the other person. Furthermore, players should avoid filling up their “dance card” with known relations ahead of time and should be open to playing with unknown players, especially when the larp relies upon it (Tolvanen 2022). This principle was especially important in Together at Last, as we did not sign up in pairs, a recommended practice in other larps featuring dyadic play, see for example Helicon (2024), Daemon (2021-), Baphomet (2015-), etc.
Parenting class.
However, consent becomes a bit tricky in situations like these. Yes, we technically opted-in to playing closely on romance with three people — likely off-game strangers. But chemistry can be a difficult thing to predict even when not considering physical or emotional desire (Nøglebæk 2016, 2023); for example, incompatible playstyles can be a bad fit in such close, mostly-dyadic play (Bowman 2024). We are essentially responsible for another person’s positive experience in ways that can feel a bit like labor (Koulu 2020), which is not an inherently bad thing for me: I often prefer to play characters with a support role (Fido-Fairfax 2024, in press), which is why I played one of the game’s few in-game coach/counselors.
But that responsibility for another’s play experience is quite heavy especially when engaging with romantic and sexual intimacy. In such games, we expose some of the most vulnerable parts of ourselves to others, even through the alibi of the character. We may think the alibi is strong for many reasons — trust among co-players, a rather light-hearted and sometimes absurd setting, strong distinction between player and character personality, etc. But the emotions we experience are often all-too-familiar, and may have spectres of previous relationship memories attached to them, reemerging unbidden before, during, or after play. From a transformative play perspective, these emergences can be viewed as positive, in that they show us areas that need healing in ourselves (Hugaas and Bowman 2019), but not everyone attends leisure larps interested in or prepared for intensive personal transformation.
Emotions around rejecting others or being rejected are especially potent and are inherent to this setting. Needs for love and belonging and fears of ostracization drive much of human behavior as matters of survival, and are especially sensitive with romantic and sexual relationships. These themes were inherently present in the larp, whether or not each individual player experienced them or not.
Polaroid photo by Karolina Soltys.
The first date was meant to feel like an evening. Then, the chip went into “Turbo mode,” meaning Dates 2 and 3, which were only one day in this run, felt to the character like a several month relationship. This design combined with the enforced monogamy meant that rejection would likely happen in-game on some level. For example, while we could still pine for our last match, diegetically we risked being reported and kicked out of the program if we did not adhere to the rules, such as not talking to our exes without a “chaperone.” While off-game, we were encouraged to bend the rules, in practice, this rule meant that at least some of the time, many of our characters were likely to feel insecure or rejected as we watched our potential “perfect match” playing closely with others.
The angst around these feelings was also tied to the fact we had no actual power to choose who we married in the end or whether we got married at all, leaving our fate up to the “algorithm” and for us to “trust the process.” Interestingly, as players, we had much more influence over the outcome than our characters; we were instructed to fill in calibration forms at the end of each match, sharing our in-game feelings for our current match (and others at the program). We were also permitted to share our personal desires for an ending as an off-game request; some players wanted a happy ending, others wanted a terrible match, and others let the organizers decide the ending. This last option seemed the most risky to me, as unsuspecting players might be sideswiped by emotional (Montola 2010) and romantic bleed (Boss 2007; Waern 2010; Bowman 2015; Hugaas 2022) from past triggers or current desires dashed.
The HelpBot.
Furthermore, the game setting itself was inherently murky consent-wise. While were instructed not to play on sexual violence of any kind, there were in-game consequences for rejecting our current match. Yes, technically we all opted-in to the program, but we had literally no other choice if we wanted to live with another person. We could live alone or with our families, some of which we wrote to be highly dysfunctional and even abusive. We were not required to engage in sexuality with our matches, but we would be forced by the program to live with them for a certain length of time before divorcing, or be alone. And since polyamory was forbidden, we were expected to somehow make it work with this person. Off-game, this rule was here in part to provide angst for the characters, who would likely have feelings for multiple people, but also to try to prevent the players from solving their character’s dilemmas in this not-quite-dystopia by becoming poly. The HelpBot, a non-sentient robot who helped run the program, who played by one of the organizers, would inform us that 97.5% of matches ended up “perfect”… even if it took 10 years for the couples to realize it.
