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  • Three Roads (of Translation) Not Taken: Different Degrees of Openness of the Work (and of the Game)

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    Three Roads (of Translation) Not Taken: Different Degrees of Openness of the Work (and of the Game)

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    Abstract

    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.

    Keywords: Communication; Narratives; Poem; Music; Larp.

    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. 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:

    1. First degree of openness: passive participation;
    2. Second degree of openness: active/ perceptive participation;
    3. 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

    Ludography

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

    Cover photo: Allison Balcetis and Manuel Falleiros performing The Road Not Taken (Mestre, 2014) at University of Campinas in 2015. Photo by Luciene Mourige.

  • Keeping Volunteers Alive

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    Keeping Volunteers Alive

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    Organising larps is a multi-disciplinary exercise at best. At its worst, you need a witch’s cauldron of different skill sets, and being negligent in one area can mean that no matter how much you shine elsewhere, you still have a failed larp on your hands. A large part of my larp work consists of managing somewhat large (25+) teams of people, most of them volunteers. Doing that for big larp productions like College of Wizardry (Nielsen, Dembinski and Raasted et al., 2014) and Convention of Thorns (Raasted, et al., 2016) has given me some insights that may come in handy for others.

    Pretend It’s a Video Game

    If you think of your helpers/volunteers/team as being human versions of The Sims characters, then you’ll have an easier time managing them. Each of them comes equipped with a number of “status bars” that you need to be aware of. They have to be fed, housed and instructed, if you’re to get anything useful out of them—no matter if they’re at your larp to play the hostile orc army appearing out of nowhere, helping with getting the location ready, or doing cleanup.

    It doesn’t matter much whether you call them helpers, minions, team members or something else. It matters how you treat them, though. To aid you in your larp organising, I’ve compiled a list of tips, structured into three chapters. And while I use these strategies when working with larpers, it’s just as easy to apply this sort of checklist elsewhere.

    And with all that in place, let’s jump right in!

    Health Points

    Health Points represent the physical side of things. If this was a video game, these would be the different status bars that could be boosted using physical remedies. If your helpers are low on health points, it’s very hard to make them do anything (at all).

    • Water. It may seem like a simple thing, but if your helpers don’t have easy access to water, they will suffer. If you’re using an outdoor location, it’s extra critical.
    • Food. People need to eat. Food should be plentiful, nutritious and if possible account for dietary needs and wishes. Both meals and snacks are important.
    • Accommodation. Without a place to sleep, it’s hard to be a hero. Taking care of this can be tricky, since you have to deal with things like snoring, privacy and the general psychological makeup of your helpers.
    • Temperature. I’ve worked on a film project in Abu Dhabi, and I nearly melted. I’ve also frozen my ass off during late Autumn larps in non-heated castles. You need to make sure that either you or your helpers are taking care of making the temperature bearable.
    • Toilets. What goes in must come out, and access to sanitation is vital. One toilet for 50 helpers is not good, and if you’re feeding them well, it’s even worse!
    • Physical safety. To work, we need to be safe—and to feel safe. If you’re doing something in an environment that’s less than friendly to humans, it’s even more important. Enthusiasts will often take risks to make things work. Do your best to make sure that they don’t have to!

    Mana Points

    Mana Points represent the mental state of your helpers. This is slightly harder to quantify, but nonetheless very important. It’s the things that make your well-fed, well-rested work crew put in that extra effort that is necessary to make an event run smoothly.

    • Vision. “The how begins with the why” is a popular phrase. It’s also at least somewhat true. Helpers who know what’s going on and why it’s important are more likely to actually make that vision come true.
    • Motivation. There are many different ways to motivate people, and I’ll not go into details here, but if you don’t manage to motivate your helpers, they’ll slowly degenerate into slow, unhappy shades of themselves. Okay, not that bad, but still bad.
    • Morale. Akin to motivation, but different from it, morale matters when things get tough. When something goes wrong, and you need to ask people to stay an hour extra to dig a ditch or clean toilets, morale is critical. It’s the difference between “Okay, if I absolutely must” and “Yes, let’s do it!”
    • Free time. This is something that I find is often undervalued in projects: the clear communication of when there’s free time, and how it can be used. Are there spaces for resting? Opportunity to hang out with others during free time? Knowing how things work when you’re not working is important.
    • Solidarity. Most of us know that some tasks require heavy lifting while others require less obvious forms of labour. Even so, it can feel very demotivating to see someone watching cat videos on YouTube, while you’re putting the finishing touches on a prop, regardless of whether or not the other person has worked hard earlier. Providing a good feeling of solidarity in the workforce is a key component to creating team spirit.
    • Emotional safety. If we’re stressed and overloaded—or even feeling unsafe and unwelcome, we’re not concentrating on the task at hand. Everyone in your team should feel included and accepted, and creating a culture that supports this is very important—especially when working with diverse teams of strangers.

    Equipment

    Last, but definitely not least, comes the hardware; the things you need to make your highly motivated and cared for helpers actually do the work they’re here for. Inadequate hardware is the most common mistake I’ve come across, and is not just about tools, but also related things.

    • Workspace. Once you’ve gotten someone who can build a dragon, they need a place to build it in, or it’s not going to happen. Having appropriate amounts of space for the work that needs to be done is a necessary component to making things happen.
    • Tools. It may be possible to build a wooden house without hammers and nails, but it’s certainly easier if you have the proper equipment at hand. This can be small things like scissors and pens, or it can be expensive power tools or technical equipment. Often, it’s possible to come up with ad hoc solutions but having the right tools is preferable.
    • Working gear. If you’re working on a construction site, hard hats are often mandatory. If it’s pitch black, lights are pretty much a must. This seems self-evident, but is a place where I’ve seen too many failures.
    • Transportation. Perhaps one of the most overlooked factors when doing projects in locations that are off the beaten path (and yes, castles in Poland fit this category). Just telling people to show up on location doesn’t work that well if your location isn’t easily reachable. Transport solutions take time, and often need to be customised.
    • Physical safety. This is not only about the more obvious aspects of safety, but also about the more tricky ones. Asking if there’s a first aid kit is simple. Remembering that women need lights in toilet spaces because periods are a thing should be simple, but has proven not to be.
    • Emotional safety. Is there a sanctuary to retreat to if you need one? Are there people you can trust who can help you deal with trouble? Larps are often as high-intensity behind the scenes as on stage, and it’s valuable to know if someone is there to make sure that your mental health is taken into consideration.

    Final Words

    This article could easily have been longer, more detailed or more focused on explaining the whys and the hows. Having been a helper at many larps, and being a helper coordinator for larps as part of my professional life, I will be grateful if you can provide everything on this checklist. Time, money and reality often get in the way for that, but it’s a worthy goal, I think. The reason I have chosen to go the video game route is that I’ve discovered two things while working with helpers (and as a helper myself):

    • People are not resources. People have resources, but forgetting to treat them like individual people is not only morally problematic, but also bad for your project.
    • People still have similar needs, and once you learn how to think systemically about some of those needs (as you do with The Sims characters) you get better at managing your helper teams.

    In the end, larps come alive because of the players, but the work done before, during and after larps by organisers and their helpers make the play experience possible in the first place. If handled right, being a helper for a larp can be a very fulfilling experience.

    So let’s do our best to get the basics right!

    Ludography

    • Nielsen, Charles Bo, Dracan Dembinski and Claus Raasted et al. College of Wizardry. Poland: Liveform (PL) and Rollespillsfabrikken (DK), 2014-.
    • Raasted, Claus et al., Convention of Thorns. Poland: White Wolf Publishing and Dziobak Larp Studios, 2016.

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

    Cover photo: Volunteers at College of Wizardry 8.

  • Ludo-narrative Dissonance and Harmony in Larps

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    Ludo-narrative Dissonance and Harmony in Larps

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    Out of Tune

    Ludo-narrative dissonance seems like a pompous term but actually defines a simple concept that appears when gameplay (“ludo” from ludis, “game”) and narration (“narrative”) diverge or oppose: the story created by players’ actions contradicts the story tailored by the narration.

    For this article, the definition of “gameplay” in larps includes the system of rules, techniques and meta technical setup which allows players to express themselves in the larp-specific fictional universe, thus to build and expand their story through common tools. The term “narrative” refers to the context in which the game takes place (historical period, genre), displayed themes, game masters’ intentions (what experience they want the player to have), tone, etc. In larps, the narrative is set up primarily through character sheets, player tips and guidelines (describing the universe, social conventions, background), scripted events, etc. The marriage of gameplay and narrative creates the story.

    Prelude in Video Games

    Clint Hocking,1 the creative director at LucasArts and Ubisoft, first used the term “ludo-narrative dissonance” in 2007 when discussing an issue related to the video game Bioshock (2K Games, 2007). The term became an instant success and a practical tool of analysis for video games.

    To summarize Hocking’s original argument, there is a conflict between the ludic contract and the narrative contract in Bioshock. The game enhances the theme of personal interest vs. generosity through the gameplay, but denies the player that freedom of choice through its narration, creating a breach in the player’s adhesion to the overall game history.

    Other examples of such dissonance are abundant in video games. For instance, in the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, a “hero next door” young man or woman is presented in the intro cinematics as immature and fragile and then transformed in the early stages of the game into a killing machine, almost without transition. Another typical example appears in Batman Arkham City, when Batman is poisoned and encouraged to rush to find the antidote; actually, the player has all the time in the world to fulfill as many side quests as he wants. As soon as he explores the city, the game mechanics actually encourage him to do so in order to increase his skills, negating the feeling of emergency put in place by the narration.

    The ludo-narrative dissonance goes beyond a simple bug, continuity error or occasional incoherence. When it emerges, it’s the whole system that is at fault, where the story promised to the player is contradicted by the story that he lives, which is precisely what we wish to avoid in larp.

    Counterpoint in Larp

    "Anne d'Autriche with a Jambon-Beurre", or when anachronism is a kind of dissonance. Photo taken before the Fouquet's larp by Jérôme Verdier - Photographe. “Anne d’Autriche with a Jambon-Beurre”, or when anachronism is a kind of dissonance. Photo taken before the Fouquet’s larp by Jérôme Verdier – Photographe.

    Like for video games, I believe ludo-narrative dissonance is not only a useful analytical tool, but also a key challenge for larp storytelling. Whether a larp is gamist, simulationist or narrativist (or any other category if one does not adhere to these) does not say anything about its quality. However, if the rules are not consistent with the announced intention, then the organiser is exposed to the likely disappointment of the players. Imagine a larp centred around introspection or character relationships, but whose preparation material instead focuses on encyclopedic rules that detail every aspect of the external world; or a larp promising to explore the daily life of 16th century Venetian merchants, without designing an in-game economy or rules of exchange.

    Although other classifications are possible, I’d like to distinguish the most frequently encountered dissonances into two categories: passive and active.

    Passive dissonances are related to unnecessary rules. Sometimes these are rooted in the desire to present a comprehensive overview of the world or the designer’s work, which leads to an encyclopedic system. Other times, they are a result of the designers’ anxiety to cover all possible avenues of play and not limit players’ freedom or immersion. It is even specified sometimes that some rules are detailed “just in case,” even if it is not advisable to use them.

    Players’ observations tend to show2 that the more our memory is cluttered by the need to take charge or remember the rules of a game, the less space it can devote to emotional impact and empathy. Consequently, a game that would favour an abundant, complex or counterintuitive system of rules diminishes the quality of players’ immersion. This argument alone should lead designers to promptly and ruthlessly suppress any rule not actively reinforcing the game themes (safety rules not included, obviously).

    Not forgetting a more insidious effect: some players, intuitively familiar with the famous trope of Chekhov’s gun,3 may be tempted to think that if the rule exists, it is to serve a purpose. It would be a shame to unintentionally encourage players to use a rule that doesn’t serve the intention of your game, or worse, which lessens the impact of the game’s story. Even though combat, sex or healing rules cover basic subjects (from a simulationist point of view), this is not a reason why they should appear by default in a game system. Every rule should meet a need. One way to avoid passive dissonance and strictly focus on relevant rules may be to suggest to players other means of resolving situations that might occur, more in line with the game themes. Organisers should also clearly communicate what will not take place during the game because it is not part of the scope. For instance, in Prima la Musica or L’Agonie du Poète (The Poet’s Agony, 2016), there are no rules to simulate sex. In operas or 17th theatre plays, protagonists do not sleep with each other, so the same rule applies to these larps set up in the same context, period. However, the theme of being in love is central, thus other means consistent with the setting are suggested to express it like sighs, looks, and gentle touching of hands.

    Active dissonances are caused by rules conflicting with the intentions of the game. The experience they offer to the player is different from what the larp promises. As a consequence, the story experienced by the player is different or even in contradiction with the narration of the game. This situation can take many forms, among which:

    • A discrepancy between the intention of the game, and the type of rules set up by the game design: games anticipated as fun and light but burdened with heavy or complex rulebooks, or games without rules or with minimal rules, where players’ objectives require simulationist mechanisms. This last case can make players and designers think that rules are necessary in a larp, when the actual problem is that it’s not possible to achieve the game objectives with the tools provided.
    • Poorly chosen rules, inconsistent with the narration, and ultimately harmful to the game. Ars Amandi for instance, is a sex simulation rule requiring touching one’s partner’s arm that allows a wide variation of interpretations. Nevertheless, it should not be systematically used as a default sex simulation rule: in games where sexual intercourse is not an important stake, other rules that don’t involve physical contact may be as relevant, and less intrusive for the player.

    Rules are marvellous tools to support, structure, and build a story. Just as it would be unthinkable to reuse character sheets from one game to another (except in the case of a very innovative concept), it would seem at best neglectful, at worst counterproductive, not to design specifically tailored rules for each larp in order to define the game’s own identity. The assumed ambition by most larps—to propose original, varied, strong, and inspiring experiences—requires designers to pay attention to the consistency of all tools used to reach the Holy Grail of ludo-narrative harmony.

    From Dissonance to Harmony

    Following the above thoughts, a term has naturally emerged to greet the effort of preventing—and indeed actively counteracting—the dissonance: ludo-narrative harmony.

