JM: Now that we have more people talking about larp, a lot of people say “larp taught me that I could be another gender.” That’s a great conversation that we’ve now had a few times, so what is the next conversation? What’s next after “larp can teach me that I can be different”?
ES: I would say that it can teach you how to be different. Gender is a thing we do, and having an environment where we can actually learn — I mean, my first Inside Hamlet was the first time I ever tried to perform that specific kind of high femininity.
AN: I was thinking about skills. It can take years to feel comfortable with the most basic skills of performing the gender role that you want to be reflected as.
JM: I’m what, eight years in? And I’m finding that I don’t feel like I’m getting so much more comfortable with the skills as much as getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. There are definitely people and situations where I still have no idea how to interact.
ES: It gets easier. There are still things that feel weird and fraught—but there are so many things that I’ve also stopped noticing are skills; I don’t realize they’re learned anymore.
AN: But there’s also some danger to larp being talked about in this sense. How do we talk about what it is that we do? Because there’s no way to make that immune from someone saying “well, this is just an act” – reducing it to clothing and skills. We didn’t just put on the dress or the suit, we put on the skills, and they don’t want environments where people can learn these skills and become comfortable with them. They don’t want us to exist. Maybe let’s not get too depressing here, but I think that’s what is radical about larp spaces: they can be a place where you can learn.
JM: Most people don’t actually want that liberation.
ES: To that I would say they’re going to try to kill us regardless, so making ourselves smaller isn’t going to stop it. My answer to that is to ignore it, and even to be explicit about this — here is the fraught thing, and we choose to ignore it. But skills are an interesting frame because body language isn’t a skill. You’re literally restructuring your peripheral nervous system to have different kinds of reflexes, right? You could argue that performance plus time is part of physical transition.
JM: Like fluency?
ES: Deeper than that, it’s physiological.
JM: Maybe similar to the way when you start to think in a new language and react in that language – you don’t forget your original one, but for a long time they can get mixed up.
*****
SS: As a player, I find it useful to have access to queer history and other queer experiences. And to play your own oppression, because it can be very liberating to fuck with it. But as the backlash against queer people has been growing, our queer games have become more sanitized; people don’t want to play on things they experience in real life. People playing the oppressors are scared of playing the oppressors.
JM: If you can’t have the oppressors in these games, you also lose out on the possibility for liberation.
SS: Exactly, and that’s what’s been bugging me. One of the things larp can do is let us see the oppression and act against it.
AN: We have to workshop people to get them to play mean and nasty!
JM: In The Future is Straight I played the head of the conversion camp and used this very nuanced, caring kind of normative oppressor — the counselors and I would do these horrible scenes and then meet up in the kitchen to cry. But at the end I didn’t feel horrible, I felt intensely grateful to anyone who had done any of that work, who had stood up to this in the past and now. But can trans liberation and larp overlap?
ES: I mean, we know larp is a very bad tool for doing politics because it doesn’t scale. But learning history in a very deep way is one of the places where it can be useful. Like, this is what it meant to come out as trans 15 or 20 years ago. Or the fight between the leather dykes and the conventional pride ecosystem in 1980 and ‘81. Understanding how we survived previously and how we fought is a direct survival mechanism.
JM: But are the kids even interested in history yet?
ES: Larp lets us create scripts for talking across generations. We don’t really have scripts for talking to our elders because they died, or went stealth.
JM: And there’s an active campaign to prevent us from interacting with young people.
*****
JM: Sometimes I go into a larp thinking I want to consciously play with a particular part of myself, or to try something out, and to cis people it might not be a characteristic or personality that is obviously gendered, but for me it’s inescapably gendered.
ES: I mean, as a trans person, can you actually imagine a version of yourself without thinking about the gendered implications of it?
JM: No, exactly.
*****
SS: One of the reasons I larp is that sometimes when I’m larping, I can forget that I’m trans, and I crave that so much.
JM: Do you reflect yourself as cis, or do you just forget that transness is a thing?
SS: I don’t know. I forget that I am trans. Not that it exists, but the inhabitation of another character can sort of reinscribe a bodily understanding of myself.
ES: I remember that specifically from Just a Little Lovin’, this physical weirdness of interacting with my own body after the game, like wait, what is this?
JM: I’m going to take a different direction. Obviously Just a Little Lovin’ was the larp that made my omelet more than cracked my egg, and it was jarring to leave that character body, but not just the body; the way that people behaved around that body. And like, in real life when I walk into a new social situation, especially a non-queer one, I’m always looking for my failure modes and the social and gendered awkwardness have real consequences. But in a larp, people are so ready to paper over your “mistakes.” I experience some of the usual anxiety of performing in the larp, but I have a lot less anxiety about just being in a social situation at all. And I wonder if this is the liberatory element; like, I would like to live in a society where I feel like that all the time.
ES: To be in a room where you’re guaranteed a kind reading.
AN: Also something about the fact that everybody has a layer of performance.
JM: Yeah, and they know it!
ES: Everyone is aware.
JM: Because we all do this all the time.
ES: I feel like we should ask some cis people about whether they have that understanding that they’re performing all the time.
AN: They don’t!
SS: Some do, but yeah.
AN: That’s the problem! But larp is an equalizer in that way, right? That’s why there’s safety in a larp pack and why we party so well at Knutepunkt — even if you’re not trans, everyone has some kind of understanding that reality is a stack and you can play with it, and at the base layer we’re all performing something.
JM: So larp levels the playing field when it comes to the creation of the self?
ES: There’s also something about the ensemble thing, though, right? Because we’re not just aware that everyone is performing. There’s this explicit trust and co-performance relationship that’s happening. And you know that everybody kind of knows that.
AN: Everybody is performing and everybody needs to support everybody else in that performance.
ES: And if you say that you’re X, of course I’m going to take that at face value, because why wouldn’t I?
AN: That’s why it’s so hard to lie at larps; we interpret everything so kindly.
JM: And then in the real world, in the office, people are deeply invested in not doing this.
*****
SS: You said something that made me think — about making explicit the gender play in every role. That would do a lot, forcing people to think about it, because the privilege of cisness is that you don’t have to think about gender.
JM: We often write very gendered characters in the backstory, but we’re not explicit about it.
AN: And now a lot of larps now have gender-neutral casting —
JM: Not a fan.
ES: I hate it!
AN: Because all this is taken out, right?
JM: I realize I don’t really play cis characters, but I don’t really play trans characters, either. I’m just kind of this guy —
ES: I know what you mean.
