When every part of a larp is a designable surface, we as designers are faced with both the opportunities and the responsibilities that this implies (Koljonen, 2019). As a wide age range exists in the larp community, it is essential to design for softening up the impacts that off-game power dynamics born from participants’ age and experience level can have on the interactions. This article deals with why and how you design balanced power dynamics between adult and child participants. This design approach is practice-based, utilized at the mythical fantasy larp campaign Fladlandssagaen (Denmark 2006-, Eng. The Flatland Saga) as well as the edu-larps and leisure larps I have run at Østerskov Efterskole in 2023.
Why design spaces that allow children to influence the larp?
As a co-creative, collaborative medium, larp becomes breathtaking when its participants experience co-ownership as the larp unfolds. In larp, different age-groups’ perceived areas of agency and social legitimation to participate in the activities of the larp are formed by our design choices – absence of design maintains status quo and ensures that those with the off-game social power to define acceptable social behavior will do so in-game as well; in this context, adults will define the larp’s social frame for children. Counteracting this requires conscious design of in-game spaces in which the children have agency and power to influence the larp, without alienating the adults. I recognize that there are differences between adults and children, and that adults ultimately bear off-game responsibility for everyone’s safety and experience throughout the larp. I argue, however, that we can create a framework in which children can be allowed to explore, lead, mentalize and be taken seriously, to let them expand their social skill set and experience being a part of the associated community.
Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photos by Susse Kobberø Chapman.
A framework for designing balanced power dynamics
The following section reviews the design strategies I use to create balanced power dynamics in larp. Each design step describes how, and is followed by an example, marked with an arrow, from the player-group Umbrafalkene (Eng. The Umbra Falcons) at Fladlandssagaen (Denmark 2006-, Eng. The Flatland Saga):
The participants play former soldiers and children of former soldiers, who try to make a new life for themselves in a troubled area. Throughout their storylines and plots, the players face situations wherein they learn to deal with anger, sorrow, loss and a craving for revenge. The themes were selected because our young players find it difficult to recognize and deal with the associated feelings in their own lives.
The author (left) at Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photo by Susse Kobberø Chapman.
1) Set concrete design goals for the power dynamics and social interactions in the larp. Define and formulate the intention, so you can communicate, measure, and test your choices.
The goal was to create a dynamic in which the children address the team’s difficulties through collaboration, their courage to be honest and their willingness to act together, while the adults escalate the problems through their old habits and stubborn beliefs.
2) Designate a coordinator that knows how to work with children. The person needs to be introduced early and be readily available, so that the children know where to find them in case they need help. It is advantageous if the person discreetly checks in on the children during the larp, asks about their experience and offers to help them reflect on their experiences.
We usually have multiple coordinators who share the responsibility. When we have the resources, we divide the children into smaller groups so we can interact with them on their terms and facilitate play accordingly: one of us has the youngest players (4-8 years), one has the slightly older children (9-12), and one has the teenagers (13-15 years).
The author (center).
Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photos by Susse Kobberø Chapman.
3) Then, design the overall narratives and dynamics. The narrative reasoning and legitimation for the dynamics must be experienced as meaningful and authentic to play on for both the adults and the children. Significant design areas that you can focus on are, among others, defined standards for social interactions that grant both agency and alibi, rites of passage, easily usable safety measures, and formed spaces. Within these spaces the players can explore their chosen themes by themselves or with each other, without excluding or invalidating the focus of other players. Design who wields the social power, as well as when and how the characters handle in-game conflicts across age groups so it doesn’t break immersion nor default to the off-game power dynamics. Remember both groups’ needs.
The children are staged as experts in how to live peacefully as a part of a community, while the adults are staged as experts in conflicts and making tough choices. The children wield the social power to de-escalate situations, while adults steadily escalate scenes towards the point where weapons must be drawn. Furthermore, the children are the only ones who can handle the mythical creatures living in the nearby dangerous magical forest, while the adults are the only ones that can carry titles and be punished by law.
Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photo by Susse Kobberø Chapman. Image has been cropped.
4) Create character development, plots, and tasks that support, maintain, and necessitate the chosen dynamic in basic routines, keeping both adults and children in mind. Players need meaningful activities during the larp that serve a purpose in the larp as a whole (Kangas 2019). Here, you shape the children’s areas of agency; their plots and actions must be important for the overall larp with consequences they can take responsibility for and react to during the runtime. It is essential to prioritize explanation of the context and consequences of a scene, so the children understand their agency and choices, for example through a narrative voice where the facilitator meta-communicates what will happen if they follow through with their actions. This teaches the children how they can navigate and decode a scene. Creating an alibi for making the choices together and sharing the responsibility, connected to an explanation of why the adults cannot help, is beneficial.
The Umbra Falcons had been asked to help in a nearby battle. The children were in doubt. Before they made a decision, one of the adults, who was their facilitator and knew that there would be fighting in that plotline, said: “If we go to battle, it will be dangerous. Maybe, there will be fighting, in which case we could die. But our help is needed, and we do not have time to find others instead. What should we do?” Here, the theme and the impending actions were meta-communicated to the children, so they knew what they were getting into if they chose to follow through with the plot.
Plotlines created specifically to our teenagers and adults are played on when there are no children around. When a child joins a scene, everyone will adjust their playstyle to make room for the child’s perspective, rather than forcing the child to adopt a grown-up perspective on matters. In-game, the narrative explanation is that the adults try to protect the children from the darker aspects of the world – they will get to know it in time. This clearly marks the space for adult plots.
Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photo by Susse Kobberø Chapman.
5) Communicate the design before, during, and after the larp through both shared and divided briefings, workshops, intro-scenes, and debriefings. This makes it easier to form consensus and calibrate collectively, while ensuring safe spaces wherein both adults and children can express their thoughts and difficulties and practice the dynamics among peers while supervised by a facilitator. Debriefings and post-play activities, in which everyone can reconnect, reflect and recuperate their experience together (Brown, 2019) and establish a narrativized tale are essential factors in building a sense of community afterwards.
We have a collective briefing for all players and a briefing for The Umbra Falcons in which we coordinate the day together. Sometimes, rules are mentioned again (for example that children, who don’t understand that game masters dressed in black are invisible, can interact with them as their “imaginary fantasy friends”, while the invisible spirits are ignored by the rest of us).After the play, we do a follow up talk with the children individually or together with their parents.
The most important thing you can do when you design these larps is to focus on building a trusting culture in which your participants can play and explore together. It requires respect, patience, and curiosity from everyone involved, but if we as designers design a safe space, adults and children will conjure up larp magic together.
Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photos by Susse Kobberø Chapman.
Bibliography
Kangas, Kaisa. 2019. “Functional Design.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Koljonen, Johanna. 2019. “An Introduction to Bespoke Larp.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Brown, Maury Elizabeth. 2019. “Post-Play Activities.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Ludography
Fladlandssagaen (2023):Denmark. The organizer team of Fladlandssagaen.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Høyer, Frederikke Sofie Bech. 2024. “Designing Power Dynamics Between Adults and Children in Larps.” 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: Fladlandssagaen (2023). Photo by Susse Kobberø Chapman. Image has been cropped.
This article introduces the reasoning for making recordings of larps played online. We present our core concepts and provide a categorisation of motivations, followed by an overview of the historical development of LAOG Actual Plays (APs). We also discuss some theoretical concepts and design goals around AP-informed play, and point to some further avenues of exploration.
What are Live Action Online Games (LAOGs) and LAOG Actual Plays (APs)?
Live-Action Online Game – LAOG
One of the truisms of larp design is that “everything is a designable surface” (Koljonen 2019, 27). It is not surprising, therefore, that different communities have used the specific characteristics of the online medium to design games that can be considered a larp. The term LAOG stands next to similarly used terms like online larp, digital larp, VORP (virtual online role-playing) and others. We suggest that something should be considered a LAOG if it corresponds to the components of the abbreviation: it is to be played as live-action, with a sense of a full-body experience; it is designed specifically for an online context; and it is a game (however one wants to define that term). LAOG as a term was first established in A Manifesto for Laogs in 2018 by one of the authors of this essay (see Reininghaus 2019).
Actual Play – AP
An Actual Play is a representation of game play – either live or recorded – that is prepared and made available for an audience. Actual Plays of digital and analog games have become a significant aspect of today’s popular culture. Platforms like Twitch and YouTube provide space for creators to host their own APs, some of them live, others pre-recorded. Actual Plays can present board games, video games, Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG) – or larps.
The history of and some current community perspectives on LAOG APs
The history of AP recordings is connected to the development of technologies that make live-action online games and their recording possible. For some time, Skype was the most popular software that offered possibilities for online play, but this required paid accounts and had some technical drawbacks, like limited screen-sharing possibilities. TeamSpeak, as an audio-only platform popular for massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), offered possibilities to play online but to our knowledge was only used for TTRPG online sessions.
The introduction of Google Hangouts provided a video chat platform which can be considered a game changer. Google Hangouts was a service offered by Google from 2013 to 2022 without any financial cost to users. It brought playing TTRPGs online to a wider audience, and allowed players from all over the world to connect and play together. Recording and hence making APs was easy, as the direct connection to the YouTube platform allowed users to stream or record and later publish their games with a few clicks after doing an initial setup. For example, Google Hangouts enabled the growth of The Gauntlet (now known as Open Hearth Gaming), an Indie TTRPG online community, where for many years it was used as the main medium of play. The resulting large library of APs is still available on YouTube.
Already before the rise of Google Hangouts, in 2012, Orion Canning and Robert Bruce designed and played The House online. It does not fall within our narrower definition of LAOGs as it is not played synchronously, but players are invited to upload videos recorded in-character as inhabitants of a Big Brother-like reality TV show to a YouTube channel offered by the creators. Other players then react to these videos, again by recording their reactions and uploading them. The game is entirely based on the “confession video” format popularized by reality TV shows, in which participants of the show are talking to the camera by themselves, without the other participants present, about their motivations and strategies. As an AP, it is difficult for the audience to follow the exact stream of events, which possibly replicates the feeling of the source material quite closely.
ViewScream by Rafael Chandler came out in 2013 and became the cornerstone for LAOG APs for the next six years. The game referred to itself as “Varp”, or “video-augmented role-playing”. In ViewScream players play people on a spaceship doomed to destruction. The mechanics guarantee that not all characters can get out alive. The video call setting is an in-game element: not only the players but also the characters are all in a video call together, calling in from different areas of the spaceship. The run time is approximately one hour. The game provided virtual backgrounds, several scenarios as variations of the game’s story, and included a captain role with some typical game master functions in the sense that this player was specifically asked to help create a dramatic story. All these ingredients and the novelty of the format helped to create a small ViewScream community and the creation of at least 30 APs.
Interestingly, ViewScream did not emerge out of a larp community but was developed in the context of a TTRPG community, mostly active and connected on the platform Google Plus, which at the time was important for Indie TTRPG creators.
In 2017, Gerrit Reininghaus started creating APs for LAOGs on his YouTube channel “betafunktion”, with Jason Morningstar’s Winterhorn (2017) as the first AP. Soon after, in 2018, Reininghaus published A Manifesto for Laogs and established the genre. Today, betafunktion contains the largest collection of LAOG APs, presenting more than 20 games by different creators (see Reininghaus 2020). The YouTube channel has become a reference point for LAOG creators, with the recordings with the largest view count making it to more than 1.6K views (of So Mom I Made This Sex Tape, 2016) at the time of writing.
The pandemic brought increased attention to online larp. Many creators have since then entered the design field and shared design ideas (see e.g., D.& Schiffer 2020; Marsh & Dixon 2021). However, few APs have been created during the pandemic. The LAOG The Space Between Us (2020) became an underground hit and its APs and fan productions went viral in interested circles. Why LAOG APs did not become even more popular during this time of elevated attention for online play is a question that cannot be fully answered here. One suggestion the authors can offer is that larpers have a) a more rigid understanding of the social contract in larp, specifically that a larp shall not have an audience, b) that familiarity with the technology required to make APs was not immediately available, and c) that one platform which became a home for many designs during the pandemic was Discord, which – unlike Google Hangouts – does not allow for simple recordings. However, Zoom, which also became popular during the pandemic, does (see Otting 2022).
Over time, the larp scene has recognised the existence of LAOG APs. For example, the German association of larpers (Deutscher Liverollenspiel-Verband, DLRV) awarded the FRED award in 2020 for advocating larp to a larger audience to the aforementioned YouTube channel betafunktion.
Why should we make APs of LAOGs?
There are many reasons to produce Actual Plays of Live-Action Online Games. We provide a structured overview here that hopefully reflects most motivations. In any concrete project, there often will exist a combination of different reasonings for producing AP recordings.
APs as entertainment
Currently, the most prominent form of role-playing APs are productions to entertain an audience. Actual Play video shows like Critical Role or podcasts like The Adventure Zone have become part of the entertainment industry. But even shows without large profit ambitions have created their own style and offer high production values. Nameless Domain is a producer of such APs, now award winning for GUDIYA, a Bluebeard’s Bride (2017) one-shot. The Magpies, a Blades in the Dark AP-podcast by Clever Corvids Productions is another example. Some of these APs can be both watched live and in recorded forms, with the recordings usually edited and enhanced for a better audience experience. Live shows make use of the entertainment format and excitement present in something like live sports – with the unexpected luring behind every corner. The actual game play is just one contributing factor in APs for entertainment, while participants’ performances, the production values, and pre-written story arcs often play a similarly important role for the end product.
While TTRPG-APs have today become part of a growing entertainment industry, as far as we are aware not many LAOG APs have so far been (professionally) produced purely for reasons of audience entertainment. However, some of the larger commercial TTRPG shows like KOllOK have recently included live-action elements with success (when measured in terms of public appraisal and audience size).
AP production can also be part of a LAOG’s design concept. The recording can be a diegetic feature of the game as in a reality show larp. Or, if watching or listening to a recording of (parts of) the game is itself considered an element of gameplay by the designer and hence it can be a source of entertainment for the players. In The House (2012), for example, directly interacting with the camera in-character is a central design element.
APs for demonstration purposes
APs can also be produced to demonstrate how to play. The teaching of games through play itself has always been an important part of play cultures, and assumes that people best learn about a game when they see how the rules work in practice. This is especially true for role-playing games and larps, which have a large body of implicit rules of engagement not laid down in scripts or rulebooks.
In a certain sense, recording LAOGs for demonstration purposes allows non-larpers access to a first-person perspective of a larp. The audience sees exactly what the player themself has seen during play. Such APs also provide insights to the designers about how their game works “out in the wild”. Designers can benefit from seeing specific mechanics and techniques in play, for example to analyse player engagement and dynamics, and their effects on pacing.
Play cultures in larp differ significantly: another proper reason to produce APs is to showcase your own playstyle, although this is often a side effect rather than the intended production reason. One exception might be if larp production companies want to showcase their specific playstyle, making it easier for potential players to identify if a larp is right for them.
APs as a community contribution
We do not larp alone. As larp communities, we share our joy, we like to engage in discussions of games, and of our play experience. We like to see people we have played with in other games, and we watch out for each other.
Recording a game for the community can happen to establish facts about how the community is playing (safety, inclusivity). This is not the same motivation as demonstrating game play or showcasing play culture as previously described. APs from and for a community are revealing community norms in less intentional ways.
Producing an AP from and for the community is sending a signal on what is played, who is playing, who is visible, and consequently who is relevant. It is a way to emphasise community structures and relationships.
APs for posterity
Making an AP can be an artistic expression. In this case, the game itself might be designed around the AP concept or the production might be focused on turning the game into an artistic expression.
APs can make contemporary play culture visible, and that might also be a goal: to help future generations understand how live-action games were played online, who was playing, and what unwritten or undocumented elements were relevant to players at the time. Archivists and researchers will be grateful for live recordings of games from past decades.
When participating in a LAOG, recording it can also be motivated by the idea of creating a personal memory. Just like taking photos at events, an AP is a form of conserving an experience in some form, to be able to return to it later in life.
Audience in online game design and LAOG facilitation
Making an AP of a LAOG is in most cases different from documenting a larp played in physical space. The recording button is not as intrusive as it is to have a person with a camera circling around the players in-character. Even when the camera is an in-game element, recording has a more direct effect in physical larps.