    Passive and Active Harmony

    In the same way that passive and active dissonances can be categorised, it seems relevant to distinguish passive and active harmony:

    The Santeuil Boating Party design illustrates seamlessly their "slow gaming" approach: "Take your time, enjoy, live at the pace of the ripples on the lake..." The Santeuil Boating Party design illustrates seamlessly their “slow gaming” approach: “Take your time, enjoy, live at the pace of the ripples on the lake…”
    • Passive harmony: when the rules are consistent with the premise of the game, without necessarily supporting the theme. Consider for instance a post-apocalyptic game where everyone is accustomed to the rigours of survival since childhood, but that promises players the opportunity to explore interpersonal relationships, the importance of family ties, and the experience of group life. To fully focus rules on combat or survival would be consistent with the setting, but would be inadequate to convey the theme. Dissonance is then avoided but harmony is not fully achieved.
    • Active harmony: when the rules, whether chosen among existing ones or created, are always selected specifically to support the whole story by incorporating themes into players’ actions. By this means, the focus of the rules and their tone and treatment are in line with the fictional framework. Again using the post-apocalyptic game example, it may translate to rules setting up group rituals for instance.

    In an effort towards active harmony, many games have brilliantly set up such rules, through the choice of their subject matter (which rules to focus upon, such as sex-play or inter-generational dynamics) or the choice of their treatment (the mechanics by which this focus is handled). Let’s take a look at some examples:

    The first path to ludo-narrative harmony is to choose rules that address a specific topic, to frame the specific larp narration setting and themes. It ranges from designing rules about quodpot for a Harry Potter university larp (Salem-Never forget, 2012), where the championship is not only competitive but part of the narrative; or duelling rules in a western larp to create smooth scenes (Hell on Wheels, Appl and Dulka et al.,. 2015); to more unexpected ones, like rules that allow players to forget or blur serious events as a means of reinforcing the desired dreamlike atmosphere in an oneiric larp (La Sirena Varada, 2015); or a rule that channels madness through a necklace that enhances charisma and lowers a character’s inhibitions, imbuing the game with psychological horror (Pan, 2014).

    Once the designers have chosen the subjects of the rules, it’s time to design them in a relevant way that reflects the narration specific to the larp. Sex simulation rules are a good illustration for that kind of choice. The needs unique to each of the following games has led designers to address this topic, but each set of rules has been executed differently, echoing the identity of the larp:

    • In Les Liaisons Dangereuses [Dangerous Liaisons] (2014), where love is seen as a tool of power and competition, a tarot deck is provided in each room to calculate the sexual performance of each character and determine the winner, with consequences ranging from change in reputation to pillow talk; and even the ultimate disgrace for both characters, the birth of true love.
    • In Les Canotiers de Santeuil [The Santeuil Boating Party] (2014), where love is a floating dream in a light and leisurely atmosphere, there is no crude simulation, no undressing, and (almost) no contact, but a system of ribbons to lovingly tie each other’s wrists before counting clouds together to climb to seventh heaven.
    • In Les Fleurs de Mai [Flowers of May] (Algayres, 2014), where love is designed as a tool of power and enslavement in a brothel, each player is required to use a range of various and subtle interpretations of Ars Amandi.
    • In Just a Little Lovin’ (Edland and Grasmo, 2013) where homosexual advances are at the heart of unbridled evenings, bowls of feathers are available in some scenes: to give a pink feather to someone is a smooth way to suggest directing the scene towards sex. If the player ignores the feather, the scene then moves elsewhere. If black feathers had not also been used to invite to black box scenes, this meta technique could even have been integrated as an intradiegetic mechanic to further strengthen harmony—the feather would then have been considered a usual code of these kind of evenings and well-known by the characters.

    The same attention to consistency can also be advantageously applied to explain the game intentions or overall design. In Vivre Vite [Live Fast] (Allermoz, 2014), a game about young punks in the 80’s, rules are offered to simulate headbutts or ass grabs, in order to enhance a violent, vulgar and sexist atmosphere. Aside from these rules, though, the playing intentions are all consistent with the subject, either in the writing (some paragraph titles for instance: “I’ll punch you,” “I’ll stab you,” “I’m on drugs” “I’ll f… you”) or the numerous incentives to break generic larping codes, including those regarding conflicts (“let’s prioritise shouting over discrete quarrels”) or physical fighting (“in that culture, opponents may finish off a fight either with a few insults or by grabbing a beer together, depending on the case”).

    In the same vein, the rules for Dirty Little Secrets (Algayres, 2013) provide several dramatic elements based on tropes from the soap opera genre—dramatic monologues, slamming doors, looks toward the camera— creating an innovative experience where ludo and narrative merge seamlessly.

    Arabesques

    Pre-game workshops could also be regarded as tools of ludo-narrative dissonance or harmony, as well as other kinds of rules; for example, the many and varied workshops for Mad about the Boy (Raaum, Edland and Lindahl, 2010) – especially the one collectively building the world through examining how the disappearance of all men would impact each character’s daily life. Similarly, the meta technique of using safewords may enable greater harmony, even if it does not create it. In our violent post-apocalyptic world example, safewords would allow to safely and fully experience the rigour or cruelty, designed as pillars of a society fighting to survive.

    Another interesting reflection: once aware of the ludo-narrative harmony mechanism, one could imagine playing with it, in order to create what I’d call constructive dissonances: dissonances that at first don’t appear to be part of the story, but in the end benefit the game, as described in the first musical definition of dissonance:

    Despite the fact that words like ‘unpleasant’ and ‘grating’ are often used to explain the sound of dissonance, all music with a harmonic or tonal basis—even music perceived as generally harmonious—incorporates some degree of dissonance. The buildup and release of tension (dissonance and resolution), which can occur on every level from the subtle to the crass, is partially responsible for what listeners perceive as beauty, emotion, and expressiveness in music.

    Consonance and dissonance

    Game designers can use players’ unconscious desire for resolution as a (comprehensive and benevolent) manipulation tool, to push them towards playing in a certain way, creating a home for some unexpressed expectations that will be resolved in-game, or to induce the tone of game without announcing it.

    Such use may be dangerous, exposing the organiser to the risk of poor communication and the player to disappointment, but tempting to lovers of non-transparent games.

    Why not imagine, for instance, apparently ill-designed rules (rules too simulationist or insu cient, detailed topics unfit with the announced themes) ultimately justified by the unexpected change of direction along the way, with the introduction of new issues that finally justify the original rules (it was all a dream, your character wakes up in another world/lives in a different one than they thought they were living in, etc). Or also, the use of certain preparatory workshops in order to create an artificial intimacy on a meta-level, which can resurface during some unexpected internal changes to the game and impact characters’ actions; for instance, characters supposed to hate each other who are teamed up during the Ars Amandi workshop, seemingly as a joke, but discover ingame that they are attracted to each other. In this case, the dissonance allows designers to avoid foreshadowing in character sheets, suppressing the consequent risks of players understanding, and enhancing the emotional impact of unexpected events and psychological turnarounds.

    The Breakthrough, a Perfect Tune?

    So much Space is played in a real bar, allowing life to imbue the game experience. So much Space is played in a real bar, allowing life to imbue the game experience.

    To go further, I would like to introduce a notion sometimes called “breakthrough” in the field of video games. I do not, however, use it in the overall sense of “breakthrough that marks the era or the history of the game,” but in a more restricted sense, a technical or design innovation at the heart of the game, defining its specific identity and allowing for—in the most successful cases—a new way to play. This concept provides an interesting construction and analysis framework to apply to larps.

    Crystallisation of Storytelling

    It is possible to create a breakthrough that does not lead to ludo-narrative harmony— for example, in the case of a gameplay innovation that isn’t related to the game’s theme. But when given its full potential, the breakthrough is the innovation that amplifies and gives an unexpected echo to the narration. It is the one rule that will often be the most memorable and regularly cited when trying to describe t he game—and therefore a good way to help define and differentiate one larp from another.

    For example, the massive medieval fantasy larp Légendes d’Hyborée [Legends of Hyboria—Opus 1] (2015) offers an innovative system of instances, derived from video games. Instances scattered throughout the site were accessible to players during some quests, with the objective of recreating the kind of epic pulp scenes that groups of adventurers had been told about in their character sheets. For instance, the dungeon of thieves, a succession of rooms filled with physical and mental puzzles to decipher in order to access the following room was an exciting adventure in which each player could refine and a rm their role within the group.

    The breakthrough is a particularly valuable way to direct the player’s attention to the theme at the heart of the game. In all larps—even the most detailed and carefully designed—immersion is an illusion. Only the agreement of the players, who willingly suspend disbelief during the duration of the game, allows what is commonly—albeit imperfectly—called “immersion.” To do so, the players tweak their sensory perception. They mentally erase what doesn’t align with the proposed narration (other players’ appearances, boffer weapons or other anachronisms), and instead focus on elements in tune with the story that they want to experience, which ideally matches the narration offered to them. More than aesthetics or the story of a game, what best enhances this objective are the rules which provide the framework for action and drive the story forward. The breakthrough is a meaningful way to help them focus their attention towards what enriches their game experience, and away from what contradicts it.

    Tant d’Espace [So much space] (Duvned, 2014) is a game for two players based on the themes of melancholy, nostalgia, and a known non-dramatic ending. Participants can play in a real bar, which reinforces on multiple levels the intention of the game. First of all, thanks to the familiarity of the setting, it utilises known references such as the selection of drinks and the presence of other customers as a way of strengthening the bleed-in inspired by the game design. Playing in a real, open world also encourages the interruption of reality through its unpredictability (rose vendors interrupting, the dynamics of background music, server downtime, closing time that forces the game to end). These hazards do not break immersion, but rather reinforce it, immediately merging with the story and offering a different experience for each session. In this sense, one could even qualify it as a systemic feature.

    The larp Comme le Houx [Like the holly-tree] (Henry,2015) explores quite another path, as the game consists entirely of a phone call between two friends. This idea is born out of the desire to remove the bodily dimension from a larping experience, in order to facilitate “immersion” and identification with the character rather than the player, as well as to encourage listening, confession and dialogue, which are the essence of the intended experience.

    Creating Languages Beyond Words

    Many larps already include breakthroughs, although they have not necessarily been identified as such. The following examples provide players new ways to express their characters, through songs, dance and music:

    Tango is a powerful way to convey emotions in The Wedding of Ashes, set in 1945 Argentina. Photo by Ze Moz. Tango is a powerful way to convey emotions in The Wedding of Ashes, set in 1945 Argentina. Photo by Ze Moz.
    • L’Eté 36 [Summer 36] (Artaud and Frénot, 2012): In order to recreate the “bucolic, romantic and festive” atmosphere, designers invite players to sing as a way of expressing their state of mind at key moments of their choice. To achieve this, a song book with customised songs of the relevant period is provided in addition to each character sheet. They become a powerful means to channel emotions, relevant both as a way of expressing the concerns and hopes of the era, and for reinforcing, through communal choirs, the characters’ sense of belonging to a group. The songs can also reveal dilemmas and intimate revelations, either through force or subtlety. This tool could be transposed and fully exploited in a musical larp, for example, where ludo and narrative would then be perfectly tuned. In any case, singing is a specific gameplay technique to personify characters.
    • Les Noces de Cendre [The Wedding of Ashes] (Gresset and Abbey, 2012): In this game, players are invited to express their characters’ moods through tango. The rules emphasise the diverse palette of emotions that can be communicated, as well as the universality of the language (everyone can dance and convey an intention while dancing: love, friendship, passion, hate, …) thus providing an additional tool shared by all players.
    • Prima la Musica (2016): This game, typical of the French romanesque genre, revolves around the world of opera and offers the players a game mechanism called the Theatre of Emotions: a clearly defined theatrical space in which the player can play a scene, sing, mime, or dance with the accompaniment of famous arias in the background, selected from a catalog available before the game so the players can familiarise themselves with the music. It punctuates players’ stories by enhancing key scenes that they choose, at their discretion, to disclose to the other players (open curtain) or play in private (closed curtain). It is a clever mechanism to enhance the atmosphere and intimately connect the opera to the game, allowing the players to interpret scenes worthy of a real opera.

    Make no mistake: I am not claiming that every game should have a breakthrough or should create an innovative rule. Innovation only makes sense if it adds to the game narration. That’s why it can be an interesting question to ask when creating a game, and the answer will depend on the nature of the larp.

    The Sound of Music

    What best than a phone to relive the friendship's years from the pre-social networks area? Photo taken by Rémi Lapcinelle during a session of Like the Holly Tree. What best than a phone to relive the friendship’s years from the pre-social networks area? Photo taken by Rémi Lapcinelle during a session of Like the Holly Tree.

    It seems obvious that when creating rules, one should keep in mind their relevance to the game. Yet the persistence of ludo-narrative dissonance in larp suggests that it may be not that simple, as it requires from larp designers both a clear vision of what they want the players to experience, and what the rules and mechanics will engender.

    Still, larps have by nature many advantages, especially compared to video games, and these advantages should be utilised as much as possible:

    First, the team composition and the workflow pipeline: in a larp team, designers often conceive all aspects of the game, including the rules and story. Even when that is not the case, the team is small enough for everyone to work tightly together. In video games, this kind of collaboration is an exception. Worse over, video game designers are not necessarily trained to take the story into consideration while developing the game design. Fortunately, narrative designers and producers, who translate the story into gameplay, are more and more frequently part of the development teams. But the fact that writers are not always included in the video game development team from the start of the project increases the chances that narration and gameplay are treated as parallel strands rather than as two sides of the same coin. On the contrary, larp designers usually keep a clear overview of the experience they want the players to live, and can more easily harmonise their design and story, since they control everything.

    Also, contrary to video games, last-minute gameplay changes in larp do not usually have cost implications, which makes it easier to align ludic and narrative elements and to address any divergences, right up to the very end.

    Finally, and most importantly, larps are ahead of video games when it comes to avoiding ludo-narrative dissonance, because larps are by essence a collaborative form of storytelling. One of the most exciting and di cult challenges that video games are trying to overcome today is at the heart of most larps: providing players with tools that allow them to take an active role in the creation of the story and to build and tell powerful, non generic-stories within the framework of the game.

    In conclusion, here are some questions that can help game designers interrogate the ludo-narrative harmonics of their game design:

    • What experience do I want the player to have? Which eras, themes or questions will they explore? Therefore, what kind of actions would logically happen during the game?
    • As a consequence, which topics require rules in order to frame, guide and strengthen this exploration? For instance, if the game is categorised as gamist, it should include rules for defining the winner of various kinds of conflicts; if simulationist, it should introduce rules reflecting the atmosphere and detailing societal injunctions and codes; if it’s a campaign, it needs to provide rules for the play happening between events.
    • Conversely, what kinds of rules do not fit into this framework? Does each rule support the narration? If not, is it useless and therefore dispensable?
    • Once the rules have been defined: what kind of execution best reflects the themes of the game? Do relevant rules already exist to support the intended theme? If the answer is no, they need to be created.
    • What is the focus of the game, the essence of the experience? Which specific game mechanics should I create to enhance it? What about preparatory workshops or rules dealing with unexpected topics or treatment? A specific structure (linear, ellipse, cutting into action with gradation of intensity)? A specific medium? etc.
    • Would constructive dissonance be a meaningful way to create a specific feeling or tool for my larp?

