A new generation is slowly joining the Nordic larp community. This fact is undoubtedly true; it can be seen at Knudepunkt/ Solmukohta/ Knutepunkt/ Knutpunkt and at the local smaller larps. But why are so few of them joining the multinational Nordic larp community and why are they not attending as many Nordic larps as previous generations? These are burning questions that I was sitting with, so I did the most logical thing. I asked them. I visited multiple Danish larps and larp organizations, where I conducted short semi-structured interviews with about 30 larpers aged 15-25, to try and get answers to my questions.
The two most common answers to the question were, “I can’t afford to attend Nordic larps” and “It’s not inclusive enough, because there is not enough info beforehand.” While talking about lowering larp prices,
the thing that really stuck with me was, “It’s not inclusive enough.” Having been part of the Nordic larp community for some time, this statement really shocked me. This shock naturally leads to curiosity and so the hunt for more answers began. What did they mean when they said it wasn’t inclusive enough?
There is an old saying, that answers often come when we least expect them. While working on a website for an unrelated project an email arrived asking about content warnings. Having worked with content warning before as part of a larp I was organizing, I wrote back only to realize that we were thinking of content warnings in different ways. In the past, I had used content warnings to
warn about sensitive themes. However, she was asking about content warnings for the actual physical mechanics, like a content warning for prolonged eye contact, because she had sadly had a bad experience in the past where this was only brought to her attention at the pre-larp workshop. Because this hadn’t been shared beforehand it basically prevented her from playing the larp.
Hearing about this experience guided the path towards further stories from newer players and their
experiences with Nordic larp (Editors n.d.). Another theme also arose in regard to spoiling a scenario vs. keeping players informed. Organizers sometimes want a big twist in their games to surprise their player and keep them on their toes, but in keeping the twists hidden, especially twists with hardcore themes, can be very damaging to the player experience. For this new player, the twist was so out-of-left-field that they ended up leaving the scenario midway, because they simply weren’t prepared for this experience.
So now comes the central question, “How can we design larps for this new generation of younger larpers?” While there is no central answer to this question, there are tip and tricks you can integrate into your larp design to include this newer generation of larpers. I have here tried to formulate 3 tips and tricks to use in your larp design based on the interview responses, as well as my experience designing for this audience for over 10 years.
1. Remember your content warnings, also for your mechanics.
If you are not already using content warnings for your themes, you should consider using them to make
sure your players are prepared for what your larp is about (Koljonen 2016). Remember all the pre-workshop information you give out is both to attract the players you want, while also giving players enough information to opt-out of your larp if your themes are not for them. If you are using content warnings for your themes, consider expanding your practices to also include your mechanics. Does your larp involve long periods of eye contact? Are you expected to be physically intimate with other players? Will other players touch each other without immediate consent because negotiations occur at the workshop beforehand? Then include that information as content warnings on your website. All of these mechanics are okay to have in your larp, but letting your players know before the workshop will give everyone a better experience.
2. Prepare your players, even for the twists!
Continuing on the content warnings, they are all about preparing your players for what your larp is about.
While it can feel great to shock your players with a twist in the story of the larp, this can also lead to a really bad experience for your players (Torner 2013). I am not saying that you should tell your players about all the twists and turns, but you should prepare them for these surprises. If someone is suddenly murdered in front of all the players during the larp, then it should be clear beforehand that this is a possibility either in the form of content warning or as some text available on the website. You don’t necessarily have to spoil your twist in order for your players to be prepared for them.
3. Have this information available on your website.
While for some it might go without saying, but remember to have all this information on your website or at least make sure your players have access to this information before they sign up. There is nothing worse than a player having a truly horrible experience because something wasn’t spelled out beforehand. Therefore, it is very important to have everything ready before signup to make sure you get a great player base that is ready to play your larp.
There are many more things you can do to design larps for newer generations, but the hope is that this has been a stepping stone for further ideas and an interest to delve deeper into the subject of designing larps for a new generation.
Torner, Evan. 2013. “Transparency and Safety in Role-playing Games.” In The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, 14-17. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2013.
Personal note: In this article, I give my personal opinion. In doing so, I must refer to the article by Shoshana Kessock The Absence of Disabled Bodies in Larp, as it addresses some basic things regarding game design which I wholeheartedly support, especially the point about the representation of disability by non-disabled people. What is needed is not more non-disabled people in larp portraying disability (whether to make the character cooler and more interesting or something else), but more people with disabilities larping.
1 billion disabled people in the world
6% of the world’s population affected by deafness or hearing loss
1% of the world’s population need a wheelchair
2.6% of the world’s population have an intellectual disability
17% of the world’s population affected by blindness or visual disability
Our world is becoming more and more diverse. Realities of life can finally find a place and we are every day socially responsible to deal with and react to people’s most diverse needs. This hard-won achievement does not stop at a hobby like ours.
This means that all those who are active in the field of larp, as organisers or players, have to face the fact that needs arising from diversity have to be recognised and accommodated. It is irrelevant whether a person is disabled or not. Every person has needs arising from their background. Our task as larpers is to meet these needs as best we can, provided that we have the opportunity to do so.
In this article, I try to show that the limit of my imagination due to the awareness of my self means a break with immersion and has an impact on inclusion in larp in terms of self-determination and informed choice. In the course of the article, I draw attention to communication and expectations from the perspective of the vision of a larp event and the resources of all participants, and which courses of action can result from this.
So let’s have a look together at what points we still need to work on.
At the Limits: Our Imagination
A central element of our hobby is the oft-praised immersion. We can immerse ourselves as completely and holistically as possible in situations we encounter in the game and not be distracted. Immersion is an element that is supposed to help us get as close as possible to a realistic experience or feeling.
It is a fact that we succeed in immersion to a greater or lesser extent depending on the situation, location, participants, or unexpected events. The fact that we often portray supernatural beings and abilities and have to imitate these abilities without actually possessing them is already a break with immersion.
So on some meta-level we are fully aware that what we are doing is a game. Yet we engage with it and ignore the fact that it is merely a representation. So we build representation into our immersion for the benefit of the flow of the game. Why is it nevertheless possible to get the impression that this is a bigger problem in interaction with disabled people than, for example, in the representation of a superpower.
My personal experience and assumption is: because despite immersion, we think of ourselves mentally on the meta-level as the real me and thereby include social contexts, assumptions, as well as learned knowledge and ignorance in situations. We are moving in ableist systems, which, in addition to the disability itself, constitutes the true core of disability: non-participation in society.
Ableism is the “discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities. Ableism characterises persons as defined by their disabilities and as inferior to the non-disabled” (Kessock 2017).
The lack of accessibility is a central element of the non-participation of disabled people in social interactions. It is irrelevant whether this discrimination happens consciously or unconsciously. The decisive factor is whether measures and actions are taken to eliminate this situation once the discrimination has been recognised.
In doing so, we realise that in many cases we have little contact with disabled people in everyday life. This realisation often brings with it insecurity, which then shows itself in play and interactions. However, we also fail to realise that disability is not a condition that prevails from the beginning of life. Only 3% of disabled people are disabled from birth. All other disabilities are acquired in the course of a lifetime. We fail to realise that at some point in our lives we ourselves may belong to the group of people with disabilities that, according to the WHO (2023), makes up about 16% of the world’s population. That is roughly one in six of us. This figure does not stop at larpers and is not linked to a specific population stratum.
Source: Lise Wagner (2021) – Disabled People in the World: Facts and Figures at Okeenea – Inclusive City Maker
It is beyond our imagination to suddenly no longer be able to do things we were previously good at, for whatever reason. This limitation of abilities is often understood as a loss of quality of life. It is accompanied by assumptions about what disabled people are able to do. This is where the greatest danger of acting ableist lies: we cannot imagine what disabled people are capable of doing, and also we think we have to make decisions without including disabled people in the discussion.
