Tag: Player Skills

  • Play Boldly – Let Yourself Be Vulnerable

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    Play Boldly – Let Yourself Be Vulnerable

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    Challenge yourself. Go beyond your comfort zone. Decide to do something you are not sure you can actually pull off. Try something new. Let your character be made a fool, or be seduced by the enemy.

    Play boldly. Let yourself be vulnerable. 

    It’s about you, your wants, and your fears. By challenging yourself and going beyond your comfort zone, you learn and grow as a larper. It’s about doing what you want even if it’s scary. About trying something new or letting someone else make your story take an unexpected turn.

    Playing boldly and letting yourself be vulnerable isn’t about what you do, but why you do it.

    Playing boldly

    Being bold is about doing things that feel scary but that you really want to do. It’s about making new choices. Getting your character in trouble, instead of avoiding it. Going ahead with a cool idea, even if you don’t know how to pull it off. Playing a new type of character even if you are not sure about how to do it.

    Playing boldly is not about the character. It’s about you. Be bold. 

    If a certain subject feels scary but you want to do it, approach it anyway. Play the romantic scene even if you are blushing. Do the thing you want to do, even if you worry that someone might think it’s silly. Dare to deal with serious subjects. 

    Playing boldly doesn’t come naturally. You need to push yourself to play boldly, to go beyond your comfort zone. To find the point where you hesitate, say “fuck it”, and do it anyway.

    As players it’s natural to want to feel safe. To stay away from things that scare us. No matter if it’s about physical harm or social shame, or worry of hurting others. Some caution is natural and healthy, but too much caution can harm your larp experience. 

    Too much caution can make you:

    • Pick a “safe” character concept, rather than the character you want to play or the concept that would challenge you in a fun way. 
    • Censor yourself and stay passive in order to not say or do anything wrong.
    • Distant and unengaged, because caring too much might get you hurt.
    • Block everyone else’s initiatives because you are scared of losing control.
    • Not take the initiative, because it feels safer to wait until someone else does it.
    • Focus on pleasing everyone else, while not enjoying yourself.
    • Be too focused on yourself, and see everyone else as a threat to your experience.
    • Repetitive, always playing the same type of characters and making the same sort of choices larp after larp.

    If you focus too much on staying safe, then nothing really happens, good or bad, because you don’t take any risks. Despite playing it safe you might still spend your time worrying about those risks or being bored and disengaged because you run on autopilot. Being overprotective can ruin your own larp and it also makes you a much less fun and creative co-player.

    So how do you play boldly? Begin by figuring out what you want to try even if it scares you.

    What we want differs, and so do our fears. What you find scary might be different from what scares me. If someone is used to fast paced action, then low-key emotional play might be challenging. For someone used to playing family drama, a boffer fight might be completely out of their comfort zone.  For someone who usually plays extroverted characters that drive the story, then picking a more introverted character and responding to events rather than driving them might be a bold move.

    You can always find some way to challenge yourself. Perhaps you want to try a different type of character, perhaps you want to play a scary scene with a friend you trust, or perhaps you want to wear a costume that shows more skin than you are used to. It doesn’t have to be something huge.  

    Letting yourself be vulnerable

    At knifepoint. Photo taken during play. På Gott och Ont - Illmarig (2023) Photo by Linn Vikman
    At knifepoint. Photo taken during play. På Gott och Ont – Illmarig (2023) Photo by Linn Vikman

    Doing scary stuff is hard, but letting yourself be vulnerable can be even scarier. Because letting yourself be vulnerable is about not being in control. 

    Letting yourself be vulnerable is the other side of playing boldly. It’s about trusting and opening up your play to others. Vulnerability can mean letting someone else’s actions take the story in an unexpected direction, or letting their actions affect your character. It can mean letting someone successfully kidnap your character even if it’s scary and takes the story in an unexpected direction. It can mean letting your character be really hurt by the insult someone hurled at them, even if playing on humiliation makes you feel nervous. Vulnerability can also be letting your character fall madly in love when someone else’s character flirts with them.

    When you let yourself be vulnerable you can still set boundaries for how far you want to take it. For example, allowing your character to be kidnapped but whispering to the other players that you are okay with being taken prisoner but not with brutality.

    Don’t go overboard

    Whatever boldness and vulnerability might mean to you, there is no need to take it too far. It should be like taking a roller coaster ride. Scary, but fun. Scary, but safe. (Not like jumping off a cliff and being smashed against the rocks, okay?)