    These are only some leads to help explore new paths towards a meaningful and consistent larping experience, without any claim to absolute truth or completeness. Employing these concepts of ludo-narrative harmony and breakthrough may help drive the expressive power of the game, and ultimately, improve the players’ experience.

    Ludography

    • 2K Games. Bioshock, Novato, USA: Take-Two Interactive. 2007
    • Algayres, Muriel. Les Fleurs de Mai [Flowers of May] France: Association Rôle. 2014
    • Algayres, Muriel. Dirty Little Secrets. France: Association Rôle. 2013
    • Allermoz, Isabelle and Olivier Allermoz. Vivre Vite [Live Fast]. France: Association Clepsydre. 2014
    • Appl, Filip, Tomáš Dulka and Jan Zeman et al.,. Hell on Wheels. Humpolec, Czech Republic: Potkani and LARPard. 2013, 2014 & 2016 http://howlarp.cz/about
    • Artaud, Olivier, Marie-Claire and Olivier Frénot. L’Eté 36 [Summer 36]. Castle Cernay, France: Association Rôle. 2012
    • Barnabé, Frédéric. L’Agonie du Poète [The Poet’s Agony] France: Association Rôle. 2011 http://agoniedupoete.fr/
    • Crystal Dynamics. Tomb Raider, Redwood City, USA: Square Enix. 2013
    • Canotiers de Santeuil, Les [The Santeuil Boating Party] France: Les Francs Papillons, Beaulieu and Association Les Amis de Miss Rachel. 2014.
    • Duvned, Sébastien. Tant d’Espace [So much space]. France: Association eXperience. 2014 http://www.murder-party.org/tant-despace/
    • Edland, Tor Kjetil and Hanne Grasmo. Just a Little Lovin’. Denmark: Rollespilsfabrikken. 2013 http://just-a-little-lovin.blogspot.fr/
    • Gresset, Veronique, Raphaelle Gresset and Vauluisant Abbey. Les Noces de Cendre [The Wedding of Ashes]. France: Association Rôle. 2012 http://agoniedupoete.fr/NocesDeCendre/
    • Henry, Hélène. Comme le Houx [Like the holly-tree] France: Association eXperience. 2015 http://www.murder-party.org/comme-le-houx/
    • Légendes d’Hyborée [Legends of Hyboria]. Château de Guise, France: Association Eve Oniris. 2015 http://www.eveoniris.com/
    • Liaisons Dangereuses, Les [Dangerous Liaisons]. Castle Carsix, France: Association Les Masques de Dana’t for organization, Don Quixote for creation. 2014
    • Prima la Musica ou L’Opéra Terrible [Prima la Musica or the Opera Terrible]. Castle Montbraye, France: Primoot Team and Association Urbicande Libérée. 2016
    • Raaum, Margrethe, Tor Kjetil Edland and Trine Lise Lindahl. Mad About the Boy, Norway: 2010
    • Rocksteady Studios Batman: Arkham City, London, United Kingdom: Warner Bros. 2011
    • Salem—Never Forget. France: the Very Disturbed Team and Association Le Chaudron penché: 2012
    • Sirena Varada, La. Granada, Spain: Somnia. 2015 http://somnia-larp.wix.com/lasirenavarada
    • Udby, Linda and Bjarke Pedersen. Pan. Organised by Nina Teerilahti et al. Finland: 2014

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

    Cover photo: Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Édouard Manet.

  • Telling Character Stories

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    Telling Character Stories

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    There are many ways to tell a character story. Nordic larp design often implies that characters are written by the larpwright(s). Relationships and turning points in character stories are set up from the start, often being part of the overall design of the larp. With authorship comes a certain degree of ownership and control over the character for the larpwright. The player who receives such a character, continues telling a story that someone else started and owns.

    German larp design mostly leaves it to the players to bring characters they created completely on their own. Characters belong to the player alone. The story belongs to the player and every larp (and every piece of downtime in ongoing campaigns) is another piece in an ongoing tale, which the player influences as she sees fit. Those characters live whenever and wherever the player decides and often collect years of relations, experiences and tales at numerous events.

    This article will explore the effects and implications of a self-written, player-owned character on different levels: How do larpwrights, organisers and game masters incorporate this kind of character into a game? What is the influence on design choices? As a counterweight to the German concept, the article will look into the character creation at College of Wizardry (Nielsen, Dembinski and Raasted et al., 2014-).((College of Wizardry is a weekend larp, depicting the school life at a college for witches and wizards in an alternate version of our current reality.)) Originating from a nordic tradition of pre-written characters, the rerunning larp now faces an increasing amount of characters that are player-written. It will become apparent why both plot-driven and character-driven larps can incorporate self-written characters and how this can enhance the individual player’s experience.

    1. The German Concept: Bring Your Own Character!

    1.1. Terminology

    Talking about “the German concept” of larp characters does not imply that there is only one way all characters are made. The German larp scene includes a growing variety of playing-styles. This article will, however, focus on the most common way of character handling that is typically assigned to German larp. From here on, I will work with the following definition of “the German concept”: A player comes up with a character idea independently from any larp. She developes a background story and traits based on the initial idea, as well as a costume and possibly even props. The character may or may not be attached to the backstory or world-setting of any larp ever played. Anything from using pen & paper inspired backgrounds, references to settings from novels and movies, to free floating ideas is possible. There is no corrective or norm to follow. The only limit that has to be taken into account is the genre of the larp the character is supposed to belong to. As most German larps can still be summed up as based in a “fantasy” setting in the broadest sense, that will be the reference frame for this article.((Considering plot, the roots in pen & paper show again: The setting of most larps is “fantasy,” ranging from low fantasy (most characters would be thieves, rogues, healers or knights, plots are about politics, justice and fighting the evil) to high fantasy (characters such as elves and other fantastic races get involved, plots are about demons, rituals, otherworldly menaces and evil witches and wizards, etc).)) The newly created character may take part in campaigns such as ConQuest((Commonly known as ConQuest of Mythodea, mostly referred to as Mythodea in the international scene.)) (Guess et al., 2016) and Drachenfest (Schlump and Wolter et al., 2016) and may attend any other smaller larps of different campaigns, or events that are not associated with a campaign at all. There are no restrictions: any event can be attended with the same character, even if the different games do not refer to the same setting. The same character can be played in different campaigns.

    The word “campaign” is not used consistently in German larp. The biggest ongoing campaign is ConQuest of Mythodea, with three annual events, of which two add to the main plot.((ConQuest being the main event. Jenseits der Siegel serves as a prequel to this. Chroniken von Mythodea is set in the same world-setting and loosely tied to the plot of the main event.)) But “campaign” is also used to describe a loose assemblage of larp settings. Among various, one is well established in Germany: The so-called Mittellande Kampagne. (Deutscher Liverollenspiel-Verband, [date unknown]) This “campaign” works as a giant sandbox. Depicting a fantasy world, it contains various fictional countries, that vary in politics, population, and subgenres. Over the course of years, many larp organisers have established plotlines that tell the story of a freely scalable part of the fictional continent and uncounted one shot larps have been played in this setting. Other campaigns exist under this definition, but are less frequently played upon. (Larp Wiki, 2106) In this article, the term “campaign” refers to events like ConQuest of Mythodea and, to add another European example, Empire in the UK.

    Nevertheless, the very structure of the Mittelande Kampagne reflects the German approach to characters and their stories: It creates an environment, in which players have a huge variety of options on which larp to play next with one character and thus determining how the story continues, while the setting remains vaguely consistent as a bonus to the consistency of the character story.

    1.2. Roots of the “German Concept”

    In contrast to Eirik Fatland’s assertion that nordic larp has its roots in psychodrama (Fatland, 2016), larp in Germany emerged quite firmly from the pen & paper gaming tradition. Presumably the first German larp-like events took place in the late 1980s. The first event which is acknowledged to meet the definition of a larp in Germany and was directed at a public audience took place in 1991 under the name Dracon 1. (Neupert, 2002)

    Coming from a gaming tradition, early German larps were heavily regulated by rule systems, which defined what a character could do with a certain amount of experience. As the active larp scene developed simultaneously in different parts of the country, a number of rules systems were published, none of which achieved a leading position across Germany.((Prominent rule systems were among others: DragonSys, Phoenix-Carta, Silbermond, That’s live. As German larp develops away from the gamist approach of the early days, WYSIWYG “rules” now mark a majority of the games held. (Bolle, 2010))) What they had in common was a game-like structure: Skills were bought with experience points, which were gained by attending a larp. The aim was to translate pen & paper rules to a playable and practical framework for larp. Even the conversion between different rulesets was regulated,((Most larp organisers offering a set of “house rules” on how to convert your character from one system to another.)) enabling players to attend more events with the same character. Attending many larps was, save few exceptions, the only way to get to play a powerful, capable character. As previously stated, this collection of experience points could extend over campaigns and stand alone events alike. The amount of experience points that a character would receive after a larp depended on the duration of the event: One day at the larp was rewarded with a fixed amount of points. The skills and power had to be earned over actual years. Personal and systematic progress of the character went hand in hand.

    Today, the strict obedience to rule systems is broadly abandoned. Although many events still o cially follow a rule system, the rules have less influence on the actual game, which mostly shifts to a variation of WYSIWYG, called “you are able to do, what you are able to depict.”((“Du kannst, was du darstellen kannst,” commonly referred to as “DKWDDK.”))

    1.3.Practical: Implications, Influence on Design, Problems and Solutions

    1.3.1. Prerequisites: Players “versus” NPCs

    From the first events up until now, German larp has developed many forms of organisation and structure. Again, to make the case more clear, I will refer to the best known and widest spread structure, which is also typically connected to the fantasy setting. The larp is run by organisers and a rather big amount of non-player characters (NPCs), aiming at a 1:2 ratio between players and NPCs. The NPC roles vary in quality and importance, but altogether, they drive the plot.

    Because the characters don’t come along with a backstory that is inherently connected to the plot, they cannot be used to trigger events. This task falls completely to the NPCs as “tools” of the organisers, creating circumstances that push events forward. Characters and players alike start the larp with very little knowledge about the plot. Their task is to engage in play with NPCs, who carry information about the current in-game situation and try to manipulate the characters for their own advantage, give them mysteries to solve or help them in doing so. They can depict conflicting parties, which try to pull the players’ characters to either side. In general, NPCs are used to make the setting of the larp “come to life.” Dramatic escalation or factors such as time pressure to solve a plot are communicated in-game through NPCs. Depending on the game designers’ choice, NPCs can help move the plot forwards when it is at risk of being derailed by the players.

    1.3.2. Challenges for Organisers and Game Designers

    Along with this concept of character creation and ownership come a lot of challenges and implications for every party involved in a larp. Game designers and organisers certainly face the most of them. How can you create a plot, not knowing who will be there to take part in it? There are basically two ways to solve this challenge: One is to adjust the game as far as possible to the characters, which is mostly done for smaller events with up to 50 participants on the player side (e.g. Verushkou—Si vis Pacem, Bad Monkeys Crew, 2016). The second option is to let the characters adjust to the game, which has proven to be a good strategy for larger events, like ConQuest and Drachenfest.

    1.3.3. Know Your Players

    To gather information about the characters that will take part in the larp, many organisers combine the signup with the option to send in information about the background and special skills of the characters. This serves the purpose of identifying significant gaps between the planned plot and the set of people to solve it. Organisers get the chance to adjust their plans according to their audience and create personalized, small scenes for each player. This may be an individual in-game arrival to the site, during which players meet an NPC that in some way refers to their character’s background. It may also be a dream or vision scene during the game that picks up on personal plot hooks which the players gave to the organisers at sign up, intertwining the character’s story and the story of the larp. Less frequently, organisers design (side)-plots especially for the characters that have been announced to the game.

    Another influence of gaming tradition can be found in the “character check-in” and “check-out.” This used to be a standard procedure at German larps but has been dropped by many organisers over the course of years. During check-in, organisers go through the written character sheet and check if skills and experience points match and list up the items that a character brings to a larp. The check-out awards the character with new experience points and documents the new status on owned in-game items. The thorough, written documentation of the character makes it easier to switch between campaigns and settings.

    Although all these tactics give designers an idea of which characters are at their games and gives them the opportunity to a certain extent to tailor plot to groups, working with player-written characters does have the effect of disconnecting larp designers from their players.

    1.3.4. Beat Them with Mass

    If an event surmounts a certain size, it becomes undoable to adjust plot personally for each player. The challenge is met by offering a main plot for a certain set of characters, assuming that a fitting constellation will show up and/or that players will steer their characters towards the plot. Additionally, these events offer smaller side-plots. Those are designed for character types that will most likely not become involved in the main course of action and focus more on character game rather than following the more epic setup of the main plot. For example, a main plot could be “reconstruct an ancient magic machine to ward off a powerful demon” while a side-plot about “find out who stole the midwife’s healing herbs” happens. In events that reach a capacity of 1.000 and more players, again like ConQuest and Drachenfest, a part of the larp turns itself into a sandbox.

    1.4. German Character Concepts: An Epic Journey

    The process of writing characters is surprisingly badly structured and supported in Germany. Knowledge about how to create an interesting and functional character is not spread across players and most larp organisers don’t proactively support character creation for their players. It is assumed that players attend the larp with characters that are ready to be played. The responsibility for the playability of a character lies completely with the player.

    For creation, most players deduct from pen & paper experience. For example, they work with sets of questions that a player may answer about their character, determining background and traits, incorporating topics such as religious beliefs, biggest dreams and fears, turning points in life and so on.((Such as the sourcebook of the German pen & paper system Das Schwarze Auge, widely known in the German larp community (Römer, 2007, p. 294).))

    This process of creation leads to a set of recurring stereotypes((“My parents were killed by Orcs” has turned into a running gag in the German larp community. Additionally, many character stories are set up according to the archetype of the “Hero Quests.”)) and a huge amount of character stories that are very similar to begin with. The lack of originality in character stories leads to the common conception that telling another player your character background story is considered bad style both in-game and off-game. This does however not apply to telling the stories that make the character an original person, based on larps that have been played. The sharing of “war stories” around a campfire is an inherent part of German fantasy larp which is valued by many players as a part of what makes the spirit of a good game. The unoriginal starting point is kindly disregarded for the sake of stories that are truly unique because they were actually played out.

    The focus of character creation is not on making up a deep, highly dense and well designed character, but more about generating a starting point from which the player can immerse into the larp straight away, letting the course of events and the relationships that develop shape who the character is. This aspect of actually co-creating a character during the game is not unlike the process of creating character relations that takes place before a College of Wizardry run.