Often the boundary between external responsibility and personal responsibility is crossed in an encroaching way. A supposed protective space is built up for disabled people that protects no one but ourselves – from experiences that could take us further.
The diversity of forms of disability is obviously a big problem for many people. Facing many forms of disabilities means that I cannot develop a patent remedy for dealing with them all. As a result, I have to reposition myself in every situation, at every event, in every conversation, according to the needs of my counterpart.
Even though this last sentence applies to practically every situation in my life, even without people with disabilities, it takes on a special meaning for me when dealing with people with disabilities. In this context, if inclusion would be really implemented, it would mean that it is just not a special event. I deliberately avoid the term normality here, because this is a fallacy regarding the diversity of people we encounter in the course of a lifetime.
The special nature of the situation is made clear for many by the fact that they are afraid of possible embarrassment in direct contact with disabled people. They are afraid that they could do something wrong out of ignorance. Therefore, they often do not do it at all and thus deprive themselves of the opportunity to learn and to overcome that very limitation of imagination.
At the Limits: Communication
If there is no meeting or exchange, larp will not be able to develop in this. area. One often feels that disabled people are not taken into account at larps. For example, if I can’t find any information in advance of an event that helps me as a disabled person about the location, the game, the expectations of the organisers, etc., I have to expend additional energy on top of my personal effort, which is regularly caused by my disability anyway, in order to be able to make an informed decision.
What does informed choice mean?
According to the NC Department of Health and Human Services in North Carolina,
“individuals with disabilities have the right to make choices over where they work and how they spend their days. However, people with disabilities too often have limited experiences on which to base choices. Informed choice is what we call the process of choosing from options based on accurate information, knowledge, and experiences. Core principles include:
Everyone is capable of making choices, regardless of their limitations, and needs opportunity, experience, and support to do so.
Choice means selecting among available options, and clearly defining what those options are.
Choices have consequences and it is important to clearly understand what those consequences are.
Choices are made within the overall context of cultural and societal expectations and some choices are viewed as more acceptable and more positive than others.
Informed choice occurs when a person, with or without reasonable accommodations, understands all the options available to them, including the benefits and risks of their decisions. The process of informed choice doesn’t have an end and doesn’t just occur one time. Informed choice is part of an ongoing process of engaging people in person-centred conversations about their goals.” (NCDHHS 2023)
Especially with regard to organisers, it is desirable that people with disabilities can be involved in the run-up to an event. This means that I either have people with disabilities in my environment that I can integrate into my team, or I make an effort to recruit people with disabilities as experts for my event.
Here I should just briefly point out that counselling, in the sense of “I educate myself further”, is something I pay money for in my working life. It should be noted at this point that disabled people owe nobody free education.
Low-barrier access to information on the event’s website is also something that not only benefits people with disabilities. Clear structures of the page layout, bundled and brief information, pictures of the location, and references to the sanitary facilities are just a few examples to help people in general make informed decisions.
It seems to me that an important point is the agenda of the organiser. As a disabled person, I want to be able to get an idea of who I am dealing with on the organiser’s side:
Personally, I would like to meet people who have not already made up their minds about me and my disability.
I want to meet people who trust me to do things, as they would trust non-disabled people.
I want to meet people who trust that I can make decisions for myself just like non-disabled people instead of organisers who have already made decisions for me without knowing what I am capable of.
I want to meet people who want to look at situations with me and find a solution together.
I want to meet open-minded people who are aware in their communication that they don’t have to know everything (and probably can’t), but are willing to learn and educate themselves
I want to meet people with whom I can build a trusting relationship in order to be able to discuss needs that may also require more intimate knowledge in one situation or another. For this I need a protected space.
I want to meet people who recognise where there is a need in play situations (be it through physical barriers or in interaction with other participants) and are not afraid to solve the problem with the necessary knowledge and calmness and above all, clarity and unambiguity.
This sounds like a lot of work at first, but on closer inspection it turns out to be demands that we in the field of larp already implement in many other things and that we try to incorporate into our thinking and actions on diversity issues anyway. Often, experiences of marginalisation arise from the same or at least similar behaviour of counterparts in encounters, so intersectionality is a clear building block of a diverse world for marginalised people, but one that needs to be remembered again and again.
Nevertheless, we need to be aware that there are people who are already overburdened by these demands.
At the Limits: Our Own Vision and Our Resources
Does this mean that I, as an organiser, can no longer organise an event that is not barrier-free, such as a castle larp? Does every event I organise have to be inclusive and diverse?
Those who ask themselves such questions have failed to understand what inclusion and diversity actually mean and what added social value their own events derive from them.
First of all, there are not only physical hurdles when I organise a larp in a castle. Running a larp in Czocha Castle in Poland, for example, has driven an organiser bankrupt and ticket prices have risen out of reach for many larpers.
One question I should ask myself as an organiser is whether the location I have chosen is a compelling element for what my larp will ultimately be. In the course of developing a larp, I have to think about which of my visions will ultimately become reality due to various circumstances. Sometimes the process involves painful decisions. Inclusion can seem like another hurdle that prevents me from realising my visions.
Even though I personally find this assessment regrettable, it seems to me to be a valid attitude if I am eager to implement a certain vision. Here it is important to know that I can (and should!) also communicate this accordingly, but then also have to face consequences and counter-positions. This means above all that I have to be prepared for criticism and accept it, listen to it, and process it.
But maybe I also have to admit to myself that my own resources may not be sufficient to implement inclusion. This also needs to be communicated. It would be important to remain open to the process, to accept help if necessary and to include people in my team with whom I can better implement inclusion. However, if my resources are not sufficient, the most important advice is not to promise what I cannot deliver. This only leads to frustration on both sides, as expectations and implementation efforts clash and cannot be resolved. The worst-case scenarios are that someone is at an event that I, as the organiser, cannot help or I, as a disabled person, am sitting at an event and cannot take action because the circumstances are not as they were announced to me.
In my opinion, organisers must be able to clearly communicate what resources they have available for which processes. They must provide resources in their event organisation structures to be able to address the issue of inclusion appropriately and provide contact persons. In my experience, it helps enormously if this person is a person with disabilities themselves, as this already offers a less barrier-laden approach, which can be of great importance for communicating the own needs of people with disabilities.
Beyond the Limits: Accepting the Challenge
Perhaps the most important conclusion that can be drawn from this article is that there are no easy answers to how best to implement inclusion. The human species is diverse and each of us, regardless of whether it is a person with a (visible) disability or not, or if it’s just personal preferences that matter to us: we have to try to engage with our counterpart.
When it comes to disability, both Shoshana Kessock (2017) and Lizzie Stark (2014) have made suggestions years ago about great ways to implement their own game design as an organiser and take further steps from there. For example, the idea of an avatar taking the place of the player in certain situations is one way to create an element of participation in certain situations. Lizzie Stark rightly writes: “Since the world is big and people and their needs are complex, it’s unlikely that any one technique is going to work for everyone all the time” (Stark 2014). Dann Lynch (2023) has also given suggestions on how to make larp more accessible.
People with disabilities will not give you a one-size-fits-all answer to the question: what do I have to do to be inclusive? None of us can avoid thinking about it ourselves in exchange with affected people.
There are already many people with disabilities in the field of larp – but not all of their disabilities are visible. These people must be allowed to gain the courage and be offered the opportunity to talk about it without prejudice and in a self-determined way. Larp designers must credibly and honestly assure and emphasise that disability in larp is treated neither as a cool feature of a character such as an eye patch nor as a burden regarding the efforts I have to put in my larp because someone is disabled, but as a part of the personalities that live in the game world in which I currently find myself.
Real participation means that people with disabilities can also immerse themselves in play worlds in order to have new experiences like everyone else, and to escape from everyday life for a while.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Butzen, Björn. 2024. “Inclusion in Larp: Between Challenge and the Experience of Limits.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
There are monsters under my bed. When I was a child, I could sense them in every half-seen shadow, feel their breath on my neck. I knew monsters were imaginary. But I was still afraid.