    You shouldn’t challenge your every fear at any single larp. That is just reckless. Take care of yourself.

    Playing boldly and letting yourself be vulnerable isn’t a perfectly smooth ride either. Trying new things and letting others take the story in unexpected directions means that you are taking a risk. Sometimes that risk will pay off spectacularly, giving you an amazing larp, sometimes it will be just okay, and sometimes things don’t work out. You might be disappointed or hurt.

    But by playing boldly and letting yourself be vulnerable you will evolve as a player. You will learn from the experience, no matter if the result is good, bad or average. This will lead to more awesome larps in the future, even if this particular thing didn’t work out.

    I also want to say that there is time and place for everything. Sometimes you just want comfort food and a cozy blanket, not boldness and vulnerability. That is okay. Larps can be a place to relax and recover. Not challenging yourself is just as valid a way of larping.

    Playing with others

    So far this article has focused on your own play, but larp is about interaction with other players. 

    When we play boldly, we must keep in mind that while we challenge our own comfort zones we must also respect the comfort zones of others.

    Let’s say Amira want to try something that is out of her comfort zone, like a violent torture scene (or an intimate love scene for that matter) with her fellow player Maggie. If Amira knows that she is going to be super uncomfortable during that scene, she should give Maggie a heads-up and check out if Maggie feels okay with Amira challenging her boundaries together with her too.

    “Psst. Out of character. I haven’t played this type of scene before. I want to give it a try, but it’s a bit  out of my comfort zone, so I am nervous and uncomfortable and might have to de-escalate the scene. Would you be okay with that, or should we take play in some other direction?”

    Because Maggie might not feel up for playing that type of intense scene with someone who is hesitant. Challenge your own boundaries but respect the boundaries of others.

    You can also invite others to play boldly and to let themselves be vulnerable, but you should never push them. 

    Remember the roller coaster ride? Inviting others to play boldly should be like asking “Hey, wanna come ride the roller coaster with me? ” and letting the other player gracefully decline if they don’t feel like it. It should never be like pushing someone into a roller coaster cart against their will! Consent is central.

    An invitation to play boldly can be an out of character discussion before or during the larp, but it can also happen in character. You just give the other player an opportunity to challenge themselves. If you know that Maggie has never been in a boffer fight, you can give her character a chance to join the war raid, but also give her a chance to gracefully decline if she doesn’t feel like it. “We could use a pair of extra hands during the raid. Are you up for it or are you needed elsewhere?”

    Playing boldly and letting yourself be vulnerable can be an infectious playstyle. If you play boldly by trying new things, then others may feel braver and also step up to play more boldly. If you let yourself be vulnerable by letting others take your story in unexpected directions, others will trust you to do the same. If you are bold enough to show vulnerability then others might also do that.

    It promotes trust, lets people try new things, and makes the larp more interesting and more fun. You lead by example.

    Conclusion

    Armed. På Gott och Ont, photoshoot 2017. Photo by Emmet Nordström
    Armed. På Gott och Ont, photoshoot 2017. Photo by Emmet Nordström

    Play boldly. Let yourself be vulnerable. But there is no need to go overboard with it. A little boldness and vulnerability goes a long way.

    Sometimes the results will be amazing, sometimes things might not give you the results you wanted, but it will make things more interesting, and it will help you grow as a larper.

    Challenge your own comfort zones, but respect others’. Communicate. Lead by example, and others will dare to play a bit more boldly and be a bit more vulnerable.

    Play boldly.


    Further reading

    There are other articles on great ways to play. We can play to lift, play to lose, and play unsafe. All of those ways to play are great approaches on how to create a better larp experience. You can combine all those with playing boldly and letting yourself be vulnerable however you want. Another link to check out can be this article on Brave Spaces in larp.


    Cover image: An intense gaze. Photo taken during play. På Gott och Ont – Illmarig (2023) Photo by Linn Vikman

  • Villain Self Care

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    Villain Self Care

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    I vividly remember the first time I played a villain. After years of always opting for and being cast as the sweet and innocent characters, I signed up to a larp with a group of friends and dared ask the big question: “Can I try playing the villain?”

    Thus started my travels down the road of larp villainy – a travel filled with plenty of bumps in the road! Already during the larp, I started feeling increasingly bad. And after the larp concluded, I became riddled with guilt. I felt physically sick from what I had done to people I cared about, being the manipulative and scheming horror of a person behind many of the transgressive actions of the larp.