JM: And it’s not gender-neutral, but it’s somehow resisting or even escaping the categories. But here’s a conversation: When you larp, is your body your body? Are your scars your scars?
SS: It’s complicated.
JM: Yeah, me too. I feel like I have a bit of a Schrödinger’s body.
SS: I mean, the facts of our bodies are by and large inescapable. We can change them but that’s not really something we do for larp. How we physically access this world is a fact, though we might experience the liminality in that particular larp moment.
ES: Obviously I acknowledge that I’m playing the character with the same body as I have otherwise, but it would never occur to me to think of any of the specificity of my body as belonging to the character. Almost like something that I have to do to play the character is to step away from the history of the body, because it’s so bound up with identity — and not just identity, but path dependency and time and interaction with gatekeepers and all of this specific body history. For me to play a character it can’t be the same body. It has to be, at the very least, read through a soft focus.
*****
JM: Could we ever make a trans liberationist larp that cis people would get?
ES: What does liberation mean?
JM: [struggling] … with this sort of idea baked into it that… I have to describe it negatively — no gatekeeping, no violence, no prejudice on the basis of a trans identity.
ES: That just sounds like freedom from oppression. That feels like a really low bar.
JM: Yeah, it does. I’m not going to fall into the trap of saying it’s liberation from gender because I like gender and I think it’s a nice flavor. But I could imagine something where fluidity is actually assumed for everyone?
ES: I don’t want to play that game.
JM: Okay, not fluidity. But I somehow want the society I would like to see modeled in a larp, though I don’t think it’s so important to model the exact society so much as get something right in the design about the interaction. Why do we interact with gender and each other in a particular way?
AN: Another answer for a trans liberatory larp would be one that’s for trans people, one that actually leaves the concerns of cis people behind. I don’t know what that looks like —
ES: Me neither, but I would play that. Trans utopia sounds nice. I’ve never played a larp that is as queer as my life is.
This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
MacDonald, Jamie. 2022. “Beyond Cracking Eggs.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 51-54. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Working with larp professionally for 10 years has forced me to think a lot about structure, communication and documentation. When writing larps that are supposed to be run multiple times and by multiple people, it needs to be documented. You then need a language to talk about what that documentation is. What parts does it consist of and what do we call the different parts? This has been relevant for me in my previous job as one of the founders and larp pedagogues at Lajvbyrån and in my new position as part of the Transformative Play Initiative at the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University. Both on a practical level and on a theoretical level. I have also seen discussion about this showing up online in larp communities and I would like to address this.
Procedural Documentation
As I see it there are eight main design relevant documents that need to be talked about that are aimed at different audiences and have different purposes. These documents can be either finished edited documents or living documents that get updated regularly for example on a web page. You probably won’t need all of them but instead will choose the versions that are relevant for your larp. The first part is the part that is aimed at the players, then we have the part aimed at facilitators/game masters and organizers, and the last part is aimed at the organizers only. I will now go through the different parts and the documents.
For Players
Player Handbook
The player handbook is all the info that the players need. That means both things that are sent out and info on the webpage. It can include; practical info like time and date, safety info like content warnings and safety person, narrative info like the setting and the vision, dress code info, meta techniques, transparency and so on.
For Facilitators/Game Masters
A facilitator/game master is someone running the game but not necessarily organizing it. An organizer has more responsibilities that also include things like production. For example a facilitator could be someone running a game in a convention where the organizers would be the ones renting the place for the convention and making the schedule with slots where the individual facilitators/game masters would run games.
In this category we have a number of different documents. You will probably only have some of these since they overlap and sometimes entail each other. Which ones you need depend on your design and who will be reading the documents.
Gameplay Design Document
A gameplay design document contains what is relevant for the players interactions and agency. This would include things like characters (if pre-written), groups, relations, meta techniques, and what happens during the playtime. It would not include any type of framing such as pre- or post-game activities or any planned activities during off-game breaks mid-game. This is a helpful document to look at the design of the game itself, how it all fits together and what the players will be able to do during the larp.
Runtime Script
The runtime script contains what happens during the runtime of the larp. That is what happens from the players go into character until the game is over. This is without any pre- or post-game parts but including mid-game parts. It also wouldn’t contain characters, groups or relation since that happens outside of the runtime. This is a helpful document to look at what happens once the larp starts until it ends. It could be something that you might want to have available in a game master room during the run. Another reason to have a separate run time script could be that you have a design that has three small larps on a theme that are interchangeable but where the framing for the games are the same.
Larp Script
The larp script entails what you have in the gameplay document and runtime document and also the full framing including pre-game and post-game activities. So this includes things like any kind of workshops, deroleing and debrief. This is what you would need to have to facilitate/game master the larp. It also includes annotations with comments about how to facilitate/game master the larp and minor preparations like moving chairs, starting a fire or hiding the secret potion recipe. It can be done in different ways from as simple as overarching headings to really meticulous with exact timestamps for every little part. This is a helpful document to cover the whole design from the facilitators/game masters perspective.
Complete Schedule
This is something that is not needed most of the time. It is for those times where you might want to run several small larps as part of a bigger theme but have workshops and other things that are overarching. Then it can make sense to separate out the parts specific to the small larps from the overarching experience. For example, at Lajvbyrån we had a larp experience focused on the industrial revolution for school classes. During one day a school class had lectures, got visits from historical persons and got to play two shorter larps. Everything during the day is facilitated by the larp pedagogues. Half the class will play one of the larps before lunch and then the other after lunch. The other half does it the opposite way around. Both classes have the lectures and the other parts together. Here it was a lot easier to have an overarching script for the whole day with the specific exercises in there and then just a header saying “Larp 1” for the first larp slot but no further info in there. Then we could have one GM running the same larp twice and having the larp script for that specific larp in the assigned larp location while having the overarching script in the main room. In this case each larp would have its own framing and then there would be a broader, more overarching debrief and after discussion for the full day in the main room with the full class.
Campaign Design Document
The campaign design document is only relevant for larger campaigns that have many larps running as part of it. Here you have the overarching information that goes for all the larps in the campaign. It can include world info, systems for fighting or economy, what you are allowed to change or not in the setting, visual guidelines, and so on. A lot of the info in the player’s handbook would be found here if you are running a campaign larp. This is a helpful document to have a coherent world but still have many larps run by different organizers.