I am a non-binary larper. Time and again, I find that larps are framed to create those shadowy spaces and summon monsters. Monsters hiding under the bed and in the closet, but much more real and able to harm me.
Most of my fellow larpers are lovely people who don’t intend their games to include monsters. They are happy to fight the big and dangerous monsters. But many of the monsters I fight are sneakier; they keep themselves invisible to well-meaning allies.
This is a guide to some of the monsters that non-binary adventurers encounter when they larp. If you are non-binary, you might recognise them and know you are not alone in your fight. If you are not, then I hope you can use this as a spotter’s guide to help you check your games to see if you might be creating fertile ground for monsters to spawn.
Basilisk, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Basilisk: This snake-like creature can petrify or kill with a glance. It is common in larps to find that a Basilisk has wiped all non-binary people from the game world. Non-binary adventurers risk petrification from the discomfort and dysphoria of being forced to play a binary gender. Even the reflection of a Basilisk’s gaze can kill: larps based on highly gendered media often mimic source material and exclude non-binary characters, unintentionally perpetuating a problem. The danger can be reduced to a painful skin condition by allowing non-binary characters who are perceived as binary, but beware; this opens you up to a Bogeyman attack.
Kelpie: These river spirits take the shape of a horse, trying to entice would-be riders up onto their back. At larp events, they appeal to players by offering the promise that people can sign up as their own gender – because that’s important to many people. When the non-binary adventurer mounts the Kelpie, it becomes clear that this was a ploy; the Kelpie attempts to drown them in the river by forcing them to sign up as Male or Female. Kelpies can also attack adventurers of sexual or romantic minorities, manifesting as a promise of romance plots that turn out to only be compatible with the sexuality of straight players.
Goblin: These monsters taunt and harry writers, whispering in their ears until they are afraid to include non-binary characters in their game “in case they get it wrong” – even though their larp contains no plots about the characters’ internal sense of gender. Gripped by fear, the writer does not notice that they have written many characters outside their experience, such as androids, giant insects, and humans with a binary gender not their own. While the Goblin’s attack seems subtle, the results are indistinguishable from the attack of a Basilisk. Fooled by the Goblin, the writer does not even think to consult a non-binary adventurer for advice.
Bogeyman, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Bogeyman: This monster lurks in the closet, ready to pull adventurers inside at any sign of gender-transgressing ‘bad behaviour’. If you attend a gendered game and decide to play in a gender non-conforming outfit, such as a woman in trousers – a common armour against dysphoria and often an adventurer’s only clothing – then watch out for this monster causing in-character hostility. This monster exists in larps, but also in many other contexts, and fighting too many becomes exhausting. It is often necessary to make a choice: hide from this monster and suffer the wounds in silence, or face it for yet another painful battle?
Dragon: Like Goblins, Dragons attack imaginations, destroying even the idea of better alternatives. There are numerous types; the non-binary and sexism Dragons like to team up, setting fire to whole cities of imagination so writers see only barren ground. Bereft of inspiration, the writer uses their own world and again chooses gender as the basis for the division of character roles and social dynamics. The resulting highly-gendered game harms AFAB people, but causes extra damage to a non-binary adventurer. The Dragon’s work also causes the GM to almost always cast non-binary adventurers as the gender they were assigned at birth, even when there is a better fitting character in another gender.
Changeling: This monster exists in disguise, often using words like ‘inclusivity’ and ‘feminism’ to create what seems like a welcoming space. Once inside their lair, they reveal their fangs and attack any trans person who enters. These monsters are so insidious because any enticing larp could be a Changeling lair; as a result, their very existence ensures that many an adventurer must distrust any game unless they clearly display support of transgender and non-binary inclusion, behaviour that Changelings usually struggle to mimic.
Minotaur, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Minotaur: These monsters like to hide inside a labyrinth. These can be subtle constructions, taking a while for an adventurer to realise they have been drawn in. While the game contains nothing openly problematic, it also contains no non-binary characters or suggestions for replacement gender dynamics written into the background. This allows the Minotaur to gradually fill in the gaps with its labyrinth, reproducing existing social dynamics and player biases. The adventurer experiences a gradual realisation that they are becoming more lost with every turn, as the distant roaring sound grows ever closer.
Ghost: An adventurer possessed by this monster, becomes invisible. They can wear pronoun badges, deliberately mix gendered clothing and other markers, and correct people’s misuse of their pronouns, but it won’t help – they are treated as binary despite all evidence to the contrary. The more this happens, the tighter the grip of the Ghost. If you are haunted by a Ghost, your only hope is that there are enough psychic players in the game to affirm your characters’ gender until the influence of this monster has been overcome.
Zombie: Zombies are slow and would not be very threatening on their own, but they can destroy an adventurer through sheer relentless numbers. Phrases like ‘ladies and gentlemen’, ‘he or she’, ‘this is a game for women but men are also welcome’, lack of gender-neutral toilets at a venue – these things permeate out of character interactions and they build up until the adventurer becomes worn down from a thousand small wounds.
Nessie, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Nessie: Nessies are mysterious beasts that lurk under the surface of your game. They manifest as social pressure not to make a fuss or drop out of a game, taking advantage of people’s reasonable desire for commitment and natural wish not to spoil things for others. When a Nessie emerges, a person suffering other monster attacks finds their escape cut off by sinewy scales, causing them social damage and increased exclusion if they try to flee. Nessies do not limit their prey; they often attack disabled adventurers or those with mental health conditions to manage.
Counterspells
There are monsters under my bed. When I was a child, I learned to use magic to fire lightning and create a shield. I reasoned this should work because the monsters were also imaginary.
Larps are spells. Larp is where we take our own stories and build new cultures and visions for how the world might be. Through this ritual we take them one step closer to reality.
This is a guide to some counterspells that can arm non-binary adventurers. If you are non-binary, I hope this gives you light and hope. If you are not, I hope you can use this guide to help you write, play, and run larps in ways that help combat the monsters we face daily.
Horn of Plenty, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Horn of Plenty: Just as some monsters team up, so can different adventurers, generating a nurturing feedback loop. Including other queer characters, having non-normative relationships, and combating sexism monsters in larps can invoke the Horn of Plenty, causing a feast of nourishment to flow for all. This effect is enhanced by placing these characters in positions of power; write non-binary heads of house, trans woman ruler in a polyamorous triad, and a pansexual and aromantic Grand Vizier.
Circle of Protection: An adventurer equipped with this spell possesses a magic shield that encircles them and holds back monsters. The Circle of Protection is invoked on the spot using safety words or prior to an adventure by writing a list of lines, and its use empowers an adventurer by offering them control over participating in certain themes and topics.
As Above, So Below: Sympathetic magic makes use of the way that ‘like produces like’, enacting changes in a representation that will also affect the real thing. In a larp, this can be invoked by writing explicitly non-binary or gender non-conforming characters into setting and character backgrounds in ways that deliberately offer new social dynamics and non-gendered roles. This spell can be boosted with subtle details in set dressing: costumes that mess with traditional gendered clothing, feminine motifs in the warrior enclave, masculine motifs at the woolmaking hearth, background music from queer subcultures.
Walking the Ways: An experienced adventurer can learn to slip between the cracks and into the Wild Ways, allowing them to traverse large distances quickly and avoid the monsters lurking there. You can enable this in a larp by calling down some essence of the Ways into your game. Write a game where gender neutrality is the norm; where queerness and gender fluidity is the default assumption; where gender weirdness is celebrated; where characters have different genders or no genders or extra genders.
Talisman of Sky, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Talisman of Sky: Air is a powerful element, one which fuels our breath and is associated with the mind and communication. Allow players to commune with their characters in whatever way their breath and connection takes them. You can invoke this in a larp by writing all characters as gender neutral and allowing players to choose their gender and pronouns. Many writers find this spell difficult to invoke; their minds want to impose their own gender habits, which hampers the Talisman. Think carefully before you gender a character, as almost no plots really require a specific gender identity.