My character Hope was a 45 year-old intimacy coach who made her living by teaching people ways to connect in online environments. She also had the visceral memory of living harmoniously with someone for much of her recent life; indeed, her “perfect match.” However, Hope was also polyamorous, which was highly frowned upon in this setting, meaning she was one of the few people critical of what she viewed to be compulsory monogamy forced upon the program participants. Indeed, one of the reasons her previous husband, Paul, was “perfect” was that he supported her online relationships with other people and provided stability while she was on the turbulent rollercoaster of dating.
The game had an overarching Panopticon feel, as all interactions were fed through our chips to the system as “data.” Our matches were read over a loudspeaker by a robot voice each time they occurred, with dramatic pauses for us to react within our Support Groups, which were set up for us by the program. Almost all of us were matched with one or more exes. For Hope, this practice was initially problematic, as her ex had left because she wanted a monogamous relationship. While we were instructed by our character sheet and the rules to be excited to see these exes at the program, Hope immediately worried if this forced interaction would be unwelcome, which thankfully it was not.
Furthermore, Hope found out in-game that her ex was almost twenty years younger than her and a virgin (like most characters), while my character had previously been married and had many online relationships. (Note that before the game, I asked the organizers to be paired with players closer to my age to try to avoid these issues, which thankfully was arranged). This fact led to extensive discussion between our characters about the ethics of such a relationship, a conversation also echoed in Hope’s second match, Serena, who Hope believed was her soul mate. Serena had been married before but had never experimented with polyamory. In both cases, my character’s polyamory could be experienced as non-consensual non-monogamy by the other characters, leading to rocky emotional waters in-game and discomfort for me off-game.
Siblings preparing for the mass wedding. Photo by Linnéa Cecilia.
Another oddity was the inclusion of family members in the setting. As players, we were expressly directed not to engage in incest. Yet, in practice, to engage in group activities such as the sex education, burlesque, and neo-tantra workshops (which I ran), characters were asked to consider sexual themes in close proximity with their parents, siblings, or cousins. On the plus side, this factor also led to deep play around protectiveness and family-building; two of the Dates featured a Meet the Family meal, in which various configurations of participants found themselves testing the waters of each new family constellation.
Finally, while the setting enforced monogamy, it was also paradoxically a polyamorous — or at least serial monogamist — environment. As an intimacy specialist, Hope found this setup to be irresponsible at best and sadistic at worst. Not only were characters forced into relationships with their previous exes, but they also had new exes after every match all together in the same space. They were forbidden diegetically from openly loving or desiring others, although of course transgressions of these rules were off-game encouraged. No one had any time to process the relationship they just left and were forced into another relationship immediately, a recipe for drama and dysfunction — which, of course, makes for excellent larp fodder.
Inherent to this design was the “Singles Night” embedded in the program after Date 2, in which characters were temporarily single. While they were discouraged from interacting with their exes, of course this rule was repeatedly broken and new connections were formed, many of which did not align with Date 3 the next day. Hope interpreted this more licentious setup as entirely intentional on the part of the program — any connections that night fed the algorithm more “data” regarding who might actually make a good match and how characters might behave given liberty.
Serena and Hope before the wedding.
Thus, the compulsory monogamy of the program was challenged at each stage of the process in fascinating ways. Regardless of how each character felt about their previous matches, they were likely to have strong feelings of some kind that caused complications in the future relationships. Hope viewed these complications as a test of her integrity as an openly polyamorous person: could Hope have compersion and be happy for her soul mate if she fell deeply in love, had incredible intimate experiences, or ended up married to someone else? Wrestling with this inner dilemma was intense enough for me to feel that I had not “solved” the larp through poly as a player.
When the robot voice announced who Hope would marry — thankfully, her second match and “soul mate,” Serena — the joy Hope felt was immediately tempered when she considered the feelings of her two exes in the room, including her third match, who also happened to be in her Support Group watching her reaction. Fortunately, the two had come to a mutual understanding, but still the drama of the moment was high for all characters. Furthermore, Hope had difficulty feeling joy when her other loved ones in the room were visibly distressed by their matches. The Group Wedding final scene was bittersweet, as the matched characters lined up in their fancy wedding clothes for the mass ritual, while the Unmatched watched on in their hazmat suits, preparing for more time physically separated from intimacy with others. Conversely, some characters were devastated by their pairings, yearning instead to be with someone else.