Design Document
The design document contains everything you need to facilitate/ game master the entire larp experience. It includes (Some or all of the following):
The player handbook – or all the info from it
The gameplay design document
The runtime/larp script
The complete schedule
The campaign design document
Annotations: Extra comments relevant for running the larp and info like the target audience that might not be relevant for the players. This might also be included in a larp script but is more common in a design document and therefore gets an extra highlight here.
So what is the difference between a larp script and a design document if both contain what you need to facilitate the larp? A lot of the time a larp script is a design document. But as mentioned you might have a situation where you are doing a larger larp experience with more than one larp as a part of it so you also have a complete schedule. In that case the design document would contain the complete schedule and maybe two or three larp scripts.
For Organisers
Design Bundle
The design bundle contains everything you need to organize/re-run a specific larp. It includes the design document but will also include things like production info, a list of necessary props to have, promotion material, and maybe a budget. It could also include relevant articles about the larp. By giving someone the design document they would be able to run the larp with only this information. This also means the design bundle often is less of a document and more of a folder with multiple documents in it.
Examples
The Hobbyhorse Scenario by Nynne Søs Rasmussen
This is a 3 hour short scenario larp that is available to print and play. It contains everything you need to know to run the scenario. From in-game info that could go into a gameplay design document like the scenes, to the broader parts that could go into a larp script like workshops. It also contains things that are relevant only to the facilitators/game master like how to game master the scenario and how to prep the room. Since it’s a free form scenario that means the players don’t have to read anything before. That means there is no need for a player hand book. All the players would need would be a blurb, a time and a place but the general info found in a player guide is still available for the facilitators/game masters. Since it’s a scenario larp for one game master it is a larp script as well as a full design document. But since there are no document with more overarching info I would call it a design document.
Krigshjärta (Warheart)
Krigshjärta is a campaign that has been running for many years in Sweden. Like most campaign larps it has one overarching fictional universe but many different individual larps. It also has many different organizing groups that run larps in this fictional universe. A game design document here would need to include a campaign design document, a larp script for the specific larp, a player handbook and probably annotations. A runtime script or a gameplay design document could be included but are not necessary. Here the facilitators/game masters would probably also be the organizers. But this would not be a design bundle since each run is different and can have very different content and therefore the production parts and the larps script will be very different for each larp. If you would do a rerun of one of the larps, then you would instead create a design bundle.
Just a Little Lovin’ Book
by Anna Emilie Groth, Hanne “Hank” Grasmo, and Tor Kjetil Edland.
This book is actually called Just a Little Lovin’ – the Larp Script. I would say this is not a larp script, it is more, it is a design bundle. It contains everything you need to organize the larp. Runtime design, framing, music, food, sleeping arrangements, articles and so on. It also has a list with checkboxes to tick off as you go along.
Why Do We Need All These Versions and What is the Purpose of Them?
I would say a lot of the time we do not need to have all of these. Many larps are for example one offs and then you don’t need to put hours and hours into writing a design document that should be understandable by someone else. But for making a larp re-runnable you will need to document all of it in some form. You will probably never need all 8 but will pick what level you need depending on the larp. Many times you don’t need a freestanding overarching script with separate larp scripts for example. But there are also times when it can be very good to have it. Like when me and my colleague were supposed to run a larp while I was working at Lajvbyrån and I got sick and lost my voice the evening before. Then it was super good to have a larp script and an overarching script because then we could just ask someone to read one of the larp scripts and they could jump in. They didn’t need to read or know the overarching script since that could be handled by my colleague that also ran the other larp in parallel.
The reason to separate the player info is because your players should get all the info they need but not more. If you give them all the info it will be hard to find what is actually relevant for them. If you have a plot written about finding a treasure you don’t give them the location because that is what the whole plot is about. The players also might not need to know the exact price of the rentable toilets because that is not what’s important to their experience (even if the fact that there are toilets there absolutely are). Even in games with full transparency not all players need to beforehand read exactly what workshop exercise that will be run pre-game and in what order. That just leads to information overload. And as a game master/facilitator you might want to have some freedom to run different workshops depending on how the group feels and what they need and then it can be better if not everyone has expectations on what should happen.
On the other hand there might also be information that needs to be in more than one place. Info about the world might be available in many places. This means that you might have to change info on multiple places if you do any changes late in the process which lead to extra work. My experience is that even if it can be a bit of extra work it is worth it. Having a clear structure helps with knowing where to make the changes and each document has a different purpose.
So to conclude, depending on how you interact with the game you will need different information. As a head organizer there is a lot of info that you need that a runtime game master or a player doesn’t need. By having different documents it’s easier to share the relevant information with the right people.
In recent years, we — the Nordic/International progressive role-playing scene, both tabletop and larp((I’ve been in on the tabletop/freeform side of things for many years; on the larp side, I got going with a splash with Just a Little Lovin’ in 2015. The otherwise admirable and magnificent Just a Little Lovin’ probably did a lot of messing with my head, but I was thoroughly softened up long before then.))– have produced games that can bring out powerful emotions in the players, and empower the players to engage with powerful emotions. This process has significantly extended the artistic reach of the role-playing medium, and also given a lot of people (myself among them) some great experiences. In this context, some design and cultural elements have been developed to help handle difficult topics and emotions. Of particular importance has been the widespread acceptance of the notion that it’s actually alright to feel a lot of feelings and not be too tough or hard to shed a tear or ten. Bleed is here to stay, and it’s OK to be concerned with the comfort and safety of yourself and your fellow players.
This is excellent! I’ve been a part of this movement as it regards play, design, and culture. Although I’m not personally inclined to weep over role-playing games, I’m happy with my part in all this. In those of my own games that deal with difficult subjects, I’ve included a debriefing: one containing the line that it’s OK to feel a lot of powerful or strange things, and it’s also OK to feel nothing much at all.
The New Norm
Last year, I discovered a surprising dark side to this new, accepting culture around strong feelings about role-playing games. Even though it’s a pretty standard disclaimer that it’s OK to not bleed all over the place, not just in my games, but in most games that come with debriefing instructions attached, somehow strong and care/space-requiring emotions have become not just normal (fine!) but also normative.((NORMAL = within the range of commonly occurring phenomena in a given category and commonly accepted as such. NORMATIVE = in accordance with social norms determining what is socially acceptable.)) It’s the norm for how you do demanding and artistically ambitious role-play; it’s how you demonstrate that you’re a good role-player. If you don’t feel all of the feelings, passionately, you’re not quite alright.
