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  • Food for Thought: Narrative Through Food at Larps

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    Food for Thought: Narrative Through Food at Larps

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    Food is an essential part of any culture. Taste and smell may be some of our more abstract senses but they have the power to bring us closer to memories and common experiences than many of the other senses. Anyone who pretends to be an intellectual knows about Marcel Proust and his Madeleine biscuit; how the taste of the Madeleine brought forth memories of the protagonist’s childhood with crystal clear vividity. It is our belief that food has this power. Food is very strongly culturally bound. What is deemed edible or taboo is strongly rooted in us, and often it does not matter that we intellectually know that something is safe or even tasty. If our culture has taught us that dog meat or insects are taboo we will have a very hard time bringing ourselves to try them. Simply put, food is a strong carrier of both memories and common culture.

    Eating food is also often a social ritual. The time during the day when we gather together, and share our experiences with each other. In all these ways food and eating are excellent tools to carry a narrative. To enhance an experience of being in an alien or different culture, or even literally to act as plot-tools. Still it is our experience that a lot of larp designers forget about the power food can hold over the participants experience. Below, we will share our experiences as both organisers and kitchen helpers/volunteers. We hope that our experience and creativity both will bring food to the forefront when it comes to narrative tools but also inspire more larp-designers to use the kitchen staff and the food as narrative tools. If they do it is our belief that they deeply will enhance the larp experience for their participants.

    The Food

    We are very emotional about what we eat. This is natural since we quite literally would die if we did not eat. Getting food when we are really hungry is among the most pleasurable experiences in the world. Likewise the disappointment of realising you cannot get food when you are really hungry can be devastating. There are very clear cultural connections to food. What is supposed to taste good, and what is expensive. Even if we try to pretend that champagne and caviar are really cheap in a certain larp culture the larpers will have a hard time accepting this as truth. Likewise, presentation means a lot for the eating experience. Texture, colours, the way it is presented and plated. If you understand this you can start to really play around with the food to create the feeling you yourself envisioned as a organiser and larpwriter. We will now present some case studies of how we have used the food itself to enhance a narrative and in some instances even created narrative with it. We have made jello to make a larp about American gods feel more American and we have made hundreds of fluffy little cakes to give a mad hatter feeling to a mental ward in fable inspired fairy tale larps. Food is a way to involve another sense into a full body larp experience and we want to tell you a little about the way we have done that in the past.

    Beyond the Barricades — Literally Putting the Narrative in the Food

    Beyond the Barricades (Göthberg and Wei, 2015) was a larp inspired by Les Misérables, it took place during the French Revolution of 1832. The players portrayed the revolutionaries on the barricade and all either deserted the cause or died heroically in the ending scene. The wish was to create a feeling of constant pressure from the outside, both from other barricades to stay strong and from the military to give up. We also wanted to serve very simple food, something that made the characters, all from different socio-economical classes contrast each other. Some saw it as luxury dinner, other as basically inedible garbage. The meals were very simple, a french onion soup without the garnish or quite literally lentils and garlic. It was carried in beyond the barricades by the kitchen staff in buckets and served together with loafs of bread. However, in some of the breads letters from another barricade were hidden. This created hilarious discussions between the NPC players, organisers and kitchen staff regarding how to pace the NPCs dramatic curve alongside the dramatic curve served to the players in the breads, making sure that the NPC’s portraying revolutionaries from the same barricade as the letter inside the breads followed the same narrative curve as the letters we served up for lunch or dinner. It also helped giving a feeling of a meaningful surrounding outside the barricade and created some nice scenes when the bad news of the other barricade falling under the military attacks were delivered in a bread during the last day. The kitchen staff also used the food to guilt the players characters into doubting their commitment to the revolution. By blaming the revolutionaries for cutting off supply lines resulting in less profits for the poor workers that made the food for them, and the further the larp went bringing in more and more meager supplies the food became a symbol for the fruitlessness of the revolution. This was possible to do since there was extra food available in the off-game area, and we also served up a feast on the evening after the larp ended.

    Made in Hessbrand — Starvation and Disgust

    Made in Hessbrand (Zeta, Johnsson, Modin and Isaksson) ran in 2015 and was a part of the long going fantasy campaign, Heart of War. The setting was far away from the war in question. Deep in the countryside of Hessbrand, a country visually and culturally inspired by Ireland in the 14th century. The story was something along social revolt and miserable failure. The players portrayed Hessbrännian workers and a manufacture for buttons or supervisors from an occupation force. During the larp the players made a revolt, barricaded themselves in and finally got completely massacred by arriving soldiers. The feeling the organisers wanted to communicate was one of poverty, sickness, working too much in the factory and oppression. We tried to make that happen through the food serving, but in the same time we wanted to serve tasty food so that people could eat their full. We started of presenting ourselves and the food to the players before game start. We played disgusting and filthy characters. Everyone had probably seen me sneeze in the pots. We asked them to actively play down the food as weird looking and disgusting. The food served was “Fishys mush” which was named after the colour they had, green and yellow. They were served together with honey glazed fried cabbage, bread, hummus, and fried bacon. The compliments were tasty and therefore made it possible for players who have a hard time to stomach the mush on account of them looking almost inedible to still get a decent meal. The green mush was green lentils cooked in garlic and olive oil until it turned into a porridge and the yellow mush was simply mashed potatoes with a mushroom sauce mixed into it which gave it a greyish colour and lumpy texture.

    This meant that the food was very tasty even if it looked horrible. This together with the player actively joking about how disgusting the mushes were and the kitchen staff portrayal of thieving lying entrepreneurs happy to make money out of others misery helped create a feeling of the food as a horrible thing you did not want to touch with a ten foot pole, but the only nutrition to get within walking distance. It increased the players’ feeling of being abused by a system and the feeling of poverty. In the same time the actual food was really tasty and filling.

    Last Will—The taste of something different

    Last Will (Stenler, Strand and Gamero 2014) was a larp set in a dystopian future when Chinese culture had grown in importance together with American. This created a vision of the future where a lot of texts were written in Chinese and Chinese culture was present in name culture and such. Last Will was a larp about modern day slavery and the loss of democratic rights, set in a dystopian future Sweden, in a gladiator stall. The players portrayed slaves of free workers (who lived under slave like conditions). They were not allowed to leave the gym where they lived on plastic mats behind plastic sheet walls. Their whole life circled around making sure the fighters were good enough to survive the gladiator-style fights. Food was served from “upstairs” quite literally as both the in-game administration and the off game organisers were sitting up the stairs from the playing area. The organisers had a clear vision of what they wanted the food to say. It was suppose to speak industry, impersonal, calculated nutrition and Asian. This was very well achieved. The food was simple lentil stews with potatoes and other root vegetables. Added in was also seaweed which gave the food an unpleasant slimy texture and a slightly Asian flavour. It was served in vacuum packed bags of plastic, the food weighed by me and the other helpers to make sure it was more or less the exact amount of an adult’s daily intake or calories, supervised by the cooking organisers. It was then frozen and thawed in water baths before served at the venue. Together with your allotted plastic bag you would get seaweed crackers and some of the characters even got “vitamins” to moderate their health. These “vitamins” and the calculated sizes of the food gave the players a feeling of being under constant supervision and moderation from the people upstairs. The Asian flavours helped create a feeling for the culture that larp was portraying and if you could not stomach the seaweed lentil stew and felt you needed something else to eat the players could go to the off game area where there was plenty of fruits, sandwiches, chocolate and hugs. This made it possible to serve food that was a bit strange in flavour because if the players could not stomach it there was a backup solution.

    Tre Kronor, Lindängen and the luxury of the upper class

    Just as it is hard for players to really immerse themselves in an experience of poverty and hunger if the food offered is a cornucopia of delights, playing on themes of luxury and richness will also be enhanced and helped by the right food. More than that, food can work as a nice divider between rich and poor at larps where different economic classes mingles. Tre Kronor (Linder, Wånngren and Ahlbom, 2012) was a small one night event. The setting a high status upper class freemasonry lodge’s yearly banquet. During the larp the kitchen staff were players as well, but we paid less than those playing upper class. A professional cook planned and executed lavish multiple course dinners for the upstairs crowd that the staff heated and served during the larp. The downstairs staff got simple soup and cheap alcohol. This created a nice division between player groups, a feeling of entitlement in the upper class characters and a feeling of oppression for the downstairs crowd. The kitchen, dressed up in uniform clothing helped to create an atmosphere where any wish or demand was upheld.

    Another larp where the players portrayed the upper class was Lindängen Boarding School (Elofsson and Lundkvist, 2013). In this section I want to concentrate on the food and how it acted to help create a feeling of luxury for the players. Sometimes you might not have the possibility to get a real chef to make the food, but there is a lot you can do to play around with the feeling of more luxurious food for the participants even as a volunteer with no formal training. We will talk more about the different way we choose to portray Lindängen below but there is still some interesting points to be made about the food itself on the different runs. During Lindängen 1 (2013) we opted for classical dishes from Swedish schools but in a fancier setting. Green pea soup with white wine instead of the traditional brown pea soup. Salad served in pretty containers, and homemade bread (cheap and luxurious) gave a feeling of more upper class establishment. During Lindängen 2 (2014) the kitchen chose to be even more upscale, with a lot of energy going into making food from scratch which made it possible to serve food that usually is quite expensive even if it did not cost that much since it was made from cheap ingredients such as gnocchi and stuffed peppers. For Lindängen 3 (2016) the homemade croissants were a hit that gave a quite ordinary breakfast spread a more fancy tone, together with the attention to details such as cheese roses and whipped butter.