It remains an open question if recording, both live-streamed or published later, is a violation of a central aspect of the sort of social contract (also called the “role-play agreement”, Stenros & Montola 2019, 17) often seen as a unique and required ingredient of larp: the fact that play is not performed with an audience in mind. Some players have reported that they cannot enjoy being in a recorded play session, as they start playing performatively. Other players explain that playing in a recorded session does feel different to them during an initial short period of time, often just minutes, in which they get used to the situation. This is similar to the inhibition expressed by players towards non-diegetic LAOGs (see Reininghaus 2021). Non-diegetic in this context means that the characters of the game are not speaking through a video call to each other but in the shared imaginative space might be physically close together. Some players report that they cannot enjoy the dissonance between the players’ distance and their characters’ potential closeness.
From a safety perspective, recording online play requires a couple of specific considerations. The following procedure can be considered good practice:
Announce in the sign-up process for the game that a recording is planned.
Remind players at the beginning of the game that the session is going to be recorded and offer an Open Door, i.e. the option to drop out at any time for this reason (or any other, without having to offer any justification).
Break debrief into two parts: a recorded and an unrecorded part.
Do not stream the game live, instead offer a 48-hour hold-off period before publishing the video. Inform players that they can express a veto after play, meaning that the recording is not going to be published as an AP.
From a game design perspective, APs offer an interesting additional creative dimension. A game designed to be recorded for AP purposes has specific requirements. If the video call’s chat is used as a communication dimension in the game, for example, a typical recording will not capture this and hence the AP will present only an incomplete version of the session.
Games which assume that players move between different virtual video rooms require choosing the recording perspective. The audience will either follow one player through their experience of the game session in multiple rooms, or experience everything that happened in only the one virtual room that was being recorded. If more than one player is recording their play, the audience can shift between views and create their own experience of the game. The APs of End Game (2016) allow for such an experience, as players are shuffled between the two in-game rooms exactly every ten minutes, allowing the audience to choose whose story to follow next.
Gerrit Reininghaus designed the game Last Words (2019) with an “audience first” approach in mind. Some players play the game muted, some without a camera or sound, due to the asymmetrically-designed communication setup. While during the game no player therefore fully experiences what is happening, an audience can have access to this experience – in a single recording.
Conclusion
Both for players of larps and for future researchers, an archive of APs of contemporary larp play styles online could turn out to be invaluable. This alone should encourage more community members to consider recording their games.
We also see plenty of potential avenues for further theoretical and practical explorations around APs of LAOGs. For example, we do not know much yet about the concrete effects that being recorded has on online play. We equally should consider the possible ethical implications of recording and distributing records of LAOG play, like a near-future use of public video libraries for training generative AI models. On the positive side, APs could positively contribute to making minorities in the larp and LAOG communities more visible.
Regarding future potential design avenues, we are excited – as facilitators, designers, players, and audiences – to further explore how LAOGs can be designed to make AP production easier, how the recording and re-watching of APs can be a tool for iterative game design, and what APs as a designable surface can contribute to larp. We are looking forward to seeing these questions explored in the future.
Jaakko Stenros & Markus Montola (2019): Basic Concepts In Larp Design. In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen & al. Kopenhagen: Landsforeningen Bifrost (Knudepunkt 2019), p. 16–21.
Johanna Koljonen (2019): An Introduction to Bespoke Larp Design. In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen & al. Kopenhagen: Landsforeningen Bifrost (Knudepunkt 2019), p. 25–29.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Reininghaus, Gerrit, and Adrian Hermann. 2024. “Actual Plays of Live-Action Online Games (LAOGs).” 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: Screenshot by Simon Rogers from online larp The Space Between Us, written by Wibora Wildfeuer, run by Sydney Mikosch
Aesthetics, Possibility and Ethics of an Immersive Mass Media
This article is a personal commentary on a few major topics I picked up throughout the past six years of creating for VR/new media and larp. The principal aim of this text is to touch on philosophical themes related to industrial technology, as our community gravitates closer and closer to new media and A.I.. I also wanted to address the main question I have been asked by larpers: why VR, when we can just larp? This article thus blends thoughts on common grounds between larp and VR, impressions from VR experiences that I found inspiring, nostalgic rants, and speculations on the future. Finally, it opens a discussion on the possibility of larp contributing to an emerging immersive mass media.
I. an.other_reality
One of the first things I associate with larping is the idea of some sort of trip. If not in kilometers, it feels like a travel in time, consciousness or fantasy; a displacement from oneself and one’s own reality. If our perception of the world is called lifeworld,((Husserl (1936) calls “lifeworld” the evident reality that we perceive and experience together. A fiction-based reality that is experienced collectively as a group can be referred to as “storyworld”. Others also use the term “storyworld” to refer to a worldbuilding method or in previous larp literature (Brind 2019), but in this text it is purely a deviation from the phenomenological concept.)) we attempt to travel to a storyworld – a fictional reality that we perceive together.
When experiencing larp in non larp-spaces – arts spaces, tech spaces, video games spaces etc – I realized that such ability to travel to a storyworld relies as much on the larp design and environment as it relies on the culture nurtured by the larp community. In the way larpers interact, relate, find activities, open-up while playing, they help each other suspend disbelief and co-create the storyworld (Bowman 2017). In other words, larp designers and players alike tend to have a creativity that spans across fields. It is through this interest and ability to seek out fine details of reality building that we create levels of illusion, making the event feel more special and intricate.
Such attention put into layering ideas to engage ourselves or our players is what makes VR a promising ground for larpers: VR is not a medium, or a media, it is a milieu – which in French refers to environment, setting and social environment at the same time.
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR.
As such, VR has its own creative tools, that are ambidextrous,((VR headsets, like a minority of game consoles, generally include two controllers, one for each hand, which frees movement potentials for both limbs. Consequently, VR apps and games make use of these ambidextrous possibilities.)) 360 degrees and embodied; it is close to what our bodies can do and experience, and therefore it is more intuitive than our usual screen-keyboard-mouse tools or even our digital pads. For example: a few days ago, defeated by my inability to explain an exhibition concept to a collaborator, I hopped into the 3D VR software Gravity Sketch and drew the rigging I imagined. Visiting the exhibition’s life-sized model and looking up at the suspended objects, I realized from my own physical sensations that some ideas didn’t pan out as I had intended, and I corrected them.
Other than a creative tool, VR can be a sensational spectacle. Earlier this year, I was at a Fatboy Slim concert, dancing while free falling. From the sky, along with the rest of the audience, I overlooked his perfectly modeled Pioneer deck, before landing on the oversized table of an American diner. On the table, we could ride cockroaches alone or with someone else, towards the gigantic face of Steve Buschemi. As I was teleported from one impossible setting to the next, I felt the thrill of being effectively transported into someone’s unhinged imagination (Eat, Sleep, VR, Repeat (2023)).
For some, VR spaces can also be the avenue to explore transcendence; and I have met VR practitioners who have been exploring the similarities between traveling in VR and reaching other states of consciousness – through spiritual pursuit, drugs, or both. Today’s state of the technology is already allowing “VR shamans” to guide volunteers through digital spaces as though those were the meanders of their own consciousness, and some even explore the creation of VR psychedelic trips, like Ayahuasca VR (2020).
VR is certainly not perfect; not the “customer friendly” headsets at least. Despite the skyrocketing progress of VR graphics and playability in the past 10 years, I am still hearing the same comment: “I won’t be sold to VR until the pixels are invisible.” It can be cranky, it can be laggy, it can be obtuse or even painful. But if we can convince ourselves that a latex sword is Excalibur or that a green patch behind a parking lot is a lush forest, shouldn’t we also see giants as we ride jittery horses towards pixelated windmills?
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR.
I like inviting VR newcomers to lean into how conspicuous and ugly those spaces can be – firstly because you might discover you can get used to it as comfort adjusts, and secondly because these might be a few precious years before we enter an avalanche of hyper-realistic or hyper-convincing virtual realities. In fact, there might be questions to consider beyond the aesthetic appeal or revulsion of this imperfect VR. Adorno (1938) developed a praise for “dissonance” in musical aesthetics, as a disturbance that allows the listener to see the material “truth” behind harmony. Dissonance keeps us critical, while a perfectly harmonious music piece lulls us into accepting whatever purchase or ideology comes with it (Adorno, 1938). In this state of pleasant artistic immersion, we become “acquiescent purchasers”, ready to be mouthfed with an advertisement or a lifestyle. This praise of dissonance is similar to the “epic theater” developed by Brecht and used to describe “meta-awareness” in larp by Hilda Levin (2020). Somehow though, for some, realism seems like a sine qua non of VR, rubbing out entirely the question of keeping an awareness that we are in a virtual milieu. And so, I wonder: do all these people who told me VR wasn’t realistic enough really want to be fooled? And if so, why is that, and are they quite sure of themselves?
II. an.other_body / no.body
Have you ever wondered what your larp experience would have been like if you hadn’t felt limited by your body ability, appearance, normativity, humanness?
One of the first VR games I played was called Drift. It was a “die and retry game” developed by my highschool friend Ferdinand Dervieux. In Drift, you are a bullet sent out in full speed in a brightly coloured cubist world on hard electronic beats. If you touch something (a wall, an obstacle etc) you lose and restart. Throughout the experience, only your head movements control your trajectory and only the position of your head matters. After being reborn a projectile again and again for 30 minutes, a metonymic transformation happened: I was fully my head.
Experiencing Drift made me first wonder: how long would it take for us to get fully used to not being a human body? And what are the spaces we would crave, un-bodied in worlds that obey impossible physics rules? I regularly reopen the book Mind in Architecture edited by Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa (2017) that accounts how we conceive and build spaces based on embodied sensations. What we perceive as sheltering and comfortable, or towering and divine, or angular and dangerous, is an immediate physical reaction. Supposedly, we learned to create spaces based on those evolutionary instincts. As a projectile, almost annihilated, I craved movement, I sought feelings of orbiting and my comfort came from always sensing a spatial opening somewhere. Had there been other bullets, I would have wanted our trajectories to flirt with each other; for our interaction to be confrontational collision, cheeky scraping, avoidance. What spaces will we create for our other-bodies? Who, or what, can we discover we can also be?((VR headsets, like a minority of game consoles, generally include two controllers, one for each hand, which frees movement potentials for both limbs. Consequently, VR apps and games make use of these ambidextrous possibilities.))
Ancient Hours (2022): a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc (Design) and Josephine Rydberg (Production).
Some abstract forms of larp already invite us to imagine ourselves as non-human or more-than-human((See the work of Nina Runa Essendrop, Jamie Harper, Alex Brown, Nilas Dumstrei, to name a few.))and there is a prodigious potential in VR to explore our ability to transpose our mind into different bodies. In particular, we can already reroute our motor functions via puppeteering.((Puppeteering commonly means manipulating the limbs of a puppet to make it lifelike.)) VR pioneer and technical artist Rikke Jansen colloquially uses the word puppeteering to refer to a finer way of controlling the motions and visible emotions of our avatar, by assigning them to a variety of physical gestures that are recognized by controllers or sensors. For instance, a sensor on a foot could control a cluster of your avatar’s tentacles, another one at your waist could stretch out your outer membrane, raising your right index finger could get your helix to turn etc. In other words, digital prosthetics do not have to be thought of in terms of achieving a normative, valid body interpretation, but can be conceived as ways to experience full other-bodiedness. Puppeteering is likely to be a transitory device, as the technology is fast evolving towards image recognition through camera, full haptic body suits, and perhaps even EEG controllers.((Creating controllers that are directly connected to our “thoughts” by measuring our brain activity through electroencephalogram or EEG has been a longstanding area of research. Despite some misleading commercial communication, they are not functional yet. See Padfield et. al (2022).)) However, it is a functional current solution to explore the sensations of our mind being connected to another body.
Other than those extreme examples of being other-bodied, there is a more obvious point to emphasize about VR bodies in conjunction with larping or any other form of VR socializing: we can create or find whatever body we want. I have raved as a very large astronaut, held a speech as an orb of light, walked around as Laura Palmer, I have been the gray default robot avatar and an uncanny rendition of my IRL self.
What this also means is that we can make our VR body as conforming and valid as we wish for it to be, and VR social spaces are a testimony of it.
VR Chat, picture by Lhannan.
Discussions around ageism, lookism, fatphobia, racism, ableism etc. regularly arise in the larp community. Like in any part of our flawed society, presenting as normative as possible will grant us better social capital, integration and play opportunities (van der Heij 2021). If we push the thought experiment far enough, we land in a potential digital future where what our bodies are in the lifeworld does not matter socially anymore, as long as our avatars conform. Let’s stay with that scenario a bit longer: the dominant aesthetic might not be available to us in the real world – body type, skin color, hair, fashion, etc – but it is in the virtual world. All of us get to access valid-presenting bodies, publicly celebrated bodies, or even a gender representation that might alleviate some personal pain. Dissociated from our own body, our mind fully identifies and appropriates these virtual bodies. Is that the body equality that we crave?
This question should linger on throughout the process of designing a VR larp: which avatars are available to the players? What normativity do they shape? How can design and facilitation frame our relation to these digital bodies? Sometimes of course, budget or technical limitations will restrict design choices, as I experienced with my VR larp prototype Lone Wolves Stick Together.((VR Larp for six players designed by Nadja Lipsyc and inspired by the film Stalker by Tarkovsky (1979). The design was prototyped as a physical larp in 2018, then as a full VR prototype in 2023 in collaboration with Breach VR.)) We were only able to develop one avatar model for all six players; a half body, vaguely female, vaguely dark and masked. In this case, the larp is very discursive, and players’ voice coats those basic avatars with more embodiment and personality.
I won’t expand much on the topic of voice, but I’ll let some of my thoughts reverberate here. Voice recognition and voice alteration are still marginal in VR and in online spaces, despite already being technically achievable and available to the public. As such, voice remains the one close-to-intact physical impression of another person – a particularly vulnerable shadow that lets our mind speculate on what body could withhold it. This is quite mysterious to me and I wonder: is our ease of recording and transmitting live sound (compared to recording and transmitting 3D bodies) the reason why we do not disguise our voices in digital spaces? Would we default to avatars of ourselves if scanning ourselves convincingly was easier? Has our cultural obsession for visuals simply raided all our workforce? Or, perhaps, is there a particular attachment to sending our own naked voice out there?
III. technical difficulties / \ the cult of the technical
The app crashed. My headset died. The controllers are not recognized. You’re so glitched. I fell through the floor. I have no idea what’s happening. I feel sick. I’m lagging so much.
VR Chat avatars demonstrating avatar skinning issues and tracking glitch.
We lack a word to describe the specific flavor of pain that we experience when technology fails us. We are so close to our devices that we flirt with being cyborgs: the immediate reactivity of our computer or our phone feels just like any other action that happens seamlessly from intention to execution. Grabbing a plate from the cupboard, aligning pens on a table, and juggling through dozens of tabs and apps require a similar level of effort. However, at times, we might attempt what feels like a simple digital action, such as fixing the alignment of a paragraph in one click or connecting our computer to the only printer in the area, and it fails. Something imperceptible stops us – and this is infuriating. How to explain such fury, while we are aware of the complexity of the technology we use? Could it be connected to the profound sensation that technology should be easy, intuitive; the perfect extension of our will? These expectations of perfect performance and immediacy are in line with our expectations of high resolution when it comes to VR. If it pretends to be a digital reality, then the technological interface ought to be a perfect continuation to our experience of the world.
Graphic quality aside, technical difficulties in VR are still dissuasive to many, as there is a heightened risk of bug/crash/undiagnosed issues compared to the platforms we are used to. One way of alleviating the anxiety one can feel when facing technical issues is to learn enough about the machines not to feel completely helpless – should it be VR, a 3D software, a synthesizer, etc. To many of us, this seems difficult to prioritize, and we would rather wait for simpler interfaces. However, I do believe we should examine our passive (or even avoidant) posture towards the efforts required to understand technology. Such passivity could have worse consequences than keeping us frustrated in front of a stubborn printer.
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR.