Again, this complicated ending was engineered for maximum larp drama, and even steered toward by many of the players to get their desires met for their version of good play (Pettersson 2021).
The Paradoxes of Physicality, Tone, and Genre
A game like Together at Last is difficult to classify in terms of traditional larp genres. While we the genres of romantic comedy and drama are well-known in film, such genres have yet to be established fully in larp. In part, this limitation is due to taboos historically in more traditional play communities around romantic, sexual, and physical play, which often lead play groups to deny acknowledging that romantic bleed is a natural phenomenon that can happen to anyone (Bowman 2013). Even in the Nordic community, larps focused on oppression dynamics are far more common than settings focused entirely on romance, to the point where the designers had to explicitly signpost on the website to manage player expectations (Koljonen 2016a) that Together at Last:
is a story about attempting to have romantic relationships with a variety of people, some better suited to you than others, about growing as a person and looking for true love, whatever that means. It is not intended to be ‘misery porn,’ though there may be some difficult themes in the character backstories (e.g. depression, bullying, emotionally abusive parents). (Reflections Larp Studio, 2024)
That is not to say that larps centered upon romance do not exist; notable exceptions are Regency-based larps such as Fortune and Felicity (Harder 2017; Kemper 2017) and many UK freeforms, but rather that they are not nearly as common, and thus the play culture surrounding them is not fully solidified in terms of conventions around physicality and tone. Therefore, I would say that romance-based larp is an emerging genre — one that is developing alongside erotic larp, but is not necessarily synonymous, just as sexual and romantic attraction do not always coexist (Wood and D 2021). I would say JD Lade’s Listen 2 Your Heart (Bowman 2023) also fits the romantic genre, whereas larps like Just a Little Lovin’ (2012-) or Helicon (2024) may or may not depending on the way the characters are written and enacted.
Former members of the Banished reintegrating into the main society through the program. Photo by Marlies.
As a developing genre, norms need to be established and made clear by the organizers about what the game is and is not. Otherwise, players tend to rely on their larp muscle memory (Bowman 2017), unconsciously driving play toward genre expectations that are more familiar to them, or inserting genre conventions that were not intended as themes. This tendency is not in itself necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to wildly different expectations of play, interpretations of content, and spreading of themes that were not necessarily intended by the designers. For example, as I have described with Listen 2 Your Heart (Bowman 2023), the last minute addition of vampires to an otherwise romantic game might lead some to find the content appealing, whereas others might find it troubling (e.g., Edward’s problematic behavior in Twilight).
As mentioned above, at Together at Last, we were instructed to play along a spectrum of absurd comedy, realism, and melodrama. However, I noticed people bringing in conventions from the gothic horror and noir detective genres, which caused a bit of cognitive dissonance for me. For example, behavior that might be gritty and normative in a noir film (or even in a BDSM context) might be considered abusive in a light romance context without calibration. A normal reaction to psychological terror in a gothic horror book may look like a psychotic break in another context, something my counselor-type character found especially concerning. In both cases, I was able to successfully calibrate with the players in question, which was a relief, but the experiences were jarring. It can also be difficult to tell if such actions were fully calibrated off-game with other players involved, which can lead to concern, especially when role-players are very immersed in the drama and convincing. We were encouraged to break game to check in with other players, but I found myself wishing we had workshopped the Okay Check-In (Brown 2016) or something similar to practice in an embodied fashion.
I often noted what I could only describe as “hate walking”: characters experiencing something emotionally upsetting and hate walking away up and down the halls, sometimes in packs, with one or more characters hate-walking alongside as emotional support. Of course, larp is a physical activity, and such behavior added to the dynamism of the environment, but it also added a sense of volatility. At the afterparty, the organizers shared that this run was particularly “dark,” with the previous one ending up far more “wholesome.” I suspect part of the shifting dynamics between larp runs has to do with the player-written characters, as different inserting kinds of content can radically impact the game, i.e., the domino effect (Bowman 2017).
