When larping, players don’t always wear costumes, and even when costumed, a character ought to be more than a funny hat. Here, we offer practical ways to flesh out how a character moves and speaks, in the hope of making it easier for you to do so.
Analyzing your Character
However much or little information you receive on the character you will be playing in a larp, you will probably form a mental image and decide where you want to take them. The aspects which define a character are numerous, so a list of identifying traits is a good start, if you know how to translate them into your play.
Walking the Walk
Once you have an idea of how the character should appear to other players, there are different aspects to consider when defining those characteristics. This section will focus on bearing, posture, gait, and breathing(An interesting tool to consider when designing motion aspects is Laban Movement Analysis (sometimes: Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis). For larp purposes, LMA has been written about by Erin Marsh in the Nordiclarp.org blog (see bibliography).). When making these choices, it’s good to consider the difference between internal and external perception. Does the way I move or hold myself convey the meaning I want it to, or is it just in my head?
Bearing, Posture, and Gait
Inner perception or posture can affect your outer bearing in a useful way. Putting yourself in the right frame of mind translates well into the way you stand, sit, or walk. Practice in front of a full-length mirror or film a video: seeing the effect helps you calibrate it.
If you struggle with finding your own, copy signature mannerisms from actors. E.g., for arrogance in servitude, look no further than Stowell, Alun Armstrong’s role as a butler in season 5 of Downton Abbey((https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3962976/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast, 21. October 2019)). Films and TV offer many such examples for a variety of traits.
Gait, the way you walk, contributes a lot to a character’s general appearance. Walking on the balls and toes of your feet, keeping the heel off the ground will make you appear slightly taller, more willowy, and lighter on your feet, while stomping heel first can seem more decisive. Experiment!
As a practical example, take the run of the Shakespearean larp Forsooth, where, for the major role of a count (we’ll disregard for the purpose of this paper that a funny hat was worn), arms and hands were held a certain way: shoulders down, upper arms closer to the body, lower arms outward, palms turned more or less upwards, which might have been sustainable for a longer time. In contrast to that, a butler/servant character was portrayed as bent over forwards and partly sideways, with a rounded back, hunched shoulders and the head thrown back, so as to always seeming to look up at his ‘betters’ – this works for a limited amount of time, but remaining in that role over several hours on end, let alone days, might well have ended painfully.
Be aware that while a more or less obvious limp is a sure way of changing the look of your gait, it really shouldn’t be done for comedic effect, but rather have a medical or possibly psychological reason in the character’s background. “It looks different” is not a reason, it’s lazy characterization.
Breathing
You can also use breath for character building. Slower, more pronounced breaths can suggest frailty, which can underline old age or some ailment or other; this is something Holger used in
Bunker 101 (Chaos League), playing a character who had aged beyond the societal limit for being supplied with anti-radiation drugs, by pausing to “catch his breath” or coughing every now and then.
Talking the Talk
Your speech pattern is an easily recognisable characteristic, and changing it up will affect both how others perceive your character and how you perceive them in relation to yourself. Speaking differently will increase the difference between you and your character.
There are many elements to speech — tone, volume, register, speech pattern, etc. Your tone is connected to the way your voice travels through your body as you make a sound: a tone can be nasal, if you speak a lot through your nose, or raspy if the sound travels up your throat in a certain way. Volume is, as indicated by its name, the volume with which you speak; you can whisper or shout. Your register is the part of the total human vocal range your voice moves within; someone with a deep voice has a lower register than someone with a high voice. The amplitude of the register varies from person to person — trained singers have usually developed a broader register than someone who mostly uses their voice for everyday chats. The speech pattern is all other little quirks that mix into the way you speak; your accent, potential stutters, a lisp, using certain words more than others (e.g. “like” or humming a lot) and so on.
All of these vocal elements can be changed, though some (such as broadening your register) require more practice than others. The easiest are tone, volume, and minor speech pattern alterations. Although changing the way you use your register when you speak is effective, it can be hard to avoid slipping back into your “vocal comfort zone” as the larp goes on without constantly having to focus on the way you speak.
Tone
Changing your tone of voice is simple, and does a lot for your character portrayal. This allows using people’s unconscious biases (e.g. “soft people have soft voices”) as quick shorthand to enforce your portrayal. A snooty character might have a nasal voice, a scarred warrior a raspy one, a caretaker a soft one, etc. Be aware, though — raspy tones can damage your vocal chords and result in a sore throat if done incorrectly, so avoid those unless you know how to use them safely. Remember you will have to sustain this tone for hours or maybe days. The further away from your natural tone you go, the more challenging this is going to be.
Volume
Volume speaks volumes — we alter our body language depending on how much space we are comfortable claiming for ourselves, and the same happens to the volume with which we speak. A self-assured character will not have a problem being loud, while a confused or shy character will speak quieter, maybe even whisper or mumble at times.
Speech Pattern
The most cost-effective speech pattern changes are small. What are your character’s favourite words for expressing joy, anger, awe, etc? Do they often lose their trail of thought mid-sentence? Perhaps they interject themselves with constant uhm’s and eh’s, or click their tongue a lot? Think of a few quirks and try combining them. Decide what to keep and what to scratch — less is more, especially before you get used to playing with your voice. Play around until you find a voice you feel suits your character, while still being comfortable to maintain. If it feels uncomfortable, change it. A sore throat, cough, or loss of voice never made anyone’s larp experience any more fun.
Avoid fake accents: they are difficult to do well, and even more difficult to do without engaging a lot of unintentional, misguided, or outright offensive cultural stereotypes((The same goes for stereotypical speech impediments, such as stuttering. A disability is not a costume.)). Perhaps you are willing to put in the required effort, but let’s be realistic — we always leave larp prep to the last minute, and no one is going to believe that Scottish accent practiced overnight. Instead, focus on original, smaller changes!
Sustainability and Safety
If the physical and vocal tools you’re employing need to be sustained for the duration of a larp, consider both the safety and health of the player. The length of the larp and your physical fitness may reduce the viability of some choices. For example, certain changes to tone and register require a lot of work and risk damaging your voice if practiced without professional guidance — especially over a longer period. However, if you are a trained vocalist, you may already know how to safely experiment with these. For every technique we present here, players should ask themselves whether it’s sustainable for the purpose of the particular larp and/or role they want to use it for.
Conclusion
Now that you have assembled the bodily and vocal identifiers for the character, remember that practice makes perfect. You may not have the chance to do that for a mini larp, but before going to a bigger event, try combining the different aspects you chose, putting yourself through the expected emotional states of the character, imagining situations they might need to react to; and see how your design holds up to all of these. Practice your character voice and movement around friends to see how you’re able to sustain them during intense social interaction. Be honest about them, don’t be afraid to discard those not up to your expectations, be creative, be safe, and remember to have fun!
Playing a super-rich character in a larp probably sounds fun and easy. It is neither, at least not at all times. Centrally, it requires a fine line of balancing, in order to not take the role over the top, but sufficiently close, in order to provide the most optimal playable content to other participants. We believe, based on our experiences at for instance, Tuhannen viillon kuolema, (Pettersson, Hannula et al, 2018), that this is best done in groups or ensembles. That way, an individual character’s affluenza((The unhealthy and unwelcome psychological and social effects of affluence regarded especially as a widespread societal problem, such as A: feelings of guilt, lack of motivation, and social isolation experienced by wealthy people. B: extreme materialism and consumerism associated with the pursuit of wealth and success and resulting in a life of chronic dissatisfaction, debt, overwork, stress, and impaired relationships (Merriam-Webster) )) becomes part of a greater whole rather than a corny stereotype.
Creating a believable super-rich character is difficult. How to combine a real, playable personality, with a sense of affluenza? Role-playing usually requires a sense of connection and interaction, so the player has to be able to convey playable realism and a sense of unreality at the same time. Avoiding satire, comedy or outrageous in-game spending is usually recommended, unless the larp organizers specifically want a two-dimensional non-player character. Like simplified villains, they can of course fit some larps, but here we want to look at a more realistic approach.
In our experience, the first element for successfully constructing a super-rich character is the origin of their money. This has a significant effect on character personality. For example, it is possible to play someone who has inherited their money as either ruthless and efficient or as complacent, but if the money has been earned somehow through one’s own actions, the character will probably default to the former — even if they are now resting on their proverbial laurels. Remember to interact with other characters: a character who has ennui, or just hides in an enclave, is not useful as more than story decoration. However, by approaching the ennui and talking about it, or planning the enclave (as in Tuhannen viillon kuolema), creates playable content for others.
The second recommended step is to find at least two types of affluenza. The character should optimally be able to deviate from typical middle-class behaviour in at least one way, and be outrageous to poor characters in at least one as well. If these are different things, all the better. They should also be playable, so that they come out during play often enough. Maybe it is an off-hand art purchase that is expensive, but not immensely so, or the firing of several people during a phone call that others can hear. A classic solution is to emphasize in play how “everyone could be rich, if they just worked as hard as I did”. Unless the character is supposed to be a ruthless tycoon or something similar, however, it is far better to come up with more interesting ways to express the increasing removal from understanding the realities of those who earn or own less. One of the best ways we have found for emphasizing this, is to select some things (e.g., optimizing travel without caring about prices) that are not at all easy to the poor or even the middle class, but which the super-rich character takes for granted.
The third suggested step is to find at least two types of mental relations outside of the social class of the character. These are ways in which the character believes that they relate to other people. It is very typical for even the very rich, at least in the Nordic countries, to think that they are “not that different, just wealthier” from hard-working people with less money. Therefore, playability and interaction increase, if the rich character has situations where they can sincerely say “I’m just like you in this regard.” For some topics — like both characters going to the gym, even if one of them has a group of personal trainers and the other a student discount – it can create believable temporary empathy. In many others, this can be used to emphasize the affluenza, because the rich character’s statements will sound dissonant to the other, who will not likely see the presumed “similarity”.
The fourth step is linked to the third one. The artificial affluenza gets more realistic, if there is not just one or two contacts outside one’s economic core group, but rather a large number of characters from the middle class and “poor people”. Power is not taken, it is given, in this case by the other characters’ reactions. Playing the rich among others of similar standing provides little content to others, and can quickly become boring. Doing so in an environment of economic differences that are not just transactional creates fruitful play — and emotions — for all concerned. While playing aristocrats and their servants has its own charms, playing a rich character in a more open setting offers more possibilities.
Finally, playing rich is best done in a group of rich characters, each of a different type. Tuhannen viillon kuolema really emphasized this point for us, in its contrast with many other larps with similar themes. One super-rich character can easily get satirical, even if played well and with good care. A few of them together, with different types of estrangement, become a surprisingly realistic group of people. This also enables some of them to take the play to the level of occasional satire, especially if such satire still reflects something seen in real life (think “pharma bro” or “trophy-hunting heiress”).
Knutepunkt 2021, the 2021 edition of the Nordic larp conference, has released a call for papers! The theme for the conference is “Where the magic happens” and this is of course reflected in the conference companion book:
Why do we return to the magic circle of larp again and again? How do we transmute our experiences from the celestial to the mundane? What can larp do for us that the outside world can not? Is the act of larping a way to step into the mythical realm? What do we see when we gaze into the mirror as someone else?
The deadline for article pitches is 10 July 2020. You can read more on the Knutepunkt 2021 website: https://www.knutepunkt.org/book
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.
Larp designers who choose a real-world setting – historical or contemporary – are faced, whether they realize it or not, with a set of decisions about how to portray the social prejudices (based on gender, race, sexuality, class, age, etc) of that setting. Exploring prejudices in larp can be an interesting and enlightening experience, but there is a question of whether the players whose characters are discriminated against will have enough interesting game content. Moreover, there is potential for bleed in and out, especially if players are encountering the same prejudice in their real lives.
In this article, I’ll identify different approaches that may be taken to these decisions, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Approaches may be divided broadly into expressing (playing the prejudice ‘realistically’); erasing (aiming to represent the game setting without the existence of prejudice); or exploring (approaching the prejudice by playing a parallel or sideways version). Moreover, I will describe and discuss some techniques for playing prejudice, in the context of player safety.
Prejudice and Larp
Oxford Dictionaries define “prejudice” as follows:
Preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience: dislike, hostility, or unjust behaviour deriving from preconceived and unfounded opinions.
Oxford Dictionaries 2015
The world is full of prejudice and its consequences: discrimination, microaggression, violence, and societal friction. It makes some people’s lives miserable, while endowing others with (perhaps unnoticed) privilege. Some political groups work to reduce or destroy it: others try to intensify it. A non-exhaustive list might include prejudice on the basis of: sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability/impairment, neurodiversity, body shape/size, etc.
Some larps are designed specifically to investigate a particular prejudice or group of prejudices. However, prejudice can also be presented as a realism-supporting factor in a larp whose subject is something else, or which is a sandbox in which players find their own subjects.
Broadly speaking, these are the escalating intensity levels of prejudice that you can work with in a larp:
Prejudice is described as existing, in the larp background materials;
Character is described as being a victim of prejudice in the past;
Character is described as feeling and/or expressing prejudice in the past;
Character is expected to be a victim of prejudice during the larp itself;
Character is expected to feel/express prejudice during the larp itself.