    1.5. Effects on Player and Playing Style

    Owning and playing a character in the long run also has various effects on the player side. These cover a broader range of categories. Starting on a practical level, one may assume that players planning on playing the same character across several events are more willing to put effort and money into costume and props. It can be argued that the longer a character is played, the higher the identification between player and character becomes.

    The longer a character story is being told, the more chances arise to form the picture of a natural person, including bad decisions, traumatic experiences, successes, romances, friendships and so on. Characters that have been played over years can grow to be a part of their player. They go through a development that may resemble the actual personal development of their player. “War stories” that a character experienced are told both in-game and off-game.

    Consequently, the death of a character is a highly important event to most players that is thoroughly planned to make it a memorable moment that is “worth it.” Players steer their character towards not dying on most of the larps they attend: They are less prone to take lethal risks to not end the story ahead of time, so for example, they may engage in physical conflict, but not without regard to their own safety. In this, the element of literally having leveled up a character with experience points over years certainly plays a part.

    2. College of Wizardry — A Sandbox for Your Character

    The College of Wizardry larps offer another perspective on how character stories can be told and fitted into the design of a game. There are two parallel developments to be observed with CoW: First, the opening of the initial setup from mandatory pre-written characters to opt-in pre-written characters and secondly, players extending the stories of their pre-written characters beyond the larp. Both developments are supported by the CoW game design.

    2.1. Nordic Concept: Pre-written Characters

    Locating CoW larps as a middle ground requires a look at the Nordic end of the scale. Just as for the “German concept,” there is no such thing as “the Nordic larp.” The applied approach to “Nordic concept” in this article will follow the idea of what is commonly perceived as “nordic” in the German larp community: Many nordic larps tell a standalone story not situated in a campaign. Characters are often pre-written by the game designers, including at least a basic setup for relations and personal character goals during the game. The characters are usually connected in a way that allow a low ratio of NPCs to players.((Of course, the defining aspects of a “Nordic larp” extend these parameters by far and it can be argued if there is a thing such as “the” Nordic larp.))

    In this setting, the game designers have a lot more potential influence on how the story of the larp will unfold. By retaining control of the characters, they can insert breaking points and levels of escalation beforehand by anchoring characters in relations and background stories. It’s possible to create a more coherent design, reflecting themes and moods in different elements such as plot, set design, props, and characters. The designers access and influence all layers of the game (Stenros 2014). The player takes part in someone else’s narrative, in which the character plays a fixed part.

    Opposed to that, the German concept means that a player continues to tell their own, independent character story in the framework that the larp provides.

    The more detailed the relations between characters are predesigned and the more their actions and goals during the larp are predetermined, the better drama and escalation can be anticipated and again be incorporated in the overall design. Games which follow this form are consequently much more characterthan plot focused.

    It can be argued that a pre-written character story, including connections to others, produces a higher level of drama at a larp than a self-written, unconnected character would experience. The fact that the nordic narrative is often more carefully crafted does not necessarily mean that it turns out as planned. Relationships and storylines that develop on the spur of the moment during a larp can be just as powerful as predetermined developments.

    2.2. Practical: Creating a College of Wizardry

    2.2.1. Design and Balancing of a Sandbox

    College of Wizardry is designed as a sandbox larp. Handing out characters that are only roughly sketched out, is a very different approach than predetermining every connection and in fact, the whole game is set up to give the players the biggest possible amount of freedom both in their playing style and with the topics they want to play on.

    “The larp will not fail because a certain character is played differently than it is written; it will just mean that different stories are created. This is important. Your character is your own.” (Raasted, Nielsen and Dembinski et al., 2014, p. 19)

    CoW follows a number of design choices that enable both self-written and pre-written characters and even allow the combination of the two concepts in one larp. Similar to the plot driven German larp that has been discussed so far, the key element for CoW is to give the players broad freedom in choosing the focus of their game.

    How a certain run of CoW turns out very much depends on how much players indulge into the co-creating aspect of the design. The larp offers both the space and time for different playing styles to coexist. No matter how many demon summonings go on in the dungeon, the college drama can still be gossiped about in the common rooms (Nielsen, 2016). Although the focus of character stories shifts from run to run, the overall framework that ties the larp together will still work.((Events that are fixed in time and place, such as lessons, school gatherings, and the Saturday night ball etc.))

    In a plot driven German concept larp, a lot of how well the larp goes depends on balancing the different kinds of characters. That can be done by announcing the larp to be mainly aimed at a specific group (rogues and thieves etc.) or adjusting the plot to the characters that actually attend, as described earlier. The individuals have a high impact on the game. Opposed to that, the structure of CoW is focused on groups and collectives. The College has to work as a whole and the Houses have to work as ingroups for their members. (Jankovic Sumar, 2016)

    This is achieved by a few, but effective fixed balancing factors at CoW: The large majority of players play students. Special roles such as headmaster, teachers, janitor and prefects are assigned by the organisers.((This may seem to be understood, but would not necessarily be in a German larp, where there is no given limit to how many kings and queens of made up realms may show up to an event.)) To make the collectives and groups at CoW work, players have to stick to the Houses and years their characters are assigned to. Whereas the design can take an excess of rich snotty students, evil characters or any other kind of personal alignment, it could not handle one missing House or a school in which no Juniors exist, because the game dynamic evolves around the interaction of Houses on a vertical and years of students on a horizontal layer. The design of CoW as a college eventually unites all individual characters due to the fact that they are all students in the first place. And in this, they are all the same and part of the same collective. (Jankovic Sumar, 2016)

    2.2.2. Character Creation

    After three runs, CoW went through a thorough redesign, removing all Harry Potter references and setting up a whole new background for the larp. What remained was the choice to hand out pre-written characters, which left vast options for individual interpretation and design by the players. (Again: “Your character is your own.” Raasted, Nielsen and Dembinki et al., 2014) Laid out as an international larp from the very start, CoW had to incorporate a broad culture of players. Openly created characters enabled various interpretations and playing styles. (Nielsen, 2016)

    The pre-written characters for CoW have never been balanced on a scale of royals and rebels, werewolves and hunters or other factions represented in the student body. Starting with a very diverse team of character writers and trusting the self balancing power of large groups as well as the natural inclination of players to aim for different styles, the organisers of CoW did not actively adjust characters to balance the game for the first five runs. (Nielsen, 2016)
    Relationships to other characters were suggested on an abstract level which fitted the character. For example, a bookworm would be suggested to find study partners, a dashing duellist would be proposed to assemble a group of fans. The characters were written action-focused, giving agencies for all kinds of play (Nielsen, 2016). Accordingly, suggestions for “things to do at the larp” were listed as inspirations to enhance the playing experience.

    The option to bring a self-written character was not proactively advertised, but was allowed by the organisers on personal request. For the very first run, organisers put a lot of effort into developing characters together with the players, which turned out to be impossible to uphold with the increasing feedback they received from outside the player community as the popularity of CoW grew. (Nielsen, 2016)

    One element of design, however, was written into the characters in order to set the tone for the larp. CoW was designed to be fun experience but also a serious larp, so most characters came with a “darker tone and atmosphere.” (Nielsen, 2016)

    For run 10, which is upcoming by the time this piece is written, the option to bring a self-written character has been incorporated into the signup form. A 50/50 division between preand self-written characters is expected for that run (CoW 10, Casting Document, 2016). Many players who’ve previously played with pre-written characters now opt to return with characters they’ve created on their own (CoW 5, Casting Document, 2016). It can be argued that this degree of opening up the sandbox even further is possible because of two factors: the mood of CoW has been successfully established and settled in numerous runs. And a huge part of players keep returning, carrying on this spirit both through their own depiction of their characters and actively helping newcomers and first time larpers to adjust to the setting (Nielsen, 2016). Foremost, this means to pass on the idea of creating an action-focused character and encouraging the creation of character relations.

    The combination of both the design focus on collectives rather than individuals and the strong player community enable CoW larps to not only incorporate self-written characters, but merge them with a set of pre-written ones.

    2.2.3. Telling CoW Character Stories — Extending the Game

    The organisers choice to hand over creative ownership of the characters to the players worked well for a large group of participants. As the runs proceeded, an increasing amount of online pre-game took place. Events leading up to the larps were played out in Facebook groups and chats and collaborative fiction. The social online platform “Czochabook”((“Czochabook; an in-game social media platform in which players sign up in-character. The platform mirrors a Facebook-style format and is thus immediately familiar and accessible to most players who choose to engage.” Ashby, Charlotte: Playing around the Event: The College of Wizardry pre-game and postgame, in this book)) served as a tool for characters to stay in touch and forward their plots (Mertz, 2016). After several games, uno cial spin offs were held,((The Debauchery Party, 2015 To hell and back, 2016, CoW5: A Midwinter Night’s Dream, 2016.)) continuing to tell character stories.

    For example, for a group of around 28 people, a story arc developed that started with pre-game before CoW5, extending to the spin off larp To hell and back after CoW5 had taken place, and ongoing text based role-playing up to CoW8, which was set up as a sequel to CoW5 and CoW6 (Jankovic Sumar, 2016). On the final event, most of the character stories of that specific group were led to some kind of resolution. The overall feeling was that they had now been told to a point at which the players could find closure.

    This dynamic developed due to the fact, that in the course of intense prebleed (Svanevik and Brind, 2016), bleed and immersion, the members of this group created not only an individual character story each, but a complex network of social connections that shifted and grew throughout the process.

    This development was heavily favoured by the action-focused design of the characters in the first place. Starting from pre-written characters, the intensity of the experience lead the players to embracing their characters as their own creations and they tasked themselves with telling their stories in the best (most dramatic, immersive and intense) way possible. Whilst this development in general resembles the German concept in so far as that the storylines evolved over a number of events, there are significant differences. A CoW character cannot be played outside the CoW setting and it is not possible to bring a character from any other larp campaign into the game. Instead of “just” attending more larps with one character, the players of CoW created events, plots and life for their characters outside the hands of the organisers.

    3. Conclusion

    At first sight, the difference between the German concept of character creation and storytelling on the one side, and the nordic-inspired approach of College of Wizardry seem to bear a lot of differences. Having taken a closer look, it has become apparent that both concepts enable players to take control over their character’s stories and the option to play them longer, either moving one character from larp to larp, or extending the story of one larp with pre-games, spinoffs and sequels. Both mechanics create high identification between player and character and thus intense immersion during the game.

    Both a self-written German character and a pre-written CoW character start as sketches that are designed to allow an action-focused, immediate start into a larp, where they can grow and develop during the game and in interaction with other characters. A part of that process is put before the game for CoW, where players create relations before the game, online and in workshops. As both design and player community favour the incorporation of self-written characters, CoW has successfully opened up to this character concept.

    In essence, the German concept and College of Wizardry prove that there are (at least) two core strategies to design larps for self-written characters: One is to adjust the larp to the characters, focusing plots on their backgrounds and skills and giving the characters a strong guidance towards a determined goal. The second one is to do much the opposite: Let the individual characters play freely in a sandbox, where they will be re-collected regularly in various collectives that frame the experience.

    Giving players freedom to run their own characters and play them over time—through pre-game or several events—has a chance to make them identify more strongly with their characters and immerse more deeply, even if the character only started out as a list of traits or two paragraphs on a character sheet. The war stories they tell are real, in a sense, not just written as background story. As they play the same character again and again (on Czochabook, in co-creative fiction or across events) they experience, grow, learn, and create stories that are much deeper than what you may find at a stand-alone event with no pre-game.

    Bibliography

    Personal Communication

    • Fatland, Eirik. A New History of Live Role-playing. Talk. Solmukohta: 11/03-2016
    • Jankovic Sumar, Edin. Email interview. [held 16/10-2016]
    • Nielsen, Charles Bo. Email interview. [held 17-Oct-2016]

    Ludography

    • Bad Monkeys Crew, Verushkou 2—Si vis Pacem. Strange Land e.V. 2016 [date of access 01/11-2016] http://www.strange-land.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=225&Itemid=99.html
    • Deutscher Liverollenspiel-Verband e.V., Mittellande Kampagne. [date of access 25/102016] http://www.mittellande.de/
    • Geuß, Fabian et. al., ConQuest of Mythodea. Germany: Live Adventure Event Gmbh. 2016 [date of access 30/10-2016] http://www.live-adventure.de/ConQuest/start.php
    • Geuß, Fabian et. al., Jenseits der Siegel. Germany: Live Adventure Event Gmbh. 2016
    • Geuß, Fabian et. al., Chroniken von Mythodea. Germany: Live Adventure Event Gmbh. 2016 [date of accessed 30/10-2016] http://kampagnenspiel.live-adventure.de/StartSeite
    • Mertz, Thomas. Kin. 2016 [date of access 25/10-16] http://getkin.org/
    • Moisand, Alexis, Alissa Murray, Sarah Verbisky and Ben ‘Books’ Schwartz. CoW5: A Midwinter Night’s Dream. 2016
    • Nielsen, Charles Bo, Dracan Dembinski and Claus Raasted et al. College of Wizardry. Poland: Liveform (PL) and Rollespillsfabrikken (DK), 2014-
    • Pennington, Matt et al., Empire. United Kingdom: Profound Decisions. 2016 [date of access 01/11-2016] http://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/empire?3
    • Schlump, Fabian, Sandra Wolter et. al., Drachenfest. Germany: Wyvern e.K.. 2016 [date of access 30/10-2016]. http://www.drachenfest.info/df/index.php
    • Skjøns ell, Aina, Martine Svanevik, Ingrid Storrø and Charlotte Ashby. To Hell and back. Oslo, Norway: Valkyrie Larp. 2016
    • Skjøns ell, Aina and Charlotte Ashby. CoW 3 Mini Spinoff: Two Parties. Copenhagen, Denmark: Valkyrie Larp. 2015

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

    Cover photo: Osmond von Bar, leader of the Heereswacht, during battle. Conquest of Mythodea 2016. (Play, Holger Sommer)

  • Reply to Martine Svanevik

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    Reply to Martine Svanevik

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    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.

    This text is a reply to a response from Martine Svanevik to an earlier text by Charles Bo Nielsen.

    First thing I will address is the point of freedom for a murder mystery larp.

    First of all I would look at the design and see how I could work around it. I would argue it is to fragile a larp design if it can fall about from characters making change. The best mystery larp I ever played was “Sankt Elisabeth,” which was a haunted hospital, where we had to explore the rooms for clues and hints. The main antagonist of the larp was revealed through the larp and not through the background story of the characters. The stuff you shouldn’t change was the actual clues in the hospital. The characters all had relations to people who had died at the haunted hospital, but these relations was build up through play with NPC ghosts of former patients. The true brilliance came from the design being so steady, I and another player was 45 minutes late to the larp and got a shorter briefing and got introduced later to the larp, but it didn’t effect the experience that much, because we still got to explore through the hospital to find clues and meet up old patients.