Interestingly, I have noticed that these romantic larps that have been run several times tend to develop a devoted following, especially if the setting allows for a unique experience each time the game is played. Both Listen 2 Your Heart and Together at Last had an active Discord before, during, and after the game. Such channels lead to an intriguing blend of in-game and off-game light-hearted banter and pre-game play (Svanevik and Brind 2016) that often impacts dynamics in-game. The character sheets were all transparent, meaning we could read them before play, leading some players to have a strong in- and off-game familiarity with all of the characters; some even seemed to ship some duos over others coming into the game, meaning they had preferences for who should end up together and not. The Together at Last Discord was active many months before the larp and though I could not participate in it due to time constraints, I found it oddly reassuring to see people connecting so excitedly around larp. The Discord also became a needed lifeline after play, as we emerged from this 3-day experience back into life (see e.g., Bjärstorp and Ragnerstam 2023). Now, in the post-larp transition, it feels good to continue to be connected to my co-players.
Diegetically, the Discord was used in interesting ways as well. We all had our own in-game social media timeline upon which people could post, as well as several channels for special interests our characters would have had online, e.g., simulators for farming or raising AI children. One of the reasons this run was particularly intense was that many of the characters were celebrities, so actions that happened in-game would become news stories on Discord, thus raising the stakes. The organizers also used the Discord to communicate key logistical things that we were expected to do, such as filling out the forms. Many players fluidly switched between the online engagement on their phones and the in-person play, but I found it difficult not to get sucked into my off-game responsibilities, so I used it sparingly until after the game. Ultimately, the larp was a paradoxical hybrid of virtual and physical, especially considering the newness of physicality compared to the relative comfort the characters had with virtual encounters.
In-game celebrities made for an active Discord with extensive online play.
Romantic Realism
I appreciated that Together at Last made space for happy endings for players who wanted to have that experience (as I did). I also really enjoy being part of the ongoing online community around these intense romantic larps. I have had some deep and potent scenes, as well as debriefs, with the players. I feel very lucky to have been a part of these experiences. Each larp had moments of brilliance in its design, leading to a feeling of safety when playing with these emotionally fraught themes.
That being said, after each of the larps in this series, I keep wondering what it might look like to play a multi-day romantic larp focused entirely on a realistic exploration of healthy intimacy. I have played several short Nordic freeform scenarios on romantic relationships, although they usually focus on issues of breakups (En kærlighedshistorie, Ellemand and Nilsson 2012), infidelity (Under My Skin, Boss 2010), and other critical issues rather than on trying to develop and maintain a functioning loving relationship. I realize that content might be boring for some players, but in my view, even relatively healthy relationships have plenty of inherent conflict to work through — for example, insecure attachment styles or trauma recovery.
Hope and Serena.
If larps help us develop skills in a deeply embodied way, which I believe they are capable of doing, what are we practicing when we return to dysfunction as a source of drama? What lessons are we experiencing in our bodies about love in times of conflict? What catharsis is happening? And what takeaways can we distill from these dynamics that we can infuse with our daily lives afterward, whether as cautionary tales or breakthroughs, our own intimate relationships, or our relationship with our own vulnerable, human hearts?
Together at Last
Designed and organized by: Karolina Soltys, Patrik Bálint, David Owen, Lu Larpová, Marie-Lucie Genet, and Phil D’Souza
Cost: 300€
Location: Berg en Dal, the Netherlands
Players: 40
Bibliography
Bjärstorp, Sara, and Petra Ragnerstam. 2023. “Live-action Role Playing and the Affordances of Social Media.” Culture Unbound 15, no. 2: 66-87.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2018. “The Larp Domino Effect.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 161-170. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.
Fido-Fairfax, Karolina. 2024, in press. “Strings and Rails: NPCs vs. Supporting Characters.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas et al., 38-40. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Koljonen, Johanna. 2016b. “Toolkit: The Tap-Out.” Participation Safety in Larp, September 11.
Koulu, Sanna. 2020. “Emotions as Skilled Work.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, and Mia Makkonen, 98-106. Helsinki: Solmukohta.