    I started doubting myself: Since I had been capable of playing that character, did it mean I was secretly a terrible person? After all, it might have been imaginary, but it was my brain that imagined it – every thing I said and action I took came from somewhere inside of me. Not just the character, me.

    Now, many years later, my minor identity crisis has subsided, and I have managed to not only come to peace with playing a villain, but to enjoy a good antagonist story.

    As a part of that process, I developed a strategy (or a series of steps) to help me play an antagonist in a way I find both manageable and rewarding, as well as help with the potential negative emotional effects both during and after the larp:

    1. Don’t be the lone villain.

    It can be an isolating experience playing the antagonist, so team up beforehand with someone you trust. If you are able to create an in-game relation to the person, make sure it’s one that provides positive interactions and doesn’t fall apart immediately, when confronted with your actions. If you can’t establish such an in-game relation, make sure you at least have the support off-game, e.g., someone who checks up on you, makes sure you take care of yourself, someone to brainstorm horrible actions with, or confirm you are indeed not a bad person in reality.

    2. Know your boundaries.

    A villain can be and do a multitude of things. Consider what kind of villainy you are capable of and interested in portraying – and what you should steer away from. An antagonist can be everything from the physically and emotionally violent spouse or schoolyard bully, to the disengaged leader causing the suffering of hundreds with their actions (or lack thereof). What kind of play, themes, or actions are difficult or impossible for you to do? What is a soft limit you might want to explore, and a hard boundary you shouldn’t cross? It is as essential for you as the pretend-perpetrator to know and respect your boundaries, as it is for the pretend-victim.

    3. Understand your character’s motivation and beliefs.

    Unless you play an evil cartoon villain, most villains don’t perceive themself as evil. They act according to their moral compass, however flawed that might be. Consider how your character justify their actions and explain away their behavior. What is at the center of their decisions, driving them forward, and what brought them to this point? It’s both easier being antagonistic if you feel excellent – or righteous – doing it, and potentially horrifying to everyone else observing it.

    Photo of person in black makeup and gold armor sitting at a stone table
    The author in the larp Høstspillet. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen. Image has been cropped.

    4. Prepare your play and potential interactions.

    Playing a villain puts you in the role of the aggressor, often having to generate new ideas for transgressive actions towards multiple co-players. It can be tiring and draining, both regarding energy and capacity for new ideas. First step is to consider what your low effort villainy is like. What can you always do if low on energy? Some mean bullying, hateful glaring, or sabotaging someone else’s life and relations? Secondly, can you plan some (inter)actions ahead? Either pre-calibrated scenes with other players (especially good for the start of a larp, as it kicks everyone, including yourself, into action and sets the tone) or “a catalogue of evil ideas” you can draw inspiration from during the larp.

    5. Let your victims be creative.

    See if you can make your victims come up with the perfect transgressive actions towards them. After all, they know what would hurt them the most. It can both be done in-game, which might even add another layer to the scene, making them tell you how to hurt them, or as a part of an off-game calibration, with the player of the victim brainstorming or suggesting ideas to you. Do, however, make sure you don’t end up as a facilitator of their larp. Their ideas might not match your character’s motivation and beliefs (no.3) or even more importantly, it might be against your own boundaries (no.2).

    6. Steer for a conclusion to your character.

    Consider what kind of ending you want your character to have. Do you want your villain-self to suffer for their actions? To experience redemption and forgiveness? To ride off into the sunset, preparing their next villainy deed? You might not be able to decide yourself, and it might change throughout the course of the larp, but steering for catharsis of your antagonist story arc, can add value to your experience – or be a full stop separating you from your character. It is especially relevant, if you are suddenly facing an ending you are not comfortable with, e.g., revenge from your victims. Remember to consider your boundaries. You might be comfortable playing the perpetrator, but not comfortable ending as the victim. And that is okay.

    7. Check in with your victims – and yourself!

    Checking in with your victims is necessary to make sure they are okay, the larp is safe for them, and the interactions aren’t crossing their boundaries. But it is equally important to check in with yourself, especially after hard scenes! What do YOU need? A comforting hug? A cup of coffee? A nap or a positive interaction-break? Being behind the transgressive actions can be just as emotional and taxing an experience as being on the receiving end. Use your support-person (no. 1) if necessary; your victim might not be the one wanting to hug you right after the scene – and that’s okay too.