Sigil of Earth: This element of growth and strength can be invoked if Sky is not possible. When writing a larp with pre-set character genders, plant the seeds for this spell by deliberately writing against cultural gender roles and including explicitly non-binary or intersex characters. Gender roles are very ingrained, and writers tend to use their culture’s ideas if they let their feet carry them without conscious intervention. (Try rolling a die after writing each character: 1-4, female; 5, intersex; 6, non-binary; 7-10, male.) When you cast, allow for players willing to play any gender, and do your first pass without knowing their identity and thus name or presentation.
Shadow Dancing: An adventurer can use movement mirroring a monster’s symbolic representation to form a spell that will strip them of their power. At your event, you can dance this by ensuring that procedures are the same for all genders: if game writers must specify the number of male or female characters, also ask how many characters are explicitly non-binary. If players can sign-up as male or female, allow them to sign-up explicitly as non-binary. If your venue has toilets that are provided specifically for men and for women, select one set and make them gender neutral (labelled with urinals or with sanitary bins).
Ritual of Transmutation: No adventurer steps out with immediate mastery of monster hunting skills. This ritual is best reinforced frequently, gradually allowing your powers to grow. This spell is invoked by using non-binary inclusive phrases at least three times in the mirror, with increasing intensity until you feel the spell begin to settle in your bones. Practice turns of phrase, pronouns, and forms of address. Check your writing, and if you’re not sure the spell is working, ask a friendly non-binary adventurer if they have time to look over your work – though adventurers may need to conserve energy for fighting monsters.
True Naming: Knowing someone’s true name grants power – knowing your own, more so. In a larp, you invoke this spell by building norms to always check pronouns, either visually (if there are badges) or verbally. When players sign up, don’t ask what their gender is; ask them instead what gender they would like to play and what pronouns their character should have. In your game, specify that the default pronoun is ‘they’ unless you have checked on a particular character’s pronouns. Use a clear and simple pronoun correction procedure, and have players practice it in a game workshop as they would any other mechanics.
Healing potion, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Healing Potion: This spell is created in advance, combining sacred herbs and hidden fruit in a potion to restore lost vitality. You can create one by taking the time to include Queer histories and media in your source material, supporting non-binary and transgender writers, uplifting LGBTQIA+ players in your community and giving them a voice – and importantly, listening to what they say. Sometimes people feel a shadow of the pain when they encounter a wounded adventurer speaking of their battles, and can unknowingly lash out at the adventurer instead of helping to fight the monster. The best response for you both is to offer the wounded adventurer a healing potion instead
Adventuring
There will always be monsters under the bed. Some of these will be of my own making.
I write and run games. I, too, inadvertently create monsters. As a wizard, I must research the side effects of my choices and try to modify my spellmaking accordingly. If we make an effort, we can perhaps band together as fellow adventurers of all kinds. We can share our spells and our vitality, and create a better fantasy land for all of us.
Will you come adventuring with me, and fight them together?
This article is published in the companion book Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
England, Rei. “Magic To Fight Monsters: Larp as a spell for claiming my spaces.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
One of the most important tenets of the communities built around Nordic larp these past few years has been inclusivity. “Inclusiveness” was defined by Lars Nerback in a 2013 Nordic Larp Talk as the feeling of being culturally and socially accepted, welcome, and equally treated (Nerback 2013).
From a larpmaker’s perspective, it designates the effort to design spaces in which people who experience discrimination in their ordinary lives are actively supported and encouraged. Over the years, people involved with Nordic larp have consequently developed practical and educational tools to support their claim of being inclusive. For example, papers have been written about how to perform cultural calibration so that players have the same vision and understanding of the culture depicted ingame (Nielsen 2014) or of the actual culture and everyday experiences of the people whose lives are being used as a direct inspiration for the larp (Kangas 2017). Others have written to address discrimination experienced in larp contexts, for example due to race (Kemper 2018) or body type (Kessock 2019).
Those tools, although primarily designed to be used in larp contexts, contribute to shaping the behaviors and practices expected on a community level. Indeed, if larps are the ground from which most social relationships among larpers grow, sociability doesn’t end at larps. For most people, it continues, through Facebook, chat, public meetings, events, etc. That’s why, in this chapter, I will address larp primarily as a community — a social group sharing common interests, supported by a feeling of belonging.
In addition, many (larp and non-larp) communities, seeking inspiration from Nordic larp or following the spirit of the times, also strive towards inclusivity. Those communities may encounter similar problems: inclusivity questions our collective ability to remain actively open while taking part in a group of interests. It is, at its essence, a matter of community skills.
The partial success of the effort towards inclusivity is especially apparent in the increasing visibility of queer people, for example at Solmukohta — from Drag me to KP to “queer at KP” badges to the prominence of rainbowcolored pieces of clothing. However, the larp world remains strikingly homogenous, revealing limits to how inclusivity is currently practiced. Even though it is not true of all larp cultures, most Nordic larpers are white, able-bodied, and come from moderately wealthy, educated backgrounds: people of color, people of reduced mobility, and people with low income or education, are scarce.
Intersectionality, a notion created by African American academic Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), helps us understand how different discrimination (for example, race, ability, and class) combine in ways that make it necessary to address all its aspects in order to understand how a person is being limited or suppressed based on their identity. We must also take that into account in designing for inclusivity.
The aspects we need to consider to make a community effectively inclusive are many: gender, class, race, ability, but also education, and even social skills. Nordic larp was born out of an endeavor to get several emerging larping traditions to share practices and ideas, and it worked tremendously well. However, this creative proliferation has, over the years, built to increase the distance between insiders and outsiders. From the outside, the threshold to participate in the Nordic larping community now seems ridiculously high.
I joined the Nordic scene two years ago at age 23 during Knutpunkt 2018 after a pretty short larping career in France, in the pursuit of a degree in Social Anthropology. I was fortunate enough to have a motive to join (research), a feminist background, and a compulsive learning attitude forged by years of university training. Yet, even today, after spending some time in the Nordics countries, reading as much larp theory as I could stomach, and writing a thesis I’m pretty happy with, it still feels I can never, ever catch up with what was produced during the last twenty years.
As a result, I feel dangerously ignorant of the cultural and social ways of the community, and constantly in danger of making a misstep. I think it is safe to say I’m far from being the only one. Many other larpers I had the chance to talk to shared similar feelings. The cost of access, i.e. the amount of specialized knowledge required to participate in the Nordic larp community is very high.
Some of the cost of access that impedes inclusivity is, in fact, due to the efforts to support it. There’s two sides to every coin: to be inclusive to certain people, a space has to be exclusive of others — and it is not always clear who.
This is the paradox of inclusivity.
In this chapter, I would like to address how “being inclusive” and “feeling safe” come into contradiction, notably in the way that we design community spaces. Then, I will try to question the phenomenon of community violence and how it relies on our in-group conceptions of difference and ways to confront it. These thoughts will help build a clearer vision of what inclusivity does, and can, mean. Finally, I will try to offer practical advice to help us build more inclusive communities, encourage collective reflexivity, and conceive of larpers’ spaces as a piece of a more global society, which needs to become more inclusive as well.
Inclusivity vs. Safe Space: Bringing In or Keeping Out
When trying to achieve inclusivity in practice, the first obstacle encountered is the exclusiveness of general society. Just because a space seems public, or open, doesn’t mean that it is: homeless people are constantly pushed away, people of color are at risk of police violence, openly gay couples often have to fear assault, sex workers are criminalized and stigmatized, etc. Therefore, all attempts to build an inclusive community must deal with the matter of the space in which events, gatherings, or larps take place.