    The Fluffy Muffin Plot — When you Cook up Larp Magic

    Sometimes just the presence of the most mundane normal thing will create game for a large group of players. These stories are never planned but happens in the moment. Some might even argue that this is the basic strength of larp as a medium. We are as larpers hyper-aware of any possible storyline and we tend to try and make sense of the random. During Lindängen 3 this happened to great effect in the many twists and turns of “the fluffy muffin plot.” It is—as are so many of these larp stories—too long and too personal to be of a broader interest in its entirety but we will try to give you the boiled down version here, to explain how you can create play with food at larps.

    One player (who portrayed a very stern and scary teacher) asks the organisers one morning for some “fluffy muffins.” He was going to make a psychological experiment. The organisers were a bit confused but asked the kitchen staff to make some fluffy muffins. The thought of a very stern and sadistic teacher playing around with six fluffy muffins generated a lot of laughter in the kitchen. The kitchen obviously made sure to have the windows open and to talk about this very loudly to spread the rumours about the fluffy muffins and their longing to spit in them. By the time the muffins reached the teacher who ordered them, the rumour that the kitchen spat in them was already in motion, and therefore by larp magic became true. The kitchen totally DID spit in them.

    The psychological experiment is done and create an interesting scene for the players and that could have been the end of the fluffy muffins. However there were five muffins left so the teacher served them to the five students with the highest status in the third year. They were of course terrified to accept such gifts from their horrible teacher, but decided after much anguish that to eat them was better than to not eat them. However one of them was so curious about what these muffins actually meant that he sends a younger student to find out about the muffins (since speaking directly to the kitchen was forbidden.) The student who was sent to find out the truth misunderstands him though and just ends up ordering more muffins. Since the kitchen was well staffed it had the time to bake new fluffy muffins and serve them. Through the inner working of status fall and reputation this last serving of the fluffy muffins resulted in the fall from grace of some students, the rise of others and some scenes of oppression. All very welcome at a larp about pennalism and boarding schools.

    At the same larp we also let some students make a hat out of cheese that they used to bully another student. And on earlier Lindängen frozen peas, spinach and at a memorable occasion frozen scones has soothed black eyes of students. The importance of this story is to show how much you can do with food and kitchen staff to create game and dynamic. The so called “Fluffy Muffin Plot” ended up being one of the most retold narratives in the debrief group, and would never have happened had not the organisers planned for a big enough kitchen crew that a person could be spared to make the muffins in the first place.

    The Kitchen

    All larps that provides food for their players needs some kind of kitchen crew. These are often volunteers, or even organisers, who have a huge responsibility to make sure everyone is fed (preferably food that is sufficient in nutrition and quantity and on time ) and who because of that often spends most of their time off game without being a real part of the larp and the story. We would like to propose different ways to use the kitchen as a play area and the kitchen crew as proper characters. People who are responsible for feeding the rest of the larp (as well as with other kinds of practical off game duties) should of course never get involved in the game to an extent where it interferes with those responsibilities but there’s still plenty of room to create characters that contributes to the setting and fills an in-game purpose without interfering with the actual cooking.

    Lindängen — One Larp, Three Different Kitchens

    One larp that has already been mentioned in this article is Lindängen, a larp about an upper class boarding school revolving around themes such as bullying, peer pressure, social status and the never ending upholding of a system that keeps hurting the people within it. It’s been run three times and one or both of us have been a part of the kitchen crew each time. What’s particularly interesting about this larp is that the way the kitchen was used as a play resource and the role it filled in the game varied a lot between the different runs.

    For the first run, we were aiming to create a contrast between the upper class students and teachers of the school and ourselves, as well as offering a safe space for those characters (and players) who suffered the most from the bullying. The kitchen staff were portrayed as working/lower class who sold home made booze and listened to loud socialistic punk music. Being in the bottom when it came to status and influence also created the opportunity to actually question what was going on in the school. The kitchen itself became a place where all the “outsiders,” the ones who didn’t want to play along with the system and those who it affected the hardest, could come to breath or hide out for a moment. Within the kitchen walls, no one could hurt them and to it’s staff they could reveal how they really felt about the school. In the end the kitchen staff also worked as a reminder on how status is the only thing that matters within the system when their attempts to actually make a difference and create some justice miserably failed.

    The kitchen in the second run was rather another tool to uphold the system than a contrast to it. Not only was the food fancier, the kitchen staff themselves had a much more polished and professional approach with more of a personal distance (at least officially) towards the students. The kitchen also played a role in the actual bullying through the use of kitchen duty as a penalty for students that misbehaved. While the kitchen in the first run was a place to hide from oppression it was now a place to be even more oppressed. In a similar way the kitchen during this run amplified the need of upholding a surface. They would be very professional towards the player until they were sent to kitchen duty when the facade would be lowered and the player now forced to mop the kitchen floor had an opportunity to hear conversations between people who came from a different social background and had a different view of the world. This suppressed form of dislike towards the school and its traditions worked well in giving the players a feeling of another world outside of the school, but a world that was judging, different and impossible to be a part of.

    For the third run, the role of the kitchen was pretty much set by the players themselves. During the pre-game workshop they decided that one of the unofficial school rules would be “no personal socialising with the kitchen staff” and even though this rule wasn’t upheld at all times it contributed to an us and them-division between the kitchen and rest of the school. This was even more established through for example a scene where the career counselor used a member of the kitchen staff as an “example of bad character” before a group of students. The kitchen staff was in many ways more looked down upon than in the previous runs but still filled the purpose of being the harmless adults, the ones you can turn to when one of the games has gotten out of hand and someone is actually hurt without risking getting in trouble for it.

    Coven — Increasing the Creepiness

    Coven (Häggström and Falk, 2015) was a larp inspired by the show American Horror Story: Coven and centred around a small coven of witches with the task of both educating people with magical powers as well as hiding them from witch hunters. The larp started with a group of teenagers who had just learned about their powers and the whole existence of the witch community arriving to the coven, their new home. The feeling of the coven was supposed to be eerie, freakish and unpredictable for those who were new to it and one element that was used to create this was, of course, the household staff.
    The household did not only provide the food but also other chores like tidying up the sleeping quarters, making beds and assisting in magical rituals. The kitchen was not only a place where the food was prepared but also the place to go to if you needed to get blood, salt or plastic covers for said rituals. The staff itself were portrayed as emotionless, ageless and it was uncertain even to ourselves if they even were human. We spent a lot of time stone faced staring out the kitchen window, sweeping the same spot of the floor over and over again, making beds extremely neatly, folding the players clothes and reorganising their personal belongings when they weren’t looking, wiping blood of the floor without showing any sort of emotion and so on. We even listened to the same song on repeat in the kitchen throughout the whole larp. For the players this created a feeling of having walked straight into a horror movie. The knowledge that the household always saw you became very powerful, and the players experienced a feeling of loss of personal space when their belongings would be reorganised as soon as they turned their head. The almost mechanical movements of the household, paired with the same song going on repeat really made you doubt if they were real people. It became very effectively a way of entering into a magical circle of belief as the characters tried to accustom themselves to a new reality where magic was real and dangerous.

    The Do’s and Don’ts of Kitchen Work at Larps

    We have during our unofficial career as kitchen volunteers gathered some overall valuable lessons that make life easier for everyone, participants as well as organisers, that are listed below. We hope that these tricks of the trade will help others, organisers and kitchen volunteers alike to make their work easier.

    Three Things You Never Should Do

    • Poison your players.((We have all done it, but try your best and never do the same mistake twice. Like Siri did.)) With this we mean, do not serve food that the player in question is allergic too. Make sure to clearly mark allergy-friendly food, or serve it separately for the larper in question. Most modern settings will allow to mark the food clearly with a name sign using the player’s in game name.
    • Not having enough food to feed everyone. This means that during starvation larps there should be access to food off game that has not gone bad or is disgusting but good, preferably warm, food, ready to help players through a taxing time. If this is not going to be available, clearly communicate this to the players in advance and make sure there is a convenient way for them to stash off game food for themselves if they need sufficient nutrition to handle the larp.
    • Understaff your kitchen. It creates anguish, pain, stress and bad role-playing on behalf of the staff. Mistakes happen more easily when the kitchen staff have not had sufficient sleep. Better to have space in the budget for a person too many than to have too few in the volunteer group. That way you can have some designated to do the actual cooking, one to do last minute shopping (which will happen) and some more focused on creating the right atmosphere and role-playing if you want the kitchen to actually enhance your game.