Svanevik, Martine, and Simon Brind. 2016. “‘Pre-Bleed is Totally a Thing.’” In Larp Realia: Analysis, Design, and Discussions of Nordic Larp, edited by Jukka Särkijärvi, Mika Loponen, and Kaisa Kangas, 108-119. Helsinki: Ropecon ry.
So, you have found yourself on the verge of a burnout, or already in one, without the tools to stop repeating the cycle. In this text I will, as a newly working occupational therapist, larper, larp creator and two-time burnout survivor, give you some real-life tips and tools to fight back.
Many of us think that burnout is something that only happens at work, when we are doing too much in a stressful environment. But burnout can also happen when we do something we love so much that it consumes us. This is called Passion Burnout. While burnout can happen to anyone, people working with things they love are at higher risk. When we do what we love, we risk thinking that we are not really working. We risk thinking that because we love the work so much, we should actually do more, that because we do what we love we don’t need to rest. When our passion peaks we become full of energy, and that can make us unable to detach from work enough to focus on the things we need to do in order to avoid exhaustion.
Many larp organizers are in danger of experiencing Passion Burnout, because we love what we do. But if we acknowledge the risk we can work together to prevent it. We can learn to spot the symptoms of burnout, both in ourselves and others: feeling helpless, trapped, defeated or overwhelmed, as well as lack of joy, fatigue, changes in sleep and/or appetite. We can encourage each other by setting an example by taking care of ourselves, setting boundaries, offering help and lowering our expectations. Together we can build a more caring and nurturing community.
Now for the tips and tools.
Burnout is not your fault
You, like everyone else, are a victim of this capitalistic society that lives from our work. In this system you get rewarded, praised, and judged by the work you do, with larps just as much as with every other pursuit. In the capitalist world you don’t get more money or respect by doing less. But if you manage your time better, if you prioritize yourself instead of the work you are doing, if you stop sacrificing your own well-being, your family, your friends, your relationships and your mental and physical health, there is at least one person who will respect you more: You.
Know where your time goes
Use a time management circle or a similar tool to find out how you spend your time and how you would ideally spend it. Writing things down will help you notice where the time actually goes, and with this knowledge, you can start making adjustments to your daily routine to better fit your needs. When organizing a larp, it can help you to write down larp organizing time into your day so that it doesn’t take over your whole free time.
Draw two circles and divide them each into 24 slices. The first circle is your everyday life: how you actually spend your time. Think of the last few months or the last time you organized a larp and fill the circle with your everyday occupations such as sleep, work, taking care of yourself, cleaning, cooking, down time, relaxing, hobbies, etc. You can be as specific or as vague as you like, you can fill it hour by hour, or more approximately. Use color coding if that helps.
Now fill out your second circle. Think of your perfect life and fill your dream circle with what your everyday life would look like if by some magic all your hopes and dreams had come true.
Then look at your two circles side by side. Visualizing the differences can help you find the things you can control. Maybe you need more time for sleep, or more time with your loved ones, maybe less work and more time for self-care. See the differences, but remember that you are not a wizard but a mere mortal. So start small, just one change towards your ideal life. Set yourself a goal that is realistic and achievable. The goal can be as simple as “I want to have an hour a week for myself to go outside” or “I need half an hour more sleep a day”. State that goal to yourself and start to find your way towards it by sharing it with a friend – or a stranger at Solmukohta – and asking for help along the way.
Write things down
The following tool is useful while working on a larp project. The version pictured is called the Time Management Matrix. It can help you see what needs to be done in order to manage a project and help avoid burnout by giving you a clearer idea on how to spend your time and where you can cut yourself some slack.
Urgent
Not urgent
Important
crises
deadline driven
emergencies
etc.
preparation
prevention
planning
etc.
Not important
interruptions
some emails or social media activity
some meetings you don’t need to attend
etc.
busy work (work that adds a little value, like searching for theme songs for characters)
something someone else should be doing
etc.
Fill the matrix with the things you need to do for the larp. Fill it with your responsibilities and burdens. After you have things written down, you can see the actual amount of work that needs to be done and spot the things that are less important. Which are the things you don’t like to do, and which things give you joy? What could you delegate to others? Are there things you don’t have to do at all? To help avoid burnout, I would suggest focusing on the things you like and delegating the ones you don’t.