So for example you might be portraying a world in which sexism exists, but (perhaps because the characters are all of the same sex, or are morally enlightened) it’s not going to be actually apparent during the larp itself, other than maybe by reference. Of course, that will be less intense as an emotional experience than if you’re expecting characters to be sexist towards each other during play.
It’s quite common to use non-real larp settings as a lens to examine aspects of human society. So, for example, a larp set in space might have prejudice against aliens as a kind of metaphor for human racial prejudice. Or in a fantasy world, prejudice against a third gender might take the place of male–female sexism.
Any real world setting, and most larp settings will include at least some aspect of prejudice. After all, irrational dislikes and hostilities seem like an integral part of human societies. So, whether you realize it or not, you have to make a choice on how to portray prejudice in your larp.
Paying the Fun Tax
Players who have to face prejudice in their daily lives might find it tolling to have to encounter similar prejudices ingame. This can be exemplified by the notion of Fun Tax.
In video games, Fun Tax refers to the practice of being urged to make payments to speed up, or otherwise improve, a free-to-play game (see eg. Ralph 2013).
It was later adapted to the context of tabletop role-playing, but there it has become a rather different concept:
I use [Fun Tax] to describe a passage in [a] gaming book that typically reads something like this: Yes, you technically CAN play a person of color, a woman or a queer person in our game but you’ll have to put up with that character being harassed, discriminated against or ignored because of it. What you are doing, with that passage and the infinite variations upon it, is saying ‘If you are a gamer who isn’t a cis-gendered, heterosexual, white, middle class or higher male, you have to pay a toll of unfun to have fun playing a person like you’.
Thompson 2014
So Curt Thompson here is proposing a positive virtue of erasing prejudice in a game setting – that failing to do so may make the game miserable for players who are themselves among the real-world group that would be suffering the prejudice.
A 2015 discussion around the tabletop role-playing game Lovecraftesque (2015) develops the idea a little:
[F]or some people, the historical impact of bigotry is too unpleasant to be fun. For those people and their group, it would be better to play in a historic setting that carefully avoids those issues or excises them altogether, or to choose a different setting.
Fox 2015
Player sensitivities are important, of course, but it might be that tailoring your game design to the players’ wishes (rather than designing the game and then seeing who wants to play it) is more common practice in tabletop role-playing than in larp.
If you’re setting a larp at an advertising agency in the 1960s, in the world of the TV show Mad Men, sexism in the office is likely to be prevalent. Suppose you’ve decided that you do want to explore it thoroughly, and your players have been briefed accordingly. Female characters can expect to be constantly sexualized and diminished.
You will need to consider how this is going to feel for players who themselves are experiencing sexism at work in their real lives. Is it going to be unfun for women who experience lecherous microaggressions and dismissive comments in their daily routine, to have to experience even more of the same in this larp?
The Fun Tax argument suggests that you should at least have tools and techniques available to help players deal with these bleeding-in feelings, and to allow opt-outs.
Sociopolitical Duty
Perhaps you feel that sexism in the setting is so important that you actually want to make it the focus of your design. Rather than being “about a 1960s advertising agency” it’s going to be explicitly “about sexism in a 1960s advertising agency”. This description will repel some players, but will encourage others.
And there are some settings where you’d be unlikely to be designing a larp unless you actively wanted to explore the prejudice manifest there. St. Croix (2015), set in the Danish–Norwegian slave colony in the Caribbean in 1792, with some players in the roles of slaves and others as owners or overseers, is a good example. The tension between slave and slave-owner is predicated upon the latter’s view of the former as a lesser form of human being. To run a larp set in such a colony without focusing on the racist nature of the establishment would be distorting history. And once you take that as the basis, you can explore variations in prejudicial thoughts, feelings and experiences across the range of characters available.
Larp is a fantastic medium for investigating social and political themes, and prejudice is an interesting and significant aspect of society. A suitable larp design can be the right tool to give your players a really thorough and thoughtful experience into which they can take their own thoughts and feelings about prejudice, and from which they can hope to emerge having learnt and felt more and more deeply.
What can go wrong with this approach? One pitfall is that the larp may end up being too grim and difficult for many players to enjoy. The other is that you may find that you’ve sacrificed other things that you found interesting about the setting, by focusing on the prejudice. Your vision of characters breezily drafting clever ads may have been swept away and replaced by anxious and tearful workplace-sexism discussions.
Ways of Designing: Expressing
Perhaps the simplest approach to prejudice in your larp design is to play it realistically: allocating feelings and experiences of prejudice to your characters in the same sort of way that would be expected in real life, and encouraging the players to express them in the same range of ways that real people do.
Sexism will be prevalent in the 1960’s ad agency game. Some male characters may express it in a ‘gentlemanly’ or ‘chivalrous’ way, like the character Roger in Mad Men; others may be cruder and more exploitative, like Pete. Some female characters may suffer it in silence, like Joan; others may complain, like Peggy; others may not see anything wrong with it, like Betty.
This approach may of course require research. We’re not always as aware as we may assume of the extent and shape of prejudices in other societies, historical or elsewhere in the world. Some historical forms of prejudice are now obsolete, or weakened: some were unremarkable at the time but are highlighted in today’s society. If you aim to give a realistic picture of prejudice at work within your depicted society, make sure that it actually is realistic.
In Just a Little Lovin’ (2011), which is set mostly among the gay community of New York in the early 1980s, the characters are in a largely homosexual bubble during the game. But prejudice that they may experience in the outside world plays an important part in the backdrop. As does straight-on-gay, male-on-female, homo-on-bi and cis-on-trans prejudice between individual characters during play: it’s there and acknowledged, and players can pick it up and use it as much as they feel will be valuable to their own play experience. In the 2015 run, the hetero male leader of the Saratoga cancer survivors’ group, Kohana, was initially ignorant and mistrustful of homosexual male lifestyles. And Nick, a trans man, had to demonstrate by deeds and self-sacrifice that he deserved to be respected as a gay man rather than a straight female “tourist”.
What can go wrong with this approach? If you find that, to express the prejudices realistically, you end up overwhelming your other material – because these prejudices were such an important part of that society that they end up influencing every interaction – then this may not be the best way to go. And furthermore, the players themselves may be overwhelmed – because as modern people, they are likely to be more aware of and sensitive to expression of prejudice than their characters would have been. This can make players feel that the prejudice you’re representing in your design is a more important theme, colouring their experiences of the game, than you had intended it to be.
But of course you have to set that against the considerable advantages of using a realistic portrayal: accessibility to players via their real-world experiences and those of others; availability of research materials that players can immediately apply to their expectations without having to apply some sort of filter; the chance to learn directly about an authentic part of history; relative ease of simulation and creating immersion; and so on. For these reasons, departing from realism has to be a positive decision from which you feel your design has much to gain.
Ways of Designing: Erasing
A common approach to real world prejudice in a larp setting is to not represent it at all – either because of lack of awareness or thought about its existence, or because of a wish to make the players’ lives easier by not forcing the task upon them. Examples include Mare Incognitum (2014, set in Sweden in 1951) and Tonnin stiflat (Thousand Mark Shoes, 2014, set in Finland in 1927), both of which gave characters full gender equality.
If you’ve taken the conscious decision to ignore prejudice, you needn’t feel guilty about it being a cop-out. It may be necessary in order to keep attention on the parts of the setting that are important to your design ideal.
However, you might want to think about whether by erasing the effects of prejudice from your larp, you’re maybe doing a disservice to its victims by misrepresenting their situation. Take those female staff in the 1960s advertising agency: their real-life counterparts suffered abhorrent discrimination and sexual microaggression. And many women in modern-day offices still do suffer those effects of prejudice. Is it right to present the agency as a sexism-free utopia, and ignore that historical and contemporary suffering? (The answer to that will depend on your view of a larp designer’s sociopolitical responsibilities.)
The experience of prejudice may have been important in shaping a person’s identity, and when you erase prejudices, there is a danger of erasing experiences and identities. Prejudice is often based on the idea of seeing someone as the ‘other’: out of the norm, and unlike oneself. However, some aspects of the ‘other’ identity were actively embraced by some of the people you’re portraying – and may be so too today, including potentially among your players. For example, if you remove prejudice against queerness from your setting, you remove part of the rationale for queer pride – and this may make queer characters less interesting to play.
It’s very tempting to be drawn to the glamorous and fun parts of a setting but to neglect the less pleasant aspects of what it was actually like. If you’re making that decision, make sure that you’re doing so consciously and with awareness of the implications – not just by not thinking about it. Perhaps instead you might think about moving the larp to a modern setting – like the trendy ultra-21st-century advertising/PR corporation depicted in PanoptiCorp (2003) – where you can still have the advertising-agency fun, but sexism isn’t such a dominant part of the setting, and so can be more readily left in the background for the players to express and portray as they see fit.
Ways of Designing: Exploring
A rather different way of approaching prejudice in your larp design without making your players feel too uncomfortable is to explore it via a parallel of some sort. If you’re concerned that the prejudice you want to investigate is likely to have a high Fun Tax component – or if there’s some other reason that you prefer not to address it directly, perhaps because you’d like players to approach it fresh rather than with preconceptions – abstraction can be a useful tool in presenting your players with the thoughts and feelings that you seek to inspire, while detaching the associated emotions somewhat from those that they might be all too familiar with in real life.
Suppose that having researched your 1960s ad agency setting, you realize that sexism is such an important part of the milieu that you can’t leave it out. But you don’t want the intensity of bleed that players are likely to feel when playing sexism of the period, which might cause this play thread to dominate their game experience at the expense of other aspects of your design.
A suitable parallel might be eye colour,((See Jane Elliott’s ‘Blue eyes / Brown eyes’ experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott)) or hair colour, or the colour of arbitrary scarves that you hand out to the players. Instruct characters of one colour to be casually discriminatory and microaggressive towards characters of the other colour, in ways analogous to sexist behaviour, but regardless of the characters’ gender. That way “scarfism” can colour the in-game interactions in the same ways that sexism would, but without the unhappy associations of playing actual sexism.
Note that this not the same as using coloured scarves or similar as a representation of in-game race, as seen in Hell on Wheels (2013), the Czech Old-West-set larp. There, in the first run, some players playing African-American characters used dark face make-up: in the subsequent 2015 run, to avoid the unfortunate associations of “blackface”, instead coloured scarves were used non-indexically to indicate the characters’ race. In the situation we’re now discussing, though, the coloured scarf is the actual indexical property that causes its possessors to suffer or inflict prejudice.
The classic example of this technique in practice is Mellan himmel och hav (2003). In this larp inspired by the science fiction writings of Ursula K. le Guin, conventional gender was replaced by the notion of “morning” and “evening” people, denoted by different-coloured clothing that was intended to replace visible gender signifiers.((In addition to “morning” and “evening” people, there was a third gender, the sunnivas, who wore white robes.)) In this way players were empowered to explore the social effects of a structure similar to gender but without all the bleed-in baggage that working with actual gender would bring.
Playing Prejudice
So let’s look at playing prejudice from the player’s point of view. This is potentially troublesome material, with a lot of opportunity for bleed in and out. As well as the normal things that any emotionally intense larp should include for player safety, there are some techniques specific to prejudice, which are worth looking at.
Escalation
If you want to address real prejudicial traits directly in your larp, a possible safety approach is to taper in their effects, either intensifying over time to a planned schedule, or intensifying when the players choose to do so. So, in the sexist ad agency setting, you would start with the male characters only allowed to make mild sexist remarks to the female characters (“Nice work taking the minutes of that meeting, honeycakes!”). Once people are comfortable with that level, a signal (or player agreement) allows them to intensify the sexist behaviour, with discriminatory practice (“A pay rise? When you’ll most likely be getting pregnant and leaving?”) and microaggressions (“Let me stand behind you so I can see down your blouse, gorgeous…”) Next, add in coarse and disparaging speech and physically-exploitative touch. And so on until the prejudice is in full exercise, as far as you or the players are willing to go.
An escalation technique of this type was used in Inside Hamlet (2015). In this larp set at a decadent and vice-filled court, players were given scope for quite extreme acts, so it was necessary to be able to establish levels of comfort interactively. The word “rotten” was used, included naturalistically in a spoken sentence, when a player wished to increase the intensity of an interaction; and “pure” was the spoken signal that the right level had been reached. Another common system uses traffic-light colours – “red”, “orange” and “green” – as spoken signals for “stop”, “slow down”, and “that’s OK”.
This sort of technique will need workshopping first, and opt-outs must be clear and available. And you’ll need to ensure that your larp has an overall safety culture – an embedded mutual awareness and care-taking (Pedersen 2015) – that empowers players to opt out of the technique at any point without anxiety or fear of condemnation. But, given those provisos, it’s a workable system which in safety terms perhaps has an analogy with the combat-replacement meta-technique Ars marte:((Described on the Ars Amandi collective’s website: http://www.ars-amandi.se/resources/ars-marte/)) each participant has the freedom to raise the intensity to their own level of comfort, and then to stop the escalation cleanly.