Günther Anders’s (1956) concept of Promethean shame points at the inferiority complex we experience when we face the intricacy and performance of the technologies we have created. We escape that shame by avoiding any comparison to those machines – including our attempts at understanding them. We get used to machines thinking and executing for us, to the point we also lose track of our pragmatism and our faculty to foresee their impact on our lives. Our human abilities, both cognitive and emotional, cannot conceive the scale in which the things we create can operate. Anders takes the example of the nuclear bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 as a result of the gap between our understanding of concept and use.
With bringing more advanced technologies in larp, we can also question the gap between what we understand and what we might end up creating. As we merge larp with VR and with A.I., perhaps with little incentive to get more technologically educated, what use of our creations can we get blindsided by?
We are incapable of creating an image of something that we ourselves have made. To this extent we are inverted Utopians: whereas Utopians are unable to make the things they imagine, we are unable to imagine the things we make. (Anders 1981)
Rather than being defeated by the fear of future technological monstrosities, we can take Anders’s analysis of industrial times as a call to stay active and involved when dealing with new technology. Rather than distancing ourselves from how things work and rather than constructing inconspicuous technologies, we can learn to keep discomfort, emotions and difficulties a part of human-computer interactions. In fact, our human limitations and anxiety must remain part of the future if we want the future to have room for humans.
Photo of the author, Ancient Hours (2022).
IV. poetics of >presence< / <presence>
“But why VR, when larp is about being there together?”
Fragments of VR presence:
A distant voice calls, I turn the other way, just in time to see a silhouette of light vanish.
Notes on Blindness, Ex Nihilo, ARTE France, Archer’s Mark
I pick up a pen and draw around me the roots of a tree 4 times my size. The ink pulsates to the repetitive rhythms of a track I chose.
Tilt Brush, Google
I mute myself and approach my players as discreetly as possible. The sound is local, so I need to get close enough to hear them and judge whether it is a good time or not to trigger a flashback scene.
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR, by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR
In a karaoke room where 20 people with accents from all over the world sing on top of each other, I notice that someone is trying to get my attention. Their avatar is small and doll-like and they jump around me. I open my wings wide and cover them entirely.
The furry karaoke room by Duustu (VRChat)
I am playing with the animated locks of my co-actor’s hair, while laying on a bed by the sea. Our avatars are almost spooning. The warm light is softly reflected on the mediterranean stones, and red curtains gently move with the breeze. The director yells “Cut!”, I remove the headset and find myself lying alone on a wooden platform, in vast and austere black film studios.
Dates in Real Life, Maipo Film production.
the space between us, a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc and Josephine Rydberg.
I already miss larping, the way it felt “to be there together” 15 years ago, and that is widely due to technological changes. I miss larping before the avalanche of websites, before we checked our smartphones in our beds after playtime, before social media tipped us on the best and the worst, and before a plethora of pictures would mold my mental representation of larps.
Most of all, I miss larping when we had few enough opportunities to play that most of us were full of anticipation and entirely present at each event. This first flavor of presence is related to a mental and emotional availability; an ability to bring focus and commitment to the current experience that is perceived as an exceptional occurrence. In a form relying on togetherness, the unavailability of some will impact the sentiment of presence of all.
This longing doesn’t mean I am not fully enjoying the options, media and discussions that I now have; but larp already feels different than it did when it comes to this quality of presence – both because of technology and of commodification (Seregina, 2019). Whether the larp is physical or virtual, I am interested in discussing how we can create, participate, organize and self-organize for that sort of presence. I am making this point first, because I do not believe that digital interfaces are the main obstacle to nurturing it.
From Dates in Real Life TV series (2024).
“It’s not the same as being in the same place as someone else, it will never feel like a larp.”
The term teleabsence (Friesen 2012) categorizes the lack of bodily flow of information that prevents us from fully understanding and enjoying one another online((See Lindemann, Schünemann (2020) for more discussion on the concept of presence in digital spaces.)): I cannot look you directly in the eyes, sense the warmth of your skin when we are close, see a chest inflate and deflate or perhaps catch onto a loud deglutition. All of these clues are what allow us to react to one another in subtle and intimate ways. In this sense and as of now,((We should of course imagine a near future where most of our perceptible biofeedback can be transmitted to our avatars.)) VR is more mediated: there is a stronger need to represent or magnify our emotions if we want to convey them. Much like roleplaying with masks, our body language doesn’t disappear, but we must make it bigger to be understood. Although we can get accustomed to it with practice, and although some can experience phantom touch,((Phenomenon when a VR user gets physical sensations from perceiving a virtual touch or impact. VR is frequently used as a treatment for phantom pain or as exposure therapy due to its ability to trick our sense of reality.)) it is undeniable that VR larping takes us away from these finely sensual encounters and confabulations. However, it can be intimate, raw, and strange too.
Co-creation between VR players can flower just as much into the moments of beauty which Stenros and MacDonald (2020) also refer to as presence: “being sensitive to the emotions around you, understanding the exact situation, creating the right character response, feeling the emotion.” Presence in VR also has its signature poetics which lie in the expressive fluidity of spaces and bodies, in the playfulness of planes and perspectives, in the richness of sound integration and in forbidden intimacies.
Space and scale become potentially expressive and reactive as both the environments and the bodies you chose can be molded following your emotions or intentions: they can be gigantic or minuscule, they can form a vast open field or the most angular of cells, etc. We rarely intentionally fully design physical larps taking into consideration the perspectives of our space, where people are, how they can hear one another. VR spaces can be fully understood by the designers, either because they built them, or because visiting them and learning all their nooks and crannies is only a headset away. This option opens a more filmic or theatrical relationship to larp creation, which calls to refine our relation to larpmakers’ artistry, artistic emergence, and players’ creative agency.
But a rather easy and crucial element that I want to highlight is the potential that lies within VR larp sound design. Surround sound with outputs all around the space can create an “immersive” soundscape a lot more easily than by using physical sound sources or speakers in real life larp. On top of this immersive soundscape, you can localize sound sources as expressively as you desire: to bring objects to life, to bring participants’ attention to a specific spot, etc. And finally, you can create player-specific sound cues: whisper directly to the ear of each of your players, have them hear individual musics or, like in Lone Wolves Stick Together VR, have individual streams of thoughts for each character. This larp is about contradictory desires and introspection, and the streams of thoughts are triggered between each roleplaying scene to represent or prompt an evolving mental state. The soundtracks therefore help to guide the players going from act to act: from doubts to nostalgia, to disillusion, despair, and then finally, truth.
Screenshot from the prototype of Lone Wolves Stick Together, developed by Breach VR.
Sound alone can induce sensations of variation, call back previous moments, and give spatial and environmental impressions. Blackbox larps often rely on soundscapes and music to displace the fiction to a different place, and, with VR sound design, this trick is all the more potent: we can recreate the acoustics of an immensely tall building, make the players’ footsteps sound wet or frosty, create a musical space that reacts to players movements, etc.
There would be a lot more to explore and describe when touching upon the poetics of presence in VR, but the last trail I will allude to here is that of forbidden or impossible intimacies. VR lets us be where we shouldn’t be: in places that are inaccessible to the public, in places where sustaining life is impossible, in voyeuristic points of view. This emotion of looking at an impossible artifact from up close, of being a ghost, of being a speck of dust in a piano, of seeing someone from behind another person’s eyes, triggers an uncomfortable and shy curiosity that I have found to be a VR-specific source of inspiration.
V. the possibility of larp as mass media
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Donna Haraway 2016)
Larp has changed a lot over the past decade. It has become more international, more professional, it has blossomed into a vast array of players’ aspirations and of creative styles, it has even become mainstream in China (Shuo & al. 2022) and commonly played as an online form (Otting 2022). Industrial media and mainstream entertainment have had a more or less distant eye on larp; from big tech companies to audiovisual studios and theme parks. This proximity with the industry reinforces the expansionist dream that is a source of both excitement and trepidation among larpers. As someone working professionally with larp and VR, the first question I am asked when talking to game studios or stakeholders is: how can we reach more players or sell more copies? It is a question which generally turns into: how can we automate the game mastering or facilitation, massify the experience?
the space between us, a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc and Josephine Rydberg.
VR, like many new technologies, is connected to an all-encompassing need to massify. Its biggest actors, which are Facebook/Meta, Google and soon Apple, operate on a mass level, with only widespread adoption being able to stomach the developmental costs of their technologies and projects. Similarly, massification is what would allow more larp designers to live off their craft, and perhaps even prosper from it – an unprecedented potential.
I have been thinking that larp and VR were a match made in heaven due to their common affordances and potentials for presence, interaction, spatial creation, etc. (Lipsyc 2017). Retrospectively, I wonder how much of my initial excitement came from contemplating those creative potentials, and how much came from another sort of intuition: that larp could be the most appropriate form to create an immersive mass media.
With immersive technologies being more and more customer friendly and with the ascend of creative A.I., larp will potentially be able to rely on proceduralenvironments,((Procedural generation combines human-crafted assets with algorithms to automate and randomize the creation of large amounts of content, for instance entire game environments.)) scenes and characters. Similarly, our most brilliant designers might train digital automated facilitators, which could be combined with massively multiplayer immersive digital spaces and even possibly persistent open worlds.((Persistent worlds are digital spaces that are maintained online for all players to join and leave as they please without losing any data.)) This might thus be the way for larp creators to land an industrial career, but what are the other implications?
the space between us, a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc and Josephine Rydberg.
Who’s getting paid for larp?
Larp is not free as is – it comes with a lot of labor, which in our society must be paid by someone (in this case, the designers and their direct support network for non-profit larps, as well larper-customers for commercialized ones) – and it is not free to attend, with continuously inflating participation costs. The cost is mutual, just like the quality of a larp experience relies sometimes almost equally on designers’, organizers’ and players’ competence and engagement (Torner 2020; Jones, Koulu, & Torner 2016). Altogether, larp has been dependent on the goodwill and gratefulness that exists between designers, organizers and players.
However, this goodwill might collapse like a house of cards if larp effectively leads to some people becoming individually prosperous, famous or ascending socially thanks to the free labor of many others. The digital age has been normalizing free creative labor that people do at home: social media relies on its own customers’ content creation, creative A.I. is growing thanks to the free training its customers provide, and a mass media based on larp is just as likely to run thanks to the free contribution of its players. In other terms, many of us are or will be working a daytime job in order to be able to pay to work a creative job.((Günther Anders (1956) writes: “In a certain way, each individual is employed and occupied as a domestic worker . . . whereas the classical domestic worker made products in order to assure himself of a minimum of consumer goods and leisure, today’s domestic worker consumes a maximum number of leisure products in order to collaborate in the production of the mass-man.”))
Larp as a sustainable practice
A wonderful quality of larp is that it can be a very sustainable activity, given that we do not order cheap Chinese merchandise for costuming and that we do not fly ourselves to faraway countries every time we’re given a chance to (Brown 2022). As such, the environmental costs and political questions that come from working with technology are still unforeseen in larp. From relying on A.I. which demands extreme amounts of energy to train, to persistent multiplayer digital spaces, the maintenance of which also depends on keeping powerful computers churning at all times, and to supporting the electronics industry where mere components are obtained through excessive mining of rare materials at the expense of ecosystems and underprivileged workers in South America, Africa and South Asia (Asher 2022).
To remain sustainable, must we oppose the development of larp in the industry? Or, by excluding ourselves from those chances out of moral purity, do we also exclude ourselves from decision-making and shaping what this artform can become? How to react and act in the face of the climate crisis and what to do with industrial capitalism are questions that vastly exceed the scope of this article, but the possibility of industrial development should always come with self-reflection.
the space between us (2022) crew.
What other realities will we create?
If larp makers are potential creators for a future mass media, their influence and creative choices will radiate beyond our small community and pervade the general society. Both for the sake of our current community and our future practices, we must examine the realities we have been creating and plan to create. In particular, we must interrogate our tendency to reenact a glamourized dominant history (see Wood & Holkar in this volume). Nietzsche (1874) warned us against the temptation of over-studying history and fetishizing the past; such a tendency to “idle in the garden of knowledge” prevents us from taking action to bravely shape our lives.
Not only can a fantasy based on historical fallacy further cut us from the desire and ability to impact the current history, but our romanticisation of history is also contributing to making larp a space perceived as white and exclusive. Larp is not a diverse form for many reasons, one of them being that it ceaselessly recycles eurocentric history, representation, and codes of conduct. This isn’t to say that larp is particularly flawed as a form or a community. In fact, larp has more representation of gender and sexual minorities than most tech fields.((We now see the impact of these population biases on the technology these fields create (Zalnieriute & Cutts 2022, Buolamwini 2019).)) Yet, larp is profoundly biased.((See on YouTube the Larpers of Color Panel – Unlocking the Spectrum from Knutpunkt 2018 with great insights from Jonaya Kemper, Mo Holkar, Clio Davis, Aina Skjønsfjell Lakou, Kat Jones & Ross Cheung. See also Kemper (2018) and Holkar (2020).)) What body we wear, what space we create, those are not simply a creator’s preference or some fan service; those are statements on the digital future we are vouching for, and we now have very concrete options to challenge our usual aesthetics.
Massification’s impact on the artform
As a mass media, larp wouldn’t be the form that we now know – it would not be, feel or look the same, and we might never recognize it as larp. We might call it worldhopping, sim, VR MMORPG or VR gaming, and this immersive mass media might even mostly ignore the larp community’s praxis and reconstruct its own independent history towards storyworld-building and roleplaying.
In all cases, massification calls for mainstream content: less room and visibility would be given to experimental forms, but a bigger number of people would be getting something out of it. If it is anything like other mass media, an immersive mass media would be a constant flux of standardized content, of adaptations and of franchises. A.I. content creation being a condition to massify larp, we are likely to witness a new degree of standardization((Usva Seregina (2019) already pointed at the standardization that stems from commodification.)) in larp and across all artforms.
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR (2023) by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR.
Another consequence of using A.I. in our creative processes is that it can go as far as removing the dialectic we engage in with our creative materials: instead of dealing with the limitations that come with mastering a media, a material or an interface, we generate references and tweak them to get closer to our intuition or what we imagine. These limitations are what allow us to think of original solutions: it is because I cannot program the physics system I have in mind that I am adding the extra jumping power to my character which turns out to be the most fun part of the game, it is because the pigments I can access are not the right shade of blue that my sky is a bit green and all the more evocative, it is because I cannot find the right drum set in my sounds library that I recorded and distorted the sound of a bottle floating on the shore, relentlessly hitting a rock. Originality often comes from that friction between what we desire to create and what we can achieve. In a world of automated combinations of references, not only are we losing control and mastery over the creative technologies we use, we might accidentally lose one of our greatest creative tools: our ability to find ways to overcome difficulties.
Recorded larps
An additional disruptive potential for the larp form is the possibility to fully record a runtime: from all the players’ points of view, from all corners and angles. As of now, larp can contain a lot of secrets and privacy; a confession far away at the edge of the playscape, a joke that would only be appropriate for your good mate to hear, an off-game discussion to talk about a personal trigger, etc. In a virtual space, larp can be recorded, witnessed or re-lived. A larp recording can be an immersive reality roleplay TV experience for an external audience, or a pilgrimage through our own memory for returning players. Challenging the ephemeral and private attributes of larp, immersive mass media could become a persistent form, a voyeuristic form, and a place of collective memory (Yasseri & al. 2022).
Much customized such me wow
Streaming platforms, e-commerce platforms and social media all rely on learning and predicting customer preferences. Any digital mass-production is going towards data-driven content. As such, we can easily imagine that commercial data-driven larp would be informed by our recorded player behavior. Characters could be customized for us – with the tensions, surprises and alien elements we need, with the themes and flamboyance we want to address, with the aesthetic variations that feel the closest to our deeper selves. Although cultural products are already sold to us using the familiar language of our cultures, subcultures and social class, roleplay and identity play add the use of our own individual data: biofeedback, idiosyncrasies, fantasies and aspirations, furthering the ability to customize our online and offline experiences.
How to remain critical without being left out?
VRChat avatars. Photo courtesy of Rikke Jansen.