It’s a subtle thing, and certainly not the result of conspiracies and subversion, just the cumulative effect of a lot of usually enthusiastic conversations about earth-shaking, personally transformative experiences that have made the tears flow.
The #feminism nanogame anthology indicates the intensity of each larp with ratings of teardrops from 1-5.
Comparing Notes
It was rather by accident that I found out that there’s a problem that might be a bit larger than just me. Some time last year, after having witnessed (mostly online but also off) exchanges between people who had had earth-shaking experiences – even a year later, that one song brought tears to their eyes – I found that I was actually downright worried about how little I felt. As in, I seriously entertained the notion that I might be on the outskirts of some sort of personality disorder. And it’s not quite the first time that role-playing games and role-playing culture have had me wondering why I was reacting off — and below — the norm. Anyway, I struggled a bit with it, and after a couple of uncomfortable months, I arrived at the conclusion that the rest of my life doesn’t support the theory that I’m under-endowed with emotions and the capacity for authentic human relations. Probably.
At some point, I opened up and told my friend Anne Vinkel about my concerns. Her reaction was powerful and telling:
“Oh God, I thought it was just me!”
Then, I started considering whether there might be more at stake here than just my own discomfort: if we might have a cultural problem on our hands. When people are wondering whether they have real psychopathology (that they don’t), simply because the standards of this role-playing subculture for what “we” feel around games has become so extreme, it’s not great.
I know several role-players with real, honest-to-goodness personality disorders. They’re fine people that I care about both in and out of role-playing games. This is in no way a criticism or rejection of them. But neither Anne nor myself are in their situation! Diagnoses are a thing to approach soberly.
Promotional photo for KAPO, a 2012 Danish larp about imprisonment
Shame! Blame! Disgrace!
So whose fault is this? At whom should we point the finger of condemnation? When I put it like this, the observant reader might suspect that I’m about to say ”no one” and this is 98% true. This is a question of culture, and as is usually the case with such things, the responsibility is vague and diffuse. If, during the following, you feel personally accused, please dial down the feeling by 98%.
It started out with a desire to explore challenging subjects through roleplaying without falling into The Cult of Hardcore, which was quite prominent back in the early and middle 2000s. The standard was that WE as Good Roleplayers were too cool to bellyache over the Very Edgy games that we played. The revolt against The Cult of Hardcore that the role-playing culture around safety mechanics, debriefings, etc. represents was sorely needed.
In connection with debriefings — and war stories in a wider sense — the conversation focused on the extreme experiences that made safety mechanics and debriefings relevant. It’s natural enough to talk more about those players with issues — players in active need of inclusion — than about those who are just fine. But, as is the case in any (sub-)culture, it became a matter of prestige. Culture works like that; even in the most self-consciously egalitarian culture, there will be actions, objects, and stories that attract more positive attention than others. In this case, the tales of earth-shaking, transformative experiences became prestigious. There’s nothing weird about this; it’s a logical consequence of the inclusion and centering of the extreme emotions that had previously been marginalized. And on a very basic level, “I wept like I’d been whipped and I’m a new person now” is just a better story than “I had slightly moist eyes at one point in the second act, and I have some interesting things about sibling relationships to reflect on.” If both stories are tellable, the former is more likely to be told, shared, and remembered.
All of it is very human, understandable, and largely even sympathetic. It still resulted in myself and Anne — and who knows how many others? — separately and secretly worrying and wondering if we were sociopaths, schizoid, or otherwise emotionally under-endowed. Which is not cool.
Performative Emotions
It’s not that I see the powerful emotions as in any way fake. This is worth saying and worth repeating. I believe that, in the vast majority of cases, they are authentic enough. However, they are in many cases also performative, not just as in players theatrically performing the feelings of their characters — with a bit of player spillover through bleed — but also between players, outside of games, but inside the subculture. Because the intensity of emotions is a source of authority, prestige, and bonding, all the nice social goods are out of reach if others can’t clearly perceive that you have the valuable emotions. And then it makes sense to make a good show out of the things you feel. Conspicuous emotion is a gainful social strategy in this context.
And the more people are performing their emotions loudly, the harder it is to gain recognition for quieter thoughts and feelings, and so we have a tendency towards inflation.
Promotional information for the 2012 run of Just a Little Lovin’, a larp about desire, fear of death, and friendship during the early days of the AIDS crisis.
What Now?
This is a tough one. I have no interest in bringing back the hardcore culture that the new, more sensitive culture has dethroned. Emotion- and safety-accepting role-playing culture has a WHOLE lot of babies that it would be bad to throw out with the bathwater. It’s great that we have created spaces of safety and recognition where we can be, as Moyra Turkington memorably put it to me in a private conversation, ”deliciously vulnerable,” and we should preserve this. But if we want to think up something to do anyway?
TALKING ABOUT IT. Both in public and in private. A bit of consciousness-raising can go a long way, and is precisely the point of this post.
DEBRIEFINGS ARE NOT ABOUT TRAUMA. While gathering pace for writing this post I had an excellent discussion with Sarah Lynne Bowman about what debriefings are and aren’t good for. A lot of people, myself included, have absorbed from the general conversation the idea that debriefings are about after-treatment of trauma, and this is not the case at all. What they do is reestablish normal social relations between players after the shakeup of the game, and create a space for recognizing feelings — not necessarily, indeed probably not, traumatic — for later reflection and digestion. If players have been actually traumatized, it is rather psychological first aid that’s called for, which is an entirely different beast that should be fielded as soon as the crisis is seen as such and absolutely should NOT wait until after the game. At any debriefing, it should be clear that debriefing =/= trauma treatment.
UPGRADING THE STANDARD DISCLAIMER. I and quite a lot of others have our standard disclaimer, typically fired off in connection with debriefings, that it’s OK to feel a lot of weird feelings, and it’s also OK to not feel that much. I’ve been saying that myself for years, and yet I let myself be quite viscerally convinced that it wasn’t the case. I’m thinking that it might be an idea to simply reverse the order so you start out by saying that it’s normal and OK if it’s not that wild, but if it’s wild, that’s cool too. Thus, the non-violent reactions are pulled back into the range of the normal, rather than remaining an afterthought. In situations where we’re on the outskirts of the sensitive culture — where it doesn’t define the standards — I’d use the traditional order instead. And I’d write this in my debriefing instructions!