In short, we need to make the participants feel safe. According to Johanna Koljonen, this involves the following:
Participants need to feel seen and secure, they need to know they’re in the right place, and have a reasonably good idea of what kinds of experiences and activities they are about to engage in. This makes them not have to worry, which allows them to be present in the moment and explore the actual instance of the experience in a playful, mindful and proactive manner.
Koljonen 2016
The careful framing of such spaces, the rules and limitations we actively give them, differ from how we experience our everyday lives. There are no safety mechanics in real life, no word that magically stops your boss from yelling at you, no graceful opt-out that’ll let you walk free of a street harasser.
What we try to achieve through all the rules, the caring, the long discussions about consent, is commonly called a safe space. And, as society itself is certainly not a safe space, we need to build a space that is separated from it and tries to counter it, to cancel the prejudices, power relations, and inequalities that we encounter in our ordinary lives.
We try to build an inclusive environment by removing it from society, and by making sure unwanted elements of society don’t follow inside. We try to bring (people) in by keeping (the problems which individuals are a part of) out.
In short: safe spaces, which are instrumental in allowing for inclusivity, are exclusive. Then again, what choice do we have? The world in general remains a dangerous place for many of us. In the absence of other options, we must ponder what we call safe and what (or who) we deem unsafe.
First, it is important to acknowledge that safety is a collective concern requiring all members of the community to actively contribute to the social design that organizers — primarily — come up with. As Maury Brown puts it:
For a community to be safe, all of its members must: uphold the agreed-upon social contract of respectful behavior; be intolerant of harassment, abuse, and assault within the group; share the duty of monitoring behavior and educating new members; support the decisions of organizers to enforce safety norms; and respect and offer support to those who make reports of safety violations.
Brown 2017
These are no small tasks: the exact meaning of words like harassment, abuse, and assault, is far from evident. Safety requirements are specialized knowledge, and contribute to raising the cost of access to communities such as the Nordic larp scene. Fortunately, in larps, cultural calibration tools and workshops provide support, and have shown remarkable efciency in including, for example, autistic people (Fein 2015).
Blockbuster larps and performance or art games marketed to the general public have an ability to attract new faces, thus building an entry point to the community. However, becoming part of the community, being a valid, full member of the group, able to participate in Facebook conversations, is not easy.
In fact, during my first Solmukohta, I felt so distressed and alone (I knew barely a handful of people among the 500, and none of them well) that I spent a whole afternoon in my room writing about “extrovert privilege”. The first time I wrote the Nordic larping community was not actually inclusive was the first time I came into contact with it. Being told this community was “a big family”, it was hard to realize that it was as difficult to take part in for an introvert as anywhere else.
The amount of community skills required to support a safe space is high, and at odds with the concern for inclusivity. To address it we can, at least partly, rely on “herd competence” — hoping the people bold enough to enter our spaces learn by doing in contact with others. However, by relying on the rather elusive notion of safety, we court confusion.
Safety is a many-sided issue: we need to be safe to play, express our identities, meet our needs, voice our opinions, etc. (what Friedner 2019 calls the brave space), but also safe from. There’s a positive safety, rooted in empowerment, and a negative safety, emerging from the perceived need of protection and defense.
Although enforced in more or less tangible ways, safety is a feeling, not a state of affairs. As such, it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with reality: we may feel unsafe while running no risk at all, or engage in risky behavior because we feel safe.
In an interview for the Knutpunkt 2018 Companion Book, Johanna Koljonen says that larp safety “is about feeling safe to play rather than being safe from harm” (Svanevik and Brind 2018, my emphasis). However, this principle of safety offers very little ground for facts. It relies largely on subjectivity.
It is difficult to decide what constitutes a threat, and even more so to distinguish between an actual threat and one we project based on our own past experiences.
What (supposedly) makes the larping community safe or inclusive is primarily the language we use to qualify it: it is safe because we’ve said so. It is inclusive because we’ve written about it. This is what is commonly called, following linguist John Austin (1962), a performative use of language: uttering a certain speech, in appropriate circumstances, may produce effects in reality. When we collectively declare “larp is safe”, we make safety happen, because all of a sudden we become mindful of others, their vulnerability, the precariousness of any social situation, etc. But when we have no clear definition of what “safe” means and the word “inclusivity” is little more than gibberish to many community members, the performative function of language is in jeopardy.
That’s when crises happen.
What We Do to Each Other: Community, Care, and the Making of Forgiveness
We often perceive safety as a human right. As far as I’m concerned, this is true. However, the chasm between “the right not to be shot on the way home” and “the right to not feel uncomfortable” is wide. As Sarah Schulman, author of an essay called Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016), warns:
Feeling “safe” of course is already a problematic endeavor since there is little guarantee of safety in our world, and the promise of it is a false one, as the effort to enforce this is often at the expense of other people.
Schulman 2016:130
There is no way to ensure 100% safety, and by trying to increase our chances, we might put other people at risk. If safety is a feeling, so is the impression of threat, unsafety, or intentional harm.
According to Sarah Schulman, projecting fears and insecurities onto others (the people who are “not us”, not part of the safe group) is common with two attitudes that we usually do not think to associate with each other: supremacy and trauma. Supremacy is the belief that the reference group is superior to other groups (by way of race, nationality, gender, ability, etc.), and therefore their own needs must be prioritized. This can lead to hate crimes, but more mundanely manifests in the feeling that the members of the supremacy group are put at risk of harm by non-members, and it’s therefore legitimate to use whatever means of “protection” against the (imaginary) threat they deem necessary.
In Europe, supremacist ideology directly translates to anti-immigrant laws, horrendous detention camps, and thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean each year.
Schulman describes supremacist attitudes in terms of the irrational feeling that one’s group must be protected against and separated from others, who are deemed dangerous, unworthy, or inferior. She draws a disturbing parallel with the attitude of traumatized people, whose feeling of being unsafe can be based not on actual risks in the present tense, but “a projection in the present based on dangers that occurred in the past” (ibid.). Because both supremacy and trauma are rooted in an analogous feeling that the group is being at risk of harm from non-members, the traumatized can become the supremacist. The Israeli occupation of Palestine constitutes a major institutional example of that escalation.
It is natural to seek to be, and feel, safe. However, when it leads to expecting others to comply with our own (not necessarily clear, visible from the outside, or reasonable) needs, conflict becomes inevitable. Moreover, conflict is often simplified until one can clearly distinguish a victim and an abuser.
The following pattern is common especially in communities using a lot of social media: A person commits, often without realizing it, an act that makes some members of the community feel hurt. These people share their pain, unease or dismay with other members. As more and more people become aware of the situation, the initial feelings flare up and reach a level where the status quo can’t hold, inducing a crisis.
At this point, it seems like nothing can be done: sides are taken, the community becomes polarized, and a stable state is only reached through splitting the community or shunning the wrongdoer. When this process targets public figures, it can take the form of “canceling,” an attempt from an active minority to deplatform a creator by publicly denouncing, slandering, and threatening them and their supporters.
Issues concerning the building of a safe space are involved in such crises. Designating a space as safe leads to the passive exclusion of people who do not know, or feel they know, enough, and the active exclusion of people thought to threaten the safety of the group. By creating a space that is viewed as separate, different from “the rest of the world,” and validating it through a feeling — safety —, those attitudes may lead to creating a critical differentiation between “us” and “them,” and to posit otherness (difference, disagreement, strangeness, etc.) as a threat. As a consequence, it becomes difficult to treat others with the same care as we expect to be treated as rightful members of our community. A Finnish larper who had been part of a recent community crisis as one of the wrongdoers told me: “You heard about the Week of Stories? We didn’t even have five minutes.”
The “Week of Stories” is a short period of time after an event (generally a larp) in which the participants withhold their criticism to give the organizers an opportunity to recover — and let the steam cool down.