    Three Things You Should Always Do

    • Appreciate your kitchen staff. Do not underestimate the importance of good kitchen staff. They will be able to help you create the right ambience and make sure organisers and players are well fed. All they want is some cred and maybe some chocolate, energy drinks or other poisons of their choice. Make sure to thank them after the larp and give them a small token of appreciation and they will be happy to go the extra mile for you.
    • Clearly communicate to the players how much food will be served, what kind of special diet you will provide for/not provide for and so on. It’s never okay to let the players discover they won’t have enough to eat after they have paid a full participation fee and arrived to the larp (you can of course serve any food you like but tell the players about it). This means be clear if there will be dietary options available, if there will be off game food in cases where the scenario doesn’t leave room for a lot of food etc.
    • Work with the players special diets instead of against it. Look at the players needs before setting the menu and try to make sure as many as possible will be able to eat as many meals as possible. A lot of vegetarians? Make all food vegetarian! Gluten allergies? Serve rice instead of pasta. If you make the food vegan it will also work for lactose and milk protein allergies. This will most likely save you not only time but also money.

    Conclusion

    We hope this advice will be helpful in your future culinary endeavours. We truly believe food is an essential part of any larp experience. If we allow it to be. Let texture, flavours and presentation play towards the atmosphere of the larp, and make sure to staff your kitchen with enough people so that they will have time to help you create the feeling and game play that truly supports the story you want to tell.

    Bon Appetite!

    Ludography

    • Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist. Lindängens Riksinternat (run 1). Sweden: 16-20 September 2013. Cooking and serving by Siri Sandquist, Rosalind Göthberg, Samuel Sjöström, Hugo Sandelin, Elsa Broman and Anneli Friedner
    • Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist. Lindängens Riksinternat 2 (run 2). Sweden: 30 April-4 May 2014. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist, John Bergström, Rune Nordborg, Mojje Mårtensson, Calle Wickström
    • Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist. Lindängens Riksinternat 3 (run 3). Sweden: 2016. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg, Lukas Renklint, Elvira Fallsdalen, Erland Nylund, Emil Rogvall
    • Rosalind Göthberg and Eva Wei. Beyond the Barricades. Sweden: 4-6 June 2016. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist and Lukas Renklint
    • Mia Häggström and Sofie Falk. Coven (run 1). Sweden: 18-20 September 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg, Sara Gerendas, Hannah Merkelbach, Elli Garperian
    • Mia Häggström and Sofie Falk. Coven (run 2). Sweden: 2-4 October 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg, Sara Gerendas, Elvira Fallsdalen, Carl Nordblom
    • Anna-Karin Linder, Oscar Wånngren and Hampus Ahlblom. Tre Kronor 2, Sweden: 2012. Cooking and serving by Siri Sandquist, Frida Karlsson Lindgren, Nicolas Lennman, Jonathan Dahlander, Severin Gottsén, Johannes Harg, Carolina Lindahl och Theo Axner
    • Anna-Karin Linder, Oscar Wånngren and Hampus Ahlblom. Tre Kronor 3, Sweden: 2013. Cooking and serving by Siri Sandquist, Rosalind Göthberg, Frida Karlsson Lindgren, Elsa Broman, Lukas Renklingt, Nicolas Lennman, Johannes Harg, Elin Gissén, Carl Norblom, Malva Tyllström and Severin Gottsén
    • Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist, Erik Holst and Teresa Axner. Organise Safely. Sweden: 2015 Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and Lukas Renklint
    • Lukas Renklint, Rosalind Göthberg, Elvira Fallsdalen and Eva Wei. Once upon a Time 1. Sweden: 2014. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and organisers
    • Lukas Renklint, Rosalind Göthberg, Elvira Fallsdalen and Eva Wei. Once upon a Time 2. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and organisers
    • Lukas Renklint, Elvira Fallsdalen, Rosalind Göthberg and Eva Wei. Sigridsdotter 1. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and Siri Sandquist
    • Lukas Renklint, Elvira Fallsdalen, Rosalind Göthberg and Eva Wei. Sigridsdotter 2. Sweden: 2016. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and Siri Sandquist
    • Siri Sandquist, Erland Nylund, Linnea Björklund and Thor Forsell. Dusk of Gods. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist and Thor Forsell
    • Siri Sandquist, Staffan Fladvad, Johan Nylin and Elin Gissén. It’s a Man’s World. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist and Fredrik Nilsson
    • Sofia Stenler, Annica Strand and Frida Gamero. Last Will. Sweden: 2014. Cooked and served by organisers and Siri Sandquist and Frida Karlsson Lindgren
    • Sara Zeta, Ola Johnsson, Hanna Modin and Josefine Isaksson. Made in Hessbrand. Sweden: 2014. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist, John Bergström and Elin Holm

    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 authors posing with a batch of bread (pre-game, Siri Sandquist).

  • History, Herstory and Theirstory: Representation of Gender and Class in Larps with a Historical Setting

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    History, Herstory and Theirstory: Representation of Gender and Class in Larps with a Historical Setting

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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.

    Why Larp with History?

    Human history as a setting for larp goes back to the earliest days of the form – even to before larp was identified as a special kind of activity in its own right, in the committee games and fictionalized simulations that preceded the larp that we know today.

    What makes history so appealing?

    • The richness, range, and depth of the real historical tapestry is such as to make it inexhaustibly appealing as a source of larp material. From Ancient Egypt (Queen of Denial, Barnard and Holkar, 2014) to medieval Britain (The Lists of Avalon, Barnard, Jones and Jones, 2011) to the Industrial Revolution (Railways and Respectability, Barnard and Dall et al., 2007) to the Korean War (M*A*S*H: Brothers in Arms, Barnard and Dall et al., 2013), there’s something for everyone. And provided you avoid exoticization and respect the people involved, the whole spectrum is available to you.
    • Familiarity to participants is another advantage: they may already be familiar with the chosen historical milieu, or, if not, they can easily make themselves familiar by using readily-available reference materials. Compare the difficulty of communicating familiarity with a fictional setting whose details are only available in the minds of the designers.
    • Historical settings lend themselves readily to parallels and lessons related to life today, for the more instructive school of larp design. For example, the 1970s Berlin of “Heroes” (Holkar, 2016) studies attitudes towards the demonized Other, and how similarities, once exposed, may resonate more strongly than differences. The distance of the setting helps to make clear the significance of the themes in our own world.
    • And there’s no denying the emotional power and resonance of larping historical events — perhaps those in which one’s own ancestors, or national predecessors, might have been involved.
    • But a larp design that draws upon history has, perhaps, first to consider the limitations and biases of our societal defaults of historical understanding and analysis.

    The Problem with History

    We must recognise that our knowledge of history is filtered by the (necessarily limited) information that we have about it. We may have access to written accounts from the period: but who wrote them, and why? We may have artefacts, structures, and other physical remains: but who has interpreted them to us? What assumptions did those interpreters make?

    Photo of upstairs and downstairs characters in Fairweather Manor
    Fairweather Manor is an example of a larp based upon historical fiction that explores the dynamics between characters of different classes and genders. Photo courtesy of Dziobak Larp Studios.

    To generalise: surviving historical texts were largely written by educated and wealthy men. And these texts, and non-textual historical remains, have also until recently largely been discussed by educated and wealthy men. Even if the author of your direct source is not in that category, you have to ask: who then were that author’s sources and to what extent did they question them? So, for example, Georgette Heyer wrote a feminized take on the British Regency period((Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck (London: William Heinemann, 1935).)) in which women have a greater focus than in historical accounts of the period. But she restricted her scope to the same narrow upper section of society that had been depicted by Jane Austen; she also restricted her research largely to the use of materials left by educated and wealthy men and to the study of decor and costume, rather than establishing what might have been going on in the world outside those stately imagined drawing-rooms. Whether, as an educated and wealthy woman herself, Heyer had any interest in the lives of the poor and underprivileged of that period, we do not know, but she certainly didn’t write about them. If you draw your larp-design inspiration from historical fiction rather than directly from history, you run the risk of inadvertently being on the wrong end of a filter of this type.

    Other Histories

    The study of women’s history, and people’s history (ordinary people, as distinct from those in power), gives new and fascinating perspectives on familiar historical settings.

    “Other” history is of its nature a kind of revisionism: it asserts that traditional historical accounts are partial and/or incomplete. Women’s history draws attention to the roles of women throughout history; it studies the lives and works of individual women, and groups of women, “of note” and otherwise; it examines the effects of historical events on women; and so on. It necessarily questions the privileged values assigned by traditional history to the lives and activities of men. It may also identify situations where women’s actual contributions have been neglected or belittled, at the time or subsequently.

    In the same way, a people’s history, also known as a “history from below”, approach to historiography looks at historical events and developments from the point of view of ordinary people rather than leaders. It proactively focuses on the lives of the poor, the dispossessed, and those who in general have no access to power. And it seeks to demonstrate how historical changes that we traditionally ascribe to “great men” are often more the product of inexorable social forces rising from below.

    Women comforting each other in a prison larp
    Female characters in Winson Green Prison, a larp about women fighting for the right to vote. Photo by Vicki Pipe for the run at The Smoke Festival 2017.

    In A People’s History of the United States,((Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).)) Howard Zinn (1980) says:

    The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

    In larp, even more than in history, positive portrayals of characters are important — because they must be playable. Endowing your female and poor characters with affordances that may not have been demonstrated in the traditional historical record is going to make them more interesting to play, as well as serving the political end of representation. For sure, larp the executioners. They’ll be interesting to play — but the victims don’t have to be just oppression-fodder.