    Had we had super tightly written characters, with a near scripts like part of story bits we needed to reveal from our backstory to the other characters, all sorts of things could have gone wrong and often does in horror/psychological thriller larps.

    Long answer short: Challenge yourself as a designer and work around it. Make a horror larp, not horror movie.

    Martine Svanevik points out there are two solutions if there are not carefully crafted character plots. Either independent plots with no direct ties to characters or a transparent design, so everyone can share and follow the changes they do. I had a great conversation about the claiming that transparent design leaves no room for surprise in the larp with a Russian larp designer Di Villiers about this at GNiales. It is all about getting that “aha! moment”—which for Svanevik and Di Villiers is when a intricate string of neatly folded surprises are revealed. But the “aha! moment” also happens in a very open transparent larp. In a open design larp you put out lots of ideas and plan with your co-players, when suddenly you create the great larp moments, you only put out as dreams, not by a well planned and playout script, but by everyone coming together and playing each other up to reach those strong immersive moments we all play larp for. The payoff for feeling that you as a player achieved greatness is just as rewarding if not more as getting it served on a silver platter.

    “Reacting dynamically to unexpected events” I would say is quite an romanticisation of railroaded larps. While I will acknowledge that it is a goal that is often achieved, I also often end up in a situation where it feels to be constructed or that I can see it coming before it happens. With a more natural story developed through play during the larp, you actually have no idea where the larp will take you. But with a railroaded experience—and especially if you know the creators—you start to realise the patterns, even more so if you are also a designer yourself.

    Then Svanevik brings up: “players have a tendency to repeat the same tropes.” This I believe to be a very valid critique. Because it is very true that with little external control, we will end up falling back to default ideas and positions, pursue the story we think we want, rather than the story someone else might have in store for us. So if you design your larp with much player freedom in mind or you play a larp like this, be aware of the tropes and challenge yourself to rethink your ideas and not go with the first and the best thing that pops into mind. And as organisers help player creativity along, through workshops, preparing for the larp, teach them something new about society, culture or play styles, so they get new impressions they can get inspired by.

    As a larp designer you should help your players see the potential of your larp and together go beyond and above, what would be possible if only one part did all the creative work.

    Ludography

    • Kaoskompaniet., Sankt Elisabeth. Kaoskompaniet. Denmark: 2013.

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

  • Response to Charles B. Nielsen

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    Response to Charles B. Nielsen

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    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.

    This text is a response to an earlier text by Charles Bo Nielsen. He has in turn written a reply to this text.

    I agree with many of the suggestions Charles B. Nielsen makes in Loyalty to Character. It is true that larps do not follow a script, that even if you write a character for a certain player, that player may pull out at the last minute. What sounds like fun play for a character writer may not be fun for the person playing the part, and any game may take an unexpected turn. As a larp designer, it is therefore tempting to go down Nielsen’s route, to say: “your character is your own, make of it what you will.” But does this approach make for a better larp? Or a better experience for the players?

    From a designer’s perspective, this open approach to character writing seems to work best for loosely designed, sandbox style games. When you have a specific story in mind, with a set of characters and relations, every player cannot change as much of their character as they want. Take a murder mystery, for example. In order for the drama to be intense, each character must have a connection to the victim and a reason to want them dead. The players may not know who the victim will be before the game starts, so if you allow each of them to change whichever part of their character they want, the mystery may fall to pieces on day one.

    There is beauty in a carefully crafted plot where snippets from a character description comes into play during a game, where each character plays a small part in a larger story. Although most larps do not—and arguably should not—run on rails, there is a particular joy in being surprised at a twist in a story you did not know you were an integral part of. Giving players complete control over the characters requires game designers to either craft plots that are independent from characters—which is a great loss, if you ask me—or to design games that are played with open cards so that every player knows the ramifications of any change they make. This second approach removes the opportunity to surprise players by in-game turns of events. By releasing control of character creation, the designers leave it to players to build their own stories, plots and relation networks to a much larger degree than in a more tightly designed game. This will naturally favour those players who enjoy and are adept at building and sustaining such networks and who enjoy building their own stories, rather than reacting dynamically to unexpected events.

    In addition, it is a known truth that left to our own devices, players have a tendency to repeat the same tropes. A player with a penchant for drama will almost always end up bleeding, broken and crying alone in the dark. A player who loves experiencing the rise to power might turn even a mild-mannered romantic into a power-hungry, machiavellian mastermind. I’m not saying that this doesn’t happen when players are asked to play parts as written, or even that changing characters is a bad thing, but complete freedom means that there’s no external push to try something new. Larping offers such opportunities to try on new roles and experiences, but sometimes you need to be offered a part you did not know you would enjoy playing in order to experience it.

    If you always get to build your character, you might subconsciously end up playing the same game over and over.

    I’m not against character steering. Sometimes it is necessary to step out of a game and change direction. The shortfalls in Nielsen’s approach is that it limits the types of stories game designers can tell, and that it removes the external push for players to try something new. In Nielsen’s games, I suspect many of the players will end up telling the same story over and over and, more importantly, that the stories they tell will be player-written and player-controlled.

    Nielsen is right when he writes that “the idea to take a character sheet and change as much of it as you want is alien to many larpers and it requires a shift in both player mentality, and in larp design.” I am just not sure if this shift is the right choice for every player and every game. Any larp designer wanting to employ Nielsen’s character design needs to be aware of the knock on limitations in terms of the game they can write, and any player going to such a game needs to be aware that by owning their character’s past, they also need to own that character’s future.

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

  • Loyalty to Character

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    Loyalty to Character

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    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.

    Ask not what you can do for your character, ask what your character can do for you?

    The Problem

    I have worked with character creation for many years and making characters fit both the larp and the players at the same time has always been a struggle. The player of the character might change, new ideas for relations pop up down the road, how the player understands the character might be completely different than what you had thought. The larp is most likely going to develop in a direction you were not able to predict, because that is what larps do. They do not follow a script, they adapt, they bend, twist and turn. Some smaller, heavily scripted larps, might have a certain amount of control over the characters and players, but the bigger the larp, the less you can predict or control the course of the action. So instead of insisting to try and keep tabs on everything, work with the character as a starting point, not a script for a character you need to play out like in a theatre. It is your character and your experience that matters.

    Some larps introduce workshop-created characters to get the player involved at an early stage in and allow designers and players to collaborate to create a shared vision of the character and that solves many problems. I think an easier solution is a change in player mentality. With both College of Wizardry (Nielsen, Dembinski and Raasted, 2014-) and Fairweather Manor (Boruta, Raasted and Nielsen et al., 2015) we tried to communicate that characters were meant to serve as inspiration for the players, not a chain around their necks. We told players explicitly that they were free to change what needed to be changed so the character could fit the experience they as players sought from the larp. Obviously while still being mindful of others and communicating with their co-players. But the idea to take a character sheet and change as much of it as you want is alien to many larpers and it requires a shift in both player mentality, and in larp design. In this article, I’ve outlined my thoughts on how you as a player should approach your characters, not to tell the story the organisers envisaged, but to make the characters your own and through that create the most amount of game.

    You Are Not an Actor

    Larp is not acting, there is not a tightly written script you have to read out aloud where every part of your character’s journey is dependent on you staying entirely true to your character. Larps are (mostly) dynamic and flexible, stories and actions are (mostly) improvised. For your character to always function in this exercise of mass improvisation, your character needs to be flexible as well.

    We Wrote the Character for You!

    Now, when I advise you to only stick to the character for as long as it works, it is not because I want you to disregard the tireless work of character writers, but because the designers wrote the character for you to have a good experience. Be aware of when it stops working, when you start crying not due to: “talking about your sister’s suicide while peeling potatoes in the mud”((Knudepunkt TV video (Thank you Karolina and Stina): A journey in to Swedish larping”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrLndFJBfs)) but because you as a player feel stuck. You have very likely been there yourself; the character just did not make sense, either for you or with the direction that the larp had taken your character. Realise and adapt.

    When I sat in the organiser room of CoW and Fairweather Manor, I met players crying their eyes out because they didn’t know what to do, they were simply unable to act out their character and have a good experience at the same time. This is a moment to “CUT,” “BRAKE,” and “STOP.” Take a deep breath and sit down, and ask yourself: “What do I as a player want to experience at this larp, why did I come here in the first place?” When you have figured that out, try figuring out how to get there.

    My advice is always to consider this before going to a larp. Spend time acknowledging why you want to play a specific larp and a specific type of character, to adapt your expectations to when you meet the larp. If you do not know what you want, then try something you would find enjoyable in other larps—being it eating cakes or drowning people in a lake (I’m not here to judge). Do it. Just do it. After you have done it as your character, try and rationalise why: “I just did this, what the fuck just happened?.” This also happens in the real world, sometimes we just do something stupid we never wanted to do, and then afterwards we try to rationalise it. It works perfectly fine in real life, so it can in larp too. Real people don’t consider everything they do: they do stuff. Often it takes a while before they realise why they did it. This is a perfect excuse to change directions for your character at a larp. Use it.

    Contradictions Are Interesting

    You see it all the time in real life, and in fiction. When someone contradicts their own beliefs or actions, it can make for interesting storytelling. So whenever you ask yourself: “What would my character do?,” also ask: “What would my character never do?” Then ask yourself as a player, what would be the most interesting story? The protective knight that lost his temper and beat up the beggar on the street, the thief that returned the stolen goods, the doctor who ended up killing his patient, the enemies who suddenly became best friends? Sometimes playing against stereotypes can provide better stories and more intense experiences than playing a character as written.

    Just like Falling in Love

    Think of it as falling in love. Sometimes we just do stupid shit for love. That is your motivation. Now ask yourself, what or who is it that your character loves? Then do that stupid unthinkable thing to get closer to it. “My character do not fall in love,” well maybe you just did anyway? Or maybe you did something stupid to protect someone? Love is the perfect illogical explanation for lots of potential play. Again, obviously be mindful of your co-players, never use spontaneous love as an excuse to stalk someone you as a player like out-of-character. Use it to start new interaction and if you feel stuck with no direction for your character.

    “I Suddenly Remember All about This Trauma from My Past?”

    Remember your 1-10 pages of character is not a full life story. People who have written diaries as teenagers has hundreds of pages of dribble and if you read it all, there would still be more teenage angst to go. Maybe there was something that wasn’t mentioned in your character? Like in real life, you also suddenly remember something from your past, that gets triggered. This could also happen to your character. Be creative and don’t panic, there is almost always a way to get a back into a larp and mold a poor experience into a great experience. I have dozens of boring or just poor larp experiences, where I went out-of-character and went for a walk to reconsider my options, sometimes asking real life friends at the larp for help. If they are your friends, they would prefer you tell them of your struggles, than just try and brush it off, even if you interrupt five minutes of their weekend larp. Who knows, maybe they are also confused and together you can solve each other’s lackluster experience.

    Sharing Is Caring

    This brings us to yet another approach. Instead of thinking about what you as a player want, think about what you could do to enhance the experience of others. If someone else looks bored, try to play with them. It might so happen that they then do the same for you when you get bored. Maybe someone is trying to keep a secret? Expose it to everyone, see what happens. Maybe someone else wants to be beaten or wants to win, let them, others will mimic your collaborative play. Look outwards and become a playmaker for others. The best stories are created together and sometimes you can get a great experience yourself by delivering one for someone else. Maybe you can deliver someone’s poems or collect their taxes, maybe someone is sitting with to much to do and you can lift part of that burden. You might break ranks a bit or upset norms in the setting, but if someone is struggling with their position anyway, their experience might already suck, so breaking a bit of the immersion of hierarchy is often the lesser of two evils.

    Reinventing the Wheel

    I am not trying to reinvent the wheel, steering was a term introduced a few years ago at Knudepunkt. I strongly recommend you read: The Art of Steering by Markus Montola, Eleanor Saitta and Jaakko Stenros (2015). What I advocate is to actively steer your character. Take charge of your experience. It is even more important today, where you have likely gone to a larp in a foreign country that cost a fortune. Try one or more of the techniques I suggested above and if you’re in doubt, always come and ask the organisers, they might not know everything, but they could have a good idea on how you could adapt your character.

    Going Out-of-character

    There is a lot of debate about whether or not it is okay to leave character. In the 90s’, it was clearly considered the biggest achievement to stay in character as long as humanly possible. Today, things are changing, while immersion is still an important goal, we want to be more aware about consent and opting in / opting out. For you to be able to play with informed consent and be able to opt out, you need to on some level to feel comfortable with stepping out-of-character and asking your co-players “is this okay?” as well as saying: “NO!” (or “Yellow Penguin,” if that is the agreed safeword).

    Nordic larps often have safewords as a default, and creating comfortable off-game awareness can be done in different ways, which I am not going to go into in this article. What I can say is that when it works, it is usually quite easy to fall back into character, surprisingly easy in fact, at least in my experience, whenever someone takes you off-game. We always think that immersion is slowly being built up. I would argue it can be kickstarted. Think of when you watch a powerful movie, some movies take you right into the action with a single chord or one camera shot. I have experienced the same in larp. If you have doubts, go off-game and ask, and then agree on a way to reboot the scene and do it.

    Kickstarting Immersion

    There are many techniques you can use to kickstart immersion, most of which are inspired by methods from theatre and may require a bit of practice. At Fairweather Manor, playing the role of the butler required the player—Daniel Sundström— to go into the off-game room to get updates about the programme for the larp. Each time Sundström entered, he would do a specific modern hand gesture (Going out-of-character) and when stepping back into the larp he would stand up straight and take a deep breath as if he was about to jump into a swimming pool (Going into character.) What he did was giving physical signals to his body, when going from off to in-game. I recommend you find a distinct physical trait for your character, which you stop doing if you go out-of-character and restart doing as you try to immerse yourself. It can be a specific voice, a way to fold your hands, a tipping with your fingers, favouring one leg—you see it in movies all the time, the really immersive character have these physical traits that completely changes the actor.

    The Actor Daniel Day-Lewis is famous for the way he changes his physicality. If you watch a few of his movies in a row, you will notice that he almost always changes his jaw position when he acts to helps with accents and changing his facial structure. I’m not saying you need to be an Oscar level performer to larp, but let yourself be inspired by it.

    Generally what you want is very clear physical behaviour transformation and have some odd physical action while going out-of-character, making it clear for your mind and body, that you are leaving the magic circle.