As the actions of the organizers of this particular event were deemed outrageous, many attendants reacted by expressing their shock and indignation immediately. These feelings were, of course, legitimate: all feelings, in fact, should be acknowledged — although not always acted upon. In that case, though, the immediate outburst caused the organizers to feel hurt and disregarded in turn.
The rules and norms of care and attention in larps are largely there not to be used: they are there in case of need, but their primary purpose is to support a feeling of “safe enough” to participate — much like a lifejacket or a seatbelt. But when those rules, like the Week of Stories, could come in handy to address a particularly difficult situation, we are not always able to resist the initial flare of emotion.
Unfortunately, social media encourage us to react immediately to stimuli, and facilitates emotional outbursts at the expense of caution and reflection. As the authors of the Living Games’ Crisis Management Workshop put it:
While many communities and events are working hard to make their spaces safer, it’s not enough to have a Code of Conduct. You need to practice it.
Stavropoulos and Steele 2016
Speaking about safety is not enough. Imagining safety measures is not enough. We need to practice understanding why we made those rules.
Violence happens. Conflict happens. But violent reactions, even verbal, even righteous, even targeted at the people who wronged us, are unlikely to lead to positive outcomes in a community. There are other ways than exclusion to support a safe and inclusive space, and resorting to it too often may weaken the space we try to preserve.
We frequently use the metaphor of the missing stair to describe an individual that we know to be “problematic” in a community, yet carefully avoid instead of confronting (putting at risk those who are unaware a stair is missing). It could have provided a nice basis for understanding how to address detrimental elements in a community, but this metaphor was built on a logical error: we don’t fix a stair by removing it, but by safely replacing faulty parts, adding safeguards, and making sure the stair doesn’t put people at risk anymore.
If shunning can be a temporary solution to address a potential danger in the short term, it is not likely to support understanding of the harmful behavior, for the perpetrator or the community.
Being denied the right to speak, the perpetrator can experience a strong feeling of unfairness and rejection. This won’t help them listen and understand the consequences of their actions. As for the community, it cannot reach an adequate comprehension of the sociological causes of the harm done without facing the perpetrator and hearing them too. As a consequence, the community renders itself incapable of preventing similar behaviors in the future. Furthermore, enforcing safety rules using the fear of shunning encourages perpetrators to hide and deny their actions instead of acknowledging them and trust the community to resort to transformative justice.
Transformative justice is a comprehensive and non-legal approach to problem solving and peacemaking that doesn’t seek to punish the perpetrator, but to collectively reach a new state of balance through educating, supporting, and encouraging dialogue. It doesn’t mean that we are responsible for fixing people: in some cases, that would simply be impossible. However, “sacrificing” members of the community who are known to misbehave may be beside the point. In fact, punishment for the sake of righteousness is often beside the point. I believe that it is our individual and collective duty to try to understand the etiology of a crisis. Otherwise an appropriate response remains impossible.
Reaching Past the Choir
By keeping us from reaching more people, building our communities as safe spaces fails to allow us to fully benefit from the educational and transformative powers of larp (e.g. Bowman and Hugaas 2019). To change that, we need to be inclusive towards other kinds of people, to be able to extend the safe space in ways that allow anyone to step in and benefit from the kind of awareness we’ve had.
The para-larp environment is awfully technical, albeit for good reasons: in general society, something as widespread as e.g. sharing one’s pronouns is mostly unheard of. Being for once in a space where people won’t misgender you is priceless — that’s also why I’m not rejecting inclusivity as we usually conceive of it, simply pointing at some of its dark spots.
Most people quickly become allies when they are placed in an environment that is appropriately forgiving with their missteps, yet encourages their efforts in learning and being included. On the contrary, hurtful reactions to honest mistakes can create more anger, confusion, and a feeling of rejection that fosters resistance and hatred. Getting angry happens, of course: but offering the other person an explanation for our reaction can help bridge the difference, and slowly bring them to our side.
Shunning hurts us. When addressing community issues, violence is almost always detrimental. If inclusivity is synonymous with purity, we are not protecting ourselves from harm, but ensuring it happens.
As it stands, the community requires specialized knowledge and legitimacy to talk about many sensitive topics. As a consequence, it is more difficult for newer and low-status members to achieve social recognition, while older and high-status members benefit from a kind of indulgence that might result in unhealthy power relations (especially in the event of a crisis). Muriel Algayres’s article about social capital in larp offers a detailed account of the effects of status differences on play opportunities and social dynamics (Algayres 2019).
The Nordic larp community is inclusive, but not all the time, and not to everyone. In fact, inclusive is, in my opinion, not the right term to use for the larp community: instead, it is queerfriendly, with (white) feminist values, and an education to difference. Not bad, but with a few fixes, we can do better. By understanding that the need for safety may come into contradiction with the ideal of inclusivity we can move to an increased awareness of how to address and support differences in our community. Here are a few steps:
Acknowledging feelings, while at the same time recognizing that feeling alone cannot be the baseline for acting upon a conflict situation.
Ensuring the persons who felt hurt receive appropriate care, but remaining careful in assuming the intentions of the wrongdoers or initiating punishment.
Keeping in mind that being inclusive means making space for different people and opinions to coexist.
Holding the space to hear all parties involved in a crisis, and offering or asking a neutral community member or entity for mediation.
Refraining from immediate social media exposure.
Instead of projecting our expectations based on a unilateral understanding of a given situation, we need to assume the best of others (at least provisionally) and create the space for reasonable dialogue to occur.
A lot of good can arise from constructing a safe space around positive tenets meant to cancel, or compensate, behaviors at play in general society. However, we need to be wary of the risk of seclusion and insularity. Indeed, such a state of affairs would give way to distorted thinking about the state of the world and the intentions of the people who don’t belong. In wanting to defend the group from harm, insular communities may thoughtlessly replicate harmful behaviors such as bullying, shunning, and rejecting difference. In doing so, community spaces become less resilient to change and dissent and thus more precarious.
Inclusivity has to meet a double logic. First, the creation of a safe space allows, from the outside to the inside, to take in people whose identities do not meet the dominant social norms. Second, from the inside to the outside, larp and larp communities can create opportunities for educating people to difference and provide alternative social models that contribute to the struggle against all oppression — a purpose the seminary The State of the Larp in Oslo in December 2018 explicitly pursued.
However, neither the one nor the other should be taken for granted or implied: what makes a space safe is far from obvious, and the power of larp is only as great as the people it reaches. In the design of our larps and communities, we must explicitly ask ourselves: what do we think we are doing, and what do we want to do in practice? To put it provocatively: to make a better place in the world for ourselves, or to make the world a better place.
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989): Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum.
Elizabeth Fein (2015): Making Meaningful Worlds: Role-playing Subcultures and the Autism Spectrum. Cult Med Psychiatry, 39(2), pp. 299-321.
Kat Jones, Mo Holkar and Jonaya Kemper (2019): Designing for Intersectional Identities. in Johanna Koljonen (ed.), Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost, 2019.
This article is partially a complement to the recent ”The Brave Space” opinion piece, but is more generally fueled by long standing discussions regarding status and social dynamics in larp communities, both at the local and wider international scale. It represents my opinion alone and does not mean to establish a universal truth regarding these issues. I will first present a definition of safety and expand it using the notion of zone of proximal development, an education theory proposed by Lev Vygotsky. I will then reintroduce the notion of social capital to argue why imbalances of power between participants should be taken into account while discussing safety and player negotiation of boundaries. I conclude with the idea that you can’t discuss a culture of trust without addressing social capital and the imbalances of power between all people involved.
The Ideal Purpose of Safety
Safety techniques as they exist at the time of this writing provide means to both opt-out of sensitive issues of scenes or to opt-in to certain types of play. Furthermore, communication around safety has become essential to establish the role and positioning of the larp organization on safety and inclusion of all players. We can admit that talk of safety mostly focuses on opting out mechanics, such as clear author statements with explicit trigger warnings, safewords, white zones, stating boundaries, etc. However, opt-in mechanics also exist, such as the signal light colors (red/yellow/green), okay check-in, pre-scene negotiations, opt-in color ribbons, and the more recent zoning, which creates opt-in spaces within the physical space of the larp. While the possibility to calibrate opt-out and opt-in is obviously central to giving participants the opportunity to experiment and step out of their comfort zone, each participant has different needs and boundaries in that regard.