    8. Plan for larp aftercare.

    Consider what do you need after the larp has ended, after all, villains might need aftercare too. Your needs are valid, even if they might not be possible to fulfill. You might want to change out of your costume to distance yourself from the character – or stay in costume to reconnect it with yourself. Maybe a hot shower is at the top of your list, or a sit-down conversation with your victims? Maybe you want to sit by yourself and digest the experience in peace? Some of it you can plan for, like packing your favorite snack and a soft sweater, other things require specific facilities or interactions with co-players. Be mindful of how you can best take of yourself, while also being mindful of your co-players and their needs. Sometimes you might need a little more help, especially if you find yourself cast as a main antagonist at a larp. In that case:

    9. Collaborate with the organizers.

    Villains don’t exist in a vacuum, and what seemed like an excellent plan prior to the larp, might fall short as soon as confronted with the runtime reality of the game. On location organizers can often help improve, steer, or brainstorm solutions with you, if you find yourself and your character stuck in a bad situation and/or dynamic.


    Cover photo: The author in the larp Høstspillet. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen. Image has been cropped.

  • How I Learned to Stop Faking It and Be Real

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    How I Learned to Stop Faking It and Be Real

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    In my opinion, one of the most important things in being a good larper is to have self-awareness. This means knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses and being able to provide play for other players – but also knowing what one wants out of a larp and how it aligns with the vision and themes of the larp.

    After larping for some years, I thought I had a good perception of my strengths and weaknesses. For example, I knew that I was lousy with directions, so I should not try to play Aragorn. However, I knew that I was really good at organizing things and playing a leader, so I thought I should actually try to play Aragorn.

    It all came down to balance and knowing that I could play most of the characters I wanted to as long as I tweaked them, had trusted friends around, and communicated well with the organizers. In addition, I was very good at making sure that my body was strong enough to carry heavy things at a larp if a character demanded it and letting the organizers know if there was something that needed to be adjusted or not played on. For example, I could tell them that I am really bad when it comes to close combat since I am short and lazy.

    Over the years, I learned more about what kinds of characters I could give the most for and what characters I could grow into. But while I was great at communicating about my practical skills and all my larp needs related to them, I was not up to par with being transparent about my health. Or rather, my mental health.

    As all people, I had ups and downs. But to tell it bluntly, there were some years when I was in a downward spiral. While I had been very outspoken to my friends about my mental health and the importance of self care, I was adamant that it would not impact my larping.

    Woman in white in a white room near a painting with a finger over her mouth
    The author at the larp House of Cravings (2023). Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien.

    Mental health issues can range from depression and PTSD to anxiety, self harm, and eating disorders (to only mention a few examples). All of these should be taken seriously and treated as reasons to get help. It does not matter what my mental health issues were. What is important is how they impacted my larping. The biggest thing they brought to me was shame over feeling the way I did and having the issues I had.

    I wanted to play pretend in my hobby and to be strong without letting my issues bleed over to my co-larpers. And I was hesitant to communicate what I needed to my co-larpers since I did not fully know what I needed. Was it sympathy? Maybe concrete hands-on help if I would not be able to play out a scene? Understanding if I needed to break the game for a time? Underneath these thoughts there was a fear of being rejected. What if people thought I was too broken to play with?

    With that, I made a promise to myself to basically take care of myself, to be a great larper and be open in every way – but not when it came to what I needed from my co-larpers and organizers with my trauma and mental health issues.

    Of course, in retrospect, that was a horrible idea.

    When things got hard or triggered something in me, I had to hide it. I rather pushed it down than caused trouble. I pushed myself to the breaking point when it came to organizing and being available to my co-players – just to prove that I was not broken. I did not cancel a single larp, but in the end, I played for my co-players, not for myself. I tried to make sure that they had fun but ended up having less fun myself.

    On the other hand, I was adamant in advising my friends and co-larpers to do the opposite of what I was doing. I always encouraged them to be open with all their needs and health issues. I was the one who took people aside to sit down and have a chat. I was the one who offered a shoulder to cry on during larps.

    Then something happened a couple of years ago. It was a standard larp with no hard themes — and played with trusted friends. I was responsible for a small group and all was well. Apart from that it was not. Around this time in life, I was struggling more than ever. I wanted to stay at home all the time and the only thing that pushed me to the larp was the knowledge that I had people relying on me.