A larp mass media could also be extraordinarily connecting, enriching and educational. Larp has allowed a lot of us to explore our identity, to overcome personal limits, to develop a sense of community, to expand our knowledge and creativity – why not open those wonderfully enriching opportunities to everyone? Why deprive ourselves of contributing to a field that might make larp creators prosperous? Why shield ourselves from the excitement of discovering more immersive forms that might enthrall and stimulate us?
Automation, sustainability and accessibility are complex and abstract concepts that are close to impossible to grasp and handle at an individual level. However, we can aim to develop tools to measure impact and risks, and balance out our contributions. We can ask what our environmental budget is. Or how much do we use free labor for our own interest? And how much do we truly return to the wider community?
This isn’t a radical solution to oppose the changes of the world, but to keep in touch with our complex realities and remain alert enough to make decisions for ourselves and as citizens. Industrial arts and new technologies are defined by a rapid progression, a rush to new projects and new ideas in order to “make it”, with little breathing time spent on forming critical opinions. Such speed, combined with the massification of our expression and desire to constantly create more and more content has been flagged by thinkers contemporary to the rise of fascism in Europe – the school of Frankfurt, Günther Anders, Hanna Arendt, Guy Debord (1967), etc.
Walter Benjamin (1936) ends his famous text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction with the following sentences:
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.
He urges us to remain critical thinkers and active actors, as opposed to creators and consumers. Similarly, Hannah Arendt (1953) argues in Understanding and Politics that fascism does not build on the radicalization of masses, but in deconstructing their ability to form opinions. With the possibility of our community being closely involved in immersive mass media and disruptive technology, we must confront one another, debate, take stances, and use the democracy tools accordingly, however eroded and illusionary they seem to be – voting, protesting, rioting.
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Jaakko Stenros and James Lórien MacDonald (2020): Beauty in Larp. In What Do We Do When We Play? edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen. Solmukohta.
Evan Torner (2020): Labor and Play. In What Do We Do When We Play? edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen. Solmukohta.
Taha Yasseri, Patrick Gildersleve, and Lea David (2022): Collective Memory in the Digital Age. In Collective Memory, edited by Shane O’Mara. Elsevier.
Monika Zalnieriute and Tatiana Cutts (2022): How AI and New Technologies Reinforce Systemic Racism. Study commissioned by the United Nations.
VR Experiences and Softwares
Ayahuasca VR (2020): Experience by Atlas V, Small Studio by MacGuff, and Ryot.Dates in Real Life (2024): Series partly shot in VR, directed by Jakob Rorvik and produced by Maipo Films for NRK.
Drift (2015): VR die and retry by Ferdinand Dervieux and Aby Batti.
Eat, Sleep, VR, Repeat (2023): Fatboy Slim Concert by EngageVR.
Gravity Sketch: VR native design software that allows you to model 3D objects with collaborators.
Lone Wolves Stick Together VR: larpdesigned by Nadja Lipsyc as part of the Norwegian National Artistic Research PhD program. Developed with Breach VR and playtested in 2023. Older prototypes were tested in 2020 and 2018.
Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (2016):short film directed by Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton & James Spinney and produced by Ex Nihilo, ARTE France, Archer’s Mark.
VRChat (since 2014): social online virtual world platform that relies on Unity-based user-content. VRChat worlds mentioned in this article: Club Babylon by Rikke Jansen (private), VR Furry Karaoke by Duutsu (public), Wind and Grass by Byanca (public).
Further Relevant VR Experiences
Ancient Hours (2022): a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc (Design) and Josephine Rydberg (Production). Playtested at Grenselandet 2022 and premiered at The Smoke 2023.
Oxymore (2022): Jean-Michel Jarre Concert by Vrroom.
The Under Presents: Tempest (2020): immersive theater piece directed by Samantha Gorman and produced by Tenderclaws.
Welcome to the Respite (2021): immersive theater piece by the Ferryman Collective.
Talks
VR & Larp (2017), talk by Nadja Lipsyc, State of the Larp.
VR & the Future of Larp (2021), panel discussion organized by Anders Gredal Berner, facilitated by Johanna Koljonen, with Francis Brady, Rasmus Hogdall, Nadja Lipsyc, Bjarke Pedersen, Josefine Rydberg, Knutpunkt.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Lipsyc, Nadja. 2024. “Comments on VR, Larp, Technology, Creation: Aesthetics, Possibility and Ethics of an Immersive Mass Media.” 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: VRChat avatars. Image authorized by Rikke Jansen.
The first time I larped, sometime around 2001, I played a governess in a Jane Austen inspired regency romance. A lot of that game – such as the name of the game or my character – have been lost to me, but I do remember the feeling of being lost and bored. My character’s status required her to be present at the party of the gentry, but was too low for any hope of a romance plot. She couldn’t sneak into the kitchen either – and she was sternly turned away when she tried – because her status was too high for the servants to risk her finding out about the drama going on downstairs.
To be clear, this game was a genre romance based on fiction, not meant to be a look into the social history and real lives of the people in regency Britain, and I as a player did not consider the real lives and social status of actual governesses of the era. When we roleplay, we often see history as our playground, and the stories of people of bygone eras as inspiration for our characters. In many cases, we find the stories that most pique our interest on the edges and in the margins: it’s often much more fun to play drama and hardship than ordinary day-to-day life.
This paper explores questions of ethics when playing with the lives of real, sometimes marginalized, historical people. How can we treat the lives of people who lived and died centuries ago with respect? How much context should we expect the players to study in order to respectfully portray lives of people in the past? In what detail should we communicate the changes we make for artistic or playability purposes?
A personal interest
The question of how we treat people of bygone times recently became relevant to me, as I joined the research project Tieteen ja taikuuden rajamailla (abbreviated TiTaRa, the name translates to Between Science and Magic), funded by the Kone Foundation from 2023 to 2025. In the project, the three people working as researchers have a background in English historical linguistics. My own merits as a researcher come from looking further back in history: I majored in New Testament Exegetics, and have studied people in vulnerable and marginalized positions in the Biblical World – prostitutes and slaves (Nyberg 2000). More recently, I worked in the field of local cultural heritage for nearly a decade.
My role in the project is one of a designer. I will be writing a roleplaying game – a tabletop game tentatively titled Tähtiin kirjoitettu (forthcoming 2025, Eng. Written in the Stars) – based on the research that my peers in the project publish. This means that the sources for my game will be examples of real people and their lives in medieval and early modern England. The research project concentrates on the vocabulary used of witches, astrologers and alchemists – and by them, of themselves – in that time period. These people were all set apart from regular society in some way, and at least in the case of witches also feared and sometimes persecuted.
As the game I am designing will be published as part of a research project, and as the aim is to make the information accessible to a wider audience, I am concerned by both historical accuracy and playability. This paper was prompted by considerations of portraying the lives of the medieval subjects in a way that does not diminish their experiences, but that allows for enough common ground for the modern players to be able to identify with their characters.
A history of stereotypes
In role-playing games studies, there has been some discussion about misery tourism during the past few years. Many games draw inspiration from current or recent historical experiences, often those of marginalized people. Some of these games have been designed in co-operation with groups affected by the real-world issues they depict, such as Halat hisar (Finland 2013, Eng. State of Siege). Others, such as the Polish 4th of July (Poland 2022) larp about trashy trailer park living in Ohio have been mostly inspired by media and there has not been contact with any actual poor trailer park residents in the design process.
In recent years, the roleplaying community has also started to acknowledge large problems pertaining to depictions of race especially in the D&D derived tabletop tradition (Loponen 2019) but also in larp . Roleplaying games have a long history of orientalism, in portraying Asian or Middle Eastern inspired roleplaying cultures as other, exotic, naïve and mystical (Trammell 2016). Roleplayers of color have made it clear that appearing in blackface or in exoticized dress or gear to portray someone who is Black, or of Arab, indigenous, or Asian descent is not a homage, but a continuation of a long legacy of racism. (Kemper 2018, Eddy 2020)
The discussions concerning misery tourism, or different racist stereotypes in roleplaying games, are far from finished, as these themes are important in making the roleplaying hobby in all its forms more welcoming and accessible for people of different backgrounds. What seems to be missing, though, is a discussion on games using history that goes beyond the 20th century. There has been discussion about historical and historically inspired games, but these discussions usually revolve more around how accurately history and historical events are represented, and what alterations have been made to make for better playability (Salomonsen 2003).
Quite a few roleplaying games, starting from the earliest D&D, are set in pseudo-medieval worlds. This makes the concept of medievalism relevant. For the purposes of this paper, medievalism refers to idealized or stereotypical views of the medieval world. In the roleplaying game context, it’s usually more important to build a setting for adventures, not portray the world in a historically accurate way. In the process, these games more often than not end up quite Eurocentric, even when creating fantasy worlds, and colored by a romanticized view of medieval times (Konzack and Dall 2008). This idealized, romanticized medievalism is also something that can attract the interest of conservative nationalist groups – with ideals directly opposed to the ideals of openness and accessibility mentioned above (Mochocki 2022).
Outside the roleplaying community
The discussions on racist and colonialist stereotypes, as well as treating the heritage of people with respect, have not arisen a vacuum in roleplaying game studies. The same discussions are ongoing in both other fields of study and in broader public discussions. For the purposes of this paper, I will only cite a couple of cases that are pertinent for the issues of history, heritage and respect.
In July 2023, as I was working on this paper, the Dutch king Willem Alexander gave a speech in apology for the part that the Netherlands played in the history of slavery (Willem Alexander 2023). At the same time, artefacts that were taken from Sri Lanka and Indonesia during the Dutch colonization are now being returned home (Bubalo 2023).
Museums that work with cultural heritage and store historical artefacts also participate in the discussion. In Finland, the National Museum repatriated Sámi artefacts from their collections to the Sámi community and the Sámi Museum Siida in 2021. I myself visited the powerful exhibit Mäccmõš, maccâm, máhccan – The Homecoming, which according to the National Museum “showcases the significance of cultural heritage to people and identity and encourages us to think about the control and ownership of cultural heritage”. In the exhibition Egypt of Glory – The Last Great Dynasties in 2020 to 2021, in the museum Amos Rex, located in central Helsinki, questions of respect and of displaying the bodies of the dead, who had been mummified and buried according to their religious customs, were included in the exhibition texts for the public to read. The part of the exhibition where the human mummies were displayed was somber. The acoustics were created to shield the area from crowd noises, and the visitors were asked to be respectfully quiet. Both exhibitions mentioned above made the exhibition materials available in the relevant languages, in the case of the first in Sámi languages, and in the second in Arabic.
These cases are but a few examples of the discussion about history, heritage, and respect, in the context of which we operate both as scholars and as creators of roleplaying games and larps.
Voices of larp writers
For a closer look into the subject at hand, I talked with the writers of two Finnish historical larps from the 2010s: Completorium from 2012 and Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa (Eng. So That the Strong Should Not Harm the Weak) from 2018. I had a personal discussion with Minna Heimola, one of the authors of Completorium, and interviewed Aino Haavisto and Ada-Maria Hyvärinen about Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa by email. In these talks, I asked these larp writers the same questions that I posed in the Introduction of this paper: How can we treat the lives of people who lived and died centuries ago with respect? How much context should we expect the players to study in order to respectfully portray lives of people in the past? In what detail should we communicate the changes we make for artistic or playability purposes?
Both these games hail from the Finnish historical larp tradition, which has been greatly influenced by the reenactment and larp association Harmaasudet (The Greywolves). This game style is characterized by an ambition for authenticity, and a lot of discussion and research into historical sources goes into the writing of these games. There is also an educational undertone, and players are expected to read background material put together by the organizers (Sahramaa 2010). Before historical games, there are often possibilities to join in crafting sessions for sewing costumes or making other gear. For my first larp, the game mentioned in the Introduction, a game in either the Harmaasudet or Alter Ego tradition, I participated in several dance rehearsals to learn recreations of historical dances of the era – and I also learned to play whist, a card game that was popular in the regency era.
In addition to Harmaasudet, several prolific Finnish writers of historical larp are alumni of Alter Ego, the University of Helsinki roleplaying association. This means many have degrees in subjects such as cultural heritage studies or folkloristics, and have gone on to careers in, for example, some of the most well-known museums in Finland. Some have also completed doctorates – an achievement that translates into ever-more professional background research.
Completorium (Finland 2012) was a game set in a medieval Cistercian monastery. The authors have already published texts about the game, from the point of view of considering gender in historical larps (Heimola and Heimola 2016) and also from the point of view of reenacting history (Heimola 2012). In the case of this particular game, the main organizers had recently completed or were just about to complete their doctoral studies in theology and in comparative religion – and during my discussion with Minna Heimola I was shown a respectable pile of books that represented just some of the background research done for Completorium.
In our discussion, Heimola reiterated that the organizers wanted to respond to a dual issue: one of the most common complaints about Finnish historical larp in the 2000s was that female characters often ended up as being boring and feeling like side characters, but at the same time – and this is something that still persists in Finnish larp – most of the people signing up for the games were non-male, and wished to play non-male characters. Hence, the main consideration of the organizers was not a respectful treatment of any historical subjects. Rather, they wanted to portray a historical setting that fit their mostly-female player demographic, in a way that allowed for meaningful play and character agency within that setting.
Heimola mentioned that they also dived into historical sources for what the characters were supposed to do during the game: the day-to-day cycle of monastic life with both services and daily labor, scenes of religious visions, as well as more action-oriented plots such as attempts to steal relics for another church.
Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa (Finland 2018) was a larp set in ancient Mesopotamia, in the context of a judge’s visit to a fictional small town. Also in this case, the authors have written about the game and their thinking around the themes and of making history playable (Haavisto and Hyvärinen 2020). Again, the historical background of the game was well-researched: Haavisto has a degree in languages and Asian studies, with a minor in Assyriology.
In my interview, the authors told me that they had a clear division of labor, with Haavisto being in charge of the actual historical background, and Hyvärinen taking more responsibility of changing things around to create a better and more playable story. From the start they agreed that playability comes before historical accuracy. Initially, the plan had been that every character would have had some connection to actual historical materials: tablets on court cases of the era, letters and the like. This did not quite come to pass, and the final result was that around a third of the characters had these direct connections to the ancient material. As an example, the authors described using actual ancient court cases that pertained to one or two people and then filled in details such as family members – so those family member characters did not have a direct link to historical materials. No characters were directly and fully based on actual historical persons, though one character did impersonate Ea-Nāṣir, the copper merchant of the clay tablet UET V, 81 (Figulla and Martin 1953).
The authors said that in their experience the Finnish larpculture surrounding historical larp expects the players to read all materials in order to understand the genre and the vision of the game at hand, and to act accordingly when playing. As such, they were not concerned about their players being disrespectful of the material presented – and also, as they point out, the events of the game were set so far back in history that any information we have is based on archeology rather than any living cultural heritage. With a 3000+ year gap in time between the time represented in the game and the people of today, we cannot really call the ancient Mesopotamians close cultural ancestors of anyone alive now.
This does not mean that history was taken lightly. In the background information section of the game homepage, details for which there were no sources in research, or which were changed for better playability, were clearly marked in cursive. The authors told me they felt it was important that the players, when preparing for the game, would be able to see right away what was based on historical research, and what was not. It was also communicated to the players from the start that they were engaging in a decidedly feminist take on history. On the point of contextualization, the authors also said that many of the plotlines for the characters were age-old, and deeply rooted in being human and not representing a particular era: fairly sharing inheritance, being involved in a love triangle, or the balance between fulfilling parental wishes versus taking your own liberties.
In all, the organizers of both Completorium and Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa agreed on that players needed enough onboarding and contextualization to grasp the setting and game vision. The Finnish style of historical larp expects players to be prepared to put in some work into understanding the era the given game is set in, and to dress and act the part. In both cases, if historical accuracy and playability were in conflict, playability was prioritized.
Of course, even though styles of play have evolved during the years, Finnish larp has a long history of prioritizing immersion into character, and acting as you believe your character would do in any given situation or social setting. Even though it’s been over two decades since the debated Manifesto of the Turku School (Pohjola 2003), the ideals of strong character immersion being central to the larp experience still linger.
The authors I interviewed felt that taking into account the style of play in historical games that has evolved in the Finnish tradition, they had every reason to believe that their players would treat their characters respectfully, and would do their best to represent the lives of the characters in an as authentic fashion as they could, based on the background material they were given.