Look at the amount of work ahead and estimate how much time it would take to complete it. Set boundaries: look at your time management circle and be realistic. When are you going to do this work? Make a schedule and add in breaks and off-time. And if the work feels like too much, ask for help.
Ask for help
Hard and shameful? For me at least it is. Many of us think we need to be able to do everything ourselves, because we value ourselves mainly through the amount of work we do, be it professional or artistic or passionate work. But try to think of what it feels like when someone asks you for help. Most of us would feel appreciated, and that it would be an honor to be a part of your project. Asking for help is giving an opportunity for others to feel good by supporting you.
Find a way to connect with yourself
This tool is a Green Care exercise. You can do it even in the middle of running a larp, you only need ten minutes. The goal is to find a way to regulate your emotions and ground yourself.
Go outside, to nature if possible. If you can’t go outside, find a picture of nature that speaks to you, or try to remember a nice view of a landscape. Start by observing your surroundings. What does it look like, what do you hear, feel or smell? Look at the big picture first, then some smaller details. If it’s hard for you to stand still, move. If you find yourself thinking about other stuff, notice that thought and then let it go, shifting your focus back to your surroundings.
After a few minutes, when it feels good to you, start shifting your focus to yourself. With the same attitude of observation, without judgment or evaluation, try to feel yourself. Listen to your breathing. How does your skin feel, where in your body can you feel your heartbeat? If you feel like moving your body, do so. Move in a way your body wants to move. If you feel an emotion, let it in and try to look at it with a sense of wonder.
When you feel ready, slowly wrap your hands around yourself. Hug yourself and thank yourself for this exercise. Do this exercise when you feel disconnected, overwhelmed or when you need a moment for yourself.
Calendar some Me Time
When I’m in the middle of organizing a larp I tend to view that time as my free time, which has led me to overworking myself. It’s really easy to cut time away from rest and self-care, but taking care of yourself is necessary to avoid getting burned out. This is difficult, I know, but scheduling some Me Time while working on a larp project really helps. How much you need depends on you. If this is hard you can start small? Mark this time in your calendar and make sure not to book anything else over it. Even if larp organizing is your hobby, don’t do that work in this time, make this time your haven, for resting and enjoying yourself.
The change needs to happen with you
Lastly, I must give you the bad news: I can help you with tips and tools, but you have both the power and the heavy burden of actually using them. This is the hard part. You must take responsibility for your time management and set up the boundaries to protect your well-being. And please, for your own sake and for the sake of the whole community: ask for help when you need it.
Don’t be afraid of the amount of tips and tools presented here, these are not “one size fits all.” Pick and choose those that feel doable for you. If something doesn’t work, try something else.
And don’t forget that the community is here: the people who can help you with tools, support and labor. If we reach out and admit that we cannot do everything alone, we can lift each other up. With community, care and support we can achieve magic.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Friman, Taro. 2024. “Please Stop – an Occupational Therapist’s Advice on How to Avoid Burnout.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Cover photo: Photo by Manfred Hofferer from Pexels
There is no such thing as an objective narrative of history. The context of the present-day, the lens of hindsight, and the impossibility of knowing or understanding the true thoughts, feelings, and motivations of people in the past, all conspire against it. Furthermore, any presentation of history is necessarily selective, and necessarily imposes a frame around those historical facts that are included – a frame dictated by the writer’s perspective and agenda. However, it can still be the case that some narrative approaches are trying harder to be objective than others; and that some are more successful at it than others.
By default, unless you are trained as a historian, you will be receiving what we would like to call ‘the popularized narrative of history’. This is a mashup of what you typically learn at school, what you encounter in popular culture, and what you are told by those around you – both from their own experiences of recent history, and from the popularized learning process that they went through themselves. It may be that you were fortunate enough to have had an enlightened education, or to have grown up among people who had an informed view of history, or to have been trained to think critically about popular culture. But for most of us, this will not be the case. We will emerge into adulthood having imbibed a historical narrative that includes a range of stories about the history of our own community; about other peoples with which it has interacted; about the ancient world; and so on.