Larping the Other
Finally we need to look at one of the most important tools in the play of prejudice – playing the Other. The assumption underlying the discussion around the Fun Tax is that players will identify with the experience of playing “people like them”. But what if they are playing people who are explicitly “not like them”?
In many larp traditions it’s customary for players to play characters who physically resemble themselves (with suitable costume, makeup, etc), for the sake of immersive verisimilitude. So for example the default assumption may be that the character will be the same gender as the player, the same broad ethnicity, and so on.
But there’s great expressive and exploratory power to be found in playing the Other – playing the trait which is unlike oneself, and which is consciously or unconsciously seen as “Other” in one’s own society. In European societies, “othered” traits include: female; ethnic minority; queer; trans*; disabled/impaired; fat; mentally ill; poor; etc. The default social identity is none of these things; and it requires an effort of imagination and empathy for a person who has none of these traits to put themselves into the position of someone who is seen as “Other”.
So, for example, as discussed, exploring male-on-female sexism in a 1960s ad agency might have Fun-Tax-associated issues if the female characters are played by female players. But if the female characters are played by male players, then those players will get an unusual and perhaps valuable insight into the life of the female Other.
Whether you also choose to inverse-Other by casting female players in the male roles is a design question. The effect is likely to be more powerful if the males in female roles feel themselves the victims of prejudice from other male players, rather than from female players: because experiencing sexist anti-female prejudice delivered by a male should feel more real than if it’s delivered by a female, which would have a stronger alibi of “we’re just playing at this”. You’ll need to think about how intense a lesson you wish your male players to be learning; and what you want your female players to get out of it (or if you want to have female players at all).
A larp example of playing the Other can be found in Halat hisar (State of Siege, 2013), in whose setting Northern Europe is in turmoil and the Arab League is a wealthy, stable bloc similar to the real-world EU. Finnish and Nordic players took on characters who were othered in the larp setting in the same way that Arabs are othered in our own world, while Palestinian players played first-world citizens.
In Fine
Prejudice is such a significant and interesting aspect of human society, and larp is such a potent and mind-expanding creative tool for examining life, the two seem a natural fit. It’s understandable that many designers are wary of addressing prejudice in their larps: the pitfalls are many and the requirement for safety is great. But with sufficient thought, imagination, and communication of your design goals, you can give your players a valuable and powerful experience which has the potential to make a real impact on their lives.
Halat hisar (2013): Fatima AbdulKarim, Faris Arouri & al., Parkano, Finland, Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen
seura. http://nordicrpg.fi/piiritystila/, ref. Jan 25th, 2016.
Hell on Wheels (2013): Filip Appl, Jan Zeman & al., Stonetown, Czech Republic. http://howlarp.cz/about/, ref. Jan 11th, 2016.
Inside Hamlet (2015): Martin Ericsson, Bjarke Pedersen, Johanna Koljonen & al., Helsingør, Denmark,
Odyssé. http://www.insidehamlet.com/, ref. Jan 12th, 2016.
Just a Little Lovin’ (2011): Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo, Lunde Leirsted, Norway. http://www.justalittlelovin.com/, ref. Jan 11th, 2016.
Mare Incognitum (2014): Olle Nyman, Sara Pertmann, Sebastian Utbult and Andreas Sjöberg,
Göteborg, Sweden. http://xn--ii-viab.se/, ref. Jan 12th, 2016.
In 2006, I was 18 years old, and I organized my first larp: a three day fantasy larp set in the ongoing campaign of Gyllene Hjorten (Eng. The Golden Deer). All things considered, it went well, for the most part thanks to the players, who made sure they had fun. We did make one mistake that I still remember. We had failed to foresee that once the group of evil soldiers got their hands on the magical ring everyone was looking for, they might leave the area. This made sense for their characters to do. We, the designers, had failed to provide a reason for them to stay on site. We were lucky and this happened on the last night of the game, which meant it did not disrupt the larp too much. If Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences had been around at the time, could we have avoided this mistake?
The Larp Design book is gorgeous, with a striking cover and clean design. It is also massive with its 428 pages. Edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen, it contains a collection of essays about designing Nordic-style larp. With 66 authors from 10 different countries, it is an impressive feat. The stated goal is that the essays should be practical and useful for beginners as well as experienced designers.
The content is divided into five parts:
The Foundations of Larp Design, where the basics of larp design are introduced.
Designing What Happens Before Runtime, which contains advice on things such as communication before an event and how to run workshops.
Designing the Runtime. This part makes up the bulk of the book and deals with a wide breadth of topics from character design to questions of signaling consent.
After Runtime. This is a short section covering post-play activities and how to gather player feedback.
How to Export Nordic Larp. The final part is also very short, covering Nordic larp in other larp and art traditions.
The book starts off with an introduction to the foundations of larp design. It then goes on to outline how to design what happens before, during, and after the runtime of a larp. The final part is a discussion of how Nordic larp can interact with other larp traditions, and how to collaborate with other art forms.
The essays range from offering concrete advice to providing perspectives to consider. An example of the former is the essay on “How to Schedule the Participants’ Time on Site” by Alma Elofsson. How long are people able to stay still and listen? About 30 minutes. How often do you need to serve coffee to Nordic players? The answer is every 3 to 4 hours. While these questions might seem trivial, when they are botched, it can drag down an otherwise excellent larp experience.
An example of an essay exploring perspectives on a more complex issue is “Designing for Queer and Trans Players” by Eleanor Saitta and Sebastian F. K. Svegaard. Here, the authors offer up questions to consider to make your larp more inclusive to queer and trans players, rather than offering clear cut answers to those questions. For example, they explore how statements like “this larp will not feature homophobia or transphobia” can be troublesome. While signaling inclusion, it also risks erasing the erasing the identities they are meant to include. It does so by removing the structures that created those identities to begin with. These questions are complex and this essay offer a starting point for thinking about them.
Together the two examples above show the breath of questions explored in this book. There is so much great stuff in this book that it is difficult to decide what to highlight. Nevertheless, I would like to bring up three of my personal favorites. The first is “Basic Concepts in Larp Design” by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola. This is a succinct and elegant summary of the subject and its terminology. As part of the introductory chapter of the book and to the field as a whole, it is indispensable. For those that have read the existing literature surrounding Nordic larp, such as the Knutepunkt books, much of this will be familiar. However, for someone just getting acquainted with larp design, inter-immersion, steering, and herd competence, may be new concepts. Readers can see the entire glossary for the book here.
The second one is “Functional Design” by Kaisa Kangas. This essay states that “a functional larp design is one where the players have meaningful things to do during the larp, and where those things serve a purpose in the larp as a whole” (p. 143) whereby Kangas manages to capture the crux of larp design in one sentence. How can designers make sure that the things that the characters do in the fiction are actually doable in the larp? How can they balance playability vs. plausibility? The essay explores these questions with the help of a well-selected set of examples.
Finally, I very much enjoyed “Spatial Design for Larps” by Søren Ebbehøj, Signe Løndahl Hertel, and Jonas Trier-Knudsen. This essay opened my eyes in a new way to how the space in which a larp is set shapes play. For example, they suggest that using a smaller space will catalyze tensions and facilitate play focused on relationships and interpersonal conflict. And this comes with the added benefit of saving money on rent. What is there not to like?
A number of practical anecdotes are mixed in with the essays. In these, larp designers tell a story and make a judgment on whether they “nailed it” or “failed it.” Most of these are absolute gold, especially the ones describing failures. For the novice, there is plenty to learn there, and I am sure there are many veteran larp designers smiling at how they themselves made the same mistakes.
There are a few minor things to grumble about. There are some unfortunate typos, and I find the sans-serif font in the section introductions difficult to read. My main criticism of this book is that, at least at the time of writing, it is very difficult to get a hold of. To fulfill its full potential this book needs to reach people outside of those that attended the Knudepunkt 2019 conference. Otherwise it risks primarily preaching to the choir. The good news is that according to the editors, while the book is currently out of print, it will be made available in 2020. To be kept up to date on release information, sign up by clicking this link
Is anything missing? To my mind, there are two things. The first one is an essay about writing larp scripts. In an age when more and more larps are run more than once, and often by different people, advice on how to efficiently document the organizing materials for a game would be useful. The second thing I miss is a discussion about running a series of connected larps. Others will certainly find other things they would have liked to see included — with that said, this book covers a lot, and leaves few stones unturned.
Larp Design sets out to be a practical book and it hits the mark. For absolute beginners, it might be a little bit too much to chew off. I imagine it would be a lot to take in for someone with no practical design experience. That said, I do think this is a book that has plenty to offer for anyone interested in larp design, from the beginner to the experienced. I sincerely hope it will be more easily available. That way, future 18 year-olds might realize how to make the evil soldiers stay on-site.
Credits
Editors: Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen
Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, eds. 2019. Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Larp design idea where what you see is what you get. The environment is perceived as authentic, everything works as it should affording participants to engage in authentic activity for real, and participants perform immersive role-play.
The things that enable a person to (role-)play and to do things they would never do in everyday life while in character. Alibi is value neutral (“It says so in the character description”) and can be used in a positive (“We have all agreed to explore these themes together in a physical way”) or a negative way (“I was drunk at the time”).
Approaching every larp as a new work and designing everything from scratch. As opposed to either iterating on a local tradition, or using the same larp system, such as Mind’s Eye Theatre, in multiple larps.
A genre of larp played with minimalist setting, with carefully curated props, and controlled light and sound. Often played in theatre black boxes. A room in a longform larp devoted to acting out scenes out of temporal sequence is also sometimes called blackbox, although a better term for that is meta room.
Longform larp that targets an international audience, features an expensive venue, high participation fee, and is hyped before and after. They usually have a high concept idea, often based on existing intellectual property. Originally, the term was critical of this type of larps.
Shorter larps, with their length measured in hours, often taking place in a small venue and with participants in single or low double digits. Low demands for scenography and costuming make chamber larps easier to package and restage.
The fictional persona a participant portrays during runtime. Sometimes also used to refer to the character description that is an inspiration for the character actually played.
The material on which a participant bases their performance of a character during runtime. Usually takes the form of text describing character background, motivation, goals, and contacts. In some traditions these can be very long and individually tailored, in others they are not used at all.
Permission to do something particularly impactful to another participant’s character (e.g. give permission to another participant that they can kill your character).
Larpmaker organised post-runtime event, where participants and designers talk about what they just did together. Can be structured or relatively free-flowing. Usually the goal is to put the runtime in perspective, to share stories, or to meet the other participants without the masks the characters provide.
The cooldown period after the runtime of a larp, when the participant is leaving the fiction and the character behind, and gearing up to return to everyday life outside the larp. Sometimes also called aftercare.
The process by which a participant divests themselves of the physical embodiment of their character, often used as a method to attempt to prevent or reduce bleed.
Anything that can be changed and made choices about that can impact the experience that is being designed. In larp, everything is a designable surface: the typeface of the website, the soundscape, the interaction patterns, character names, toilet temperature.
Things that exist inside of the fiction are part of the diegesis. For example, music during runtime is part of the diegesis if the characters can hear it, and non-diegetic if only the players hear it.
Something that exists inside of the fiction is diegetic. In a larp participants can address, react to, and interact with things that are diegetic, without breaking character. See diegesis.
The process of incrementally increasing or decreasing the intensity of a scene to come to the optimal atmosphere for all participants involved. Sometimes there is a specific metatechnique for signalling desired (de)escalation.
Prior consent by participants and/or organisers to certain, immutable narrative beats or outcomes. A conscious design decision that presumes that how something happens or someone feels about it happening can be just as interesting to explore as if it happens.
As the name implies, freeform scenarios have no standard form. They typically last a few hours, are usually played without costumes, props, or special lighting in whatever space is available, often feature heavy use of inventive bespoke mechanics and metatechniques, and are sometimes heavily gamemastered. In the Nordic countries, these used to be considered halfway between tabletop role-playing and larps; today, in the international discourse, they are lumped together with larps.
A runtime story facilitator for a larp, keeping track of plot flow, solving narrative problems, and, if applicable, making rule-system calls. Sometimes but not always one of the larpwrights.
The amount of competence in the ensemble of participants. Running a larp for a group of participants where some have prior experience is much easier than running a larp for a group with only beginners. If there is enough experience in the room, beginners can learn by following the example set by more experienced participants.
A term with multiple meanings, usually relating to how far the participant is engaged with the fiction of the larp. One common usage is in the sense of character immersion, that is, the participant experiencing the diegetic world through the eyes and mind of the character. Sometimes the word is used to mean immersion into the setting or the milieu, as in 360° illusion, or even engagement with the story as in narrative immersion.
In a larp, a participant is pretending to be a character, but is also pretending that everyone else is their character. The feedback from the other participants enhances the character immersion, creating a cycle called inter-immersion.
Annual conference devoted to larp and larp design traveling between Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland that began in Oslo in 1997. The name of the event always reflects the local language. The whole tradition is discussed under the original, Norwegian name.