As I myself have experienced this tradition and style of play firsthand, I understand the position of these authors. The question is: How much do the players actually know about history, and how much do they think they know? There are pitfalls in trusting the historical knowledge of your players.
History, heritage, and roleplaying
The authors of Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa mentioned heritage, and the fact that the very ancient history their game was set in isn’t directly lived and experienced heritage for anyone today. When considering this, I ended up looking into questions of heritage. I found the vocabulary of heritage studies very helpful when considering the issues of using the lives, experiences and accounts of real people as material for games.
According to Rodney Harrison (2013), history is about the past, whereas heritage is concerned with the present and future. This means that we make sense of past events concerning our social or ethnic group, about our nation or about a minority we belong to by giving meaning to things that our predecessors have done or experienced. It’s a process of social meaning-making.
In his book Role-play as a Heritage Practice Michał Mochocki (2021) combines heritage studies with historical game studies and roleplaying game studies, and discusses authenticity and historical accuracy in the context of games, as well as immersion and experiencing. He notes that the discussion in the field of historical game studies often distinguishes between accuracy-based authenticity, and behavioral and psychological authenticity, which leads to a dualism of accuracy-of-facts versus authenticity-of-feeling.
As someone who has played both tabletop RPGs and larped in historical settings, I recognize the thought of authenticity-of-feeling from my own experience. I would not expect historical accuracy, or accuracy-of-facts, in every detail of a game. Instead, when going to a historical larp, I want to experience something of the era the game is about. If the game had an educational goal – such as highlighting the experiences of marginalized groups in the era and setting – I would expect proper contextualization through workshops, talks, or written information provided.
Above, in A history of stereotypes, I noted that we tend to shift from questions of ethics and respect to more general questions of accuracy and authenticity when we go further back in history. The viewpoint of heritage studies sheds some light on why that is. When there is a direct link of living heritage between the era or events we portray, and people alive today, we need to take this into account. This is where the questions of respectful treatment of the past and the people and events we portray are important. When we go into history, the link is often broader – such as the Dzikie Pola (Poland 1997) portrayal of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which describes the history of whole nations rather than any marginalized groups (Mochocki 2022).
The pitfall of history is that we often think we know what it was all about, but what we are taught at school is in the end quite superficial. If we play striving to be “authentic”, it is easy to erase marginalized identities, or repeat our prejudices time and again. Having studied historical times and people myself (Nyberg 2000, 2006), I know from experience that we very often just cannot know for certain how people – especially people who were not in politically significant positions – really lived, as the further back we go, the more we rely on what kind of materials have been preserved. If we have a collection of Roman laws, for example, we do not know for sure how strongly they were enforced, unless the information is extensively backed by other sources such as court rulings and contemporary written accounts. Defending discriminatory design choices by saying “this is historically accurate” is very often not a sustainable argument.
When we move from themes of heritage to themes of history, it is well justified to use the principle “the players are more important than the game”. We are not disrespecting the people of bygone eras by considering the safety and well-being of our players today. If we design for what we imagine was historically accurate rather than for playability, we will very likely be placing roadblocks for people from marginalized backgrounds joining the game (Jones, Holkar and Kemper 2019).
Conclusion
The questions of respectful treatment of historical subjects have not been raised very much in roleplaying game studies. We visit the past and play with people’s lives not only to experience their struggles or marginalization, but to find the human connection between them and us. Even separated by nearly four millennia, we can sympathize with the client who complained about the quality of copper provided by one Ea-Nāṣir – or, as we do not know if the complaint had merit, the poor salesman. What we need to remember is that when we create a game set in history, we always create our own interpretation of it. It is not necessary to repeat every oppression and injustice – and not considering these in the design but just including them by default damages playability.
The farther back in history we go, the less information we have on what the everyday lives of people were really like, or what the thoughts and feelings of the average person were. What we do have, however, is an ongoing discussion about the respectful treatment of people’s heritage. Living heritage makes sense of events of the past and how they pertain to the events of the present and the future.
The current discussion on the history of racism, the legacy of colonialism, and the respectful treatment of cultural heritage is ongoing not only in the context of roleplaying games, but in society at large. This article is only a quick dip into these issues as they are relevant for roleplaying in historical settings, and I hope to be able to expand on this and go deeper into the questions of history, accuracy and authenticity, and respect, at a later date.
EunJung Chang (2006): Interactive Experiences and Contextual Learning in Museums. In Studies in Art Education, Vol 47, No. 2 (Winter, 2006), 170-186.
H.H. Figulla and W.J. Martin (eds.) (1953): Letters and Business Documents of the Old Babylonian Period. In Ur Excavations Texts V: Letters of and Documents of the Old-Babylonian Period. British Museum Publications.
Jenni Sahramaa (2010): Antikristuksen yö. Steel and Holy Spirit in Medieval Bohemia. In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola. Fëa Livia.
Jonaya Kemper (2018): A Seat at the Feasting Table – A Call for Inclusivity in International Larp. In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner. ETC Press.
Kat Jones, Mo Holkar and Jonaya Kemper (2019): Designing for Intersectional Identities. In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen. Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Kristel Nyberg (2000): Prostituutio Uuden testamentin maailmassa. University of Helsinki, unpublished master’s thesis.
Kristel Nyberg (2006): Prostituutio ja naisihanne Uuden testamentin maailmassa. In Taivaallista seksiä: Kristinusko ja seksuaalisuus, edited by Minna Ahola, Marjo-Riitta Antikainen and Päivi Salmesvuori. Tammi.
Lars Konzack and Ian Dall (2008): Fantasy and Medievalism in Role-Playing Games. In Playground Worlds. Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. Ropecon ry.
Michał Mochocki (2021): Role-play as a Heritage Practice. Historical Larp, Tabletop RPG and Reenactment. Routledge.
Michał Mochocki (2022): Heritage of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Polish Role-playing and Reenactment. Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022. Youtube, October 20, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCKgsPb25L4, ref. July 13, 2023.
Mika Loponen (2019): The Semiospheres of Prejudice in Fantastic Arts: The Inherited Racism of Irrealia and Their Translation. Doctoral dissertation. University of Helsinki.
Mike Pohjola (2003): The Manifesto of the Turku School. In As Larp Grows Up. Theory and Methods in Larp, edited by Morten Gade, Line Thorup, and Mikkel Sander. Projektgruppen KP03.
Mikko Heimola (2012): Completorium – keskiaikaisen luostariyhteisön elävöittämistä näytelmäroolipelin keinoin. In Glossæ III/2012.
Minna Heimola and Mikko Heimola (2016): Gender and Historical Larps: Two Case Studies of Women’s Roles in Historical Settings. In Larp Politics. Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi. Ropecon ry.
Rodney Harrison (2013): Heritage: Critical Approaches. Routledge.
Xenia Salomonsen (2003): The Use of History in Larp. In As Larp Grows Up. Theory and Methods in Larp, edited by Morten Gade, Line Thorup, and Mikkel Sander. Projektgruppen KP03.
Zoë Antoinette Eddy (2020): Playing at the Margins: Colonizing Fictions in New England Larp. In Humanities 9(4), 143. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/9/4/143.
Ludography
4th of July (2022): Poland. Bartosz Bruski, Paweł Jasiński & Ewa Żygadło.
Completorium (2012): Finland. Mikko Heimola & Minna Heimola.
Dungeons & Dragons (1974): TSR, USA. Gary Gygax & Dave Arneson.
Dzikie Pola (1997): Wydawnictwo MAG, Poland. Jacek Komuda, Maciej Jurewicz & Marcin Baryłka.
Halat hisar (2013): Finland. Fatima AbdulKarim, Faris Arouri, Kaisa Kangas, Riad Mustafa, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson & Mohamad Rabah.
Jotta vahva ei sortaisi heikkoa (2018): Finland. Ada-Maria Hyvärinen & Aino Haavisto.
Tähtiin kirjoitettu / Written in the Stars (upcoming 2025): Finland. Kristel Nyberg
Museum exhibitions
Egypt of Glory – The Last Great Dynasties (2020-2021): Amos Rex.
Mäccmõš, maccâm, máhccan – The Homecoming (2021-2022): The National Museum of Finland.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Nyberg, Kristel. 2024. “History is Our Playground – On Playing with People’s Lives.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
In my opinion, one of the most important things in being a good larper is to have self-awareness. This means knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses and being able to provide play for other players – but also knowing what one wants out of a larp and how it aligns with the vision and themes of the larp.
After larping for some years, I thought I had a good perception of my strengths and weaknesses. For example, I knew that I was lousy with directions, so I should not try to play Aragorn. However, I knew that I was really good at organizing things and playing a leader, so I thought I should actually try to play Aragorn.
It all came down to balance and knowing that I could play most of the characters I wanted to as long as I tweaked them, had trusted friends around, and communicated well with the organizers. In addition, I was very good at making sure that my body was strong enough to carry heavy things at a larp if a character demanded it and letting the organizers know if there was something that needed to be adjusted or not played on. For example, I could tell them that I am really bad when it comes to close combat since I am short and lazy.
Over the years, I learned more about what kinds of characters I could give the most for and what characters I could grow into. But while I was great at communicating about my practical skills and all my larp needs related to them, I was not up to par with being transparent about my health. Or rather, my mental health.
As all people, I had ups and downs. But to tell it bluntly, there were some years when I was in a downward spiral. While I had been very outspoken to my friends about my mental health and the importance of self care, I was adamant that it would not impact my larping.
The author at the larp House of Cravings (2023). Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien.
Mental health issues can range from depression and PTSD to anxiety, self harm, and eating disorders (to only mention a few examples). All of these should be taken seriously and treated as reasons to get help. It does not matter what my mental health issues were. What is important is how they impacted my larping. The biggest thing they brought to me was shame over feeling the way I did and having the issues I had.
I wanted to play pretend in my hobby and to be strong without letting my issues bleed over to my co-larpers. And I was hesitant to communicate what I needed to my co-larpers since I did not fully know what I needed. Was it sympathy? Maybe concrete hands-on help if I would not be able to play out a scene? Understanding if I needed to break the game for a time? Underneath these thoughts there was a fear of being rejected. What if people thought I was too broken to play with?
With that, I made a promise to myself to basically take care of myself, to be a great larper and be open in every way – but not when it came to what I needed from my co-larpers and organizers with my trauma and mental health issues.
Of course, in retrospect, that was a horrible idea.
When things got hard or triggered something in me, I had to hide it. I rather pushed it down than caused trouble. I pushed myself to the breaking point when it came to organizing and being available to my co-players – just to prove that I was not broken. I did not cancel a single larp, but in the end, I played for my co-players, not for myself. I tried to make sure that they had fun but ended up having less fun myself.
On the other hand, I was adamant in advising my friends and co-larpers to do the opposite of what I was doing. I always encouraged them to be open with all their needs and health issues. I was the one who took people aside to sit down and have a chat. I was the one who offered a shoulder to cry on during larps.
Then something happened a couple of years ago. It was a standard larp with no hard themes — and played with trusted friends. I was responsible for a small group and all was well. Apart from that it was not. Around this time in life, I was struggling more than ever. I wanted to stay at home all the time and the only thing that pushed me to the larp was the knowledge that I had people relying on me.
There was a scene, some larp fight – and suddenly I blacked out with over ten minutes of which I have no memory of. People told me that I did a great scene with screaming and fighting, and that they were surprised over seeing me get that physical.
I have no memory of this. The next thing I remember is sitting in the darkness by a lake and silently crying my eyes out. I felt so ashamed and broken. Most of all, I did not know how to handle this or how to reach out to friends. So I cried a bit more and then went back into the tent and took care of my group.
The big change came only recently. I had gotten used to hiding how I felt at larps or conferences and just faking it all the way. Always smiling, always acting like I did not care, doing my best to be the steady port for others.
I thought I had a great system for handling myself in the larp community. And then came a larp when it just did not work anymore. I had, again, the responsibility for a small group. I should have been able to keep it together, so I just ignored the feeling of terror. But for the first time, I could not push myself anymore.
I contacted my group. I told them that I had limited energy and told them to make sure to steer their larp away from relying on only me. I told them that I would need breaks but that I could handle it.
Then I contacted the organizers. I told them everything. On how I was at my limit but that I really wanted to give the larp a try. I told them what could be done, both for me and my group. They were wonderful in assuring that things were ok and that I was welcome with limited energy and all my brokenness.
The larp was a bit of a blur. I was really tired and had to rest a lot. I cried off-game in an organizer’s arms. I was sitting and resting on a friend’s lap and had her pat my hair until I could breathe again. But I had the energy to give my everything and to feel into myself. I created magic for my co-larpers and for myself. And for the first time in years I felt I was larping for myself.
I went home from that larp with a sense of sadness and peace. Sadness over how easy it had been and how many years I had robbed from myself. Peace in knowing that it would be so much easier from now on.
That experience changed larping for me. I no longer take on responsibilities for groups alone. I put myself first when it comes to how I travel to, sleep, and eat during larps. I share my needs before and after a larp, both with organizers and with my friends. I try to be open with my co-players if things are hard. When they ask how they can support me, I answer their questions honestly.
The author in Viking garb (2021).
During any larp, I take the time to rest, and I step off-game when I need to. If I feel I don’t have the energy for something, I cancel it and try to do it in good time. After a larp, I take the time to land. I might not always succeed in it but I do my best. And I give myself that time.
A while ago, I went to a very challenging larp. Even before the larp, my sleep pattern was non-existent and I had mental health issues that were acting up. I opened up to a co-larper when she asked if I needed anything and that helped a lot. Then after the first part of the larp, I just crashed. There were no triggers or bad things involved. I had just pushed myself too hard and too much.
The main takeaway was that I could accept the help from organizers who just sat together with me in a dark room while I cried. I managed to explain my needs and reached out to a loved one who came and held me. And with those small means of accepting help, speaking about my needs and just being honest, I could breathe and pick myself up for the rest of the larp. Looking back, I have come very far in how I handle myself, and I try to make sure to take care of my needs. Does it make me feel better? Absolutely not. I feel more vulnerable than in years and so broken. But I hope that it will pass in time. I will rather do this than go through another 20 years faking it.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Erlandsson, Anna. 2024. “How I Learned to Stop Faking It and Be Real.” 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 jaygeorge on Pixabay. Image has been cropped.
We live in an apocalyptic age. The collapse of highly developed and precariously connected civilisation is a recurrent feature in human history; examples range from Bronze Age Middle East to Mesoamerica in the Classic Maya era. Today the disaster is global, and the unfolding climate catastrophe and newfound affection for nuclear weapons bring the terror of disintegration closer to home week by week. The blackbox larp End(less) Story (Norway 2022) by Nina Runa Essendrop taps into this mortal dread unapologetically and with compassion.
The writing room. Photo from The Smoke larp festival.
The participants (the larp is designed for 6–15 people) play the spirits of the last humans. The characters gradually remember fragments of their life and grapple with their foregone death, which also marks the end of humanity. The characters’ means of interacting with each other, always personal and ever ambiguous, first grow as their minds open up. They are then severed as the spirits approach either oblivion or the unknown beyond, the memory of our species erased or transformed with them.
The larp pointedly leaves the cause of extinction unspecified: climate catastrophe, war, asteroid impact or other terminal events are for the players to inject if they so choose. Short larps – End(less) Story is four hours long, including workshop and debrief – necessarily leave a lot of background to the players’ discretion, which can result in loss of coherence in the shared world and mutual narrative.
End(less) Story sidesteps the problem by denying the players verbal communication. The larp is played in three rooms. In the first room, where the characters awake, the players can converse with each other by body expression, touch and movement. As lights turn on in the second room, the players can go there and interact by shadows cast on white fields with hands and sundry objects. The third room, which opens last, has a large sheet of paper with a single sentence written on it. The players can process the characters’ sensation by writing, but must incorporate a word already on the page, and cannot directly reply to or address each other. This elliptical linguistic intercourse makes for a creative contrast with the unmediated sensation of connecting by touch and movement.
Communication by touch is well adapted to the theme, as it steers the players to build a narrative on emotive currents rather than precise events. Absence of verbalisation also enables scenes that are significant for the story arc, but whose narrative meaning can radically differ from character to character, as the players individually frame their own story on the structure prepared by the organiser.