    There was a scene, some larp fight – and suddenly I blacked out with over ten minutes of which I have no memory of. People told me that I did a great scene with screaming and fighting, and that they were surprised over seeing me get that physical.

    I have no memory of this. The next thing I remember is sitting in the darkness by a lake and silently crying my eyes out. I felt so ashamed and broken. Most of all, I did not know how to handle this or how to reach out to friends. So I cried a bit more and then went back into the tent and took care of my group.

    The big change came only recently. I had gotten used to hiding how I felt at larps or conferences and just faking it all the way. Always smiling, always acting like I did not care, doing my best to be the steady port for others.

    I thought I had a great system for handling myself in the larp community. And then came a larp when it just did not work anymore. I had, again, the responsibility for a small group. I should have been able to keep it together, so I just ignored the feeling of terror. But for the first time, I could not push myself anymore.

    I contacted my group. I told them that I had limited energy and told them to make sure to steer their larp away from relying on only me. I told them that I would need breaks but that I could handle it.

    Then I contacted the organizers. I told them everything. On how I was at my limit but that I really wanted to give the larp a try. I told them what could be done, both for me and my group. They were wonderful in assuring that things were ok and that I was welcome with limited energy and all my brokenness.

    The larp was a bit of a blur. I was really tired and had to rest a lot. I cried off-game in an organizer’s arms. I was sitting and resting on a friend’s lap and had her pat my hair until I could breathe again. But I had the energy to give my everything and to feel into myself. I created magic for my co-larpers and for myself. And for the first time in years I felt I was larping for myself. 

    I went home from that larp with a sense of sadness and peace. Sadness over how easy it had been and how many years I had robbed from myself. Peace in knowing that it would be so much easier from now on.

    That experience changed larping for me. I no longer take on responsibilities for groups alone. I put myself first when it comes to how I travel to, sleep, and eat during larps. I share my needs before and after a larp, both with organizers and with my friends. I try to be open with my co-players if things are hard. When they ask how they can support me, I answer their questions honestly. 

    Woman in Viking gear sitting in the woods
    The author in Viking garb (2021).

    During any larp, I take the time to rest, and I step off-game when I need to. If I feel I don’t have the energy for something, I cancel it and try to do it in good time. After a larp, I take the time to land. I might not always succeed in it but I do my best. And I give myself that time. 

    A while ago, I went to a very challenging larp. Even before the larp, my sleep pattern was non-existent and I had mental health issues that were acting up. I opened up to a co-larper when she asked if I needed anything and that helped a lot. Then after the first part of the larp, I just crashed. There were no triggers or bad things involved. I had just pushed myself too hard and too much.

    The main takeaway was that I could accept the help from organizers who just sat together with me in a dark room while I cried. I managed to explain my needs and reached out to a loved one who came and held me. And with those small means of accepting help, speaking about my needs and just being honest, I could breathe and pick myself up for the rest of the larp. Looking back, I have come very far in how I handle myself, and I try to make sure to take care of my needs. Does it make me feel better? Absolutely not. I feel more vulnerable than in years and so broken. But I hope that it will pass in time. I will rather do this than go through another 20 years faking it.


    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Erlandsson, Anna. 2024. “How I Learned to Stop Faking It and Be Real.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.


    Cover photo: Photo by jaygeorge on Pixabay. Image has been cropped.

  • A Short Guide to Fix Your Larp Experience

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    A Short Guide to Fix Your Larp Experience

    Introduction

    Sometimes, when participating in a larp, things just go wrong. But where is the problem? How can you fix it? This article provides a quick guide that condenses the international larp community’s knowledge on techniques to remedy a larp gone wrong, and to fix it during the event.

    The core of larp, perhaps the concept of larp itself, is co-creation. It is collective and improvised, often based on an emergent narrative with a strong experiential impact. All of these aspects make larps unique and powerful, but also open to potential risks. Their performative nature makes it difficult for participants to stop for a moment, analyze, and fix what is going wrong for them.

    Larp as a triangle

    A larp can be divided into various elements, and these elements can be adjusted on the go. But one important thing to keep in mind is that a larp is always bigger than the sum of its parts. There is something difficult to understand: a ghost, a hidden melody. That’s why when things don’t go so well, it’s not always easy to figure out exactly why. For the purposes of this article let’s imagine the larp as a triangle formed by the larp itself, the community, and you, the player. Usually a larp goes wrong when one or more of the sides of this triangle do not work.