An infatuation with another participant, or maybe just their character, that a player develops during runtime due to playing a romance with them. See also bleed.
A set of rules for larping if they can be separated from the individual larp, i.e. multiple larps are run with the same system of rules. Some larps use complex rule mechanics to explain what characters can and cannot do, and those rules can be printed as books. This is the opposite of bespoke rules.
The author(s) of a larp. The person or group who defines the larp’s vision, world, workshop structure, characters, etc. A synonym for larp designer from an era before game studies terminology colonised larp discourse. Also, a person who creates larps.
Metaphor for the separate space of playing. The time and space of the larp, in which characters are played and different rules apply than normal; upheld by a social contract.
In larps where the skills of the characters are important, and they are markedly different from those of the participants, these actions are expressed through replacements that simulate things that are impossible, undesired, or too intimate (e.g. violence and sex). In some traditions, mechanics imply points, levels or other numerical systems representing skills.
A dedicated room in a longform larp devoted to acting out scenes out of temporal sequence. Often features a runtime gamemaster. Sometimes also called a blackbox.
Mechanics that allow participants to communicate player to player about their characters, without breaking play. Metatechniques are commonly employed to let participants share their character’s inner thoughts or motivations, or to let participants together establish things about their characters’ shared history and relationship.
A theory of larp design, guiding the designer to make conscious decisions between contradictory virtues of larp design. It consists of a series of faders, such as transparency-secrecy, illustrating that a typical larp cannot feature both high transparency and many secrets.
Narrative is what you are left with after the larp is done, when participants look back on the plot, the story, and the character actions and try to answer the question “what happened in this larp”. The narrative is the choice of events included, and the way they are related to each other, when a story is told. The narrative of a larp continues to change long after the larp has ended.
The acronym is short for non-player character. It refers to a character who follows the larp designer or runtime gamemaster’s instructions. NPCs are typically played by organisers, or a crew dedicated to this purpose. NPCs can be present for the whole duration of the larp, or appear only briefly. The term was inherited from tabletop role-playing games.
Designing in a way that presupposes participation in certain aspects or design elements of the larp, where participants have to actively choose not to participate.
A person who is at least in part responsible for making sure the larp runs. This can include logistics work as well as runtime gamemastering and other activities.
Participants or gamemasters communicating beforehand about the desired playstyle of a scene or larp. This type of calibration is not about the content, but about how the participants approach larp in general and to find common ground: physical or not physical, slow or fast paced, very emotionally intense or with levity.
Sequences of narrative events pre-planned by the larp designers, for example in the form of intrigues written into the character descriptions giving characters motivations for actions during the larp.
Created prior to the run of the larp; often implies that the elements of the larp have been consciously designed and intentionally related to each other.
A collection of legible social behaviours in a given social position. Everyone plays numerous roles (customer, larper, offspring), both out of the larp and within a larp as a character.
Containing few enough rules that the larp can be learned instantly by a novice and that these few rules can be recalled on the spot with little difficulty.
An instance of a full staging and playthrough of a larp. “Some see the first run as a playtest, I see it as a premiere.” (verb) To stage a larp. “We ran House of Cravings last weekend.”
Sandbox design focuses on providing participants with a playable world that reacts to their input, in which participants can freely bring in or create on-site the plots and the drama they find interesting to play out together.
The use of secrecy in larp design is to purposefully prevent participants from knowing things their characters would not know. Common ways to add secrecy are to give participants secret character goals and motivations, and to include surprise happenings during runtime. See also transparency.
North American larp design pattern. Pre-written characters in typically a single-run larp all have often-oppositional goals that they are primarily able to reach by leveraging secrets (hidden information not known to everyone) and powers (game mechanics that permit participants to get other characters to do what their character wishes).
The act of framing and describing who is in a scene, what is happening, and where it is taking place. Hitting particular themes or emotional overtones is particularly desirable.
An abstract larp exercise in which participants physically queue up in order to demonstrate and visualise where their characters lie on a specific status continuum. Examples include oldest to youngest, most powerful to least powerful, or degree of agreement with an ideology.
The theme of a larp is what the larp is about, in contrast to what happens at the larp. Setting clear themes for a larp informs participants about the desired tone and playstyle of the larp, and affects what participants expect they might be likely to experience. Larps divided into acts often have different themes for each act.
The use of transparency in larp design is to purposefully let participants know things their characters would not know. Common ways to add transparency are to let participants read more pre-written characters than just their own, to divide the larp into acts with announced themes, or to tell participants what is going to happen during the larp before it starts. See also secrecy.
The workshop is a structured period of exercises that your participants will do before the start of runtime, to familiarise themselves with each other and the larp mechanics, enabling them to play together. Typically done on-site before runtime.
Cover photo by Massi Hannula, used with permission.
Recently I rediscovered one of my absolute favorite texts about larp, “High Resolution Larping: Enabling Subtlety at Totem and Beyond” by Andie Nordgren. Now, eleven years after it was written, it is a topic well worth returning to.
In the article, Nordgren introduces the concept of high resolution larps as a way of trying to understand the larps Mellan himmel och hav (English: Between Heaven and Sea) (Wieslander et al 2003) and Totem (Andreasen 2007). Mellan himmel och hav was a science fiction game exploring gender, sexuality, and relationships inspired by the writing of Ursula K. Le Guin (Stenros 2010). Totem explored the life of a post-apocalyptic tribe as they carried out their traditional coming-of-age rites (Munthe-Kaas 2010). Nordgren found both of these games to be were powerful, fulfilling experiences. The question she asked herself was, why? The larp community at the time did not have a terminology to describe what made these games special.
The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (book cover image)
High resolution here is an analogy to computer games, in which high resolution is a description of the level of detail in the computer graphics. Nordgren suggests that some larps have higher resolution than others; however, she does not see this as a function of the level of detail of props, character descriptions, etc. Instead, she argues that high resolution games are characterized by high fidelity in two dimensions of play. Firstly, they have a high level of depth (subtlety) in interactions between characters. Secondly, they are able to represent a wide spectrum of the human experience in play. This is defined as width (“High Resolution Larp – Nordic Larp Wiki” n.d.). She presents the game Totem as an example of a high-resolution larp, proposing that “maybe the interaction in the tightly knit tribe at Totem felt so real and powerful because we had managed to create a game world and vision about the game that enabled subtlety across a wide spectrum of possible diegetic interactions.” (p. 91) Her main thesis, as I see it, is that high resolution interactions are (or at least can be) a design feature of a game and not a matter of player skill.
A term that is often used to describe these types of powerful experiences is immersion. However, the exact definition of this proves difficult to pin down, and varies in use and understanding between traditions (Bowman 2017). In this article I will instead define these powerful experiences as flow-like experiences, as discussed in a larp context by (Hopeametsä 2008):
“Flow gives a deep sense of enjoyment through the feeling that we are in control of our actions. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the best moments occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is an end in itself: the act of doing is a reward in itself. This is an accurate description of larp experience at its best.“ (p. 190)
This type of flow-like experience can be found in the heat of combat in a larp focusing on epic battle simulation, or in the glances between lovers in a modern day drama. Different players will seek out different experiences. The strength of the concept of high resolution is that it can be applied equally well in both situations.
In this article, I attempt to summarize Nordgren’s thoughts on high resolution larp and high resolution interaction, and expand on them, mainly from a designers’ perspective. I argue that the terminology of high vs low resolution interactions is a term that is useful for designers in understanding the games they create. I also discuss the idea that rules in themselves act as affordances of interaction and tools for emergent storytelling, beyond simulation and safety mechanisms. While player skill is likely an important factor in enabling high resolution interaction, it will not be covered in this text.
Tools for Lowering the Cognitive Load
Nordgren presents two main tools for achieving high resolution larps: diegetic rules and ensemble play. Diegetic rules are rules that are part of the fictional world and take place within it, i.e. the character and the player both experience the same thing. Ensemble play describes the practice of running communal pre-game workshop where the players co-design the larp.
I find that both diegetic rules and ensemble play focus on depth of interaction, rather than on the width of interaction. However, these tools implicitly broaden the spectrum of interactions that can be included in the game; they allow the designers of a game to explicitly state which interactions are a part of the game, instead of relying on common culture between the players to dictate it. Both of these tools are commonly used in Nordic larp today. However, the idea of differentiating between low and high resolution larps and interactions seems to have been lost to time.
The framework presented for the interaction with the game is a three-fold model of person, player, character. The negotiation between these three and the game itself dictates which topics, and interactions are broached in the game. The person exists in the wider social context of real life and takes on the role of a player in the game. The role of player has a certain set of encouraged modes of behaviour as decided by explicit game rules and common culture. Finally, the player embodies a character, which interacts with the diegesis. Nordgren makes the point that the person constantly needs to recognize at which level any interaction during the game is taking place, and that high resolution play emerges when character-to-character interactions are as unambiguous as possible. That means that the player needs to spend less time thinking about at which level an interaction is going on, thus lowering the overall cognitive load. This in turn serves to make the experience feel more immediate.
Interestingly, the contextualization of experiences during a game as in-character has been indicated to be an important factor in preventing negative bleed-out. The ability of a person to manage their experiences is decided both by their individual capabilities, as well as by the circumstances dictated by the game design (including unforeseen factors). In particular, the cognitive load placed on the player by the game is an important factor here (Leonard and Thurman 2018). However, the purpose of high resolution interactions is a different one. Instead of aiming at acting as a psychological safety mechanism, the purpose is to increase the probability of flow-like experiences. While the two are not mutually exclusive, the intent from a design perspective is different.
An example of how players need to properly contextualize experiences in a game could be that a person in-front of them is screaming at them. The player needs to decide if the person standing in front of them screaming is doing so in-character or not. Preferably the cognitive load of making that decision should be low enough that the player is free to scream back with gusto (or react in whatever way it would make sense for their character).
Diegetic Rules
“We use rules when we cannot trust players to represent a topic inside the game in a safe, coherent way that doesn’t spoil the game. Using diegetic rules is a way of moving these topics back inside the game world rather than excluding them or representing them with rules that are clearly off-game in the player’s head.” (Nordgren 2008)
As can be seen above, rules are presented as a tool for incorporating topics that would otherwise be risky to represent in games. An example of such a rule is ars amandi. Ars amandi represents sensual situations by touching only the hands, arms, and neck (Wieslander 2004). This interaction can be either diegetic or non-diegetic depending on how it is understood in the game. Hence the distinction of diegetic vs. non-diegetic rules.
Portraying Love and Trying New Genders, Eliot Wieslander (Nordic Larp Talks)
The difference between the two lies in whether the player and the characters are experiencing the same thing or not. If the characters experience kissing when the players touch each others’ hands, the hand-touching would constitute a non-diegetic (or simulating) rule. On the other hand, if the fiction of the game is such that touching of the hands would be concidered an erotic act in itself, the discrepancy between the character and player interaction is lessened. For example, in Mellan himmel och hav, touching the arms was erotically charged in the fiction. Thus when players touch each others arms, the player and the character were experiencing the same thing. Nordgren argues that the latter increases the opportunity for high resolution interactions. The reason for this is that it lowers the amount of the players’ mental capacity that has to be spent in interpreting at which level the interaction is occurring.
The resolution of the interaction is a key here. The strength of a rule like ars amandi is that it allows for the expression of a wide spectrum of interaction, from the shy first kiss of a teenager to the wild orgy of a rock band. Compare this to another common diegetic rule: fighting with boffer weapons. Boffer weapons, at least for the most part, will represent lethal violence. This loses out on a large part of the spectrum of human violent experience. Before cold steel, there are many other forms of violence, often progressing from one to the other: first shoving, on to a fist fight, and finally weapons drawn and used. With this in mind, designers can inspect the interactions in their design, and decide on which parts they want to be of high vs. low resolution.
Rules Beyond Safety and Simulation
I am not in complete agreement with Nordgren on the function of rules. I believe that rules in themselves fulfill a wider role than acting as a safety mechanism for the game. The rules in themselves act as affordances of the game, thus encouraging particular modes of behaviour. Introducing boffers into a game increases the probability of there being a fight in the larp. Thus, the rules in themselves have a wider function than acting as a safety or simulation mechanisms.
Both of the techniques described above tend towards simulation; however, the idea of increasing the fidelity of interaction can also be applied from a narrativistic perspective. An example of such a technique is the use of in-character, monologues as an expression of a character’s thoughts and emotions. While the other characters do not hear what is said, the other players will. Thus, they can steer (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015; Pohjola 2015) their own characters interactions with that character to create the most appealing narrative. In this case, the resolution of the narrative itself, as well as that of individual interactions, increases, as more nuances of the characters’ inner lives come into the light. One game using monologues is A Nice Evening with the Family (Westerling et al. 2007). This game adopts nine theater plays into a larp set in a modern-day upper-class birthday celebration.
Steering has been introduced mainly as player skill by Montola et al. (2015); however, they also note that it is something that can be more or less encouraged by the design of a game. The example of the monologue above demonstrates how steering can be facilitated through selection of appropriate rules and techniques.