MOVING UP THE STANDARD DISCLAIMER. Right before the debriefing is awfully late in the game to establish that the acceptable range of responses is quite wide. How about before the game proper starts?
TEMPERATE USE OF DANGER SIGNALS. Warnings about harsh subject matter is a fine idea, and ambushing people with bad stuff is not cool, but as I see it, we could show a little more restraint in communicating HOW traumatized players are ”supposed” to be by a given game. I suspect that strongly framing games as dangerous contributes to the inflation of conspicuous emotion. I also suspect that it doesn’t really contribute much to actual safety.
I’m aware that the above is not terribly impressive. So if you have ideas for what to do that aren’t too harsh on the babies in the bath, I’m all ears!
Cover photo: “Don’t Cry My Love” by Axel Naud on Flickr. Photo has been cropped. CC BY 2.0.
The theme of alternate sexuality, identity, and freedom juxtaposed with the tragedy of death permeates Just a Little Lovin’. Photo by Elina Andersson. CC-BY-NC.
Just a Little Lovin’ is commonly touted as one of the best Nordic larps ever designed by those who have played it. Originally written in 2011 by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo, the larp explores the lives of people in alternative sexual and spiritual subcultures during the span of 1982-1984 in New York who attend the same 4th of July party each year. As the larp progresses, the AIDS crisis increasingly sweeps through their community, affecting each member directly or indirectly. The result is a cathartic explosion of emotions that leave a lasting impact on the majority of the players.
This article will discuss some of these rhetorical threads surrounding the design of Just a Little Lovin’. Then, I will emphasize the importance of the ritual spaces and structures within the larp, which work to enhance communal connection in- and out-of-game and help produce these strong moments of catharsis.
Player Discourse Surrounding Just a Little Lovin’
Oh no, not I! I will survive!
Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive!
I’ve got all my life to live.
I’ve got all my love to give.
And I’ll survive! I will survive!
Gloria Gaynor, I Will Survive Most characters came together each year in a ritualized fashion for the drag/variety show. Here, they enjoy a performance by the rock band Urban Renaissance. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
In play reports, participants mention several powerful elements of the design. The characters have realistic motivations and relationship dynamics. The intersecting themes of desire, love, friendship, and fear of death interweave beautifully throughout the larp to provide a roller coaster of emotions for the players. The mechanics for sex and death are thoughtfully implemented, providing a meaningful, relatively safe framework in which to experience these powerful moments. The larp is organized into three Acts, with careful workshopping and debriefing exercises framing each phase. These breaks allow players opportunities to co-create the experience with one another through negotiation and agreement. While the larp does deal with the tragedy of disease impacting a tightly knit community of creative, experimental, open-minded people, the emphasis of the larp is not to dwell in tragedy, but rather to undergo a strengthening of that community through shared experience.
A lesbian contingent with their dutch boy. Participants emphasize an intensified sense of community after the larp in their play accounts. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
I have never had my mind opened more by a larp, nor felt more bonded to a group of co-players – including those who I didn’t actually interact with during play. And, importantly, this is not because we came through a terrible experience together: it wasn’t like that at all. It’s because we came through an amazing and uplifting and life-affirming and worldview-changing experience together.
Similar accounts exist in articles by other former players:
I’ve got this sense that I’ve stolen a true glimpse of the past, or at least a past that could have been. We’ve created something real, and beautiful, and momentous. I don’t know how to handle that. It’s immense pride and I already feel nostalgic for it. In the most literal sense — I’m starting to feel the pangs of loss that are nostalgia. It’s exactly the right emotion I need to be feeling right now. Beauty, loss, sorrow, pride, admiration, longing, pining for something.
Just a Little Lovin’ was full of life and color. Death was real, but we needed to make the most of whatever time we had left, in order to be together. The very structure of the game was oriented towards living, and even suffering was just another way to interact with others, to deepen a character, and add even more meaning to his or her life. Death was not a beautiful release; it was just the end.
Eden Gallanter, The Bridge Between Love and Death, Cheimonette, July 6, 2015 Although death permeated the lives of the characters in the game, the party went on even through Act III as a celebration of existence and love. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Picture, if you will, a group of people discussing the death of one of their characters, which is directly brought about by the nature and behaviour of another in the scene, talking about what kind of impressions they want to construct in this scene. Then they play the scene, to spec, with screaming, tears, loathing, self-hatred, disgust, horror, everything. Then one raises their head and calmly says ‘thank you,’ and, with tear tracks still drying and breath still shaking, they dissect the emotions that each other’s play brought about, praising the particular moves, words, and timing that brought the greatest effect in their character’s response to the other characters. I still can’t decide if its madness, emotional vampirism, or the most awesome thing I have ever participated in.
JaLL is without a doubt the most intense and [thoroughly] designed game I have ]ever played. I understand now why some call it the best larp in the world. There [are] other as well-designed games out there, but it’s the mix of brilliant design with a theme and especially the handling of the theme that creates just a more intense experience.Simon James Pettitt, Just a Little Lovin’: Intro Post, Pettitt.dk, July 7, 2015
Documentation book for the 2013 Danish run filled with player and organizer accounts.
Ultimately, much of the discourse surrounding the larp focuses upon the intense connections the experience creates between participants, the enhanced understanding of the struggles of countercultural movements during the period, and increased awareness about the AIDS crisis. From a design perspective, Just a Little Lovin’ is also touted as successful due to its inclusion of metatechniques from the freeform and blackbox scenes and its careful framing with regard to workshops, negotiation, de-roleing, and debriefing.
One war veteran comforts another during a PTSD episode. The theme of death was woven into the larp in multiple ways: from AIDS to cancer to war. Photo by Elina Andersson. CC-BY-NC.
My examination of Just a Little Lovin’ will discuss this framing in more detail, emphasizing the multi-layered, ritualized nature of the larp design. The careful construction and use of ritual space facilitates progressively deeper and more intense levels of play. In this analysis, I will discuss ritual in terms of both a) atmospheric rituals within the larp transpiring in specifically established spaces, and b) the overarching game framework.
My intent in sharing these accounts is not to support the claim that this larp is the “best designed in the world,” but rather to emphasize that careful inclusion of heavily ritualized processes in larp design can guide players to deeper levels of connection and catharsis.
All Larp is Ritual
Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin.
The entertainment for this evening is not new.
You’ve seen this entertainment through and through.
You have seen your birth, your life, your death.
You may recall all the rest.
Did you have a good world when you died?
Enough to base a movie on?