    A straightforward example of this kind of “other” history in larp is Winson Green Prison (Sandquist and Göthberg, 2016). It portrays “the women who fought for the equal right to vote, and the men who loved them” — people who at the time were weak, oppressed and despised by society, but who have been vindicated by history. Their struggles are moving and affecting, but we know that they were in the right and that their descendants will see them as heroes. This makes for a good playable mix of struggle and satisfaction.

    Historical Responsibility in Larp

    Grownups in the Gere family: Dina, Gere, Aina (Post-game, Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis)
    Brudpris (2014-, Norway) is a larp that explores the dynamics of a patriarchal society. (Post-game, Photo by Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis)

    When looking at and working with historical events and settings via the medium of larp, designers may feel that they owe a responsibility to the people of those times to represent them fairly: to not skew or downplay the depictions of those who have been neglected or diminished by traditional historical accounts. This is not always easy, but it’s a worthwhile use of time. As well as helping to make your design more responsible and understanding, it will also help to make it more interesting and original. There have been countless historical larps in which powerful people make key decisions while lesser folk fill in the background around them; how much fresher and more entertaining would it be to find stories in which women, or ordinary common people can take focus? For example, Dulce et decorum est… (Rider Hill, 2012) depicts a noble family and their influential friends, engaging in political discussion around a dinner table in an English country house in the runup to World War II: a solid and well-proven style of larp setting. Meanwhile Love Letter (Curd, Gammans, McCormick and Perry, 2015) examines the lives of a group of ordinary English village dwellers as the same war impacts upon them — the effects on those who fight, and those who are left behind — caused by the decisions of remote politicians to whom the larp makes no direct reference. Both are successful designs in their own terms, but one is doing something much more unusual than the other.

    St Croix (Stamnestrø and Voje, 2015) opens the question of how a power disparity between characters — in this case, slaves and slave-owners — can generate good play for both parties. Slaves have authority over very little, not even their own bodies: how do you empower those players in the larp? What affordances do they have available? Brudpris (Linder and Dahlberg, 2015) partly answered this question by giving its oppressed female characters an unhistorical sexual dominance, so those players were able to compensate, during sexual encounters, for lack of agency in other areas of play.

    Beyond the Barricades (Wei and Göthberg, 2015) brings vividly to life the Parisian revolution of 1832. The sides are clear, but one’s relationship to the people alongside whom one stands might not be — especially when unity starts to break down. This design allows for a nuanced approach to social class, and to the development of trust.

    War Birds ((Moyra Turkington, Ann Kristine Eriksen, and Kira Magrann, et al, War Birds (Toronto, Canada: Unruly Designs, 2016).)) is a collection of six freeforms and larps looking at the war experiences of women; as aviators, refugees, internees, partisans, drivers, or factory workers. It ably demonstrates the range and variety of play experience that can be generated from examining a straightforward other-historical premise.


    Moyra Turkington talks, at Living Games Conference 2016, about the genesis of War Birds: following “redlinked” stories in Wikipedia to see the unwritten history of women’s wartime contributions.

    The Myth of Authenticity

    One argument sometimes given for the dominance of wealthy males in historical larps is that this exercise of privilege is authentic for the period being depicted, and that to show otherwise would be a falsity.

    Quite apart from the question of whether the “facts” about the period upon which this view is based are correct or not — as discussed earlier, the filter over historical materials is a highly selective one — it can be argued that the whole notion of authenticity is specious. It’s impossible to larp “the 16th century” from the point of view of the 21st century; all you can ever do is larp an approach to the 16th century, which emerges from the context in which you’re designing.

    Our contemporary view of the 16th century is very different from that of historians of fifty years ago; and in fifty years time it will be different again. And as an artistic creator rather than a simulator, a larp designer will draw out themes and messages that resonate particularly strongly with their own contemporary audience. Just as performances of the play Hamlet take on new directions and resonances depending on the political and social currents of the time when they’re being performed, so too do runs of the larp Inside Hamlet (Krauklis and Ericsson et al., 2000; Ericsson et al., 2015).

    Deliberate inauthenticity — for example, giving women more prominent and higher-status roles — should not be seen as a betrayal of historical truth. Rather, it can allow a designer to recontextualise history more effectively for their audience. For example, Oss imellom (Hatlestrand and Edland, 2015) includes working-class homosexuals in a middle-class-based organisation that historically would have excluded them, so as better to present the variety of homosexual experience in 1950s Norway. To skew your design in this way, against the power balance of the traditional historical message, is to raise up living underprivileged people against those dead people who have been privileged by the conventional narrative.

    faders for the Mixing Desk
    The Mixing Desk of Larp design tool features a Loyalty to World slider, where designers can adjust according to playability vs. plausibility. Developed for the Larpwriter Summer School.

    Media and Message

    It may be that, actually, designing larp directly from the historical record is not your approach. Rather, you might be designing to convey the flavour of media works (books, films) set in that period. A larp set in the Old West is perhaps more likely to be responding to a particular subgenre of Western movie than to the actual history of the period. And a larp set at the 17th-century court of Louis XIV is almost certain to be drawing more heavily on the (19th-century) Musketeers novels of Alexandre Dumas than on documents of the period.

    This is no bad thing — resonance with your intended players is more likely to be found within media with which they’re familiar — but it’s another filter to be aware of. Reading Dumas, one would think that all warrior men are strong and masculine, while women are weak, passive, or conniving. However, we know from the existence of historical figures such as La Maupin, Philippe of Orleans, and the Chevalier d’Eon that the 17th-century French court was a much more genderqueer world than the 19th-century novelist was happy to admit; we know that the cowboys of the real Old West were often black, and sometimes women. By looking into history as well as your entertainment-media sources, you can broaden your representation without moving too far away from the material with which your players are familiar. And you should be honest with yourself, and with your players, about whether your game is aiming primarily to be history-based or fiction-based.

    Hell on Wheels promotional photo with three male and three female characters
    The Czech Hell on Wheels is a Western genre larp adapted from the fictional television show. Photo by Potkani.

    Techniques for Representation

    • Look beneath the surface – Seek out “other” histories as well as mainstream ones. By now, women’s and people’s history are well enough established that a wide range of historical periods have been covered by these approaches.
    • Look at the sources – Take in actual history, as well as media depictions of the period. You may find that the way the history has been portrayed on the page or on screen is quite different from modern historians’ understanding of it.
    • Ask the logical questions – If women aren’t mentioned in the orthodox account, why might that be? Where were they, and what were they doing? What place did poorer people have in the economy?
    • Turn the familiar face of history around – For example, war histories often focus on men who are away fighting, or on the portrayal of the victors as uncontested heroes. How about those family members who stayed at home? – what can you find out about them, that could make for interesting larp?((Heroes of the Hearth (Stiainín Jackson, in Seven Wonders (London: Pelgrane Press, 2015) is a tabletop RPG that looks at this situation.)) How about the experiences of those who were defeated?
    • Turn over stones – Why are some periods of history frequently visited by larp, and others neglected? Whose stories are still out there, waiting for a larp designer to pick them up and reflect them as something wonderful?
    • Challenge your own assumptions – However well you think you know the period, you may without realizing it be stuck in a skewed account given by a partial historian or fiction writer. Find another source, and see if it backs up or counters your belief.
    • Don’t be afraid of inauthenticity – If you feel you need to, you should deliberately adjust the historical “truths” to better make the range of stories that you seek. It’s larp, not re-enactment.
    • Check in – If you are yourself wealthy and/or educated and/or male, make sure that you’re not inadvertently carrying your own society’s tacit assumptions into the design. Involve people from other groups in your work. Build more balanced perspectives by working together.

    The Ends of History

    A historical setting for a larp can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be a painful and betraying thing. You can make sure that you’re giving your design ideas, and the play aspirations of your larpers, the maximum opportunity to express themselves by engaging with history critically, by putting in the exploratory work around it, and by looking for stories that haven’t been told.

    When it all comes together just right, you can be sure that your larp design and its enaction will earn their own places in the history of the artform. Take a look at Just a Little Lovin’ (Edland and Grasmo, 2011), the story of an assortment of people with little in common apart from their relentless othering by the media and those in power, finding community together, turning suffering into love. Their stories are respectfully told, solidly researched, and thoroughly contextualised. A larp like this brings its history to raging, pounding life — and makes its messages speak to our hearts and to our minds.

    Thanks to Liz Lovegrove and Becky Annison for their help and ideas during the writing of this article.

    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: Characters in the 2015 run of Just a little Lovin’, celebrating their otherness (photo by Arvid Björklund).

  • Moment-based Story Design

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    Moment-based Story Design

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    I believe it was the late Rosalind Russell who gave this wisdom to a young actor: ‘Do you know what makes a movie work? Moments. Give the audience half a dozen moments they can remember, and they’ll leave the theater happy.’ I think she was right. And if you’re lucky enough to write a movie with half a dozen moments, make damn sure they belong to the star.

    William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade>, 1983

    War Stories

    Why are we in this business of creating stories for people to play? What do we, as creators, get out of the experience of running games? Why do we do it? I get a kick out of knowing that the players have gone through intense emotional experiences. How do I know whether we’ve achieved that? I use a simple measure. I listen to what I call war stories.((My brother, who works in TV and film, reminds me that these are known in TV as “water cooler moments” i.e. where, in the workplace, people will cluster around a water cooler discussing last night’s episode.))