Rules can also be used in creating emergent narratives. One example of this is the use of acts to divide the time of a game. A Nice Evening with the Family utilizes this rule. In each act, the perfect facade of the happy birthday party, breaks down a bit more, until, in the final act, nothing is kept hidden, and not even murder is out of the question. This way of explicitly stating the narrative structure beforehand lowers the cognitive load of the players in steering for the appropriate interactions in each act. Thus, this structure increases the chance of flow-like experiences.
I appreciate the aesthetics of diegetic rules over non-diegetic rules, that said, I am not convinced that non-diegetic rules cannot achieve the same effect in terms of facilitating flow-like experience. However, such rules add to the game at the player level, rather than the character level, by providing a context through which players can interpret and steer their characters’ actions. The use of acts, as described above, provides and example of how a non-diegetic rule can facilitate steering. However, my understanding is that Nordgren is trying to articulate what she felt has been special about Totem and Mellan himmel och hav, rather than pass judgement on what is a fulfilling larp experience in general.
Ensemble Play
The second tool for enabling high resolution interactions presented by Nordgen is ensemble play. The idea here is that the players, as a group, are taking an active part in designing the game itself, i.e. going through things like communal character creation workshops.
Nordgren focuses on how ensemble play allow the players to negotiate and strengthen the boundaries of the game. This negotiation of a common understanding of game boundaries has the effect of making diegetic interactions less ambiguous. That is, a player needs to spend less energy deciding which interactions are diegetic and which are not. While this is not specifically addressed in the text, I think it can be argued that a significant part of this strengthening of the game boundaries comes from the establishment of trust between the players. Getting to know everyone out of character prior to the game, as well as the act of collaborative creation, establishes trust within the group. To aid in this, many workshops will contain silly elements. As Nordgren (2007) puts it, “When you have acted like screaming monkeys hunting for mango, everyone has already embarrassed themselves in front of each other, and can afford to take game relationships to a more serious level without any significant risk of further embarrassment.” (p. 96)
High Resolution Larping, Andie Nordgren (Nordic Larp Talks)
In a sense, this trust established prior to the game can be seen as a type of currency in the game. This is spent towards ensuring that actions are interpreted at the appropriate level of the game. Returning to the example of a person screaming at you, it is easier to interpret this as an in-character action if you have established a higher level of trust with that player.
An additional component to ensemble play in the form of pre-game workshops is that they blur the line between designers and players. The extent to which this happens depends on the original design. In some cases the players are asked to create a large part of the fiction, from details about the world to their own characters. In other cases, they are only asked to create their own characters. Finally, sometimes there is little novel material generated in the workshops, but instead, players are asked to work on interpreting their characters, relationships, etc.
The co-creational aspect of ensemble play does more than strengthen the game boundaries. It increases the players’ understanding of what interactions to expect in the game. In a game where the players are made co-designers, they will have a greater degree of understanding for the parts that they have designed themselves. It can be argued that this greater degree of understanding increases the resolution of those interactions, and decreases the cognitive load placed on players, hence facilitating flow-like experiences. This suggests that it may be an effective design decision to allow players to co-create the parts of the game which require higher resolution, leaving the low resolution parts entirely in the hands of the designers. Exactly how to design the co-creation process is an important decision for the designer. Too much freedom may move the game away from the designers intent, and/or leave the players facing decision paralysis. On the other hand, to little freedom may reduce the resolution of the interaction.
Two examples of recent games using workshop to enable ensemble play is Here is my Power Button (Atwater 2018) and The Naked Truth (Hanska and Katko 2017). Here is my Power Button is an American freeform game about people forming relationships with an artificial intelligence. The game uses the workshop to familiarize the players with each other (thus building trust), as well as to develop the short characters that are assigned to each player. A large part of the game is played in pairs with one player portraying a human, and the other player an artificial intelligence. In the workshop, the pairs can also discuss what they want to experience in the game, as well as decide on topics to avoid, etc. These pre-game discussions facilitate steering, as discussed earlier.
The Naked Truth is a slow-paced game about friendship in which four Finnish men gather for a sauna evening. In this game, the pre-game workshop takes on an almost ritualistic tone, where short pieces of text are read by the gamemaster as an introduction to each exercise. The exercise in the workshop develops the characters, but also bring the players into the slow contemplative mood of the game itself.
Ensemble play is very common in Nordic larp today. In particular, it appears to be common in games where characters and relationships are the focus rather than world building.
Constructing Shared Realities
Both of the tools presented above have the added benefit of making all interactions more transparent to all players. This point of the high resolution idea is stressed by Nordgren in her presentation of the text in the Nordic Larp Talks series, where she says: “And another interesting question is how can you make interactions between two people visible to others?”
Extending from the idea of high resolution interactions, when it is clear what a particular type of interaction represents, you need to spend less energy in parsing the interactions you see around you. This frees up mental space for players. It can also be used by players to better steer their characters through the fiction, thus, once again facilitating flow-like experiences.
Just a Little Lovin’ (photo, Frida Sofie Jansen)
An example of a technique which makes interaction visible to other players comes from the much celebrated larp Just a Little Lovin’ (Edland and Grasmo 2011). This larp is set in the 1980’s and deals with themes of friendship, desire, and fear of death in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the New York LGBTQ+ community. Just a Little Lovin’ utilizes a technique called the phallus method to simulate sex. In this method, the players use a phallus to simulate sex while fully clothed. This method could be used to emphasize whether a condom was used during sex or not, which played into the setting, as the spread of HIV/AIDS is central to the story (“Phallus – Nordic Larp Wiki” n.d.).
Indices to Icons
Previously in this text, I have discussed how a property of high resolution interactions is that they put a relatively lower cognitive load on the person interpreting an interaction. One way of understanding why this might be is to take a semiotic view on the interaction. With this perspective, we understand everything that is part of a game as signs (of communication).
These signs — everything from the locale and props to interactions — can be interpreted as indexes, iconics, or symbols. Or, indeed, they can be interpreted as any combination of these at the same time. Icons are linked to the concept they represent by being similar to the object, e.g. a boffer sword can be seen as an iconic representation of a real sword. Indices are linked to the concept they represent by having a relationship to what they represent. An example of this is using a cardboard card with a picture of a skull to represent poison. Symbols are understood to relate to a concept only by convention. An example of this is the use of words, which in general have no direct relation to the concept they represent (Loponen and Montola 2004).
Loponen and Montola (2004) write about the interpretation of props in larps, stating, “The problems arise when players are confused as to whether to interpret a sign as an iconic, indexical or symbolic sign“ (p. 42). The same can be said for the interpretation of interactions. Iconic interactions are generally the easiest to interpret, as they are close to “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG), i.e. boffer fighting represents a real fight. Iconic interactions place a low cognitive load on the player. As interactions become more indexical, i.e. touching of the hands represents sex, the interpretation of exactly what is happening becomes more difficult. The cognitive load consequently becomes higher. According to Loponen and Montola’s model, meaningful role-play will occur when the players’ subjective diegesis — i.e. their understanding of the fiction in the head of each player — are equifinal. That is, their understandings of a situation are similar enough to have indistinguishable consequences. (Loponen and Montola 2004).
Returning to the concept of high resolution, we see how diegetic rules work by making symbolic or indexical interactions iconic. Touching each other’s hands no longer represent having sex in the diegesis; it is having sex in the diegesis. Alternatively, ensemble play works with teaching the correct interpretation of symbolic and indexical concepts. By knowing the interpretations well, players need to spend less mental energy on parsing them once the game starts. Furthermore, it hopefully makes the players’ interpretations of the interactions equifinal, which according to Loponen and Montola, is critical for role-playing games to work.
High Resolution and Bleed
Nordgren closes with discussing the question of how much we want games to resemble reality with regards to relationships. She posits that the higher the resolution of the game, the more lifelike these relationships are bound to become. When the resolution of the interaction increases, the boundary between player and person becomes thinner, thus increasing the risk of the game impacting real life. This concept of things leaking through the semi-permeable boundaries between character, player, and person, are commonly referred to as bleed in today’s Nordic Larp discourse (Bowman 2015; Kemper 2017; Hugaas 2019). Strikingly, in Playground Worlds (2008) in which the text was first published, this term is not used to describe this phenomenon; however, in the foreword to the reprinting of the essay in The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (2014), Nordgren brings up the term and identifies that the text formed a foothold into that part of the Nordic Larp discourse.
Closing remarks
The term high resolution larp has not caught on to describe specific games. However, the idea of high resolution interactions is one well worth bringing back into the discussion.
High resolution interactions can be understood as a way for larp designers to better understand the tools they have at their disposal. Nordgren identifies diegetic rules and ensemble play as two components of high resolution larp. I believe that these can be understood from a slightly different perspective.
Diegetic rules should be seen as one of the tools in the designers’ toolbox – one that can be used to create high resolution interactions by transforming symbolic or indexical interactions into iconic ones. This is likely to prove successful in games that focus on simulation, either in the sense of having 360 degree aesthetics, or in the sense of simulating relationships and personal interactions. This may be why they worked so well in Mellan himmel och hav and Totem.
Totem (photo, Rasmus Høgdall)
If we change the perspective from simulation of character-to-character interactions to the narrative structure of the game, rules are still interesting. In this context rules can enable steering on the parts for the player, which in turn increases the resolution of the narrative. Thus, both ars amandi in Totem, and monologing in A Nice Evening with the Family, are examples of high resolution interactions. The first increases the resolution of the character-to-character interactions, while the second one increases the resolution of the player-to-game interaction.
Ensemble play on the other hand is mainly a facilitator of high-resolution interactions. Its main purpose is the establishment of trust within a group. However, it also has a number of auxiliary functions, such as teaching the game, setting the mood, etc. As noted previously, ensemble play in the form of pre-game workshops is very common today in Nordic larp, probably owing to the fact that it has strong positive effects on the game, as well as having many practical benefits.
To analyze the level of resolution (depth) in an interaction, consider a keyboard, with one or more keys available to the musician. It is possible to make music with a single key, for example pressing it to create a rhythm. If we add more keys it suddenly becomes possible to play a melody. However, just as the music is limited in which keys are used at a particular time by the musical key and time signature, the designer can select which interactions to make available to the players in order to create the desired experience. Incorporating the concept of resolution into a design framework, such as the FAtE (From Activity to Experience) model (Back 2016), could prove an interesting way forward. Briefly, the FAtE model suggests that the larp designer creates a construct (e.g. characters, workshops, etc) that encourages certain activities. These activities are what creates an experience in the player. Exactly how to create constructs that elicit high resolution interactions, beyond what has already been discussed in this text, requires further study.
Cognitive load has been a key concept discussed throughout this article. While important, I think it provides only part of the explanation of why some interactions are more likely to produce flow-like experiences than others. As always, larps are very complex interaction systems, and understanding the whole from the parts will only provide part of the truth. Furthermore, I recognize that the concept of flow-like experiences is in itself inadequate in capturing what a good roleplaying experience is, however I think that it has served its purpose in this text.
When Nordgren wrote her original text, she wished to express what was special about larps such as Totem. The language to describe it was lacking, so she came up with the high resolution analogy. Language lets us not only understand the world, but also shape it. I believe that by adding the resolution analogy to our vocabulary and refining it further, we can make more powerful, fulfilling games in the future.
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Sara Engström for reading this text and providing feedback. I would also like to thank Sarah Lynne Bowman for her excellent editing and feedback, pushing me to take this text much further than I could have done on my own.
Ludography
A Nice Evening With the Family (2007): Anna Westerling, Anders Hultman, Tobias Wrigstad, Elsa Helin, Anna-Karin Linder and Patrik Balint. Flen, Sweden.((A Nice Evening with the Family was redesigned by Tor Kjetil Edland, Elli Garperian, Kajsa Greger, Susanne Gräslund, Anders Hultman, Caroline Holgersson, Frida Sofie Jansen, Maria Ljung, Gustav Nilsson, Martin Rother-Schirren, Daniel Sundström, Anna Westerling and Emma Öhrström in 2018, and subsequently re-run in 2018 and 2019.))
Here is My Power Button (2017): Brodie Atwater. USA.
Just a Little Lovin’ (2011): Tor Kjetil Edland, Hanne Grasmo. Lunde Leirsted, Oslo, Norway.
Mellan himmel och hav (2003): Emma Wieslander, Katarina Björk & Ars Amandi. Stockholm, Sweden. Eng. “Between Heaven and Sea”.
The Naked Truth (2017): Arttu Hanska and Joonas Katko. Finland.
Totem (2007): Peter S. Andreasen, Rasmus Høgdall, Mathias Kromann Rode, Peter Munthe-Kaas and Kristoffer Thurøe. Copenhagen/Randers, Denmark.
Hopeametsä, Heidi. 2008. “24 Hours in a Bomb Shelter: Player, Character and Immersion in Ground Zero.” In Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, 187–98. Ropecon ry.
Loponen, Mika, and Markus Montola. 2004. “A Semiotic View on Diegesis Construction.” In Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, edited by Markus Montola, Stenros, and Jaakko, 39–51. Ropecon ry.
Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta. 2015. “The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together.” In The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted, 107–17. Rollespilsakademiet.
Munthe-Kaas, Peter. 2010. “Totem – Body Language and Tribalism in High Definition.” In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 255–61. Fëa Livia.
Nordgren, Andie. 2008. “High Resolution Larping: Enabling Subtlety at Totem and Beyond.” In Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 91–101. Ropecon ry.
Pohjola, Mike. 2015. “Steering For Immersion in Five Nordic Larps – A New Understanding of Eläytyminen.” In The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted, 95–105. Rollespilsakademiet.
Stenros, Jaakko. 2010. “Mellan Himmel Och Hav.” In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 158–67. Fëa Livia.
Wieslander, Emma. 2004. “Rules of Engagement.” In Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, edited by Markus Montala and Jaakko Stenros, 181–86. Ropecon ry.
Cover photo: Arm painting at Totem (photo, Mathias Kromann Rode).
Larp is a medium that helps us co-create intricate shared fictions through subjective understandings of the story world around us. Meanwhile, large story franchises – the Marvel Universe, the Potterverse, the Star Wars Expanded Universe, etc. – both steadily add content to their story universes and also canonize (and copyright) this content. Larping in a franchise or adjacent to a franchise means that players can rapidly build competence and familiarity with the material. Yet franchises encourage fans to establish canons and traditions that occasionally contradict the flexibility of the larp medium. This essay addresses tensions related to larps that aspire to create larger story universes and/or draw on the fandom related to larger franchises. I argue that larp organizers and designers must attend to how their events interact with fandom behaviors, especially the impulse to 1) canonize specific practices, characters, and events, and 2) manufacture second-order knowledge and products related to the game. Both fan practices, while in many cases beneficial to the larp, have the potential to unintentionally supplant designer principles and goals. It will be helpful for us to figure out how to wield this double-edged sword of mass culture for larps in the future.
Transmedia and Franchises
In our current socio-historical moment, immersive story worlds connected to billion-dollar global franchises such as the Potterverse let us live and breathe the fiction thanks to those dollars purchasing ubiquity and high-quality design. By “ubiquity,” I mean that it becomes hard to avoid knowing at least something about a particular franchise, given that the material is everywhere and being discussed by a critical mass of people. By “high-quality design,” I mean that the money involved has given the universe an undeniable “look” that becomes part and parcel to its brand and affordances. Design has re-asserted its authority in the corporate world (Rhodes, 2015), as franchises abide by the truism that Harry Potter isn’t the same without robes and wands or Star Wars isn’t the same without lightsabers and Death Stars. Merchandising then ensures such objects can be purchased on the open market. These franchises engage us precisely because they catch our attention, provide an easily accessible basis of the premise (i.e., Harry Potter is about wizards trying to get through school while also investigating Voldemort’s potential return), and can be found everywhere. The last point would deem them “transmedia.”
Cover of Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins (2008).
Transmedia, or the instantiation and narration of events in a story world across multiple media platforms, pervade today’s globalized society. Coined by Henry Jenkins in his widely cited book Convergence Culture (2006), “transmedia” describes a climate of media production in which franchises seed fan participation: “The circulation of media content––across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders––depends heavily on consumers’ active participation” (Jenkins 3). These consumers, or “fans,” are prompted to seek more information about and connect the dots between the content of a G.I. Joe movie, a G.I. Joe comic book, and a G.I. Joe action figure. The business model is simple: get a niche audience to emotionally invest in your content on at least one platform, and then support these devoted fans as they promote this fictional universe and consume related products. Much as we would like to dismiss transmedia as purely cynical, however, the fan practices of promotion and consumption cultivated by the business model (and transmedia’s ease of accessibility) affect our storytelling practices in fundamental ways.
Arran Gare (2016) has argued recently that most of our societal rewards now stem from a “dematerialized economy,” and that our habitus, our whole way of life, encourages us to divorce ourselves from reality as much as possible. Fans spend huge portions of their lives laboring on behalf of immersive story worlds, largely uncompensated for their efforts (De Kosnik, 2013). Fans write fan fiction (“fanfic”) about their favorite characters, much of which is readable for free on http://archiveofourown.org or Tumblr. They crowdsource and maintain Wikis and “story bibles” that are then referenced by the producers of the content, who are in turn pressured to keep continuity with previous “facts” in the story worlds. Pierre Lévy observes that this “circuit” formed between authors, readers, spectators, producers, creators and interpreters blurs the distinction between them all, as they each work to support the others (Lévy, quoted in Jenkins, 2006, 95). In the end, genre fiction and transmedia story worlds guide us to a pleasurable divorce from reality: they give us clear characters to follow, a language to communicate, and a pre-established set of expectations about the world that give us easy entry into a complex fictional world. When transmedia spreads to larp as a platform, however, the complexity of that world, its corresponding fandom, and the practices that fandom engenders all strain against the possibilities that larp affords.
Larp is above all an ephemeral medium, heavily reliant on the narrative and social emergence that happens when you get actual humans together in a space (Montola, 2012). The first-person audience (Sandberg, 2004) of the form ensures that each player experience within a larp is radically subjective, may not correspond with agreed-upon “facts” about the world, and is not readily reproducible. Yet we also have within us the impulse to make larp a canonical medium, i.e. one that builds worlds with their own intricate history and weight. Although the 360° illusion so popular in larp theory is but a myth – “a complete environment alone does not generate better role-playing” (Koljonen, 2007) – the guiding principle that one should larp in a well-conceived, deeply structured aesthetic world is endemic to most larp cultures.
Photo of the author in his Inside Hamlet Stormguard costume as Colonel Perdue.
We have a couple of practices that we regularly use to establish “world facts” in our ephemeral medium. We articulate them in large PDFs and books, writing dozens or even hundreds of pages of text normally not readily available during role-play that we hope some people have committed to memory. We create visual media, physical artifacts, fictional maps, acoustic environments – anything to give players a foothold on what the fictional world would look, feel, and sound like. We also form small groups on social media and strategize. In Inside Hamlet (Ericsson, Pedersen and Koljonen, 2015), for example, I was given the character of Colonel Perdue, commander of the Stormguard. Given that we wanted to make them “seem real,” we had a four-person Facebook group in which we co-created fictional aspects of the Stormguard that were to come up during play, including our own insignia patches and musical anthem. These aspects formed part of what Moyra Turkington calls our “socket” (Turkington, 2006), or the “place where people plug themselves into a game and give and take their focus and energy to and from.” We invested, and received returns on that investment. We gladly invented this ephemera to secure our character immersion and help others with theirs, but we also did not expect for this material to survive the run: it was for the Stormguard’s use in Run 1, and we let the Stormguard in Run 2 come up with its own material. We assumed that none of our own world building should impose any further on other runs as a matter of etiquette, that our fictional “facts” would remain an artifact of our play, rather than as aspects of the game that future players must attend to.
The act of “attending to” anything in a larp is not neutral. As J Li and Jason Morningstar (2016) recently argue it costs player energy and cognitive load to keep the fiction in focus. “Players need their working memory to fictionalize,” they write. “Structure plot so that each person only has 4-5 things to keep track of” (19). The same could be said of a story world. If I need to know off the top of my head that engineers are categorically unable to revive the ship’s computer, or even the name of that one CoW House with the unspeakable drinks (Sendivogius), then I am often committing working memory to internalize that information. If a fact about a game is recorded on some Facebook thread or some fan Wiki and I cannot readily access it in character, there is a question as to whether or not that ephemera will even exist in the duration of the larp. Transmedia from major franchises actually help us secure more fiction in our brains, as we have engaged with that story universe before and have more of its nuances stored in our long-term memory. Yet much of that readily-available fiction vanishes when creating even a re-skinned version of a franchise: new words must be remembered, new fictional events attended to, and new casts of characters with their own personalities met and judged. If a larper has to keep a “story bible” in their head as they try to navigate to find food in a place unfamiliar to the player while also navigating their complex relationship with a half-hydra, chances are that the story universe information will be forgotten.
The Case of the Wizardry-verse and the Magimundi
In 2014, the wildly successful Polish-Danish blockbuster larp College of Wizardry (CoW, Nielsen, Dembinski and Raasted et al. 2014) took the larp community by storm with its high concept and low bar for entry: players get to play wizards in a Harry Potter-esque school for several days in Czocha Castle, co-creating immersive fiction as they compete for the coveted House Cup. The “-esque” suffix in “Harry Potter-esque” is important. The organizers had to attend to Warner Brothers’ request to separate their story universe from that of the famous wizard school series due to copyright following the first 3 runs (CoW1-3). The transition from the Potterverse to the College of Wizardry-verse for CoW4 and on (or, for that matter, the Magimundi for the American adaptation New World Magischola (NWM, Brown and Morrow, 2016) proved a model lesson in filing the serial numbers off of a well-known franchise. “Muggles” became “mundanes,” Hogwarts was wiped off the map, and suddenly necromancy took on an increasingly central role as a story device.
On the one hand, a player from CoW1 in the fan-expanded Potterverse reported that having all the names, creatures, places, and events already established in the world as canon “[made] it possible to play almost without preparation and without having to remember background text, if only you knew your HP.” On the other hand, players of the post-Potterverse CoW and NWM runs remarked how much space had been established for them. Peter Svensson writes that “the emphasis on diversity and acceptance is something where NWM [and CoW] shone. I’m a gay man. The Harry Potter books could only hint at the existence of people like me. But NWM firmly established that this is a world where I exist. Where people like me are and have been part of the historical record.” The framing of our fictional lives matters. Content and expectations around the immersive story world let players know what is and isn’t possible to see happen during play.
Nevertheless, fan culture also sets expectations, with CoW and NWM taking center stage as larps adapted from the propositions of the larger Potterverse. One fandom expectation example is the concept of the OTP (One True Pairing), a term from fanfic meaning one’s emotional commitment to two franchise characters being destined to be together. In Harry Potter, for example, popular OTPs include Sirius Black and Prof. Snape, Harry and Hermione, and so forth. This is fine in fanfic, but becomes an issue when one as a player wishes to have an OTP-type experience in a larp. At the end of CoW and NWM, there is a dance that involves characters showing up in pairs or groups. Players who privately reported expecting something resembling a OTP experience were often sorely disappointed that the relationship did not go the way they (as a player) had imagined it, and were unable to fateplay((http://fate.laiv.org/fate/en_fate_ef.htm)) or “play to lose”((https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Playing_to_Lose)) as a means of controlling the situation. Larps promise living out one’s fantasies, but the expectations that come with those fantasies must be managed around the natural emergence within the game. Fandom does not necessarily prepare us for this.
DJ Dizzywands at New World Magischola 1. Photo by Sarah Lynne Bowman for Learn Larp, LLC.
Another example from CoW and NWM involved canonization. During a pre-game video call with NPCs from a previous run who would participate in my run of NWM, I mentioned in passing that I might be able to step in and do some music at the dance, in keeping with organizer expectations for us to use the affordances of the playspace. One former NPC was shocked: “But… but… DJ Dizzywands!” they stammered, thinking it inconceivable that anyone but the designated NPC whom they enjoyed from a previous run could possibly help run the dance. Although DJ Dizzywands –– played by Austin Shepard in a smashing wizard’s cloak –– did not exist in any of the game materials, he had become canonized as part of the NWM experience.
Finally, both CoW and NWM are exploring the marketing of merchandise, as one does with a franchise: control of one’s product across platforms creates multiple financial outlets for fans to show their support. The problem arises when the making and marketing of merchandise confuses relevant information about the game with fandom. A NWM player lamented to me about the constant upselling of the game through products such as T-shirts, wands, and supplemental world materials, such that one of their friends dropped out of the game “when the ‘game’ became no longer apparent amidst a marketing machine.” Second-order products, such as fan art or homemade merchandise, suddenly fall into the gray area of having to be “endorsed” or not by the larp, and can help further canonization of specific aspects of the game that may or may not remotely resemble someone else’s first-person audience experience. While larp is a means of expression and a catalyst for other forms of expression, expressing oneself through material means about a larp also has transmedia fan assumptions underlying it.
Responses to Transmedia
Larp communities have been responding to franchises for decades, and in various ways inventing interesting strategies to the dilemmas around fandom. To escape the tyrannical ubiquity of J.R.R. Tolkien-esque fantasy worlds, for example, Mike Pohjola created what he calls “folk fantasy” to re-localize and re-nationalize globalized transmedia products. “Could we retell our own myths and say something relevant to our time?” he asks (Pohjola 51). Täällä Kirjokannen alla (2011) was a larp derived from specifically Finnish folk legends, which ultimately served as a means of reinvigorating a local storytelling culture. In this capacity, neither overt, garish nationalism nor fandom serves as a proper response to the material: larpers had to negotiate their own national myths and the fact that deep, immersive story universes ultimately came from somewhere, while also being cautious against the exclusionary idea that these folk legends are “superior” to others. The larp embraced specificity over ubiquity, and emergent qualities of these narratives rather than relying on fandom and franchise familiarity to drive play. Eliot Wieslander’s Mellan himmel och hav (2002) and the Danish team behind Totem (Schønnemann Andreasen and thurøe et al., 2007) both heavily relied on workshops and co-present co-creation((i.e., players actually in the space working through their characters, rather than on social media)) to formulate ways to make science-fiction stories and stories of indigenous societies respectively neither cliché nor too abstract for the players to grasp.