This popularized narrative, as well as not being accurate, is not neutral: it serves a social purpose. The object is to bind citizens together in a communal national story. It may favour incidents in history when ‘we were the good guys’ – it may avoid situations where the behaviour of our forebears was more difficult for our modern selves to accept. It may stereotype, and it may harmfully ‘other’ – treating groups of people as different from ‘us’, and so not deserving of the same consideration. For example, in the popularized narrative in colonial nations, colonized people are said to be primitive, barbaric, and inferior – justifying the historical colonization process as one of bringing civilization and enlightenment to them. In general, we can characterize the popularized narrative as a top-down oligarchic narrative, dictated in the interests of those in power – so that they might rule us more effectively by controlling our view of ‘us’, of our historical role, and of our present place on the world stage.
Through popular culture, a country’s popularized historical narrative may spread far outside its own borders. People from outside France understand the reign of Louis XIII through the lens of The Three Musketeers; people from outside the UK understand the Regency period through the lens of Jane Austen – or, more usually, from the host of films and TV shows based on or inspired by her work. And then, they (we) design larps about it.
Politics of larp
There is a traditional view that larping is just harmless fun – a form of entertainment, apolitical in nature, without responsibility towards its subjects. We believe that this is at best naive, at worst disingenuous: it works to undermine the unavoidably political nature of choices made within an ideologically-contested cultural sphere.
What we choose to larp about, and how we choose to present it, are inherently political. Each option taken serves to exclude other possibilities. Each decision represents a commitment to one set of values, and a denial of another.
If we design a larp set in the Regency period, what are we saying about gender roles? – about social class distinctions? – about racism? – about sexuality? – about slavery? The popularized narrative contains heavily-loaded answers to all of these questions. For example, it teaches that the UK’s relationship to slavery was a noble role of leading the world in abolishing the practice and in fighting to bring it to an end – ignoring the fact that during the Regency period, a large part of the country’s wealth, and that of the characters in Jane Austen’s novels, was derived from the ongoing exploitation and subjugation of enslaved people (see for example Ferguson 2003). We must not just accept these answers blindly.
Mindful historical larping
The narrative of the Regency era through Jane Austen and the TV show Bridgerton has spawned larps such as The Social Season (Germany, 2023)and Pride without Prejudice (UK, 2018). Both these larps represent a popularized version of the history of the Regency period for upper-class people. These versions of history ignore the reality of life for anyone who isn’t upper-class. In the world of the Bridgerton-style Regency era, money and success are symbols of status, not survival.
The fact that the wealth of many families was gained through enslaving people is a topic that also has no place in either of these larps, despite being a real-world historical factor. The two larps mentioned take a different approach to handling this. Pride without Prejudice is set in an alternative reality where people were not enslaved and where queerphobia didn’t exist. The Social Season design document (Dombrowski Event UG 2023) states that play on racism is not allowed and that “conversations about slave plantations in the New World or the lucrative human trafficking that you or your imaginary friends engage in are also undesirable.”
Fairweather Manor (Poland, 2015) is a larp inspired by the TV shows Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs. It focuses on key themes of gender and class, in a similar way to the ways they have been depicted in these shows, and aims to “balance the atmosphere of a historical setting with a highly immersive and playable experience” (Fairweather Manor website 2023). The larp ignored the reality of the class division meaning that it would be unlikely that the servants and the upper class families they serve would be friends and confidants, as well as ignoring the impact of the British empire and the way it was celebrated during this time period.
This is not intended as a criticism of these larps: all of them state that they are representing a fictionalized account of history which is necessary for playability, and acknowledge the choices made about what to include and what to exclude.
So none of this is to say that creators of larps are acting immorally by using a popularized, or otherwise limited, view of history to create larps. We are always making choices when we decide what the main focus of a larp is, and with limited time and a limited number of participants we can’t hope to explore all aspects of a historical period. And even if attempted, it is likely that our own biases and lack of information would lead to some aspects being missed anyway.
Instead we need to make mindful choices about what to include, and about the statements we’re making with what we exclude.