    Another approach is setting a scene. Every player involved should agree, off-game, on who starts the conversation and then you jump in. It is best to pick a scene that is powerful and can get your adrenaline going, like a fight, running or going onto stage to perform. Demanding immediate action from your character turns the focus away from your “off-game self,” you focus on the task instead of your own thoughts. Basically, you want to distract your mind, it is a bit like trying to fall asleep, if you think too much about it, it only becomes harder.

    Lastly, music. If you are running a black box larp I strongly recommend using music or lights to signal immersion. Just like in a movie, using our senses can trigger us to get into character, out-of-character, or evoke emotional responses which are often a great distraction from off-game thoughts. This is also why black box larps can be so powerful in just one hour of play. It can get as intense in one hour as a weekend in a castle. Because just like a castle evokes emotional responses by having the smell, the feel and the look right—a well designed black box larp can play with your senses to empower immersion.

    We Can Negotiate Violence, Why Not Characters?

    At the Swedish boarding school larp about bullying, Lindängen (Elofsson and Lundkvist, 2016), my biggest regret was the scene I did not cut. It was a scene where one character was group pressured into slapping another character. It was a powerful scene, but the player doing the slapping was only giving “fake slaps” as the crowd shouted: “Hit harder,” “hit harder.” I could see the group pressure bleeding over from the character to the player as well. Fortunately, the player stood firm and did not escalate, but after the scene ended I realised that I should have said cut, stopped the scene and let us find a way to play up the intensity of the fake beating rather than playing it down.

    We make these realisations when it comes to scenes being too violent or intimate, and we agree to change them without blinking. We should give our characters the same courtesy. If something isn’t working, go off and agree with your co-players or organisers how to improve it. Worst case, you ruin one good scene but you save an entire larp experience.

    You can read a response to this text by Martine Svanevik here:
    https://nordiclarp.org/2017/02/21/response-charles-b-nielsen/

    You can read a reply from Charles Bo Nielsen to the reply here:
    https://nordiclarp.org/2017/02/21/reply-martine-svanevik//

    Bibliography

    Ludography

    • Nielsen, Charles Bo, Dracan Dembinski and Claus Raasted et al. College of Wizardry. Poland: Liveform (PL) and Rollespilsfabrikken (DK), 2014-.
    • Boruta, Szymon, Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted et. al., Fairweather Manor. Mozna, Poland: Dziobak Studios, Rollespilsfabrikken (DK) and Liveform (PL), 2015.
    • Elofsson, Alma and Mimmi Lundkvist. Lindängen International Boarding School. Organised by Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Lundkvist. Malmköping, Sweden: 2016.

     

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

  • Character-based Design and Narrative Tools in the French Style Romanesque Larp

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    Character-based Design and Narrative Tools in the French Style Romanesque Larp

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    We like to engage in larp through compelling and vivid characters. However, the available tools to create them are many and diverse: whether we go with short or detailed characters, give them a lot of background or just create a short frame for the players to develop, whether we leave the control of the story to the larpwright or give more leeway towards the player’s agenda. All of these approaches are tools that can be calibrated according to each designer’s purposes.

    France has in the past fifteen years enjoyed the development of its specific, character based, drama-oriented larp scene called the romanesque genre. With a heavy emphasis on character development and personal relationships, this type of game has garnered a huge, devoted following. Though it has been but recently documented (Choupaut, 2013; Algayres, 2016a), the romanesque scene has steadily evolved through almost two decades and developed some specific traits regarding game design.

    This article will endeavour to present the romanesque style larp in relation to other similar larp styles in Europe, and establish some tools we use to create characters and narration in this type of larps. The objectives are to expand both the knowledge about larp production in Europe and the narrator’s toolbox to create characters.

    What Is the French Style Romanesque Genre?

    An Overview of the Genre

    Harem Son Saat (play, Joram Epis) Harem Son Saat (play, Joram Epis)

    The romanesque term started being applied to games in 2010, by Frédéric Barnabé for l’Agonie du Poète (2010). However, that game was the last iteration of a long series of games coined as “emotional” or “dramatic,” which was almost as old as the practice of larp in the country. In its primary sense, romanesque means “which belongs to the realm of a novel,” a descriptive for dramatic events or actions. Therefore, it is used to describe games that are constructed as rich, narrative experiences, with pre-written characters whose rich backstory and psychology are the driving forces of the larp.

    Since then, the term has been appropriated to qualify many games following the same general features. While these features might still be debated, we have focused on the following traits (Algayres, 2016a):

    1. Focus on the character. Character creation is mostly in the hands of the organisers, and they will be very detailed, with a lot of intertwining backstory and built-in information.
    2. A huge impact of the past which explains the details in the character. The backstory gets a significant importance in building the potential for narration and the character’s psyche. Some elements might be kept secret, to be discovered for dramatic impact.
    3. An environment built as a microcosm. The diversity of characters serves as a means to establish the workings of society in the specific time and context of the game, which is why the romanesque usually love historically inspired settings.
    4. The use of narrative archetypes. Romanesque larps often draw inspiration from literary classics and embrace the romanesque genre’s common tropes as a means to drive narration.
    5. The dominance of tragedy, with character-based narrative integrating a lot of human drama, conflicts and character dilemma. This is not an absolute, though, some games advocate a lighter atmosphere or tragedy-comedy mix, such as Rêves d’Absinthe (Algayres and D’authie, 2011), or Prima La Musica (Primoot, 2016).
    6. Tightly-knit narrative arcs, which are meant to reach their climax during the game, with characters living out an exceptional destiny or a defining moment of their lives over the course of the game.
    7. A focus on the characters’ emotions and on each participant’s identification with their character, in the same manner as a reader identifies with a character in a work of fiction. Bleed may occur as a result of identification with the character.

    The generally recognised strength of these larps is that they provide a very rich, detailed frame, with complex characters thoroughly inserted in their context and network of relationships. However, as a significant part of the world, character-building and control of the story remains in the hands of the organisers. This type of larp places greater limitations on players’ agenda and freedom (in character selection and creation especially). This is usually a design choice that creators justify by that they are using it to enrich the overall story and narrative, to create more closely connected characters and potential for tight narratives and complex story arcs.

    The Historically Inspired Larp in France and in Europe

    While the term romanesque has been coined to describe a very specific sub-genre of French larp culture, we can observe games with similar intent in several other European countries. It is also interesting to see that we can find similar traits in the games in the historically inspired genre. History and larp have always worked well together, since “a historical larp can have a more interesting and challenging gameplay because of the richly faceted social situations history brings with it” (Salomonsen, 2003, p. 94). Game designers from all over Europe have had the opportunity to exploit the richness of history all the while retaining the creative licence to twist accuracy for practical or dramatic purposes, and we’ll quote some significant, but by no means exhaustive, examples.

    In Finland, historically-inspired larps are a part of the scene, with Viking history, the Victorian era, and Finnish history around the time of independence featured as time periods of interest. Finland, like France and for similar reasons, has had a tradition of long, very detailed characters, as the absence of workshops made it necessary to include a lot of information about the character’s psyche and environment in written form.

    An interesting example is provided by the Czech larp Skoro Rassvet (Haladová, Platir et al., 2013).((Whose international runs were organised in Denmark through the organisation Solhverv.)) Skoro Rassvet is a game set in 19th century Russia, heavily influenced by Russian literature and especially Tolstoy. The game is played in a day, with a half day of workshops, and the action takes place during a family gathering for a formal dinner. In its approach and objectives, this game would certainly have been dubbed romanesque in France. The character design, however, differed sensibly. The written material was relatively short by historical larp standards (less than half a dozen pages), and most of the character development was done during the workshops, essentially through social codes and rituals, and role-playing scenes from the past (Hampejs, 2015).

    Prima La Musica (play, Joram Epis). Prima La Musica (play, Joram Epis).

    Other examples from the obviously rich Czech scene include Salon Moravia (Bondy and Bondyová et al., 2104), set in a brothel during World War II, De la Bête (Pešta and Wagner et al., 2013), a super-production set in 18th century France, and Legion (Pešta and Wagner, 2015), which combines historical inspiration and hardcore larp in its depiction of a 1915 retreating military unit.

    Norway also has a significant historical larp scene, which used to be dubbed “stocking larps” (Stark, 2013). Norwegian historical larps were presented at the French convention Les GNiales with great interest (Hansen, 2014). They appeared as very rich, deeply layered productions, with high requirements for historical and costume accuracy which put them close to historical reenactment, and, in keeping with Nordic larp, bigger creative agenda for the players where the building of interactions and narrative arcs were concerned. Kjærlighet uten strømper [Love without Stockings] (Voje and Stamnestrø et al., 2004) can be mentioned as an example of the historical drama inspiration. The game, set during a wedding in 1771, presents its objective as a mix of intrigue, personal and societal drama, integrating significant amounts of conflict and romance.

    The rapidly blooming progressive scene in Italy, under the banner of the collective Terre Spezzate, has made several contributions to the historically inspired genre. I Ribelli della montagna [Rebels on the Mountain] (Capone and Bi , 2015) was a rich, vivid rendition of the last months of World War Two which got unprecedented media attention, support from A.N.P.I.—Associazione Nazionale Partigiani Italiani [National Association of Italian Partisans], and praise for its thoughtful and sensitive rendition of the conflict. Chiave di Volta [Keystone] (Tireabasso and Villa Avogadro, 2015), is a lush dramatisation of the 19th century centred around the theme of power, the possibility to play both masters and servants in a complicated power play, and a huge production value. Both of these productions have cleverly integrated design elements and techniques from Nordic larp (safety mechanics, workshops etc.) while retaining their own unique style, resulting in extremely well crafted larps.

    And of course, the blockbuster larp also ventured into the historical drama setting with Fairweather Manor (Boruta, Raasted and Nielsen et al., 2015), a larp set in Edwardian England and inspired by the hit TV-show Downton Abbey. While the brute force design proved partially unfit to cover the complexity of a multi-layered society (including diversity of age, rank and function), the game was effective in carrying over a lot of content and player-generated interactions. The first iteration of the larp warranted an unofficial spinoff, a second run and a sequel over the course of the following year.

    Back in France, the most recent larps of the romanesque genre have shown a clear ambition to expand on the genre and make it evolve for the better through the inclusion of those nordic style techniques whose use has become widespread in recent years (workshops, black box), keener focus on directing themes, and more refined work on the societal frame. Prima la Musica (Primoot, 2016) is a larp about the French opera scene of the 19th century, using opera-inspired dramatics and music both diegetically and non-diegetically through an open, black box system. Still Water Runs Deep (Ruhja, 2014) is a Jane Austen/Dickensian inspired larp with a sharp focus on class hierarchies and gender stereotypes, which was also played as a cross-gender experience, with participants praising the insight it gave them of the opposite genders’ constraints and problematics. Finally, Harem Son Saat (Algayres, 2016b) was the first international game of the genre, using English as a main language,((Which stood for Turkish in the 1913 Ottoman background, while French was in-game a diplomatic second language.)) built around the themes of oppression, gender segregation and culture shock.

    Therefore, while romanesque is solidly a French term, character-driven literary and historically inspired larps have by no means been limited to a single geographic area. The rich potential of history and its dramatisation has been widely exploited and feels still rich with great potential.

    Character Design and Narrations in the Romanesque Genre

    Archetypes in the Romanesque Genre

    Prima La Musica (play, Joram Epis). Prima La Musica (play, Joram Epis).

    Romanesque larps are character-centred games, with a significant part of the game design being devoted to the conception of the characters, all of them organiser-created. While length and composition of characters tend to vary from one larpwright to another, a couple of techniques can be pinpointed.

    The first one is what I’d like to call the smart use of archetypes. This is a very thin line to tread, as any overused archetype can become a cliché and damage the necessary suspension of disbelief. Let’s use an example. You might hear French players harp about the “switched at birth” plot, used as an ironic commentary on romanesque clichés, though, to my knowledge, it has rarely been used in the scene, except in the prohibition-game era Chicago. Illegitimate children and foundlings, however, are definitely a staple of the genre, but this is fitting to historical periods when children born out of wedlock had no status in society.

    Classic or archetypal plotlines or characters can be true to period, but also resonate with an audience of participants which has usually grown up learning and enjoying these stories. It has been argued that larp itself can be viewed as an incarnation of the monomyth, each participant’s experience echoing the traditional hero’s journey. (Hook, 2010, p.34)

    So how do we go about practicing the clever use of archetypes? In a romanesque setting, we consider all characters protagonists. Therefore, we’ll use archetypes to define them through several angles:

    • The inner nature of the character: the patriarch, the overbearing matron, the hotheaded, the cynic, the ingénue, the rebel. This is very basic and can turn cliché if the character is limited to the inner archetype.
    • Their contrast in relation to others (also called foil). This is particularly frequent in pairs or trios of characters, such as siblings, close friends, etc. You’ll have the optimist to the realist, the extrovert to the introvert, the by-the-rules personality against the rebellious type, etc. Foils are really useful because, through simple characterisation, they create a lot of potential for conflict between the characters.
    • Their position within a network of relationships and in relation to others. Each character is the participant’s protagonist, but can be another’s sibling, a third’s best friend, the romantic interest of a fourth, the antagonist to a fifth and so on.

    If we just use any archetype, a character stands a sure chance to become cliché, because its archetype will be instantly identifiable, and its characterisation weak. This is where several archetypes used in conjunction with the others become useful: the character becomes more layered, therefore more human. However, the archetypes at work can still have a universal meaning to participants, which makes them particularly effective.

    The Dual Approach in Character Design

    Another element of character design typical to the romanesque genre is what we call the dual approach. While it is by no means limited to the romanesque, it has also become typical of some of the games. The dual approach in character design is a combination of the following elements:

    • The initial approach: the character’s motif or raison d’être, their reason for being present. This can be accomplished through family ties, a function or specific job, a plot-related motif. This must answer the questions: why are they here? Why should they care? Why will they stay?
    • The final approach: what will the character’s potential arc be? What will be their greatest moment? It can be a reveal (hence the predominance of secrets in some larps), an epiphany, a staged grand scene, a necessary evolution, but an element (or several) which will make the character’s journey (and the participant’s experience) significant and meaningful.

    In a typical design, both of these approaches, as well as the archetypes at play, are handled simultaneously, as the character (and the network of characters) is constructed bit by bit. The final criteria is to analyse if the characters are playable, interesting, and enjoyable.

    The objective of this type of design is to provide the participant with potential for a rich story and interactions. Some games tend to follow a more streamlined route, and have even been criticised for railroading the character’s arc too much. However, most of these games definitely have a clear narrativist approach, only limited to what is coherent with the character’s context and psyche. For some time periods in history, these elements of context and the social pressure can really be played as antagonists of their own.