The rooms become dark and close off one by one, starting with the text area, and the spirits are forced back to their starting position. There they must relinquish their tenuous existence, whether or not they have been able to come to terms with their past history and immediate condition in this short time.
Interactions in the shadow play room. Photo from The Smoke larp festival.
The entire experience is supported by an informally ritualistic soundtrack of non-verbal Meredith Monk pieces. Three times her voice is punctuated by shots of loud brown noise, during which the characters recall their destruction with increasing clarity.
It’s a beautiful design, neatly implemented. After playing End(less) Story at the Grenselandet larp festival in Oslo in 2022, I was deeply moved and left with admiration for the composition. But reflection led to doubt.
Apocalypse and coming to terms with mortality are themes nearly as old as recorded fiction, featuring prominently already in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the 1970s, post-apocalyptic fiction had particular resonance due to fear of nuclear devastation from runaway superpower competition. Climate anxiety of the 2000s is a more persistent variety of trauma, as now impending destruction is contingent on evident societal inaction, not on possible misaction by a handful of leaders.
This is reflected in works of art shifting their focus from life after the apocalypse to accepting the end of the world. For example, while the 2021 film Don’t Look Up may have been intended to coax people into action, its climax features the characters accepting their fate as they are annihilated together with the rest of humanity. In End(less) Story, the apocalypse is equally total, with no one left to pick up the pieces. This heightens the somewhat transcendental experience of the larp, but also raises questions.
Human extinction is inevitable. But collective conduct will determine whether it comes soon or waits in the far future. Art is made from the material of its day, and End(less) Story lives in the troubles of our era.
End(less) Story may be effective as desensitisation therapy for climate anxiety, helping either to resist paralysis in the face of insurmountable odds or to remain unperturbed in the face of extermination. Interpretation of larp is arguably more subjective than other narrative art forms, especially with a figurative work like End(less) Story. I felt End(less) Story to carry the message that even if you rage, the light will die, and wise people at their end know dark is right. Tranquillity in the face of personal deadly disease or lethal injury may be a philosophical virtue, but granting people the serenity to simply accept the things they could change is a different lesson altogether.
The question that hangs over End(less) Story is whether terminal illness is an apt metaphor for the present state of civilisation. As a counterpoint we may note that climate catastrophe is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Human existence is ending on a day-to-day basis, and we can make things worse or better.
The British politician Tony Benn famously said that progress is made because there are two flames burning in the human heart: the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope that you can build a better world. We should pause before reaching for the extinguisher.
The extinction room. Photo from The Smoke larp festival.
Bibliography
Don’t Look Up (2021), directed by Adam MacKay, Hyperobject Industries and Bluegrass Films.
Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (1989). Oxford University Press.
Ludography
End(less) Story (2022): Norway. Nina Runa Essendrop.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Räsänen, Syksy. 2024. “Extinction Now: Coming to Terms with Dissolution in End(less) Story.” 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 from The Smoke larp festival. Image has been cropped.
Sometimes, when participating in a larp, things just go wrong. But where is the problem? How can you fix it? This article provides a quick guide that condenses the international larp community’s knowledge on techniques to remedy a larp gone wrong, and to fix it during the event.
The core of larp, perhaps the concept of larp itself, is co-creation. It is collective and improvised, often based on an emergent narrative with a strong experiential impact. All of these aspects make larps unique and powerful, but also open to potential risks. Their performative nature makes it difficult for participants to stop for a moment, analyze, and fix what is going wrong for them.
Larp as a triangle
A larp can be divided into various elements, and these elements can be adjusted on the go. But one important thing to keep in mind is that a larp is always bigger than the sum of its parts. There is something difficult to understand: a ghost, a hidden melody. That’s why when things don’t go so well, it’s not always easy to figure out exactly why. For the purposes of this article let’s imagine the larp as a triangle formed by the larp itself, the community, and you, the player. Usually a larp goes wrong when one or more of the sides of this triangle do not work.
What can go wrong
Following our triangle-based model, here is a list of possible issues:
The larp: unclear communication, poor game design, wrong logistics, temperature, insufficient or inadequate food, hard sleeping conditions and accessibility in general. Lack of meaningful plot and narrative, unclear larp structure.
Community: different play styles, lack of chemistry with the players or the community, lack of in-game connections with other characters, lack of things to do or meaningful actions, or a sense of being left out.
The player: your personal state, your expectations, difficulties in feeling/portraying your character, social anxiety, your commitment to the game.
How to fix your larp on the go
Rather than a comprehensive guide, I collected a series of practical tips from my own experience and the collective knowledge of the international larp community. I read articles, asked for opinions, and listened to stories. Then I tried to synthesize it into a set of tips and tricks, aimed at a quick resolution and getting the larp back on track in a decisive, though not always elegant, way.
Not all of these techniques can work for everyone. Use them as you see fit. Put them into practice as soon as possible, as soon as you begin to realize that things are not working for you.
The goal is always to relocate. This is because the experience does not work when we are out of place. Following our tripartite scheme, we can be out of place regarding the larp, the community, or ourselves.
The tool to relocate in all of these three aspects is communication: nothing can be fixed without talking with the right person. Whenever the problem is about the larp itself, the person to speak with is the designer or the runtime crew, in order to relocate yourself within larp dynamics that better fit your needs. Here are some possibilities to calibrate your expectations with the organizers’ design goals. If possible do this during breaks, in order to have more time.
Ask for advice and how to fix plots and relationships.
Ask about the core of the larp, the dos and don’ts.
Ask how the game will continue.
Ask about the play style they had in mind for the larp.
Offer your help to organizers (as an NPC or other roles)
When the problem lies with the community, the people to speak with are the other players, in order to relocate yourself within more positive social dynamics. Here are some possibilities in and out of the fiction, all meant to stimulate a quick change in your – and other people’s – character’s beliefs, social status, behavior. Here are some possibilities (see also Grønvik Müller 2020) :
Offer someone a favor
Ask for a favor
Get in trouble
Make bad choices
Spread your secrets
Show your character’s vulnerability
Make up and confess a deep love for someone
Change your mind on something
Remember something
Die!
Create things or situations (draw, write songs, start a cult)
Take the details you like in the game, and make a storyline out of this.
Involve more interested players
Sit down and let the game come to you (other lost players are searching for people to play with)
Search for some “lost player” and interact with them
Get involved in situations you want as a player, don’t worry about character consistency (see Nielsen 2017)
Go and play with the people you know/like to play with
Do your favorite/relaxing hobby
Stop your game and go calibrate with other players
When the problem is with your experience, the player to consider is yourself. The aim is to relocate yourself within your own personal dynamics. These techniques tend to affect other players less than the previous ones. It’s more about working on your personal experience, and tricking yourself a bit, in a good way. Here are some possibilities:
Calmly plan your return to the game
Play more with themes and elements within your comfort zone
Reset your expectations: accept the larp for what it is NOW, not what you wanted it to be
Do self-care
Take distance from the game for the time you need
Reduce the sense of failure
These tricks have to be used wisely. They can save your experience, but destroy the experience for other players and/or organizers in a sort of butterfly effect. For this reason it’s always good to talk with players and organizers before using them, if they involve other people. Some hacks (Brind & Svanevik 2020) and steering (Montola & al. 2015, see also Kemper & al. 2020) choices can blur the line between organizers and participants. A larp and your experience of it are not the same thing, so sometimes saving the experience means killing the larp.
Possible perspectives
From this brief guide we can draw some useful suggestions for the future, in order to make the best use of these correctives, while being mindful not to damage the social contract that underlies every larp. Designers, for example, could make space in their design for steering and hacking, clearly communicating which parts of the larp can be modified and which parts can not: possibly in the pregame communications, in player materials, and game guides or design documents. It would also be possible to workshop this.
On the other hand, as participants, we can train ourselves to reframe our expectations in a quicker way, trying to reduce the sense of a larp “being wrong”, since in most cases this is just a matter of our perception. We are not out of place at a larp: we are the larp, we are exactly where we want to be, where we belong. Larp is interaction: it’s a collective work we can do only together, as a community. And we will.
Bibliography
Simon Brind, Martine Svanevik (2020): Larp Hacking. In What we do when we play, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, Johanna Koljonen. Solmukohta 2020.
Magnar Grønvik Müller (2020): Heuristics for larp. In What we do when we play, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, Johanna Koljonen.Solmukotha 2020.
Jonaya Kemper, Johanna Koljonen, Eleanor Saitta (2020): Steering for survival. In What we do when we play, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, Johanna Koljonen. Solmukotha 2020.
Markus Montola, Eleanor Saitta, Jaakko Stenros (2015): The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together. In The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted. Rollespilsakademiet.
Charles Bo Nielsen (2017): Loyalty to Character. In Once upon a nordic larp…twenty years of playing stories, edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand. Knutepunkt 2017
Acknowledgements
Thank you to: Sarah Lynn Bowman, Bjarke Pedersen and Juhana Pettersson for private conversations, and to all the participants in the thread that I opened in the Larpers BFF facebook group
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Giovannucci, Alessandro. 2024. “A Short Guide to Fix Your Larp Experience.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Larp criticism often travels through whisper networks. After a larp event, we dissect it in private company but rarely write our thoughts – at least critically analytical ones – publicly. It has often felt like we – as a community – focus more on feedback and documentation than critical reviews, let alone critique.
A proper critique is a well-argued analysis that assesses the larp for a wider audience than organizers and previous players. Its purpose is not to help the designers develop the larp nor to record it for future larp historians but to evaluate the larp in the context of its tradition and place it on a continuum of other larps. Critique should transcend the writer’s personal experience and give a more general assessment of the larp.
Desirably, critique and critical reviews should not only evaluate the design but also voice questions about the message and meaning of the larp. Was there a point to this larp? Is it reasonable to think the participants got some insights out of it? For example, in his article “These but the trappings and the suits of woe” – Tragedy and Politics in Inside Hamlet” published in the book Larp Politics Syksy Räsänen relates the larp Inside Hamlet to the Shakespearean and Aristotelian notions of tragedy and concludes that it was more of a moral tale than a tragedy.
Our larp tradition is not completely devoid of critical reviews. They appear in blog posts and documentation books. At some point, the website nordiclarp.org made an attempt to publish more critical reviews. And yet, it is hard to find reviews or critique of well-known larps such as Baphomet, House of Craving or Forbidden History which are run several times.
Illustration by Tonja Goldblatt
Culture of Critique
In more than two decades of Knutepunkt culture, we have not developed similar institutions of critique as exist in the world of passive art like film, theatre, and literature. In assessing works, the larp community seems to rely on hearsay, impressions and publicity materials. Larp organizers have many tools to control the image of their work, ranging from documentation to the Week of Stories (a rule which prohibits players from publishing negative thoughts in the week after the larp). When we decide whether to sign up for a larp or not, we rarely (if ever) rely on public reviews.
There are many reasons for the lack of a culture of critique. The community is tightly knit. Few people wish to review their friends’ work. Some might worry how writing a review might affect their position in the community or whether negative reviews could reduce their chances to get into larps. A designer might wish to give private feedback to other designers rather than criticize them publicly. It is rarely a good idea to cross the line between making and criticizing art.
It is often pointed out that in larp every participant is a co-creator. Usually it is the players who make the larp, both in the good and in the bad. As a critic, should you evaluate your own contribution (against usual norms of criticism)? Or assess other players’ performance ?
Most of us probably would not feel comfortable playing a larp where this was going to happen!
However, you can argue that there is, especially in commercial larps, a clear distinction between designers/organizers and participants, and that different social contracts apply to these two groups. Moreover, the designers/organizers can be to some extent held responsible for player behavior. After all, they choose the participants and prepare them forthe desired genre and playing style.
This approach does not remove all challenges of larp critique. Some larps are more difficult to play than others, and it often requires skill to get the most out of a larp. Our traditions are built on assumptions about for example what you can do in a larp and how to react to different cues. Do you need to explicitly say that no murders will happen if the larp is marketed as family drama at a dinner party?
It is impossible to spell out all the implicit norms. Often we just learn them through playing.
Thus, people with different backgrounds and player skills will write different reviews. However, this does not really differ from passive art. To write a good review, a movie critic has to understand the genre and the intellectual tradition of the film.
Nevertheless, in larp the extent to which our own actions and attitudes determine the experience is on a different scale than in passive arts. And sometimes, you have a better larp if you turn some of your critical faculties off. On the other hand, to write a good review, you have to have them on.
What if you were to take frequent off-game breaks to write down notes about the larp? How do you think it would affect your larp experience? Or the way you see the larp, more generally? As a larp critic, you cannot escape self-reflection. Players often steer their larp towards interesting directions. Can you always be sure whether an outcome results from the design or your own play (or both)? Should the critic pause to think about it during play? How would it affect their larp and that of others?
Illustration by Tonja Goldblatt
Hype
Player expectations and pre-event hype affect larps. Too high expectations can ruin the experience if the larp fails to deliver. On the other hand, high expectations can also enhance the larp. Players will give their best performance and press themselves to see things in a positive light. Your attitude frames your experience.
Hype and critical thinking can rarely coexist. If you are to write a review, you cannot strive to see things positively. When you decide to evaluate the experience, you might be already giving up parts of it.
In larps, we have learned to explain away inconsistencies and to play around them. We often steer ourselves away from places where the shortcomings of the design would become too visible. But if you are to critically assess the larp, shouldn’t you take note of them? A critic has to balance between getting most out of the experience and maintaining an analytical distance.
The same problem exists with passive art: there always is tension between analysis and sensation. However, there is a qualitative difference with larp. A critic always uses themselves as an instrument to analyze an artwork, but in a larp, the instrument becomes part of the artwork. As Jussi Ahlroth put it in an article about larp criticism he published in the book Playground Worlds, we have no other alternative than let the violinist review the concert they were playing in.
Moreover, there is no possibility of going back to the objective reality of the larp. The borderline between the things that actually happened and memories/interpretations blurs. In contrast, with a novel, you can always turn to previous pages and read what the text literally says.
These challenges are not a reason to give up attempts on larp critique but they are something to keep in mind. They also partly explain why criticizing larps often is a thankless process. It might also be worth mentioning that there are ways around them. You could use a pen name to avoid community issues. To rise above a subjective vantage point, you might review the larp as a team or interview other participants. Of course, this probably does not make the task more appealing as it adds to the workload.
Is it a problem, then, that larp has no institutions of critique? Lately, there has been more and more interest in larp from inside the arts. For example, in 2016 the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm staged Gertrudes möhippa (Gertrude’s Bachelorette), a crossover between larp and theater.
If larp is one day going to be part of the institution of art – as some of us hope and others fear – then there will be critique. Will we let people without much experience of larp write it? (A regular theater critic could never have identified the design flaws in Gertrudes möhippa that Annika Waern discussed in her review in 2016 on nordiclarp.org)
Or are we going to show them the way by creating our own institutions?
This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Kangas, Kaisa. 2022. “Possible, Impossible Larp Critique.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 124-128. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Compared to other time periods, the 1700s have not inspired many larp settings. Even putting medieval fantasy aside, way more designers attempt to emulate Pride & Prejudice than Dangerous Liaisons. And when Nordic larpers do indulge in tricorns and powdered wigs, they seem to opt for a serious and dark tone like St. Croix (Norway, 2015) and Libertines (Denmark, 2019). I did not attend either of these, but I did attend an international run of De la Bête (Czech Republic, 2017). While clearly reminiscent of the monster-hunting film Brotherhood of the Wolf, the larp avoided the film’s kung fu fighting and video game weaponry. Instead, it focused on the recreation of 1700s village life, using plotlines more inspired by French literature than by pop culture.
My interest for the “Lace Wars” era probably started with an 18 minute-long, Barry Lyndon inspired, lavish music video: “Pourvu qu’elles soient douces” (Farmer 1988). But I also loved less polished mashups, like the presence of an electric bass player in a supposedly historically costumed orchestra (Rondo Veneziano 1983), and a Marie-Antoinette inspired performance of Vogue at the MTV music Awards (Madonna 1990). I wasn’t alone: from “Rock Me Amadeus” in Austria (Falco 1985) to Spain’s Loco Mía (1989), it seems the combination of ruffled shirts, embroidered frock coats, glitter, sequins and synth pop was extremely popular throughout late ’80s and early ’90s Europe. But in larp, this type of 1700s kitsch crosser has been even rarer than more historical options. So when Kimera Artist Collective announced that they would open their Finnish Rococo-punk-camp-queer larps to an international audience, I immediately signed up.