This is not an argument that all historical larps should be exercises in exploring historical oppression. It is totally fine to create an alternative history where racism, or queerphobia, doesn’t exist, in order to focus on another aspect of the experience (see also Holkar 2016). In fact, choices to include things (e.g. a strict gender binary, sexual violence) because they are deemed to be historically accurate should also be made meaningfully.
An important question to ask ourselves as designers is, if we are exploring a historical period that is portrayed in a specific way in the media and in general public understanding, are we leaning into that portrayal? If so, what has been omitted from that portrayal and should that be communicated to participants?
For example Unnatural Allures is “a fictionalized and heightened version of the late Victorian and Edwardian era” (Design Document, Kraut.tales 2023)and plays with eroticism and horror. The writers acknowledge the nationalism, colonialism, and orientalism of the period, and suggest that there will be some play around it, although it will be framed in a negative light; while stating that racism is not a theme of play. They also include suggested readings in the appendix of the design document for potential players who want to contextualize the period.
Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway, 2011), set in the 1980s, engages heavily with the time period. The themes of the larp are desire, in part represented through queer spaces and cultural movements of the time; and death, represented by the AIDS crisis and the social response to it. However, in the majority of runs of the larp, themes of racism – which was prevalent within and outside the queer community at the time the larp is set – were largely ignored, generally as a conscious design choice not to shift focus or add another axis of oppression. But in a run in the USA (2017), play on racism was included, as the designers then felt that it was essential not to erase the experiences of people of colour.
Conclusion
To state that all larps are political is not to state that all larps have to engage in difficult topics, to evoke negative emotions, or to be an exploration of the deeper injustices of society. However, we believe that there is a responsibility for designers to consider what they are including in, and omitting from, their larps; and what statements are being made by those decisions.
The popularized narrative of history will always be tempting to draw upon, because it is what is most accessible and familiar: it requires the least work on the part of the designer. But it brings a load of cultural baggage and assumptions that may be unwanted – and that, we feel, should be investigated and challenged.
Mo Holkar (2016): Larp and Prejudice: Expressing, Erasing, Exploring, and the Fun Tax. In Larp Realia – Analysis, Design, and Discussions of Nordic Larp, edited by Jukka Särkijärvi, Mika Loponen, and Kaisa Kangas. Solmukohta.
Fairweather Manor (2015): Poland. Agata Swistak, Agnieszka Linka Hawryluk-Boruta, Akinomaja Borysiewicz, Alexander Tukaj, Beata Ploch, Charles Bo Nielsen, Claus Raasted, Dracan Dembinski, Ida Pawłowicz, Janina Wicher, Krzysztof “Ciastek” Szczęch, Krzysztof “Iryt” Kraus, Maciek Nitka, Mikołaj Wicher, Nadina Wiórkiewicz, Szymon Boruta. Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform.
Just a Little Lovin’ (2011): Norway. Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo.
Just a Little Lovin’ (2017): USA. Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo. Pink Dollars LLC.
Pride without Prejudice (2018): UK. Amy Mason and David Proctor.
The Social Season (2023): Germany. Dombrowski Event UG.
Unnatural Allures (2024): Germany. Alexandra Vogel, Florian Hofmann, Marina Machaeuer, Christian Schneider, Germany. kraut.tales
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Wood, Laura, and Mo Holkar. 2024. “Challenging the Popularized Narrative of History.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
The original setting made use of the actual pandemic and social isolation conditions players experienced to maximum effect; in this near-future scenario, humans cannot leave the house or socialize with others outside of hazmat suits without facing instant death from the mutated virus unless living in the same household as a family. Once a person decided to leave home, they must live alone, as proximity was too risky. As physical contact and companionship was deemed necessary by the government for human thriving, the Together Forever program was designed in order to allow people to date. At the end of the program, the system decides which characters are matched together, as well as which characters will remain unmatched. The matched participants are married in a perfunctory mass ceremony. Participants must choose to marry their “forever match” assigned by the algorithm at the end of the program; otherwise, they forfeit their right to ever go through the program again. Their alternatives were to beg this person to reject them or to run off into the wilderness to become part of the Banished, a group of people living in dangerous conditions outside of society. Divorce was possible long after the match was made, although that was deemphasized in play.