One can also turn to rules and regulation as part of the design. The common practice of using social media groups to structure in-game relations can also prompt player-characters to start play via post and even prompt the organizers to moderate or intervene such play. Having a clear policy about pre-game play and the in-game larp consequences allows organizers to not have to attend to every piece of fanfic or “what-if” scenario created by the players. Establishing that no single player has rights over a specific character in the fiction is also important: these characters are roles, not canonical figures, unless designed that way. Merchandise should above all serve play or memories of play, and memes and merchandise that point to specific moments in-game should generally have the run title (NWM2, CoW4, Inside Hamlet Run 2, etc.) somehow associated with it, so as not to create the impression that this is an eternal moment of the “classic” version of the game. Better still, organizers can connect multiple images of the same character or comparable situation across multiple runs, so as to engage with the dynamic of cosplay, in which one celebrates the labor of performance across multiple different representations of emergence (Scott, 2015). Such strategies assist prospective players in imagining themselves into their roles, rather than championing and canonizing the ephemeral acts of the past players.
Conclusion
Although franchise story worlds function through ubiquity and high-quality design, most larps do not. Our internal fictions, however cool, largely dissipate beyond war stories and actual-play reports. Few know our larp worlds, and fewer still keep track of all their details. This is fine, for it removes the pressure to establish anything we’ve done beyond the ephemerality of play. However, as we lay down track in our story worlds, we should be mindful of our impulses to canonize the configuration and results of our play across multiple runs of a game not designated a campaign. Canonization creates more laws, facts, and general overhead for other players to deal with later on, and it serves to cheapen future experiences by according social capital only to those who played the “classic” earlier runs. Especially in a climate in which Kickstarters and global simultaneous ticket release dates determine who gets into which larps, the players who had the benefit of a fast Internet connection should not get to pre-determine storyworld aspects of the game for other runs beyond what the organizers and designers have already established. Each larp run in a non-campaign larp benefits from its “reset” switch. Furthermore, fan-created ephemera about the game can comment on it and its world, but should not be confused with the material of the larp itself, which remains yet-to-be-determined.
Inside Hamlet 2017 promotional photo. Photo courtesy of Participation Design Agency.
As larp moves into becoming a platform for well-worn fan properties – albeit re-invented without the burden of their original franchise – we must now figure out the contradictory balance between being a good fan and a good larper. A good fan knows the story world inside and out, perhaps contributing their own small portion of it in keeping with the general spirit of the fiction. A good larper knows that the rules, design, objects, and setting of a larp are but playthings for their imagination and the co-creative space of their fellow players. They understand the intent and spirit of a component, and use it for emergent play as it develops. A good fan, however, also speculates and chooses favorites from among the various fictional options available. A good larper, at least for the time being, leaves much up to chance encounters in play, leading sometimes to bittersweet results after months of preparation. Pre-playing as the good fan can sabotage the good larper; the vast storyworld overhead becoming instead a ballast as pre-game role-playing and the established canon of previous runs take on more importance than an individual run itself. Moreover, seeing certain players as the only ones able to inhabit the “classic” versions of characters inhibits the emergent properties of a larp’s design in favor of establishing a rarefied high court of “key” larpers and their social politics. Merchandising of franchise-related materials pulls in much-needed revenue, but also puts fetish objects at the center of organizer attention, the proverbial act of “selling the T-shirt” perhaps overtaking the event itself.
Now: much of this argumentation could constitute my overly precious attempt to preserve some particular larp aesthetic in the face of imminent commercialization, such as through Disney’s impending licensed Star Wars larp attractions or expansions of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, but I find the corporation cooptation of the larp artform much less a threat than the colonization of our minds by fandom. Larp is a medium through which we can say anything we want, provided negotiation with the design, the organizers, and one’s co-players. We must therefore be agentic and proactive with respect to our designs, adopting Bjarke Pedersen’s (2016) ethos that not only is design everything, but that what we call “tradition” is its opposite. When we unintentionally encourage players to use fandom interests to patrol other players, then that is, indeed, the fandom tradition sneaking into our larp design. Whatever Jedi Knights or their analogues happen to do or be in our larps, they must follow the design of the larp first and the dictates of the franchise second. Whatever strict adaptation one wants to make of the Doctor Who universe, the larp should include the points of departure in its initial write-up, lest competing fandoms overtake the preparation and implementation of the game. Whatever character you thought you played well in one run of the larp, the next person will have an entirely different interpretation and that will be perfectly fine. As we calibrate our play with each other, let us know that our impulses to create fan Wikis, fanfic, speculation about what characters will and won’t do, fan-favorite actors and portrayals, and second-order merchandise have an overall effect on the larp in question and larp culture in general. Worldbuilding is an act we can undertake together, but let us recognize our fellow players first before the franchise.
Bibliography
De Kosnik, Abigail. “Fandom as Free Labor.” Digital Labor. Edited by Trebor Scholz. New York,US: Routledge, 2013. Pg 98-111.
Gare, Arran. “Beyond Modernism and Postmodernism: The Grand Narrative of the Age of Re- Embodiments.” Edited by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer, Vito De Lucia, and Sian Sullivan. New York,US: Routledge, 2016. Pg 27-46.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York,US: New York University Press, 2006.
Koljonen, Johanna. “Eye-Witness to the Illusion: An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role- Playing.” Lifelike. Edited by Jesper Donnis, Line Thorup, and Morten Gade. Copenhagen,DK: Projektgruppen KP07. 175-187.
Montola, Markus. On the Edge of the Magic Circle. Ph.D. Dissertation. Tampere: University of Tampere, 2012.
Pohjola, Mike. “Folk Fantasy: Escaping Tolkien.” States of Play. Edited by Juhana Petersson. Helsinki: Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura, 2012. 48-53.
Sandberg, Christopher. “Genesi. Larp Art, Basic Theories.” Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination. Edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros. Helsinki: Ropecon, 2004. Pg 264-288.
Scott, Suzanne. “‘Cosplay is Serious Business’: Gendering Material Fan Labor on Heroes of Cosplay.” Cinema Journal 54.3 (Spring 2015): 146-155.
Cover photo: The heads of New World Magischola, Nibelungen, and College of Wizardry speak before those assembled at The Challenge. Photos by Made by Iulian Dinu, Nicky Sochor and Brent Rombouts for Dziobak. Photo has been cropped.
The companion publication for the Knutpunkt 2018 international larp conference wants your contribution! We are now accepting submissions for all kinds of digital content. In this announcement you can find details on what kinds of content we are looking for, what the themes are for the 2018 companion, and how to learn more about contributing to the Companion publication.
Concept
The Companion will first and foremost be a digital publication, including all kinds of media. We have no limits on what kind of content we accept, as long as it’s technically possible to be published online. A text, a video, a podcast, a computer game, a piece of music…? Send us your suggestions! We cannot promise to publish all submitted content, but we will consider everything.
Content will be published on Nordiclarp.org, on a weekly basis over the months leading up to Knutpunkt 2018. The idea is to let the community digest and discuss the companion content even before Knutpunkt. We hope this can inspire the conference participants, as well as create interesting conversations and exchanges in other spaces before, during and after the conference.
There will also be a print on demand book available with a selection of articles. We aim to have this ready so that it can be ordered around the time that content is beginning to come out online. Only magazine style texts will be considered for the printed book, you can read more about this format further down.
Themes
The theme of the Knutpunkt 2018 conference is “Shuffling the Deck”. We have chosen to interpret that as highlighting the diverse nature of larp, wanting to showcase a multitude of themes in a variety of formats. We especially want to lift the scenes that have been less visible in previous Knutpunkt publications.
The publication will have five main themes, roughly mirroring the five tracks of the conference. We encourage you to use them as starting points for your contributions and be as creative as possible!
♠️ Spades
Larp analysis, discussion and reflection.
♦️ Diamonds
Larp design tools, tips and tricks.
♣️ Clubs
The practicalities of organizing larp.
♥️ Hearts
Participant stories and designers’ post-mortems.
🃏 Joker
Discussion and reflections on issues within and opportunities for the (Nordic) larp community.
Contributing
To contribute to the publication, please read the full Call for Content on the Knutpunkt 2018 website.
Johannes Axner is the founder and Editor in Chief of Nordiclarp.org, an online magazine and knowledge portal about larp.
Annika Waern is a professor in the field of Human–computer interaction at the department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is an established and seasoned researcher and author on the topic of games in general and larp specifically.
Editing Team
Besides the main editors, the talented editors of Nordiclarp.org will help edit the content.
Contact
Any questions, ideas or feedback can be sent by email to:
From the Julio Plaza’s proposition that, based on the concept of open work of Umberto Eco, categorises the relationship author-work-reception in three degrees, and the division in cultural events in reception, interaction and participation, seen in the research of Kristoffer Haggren, Elge Larsson, Leo Nordwall and Gabriel Widing, this study plans to compare three works called The Road Not Taken: a 1916’s poem by Robert Frost, a 2008’s larp by Mike Young and a 2014’s music piece by André Mestre. Besides that framework, this research uses the notion of game from communication and culture theorist Vilém Flusser, which divides them between open and closed. In open games, the translation process would be seen as a modification of the structure of rules in a given game. From this theoretical basis, the objective is to draw a relationship between the open work and open game. In this context, the poem would stand as receptive work, the music piece as interactive work and the larp as participatory work.
Three Different Roads Not Taken: A Brief Presentation of the Works
In 1916, the US poet Robert Frost (1874- 1963) published a collection of poems called Mountain Interval. The opening poem was called The Road Not Taken. In general, the four stanzas of the poem make up the story of a traveller who finds himself at an impasse after the initial event in which “two roads diverged in a yellow wood”. (Frost, 1916, p. 9) After watching each of the paths, the traveller chooses one. However, he keeps thinking about the other. The end of the poem perpetuates a puzzling atmosphere, since the poem ends complementing the initial starting sentence, pointing that “two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference”. (p. 9)
In 2008, the larp The Road Not Taken was created by US game designer Mike Young, described by him as “a game of emotions and decision” (Young, 2008, p. 3). In his script, designed for six to twelve players, each one will be the main character in a scene of about ten minutes, where he or she will be in a moment of critical decision. The other participants represent voices that indicate different views or decisions to the protagonist. According to the author,((Although the relationship with the Frost poem is not made clear in the larp script, it was clarified by Young in an email conversation on 05.03.2016.)) the influence of Frost occurs since both the poem and the larp are about decision making, so it seemed appropriate to give an eponymous title.
In 2014, the Brazilian composer André Mestre writes The Road Not Taken, an “open piece for two instrumentalists” (Mestre, 2014, p. 2). It is clear that Frost inspired more than merely the title, since:
(…) The two voices contained in the work poetically represent the path taken and the path that could have been. One acts upon the other as a shadow, a memory, an anxiety. It is my hope that the spirit of the poem can also be extended to alllevels of decision-making of the piece, especially those pertaining to performance. Contemplate the multitude of options at every moment, take the road less traveled.
Mestre, 2014, p. 2
Mestre’s proposal extends beyond the literary sphere and the musical sphere to the imagery sphere, since the very music score escapes from a more orthodox pattern to merge itself with the poem and the wood’s image where (in Frost’s poem) the decision was taken, as seen in Figure 1.
In order to immerse the instrumentalists deeper in the experience of playing the roles of path taken and path that could have been, Mestre suggests the use of live electronics, as pointed out by indicating that the piece:
(…) makes use of two electroencephalogram headsets, to be used in real time by the performers. These headsets are responsible for measuring and monitoring focus levels and performative efforts. This data is then used to process and trigger recordings that are constantly being made during the performance. Both performers should be microphoned. Each of them, however, can only access the other’s recordings — “playing” the other on the level of the mind. It is a poetic metaphor for our constant pursuit of alternatives, of “what ifs?”, of trying to go beyond our fate of always having to choose one instead of the other.
Mestre, 2014, p. 3
Thus, we present here (although superficially) three different works. Two of them, despite being made to other artistic platforms (music and visual elements in the case of Mestre, the larps’ dramatisation in the case of Young), derived from the Frost poem.
Figure 1 – Excerpt from The Road Not Taken music score. Source: Mestre, 2014.
A Road Less Travelled in Translation
For the scholar Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), a Jewish Czech who spent 32 years of his lifein Brazil, the game is a comprehensive concept, considered “all systems composed of elements combined according to rules” . (Flusser, 1967 p. 2) Flusser (1967) calls repertoire the set of game elements, while the set of rules is called structure. Competence in this case would be “all the possible combinations of the repertoire in the structure” (p. 2), while the universe of the game would be all of such combinations already performed. In games where repertoire and structure are unchangeable, “competence and universe tend to coincide. When this happens, the game is over”. (p. 3) Once defined, Flusser’s relevant terms for this study (repertoire, structure, competence and universe), it is observed that:
The game’s competences, although specific, given their disposal, tend to interpenetrate themselves. There is a tendency for anthropophagy between games. In spaces of anthropophagic interpenetration of competences there is the possibility of translation, and does not exist outside of these spaces. And the translation is always a modification of structures.