    What can go wrong

    Following our triangle-based model, here is a list of possible issues:

    The larp: unclear communication, poor game design, wrong logistics, temperature, insufficient or inadequate food, hard sleeping conditions and accessibility in general. Lack of meaningful plot and narrative, unclear larp structure.

    Community: different play styles, lack of chemistry with the players or the community, lack of in-game connections with other characters, lack of things to do or meaningful actions, or a sense of being left out.

    The player: your personal state, your expectations, difficulties in feeling/portraying your character, social anxiety, your commitment to the game.

    How to fix your larp on the go

    Rather than a comprehensive guide, I collected a series of practical tips from my own experience and the collective knowledge of the international larp community. I read articles, asked for opinions, and listened to stories. Then I tried to synthesize it into a set of tips and tricks, aimed at a quick resolution and getting the larp back on track in a decisive, though not always elegant, way.

    Not all of these techniques can work for everyone. Use them as you see fit. Put them into practice as soon as possible, as soon as you begin to realize that things are not working for you.

    The goal is always to relocate. This is because the experience does not work when we are out of place. Following our tripartite scheme, we can be out of place regarding the larp, the community, or ourselves.

    The tool to relocate in all of these three aspects is communication: nothing can be fixed without talking with the right person. Whenever the problem is about the larp itself, the person to speak with is the designer or the runtime crew, in order to relocate yourself within larp dynamics that better fit your needs. Here are some possibilities to calibrate your expectations with the organizers’ design goals. If possible do this during breaks, in order to have more time.

    • Ask for advice and how to fix plots and relationships.
    • Ask about the core of the larp, the dos and don’ts.
    • Ask how the game will continue.
    • Ask about the play style they had in mind for the larp.
    • Offer your help to organizers (as an NPC or other roles)

    When the problem lies with the community, the people to speak with are the other players, in order to relocate yourself within more positive social dynamics. Here are some possibilities in and out of the fiction, all meant to stimulate a quick change in your – and other people’s – character’s beliefs, social status, behavior. Here are some possibilities (see also Grønvik Müller 2020) :

    • Offer someone a favor
    • Ask for a favor
    • Get in trouble
    • Make bad choices
    • Spread your secrets
    • Show your character’s vulnerability
    • Make up and confess a deep love for someone
    • Change your mind on something
    • Remember something
    • Die!
    • Create things or situations (draw, write songs, start a cult)
    • Take the details you like in the game, and make a storyline out of this.
    • Involve more interested players
    • Sit down and let the game come to you (other lost players are searching for people to play with)
    • Search for some “lost player” and interact with them
    • Get involved in situations you want as a player, don’t worry about character consistency (see Nielsen 2017)
    • Go and play with the people you know/like to play with
    • Do your favorite/relaxing hobby
    • Stop your game and go calibrate with other players

    When the problem is with your experience, the player to consider is yourself. The aim is to relocate yourself within your own personal dynamics. These techniques tend to affect other players less than the previous ones. It’s more about working on your personal experience, and tricking yourself a bit, in a good way. Here are some possibilities:

    • Calmly plan your return to the game
    • Play more with themes and elements within your comfort zone
    • Reset your expectations: accept the larp for what it is NOW, not what you wanted it to be
    • Do self-care
    • Take distance from the game for the time you need
    • Reduce the sense of failure

    These tricks have to be used wisely. They can save your experience, but destroy the experience for other players and/or organizers in a sort of butterfly effect. For this reason it’s always good to talk with players and organizers before using them, if they involve other people. Some hacks (Brind & Svanevik 2020) and steering (Montola & al. 2015, see also Kemper & al. 2020) choices can blur the line between organizers and participants. A larp and your experience of it are not the same thing, so sometimes saving the experience means killing the larp.

    Possible perspectives

    From this brief guide we can draw some useful suggestions for the future, in order to make the best use of these correctives, while being mindful not to damage the social contract that underlies every larp. Designers, for example, could make space in their design for steering and hacking, clearly communicating which parts of the larp can be modified and which parts can not: possibly in the pregame communications, in player materials, and game guides or design documents. It would also be possible to workshop this.