    It’s something that’s obvious in hindsight. Every time you get a bunch of larpers together to socialise, out come the war stories; tales of things that happened at events to them, or to their friends, or at another event that they heard about once. “That bit when the demon appeared …” “And then, my God, I was running from that thing, I’ve never been so scared …” “The look on her face when she realised the truth!”

    Most of those stories have been provoked by moments of intense experience, of intense emotion: fear, shock, hilarity, love, freezing cold weather, sleep deprivation, utter disbelief. These people have been put through the mill, and these stories are the resulting moments that stood out to them, memories that will live on in their heads forever, stories they want to share. And so they share them. Many become iconic, and are passed on second or third hand.

    This isn’t solely restricted to larp, of course—it’s the sort of conversation that happens when film-lovers get together to discuss “the bit where Hulk punched Thor!” or “when Bruce Willis realises the truth!” These stories bind people together in pubs, or on forums, or at book clubs. A need to share the things that really affected them, that etched those experiences into their minds.

    It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to the realisation that such froth((Used in UK larp circles to mean excessive outpourings of excited conversation about an event you’ve played, an event you’re going to, a game system, or really anything about larp at all. An umbrella is advised.)) is my primary measure of a successful game. But in starting to analyse the phenomenon, I realise that it’s how our team at Crooked House((A long-running UK larp organisation that runs high-budget one-off events with lots of special effects.)) has always approached shaping stories. We write larps by coming up with moments that we hope the players will talk about afterwards, and we’ve been doing that for years. It’s something we evolved entirely accidentally, with no in-depth analysis of what we were doing.

    Background

    Historically, the core of our team has been very focused on set-piece moments. This is because we have people who work in set design, stunts, pyrotechnics and props for films; we do our best to make best use of those talents. The art & stunt department always have gags they want to try, no matter the genre.

    And we’ve always tackled games as an exercise in genre. When we ran a gore-based horror event, we did our best to push the boundaries of taste and decency and to cover a whole range of tropes that players would recognise, but would have never encountered before in larp. Similarly, on running a pulp action-adventure, we made certain to pack it full of red lines drawn across maps, tombs half-buried in sand, ridiculous accents, and traps involving lots of creepy-crawlies.

    We write and run one-off events. We knew our pulp adventure was probably going to be the last one we’d ever run, so we packed it full of as much pulp as we could find, as we wouldn’t get another chance.

    The Writing Process

    So we get together with a rough idea of theme and setting, and a long list of experiences we’d like the players to have. These could be set piece stunts, gags, or special effects; atmospherics where we generate a certain mood; small interpersonal moments; several hours of continuous unrelenting horror. They could be ideas for rules. They could also be material for pre-event, to set the scene. At this point many of the ideas will be only partially formed. For example, our list might include “have to deal with a confined space,” “there should be a moment where all the lights go out,” “a scene where the antagonist lays bare every character’s deepest secret” or “we could do that trick with a Ouija board and magnets.”

    Then, through brainstorming sessions, we identify a few key moments and solidify them, making them the tentpoles of our game timeline.

    With our tent-pole moments in place, the shape of our event starts to emerge, as do the themes, and the story itself. This is the stage at which we may reject ideas from our list outright, as we find they don’t suit the story or the theme or the mood. Eventually we’ll have a firmed up set of key experiences and a rough idea of when they might happen.

    If we were creating a story for a book or a film — and we’ve used this system for that — then the story would be essentially linear. One key moment would play out after another, and the viewer would have no options to change that, no choices to make. Our tent-pole moments would always happen in the same order.

    With larp, we could run our games in that way, but there’s a danger of “railroading” the players—making them feel as if their actions have no effect on the story, as if it’s being told to them rather than as if they’re part of creating it.

    Our games are somewhere between linear and totally free. We are certain of several fixed moments that will happen no matter what, and we know roughly when they’ll happen, but we leave a lot of space for flexibility with other moments and the order in which they might play out. This is critical not only for the dramatic flow of the story—for example, during these few hours the players shouldn’t be overly stressed or challenged, but right here we need a climax— but is also critical for the art department, so they know in what order they need to get sets built or rebuilt and stunts and effects rigged. We have a rough idea of the window of time in which a particular moment can be experienced.

    Note that there’s no guarantee a moment will happen. We give the players the opportunity to take part in a particular scene, gag or event at specific points. All we’re doing is providing opportunity. Those opportunities may not be taken in the way we expect, or may not be taken at all. And, honestly, we cheat. In some cases we make the players believe they’ve made their own timeline choices, but we’ve secretly railroaded them. I give an example of that later on in this article.

    We’ll do several brainstorming passes filling in the blanks. Normally I go away and write a treatment of the flow of the game as if it were a story, because this irons out inconsistencies and brings up all sorts of issues we haven’t thought of—it also shoots down ideas that we thought seemed amazing at 3am.

    And then we’ll simply repeat, talking through the game again and again, picking apart each moment and polishing it until—hopefully—it shines, making sure the story is consistent, making sure our supporting cast fit in where they should, and layering theme and mood into everything we can. When we’re done, some of the things we’ve come up with will be concrete set-piece-like moments. Others will be ongoing opportunities for players to generate moments themselves. Both are equally important, and I’ll give examples of the design of each.

    A Moment Design Example: The Jump

    A 'moment' from God Rest Ye Merry (staged, Rachel Thomas). A ‘moment’ from God Rest Ye Merry (staged, Rachel Thomas).

    It’s 3am. You haven’t slept for two days now. There are strange things happening in this mansion. You’re upstairs in your bedroom, in bed with your partner, but the lights are on; you’re both too scared to turn them off.

    There’s something about this room. When you came in, you noticed the wedding pictures of the young couple, and the photos of their baby daughter. You know it’s a daughter, because the crib is still here, beside the bed; the name Gwendolyn hangs on a wooden plaque at the end of it. You turned the photos face down, because you realised who they were; the young couple who died here years ago. You’ve read the newspaper reports, and heard the family stories. You’ve found letters: receipts, bills, final demands.

    And you’ve heard things. A baby crying, although you couldn’t find the source. A man and a woman arguing, muffled, through the wall; something about money. And, twice now, a gunshot, somewhere outside through the corridor. You’ve never found where it came from… although there was blood on the bathroom floor.

    And now, tonight, you hear the gunshot again. And the baby starts crying outside your door. A girl screams. And the door flies open. There stands the young mother, dressed in black, the baby bundled under her arm. She’s in tears, makeup running. In her right hand she brandishes a revolver. She runs into your room and turns around, frantically warning away her pursuers. Except there aren’t any pursuers; the doorway is empty—but she can clearly see them. She runs to the window, still waving the gun; opens the window; and throws the baby out.

    At this point, you, the player—because you are a player, and this is a moment in a live-action game that you’ve been taking part in for the last few days, having taken on the role of a 1950s character— might realise something. If you’ve got enough detachment from the terror of the moment, if you can draw yourself back, you can think “Ah. I get it. I understand what’s going on. The baby’s clearly not real. it’s all fine. It’s just a play, a scene, a trick. I don’t need to panic.”

    At which point the young woman jumps out of the window.

    When you’ve recovered yourself enough to get to the window and look out, there’s nothing below; no baby, no woman, nothing at all.

    We started this one with a simple request from our stunt team. “We want someone to jump out of a first floor window and disappear. And we don’t want the players to know how we did it.”

    This was for our event God Rest Ye Merry (Thomas and Thomas et al., 2015), a Christmas ghost story set in the 1950s. The house, a rambling old mansion set on Dartmoor, was perfect for our needs, and on our site visit we scoped out the perfect window.

    So, from a writing perspective, we knew that our stuntwoman Kiera Gould would be the one who jumped. And it made perfect sense that, for a ghost story, the disappearance would be due to ghostly goings-on. It follows, then, that this must have been how someone died. And that the players would see this as if it were a vision—it would be a haunting. To make it extra-scary, we would have them seeing it late at night.

    The first concern came from the stunt team. The window Kiera would be jumping from was a bedroom window, and we expected two players to be in bed asleep. What was to stop the players leaping out of bed and interrupting the stunt, ruining the gag? We came to the conclusion that we’d put a barrier between the bed and the window, and settled on a baby’s crib, since there was one in a nearby room. We would fix it to the floor.

    This immediately led to story. The woman who had died had a baby. So who was she, and what happened to the baby?

    Someone came up with the genius idea that Kiera should come in, distraught, with the baby under her arm—a dummy, obviously—and should throw the baby out of the window first. Not only would it add to the horror, it would mean there would be a moment where the players thought that the baby-throwing was the whole gag, and, internally, they’d relax—just as Kiera jumped.

    “Wait,” said the stunt team. “If there’s a baby involved now, they’ll work extra-hard to interrupt the stunt. Can we introduce some other barrier?”

    So—why was the girl distraught? Well, we decided, she’d just shot her husband, and now, filled with regret, was going to commit suicide. So we would give her a revolver. The scene would start out in the corridor, with the sound of a revolver firing and a scream. Now, as the girl ran into the room, she would be brandishing the revolver, “accidentally” waving it towards the players—who she, being a ghost, couldn’t see. This acts as a psychological barrier to anyone wanting to get involved; a gun being waved in their face.