Flusser, 1967, p. 5
In this manner, one arrives at one of the focal points of this study: the notion of translation. In the works cited, understanding that we are dealing with three different formats (literature, music and larp), there is a translation process. The common element in all of them is the notion raised by taking a road. Each of the works (or each of the games, adopting Flusser’s term) fits the elements to its structure, thus creating a completely different game, yet with elements that refer to each other. Thus, from the element taking a road, it allows to relate the polysemy of the poem both the decision-making of performers and visual presentation of the musical play score as in the creation process of a narrative in larp.
This position could be supported by a separate definition. For the Spanish multimedia artist Julio Plaza (1938-2003), the translation process between the three briefly outlined works could be considered an Intersemiotic translation, a term supported by the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), which defines it as the interpretation of a sign system to another (Jakobson apud Plaza, 2003a). Plaza extends the concept of Jakobson, because for him the Intersemiotic translation would be an artistic practice, since it is:
(…) a critical and creative practice in the historicity of the means of production and re-production, such as reading, metacreation, action over event structures, dialogue of signs, synthesis and rewriting of history. It means, as thought in signs, such as tra c of meanings, as transcreation forms in historicity.
Plaza, 2003a, p. 14
The common point between both hypotheticals is that the translation would refer not only to an adaptation of one language to another. Because they have different rules, they form different games.
The (Gradually) Open Works: Reception, Interaction and Participation
Although not the aim of this study, exhausting or even encompassing the myriad of possibilities related to the concept of translation, the notion presented here allows us to bring to light the second of its focal points: the concept of open work. Coined by Italian philosopher and semiologist Umberto Eco (1932-2016), open work refers to the idea of a text that conveys not only one interpretation. In these works, “a plurality of meanings coexist in one significant”. (Eco, 1991, p. 22)
The concept of Eco concerns the subjectivity of enjoyment, and not the objective structure of a work. Thus, while closed (in the sense of finished) as an author creation, Eco points out that:
(…) in the act of reaction to the web of stimuli and understanding of their relations, each spectator brings a concrete existential situation, a particularly conditioned sensitivity, a determined culture, tastes, trends, personal biases, so that the understanding of original form is found in an individually designed perspective.
Eco, 1991, p. 40
Plaza (2003b) starts on this definition of Eco to demonstrate three different degrees of openness in the work. To Plaza, the fruition of the work would have different degrees of participation of the spectator, following a designed pathway between passive participation, active participation, perceptive participation and interactivity.
In this logic, the first degree of openingwould be the open work advocated by Eco, characterised by polysemy, ambiguity, multiplicity of readings and wealth of meanings (Plaza, 2003b). The second degree of opening, in turn, was unrelated to the ambiguity, which is related by Plaza with a passive participation. Instead, counts with the active and/or perceptive participation of the viewer, aiming to bridge the gap between creator and viewer, using as tools playful participation, randomness and creativity of the viewer (Plaza, 2003b). Flourishing as a counterpoint to the mass culture, this “art of participation” (Plaza, 2003b, p. 14) understand the perception of the spectator as a re-creation of the work, as opposed to the polysemy of the first degree of opening. Finally, the third degree of opening would refer to the interactivity, placed by Plaza as the art related, above all, to contemporary technologies. Here, artists were “more interested in the processes of artistic creation and aesthetic exploration than in the production of finished works” (Plaza, 2003b, p. 17), so that both the artist and the work “only exist for effective participation the public” (Plaza, 2003b, p. 19). Because of this requirement of a receiver so that there is the author and the work, Plaza also gives this degree of opening the name of communicational art as it “allows a creative communication based on the principles of synergy, constructive collaboration, critical and innovative”. (Plaza, 2003b, p. 17)
Synthetically, the different degrees of openness proposed by Plaza could then be called in accordance with the inclusion of the viewer in the work on:
First degree of openness: passive participation;
Second degree of openness: active/ perceptive participation;
Third degree of openness: interactive participation.
However, polysemy also affects the very theoretical concepts that underlie it. This is the case of the positioning of Swedish researchers Kristoffer Haggren, Elge Larsson, Leo Nordwall and Gabriel Widing. Similar to Plaza, they divide the arts according to therelation author-work-reception in three different categories.
The first artistic category would be spectative art, assuming that “to spectate an event is to subject an individual to a solitary internal mental process: our senses perceive stimuli, we interpret them and create an experience for ourselves” (Haggren et al, 2009, p . 33). For the authors, the works of art encompassed by this category would occupy the space of thinking, had here as the “potential experiences that a certain sensory stimulation can bring up at a certain time in a certain observer” (Haggren et al, 2009, p. 36), including that spectrum “all possible thoughts, emotional reactions and associations that the subject can connect to the stimulation of the work” (Haggren et al, 2009, p. 36).
The second category is the interactive art, which “can be described as a perception of stimuli driven by choice” (Haggren et al, 2009, p. 39), since the works in this category “gives the observer the possibility to choose which sensory input will be exposed “(Haggren et al, 2009, p. 40). Here, although the authors show that the vast majority of works generate a space of potential thinking, we also have the space of choice, or “the range of all possible stimulus where the viewer can choose” (Haggren et al, 2009, p. 41).
The third (and last) category would be participative art. Participation in this context is understood as “the process by which individuals produce and receive stimuli to and from other subjects in the framework of an agreement that defines how these exchanges will be performed” (Haggren et al, 2009, p. 43). Here, the viewer’s notion breaks down, since he becomes a participant, a simultaneous consumer and producer of stimuli. The rules of stimuli exchanges make up a pillar of the participative art, since they give to this agreement a social meaning and, therefore, communication. It comes as the space of action, that “indicates to participants subsidies and restrictions to act communicatively”. (Haggren et al, 2009, p. 46)
The main difference between these two theories are in the meaning employed to the word interactivity. While, in Plaza’s research, interactivity refers to the “reciprocal relationship between the user and an intelligent system” (Plaza, 2003b, p. 10), showing the position of the author of that interactivity is related to “issue of technical interfaces with the notion of program” (Plaza, 2003b, p. 17), for the Swedish authors interactivity refers to the notion of choice. From this concept, the categorisations of both are distinguished by creating distinct incremental positions.
In this respect, this study is based on the second theory, marked by the apparatus notion viewed in Flusser (2002; 2007): the apparatus would be the producer of information, or non-things (as opposed to tools and machines that perform work or, in Flusser’s terminology, produce things), always subjected to a program. The person operating the apparatus (or that for it is operated, if we take the servant’s notion mentioned by Flusser) seeks to exhaust the options already pre-prescribed in the program. In this sense, it points to a connection between the use of the term interactivity both by Plaza and by the Swedish authors: interactivity would occur for a series of choices resulting from the user’s relationship with the program. The participation, however, is part of a more complex level: a deprogramming of the apparatus, namely the freedom to incorporate noise as part of the repertoire (Flusser, 1967) of the apparatus. The American media researcher Henry Jenkins also points to this sense of insubordination to the apparatus as ulterior to the interactivity, under the name of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2009). Explaining: only a culture that has dominated the apparatus, as seen in some contemporary groups, could insubordinate themselves as the way we see in the Jenkin’s participatory culture that deprogram the apparatus moved mainly for entertainment and pleasure.
In short, the spectative art is a first degree opening, polysemic, where there is a dependence of an viewer on a finished work by an author. In interactive art, the third degree opening restricts the dependence between author and spectator just to one program mediating the process, and no longer to a work. Finally, participative art, the relationship between the participants (a second degree opening in Plaza studies) is given by an agreement.
Open Work and Open Game
Once demonstrated, the three aspects that make up this study (i.e. the aforementioned works of art, the concept of translation, and the opening of the work), this research reaches its central point: the relationship between opening of the game and opening of the work. It is evident that by opening the game means the increase or decrease of the repertoire and/or modification of its structure (Flusser, 1967). The increase or decrease in the repertoire would occur by the transformation of noise in game elements, and vice versa, understanding noises like “elements that are not part of the repertoire of a particular game” (Flusser, 1967, p. 4).
In Frost’s poem, the original((Despite the use of the term original, it is assumed that even the poem can be considered a possible translation of Frost’s thoughts, memories, perceptions and interpretations.)) of which the other two works has operated translations, could be admitted an opening of the first degree, or a spectative art. The possibilities of game openness are limited to the repertoire of each spectator, i.e. the set of elements, in this case the meanings, that he can give to the work. However, the structure of the game/work remains unchanged.
In Mestre’s music piece, the translation, or modification of structure (an openness in the game), incorporate different elements to Frost’s poem. The usual score’s pentacle is replaced by a structure that unfolds in the image of a tree, in allusion to the point where the roads diverged in the poem. The two musicians take on the role of the possible paths, invited to improvise on the suggestions of musical notes that they may possibly take from such subjective musical notation. The very distinction between the two demonstrated interactivity concepts here have their place: on one hand there isthe third degree opening, the interaction between user and program, seen as changing the music through the capture of concentration and relaxation states of the performer (hereinafter also receiving the output of the other performer) by electroencephalogram (EEG).((This study highlights the metagame played by Mestre, who incorporates a noise to the electroencephalogram repertoire, which could be understood, in Flusser’s terms, as a deprogramming of the device in question.)) On the other hand, the relationship with the possible choices, based on the music feedback returned to each of the performers, suggests a second degree opening.
Finally, in Young’s larp, the very perception of the participants on the few lines describing each scene and each role is the heart of the matter, because it allows them to create, in every execution, a completely different work for producing and receiving completely distinct stimuli.
Which Road to Take Forward?
Although Mestre never played Young’s larp, he has been a role-player for several years. To which degree would the immersion in a participative art affect the production in other (and sometimes less opened) artistic structures?
Larps have been around for a while: about 20 years as an artistic expression, if you take the nordic larp slope; about 40 years if you take a common origin with the tabletop role-playing games; or even millennia, if you take the relationship between larps and Roman Saturnalias, as pointed out by Brian Morton (2007).
Eco stays in the metaphor of a wood to the narrative. The Italian semiologist, with this term, honours the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), for whom:
(…) a wood is a garden of diverging roads. Even when there are not well-defined paths in a wood, everyone can draw their own path, deciding to go to the left or tothe right of a particular tree and, in every found tree, choosing this or that direction.
Borges apud Eco, 1994, p. 12
Using this metaphor, the narratives, whether they be literary, imagistic, musical or ludic, would be composed of options all the time. Eco even compares the fruition of a work to a game, given the relationship between the author and the spectator, whom he defines as “someone who is eager to play” (Eco, 1994, p. 16). As pointed out by the Brazilian communicologist Monica Martinez, human expressions, even over the millennia and innovation of techniques, relied on “new interpretations layer overlaps on the same content”. (Martinez, 2015, p. 4)
Thus, passed this literature review, it is suggested that a possible road to be taken in the future would be to research, learn and absorb how a participative art, as is the case of larps, could contribute (or already contributes) to the choice of new layers to overlap the elements contained in different artistic expressions and/or structures.
Bibliography
Eco, Umberto. Obra aberta [The Open Work]. São Paulo, Brazil: Perspectiva. 1991
Eco, Umberto. Seis passeios pelos bosques da ficção [Six Walks in the Fictional Woods]. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras. 1994
Haggren, Kristoffer, Elge Larsson, Leo Nordwall and Gabriel Widing. Deltagarkultur [Participatory Culture]. Göteborg, Sweden: Bokförlaget Korpen, 2009 [date of access: 03/05-2016] http://download.deltagarkultur.se/Deltagarkultur.pdf
Jenkins, Henry. Cultura da convergência [Convergence Culture]. São Paulo, Brazil: Aleph, 2009
Martinez, Monica. “Imagens que (nos) devoram: reflexões sobre tigres, jornalismo cidadão e coberturas jornalísticas. [Devouring Images: reflections on tigers, citizen journalism and news coverage]”. In: XXIV Encontro Anual da Compós, 2015 Brazil: Universidades de Brasília e Católica de Brasília, 2015 [date of access: 08/01- 2016] http://www.compos.org.br/biblioteca/monicamartinez_2883.pdf
Morton, Brian. “Larps and their cousins through the ages”. In Lifelike. Edited by Jesper Donnis, Morten Gade and Line Thorup. Copenhagen, Denmark: Projektgruppen KP07, 2007. p. 245-259. [date of access: 10/05-2016] https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Lifelike
Cover photo: Allison Balcetis and Manuel Falleiros performing The Road Not Taken (Mestre, 2014) at University of Campinas in 2015. Photo by Luciene Mourige.
The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (book cover image)
Just a Little Lovin’ (photo, Frida Sofie Jansen)
Totem (photo, Rasmus Høgdall)
Inside Hamlet 2017 promotional photo. Photo courtesy of Participation Design Agency.