From the photo shoot for the promotional music video. Photo by Kimera.
Serious Fun
For Disgraceful Proposals – In the Garden of Venus (Finland 2022) to be successful, every participant must faithfully adhere
to the composite, yet specific visual style. Luckily, as its name implies, Kimera Artist Collective includes several professional visual and performance artists. They used multiple types of media for visual communication, from original art to hacks of historical engravings, to a video trailer and finally a full music video that ensured every interested party understood what they were aiming for. Importantly, Kimera also quickly realized that the online excitement about the visual style, and peer pressure of wanting to look fabulous, could also generate stress among the players, so they later released the following statement:
“Many of you have been planning outfits already and thinking of what to wear. Don’t stress. The point of all this is to have fun. If you think your choices are fun and cool, they are! Go wild! Be extravagant! This is not a costume competition, this is crazy fun play with friends. You will not be judged. The guidelines are just for inspiration, not rules to stress about. Each and every one of you will be adored.” (Kimera 2022)
This serious-but-not-too-serious approach permeated beyond the costuming advice, and was at the core of the the fictional 1700s setting:
The larp takes place in a place called Venusberg somewhere in Central Europe. Venusberg is an independent principality ruled by the Princess Bishop, a self-proclaimed Venus and goddess of love. They hold their court in the famous Party Orangerie, a beautiful winter garden on a mountain top. The Orangerie parties attract a wide variety of revelers: pretty peasants from the nearby Village and fierce Dandy Highwaymen from the Forest, as well as more outlandish visitors and creatures. And they all party like there’s no tomorrow. The night our larp takes place is a very special night, as the Great Six-Tailed Comet of 1776 is coming tonight. (Kimera 2022)
From my French cultural frame of reference, the Germanic flavour of Venusberg (see character names below) instantly amped up the kitsch factor: this was neither gilded Versailles, grimy London nor mysterious Venice: this was queer Baron Munchausen high on Mozartkugel candy.
From the photo shoot for the promotional music video. Photo by Kimera.
Textual Healing
To my surprise, Kimera put in as much style and intent in their written content as in their visuals. How often do larp info letters put a smile on your face? One started with:
Dear fluffy shiny pufflings! You glorious diamonds of meringue sparkles! (…) Peekaboo! Your character is waiting for you! You can find your character in this folder(…) (Kimera 2022)
Character text was transparent for all players to read if they so chose, with succinct public descriptions that were equally hilarious:
Name: Count/essFrou-Frou
Position: Boudoir Designer
Countess Alexandra / Count Alexander Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Plön, or Count/ess Frou-Frou is Venusberg’s most wanted boudoir designer. They are married to Porcelain-Dolly, and they both love to hate each other and have an intense rivalry on seducing others. Lady Bee, the leader of the teen girl gang the Powder Puff Girls is their daughter who tries to outdo her parents in scandalous notoriety. Good luck trying, girl. (Kimera 2022)
From the photo shoot for the promotional music video. Photo by Kimera.
Individual character texts were in the same vein, consisting three pages full of whimsical flourishes, but also directly usable info, such as suggestions of “Whims, ideas of what to do in game” (make-your-own-fun sandbox style of play was explicitly discouraged). More classical connections between characters were called “Liaisons”, and beyond the jokes, backstories also included opportunities for deeper connections and more serious scenes during the game.
Wolfgang jr. was born as a bastard child of Papa Wolfgang and the well-known porcelain polisher Leonora Möller. Papa Wolf did send money for his son but spent his time hanging out in the Forest in pursuit of manly sports and activities in the forests with the rugged Dandy Highwaymen, and never understood his son’s sensitivity and love for pretty things.” (Kimera 2022)
To encourage play across social classes, characters were also part of “Hobby groups” with ludicrous names and goals, from the “Cake Crowning Society” to the “Water Fairy Appreciation Club”. They were actually neither jokes nor useless fluff, but accurately described what would happen during the game. A group did crown a cake in the center of the dancefloor, another group then really guillotined said cake, water fairies were very present, sociable, and appreciated.
From the photo shoot for the promotional music video. Photo by Kimera.
Staying Power
I kept wondering how Kimera would maintain the announced “intense larp comedy” energy for the full duration of an international destination larp, i.e. much longer than a pop song. The designers had thought it through:
It is a three-day event that includes the pre-larp workshops, the larp itself (estimated length 6 hours), a debrief and the option to hang out afterwards. The actual larp time might seem short, but we want to be able to keep up high energy for the whole duration of the larp. These six hours will be a breathtakingly delightful exhilarating spiral into silliness – trust us, more would make it less. (Kimera 2022)
This short in-game duration was a good indicator that the organizers knew what they were doing. They had a clear vision, and clear expectation of how long people can keep up a certain type of play. This became crucial to me, as a global event was about to affect my energy levels for years to come.
Kiri Kaise / Kaisa Lervik.
Not Your Average Knuteflu
Disgraceful Proposals was announced at the end of 2019, confirmation of participation was swift, and info letters started flowing, for an intended run at the end of March 2020. But the pandemic hit, leading to the following email:
Mar 12, 2020, 6:36 PM Dear players,
It is with heavy hearts that we make this decision. Today the Finnish government issued a ban on all over 500 people events until May and a recommendation to also reconsider all smaller events due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the current situation we just can not justify holding an event like this, with a lot of physical contact which is a high risk no matter what we do. Even if it breaks our hearts, and it really does, we have to do the right thing and decide that this will not happen now. We need to do our part in slowing the pandemic down to protect the weakest ones.
But we are not forgetting you, sweet cream puffins. We will rearrange the event at a later date. (Kimera 2020)
From the photo shoot for the promotional music video. Photo by Kimera.
This cancellation increased my confidence in the organizers: for them, participants – and innocent bystanders, i.e. society at large – indeed mattered more than games. Even though they weren’t forced to do it by law, they refused to organize an event that could inherently become a Covid cluster, at a time when no vaccines were available. I did catch Covid in early 2020, and never fully recovered. I stopped crafting my costume, sheltered in place, and hung tight while at least 3 million people died worldwide. Fast forward to 2022, and another email felt like the return of spring:
Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 12:41 PM Dear disgraces,
It’s been two years since the world changed with the Covid-19 pandemic and we all had to let go of the frenzied expectation of Disgraceful Proposals. Today, the world is still not okay – not by far – but we want to believe that in six months we can come together and frolic again.
And so we are back and we’re having another go at this. Disgraceful Proposals – In the Garden of Venus will run in October 2022 in Hauho, Southern-Finland. (Kimera 2022)
The larp world had changed too, and there were not enough sign-ups anymore to fill several runs. But both organizers and remaining players seemed ready to make that one run an event to remember.
Since my initial infection, I had developed a series of chronic symptoms now referred to as Long Covid. This means that I regularly lose cardiopulmonary, muscular and cognitive abilities in a very unpredictable manner. I often need to prioritize using what energy I have left for work, rather than for hobbies. So shorter larps are more important to me than ever. Exhaustion did affect my play, but Disgraceful Proposal’s design proved to be rather Long Covid friendly.
Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien.
A Clockwork Orangerie
First, the organizers recognized that Covid-19 was a current, ongoing threat:
Covid-19
There is still a pandemic going on, but at the moment it looks like it is possible to larp in October. But please only come to the larp if you’re healthy, and preferably take a covid test before the event.
If someone gets sick during the event, we have rooms where you can isolate yourself apart from the rest of the players and rest. (Kimera 2022)
Second, the three days were very well planned. The numerous workshops took things slow, step by step, and had breaks in between, long enough to rest (I could go lie down regularly in my room) or to get to know the other players off-game. Particular emphasis was put on safety, repeating there would be no nudity, no touching the bikini zone, and that participants should focus on co-creative appreciation, adoration and stepwise intimacy. The collaborative spirit translated beyond the workshops: players helped each other putting on their costumes, calibrating to play each other up, or just lending nail polish remover.
Viktoria, the Daughter of the Comet.
Third, spatial design was also extremely precise, and well thought-through. All the pre-game activities, workshops, meals and sleep happened in a building that was large and comfortable enough to avoid overcrowding, including a large number of bedrooms with private bathrooms to avoid any dormitory or tent camp feeling.
Players only discovered the in-game location at runtime, and even more spatial design had gone into it. The Orangerie was a large, multi-level wooden barn, with a main dance floor surrounded by a bed and couches, shelves with rococo kitsch porcelain ready to be worshipped, a portrait of Mozart with a “Rock Me Amadeus” graffiti, etc. This space provided many options for public play, from socializing to performances, happenings, etc.
A basement room had refreshments, including a dizzying array of meringue flavors (some vegan, and one of them the oh-so-Finnish salmiakki), tea and alcohol-free bubbly, which provided enough calories to keep the energy going. It also had plenty of comfortable couches, pillows, and macramé braided cords hanging from the ceiling. Literally turning these iconic kitsch flower pot holders onto their heads transformed them into ropey curtains/cages suitable for more private dance performances. Upstairs were more pillows in a mezzanine, as well as a “winter garden” that was actually cold, decorated with a magnificent silk paper cherry tree and a rococo sofa. As announced in advance, some doorways and stairs were not wheelchair-accessible, and proved a bit difficult to navigate for my giant wig made of EVA foam. Attention to prop detail extended to the character name tags, made from those lace-like paper things usually placed under small cakes, i.e. perfectly matching the theme.
Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien.
Showtime!
When we all gathered in costume on the dancefloor, my jaw dropped and I had to do a 360° turn to take it all in. Per the announced rules, I knew there would be no in-game photos, but what stood before my eyes was a visual orgasm of kitsch and camp: polyester corsets, outrageous makeup, piercings, proper lace lingerie, funky colored wigs, gigantic fake eyelashes, panniers with skirts, panniers sans skirt, two halves of a birdcage as panniers, sea creatures wearing fishnet stockings, sea creatures wearing actual fishing nets… you name it. I was also impressed by the Peasants characters, who somehow managed to go all-in in the meek and innocent direction, including a shepherd boy with a cotton-wool-like wig.
Then, what actually happened? The groups mingled, gossiped, betrayed and worshipped each other, there was some gentle flogging, foot rubs, rivalry between teen gangs, some theatrical kidnapping, a lot of yelling… So not a full six hours of frantically running around and laughing hysterically, but quite a lot of it.
There were also those very classic larp moments where multiple groups tried to take center stage to each have their 15 minutes of fame, or when everyone ran to achieve their secret society objectives or resolve their personal conflicts just before the end of the game. There was also co-creation, such as when a hobby horse race was made more participatory by using non-rider players as obstacles. And there were also slower moments, as well as opportunities for those deeper scenes that were hinted at in the character text. I did feel the eponymous disgrace when one of the main inspiration songs, “Crucified” (Army of Lovers 1991), played just as my character was being betrayed by his prophet, in front of everyone.
Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien.
Rococovid
Long Covid did affect my experience, but it didn’t spoil it, thanks to a steady supply of medications and energy drinks, my co-players’ support, and Kimera’s inclusive design. The off-game safe room was very quiet, and had comfortable beds, plus chocolate to snack on. I visited it within 20 minutes of game start, because I had to lie down and take an actual nap. In any larp, experiencing fatigue makes it hard to do justice to a character written as being “the life of the party”. Now try making a dramatic entrance when at least 30 of the other players are already busy being very dramatic.
I quickly realized I was doing a pretty poor job as the leader of my character group. One of the players was friendly, but had chosen a very different direction compared to the other members, both in terms of costume choice and of the amount of hanging out with the group vs. going exploring on their own. The other player, who was playing my sidekick, yes-man, and planned to repeat every witty thing I was going to say, was extremely kind and supportive… but I didn’t provide many punchlines or cool moves to mirror. Both of these players seemed to have enjoyed themselves, but for me it was a missed opportunity. I did not play the character as intensely as it was written, or as I had intended to. In retrospect, based on that latter player’s impressive energy and creativity, I would have done a better job as their sidekick.
From the photo shoot for the promotional music video. Photo by Kimera.
The Comet is Coming!
The lights dimmed for the final scene, as the comet came down on the Orangerie (the giant chandelier-feather-boa-string-lights contraption attached to the ceiling lit up). The players gathered as practised during the workshops, first dancing separately, then closer, turning into a giant group hug, a progressive vertical cuddle puddle of silk, sweat, glitter, perfume, and those musty smells typical of rented theatrical costumes made with furniture fabric. We gently swayed for four songs, which was really long. It reminded me of calibration workshops where you practise hugging a person until it gets uncomfortable and you use the safeword. Except we were doing it in a human mass made of all the players. I was definitely uncomfortable by song two, especially as this was the first time in years that I was within centimeters of multiple people’s breaths. But it was the final scene of the larp, and I eventually gave in to loudly singing what I could remember of “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” (Dion 1996) – and I did not catch Covid. The magic of larp, I guess.
From the photo shoot for the promotional music video. Photo by Kimera.
Pillow Talk
After this sensory overload, I needed some alone time, fresh air and to remove my makeup. People debriefed gently, and chilled in small groups, as both buildings provided multiple spaces for it.
While my main regret was my own lack of energy and leadership, the main criticism about the larp that I heard from other players was that they expected more intimate sensuality, and felt burdened by the sheer amount of safety measures. I agree that it felt a bit like every single safety meta-technique in the book was workshopped, from lookdown to taps, to squeezes to two different safewords. These were intended to let people explore in a safe way, but they may have actually discouraged some players, who interpreted the organizers’ intention differently. Or maybe the players just had different expectations – I was OK with the level of sensuality I experienced.
These minor gripes aside, I think Disgraceful Proposals was a resounding success. Starting from a very niche concept, organizers and players from multiple countries and different larp cultures pushed themselves in the very same creative direction. They were sensual but not sexual, and they took this intense Nordic larp comedy very seriously – but not too seriously. So since you’re asking, yes, I’d gladly get disgraced again.
From the photo shoot for the promotional music video. Photo by Kimera.
Disgraceful Proposals – In the Garden of Venus
Creative and practical work: Kimera, e.g. Tonja Goldblatt, Vili Nissinen, Kirsi Oesch, Nina Teerilahti
Character writing: Kimera, Jade Heng, Ernesto Diezhandino
Info, safety and support: Joonas Iivonen, Arhi Makkonen
Scenography building helpers: Tia Ihalainen, Milla Heikkinen, Joonas Iivonen
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
B., Thomas. 2024. “Kickass Rococovid Kitsch: A Review of Disgraceful Proposals.” 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: From the photo shoot for the promotional music video. Photo by Kimera.
Writing about larps is hard. They are ephemeral co-creations that exist both in a measurable, physical reality, and in the participants’ imagination. The participants’ experiences are not just different receptions of the same work as in passive art, but they include objectively different content. Oftentimes, no one, not even the organisers, has seen the entire piece. Finally, participants process these experiences extensively, after runtime, alone and as a group, whether on the spot through debriefs and after-party discussions — leading to ”the post-game lie” (Waern 2013) or weeks later, through in-group online chats and photo uploads.
These challenges have been eloquently discussed by Nordic larpers for over 15 years, with people alternatively referring to public larp feedback as reviews, criticism, or critiques. However, these categories may not always translate well to certain countries (Ahlroth 2008). In a series of educational articles, North American larpers used passive art definitions to define what would be larp critique vs. criticism vs. review (Roberts & Stark 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2017d). A critique focuses on one particular aspect of a larp and frames it in its artistic context, and it is more aimed at scholars. Criticism would be rather aimed at providing feedback to the designers/organisers (I’ll use “organisers” for short). A review would talk more about the writer’s own global experience at the event and be aimed at potential future players. In the latest Nordic article on the topic, Kangas (2022) mentions larp critique in the title, but also extensively covers challenges of reviews, pointing out the lack of both. And yet, in spite of these well thought-through pieces, in 2024, there is still no comprehensive repository for larp feedback that would be:
public and easily accessible (neither requiring sign-up to a closed Facebook group or Discord, nor having to search for each individual larper’s blog)
in English (international larps have a global audience)
online (not everyone can afford to travel to Solmukohta to hear feedback in person)
free from organiser control.