    An interesting facet of our barriers—the crib and the gun and, in fact, the mood we’ve engendered up to this point— is that we’ve almost certainly shut down the player’s desire or ability to stop the girl jumping but, crucially, they think it’s their own choice. They will think they’re unable to act through their own fear, rather than through our railroading or design.

    So there was the basis of the stunt. On top of that, we built up and layered story—the room was filled with mementos from the young couple’s marriage; elsewhere in the house you could find evidence of the husband’s debts and excessive gambling habit; newspaper clippings reported their deaths; family stories told of the tragedy; a wooden plaque on the crib named the baby Gwendolyn. And sometimes, if you listened carefully, you could hear a couple arguing, muffled, through the wall.

    From a very basic moment idea, we now had a chunk of story, a very visceral moment, that was wound into the fabric of the house and the event and which fitted our themes. We knew roughly when it would happen—around 3am Saturday night.

    Oh yes. The girl vanished completely, as did the baby, when you looked out the window. Despite the long drop below. How did we do that? We’ll leave that to your imagination.

    A Moment Design Example: Pulp Languages

    Now something from the other end of the spectrum—a rule specifically introduced to allow the players to spontaneously generate their own memorable moments.

    For our 1930s pulp action adventure Captain Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph (Thomas and Thomas et al., 2006), we’d decided that multiple languages would be a fun feature of the game, as we had an international cast of characters. However, very few of the players involved spoke multiple languages. How could we deal with this?

    Well, we could adopt ridiculous accents. So if you spoke, say, with a French accent, it would be assumed you were speaking French. But if we did this, it meant that we wouldn’t be fitting into the pulp stereotype; in pulp, Germans need to sound stereotypically German, Americans need to sound stereotypically American and so on when speaking English.

    So we dreamed up a very simple system. Any sentence that was supposed to represent French would be prefixed with the keywords “Zut alors!” Any sentence that was supposed to represent German would be prefixed with “Achtung!” “Effendi!” for Arabic. And so on. Terribly stereotypical, but pulp is stereotypical, and we were erring on the side of comedy.

    Adding to that, we came up with a very simple system of written languages. Anything in red would be Arabic; green would be German; blue French and so forth.

    This was introduced as a rule to our players. The key reason for including this was very simple—to allow them to create moments where the players OOC entirely understood what was going on, but, for comedy purposes, their characters would not. I call this sort of technique Seeding Opportunity—providing fertile ground for moments to happen in.

    This would only work in this style of game. For a deeply serious game based on secrets and lies, the OOC/IC divide simply wouldn’t work. But for our purposes, it worked brilliantly.

    Here I’ll cite an anecdote from one of our cast, Harry Harrold:

    So when my bazaar salesman started a line with “Effendi”—the English-speaking customer couldn’t understand a word, but the spy who was posing as a translator could, and the conversation went something like:

    Customer: How much is this statuette? It looks jolly ancient

    Spy: Effendi: How much for this?

    My salesman: Effendi: I don’t know, my uncle’s mother in law’s family makes them by the dozen, how much will the idiot pay? Tell him it’s tenth dynasty … I’ll cut you in.

    Spy: He says it’s very valuable. Tenth dynasty.

    Customer: I say, marvellous …

    You see where it’s going. The customer’s player knowing exactly what I was saying, and the simple delight of three people performing their little hearts out to an audience of—oh, I dunno, maybe half a dozen at the time? It carried on for a while in the same vein. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told that story.

    Harry Harrold, The Hole in My Tooth, 2016

    Pay close attention to that last line. “I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told that story.” We’ve achieved our outcome—the desire to create a war story that players would tell and retell.

    So, with our Jump stunt, we were introducing a specific moment. With this language rule, we were introducing the possibility for the players to create their own moments.((Okay, okay. Some moments we helped them create. For example, the minefield with a large sign—in greenreading “Achtung! Mines!” Which came into its own when it was crossed by a small group of players who could read it perfectly well, but none of their characters knew German…)) We’ve found the mix of these techniques extremely successful.

    Other Media

    I’ve talked solely about larp here. But since we started working this way, I’ve applied these techniques successfully to writing films, books, and in particular to computer games. Each medium has its own rules and styles, and by doing this you don’t need to eschew standard dramatic structure—but, in the same way as with larp, thinking about what your audience will take away is a great starting point for building your story.

    Conclusion

    It’s my contention—and experience—that if you work this way, if you concentrate on the highs and lows, on provoking war stories, you’ll have a memorable game.

    It almost doesn’t matter what goes between those moments, so long as it makes some sort of sense. Honestly. I know that sounds crazy, but most people have terribly fuzzy memories and the bits they didn’t enjoy or found bland fade away, leaving the bits that excited them.

    Sure, the quality of your whole piece will be vastly improved by good joining-of-thedots, but to turn it on its head, if you don’t have those memorable moments, you have nothing. I’ve lost count of the number of movies I’ve seen or books I’ve read that I can’t recall anything about a couple of months later. But people in pubs still talk about the time we had a WW1 tank, ten years later.((We didn’t. It was two sides of a tank faked up out of plywood + paint with a couple of pilots inside and some carefully positioned pyrotechnics, so that when a puff of smoke came out of the barrel, a piece of the ground exploded. But we still hear about “that game where they had a real tank.”))

    Bibliography

    • Goldman, William, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Warner Books. 1983

    Ludography

    • Harry Harrold, The Hole In My Tooth. LarpX. 07/05-2016 https://larpx.com/2016/05/07/ the-hole-in-my-tooth/
    • Ian Thomas and Rachel Thomas et al. God Rest Ye Merry. United Kingdom: Crooked House. 2015
    • Ian Thomas and Rachel Thomas, Thomas, Brewis and Macmillan; Captain Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph. United Kingdom: Crooked House. 2006

    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 setting for the stunt “The Jump”, from God Rest Ye Merry (pre-game, Rachel Thomas).

  • The Absence of Disabled Bodies in Larp

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    The Absence of Disabled Bodies in Larp

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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.

    The first time I remember encountering someone who was disabled in a larp was during my long-ago days of playing Changeling: the Dreaming. My fellow players and I were waiting for the game to begin and a new player arrived wearing dark glasses and carrying a white cane. We were waiting outside the game space at the top of a staircase and were jostling one another quite a lot, so I became concerned by the person’s proximity to the edge of the stairs. I stood up from a bench and asked the person quietly if they’d like to sit down. “The stairs are very close behind you,” I said. The new player looked at me, puzzled. “I can see that,” they said. When I blinked at them in surprise, the player’s face lit up and they lifted their glasses to wink at me. “The costume works!” they said. “At least I’m believable. Gotta play up that flaw if I want the points.” The player in question wasn’t disabled at all. To quote the old saying, they just played one on TV. Or in this case, in a larp.

    It would be years before I larped with someone who was visually impaired and became acutely aware of the difficulties they faced when interacting with larps due to their disability. Yet in those years, I met people with various physical and psychological differences who encountered challenges when larping due to a lack of accommodation for their disabilities. I was also acutely aware that, much like other forms of entertainment, larp was a rather ableist((Ableism: discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities. Ableism characterises persons as defined by their disabilities and as inferior to the non-disabled.)) space, erasing disabled players by creating obstacles for inclusion that kept them out. While conversations about inclusivity in regards to many forms of identity rose to the forefront of thought in the larp community, the issue of disability visibility seemed to remain one of the last unexplored countries.

    For a long time I was a larper standing outside of the issue, looking in. Then the issue became far more personal. At the time of the writing of this article, I’ve been larping for eleven years. In that time I’ve gone from an able-bodied young woman with an invisible disability((Bipolar disorder.)) to a woman using a wheelchair to get around. This evolution has given me a different perception, perhaps, than most and opened my eyes to the pitfalls one can stumble into when designing larps: namely the exclusion of the disabled due to lack of consideration for accommodation. As a heavily physical-based activity game and art form, larp requires players to inhabit their character roles with their bodies, experiencing the game space through their five senses and interacting with the environment and other players with their own bodies as their character’s avatar. Larps can be challenging to players physically and psychologically based on the creator’s design, even for those who are able-bodied. Imagine then the challenge presented to those who are disabled if the game is designed with only able-bodied players in mind as their prime customers and patrons.

    If those who are differently abled are not taken into consideration during the very first stages of a larp’s creation, designers may inadvertently set up obstacles which block disabled players from engaging with the game. Furthermore, I’ll go so far as to posit another argument: by not taking disabled players into account and allowing them to be under-represented or misrepresented through play, then the game in question and whatever narrative it crafts becomes inherently ableist.

    The Design Challenge

    Larp design is a complex and ever-shifting ludic space, requiring consideration of many different factors. Designers engage in discussions of narrative construction, community building, environmental design, sociological and psychological interaction and game design when producing any larp, whether they’re aware they’re doing so or not. Larp design is a hybrid discipline, one part improvisational acting, one part theatre production, one part playwriting, and one part game design. Yet at its very heart, larp is an attempt to bring to life imagined worlds with characters being physically inhabited by the players.