Jim Morrison, The Movie
According to scholars Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner,((Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas: Form and Attributes of Rites of Passage,” Excerpt from The Ritual Process (London, UK: Aldine, 1969). http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Turner.htm)) ritual involves three stages: a departure from the mundane world with thorough separation, an entrance into an in-between state called liminality, and a return to the mundane world with an incorporation of the liminal experiences.
Separation: During the separation stage, the group prepares to shed their everyday roles and enter into new ones for the purpose of the ritual. The separation phase can include practicing the ritual, costuming, makeup, masks, establishing ritual space, or other activities intended to facilitate the transition.
Liminality: Participants enter their temporary social roles and play parts in a performance of some sort, either actively or passively. They cross over a “threshold” – or limen – into another state of being, which often transpires in a physical location specifically demarcated for the ritual. All participants agree to take part in this temporary, “betwixt and between” state, collectively agreeing to these new terms of their social reality. Turner refers to the liminal state as a “moment in and out of time”: a paradoxical, transitional experience.((Turner would distinguish play activities like larp as “liminoid” rather than “liminal” as they arise from leisure cultures, but this distinction is beyond the scope of this current discussion. For more information, see Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” Rice University Studies 60.3 (1974): 53-92.))
Incorporation: Participants then return to their previous social roles, leaving the ritual space behind. However, they incorporate the liminal experiences into their own lives to greater and lesser degrees. For example, if a community holds a rite of passage to mark a marriage, the couple leaves the wedding with a new social status acknowledged by all present. After leisure ritual activities – called “liminoid” moments — the individual can determine how the experience will impact their involvement in the community and their development of self.(( Turner, ibid.))
Turner believed that rituals create communitas: a greater feeling of communal connection between participants. Additionally, rituals are often guided by a shaman figure: some sort of guide or facilitator of the process who helps establish the atmosphere, tone, and components of the ritual.
Larp designer and co-organizer Tor Kjetil Edland gets everyone’s attention during pre-game workshopping. Organizers often serve the role of guide in facilitating the ritual activity of larp. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Several scholars have emphasized the ritual nature of larp itself.((For a few examples, see Christopher I. Lehrich, “Ritual Discourse in Role-playing Games,” last modified October 1, 2005, The Forge, http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html; J. Tuomas Harviainen, “Information, Immersion, Identity: The Interplay of Multiple Selves During Live-Action Role-Play,” Journal of Interactive Drama 1, no. 2 (October 2006): 11; Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Functions of Role-playing Games, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010, pp. 15, 48-53; J. Tuomas Harviainen and Andreas Lieberoth,”The Similarity of Social Information Processes in Games and Rituals: Magical Interfaces,” Simulation & Gaming (April 10, 2011): 528-549; Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Returning to the Real World: Debriefing After Role-playing Games,” Nordiclarp.org, December 8, 2014, http://nordiclarp.org/2014/12/08/debrief-returning-to-the-real-world/)) While not religious as many rituals are, secular ritual rites do exist in society. Generally speaking, larp includes the shedding of social roles, donning of new identities, performance of these identities in a temporary space guided by an organizer, and a return to the previous self, often with some sort of change individually and socially. Players often report a greater sense of community as the result of these experiences, as evidenced by several of the quotes above.
Therefore, Just a Little Lovin’ is not unique in its ability to create these bonds, as all larp has the potential to do so. What I believe the larp excels at doing is creating well-timed, nearly continuous ritual activities that have the potential to personally transform both the player and the character. Due to the personal nature of the larp’s content and its emphasis on sexuality, intimacy, vulnerability, and fear of death, the play offers participants the opportunity to reflect upon these aspects within themselves.
The larp afforded players the opportunity to shed old social roles, including sexual preference and identity, and explore intimacy in a relatively safe framework. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Each of the three Acts is framed by standard rituals common to the experience of most Americans to greater and lesser degrees: 1) the raising of the American flag while singing the National Anthem in the beginning and 2) a funeral at the end. Between these two poles of ritual experience, several smaller rituals are timed at regular intervals to offer potent, transformative experiences for characters and, by proxy, their players. On each side of these Acts, out-of-character ritual activities of workshopping, debriefing, and negotiating provide an even more structured frame. In this regard, Just a Little Lovin’ can be seen as producing rituals within rituals within rituals for the players. Leaving mundane life to go to a camp for five days with a group of people is a shift in perspective in and of itself, which is then followed by larping, and then followed by ritual activities within the larp.
Ritual Spaces and Subcultures in the Larp
Hey, babe. Take a walk on the wild side
Lou Reed, Walk on the Wild Side
The structure of the character relations in Just a Little Lovin’ involves each character belonging to one or more subcultures that were representative of the alternative scenes of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in America. These subcultures include: rich gay men; the gay leather/fetish scene; drag performers; lesbian clubs; literary circles; the night club scene as exemplified by Studio 54; alternative spirituality seekers; tantra practitioners; members of a polyfidelity commune; performance artists; swingers; peace activists; a group of cancer survivors; the Radical Faeries masculinity movement; and AIDS activists. Effectively, each character had multiple connections within some of these subcultures, including their core group of friends, their primary social circle, and their extended connections within their party scene.
Map of the character core groups and subcultural associations in Act 2. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
These subcultures often had ritualized activities associated with them, as outlined in detail below. I played Joani, one of the leaders of the Spirituals, which meant that my in-game husband Kohana (Kevin Burns), best friend Kim (Caroline Christiane Kasten Koren), and I were responsible for running some of these rituals ourselves. Joani and Kohana ran the Saratoga Pact of friendship for the cancer survivors in a copse of trees in the woods; Kohana and Kim ran the Green Drink ritual of personal transformation around the bonfire at midnight; Joani ran tantra workshops in a special room complete with lava lamps, dark lighting, and pallets; and Kohana ran all-male drum circles, also around the bonfire. Other subcultures had similar ritual spaces, such as the stage, the dance floor, and the “dark room.”
Joani, Kohana, and Kim made up the Heart of Saratoga core group, running rituals for the cancer survivors and the larger gathering as a whole. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
These spaces were established carefully as important parts of the scenography and were not in any way incidental to the setting. They offered Temporary Autonomous Zones for the Temporary Autonomous Identities of the characters: spaces where the rules of reality could function differently and where both characters and players could explore new facets of themselves.((Mike Pohjola, “Autonomous Identities: Immersion as a Tool for Exploring, Empowering, and Emancipating Identities,” in Beyond Role and Play, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros (Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry, 2004), 84-85; Saitta, ibid.))