There are no print larp magazines with global reach, and there is not enough space in a single Knutebook per year to review a significant portion of the scene. The Nordic Larp website (nordiclarp.org) is receiving more submissions (see below), but it is still nowhere near a RottenTomatoes / GoodReads / TripAdvisor / Google Reviews of larp. The last two are indeed not art review websites: in my opinion, a larp event cannot just be a work of art, it is also a real-life physical experience, often paid for, and should also be reviewed as such.
If you end up being beaten by a cast member at an immersive theatre experience that advertised “no physical contact”, poisoned by a chef in a restaurant, or if your AirBnB had bed bugs, your review would probably mention it. All three can happen in a larp, and could therefore be in the scope of any public larp feedback. Most larp organisers are not paid professionals, and this should be taken into account, but neither are many AirBnB hosts. The monetary transaction to an unknown party can make larp a different activity than just “doing art with friends”.
One of the reasons there is so little public larp feedback is that these articles may have unintendedly discouraged some players from writing any. First by emphasising intrinsic challenges overtly, second by using passive art criticism as a benchmark. For example, the requirement to put things in context of the artform bans any first time larpers from writing a critique – and might discourage them from writing a review. Even an old fart like myself cannot be bothered with carefully referencing other games in his reviews or thinking about his reader’s cultural environment, and thus the messy walls of text stay in friends-only Facebook posts. As Kangas (2022) writes, larp criticism is a “thankless process”, and the final straw is the fear of retaliation. No novelist can prevent reviewers from reading their next book once it’s published. A larp organiser can totally ban a reviewer for life.
But why would anyone want to review larp events anyway?
For both Ahlroth and Kangas, the main ethical conundrum around larp reviews is that, to fully experience the larp, the reviewer needs to participate, hence will be a co-creator, the “violinist reviewing the orchestra’s performance”. Kangas also discussed the effects of active decisions from one participant that may not even have been part of the larp’s initial design (e.g. steering). But both authors concluded that larp critique is really required for larp to be taken seriously as an art form.
I do not care whether larp gets taken seriously as an art form. What I do care about is participants – they matter more than the games. Right now the discourse is controlled by only one type of participant: organisers. From pre-game online material to sign-up/casting process, to highly curated audiovisual content (sometimes posed, off-game photos, or highly edited video clips), organisers control most channels. Even talks at Solmukohta about specific larps are usually given by the organisers themselves. When players are invited to speak, they are usually sandwiched between two organiser speeches in which the organisers get to introduce and reframe the testimonies.
In private conversations with organisers and unrecorded Knutepunkt presentations by larp scholars, I have heard about structured before/after assessments in two famous Nordic larps that were intended to be transformative. One was found to be no more effective than a dance class, and the other one was sometimes actually detrimental to the values the larp intended to foster. The organisers just did not include this key player feedback in their post-game communication. For a scene that prides itself on transparency and free speech, there sure is a strong culture of omertà.
But I don’t want to be trashed as an organiser!
First, this is not about you. If you want private feedback as an organiser, read Waern’s (2017) great article on this very topic. This is about players. I have been both a player and an organiser. As a player, I have given candid feedback to larp organisers, in person, by private email, and in public blog posts. As an organiser, my larps have been both praised and trashed by their players, to my face while still at the game site, in private emails, and online. I know full well that organising larps can be extremely taxing physically, mentally, and financially. Any negative feedback about something you have invested so much of yourself in can feel extremely painful.
Does that mean organisers should get away with everything? With lying in their pre-game communication? With unethical behaviour during runtime? There will always be people who comment negatively on events, so it might as well be people who were actually there. Looking back at 10 years of Knutebook articles, it seems acceptable for authors to comment at length on larps that they did not attend, that were run in countries that they have never visited, and that were played in languages that they do not speak. Would we accept all three from a book or opera critic? Sometimes these authors have not even talked to any of the larp’s actual players: they based their articles only on curated audiovisual documentation and on the organisers’ word.
To level the playing field, player feedback should be available on a platform where it could be useful for both organisers and future players, who can then decide if they want to participate in reruns or in new events run by the same team. Consent is only truly consent when it is informed.
Some organisers have said that if such a central repository existed, they would stop organising. I do not want anyone to quit, but the current situation of hidden backchannels to obtain candid reviews reinforces cliqueishness, in-crowd phenomena that excludes newcomers. This is far from the oft-professed Nordic goal of inclusivity and learning as a community.
But it’s not objective!
There are several ways to document things that actually happened. Both Waern (2013) and Kangas (2022) describe ways of taking notes during breaks in the runtime, while Axiel Cazeneuve describes how they mentally put themselves in “recording mode” during runtime and write everything down afterwards (Cazeneuve & Freudenthal 2021). But technology can also help. Tiny cameras are now affordable, and they can be used to unobtrusively photograph or film an entire short game if other participants provide informed consent.
Years ago, I time-lapsed Le Masque de Boba Fett (Switzerland 2015, Eng. Boba Fett’s Mask), a Star Wars larp, with a tiny GoPro, from arrival on site to post game chats. The photos not only made for fun memories, but they also showed me how much I drank, and how alcohol affected my experience – positively in this case. I was also wearing a research-grade medical device that tracked my movement, blood pressure, heart rate, and sweating. This allowed me to confirm that tense scenes (even when immobile) triggered objectively measurable stress responses, but that my pre-game period was actually even more tense than runtime (B. 2016).
Nowadays, consumer-grade smartwatches can refine this data collection through unobtrusive experience sampling. I am not saying that all reviewers should always revisit hours of play on a screen without the magic of imagination, nor that they should wear wireless electroencephalograms. But both handwritten notes and recording devices can help verify whether fast-paced action was actually as constant as advertised – or whether most of the game actually consisted in boredom/quiet reflection?
Even without any technology, if people leave the game before its planned end, it is an objective event that I want to hear about as a potential player of a rerun, especially if any of these were ragequits. Objectivity can also be positive: these Star Wars larp photos showed me details I had no memory of. And even if photos do not quite look like how you remember a scene, that very difference is part of the effect of the larp. What made it different from the raw visual?
Non-anglophone examples of public larp feedback
Before it was killed by the rise of social networks, the website Au Fil du Jeu (Eng. In the Course of the Game; Aufildujeu.ch) acted as a main portal for the French-speaking Swiss larp scene. Organisers would announce their games, and participants would often write post-game feedback under the initial post. While post-event debates sometimes got heated, they were extremely useful to me, a newcomer in the Swiss larp scene. Was it really a big deal for me that some non-player characters were unkillable, or that there wasn’t enough roasted boar for every player? Maybe not, but it allowed me to learn about the local organisers and their game styles.
In France, the largest larp review site is L’univers du huis clos (Eng. Chamber Larp Universe), a repository of more than 170 larp scripts. People who have downloaded and played a script sometimes write public feedback in the comments section of its page. Some reviews are very short, others provide details about how actual runs went, but they remain mostly written by organisers rather than players.
For a more thorough journalistic review site, the French website Electro-GN (Eng. Electro-larp) provides both larp previews by organisers, and reviews of games by players. As many of these larps are rerun regularly, reading about how the organisers’ vision actually panned out is extremely valuable. These reviews help me assess the odds of having a satisfactory experience after taking a day off from work and 8 hours of travel to a remote game site to co-create with people I have never met.
The Czech website Larpová Databáse (Eng. Larp Database) is a larger review repository, in which larpers can comment on games. I do not find the 1-10 rating feature informative, but the most reviewed game, De la Bête (Czech Republic 2014, Eng. Of the Beast), has 192 written comments of various lengths from individual players. Now compare this to Parliament of Shadows (Belgium 2017), a high profile international larp with so few public reviews that the most sobering one is available only in Polish and on a Polish website (Skuza, 2017).
So, are such sites reserved to larpers from fiery Romance or Slavic debating cultures? Can people raised with protestant moderation under Jante’s law do it in English for the whole world to see?
Elements I would appreciate in a larp review
First of all, there is a lot of excellent advice in English out there. The recommendations that Waern (2013) provides for larp historians are also useful for reviewers:
PLAY!
Talk to both players and designers (and game masters)
Collect multiple views on key events
Collect media
Unlike Waern, I am not looking for neutral larp history. I do want to know what you, as a player, liked, what you did not like, and why was that. I do want to hear whether the larp was run as advertised. Kangas provides additional tips and tricks, such as using a pen name or providing group feedback. Stark and Roberts proposed a structure for larp critique, but it could be useful for any larp feedback: “Theme, Setting, Tone, Pre-game activities, Structure, Techniques/Rules/Mechanics, Facilitation/GM Role, Post-larp activities”. They also advise to show compassion, assume the best and avoid snark. However, I think some snark is OK, especially if the organisers treated you badly.
It seems like the Nordic Larp website has also noticed that meeting art critique standards may be one of the reasons they have not been receiving much reviews, and thus they decided to call this public feedback “larp documentation”, specifying:
Does it have to be a critique/criticism/review? No. We are very happy to publish those, for sure, but what we mostly want is straightforward accounts of people’s experiences. We don’t need you to say what you thought was wrong about the larp, or to suggest how to improve it, or so analyse it within some critical framework. Just what it was like, and how it was for you, will be perfect.
Should I write a long narrative about my character’s journey? A documentation piece is not a long account of your character’s narrative arc, but rather discussion about your overall experience and your reflections about it. Ideally, you will be able to provide some details about the basics about the larp setting, themes, and organisation, along with a brief account of your experience, and any takeaways. Bonus points if you can connect the larp to other texts, larps, or theories in the discourse, but this is not required. (Nordic Larp 2023)
Since participants matter more than the games, I would also love to read about player well-being.
Corporeal well-being
A book may give you paper cuts and move you emotionally, but a larp will by definition affect your body, potentially up to bodily harm. Players’ pre-game health affects their experience and could be relevant to it. I started The Monitor Celestra (Sweden 2013) with gut issues and cut my scalp open on a doorway – literal pre-game bleed. An eye infection at Conquest of Mythodea (Germany 2004) required immediate antibiotic treatment, making me miss a full day of game. To avoid sweat dripping into my eye, I could not wear the silicone mask that fully covered my entire head and neck, and therefore had to change character, which affected my experience.
Quite often, organiser choices affect players’ physical well-being, so it makes sense to write about those experiences in a review. One example is hygiene: were there enough bathrooms for everyone? Could people change their sanitary products and contact lenses in the bathrooms? Also, did you get accurate information about the conditions where you would be living and playing? For example, pre-game information about De la Bête mentioned that I would sleep in a castle, but not that it would be so dusty that my black costume would become grey every day. It was honestly not a big deal, but it could be relevant for future players. When discussing health related issues, you should obviously only share what you are comfortable with, what is relevant to your experience at the game, and you should always respect the privacy of other participants.
Emotional well-being
In Fat Man Down (Denmark 2009), a 2-4 hour jeepform/freeform scenario originally designed for the Fastaval festival, players consent to roleplaying scenes from the life of a fat man and the people making his life miserable. Just before going in character, players are told by the organiser (without the player of the “fat man” hearing) that his use of the safeword should be ignored. Meanwhile, the player of the “fat man” is given the real safe word and will therefore get to observe the other players breaking a game rule.
This constitutes bait and switch as the players did not consent to participate in an experiment testing their willingness to break agreed-upon rules and to potentially abuse a co-player. In a scientific setting, this type of “forced insight” experiment, without the oversight of an external ethics committee, would get the organisers fired or disbarred. But in the Nordic larp scene, several larpers have told me: “Sure it’s a bit unethical, but it’s an innovative design! It’s great art, so it’s OK!” Parts of the Nordic freeform/larp scenes may have moved on from this “provocation first, people second” approach, but how many players have signed up for this game without even having the option to read player feedback?
People often joke about Type II fun and extreme emotional sports, but do larpers sign up to get abused? I need to see whether limits are clearly announced on a larp’s website, but I would also like to hear whether they were actually respected. Not just by the organisers, but also by supporting casts and co-players. And if all of the above was perfectly healthy and safe, well, that’s a great thing to know for future players too!
Financial well-being
Since the advent of international blockbuster larps, sign-up fees have been getting closer to the median monthly income of several European countries. It would be only fair to get some accurate information about the larp before spending such an amount of money (plus costume and transportation). Furthermore, personal time investment for larps that rely heavily on co-creation by the players can mean allocating weeks into online pre-play. Before investing these resources, it would be great to be able to check whether the game is a good fit for the player, and not have to rely solely on the organiser’s website. An ageing population of players may have more money, but also less free time. Between raising children and minding their carbon footprint, a lot of people are ready to larp less – if they can larp better.
Creative well-being
Once all of the above have been considered, I want to hear about the game itself, but not just in a neutral, descriptive manner. Did the themes come to life as communicated? How? Did cheesy aliens with green antennae crash the Dangerous Liaisons larp that was announced as historically accurate? Did the much-touted lavish set and prop design live up to the hype?
If your own character’s plot was not satisfactory, what happened? Do you think it was because of your own playing, a confusing character text, or other players refusing to play to lift? Or did an interdimensional demon portal “main plot train” run over the intimate love stories that were supposed to be the core of your experience? Conversely, if you had ecstatic, life-changing scenes, how did they happen? Did they resonate with your own, pre-game interests, or did you discover an entire new side of your personality? And what about the other players? Did they seem bored or did they seem to get more out of the larp than you did? Any of this information could be useful. And the best part is that you do not have to actually include any of it for your public written feedback to be more valid and useful than the current silence.
Just do it. Please.
Two of the Nordic Larp website’s latest player “documentation pieces” perfectly illustrate the value of ignoring the strict requirements of artistic critique. In his “documentation” of Gothic (Denmark 2023), Juhana Pettersson (2023) discusses his past personal interest in the topic, takes a behind-the-scenes look at specific aspects of the design, and describes some key scenes and his feelings about it all. Simon Brind’s (2023) documentation of the erotic horror larp House of Craving (Denmark 2019) is self-described as “a gonzoid attempt to make sense of what the fuck just happened”, but both pieces are really useful.
These two are great examples of reviews/testimonies/public larp feedback, and we need more (including on the very same games, even the very same runs) to hear more perspectives. We especially need reviews by people who are less known in the Nordic larp scene and may suffer from impostor syndrome.
If none of the advice above helps, you can always start by just writing down three things you liked, three things you didn’t, and then explain why you did or did not like them. That would already be better than the current situation. Other future participants would thank you, and again, they, like you, matter more than the games.
References
Ahlroth, Jussi. 2008. “Leave the Cat in the Box: Some Remarks on the Possibilities of Role-Playing Game Criticism.” In Playground Worlds, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola. Jyvaskyla, Finland: Ropecon ry.
B., Thomas. 2016. “Your Brain on Larp: Questions and Tools for Neuroludology.” Presentation at Solmukohta.
Electro-GN (Eng. Electro-larp). 2024. Electro-GN.com.
Kangas, Kaisa. 2022. “Possible, Impossible Larp Critique.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt https://leavingmundania.com/2017/05/30/why-larp-critique-is-awesome/2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Waern, Annika. 2019. “How to Gather Feedback from Players.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, 373-388. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Ludography
Conquest of Mythodea. 2004. Live Adventure Event GmbH, Germany.
De la Bête. 2014. Rolling, Czech Republic.
Fat Man Down. 2009. Frederik Berg Østergaard, Denmark.
Gothic. 2023. Avalon Larp Studio, Denmark.
House of Craving. 2019. Participation Design Agency, Denmark.
Le Masque de Boba Fett. 2015. Nugerôle, Switzerland.
Parliament of Shadows. 2017. Participation Design Agency in collaboration with Oneiros and White Wolf Entertainment, Belgium.
The Monitor Celestra. 2013. Alternatliv, Bardo and Berättelsefrämjandet, Sweden.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
B., Thomas. 2024. “This Larp Sucked – and Everyone Should Get to Read About It.” 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 space between us, a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc and Josephine Rydberg.
the space between us (2022) crew.