    No matter the complexity of the physical design, from the stripped-down aesthetics of black box theatre games to the blockbuster nordic games set in castles or the combat-intensive live “boffer” games set out in forests around the world, there is one basic design principle of larps: players move and interact with the game space with their own bodies. And in that single conceit, designers are presented with an obstacle in how to allow people of different abilities to interact with the physical aspects of their game. How they tackle that challenge then determines whether or not their game is accessible to a wider range of players.

    It’s important at this juncture to address and acknowledge the difficulty of this particular design challenge. The term disabled is very broad and encompasses a myriad of people whose physical or psychological states put them outside of what society considers the healthy, able-bodied norm. Therefore, speaking about making accommodation for those who are differently abled in a larp means acknowledging that a creator will be designing towards an ever-moving target. The paradigms may need to shift when a new player with specific accommodation needs wants to participate in their games. However, the very first step in heading towards more accessibility in games is to start by acknowledging one base truth: larps are not just made for the able-bodied. Just because the design challenge is difficult does not mean it should not be tackled. If a game wants to truly call itself inclusive and welcome all kinds of players, disability inclusion must be part of the discussion right alongside discussions about the participation of all genders, sexualities, races, religions, classes, etc. To be truly intersectional and inclusive, ableism cannot be forgotten as a potential venue for discrimination through design.

    Thankfully, larp designers have the opportunity when creating new larps to approach each game as a blank slate, utilising that mindfulness about inclusivity to create spaces capable of accommodating disability needs. They only need to choose to do so from the beginning.

    Larping in Czocha Castle for College of Wizardry 1 as a wheelchair-using player. (Photo by: Christina Molbech) Larping in Czocha Castle for College of Wizardry 1 as a wheelchair-using player. (Photo by: Christina Molbech)

    The Cornerstones of Disability: Considerate Design

    There are many areas a designer ought to consider from the beginning if they wish their games to be more accessible. They include:

    1. The role of the disabled in the game’s world building and narrative
    2. The question of how disabled and abled characters will be played, by whom, and how they are portrayed
    3. Physical design of your game space and its availability for accessibility and/or disability accommodation
    4. Consideration for equal treatment out-of-character within your player community.

    While this is by no means an exhaustive list of considerations, I believe they cover a range of basic areas a designer might consider to broaden those able to access their games. Let’s break them down and look at their unique challenges.

    The Role of the Disabled in the Game’s World Building and Narrative

    While this might seem like a simple idea, it is often difficult to recognise where narratives skew towards ableism, perhaps even without meaning to do so. For example, most post-apocalyptic narratives make it clear that those who are disabled would have a difficult time surviving in a world without basic social services and modern technology. Those narratives can default to erasing disabled persons without much of a thought in pursuit of “authenticity to genre.” That same argument is often used when representing those with disabilities in historical games, or medieval fantasy games, as the idea of someone with disabilities succeeding, thriving, or even achieving positions of power challenges the idea that games set in historical periods must be (needlessly) appropriate to every inch of perceived historical correctness.

    Games which choose to marginalise the roles the disabled have in the visible narrative then set the tone for how those characters who are differently abled will be treated, and can even translate into how players who are differently abled feel welcome within a space. Additionally, erasing disabled characters due to “magical cures” such as biotechnology, advanced medical science, and sorcery in a game’s narrative also signals that your setting assumes everyone who is disabled should be “cured,” signalling a need to erase disabled stories from that setting and your game. Examples of such settings are cyberpunk futures where technology can cure disabilities, magical settings like College of Wizardry (Nielsen, Dembinski and Raasted et al., 2014-) and New World Magischola (Brown and Morrow et al., 2016) where magic can cure nearly every ailment or injury.

    How Disabled and Abled Characters Will Be Played, by Whom and How They Are Portrayed

    As mentioned in the story at the very beginning of this article, able-bodied players may opt to play disabled characters in a game. Some larps even incentivise such play by offering mechanical advantages for including a disability in the character. One example of this is White Wolf’s games like Vampire: the Masquerade (Rein-Hagen, 1991), whose system allows disabilities, both physical and psychological, to be taken as flaws on a character sheet. Ostensibly this design choice was meant to motivate people to create more nuanced and interesting characters for the game by representing a world inhabited not only by able-bodied people and monsters but also the disabled. Most of the time, however, I saw it used as a cheap and easy way to gain additional points to buy up mechanically advantageous things on a character’s sheet, since for every point of flaws you took, you received freebie points to spend elsewhere. This process of mechanising a disability in exchange for positive rewards elsewhere provides a problematic view of being rewarded for taking on the “burden” of playing someone disabled, labelling a disability a flaw with all its associated negative connotations.

    Similarly, by including disabilities as a mechanical flaw or as an in-character effect gained during play, there is a greater chance a player may be presented with a disability they’ll try to or be required to play without understanding the best way to do so. Games that use mental illness as part of their punitive mechanics will afflict players with “insanity” such as in the Cthulhu Live (McLaughlin, 1997) system, or else give people a derangement as the results of play such as in the Dystopia Rising (Pucci, 2009-) system, without giving them much context or preparation for role-playing what amounts to a psychological disability. Without time to research and understand the illness they’re being asked to portray, players may default to naturally offensive and harmful stereotypes, making the play space a hostile place for people who actually have those disabilities. The opposite side of this question includes whether or not disabled players will be able to play non-disabled characters. In games which rely on more “what you see is what you get” or 360 degree immersion play, organisers often require players to do whatever it is their character would do, including all physical activities. Allowing disabled players to play non-disabled characters, essentially asking others to ignore their adaptive devices during play, is a form of making accommodation during a larp, bending the rules of the full immersion for the sake of making all roles in the game accessible.

    Physical Design of Your Game Space and It’s Availability for Accessibility and/or Disability Accommodation

    This aspect of designing towards inclusivity involves the design of the actual space and materials to make a game accessible for all, and it is perhaps one of the most difficult and controversial topics when dealing with disability advocacy in larp. Unless you are talking about black box or theatre style games, larps rely heavily on environmental design or utilising already created appropriate venues to host their games so as to create immersion for players. However, often when seeking out genre, theme or mood appropriate venues, designers don’t realise or even ignore the fundamental accessibility issues a venue might have. When choosing the beautiful Czocha Castle as the setting for the blockbuster College of Wizardry games, the organisers discovered a glorious location full of secret passages, lush forests, and amazing rooms ready to become classrooms in a magical school. What the castle did not have, however, was basic disability access, a fact which did not escape me upon my attendance. This limited my interactions with the game, keeping me from attending classes held in the perilously high astronomy tower or down in the steps into the murky dungeon.

    Even games that try their hardest to provide accommodation can end up falling short, such as in the case of the 2016 New World Magischola games in the United States. While the game was hosted by a presumably ADA((Physical accomodations and accessibility as described in the Americans with Disability Act of 1990.)) accessible campus in the University of Richmond, the game locations were scattered so far across the campus itself that those who were disabled found it difficult to interact with game events going on at far flung locations, especially at night. Other games which are designed for gruelling conditions as part of the experience, like the Swedish Hinterland (Nyman, Utbult and Stormark et al., 2015), are additionally problematic in that they present physical challenges meant to test even the hardiest of able bodied players and therefore exclude disabled players almost by design, in favour of supporting the taxing gameplay part of the experience. This important obstacle to accessibility ought to be weighed against a location’s appropriateness for play, if the designers want to see their game available for all comers to play.

    The Consideration for Equal Treatment Out-of-character Within Your Player Community

    This last element is less of a physical design challenge or game mechanic design question, but rather requires game creators to take a closer look at how those who are differently abled are considered within the community. It’s no secret that the disabled face discrimination from the general world. Even well-intentioned people can express demeaning and belittling treatment of the disabled, unsure of how to engage with their differences and needs for accommodation despite the best of intentions. The disabled are often seen as less capable or even worthy of doing things people take for granted, such as opening up businesses, holding positions of leadership, or even having stable relationships and raising children.

    When a player who is differently abled is part of a larp community, an organiser must consider whether that player is facing similar discriminatory treatment from fellow players. While it is not an organiser’s job necessarily to police their community, the tacit social contract of a larp as a communal storytelling experience requires players to feel welcome and heard so they can participate wholeheartedly in safety and trust. Should a player be treated differently based on their disability, the responsibility falls on the organisers to address the situation, as would be the case with any instances of discrimination affecting their community.

    These cornerstones of thoughtful accessibility design are best deployed from the beginning of a game’s creation, as the accommodations they may require become more difficult when trying to retroactively fit them in after the entire game has been put together. Indeed, tackling accessibility issues only after discovering a disabled player wants to attend requires far more work as a designer must scramble to find a way to shoehorn those accommodations into a space that might not have that capability. While the intention to find accommodation later is noble, it is often not the most e cient and may end with frustrated designers and players both, should the attempts towards accommodation after-the-fact fail. Designers should also be mindful to check back to these design considerations throughout the process and even during gameplay to make sure they are still in place and functional.