This design created the possibility for overlap and exposure to new experiences. Rather than creating little pockets of exclusion, the social space was designed so that the environments occupied by members of these groups were in close physical and social proximity to one another. For example, the tantra room where my character ran workshops was physically next to the “dark room,” where cruising, BDSM, and lesbian activities transpired. Sounds from that room emanated into our space and some participants wandered between both at various times.
Members of the Saratoga Pact of cancer survivors and their loved ones head to the woods for their yearly ritual of recommitment. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
This design encouraged “regular” attendees of each subcultural space to experiment with new ones, especially when all characters were expected to participate in group rituals such as the Green Drink ceremony, which might normally not interest some individuals. As an example, my character helped run the Saratoga Pact ritual, an annual ceremony in which cancer survivors renewed their vow to remain true to themselves, live life to its fullest, and always support one another. As the years went on, we inducted new members into the Saratoga Pact based upon their connections with previous survivors: lovers, close friends, family members, etc. Therefore, other characters were exposed to a small part of the survivor experience, just as many from the Pact were exposed to the new worlds of drag queens, BDSM, performance art, etc.
In another example, due to my off-game interest in drag and desire to help with the show, my character spent a good deal of time helping with makeup in the backstage area. This experience gave her access to a new subcultural realm and mode of artistic expression, as well as deeper connections with that social group in the game. The design of the physical and social space facilitated these sorts of crossovers.
Ritual in the Structure of the Larp Design
You can dance, you can jive
Having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that scene
Digging the Dancing Queen
ABBA, Dancing Queen
Just a Little Lovin’ takes place over the span of three Acts, each focusing upon a central theme: Act I is Desire, Act II is the Fear of Death, and Act III is Friendship. The total game time is approximately five days. 5pm until 12pm the next day is spent in-character during the Act, framed by workshopping before and debriefing after. Before each Act, players negotiate with their groups about how best to proceed, followed by 1-2 hours of downtime. The whole experience is followed by de-roleing and debriefing, with a much-needed afterparty in the evening after Act III, where players can reconnect with their out-of-game selves, as well as process their experiences and connect with others.
Off-game negotiation within core groups in between Acts helps direct play for the next phase. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Game time itself is heavily structured with back-to-back in-game rituals, which I detail below. Players are empowered to design and run many of these rituals themselves, with the exception of the National Anthem, the Lottery of Death, and the funerals, which are run by the organizers. The 2015 run of the game had roughly the following structure, with some variation from Act to Act of non-essential rituals like tantra, BDSM, and drum circles:
Kohana during the raising of the flag, National Anthem, and subsequent speech. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Song: The organizers play the “Just a Little Lovin’” song by Dusty Springfield while characters are frozen. This song ritually starts and ends the entire larp.
Entrance to Mr. T’s party: The party is itself a ritualized escape from the mundane world, as people can feel free to explore new identities. For example, a professor by day can engage in gay BDSM scenes at night.
National Anthem: The raising of the American flag on the porch, accompanied by the singing of the American National Anthem.
Speeches: T gives a welcome speech. Kohana gives a speech to honor the Saratoga Pact and summons members to that ceremony.
Saratoga Pact: Joani and Kohana run the Saratoga Pact ceremony for the cancer survivors in the woods away from the main party. When I ran this ritual, I had us recite the words of the pact in call-and-response format. Then, I asked each of those gathered to state their intentions for the year, evaluate past intentions, and induct new members. I hoped the intention part of the ritual would serve as a form of steering ((Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta, “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 (Copenhagen, Denmark: Rollespilsakademiet, 2014), 106-177.)), where player-characters could focus their goals for each day of play in a directed manner.
The Games (optional): The Indigo House members organized some fun physical game activities in the field during Act II.
Eating together was an important ritual activity as members from different social circles had the chance to become acquainted. During the breakfast of Act III, an impromptu gay wedding took place. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Dinner: Ritual of eating together. Mr. T usually gave a speech during dinner.
Tantra Workshops (optional): In the tantra room, I ran workshops in Acts I and III, primarily using techniques of guided mediation, eye gazing, and ars amandi.((Nudity and actual sex were forbidden at the larp, as was the consumption of real drugs or alcohol. The sex mechanics are described in the next section.))
Dark room (optional): BDSM scenes, lesbian hour, and cruising pick-ups. The dark room was intended for characters willing to have semi-anonymous sexual encounters. Lesbian hour was part of the structure of the larp in order to establish liminal space for those characters as well.
Drum circles (optional): In Acts II and III, Kohana/Kevin ran all-male drum circles for the Spirituals and Radical Faeries around the bonfire, with several other men attending as well.
Blackbox scenes (optional): Transpiring throughout the Acts, the blackbox was a liminal space within which players could negotiate and play out scenes from the past, the future, or fantasies. Two blackbox rooms were set aside for these purposes and did not “exist” in the normal game space. Our group used this space, for example, for Kohana to guide the Spirituals through a shamanic journey to meet their spirit animals — a scene that had transpired in the past.
DJ Tony, singer-songwriter Marylou, and Nate, the Queen of Manhattan during the drag/variety show. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Drag /variety show: Performance art, drag shows, singing, male stripping, poetry readings, anti-war protests, safe sex public service announcements, and rock band performances. Most of the characters attended or participated in this ritual during each Act.
Dance party (optional): Seduction on the dance floor, vogue-offs, circles where characters danced in the center, and general revelry transpired during this time.
Hookah smoking (optional): A “love nest” similar to a treehouse in the woods was set up with lights, pallets, and a hookah. Characters ritually smoked tobacco, laughed, and shared stories.
Green Drink Ceremony at midnight: Serves as an in-game ritual and a metatechnique. The characters consumed the Green Drink, which has unspecified contents in-game. This technique allowed players the chance to steer their characters toward explosions of building conflict or redirect them into new perspectives. Brilliant in replicating the transformative moments of hallucinogens that many people experience, while also offering the player an opportunity to take the reins of the character in their desired direction.
Lighting the paper balloons to commemorate the fallen. Photo by Elina Andersson. CC-BY-NC.
Fireworks and paper balloon ceremony: Each night after the green drink, fireworks were lit. In Act II and Act III, paper balloons were lit in memory of those who passed that year. The balloons rose into the air, then the lights winked out just over the horizon.