    Conclusion

    With more than ten years of established existence and a very rich history of diverse and celebrated games, the French style romanesque scene is certainly a prime example of a national scene which strives through its own specific identity, all the while getting enriched through contact with other genres and countries.

    Rêves d’Absinthe (post-game, Joram Epis).
    Rêves d’Absinthe (post-game, Joram Epis).

    Bibliography

    Personal Communication

    • Erlend Eidsem Hansen. Days of deeds, Nights of Myth— The Design tricks of Historic Larps in Norway. Les GNiales. Paris, France: Conference, 2014.

    Ludography

    • Algayres, Muriel and Abbaye d’Authie. Rêves d’Absinthe [Dreams of Absinth]. Ouroux, France: Association Rôle, 2011.
    • Algayres, Muriel. Harem Son Saat. Château de Cernay, France: Association Rôle, 2016b. http://www.assorole.fr/haremlarp-en/
    • Barnabé, Frederick. L’Agonie du Poète [The Poet’s Agony]. Joyeuse Castle, France: Association Rôle, 2010. http://agoniedupoete.fr/
    • Bondy, Radim, Veronika Bondyová, Jan Fiala, et. al. Salon Moravia. Brno, Czech Republic, 2014. http://www.pojd.name/salon/
    • Boruta, Szymon, Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted et. al. Fairweather Manor. Mozna, Poland: Dziobak Studios, Rollespilsfabrikken (DK) and Liveform (PL), 2015. http://www.fmlarp.com/
    • Capone, Andrea and Elio Bi . I Ribelli della montagna [Rebels on the mountain]. Villaggio delle Stelle, Italy: Terre Spezzate, 2015. http://www.grv.it/setteprincipati/item/424-home-ribelli.html
    • Haladová, Markéta, Petr Platil, Martin Buchtík, et. al. Skoro Rassvet [Breaking Dawn]. Translated by Jeppe Bergmann Hamming, Maria Bergmann Hamming. Odense, Danmark: Association Solhverv, 2103. http://rassvet.cz/
    • Pešta, Adam and David František Wagner et al. De la Bête. Valeč Castle, Czech Republic, 2013. http://www.delabete.cz
    • Pešta, Adam and David František Wagner et al. Legion : Siberian Story. Hvožďany, Czech Republic: Association Rolling, 2015. http://legion.rolling.cz/
    • Primoot Team. Prima la Musica ou L’Opéra Terrible [Prima la Musica or the Opera Terrible]. Montbraye Castle, France: Association Urbicande Libérée, 2016.
    • Ruhja Team. Still Water Runs Deep. Paris, France: Association Rôle, 2014.
    • Tirabasso, Chiara and Daniele Cristina Villa Avogadro. Chiave di Volta [Keystone], Biella, Italy: Terre Spezzate, 2015 http://www.grv.it/chiave
    • Voje, Adrian Angelico and Anne Marie Stamnestrø et al. Kjærlighet uten strømper [Love without stockings]. Kleve gård, Norway: 2004. http://www.rollespill.no/rokokko/

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

    Cover photo: L’Agonie du Poete (play, Nadine). Other photos by Joram Epis.

  • YouTube and Larp

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    YouTube and Larp

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    A WARNING: This might be a bit more casual than the other essays in this book. From start to finish, my whole journey of success, I have been in way over my head. I have been surrounded by intelligent, capable people that know exactly what they are doing. If you would like to hear from them, check out literally any of the other pages. If you would like to hear my rambling about how I accidentally became a pseudo YouTube celebrity, keep reading and enjoy the ride.

    My dungeons and dragons group made fun of me for going larping. I remember being so excited and talking to them all about the character I was making, and the game I had found, and how much fun I was going to have, and they went to YouTube. I began larping in an age when larp on YouTube was videos of lighting bolt packet throwers and fake looking fight scenes. They went on a marathon to show me how stupid I was going to look, and then we continued to roll dice and describe fighting magic orcs.

    My name is Mo Mo O’Brien, and if there’s one thing you need to know about me it’s that I don’t care what people think, so despite the mockery from my tabletop group, I went larping anyway. It was everything I knew it would be, and so much more. I instantly knew this was going to take over my entire life. I went to more events, and uploaded more pictures to my social media, and more people started asking me questions.

    I had recently started a YouTube channel, and I thought I’d answer all the questions in a video. I called the video “The Basics of larp” and it covered everything from the definition of larp, to the different genres, to what you needed to start playing. That was the video that began it all. My channel now has over 70,000 subscribers, that video now has almost 400,000 views, the comments are flooded with requests for more larp videos, and I can no longer go to any larp without at least one person coming up to me and telling me they were there because of me. My YouTube channel has even taken me to places like panelling at San Diego comic con and being in a popular candy commercial. Since then, larping YouTube channels have been exponentially growing, and are still growing. So, I thought I’d give people some tips for larp YouTube Channels!

    1. Speak to Non-larpers

    You don’t have to tell larpers why larp is awesome. They already know. If you see someone with a t-shirt for a band you like, you don’t walk over to them and try and convince them why that band is awesome. They’re already wearing the shirt. If a larper sees ANYTHING larp related, good chance is they’re probably going to like it regardless of content. Don’t limit your audience. Any video where I talk about larp, I always explain what it is as fast and as simply as I can within the first 20 seconds. How I describe it is “an adult game of make believe.” That seems to cover any genre of larp, no matter how experimental, and everyone can picture it since everyone knows what “make believe” is. Then I proceed to talk about it as if i’m explaining it to a group of veteran larpers, and noobies.((Slang on newbies, for beginners or people without any pre existing knowledge and experience.)) People are all secretly narcissistic and love seeing themselves in things. So, try to make videos that non-larpers could see themselves in. In every video I never assume the viewer knows what larp is, and then explain it in a way that could appeal to everyone. Larp is so broad and so many things, there is always something someone will like about it; costume designing, prop designing, writing, acting, combat. There are styles of larp that incorporate more sport, more tears, more competition, more costume showcasing, more set dressing. There’s a aspect and style of larp for everyone, so make sure everyone knows that. Which means….

    2. Learn How to Tell a Larp Story

    My friend Jamie who runs my main larp campaign once gave me a very long, slightly drunk, speech on how to tell a larp story to non-larpers. First of all: non-larpers do not care about mechanics, skills, or rules. Not at first anyway. When people ask “what was the last book you read?,” their first question will usually always be “What was it about?”, not whether it fit into the three act structure or took a more experimental approach. Do not tell non-larpers that you have a level four fire spell that allows you to hit a monster with 30 health for 10 flame damage. Say “I hit a monster with a fireball.” One of those stories sounds WAY more exciting than the other. Sell your larp adventures for the adventures you had, not the numbers it gave your character sheet. When you’re larping, the emotions are real, so tell the story as if you were ACTUALLY THERE because that’s what larp feels like. Not everyone likes numbers or behind the scenes information, but everyone loves a good story.

    3. Sell Yourself

    This is not as skeezy as it sounds. What i mean by this is just find all the best parts about yourself, and showcase them. YouTubers compared to a lot of other “celebrities” is that we are a far more personal art medium. We do “question and answers” where viewers can learn all about us, vlogs((Video blogs.)) where they can spend the day with us, and it’s a lot less “glitz and glamour” than other beings of well known status. People watch a video for the content, but they stick around and subscribe for the YouTuber. This doesn’t mean invent a new personality. This means find the parts of your personality people like, and electrify them. That goes for your characters as well.

    To expand on this idea, you should check out another YouTuber that’s NOT a larper, but pretty close: Miranda Sings. Miranda is a fictional character with a YouTube channel, created by comedian and singer Colleen Ballinger. In 2008 Colleen started uploading purposefully bad song covers to YouTube as a joke, and Miranda has gained over 7 million subscribers since. As she developed the character of “Miranda” she says she just read her YouTube comments, took note of what viewers found weird or obnoxious, and started to do it even more. Take note of what aspects of your characters and yourself your viewers like, and do it more.

    4. Make It Look Nice

    Sit in front of a lit window or bright light source. Make sure any fans, or air conditioners, or any other machinery making noise is turned off. Make sure your camera isn’t making you look too orange or too blue (you can change this by adjusting your lighting. Natural light gives off a blue tint, unnatural gives off an orange.) Make sure your background looks tidy and nice.

    For a while, I thought none of this really mattered…until I went back and watched my old videos. All these technical things are like the bass line of a song. You don’t notice when it’s there, but OH BOY do you notice when it’s not. So make sure you’re well lit, your sound is good, and your shot is set up nice. Which also means, pay attention to your background. If you want people to pay attention to nothing but your words, consider a blank wall behind you. Talking about costuming? Maybe display some of your pieces behind you. Want people to have a glimpse of your personality? Show your whole bedroom. Let your background tell a story.

    5. Get That Larp Footage

    Just talking to a camera is fine, but when you cut to something else, it makes sure the audience is paying attention, because it gives them some new to look at. Also it saves you the time and effort of trying to do your awesome larp justice. You can just show your audience so they don’t have to imagine it.

    One of the biggest rules in visual storytelling: show, don’t tell.

    Hide your camera, stay out of game for a while, ask for filming privileges in exchange for some pictures of the event, ask the organiser if they can make the camera cannon in the game.

    Even if it’s just pictures someone else took, ask them if you may use the pictures.

    6. Be Picky

    Larp is really hard to translate to video because, a lot of the times it’s not a spectator sport. Its meant to be experienced, not watched for entertainment. So, try and pick the footage that portrays what larp FEELS like, not looks like. Add some music or sound effects to fight scenes, so it doesn’t just sound like latex hitting latex matched with grunting. Pick those intense scenes with dramatic lighting. Remember to market to non-larpers. People don’t want to see a larp, they want to feel it. Choose the footage, and edit it accordingly, that portrays how that moment felt when you were in it.

    When you larp, a lot of the emotions and adrenaline is real, but this is a little harder to translate to film. When you watch a movie, a scene could have a completely different feel or intensity based on the cinematography, the editing, the music, the lighting. Picture a shot of a few kids splashing in the water. Now picture it with happy, upbeat, ukulele music. It’s a fun day at the beach! Viewers are content, and calm, and are reminded of carefree summer days. Now, picture the exact same shot, but with the jaws theme song underneath. Not a carefree beach day anymore is it? Footage provides what the larp looks like, but what you do with it determines how your viewers feel about it.

    I tried to put together all of these things into one of my videos which I called “Lock Stock & Barrel: a five minute larp.” I was dared by another YouTube channel to create a larp that would last 5 minutes, and film it. So I created a simple life or death scenario; 6 people locked in a post apocalyptic shelter that was running out of air, and the maximum inhabitant capacity would drop by 1 every 1 minute. Meaning, in order to survive, one person had to be eliminated or evacuated every minute. They were given items like: booze, poison, water, a gun, bullets, cookies, and other items designed to kill each other. There was an also an exit to the shelter with a 30% chance of survival in the wasteland. This was apparently fun for the players, and they wished it was a little longer. For the sake of a youtube video though, it was the perfect length. Because it was such a short amount of time, it was high energy, panicked, and 5 minutes of intensity. There was no time for spaced out improvised beautiful dialogue. It worked better, because it was messy and all over the place, like the real situation would have been if it was filmed for an audience. I also held it in my own home so I set up my filming lights, I got to set the scene the way I wanted, all with filming this in mind. Like it was an improvised movie.

    But the biggest tip I can give, not just to larp YouTubers, but all YouTubers in general: Just do it! Don’t worry about messing up, or having the right equipment, or not being ready. We all had to start somewhere. Watch the videos you make, figure out what you liked, and what you didn’t, and adjust accordingly. Just figure it out as you go along. Fall into your place. So get going!

    As an addendum to this piece, Simon Brind conducted a brief interview with Mo Mo O’Brien; edited highlights are included here:

    Simon Brind: Would you tell us a little more about the design for the five minute larp? Do the people have characters? Did you pre-write them or did the players do it? Was there a set?

    Mo Mo O’Brien: It was very light rules, basically if they wanted to do anything physically, they just asked out loud and I told them if it went ok. They had characters they decided on themselves. Formed their own relationships and backstories. All the knowledge they were given was they had been in this bunker for almost a year. We made up the characters on the spot in a workshop before the game. The set, was my living room, with a spotlight in the middle. You can watch the whole thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgQFuLhe-ks

    SB: Are there ways that larp could become a spectator sport? or a spectator event? Would it still be larp?

    O’B: If larp was a spectator sport, it would be called improv theatre. If all the mechanics and techniques were designed to entertain an audience and not the player, it would be an episode of whose line is it anyway. Even if there was an audience to an actual larp event, by my definition, it would become improv theatre. Though I’m sure there’s 40 essays out there by people much smarter than me with different theories about it.

    SB: How else could YouTube be used in larp? Could one be played out using YouTube videos and responses do you think? Or as a part of a game?

    O’B: What I would love to see is YouTube being used as a tool in larp. We have all this new technology that I feel could be utilised better. I recently did a game called As we know it that took place entirely, on my own, sitting in a closet, and all the interactions were over text. It was a game about isolation and through technology, perfect isolation was able to be achieved. There’s so much people can do with video, I think it could be used in larp a lot more.

    SB: Can you tell the story of a larp in video? Could the 5 minute experiment scale up to 30 minutes, 3 hours or even 3 days?

    O’B: Could I tell the story of a 3 day larp in a 10 minute video? Absolutely. Especially when it comes to internet media, it is typically more likely to hold someone’s attention. It’s important to find the right balance between rambling, and cutting it short. Say what you NEED to say. Sometimes you need to cut what you WANT to say, which is the most heartbreaking thing about good editing. Take notes before you film. It helps you formulate your thoughts, keeps you from forgetting anything, and will help eliminate nonsense and rambling.

    SB: Nordic larps have done a great job of documenting their games and they are producing some great promotional videos((Promotional videos for Fairweather Manor, Black Friday and the like.)) too. But what else would you like to see from game organisers? How could they improve?

    O’B: Blockbuster nordic larps are EASILY the simplest kind of larp to film, because it is so close to improvised theatre. They usually have the best costumes, props, sets, and scenes since it’s more about characters, than character sheets. Since it’s typically more aesthetically pleasing than a lot of boffer larps, it’s easier to share, and easier to relate to, because you have to worry less about portraying how the experience feels, because it looks so nice from the outside. So I think what the western larp media needs, is to focus on what the western larp community HAS. Focus more on the competitive and self improving nature of western sport style larps, and learn how to translate that feeling of adrenaline and action to film.