    Staff and players of Time Travelers After Hours, a Phoenix Outlaw freeform larp, DexCon 2016. (Photo by: Nicolas Hornyak) Staff and players of Time Travelers After Hours, a Phoenix Outlaw freeform larp, DexCon 2016. (Photo by: Nicolas Hornyak)

    The False Dichotomy of “Going Elsewhere”

    Considering accessibility accommodations as an afterthought also often ends up with designers simply acknowledging their design cannot support those with disabilities, leading to my least favourite theory regarding the including of disabled persons in larp: the separate yet equal argument. In response to discussing accessibility in games, I’ve often heard people simply shrug and say “not every game is for every person.” They say not everyone likes every game, or is suited to every game, and therefore those disabled players who cannot be included due to lack of accommodation can simply go to another game or seek another role in the game if that will allow for better accessibility. This argument contests that this problem happens even to able-bodied people who must choose based on their tastes what games to attend. This is a false dichotomy.

    Able bodied larpers who choose either to attend or not attend a game based on its content or any other myriad of factors are not physically barred from doing so. They are not kept out by virtue of a space not being capable of physically allowing them entrance. The important word to factor in here is choice. Those players are choosing not to go to a game based on their tastes and preferences, opting out because they have an option at all. If a game is not physically accessible to disabled players for one reason or another, designers have taken away a player’s agency to opt in or out and instead set up obstacles to act as gatekeepers that bar players from even making that choice.

    It’s that distinction that created the need for laws around the world protecting the rights of disabled people to interact with society on all levels in an equal matter to those who are able bodied. Ability-based discrimination has been a historically contentious topic, as those who are disabled either visibly or invisibly have fought for recognition as equal members of society all over the world. In the United States for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990), which expanded on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include anti-discrimination protections for the disabled, was not put into place until 1990. The ADA as it is known not only protects the disabled against discrimination but requires employers “to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, and imposes requirements on public accommodations.” This included provisions that businesses and public spaces would be required to make their facilities and events accessible to those with disabilities.

    The ADA later provided the inspiration for countries around the world to adopt similar protections. Since 2000, 181 countries have signed disability protections into law, while in 2006 the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD, 2006) was adopted by the United Nations and ratified by 157 countries, offering additional protections for 650 million people with disabilities worldwide (Shapiro, 2015). By requiring businesses, venues, and locations to create accommodations for those who are disabled by law, the governments of those countries with equal rights laws recognise that physical design of spaces and events can be discriminatory if they aren’t accessible and require organisers to take that into consideration by law.

    Yet certain activities have remained segregated, especially recreational activities which require physical activity such as sports, dance, and theatre. The separate-yet-equal idea has remained the cornerstone of this segregation, allowing for the creation of dance companies, sports events, and theatre troupes for example made up of only disabled persons participating and competing with and against one another. The notion goes that if an activity is based on physical interaction as the primary mode of engagement, and a disabled person is differently equipped to engage with that activity, rather than providing accommodation, a separate space should be provided for them to interact. While the concept of larps only for the disabled may intrigue from an artistic perspective, if only to see what might be created by people with those unique life experiences, it cannot be the hallmark of the entire larp world. To say that “maybe this game just isn’t for you” to a potential disabled player when facing the need for accommodation is based on the same principle and passes the buck away from that designer’s game to some other, theoretical game out there which may better have access.

    In short, “not for you” as a response is an excuse and misses the point entirely. The player in question doesn’t want to go somewhere else. They want to attend that game and be a part of their chosen community, and should be freely allowed to, given all other things being equal between them and an able-bodied player. The disabled person should not have to find another game, shuffled along, because considerations haven’t been made to keep a space from being discriminatory. As the laws of so many countries point out, the need to consider accommodation falls on the shoulders of designers and organisers, not the disabled person. And if only the designers had done so at the beginning, perhaps those uncomfortable and potentially discriminatory conversations might not have had to happen at all.

    A Two-way Conversation

    Of course, it seems easy to say all of this on paper. I acknowledge as of the writing of this article that figuring out the ways to balance aesthetic and artistic choices in larps and accessibility is a difficult design problem. Nor is there anyone out to impose mandates that each game must be accessible in all ways, barring what is required by law in the larp’s home country. And while it might be an intriguing mental exercise to go down the “freedom of creation” versus inclusivity accommodation mode of thinking, that conversation has been tread in regards to intersectional inclusivity ad nauseum. It is an understood right of creators to make artistic choices for their games, and should they choose not to build towards inclusivity, that is their right. However, when a game designer chooses to consider accessibility for the differently abled, especially from the beginning, they are signalling to their player base that they consider their space a welcoming one for people of all kinds, even if it makes them a little more work to design around obstacles. Designing towards accessibility is a signpost that a larp creator considers the health and well-being of their players as important as well, and can create a deeper bond of trust between organisers and players in regards to game safety.

    The final piece to the design challenge regarding accessibility, however, is communication. As mentioned above, though the term disabled indicates the need for accommodation to assist the individual with accessing a space or event, each disabled person’s needs might be specialised. Not every wheelchair user needs the same level of accommodation, nor do all those with specific psychological needs require the same response. While designers may create spaces for accommodation in the game, it is often necessary for those who are disabled to speak up and request additional accommodation or else adjustments to what is in place to suit their specific needs. While it can be difficult to self-advocate for one’s needs, it is imperative to have a process in place before or at a larp for these conversations to take place. Should someone feel uncomfortable stating their need for accommodation, an advocate such as a friend or fellow larper might be a good ally to seek out to help communicate with the organisers. This process can be as simple as organisers making it overtly clear they are open to having these discussions, or for a larger game to have a particular staff member acting as accessibility liaison. Each process can be tailored to the size, length and scope of the game in question, but all serve to make the process of creating these accommodations smoother and less contentious.

    One other note to bear in mind when considering disability conversations is the notion of trust and belief. It is important when an organiser is approached by someone asking for accommodation to show that they not only hear the person, but that they believe them. Since many disabilities, such as chronic illness, injury, or mental illness, are largely invisible disabilities, they are often questioned by people who cannot see an assistive device as evidence of a disability. Refrains like “you don’t look sick” or “can’t you just deal with it?” are typical. Requiring a disabled person to present evidence of their disability to receive accommodation is difficult and often embarrassing for the disabled person. For communication and trust to be fostered in a healthy environment, the disabled person must feel the organiser is receptive to their issues. Should an organiser feel they don’t have the perspective to understand the needs of their disabled players, seeking out resources from articles, organisations, or even disability advocates within the gaming community can help to create better dialogues going forward.

    While individual conversations on the local larp level are the bedrock on which change will come, communication in regards to accessibility needs to be fostered on an even larger scale. Conversations regarding how to create better games, better mechanics, and better communities are sweeping across the larp world, spread by the Internet and fantastic convention and conference spaces. One of those conversations going forward in terms of inclusivity in gaming communities must include further discussion of accessibility for the disabled. Our communities are in a period of sharing for the betterment of all, learning from one another in an age of what larp designer and creator Josh Harrison has coined fourth wave larp design. It is imperative for our communities to continue these conversations so better tools and best practices discovered by individual games can be shared, improved upon, and reshaped through communal iteration.

    It’s towards that spirit of communal iteration that I put forth the challenge to designers to come up with new mechanics for players with disabilities to use, new ideas for interaction in our games outside of the able-bodied norms. New mechanics, such as the Avatar mechanic brainstormed by myself and Lizzie Stark (2014), in which a player with mobility issues may have a surrogate step in during play to perform physical actions that player cannot, is an example of how two designers coming together can create a new mechanic for the game design toolbox. Collaboration will be the means by which more of these ideas become about in the future.

    Additionally, iterating on already established norms will expand and improve institutions already in place. To that end, I am suggesting an amendment to the Mixing Desk of Larp (Andresen, Nielsen and Stenros et al., 2016), that oh-so useful tool spread from the Larpwriter Summer school and now used to create games across the world. While there are thirteen slots for faders, used to plan and illustrate the various decisions made during the planning process of a larp, the last one is left blank and marked “Your Fader Here.” This space is left for designers to include their own fader, something not covered among the twelve other ingredients the Mixing Desk suggests goes into designing a larp. While it would be convenient to say accessibility is a good option for including into the “Your Fader Here” spot, I would suggest something even stronger. For a game to truly tackle accessibility and make it as much of a priority for larps as the other ingredients so important to design, a fourteenth fader slot marked Accessibility should go up on the Mixing Desk alongside that write-in category. This would signal a tacit shift in thinking, enshrining the idea that accessibility is not and should not be a sometimes consideration if designers wish to see our community tackle ableism in our design spaces. By adjusting this already understood and widely used mechanic, we as a community would be indicating how important accessibility truly is for the larp world at large.

    And make no mistake, it is an important part of the future of inclusivity in the larp world. Without considering accessibility for differently abled larpers, our community neglects a fundamental demographic and shuts out a plethora of voices who could contribute to making our storytelling communities even brighter. When a differently abled person cannot even attend an event, we lose vital voices whose presence could enhance and innovate, add and amplify the able-bodied community. All that is needed to make sure their voices can add to the collective artistic space is consideration for their needs at the forefront of design by the (mostly) ablebodied constituency of larp creators. Accessibility in design cannot be an afterthought but should live alongside questions of theme and player motivation as a reminder that larp is and should remain a space equally available for all as we go forward into designing the games of our future.

    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.