Aerobics (optional): In at least one Act, the Amazons, a lesbian-run aerobics club, led a workout session for interested parties.
Breakfast: Ritual of eating together. During Act III, two gay characters had an impromptu, “unlawful” wedding during breakfast to celebrate being alive and in love. Another ritual within a ritual. This moment later proved poignant for the players; Marriage Equality was finally ruled legal by the Supreme Court the next day in the U.S., over thirty years later in real time.
Song Between Life and Death: In the diner, a song was played to indicate the space between life and death, as well as the passage of time. All players were expected to remain quiet during the song, though they could hold hands or hug.
The Lottery of Death: Angels arrived to announce the Lottery of Death. Characters had to place the amount of lottery tickets in the hat equal to the risk level of their sexual activity in the last year. Names were drawn and those characters were called away.
Death was personified in the larp, guiding the characters to the Funeral and delivering the eulogy for those who passed. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Death arrives personified as a woman: Characters were led outside and instructed to collect flowers for the funeral. Chopin’s “Funeral March” was played in the background.
Death marches the group to the funeral space: Individuals who survived death that year were released to their loved ones.
Funeral: The group approached the coffins, where the characters who died lay. Death read the second chorus of the National Anthem like a eulogy, which framed the end of the Act.
Little downtime existed between the non-optional scheduled events, but characters had plenty of time for seduction, explosive arguments, breakups, drug overdoses, or laughing around the hookah. The tight schedule ensured that usually no more than 1-2 hours passed where no significant group event was transpiring. This structure afforded players consistent involvement with the larp on some level.
Additionally, these in-game spaces sometimes changed meaning or significance over the course of the larp. Spaces where casual sex once occurred such as the dark room were often eerily empty in later Acts as the fear of death became a palpable mood. Rituals also changed; the drag/variety show became much darker and sadder as the Acts progressed. Still, having the primary rituals and spaces remain intact added a sense of consistency for a community plagued by fear and grief.
Off-game Ritualized Structures
Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick.
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.
Let’s play a love game, play a love game.
Do you want love or you want fame?
Are you in the game? Dans le love game?
Lady Gaga, Love Game
Another important ritualized structure within the larp involved the sex mechanics. In everyday life, sexual encounters are sometimes considered liminal acts in their own right. In larps, sex scenes are approached in multiple ways: not pursued at all, played literally, or enacted using representational techniques such as backrubs, ars amandi, rock-paper-scissors, or other “resolution” mechanics.
In Just a Little Lovin‘, sex scenes also followed a ritual structure. One player would offer a pink feather to another, which represented an invitation to a sex scene. The other could choose to accept or deny the feather. Denying the feather did not represent an actual in-game rejection, but rather out-of-game consent to play a scene. Players would then go off-game and negotiate the boundaries of the scene, comfort with kissing/touching, and the events that would occur. Groping of breasts or genitals was not permitted. Players had to remain clothed and use a wooden phallus as a representational object to indicate sexual touch regardless of whether the sex was gay, lesbian, queer, or heteronormative. When the negotiated scene was over, characters stood side-by-side and used the Monologue metatechnique, which allowed them to externalize their character’s thoughts to the other player. Altogether, these metatechniques ritualized the beginning, middle, and end of each sex scene in a way that allowed for intensity, while maintaining a sense of safety and player distance.
Members of the Indigo House, a polyfidelity commune in which all members were in an exclusive, group relationship. Photo by Sarah Lynne Bowman. CC-BY-NC.
Players could also call “cut” or “brake” in any scene. They could move their bodies to subtly indicate discomfort with kissing or touching in a non-verbal way that did not break the scene, a maneuver that was termed Deflection. Again, these safety mechanisms did not affect the fiction of the larp, but provided a greater sense of comfort for many of the participants engaging in intimate encounters.
Overall, extensive workshopping in large and small groups served as the separation phase for the main ritual of the larp, as did costuming. For the incorporation phase, the organizers ran structured debriefs that lasted around 1-2 hours in groups of approximately ten people. After Act III, we de-roled by placing a piece of our character’s costuming in the center of a large circle, then wrote letters to our characters as ourselves. We were assigned a de-roleing buddy, to whom we read the letters. We were expected to exchange contact information and check in with our buddy in two weeks after the larp. These processes aided in both the return to the self and in reconciling the relationship between the self and the character. The organizers then invited guest speakers to discuss their experiences with HIV activism and with cancer, which served as a way to contextualize the themes we had just larped with real world experiences and facts.
Post-game connection between participants through the playing of music and drums, which were central ritualized activities during the larp.
As mentioned earlier, the afterparty was another crucial part of this larp, allowing players time to decompress, distance, and discuss events with other participants. Additionally, each year at the Nordic larp conference Knudepunkt, organizers host an hour-long Just a Little Lovin’ dance party, which many players attend in their costumes from the larp. Social media sites like Facebook also provide outlets for people to discuss their experiences, organize reunions, and share information about HIV and other relevant topics.
Summary
The game content of Just a Little Lovin’ on its own is powerful, exploring themes of sex, love, death, and friendship. Adding ritual elements to the larp works to draw players even deeper into the experience. For example, many participants can no longer hear the songs built into the larp design without a flood of memories and powerful emotions returning to them. Even if the character rejects the content of one of the rituals in-game, thinking it “weird” or “uninteresting,” these events offer the opportunity for the character to react to in-game stimuli, which can draw them deeper into immersion. Additionally, the repetition of these in-game rituals in every Act with changes in the fiction each time can create new meaning: a sense of irony, feelings of grief, a sense of stability in an uncertain world.
All larps can include these ritualistic techniques and many larps have similar spaces set aside. Some fantasy and post-apocalyptic larps, for example, have elaborate religions built into the game, complete with rituals, sacred spaces, and mythology. Other Nordic larps such as KoiKoi and Totem have included extensive rituals as well, which are worth examining with regard to their impact on the larp experience.
In the case of Just a Little Lovin’, however, the inclusion of vulnerability, sexuality, romantic intimacy, and death summons a particularly cathartic element for many of the players, especially since these elements become intertwined. Therefore, Just a Little Lovin’ demonstrates how ritual elements in larp design combined with complex interweaving social connections and a strong theme can provoke intense emotional reactions and feelings of communal connection in the players.
Cover photo: The rock band Urban Renaissance closed the drag/variety show every night with an energetic performance. Although Rain (right) died in Act II, the show went on in Act III. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