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

    Cover photo: The author during a video shoot. (Photo: Carol O’Brien). Other photos by Mo Mo O’brien.

  • Playing the Stories of Others

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    Playing the Stories of Others

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    Larps that treat social issues often aim to create empathy for real people who live in circumstances different from ours by putting us in their shoes. One example is provided by games where players from privileged backgrounds take on the roles of characters from a marginalised group, or experience situations where they are in a marginalised position.

    In the Norwegian larp Europa (Fatland and Tanke et al., 2001), the Nordic countries mirrored the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Nordic players spent a week as asylum seekers in a reception centre in a fictitious Balkan country. Another Norwegian larp, Just a Little Lovin’ (Edland and Grasmo, 2011), treats the spreading of HIV in the New York gay community in the 1980’s. Various runs of the game gave many players an idea on what it is to be HIV positive and raised consciousness about queer issues. Killed in the Name of Honor (Samad, Kharroub and Samamreh, 2013), organised by three Palestinian women, was set in a matriarchal culture where young men could face a honour killing if they didn’t adhere to the sexual mores of the community. In the Palestinian-Finnish larp Halat hisar (AbdulKarim, Arouri and Kangas et al., 2013 & 2016), we created an alternative reality where Finland lived under an apartheid regime and occupation similar to real world Palestine (see e.g. Kangas, 2014a and Pettersson, 2014a).

    2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen) 2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen)

    While Killed in the Name of Honor reversed gender roles, Halat hisar turned geopolitical power relations upside down. In the game world, Northern Europe was a conflict zone full of dictatorships, and Arab countries were rich and influential. Finnish players became oppressed people living under occupation, and Palestinians portrayed privileged foreigners. Such a role reversal is in a sense a form of cultural exchange, and it makes for illuminating post-game reflections, which I will discuss in more detail later.

    However, the stories we live in larp are filtered through our real-life selves. In the end, our unconscious reactions and interpretations of events are based on real-life experience. We have been socialised to certain roles and positions of which we are not even fully aware. Therefore it’s difficult to consciously set them aside.

    A good example is Mad About the Boy (Edland, Raaum and Lindahl, 2010), a game designed for women. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a mysterious disease has killed all men. The characters belong to three-woman family units hoping to get selected into a government-run artificial insemination program. The applicants go through the last stage of the process at a secret forest location where three government officials, a politician, a physician, and a psychologist, observe and evaluate their behaviour.

    In 2015, a Swedish team made a male version of the game, It’s a Man’s World (Gissén, 2015). It preserved most of the original scenario while switching the genders. Thus, there were, for example, artificial wombs instead of an insemination program. The game became completely different from the original. According to Sandqvist (2016), male players found the basic setting uninteresting: a situation where you are under surveillance and the only way to succeed is to be as perfect as possible. The female players of Mad About the Boy, however, found it easier to relate to such a situation because they had real-life experiences of being under pressure in a patriarchal society.

    Although larp is an excellent vehicle for creating strong emotions, it cannot replicate other people’s experiences. Halat hisar doesn’t teach a Nordic person how it really feels to live under occupation. However, role reversal can shed light on unexplored aspects of ourselves, power structures and our roles in them. In this article, I discuss this based on my experience of having been one of the organisers of Halat hisar in both runs of the game.

    Contextualisation

    Games where people from privileged groups play those who are in a marginalised position rightfully raise concerns of being disrespectful. One concern is that such games, especially if emotionally strong, could create a false sense of sharing the experience of marginalised people. One way to avoid this is to properly contextualise the game. When the contextualisation happens in dialogue with the group whose stories are played out in the game, it can spark fruitful reflection.

    The German organisation Waldritter e.V. runs refugee-themed educational larps with the aim of preventing racism and creating a culture of acceptance. The games end with a moderated discussion. A Syrian refugee took part in one game, sharing his personal story of the journey to Germany (Steinbach, 2016). In the debrief of the 2015 Denmark run of Just a Little Lovin’, HIV, AIDS, and cancer, important topics of the game, were contextualised. Each run of the game has had queer participants, and the 2015 Denmark run also had a cancer survivor.

    Mohamad Rabah designed the debrief for the 2016 run of Halat hisar to include dialogue between international and Palestinian participants. First, the players went through exercises that aimed to detach them from the game experience, such as guided meditation and the like. After that, there was a facilitated discussion in small groups with a Palestinian in each group. The Finnish and international players could ask the Palestinians about their real life experiences and thus put the game events into context. We had a rule that you could ask anything but the discussion would stay in the debrief group—you would not share its contents with outsiders.

    Several participants found this eye opening. A Finnish journalist who participated in the 2016 run wrote in the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat:

    When the game ended, there was a debriefing. As one part of it we were divided into small groups, each of which had a Palestinian player as a part of the group. We could ask them about the game and the reality of Palestine.

    I was naive and thought that the game, as most fiction, was built on exaggerated real-life events.

    The truth in Palestine, however, is worse than the game. In the protests at Birzeit University have seen much more than one student casualty.

    The worst thing was the realisation that after the larp the Palestinian players had to return to their everyday lives, where the game and it’s happenings were a reality.

    I cannot claim that I’d understand what they had to go through. But when I read the news about Palestinians suffering, the human tragedy behind them seems a bit more real.

    Jussi Ahlroth, 2016

    Another Finnish player said that Halat hisar didn’t allow her to understand how it feels to be oppressed, but it did make her realise what it means to be privileged. A Finn can choose whether to take part in the struggle against the occupation of Palestine, but a Palestinian cannot. The larp caused her to reflect on how privilege can be problematic even when combined with good intentions. She said this motivated her to use her privilege to make space for others instead of taking it for herself.

    The Normal and the Abnormal

    2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen) 2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen)

    In international mainstream media, stories about Palestinians are often told from the point of view of foreign journalists or Israelis. Even when the coverage is sympathetic to Palestinians, it does not often let Palestinians narrate their own stories, portraying Palestinians only as victims, as if that was the sum of their existence.

    While this can build empathy for Palestinians, it also makes Palestinians into objects instead of subjects—”others”, rather than us. We begin to expect that someone who is part of us tells the Palestinian story, as if Palestinians couldn’t do it themselves. This affects our attitudes toward Palestinians, and makes us less interested in their personal experiences. One of the goals of Halat hisar is to break this illusion by bringing Palestinians and internationals to play together. After all, in the minds of larpers, others don’t larp.

    However, based on post-game reflections and feedback, Palestinian players themselves also received new insights from the game. In the role reversal of Halat hisar, Palestinians play characters from the rich and democratic Arab League (compared to the EU in the game materials)—journalists, activists, human right workers, etc. Because the game events are close to home, some Palestinian players have found it hard to stay in character (Musleh, 2015). On the other hand, portraying foreign journalists and other internationals allows them to channel their own experiences into useful game material (Pettersson 2014b, Hamouri 2015). Some Palestinian players have also seen their own situation in a new light through the game. One of them described his experience in the 2013 run:

    Sometimes when you’re living in a unique situation, you stop perceiving things that are happening around you and to you as abnormal, you become part of a social blend that is neither natural nor normal. But when you step outside and watch your life as a third party, that is when you’re shocked by the reality that you have been part of most of your life.

    Zeid Khalil, Life under Occupation, 2014

    Oppression is not just about laws and practices nor the physical violence used to enforce them, but also about everyday social dynamics. There are the roles of the oppressed and the oppressors and—certainly in the case of Palestine—various outsider roles. In this hierarchy, those who are oppressed have less power and privileges. When you have lived your whole life in a situation of oppression, things like restrictions of movement, humiliating checkpoint searches and condescending behaviour from foreigners may feel normal.

    In the game, the privileged background of Finnish players created a social environment with dynamics different from those of real-world Palestine. After all, a feeling of normalcy is hard to establish in larps, and no amount of workshopping can equal a lifetime of socialisation. To Finnish players, the game events are unexpected and shocking, and their in-game behaviour occasionally reflects this. For example, a player could be induced to radically change their character’s opinions after encountering violence by soldiers, even though it would be routine for the character. In a sense, the players react in a normal way to abnormal situations.

    The fact that Finnish characters sometimes behave differently than the Palestinian players would do provides fruitful material for the post-game discussion. A Palestinian player from the 2013 run even found the experience empowering:

    For example before this larp, I would have not cut any conversation or expressed any anger in my real life while discussing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with a foreigner, even if I felt insulted. In the larp I was playing a role of a foreigner and by default I was insulting a Finnish student by trying to “own” her suffering when discussing the Finnish-Uralian conflict. The character I was talking to in that moment screamed at me and cut the conversation. In reflecting on this incident in my real life, I always have the choice to continue speaking with some annoying foreigner, but I have never chosen not to speak with them. This incident made me re-think about a space of choice in deciding with whom to discuss this PalestinianIsraeli conflict with from the people I meet in my life.

    Majd Hamouri, Birth of Larp in the Arab World, 2015

    To the Finnish player, this kind of appropriation wasn’t a routine part of life. She instinctively recognised its abnormality and felt entitled to stand up against it. However, it’s not unusual for internationals visiting Palestine to put themselves in the centre and concentrate on how painful it is for them to see what is happening without considering how Palestinians perceive their statements.

    A Militarised Society

    Like any cultural exchange, a larp where you switch places with others makes you see yourself, your own culture and your own society in a different way. To me as an organiser of Halat hisar, one of the illuminating things has been the military action in the game.

    Before the game, some of the Palestinian participants were worried that the soldiers wouldn’t be portrayed realistically enough. After all, our soldier extras were Finns who don’t live every day under military occupation. Moreover, our extras had never been to Palestine to witness the behaviour of Israeli soldiers. Before the first run of Halat hisar, I was also a bit concerned about this.

    However, you don’t learn to act like a soldier by watching soldiers, but through practice. In the end, portraying a soldier comes down to things like posture, movement, and certain kind of efficiency. Military training has the same basics everywhere. In Finland, there is no shortage of people who have undergone it.

    Most of our soldier extras came from a group of airsoft military simulation enthusiasts. They did not have previous larp experience but all of them had completed military service, and some had been on UN peacekeeping missions. If anything, they were sometimes too professional, considering that most Israeli soldiers serving on the Occupied West Bank are teenage conscripts. We also had a few experienced larpers playing soldiers to add some of the petty oppression and humiliation emblematic of military occupation.

    In both runs, the extras surprised the players by how soldier-like they were. This made me reflect on what a militarized society we Finns live in. In Finland, military service is mandatory for men, and voluntary for women.((It is possible for men to do a community service instead for reasons of conscience. However, a complete refusal will lead to a prison sentence of about six months. Nevertheless, it is relatively easy to get exempt on the grounds of physical or mental health.)) As of 2013, almost 80 percent of Finnish males of at least 30 years of age had completed the military service. (Purokuru, 2013)

    2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen) 2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen)

    Palestinians, on the other hand, don’t have this systemic military training of half the population. Armed resistance to the occupation is secretive and selective in nature, not something everybody is expected to participate in. Thus, it probably doesn’t occur to the Palestinian participants that acting like a soldier comes naturally to many Finns.

    This also reflects different attitudes in our societies about the idea of using violence to resist a hostile army. In Finland, it’s taken for granted that enemy soldiers crossing onto Finnish soil will be shot and killed. A person who questions this idea is not taken seriously in the political mainstream. Even when people advocate reducing military expenses or removing the mandatory service, they don’t promote non-violence in the face of an invasion.

    In Palestine, the relation between violent and non-violent resistance to military occupation is a major topic of debate. For example, Mahmoud Abbas, the acting president of the Palestinian Authority, has repeatedly condemned all violent resistance, even though the armed wing of Fatah, his party, practices it. In addition, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative party, Mustafa Barghouti, who won 19 percent of the vote in the 2005 presidential election, actively promotes non-violent resistance. (Rassbach, 2012)

    Moreover, the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), the official representative of the Palestinian people, renounced violence when signing the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, although various Palestinian groups have kept using violence. For comparison, the ANC (African National Congress) never abandoned the principle of violent resistance, not even during the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa. It is also difficult to imagine such a statement from the Finnish government. But why should arguments for non-violence be more outlandish in Finland, living in peace, than in Palestine, which is under daily attacks?

    Cultural Exchange

    I have previously toyed with the idea of larp as experimental anthropology (Kangas, 2014b; 2015). A game that reverses the roles of players from two different cultural or social categories can also be seen as a playful attempt to study culture. In a sense, it is a form of cultural exchange. This aspect is heightened when the game has a contextualising debrief where participants from the two groups share their experiences.

    Culture is often narrowly thought of as something connected to a geographical area, as in the statement, culture is different in Palestine and Finland. Usually, language plays an important role, too; for example, English-speaking countries seem like a connected cultural area, and language minorities within a country are perceived as having their own culture. However, there are cultural spheres inside a country or a language area, and they are sometimes determined by social positions. For example, we can speak of male culture or working class culture. These cultures frequently extend over the borders of national culture and connect people more strongly than it does—we may feel that we have more in common with people who share our educational background than with people who speak the same language.

    In a sense, everybody played their own culture in Halat hisar. Although the political situation of Finland was modelled on Palestine, Finns didn’t try to replicate for example, the ways family relations work in Palestine. The culture in occupied Finland was based on real life Finnish culture, and Palestinian players created the culture of the rich and democratic Arab world. And yet, there were changes. The geopolitical power relations were altered; the roles of the global north and south switched. Arab characters were privileged, and under the occupation, Finns were deprived of their basic human rights.

    One interesting aspect of the game was the interaction between characters from these two worlds. It was sometimes different from real-life communication between Palestinians and foreigners. This is no surprise, since the roles were reversed, and we unconsciously react based on the socio-cultural positions that we have grown used to.

    Reflecting on this after the game can make us question our social roles and positions. It raises the question of to what extent our cultural and social patterns are determined by power politics. How would they change if we were put into a more or less fortunate position in the world than the one we are in right now? Killed in the Name of Honor did the same experiment by reversing gender roles. It would also be interesting to reverse class hierarchies this way in larp.

    In my Nordic Larp Talk on experimental anthropology (Kangas, 2015), I argued that larp can’t really teach us how it is to live in e.g. a hunter-gatherer society, but it can give us valuable perspectives into our own culture. Similarly, playing the stories of others doesn’t make us feel the same way they do or give us the same experiences they have had. However, together with a proper post-game contextualisation, doing so can help us understand their situation better, and build solidarity. At the same time, playing out the stories of others can reveal something about ourselves and make us see our social environments and positions in a new light.

    2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen) 2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen)

    Bibliography

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

    Cover photo: 2016 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen). Other photos by Tuomas Puikkonen.