Photo: Laflor for Getty Images/iStockphoto.
In education, Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (Harland 2003) is considered the ideal space to learn. The zone refers to the space between the comfort zone of what you already know and a yet unattainable zone where the difficulty would discourage or overwhelm you (see Figure 1). We can apply this frame to understand how players can develop skills in larp, such as speaking in public, brawling, handling sensitive issues or emotionally charged conflicts, and even intimacy or sexual scenes.
Let’s keep in mind that the zone of proximal development is unique to each individual, in the same way as triggers and boundaries are (Brown 2014). As in education, if a player stays too much in their comfort zone, they might miss the opportunity to grow, experiment, and learn. And in larp, some people explicitly prefer to stay within their comfort zone for a variety of reasons, such as escapism, socialization, or love of a certain genre, all of which are absolutely valid. Furthermore, pushing someone out of their zone of proximal development too quickly can be damaging to the players’ development by forcing them to engage with problems that they are not ready for or that could be triggering for them. Brown (2014) especially underlines how triggers exist on a wide spectrum, and how they can be detrimental to their player’s whole experience and impact the player’s agency.
Therefore, the core idea is that you need a solid comfort zone before you can expand it. The scope of your zone of proximal development is completely personal and calls for personalized handling. Another educational parallel can be drawn here with the notion of scaffolding in education, where progress is built through progressive steps, support from educators, and interactions with other learners. Applied to larp, in order for a person to feel brave and explore out of their comfort zone, they need to feel safe and supported by their environment, which is not a given in larp communities for many players.
Figure 1: The Zone of Proximal Development. Figure by Dcoetzee (CC0).
There is no denying that larp can provide powerful transformative experiences. Jonaya Kemper (2017) coined the term emancipatory bleed to reflect on the process of steering towards a specific type of play that would reflect one’s own life experience of oppression. Players should be allowed the opportunity to steer towards that kind of play, and designers can support emergent play along those lines. However, how can we support transformative play and exploration while still ensuring safety for those players who most need it? This question usually brings up issues of consent, pre-game or in-game negotiation, and personal boundaries.
We are Not Equal in Setting Boundaries and Tone
In the international larp community, we usually remind participants that the players are more important than the game, make sure that enthusiastic content is given and can be revoked at all times, and support negotiation and opt-in mechanisms. Our goal is to build a collective culture of trust. However, to build such a culture, we need to be able to negotiate it as equal participants. I don’t believe that every negotiation and every discussion is carried on an equal footing.
Games going through reruns and several iterations can sometimes be played more violently or intensely from one session to another. Framing the game experience with hard limits or requirements for consent negotiations in such a way that it sets up cohesive boundaries for the whole experience remains an organizers’ prerogative. However, I would contend that the collective level of intensity is also influenced by the players through their collective interactions. Since we tend to take cues and ideas from other players, I believe that participants are unequal in influencing the tone and intensity. Outspoken participants with a wider comfort zone can influence the game atmosphere more, sometimes for the better, by inspiring others and creating unexpected interactions.
On the other hand, a single or small group of participants who decide to play for their own agency and to disregard the collective buildup of the game can just as easily derail the tone and cohesion for the whole larp. These are rare occurrences where the domino effect can negatively impact the experience of many players (Bowman 2017). My previous article (2019) on the depiction of rape scenes in larps showed how the introduction of scenes featuring sexual violence used to be the province of a dominant group who used it for power play. Only the introduction of restrictions and safety regulations enabled the minority group — women players in this instance — to refuse playing these scenes if they were not negotiated. Further down the line, we found women participants were willing to play rape scenes for dramatic purposes or to support intense narratives because they feel empowered to choose to do so. This empowerment, though, was entirely contingent upon a corrective intervention upon the social imbalance that had originally prevented these players from voicing their discontent. Thus, safety culture was the crucial thing that allowed these women to feel comfortable to play this content.
Social Capital in Larp
Social capital is a notion popularized among others by Pierre Bourdieu as the product of resources conferred due to integration into a certain network and the capacity to act in society (Siisiainen 2003). The chart below illustrates social capital as an aggregate of these resources that allows an individual access to favors or greater resources.
Figure 2: A synthetic representation of social capital (Algayres 2019).
Since larp groups or organizations are part of society, they are also prone to the same biases that affect us in daily life. Although efforts have been made to support the integration of minority or marginalized groups in larps, some players still accrue social capital by virtue of being or passing for white, straight, cis-, or because of their class and education level. Another major point in the international context is their mastery of English, which will confer advantages to native English speakers and players from countries where English proficiency is especially high, as well as highly educated and internationally-integrated professionals. Finally, social capital as we will discuss it is also dependent on larp-specific criteria: being geographically anchored as Nordic, clout as an organizer and/or larp theorist, visibility on social media, participation at international larp conferences and conventions, playing high status characters, and involvement in high-profile games with a lot of hype.
I would claim that larpers with higher social capital are in a position to influence their co-players’ choices or leverage their own desires when boundaries are negotiated. Has anyone ever been accidentally pushed out of their comfort zone for fear of missing out certain parts of the game or the opportunity to hang out with this cool larper they’d read a lot about? Could peer pressure and “hardcore larp culture” ever push some people to willfully step out of their zone of proximal development because that’s what a “good larper” would do? I would contend that this can happen, and that it is very easy to be blind to your own social capital, as it can intersect with other forms of oppression. For example, as a woman, I have to contend with sexism and have even been the subject of sexual violence. However, since I hit almost every other marker of status, I have often been in situations where I benefited from my higher social capital and I was sometimes blind to it to my own detriment. I believe it is important for us to acknowledge our own degree of social capital and how it may influence our relative abilities to push play in our desired direction. It is also important for us to listen to people with lower social capital when they request greater safety culture around sensitive topics.
Regarding the Creation of Safe Spaces and Trust Culture
I think that safety must be used both as a way to opt-out and opt-in of specific themes and scenes. However, safety also has been used to protect minority groups and players with specific triggers and limits from play that would be oppressive to them, and is especially beneficial to players with lower social capital (Kemper 2017). In larp scenes where safety was introduced more recently, resistance to safety techniques usually comes from the more dominant and entitled groups of players. These groups sometimes feel that safety techniques are not necessary because they feel safe enough not to need them. They may have sufficient trust and familiarity within their local communities of play to feel safe without negotiation, which is a form of privilege that is not afforded to many in the international larp community, who may enter larps without the benefits of established group trust. Only active communication by the organizers compensates for this imbalance of power between groups that feel confident to play without safety rules and those who need to be sure of the implementation of safety structures before they will even sign up for the larp. In other words, players with this social capital privilege may not realize that lack of safety culture in a larp may be actively dissuading players from marginalized backgrounds from ever signing up, which further contributes to issues of inclusion in the international larp community.
I don’t believe we can discuss expanding our boundaries, reducing the need for scene negotiations, or exploring out of our comfort zones without taking into account imbalances of social capital, influence, and power. Discussion around opt-out safety was once framed around the protection and benefit of marginalized groups and players most in need of it. I would therefore wish for discussions around trust culture to be built around this issue: how can we build a trust culture that will above all benefit players with the lowest social capital and the greatest need for it?
I hope that we will develop tools that can enable players to explore and expand their comfort zone. However, when we develop these tools, we should measure their value on how much they actually empower those with the lowest social capital and facilitate a sense of psychological safety. I believe that our capacity to build a collective sense of trust will only be as big as our capacity to compensate for these imbalances and support all players to feel safe doing so.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.
I’ve got a pretty lousy memory, but I remember a lot of firsts in my life.
I remember the first time I got a solo in a choir performance. I was so excited, I could hardly stand it. I remember going in to get fitted for my costume and the seamstress frowning. “She can’t be up front,” she said, “what’s that going to look like? Put her in the back row.” I didn’t realize then she meant because I was fatter than the other girls. I didn’t figure that out until a bully in my class made it abundantly, loudly clear at recess the very next day.
I remember trying out for the role of Ms. Hannigan in Annie. I told the drama teacher I wanted to be on Broadway when I got older. “You’ll need to lose weight for that,” she said, “being heavy doesn’t work on Broadway.” I didn’t learn until later she, herself overweight, had tried to be on Broadway once. Learned from experience, I guess.
I remember the first time I got up the nerve to ask a guy out in college. It was at a sorority party at a bar. He was a little drunk. We’d been hanging out for weeks. I’d been over his house, we’d talked video games, I thought he was wonderful. When I asked him, out in the rain, I’ll never forget what he said. “Sorry. But you know how some people don’t like some kinds of porn? I don’t like fat people porn.” I never spoke to him again.
I remember. I might not remember what I ate for lunch two days ago or where I left my bag some days, but I remember every damn comment. Every doctor who never took me seriously and told me I just needed to lose weight. I remember every comment, every time I got laughed at in the street. Stories like those are memories worn into my mind. I won’t forget them any time soon.
But there are good memories too.
I’m going to tell a story here about a poignant fat-related story. And then I’ll get to my point. I was at an event where a number of small larps were being showcased. I signed up for one game because it abstracted emotions and events using music, which I thought was cool. Little did I know until too late that the game was about relationships, people falling in and out of love. I panicked. I was afraid of seeing the disgust in someone’s eyes knowing they’d have to date a fat girl in character. I was so cautious and scared it almost made me leave the game. But I stuck it out. And in that game, a guy I didn’t know at all played my love interest with such care it made me glow. When he stood up and asked me to slow dance, I nearly burst into tears. It was all I was able to do not to step on his toes. I’d never slow danced with a man before. I’d never had the chance.
Larps have given me experiences that escaped me in my life because of a lot of social anxiety due to weight. I experienced what it was like to be a woman in a position of power, confident and powerful, when before I would hide. I got a chance to be on the arm of the most handsome men and women at a game. I’ve had the chance to play out love stories, stories of triumph. To lead battles and armies. To learn to be confident in my own skin.
Teaching at New World Magischola (photo, Learn Larp LLC)
To play a badass teacher at Wizard School (Photo: New World Magischola)
I’ve also had a guy at a convention game look at me and then go to a game organizer and say he needed to trade characters because “I would never date THAT.” He was meant to play my husband.
I’ve had a guy meant to be an enemy of mine in a game say, “I’d feel bad beating you up, I can run rings around your fat ass.”
I had a woman tell me I wasn’t allowed to play a sidhe in a Changeling: the Dreaming larp because “there aren’t any fat sidhe.” (Joke’s on her who helped put THAT change in the 20th-anniversary edition, but hey…)
I remember a lot of stories about what it’s like to be fat in this world. And to be fat in the larp world too. And I have only one thing to say about it after all these years:
I’m not too fat for your larp.
Shoshana Kessock (photo, Dystopia Rising: New Jersey)
Because screw you, I’m a goddamn badass. You heard me. Larp is a fantastic place, a blank canvas upon which to build whole new worlds, worlds where you decide the structures, the rules, the norms. And as the designers, writers, organizers, and producers of games, it is in your power to challenge the status quo of how fat people are treated in your games. You have the power to make the decisions about how people are treated in your community and in play based on the atmosphere you cultivate and the games you design. So why do so many games still have atmospheres where people who are fat are mistreated? Where being fat marginalizes the positions you’re allowed to have? Or the fun you’re allowed to enjoy?
The simple matter is being fatphobic and hurtful against fat people is the last socially accepted bigotry enacted by almost every single group anywhere. Otherwise progressive communities and marginalized populations will still turn inward on fat members and harass, shame, ostracize, or minimize them when they would never consider letting that treatment go unchallenged to their own group. We as a society celebrate striving for tolerance in much of our media, giving us feel-good messages about love and kindness and acceptance with one hand, and making awful fat jokes with the other. And this same process happens everywhere, in every subculture group. Including larp.
Shoshana Kessock (photo, Shoshana Kessock)
Don’t be that person. Just don’t.
The problem is universal and yet hits different groups disproportionately. For example, it’s no secret that fatphobia affects women disproportionately more than men (although mistreatment of fat men is absolutely a thing). Women are put under the lens, pulled apart by people of every gender for the way they look, and their fat pointed out at every turn. Yet in a medium where we create our worlds, why is this still the case? Because we bring our bigotries with us. And in a real world where we can’t imagine not picking everyone apart for that stray pound, why the hell would you not do it in your games?
Because it’s not right. And by continuing to do so, you’re creating hostile larp environments. Even if your game purports to be progressive, if you don’t consider fat bigotry in your events and designs, you’re not making progressive environments that are equal for all. You’ve failed in your inclusivity.
Here’s a handy dandy list of how you might mess up at including size discrimination in your larp. We’ll call it the “If You ________ Then Your Game Might Be Fatphobic.”
If you don’t have any fat people playing characters of social status or power.
If you don’t cast fat players in romantic roles.
If you design costume requirements for games which won’t allow fat people to participate comfortably (such as providing costumes for the event and make the sizes inaccessible to fat people).
If you use fatphobic language in your game descriptions of characters (associating fat with evil, slovenly, lazy, disgusting, etc.)
If you encourage social stratification based on appearance in your games.
If you do not use people of all sizes in your larp promotion, instead relying on people who represent only the status quo in your advertisements and documentation.
If you make being fat an accommodation one must ask for when participating rather than considering people of all sizes from the beginning.
If you allow fatphobic comments or mistreatment to continue on in your game, either from other players or from your staff. (Bonus points on this one if you accept “being fat is unhealthy” as an excuse).
If you adjust the power dynamic of a character being played by a fat player once they’ve been cast because they’re fat.
If you accept bullying in character based on someone being fat and accept that as just the status quo (bonus points if you make a whole game about this, or try to subvert it and fail miserably, such as in the jeepform game Fat Man Down, which attempted to showcase the problems of fatphobia and instead only highlighted and nigh glorified them in their mechanics of the game).
Okay. So here we are at the end of this rather scathing list. And you might be asking: so what do I do to make sure my game isn’t fatphobic? Well, take a look at that handy dandy list and don’t do those things. Work hard to make sure people who are plus size, people who are fat, are in positions of power. Fight back against fatphobic jokes. Make sure you recognize the power dynamics being played out against fat players and their characters and help adjust the narrative so they are not pushed out by those who equate fat with things like laziness, slovenliness, lack of power, etc. Do the work to represent the life of fat people accurately and do not focus your games on the life of fat people and their challenges unless you know just what you’re doing.
As for me, I know that the world isn’t going to change overnight. I’m aware that there are plenty of places which will never shift the way they think about fat bodies (the clothing industry, for example…) But I solidly believe with a little conscious work we can make larp spaces more accessible and friendly towards body types of all kinds. By making sure people of all sizes feel comfortable coming to your game, you’ll enrich your game by bringing new experiences and new voices into your space. And you’ll prove that you recognize that fat people need not and should not be erased from your stories.
Embrace a new way of thinking. Or join in fatphobia as a phenomenon. There is no middle ground. And if you’re about bringing fatphobia into your games, just tell me so. Because then you get from me what amounts to a rude gesture and language and certainly no attendance at your game. Because I don’t have time for you or your fatphobia. The larp world has plenty of spaces that aren’t you.
Cover photo: Shoshana Kessock (photo, Dystopia Rising: New Jersey).