    On the other hand, as participants, we can train ourselves to reframe our expectations in a quicker way, trying to reduce the sense of a larp “being wrong”, since in most cases this is just a matter of our perception. We are not out of place at a larp: we are the larp, we are exactly where we want to be, where we belong. Larp is interaction: it’s a collective work we can do only together, as a community. And we will.

    Bibliography

    Simon Brind, Martine Svanevik (2020): Larp Hacking. In What we do when we play, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, Johanna Koljonen. Solmukohta 2020.

    Magnar Grønvik Müller (2020): Heuristics for larp. In What we do when we play, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, Johanna Koljonen.Solmukotha 2020.
    Jonaya Kemper, Johanna Koljonen, Eleanor Saitta (2020): Steering for survival. In What we do when we play, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, Johanna Koljonen. Solmukotha 2020.

    Markus Montola, Eleanor Saitta, Jaakko Stenros (2015): The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together. In The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted. Rollespilsakademiet.

    Charles Bo Nielsen (2017): Loyalty to Character. In Once upon a nordic larp…twenty years of playing stories, edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand. Knutepunkt 2017

    Acknowledgements

    Thank you to: Sarah Lynn Bowman, Bjarke Pedersen and Juhana Pettersson for private conversations, and to all the participants in the thread that I opened in the Larpers BFF facebook group


    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Giovannucci, Alessandro. 2024. “A Short Guide to Fix Your Larp Experience.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.


    Cover photo: Photo by Matheus Bertelli on Pexels.

  • Wielding the Magic of Anticipation

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    Maximizing the emotional impact of anticipation for better play.

    “I see you shiver with antici-

    -pation”

    – Rocky Horror Picture Show

    The sweet moment when you close your eyes full of expectation while your lips get closer and closer to another person’s lips for the first time. So close that you can already feel their breath caressing your cheek… when you can sense the warmth of their body close to yours. This seemingly endless moment when your heart starts beating a tiny bit faster and when you do not yet know if your and the other’s lips are really going to touch.

    Isn’t this moment of sweet anticipation often more intense than the kiss itself?

    Or the last moments of a desperate bunch of rebels before the attack of an overpowering group of stormtroopers. Waiting to stand their ground for the last time and defend their base with their lives. The last glimpses they might exchange, someone patting a friend on the shoulder. Fear and hope in conflict with each other. Final encouraging words by a leader.

    Isn’t this moment of gloomy, yet heroic anticipation much more interesting than the following fight? 

    Is it not those moments when events are yet to happen that spark our excitement and that send our emotions on a rollercoaster ride? No matter whether can foresee the outcome or not, these moments of anticipation hold a bewitching power. 

    Skillful authors use these moments to build up suspense in their novels and also to forge a stronger bond between you, the reader, and the novel’s characters. Screenwriters use them to hook you to their shows and movies while displaying their characters’ virtues and flaws. 

    Some of us larp folk instinctively use moments of anticipation to develop intense scenes during larps. However, not all larpers and larp designers are aware of the magic of anticipation, let alone of how to wield this magic. So let us quickly look at one or two things that you can do to start using the magic of anticipation to enhance your own experience as a player.

    First – and this is the most important rule of all – don’t rush to the anticipated event!

    Learn to relish moments of anticipation. Like in the first example with the kiss, you might be eager to take the next step in a chain of events. Maybe you feel like you cannot wait until the anticipated event is going to happen but learn to endure this suspense! Dive into this sweet kind of excitement in order to fully unlock its potential.

    Second, use those moments to delve into your character’s unique personality!

    Use the moment of anticipation to dive even deeper into your characters’ hopes and fears. In these moments the anticipated event is like Schrödinger’s cat. Every outcome is possible which allows you to portray and experience different aspects of your character’s personality. Imagine the worst possible thing to happen and let your character react to it! Or let your character dream of the best possible outcome and share it with somebody to play on hope! Maybe old memories from your background story surface or maybe something that happened earlier during the larp acquires new gravitas.

    Third, let your emotions flow!

    Moments of anticipation are often moments when emotional waves become massive, when feelings can’t be held back anymore. Use your whole body to feel and portray those emotions. This might be a shivering breath before you kiss or shakily grasping your best friend’s hand before you storm out into battle. It might be a long thankful smile at your mentor before you climb the stage to hold a speech.

    Fourth, focus on your co-players too!

    As we all know, larp is a co-creative medium and we all want to have a good experience when playing. So try to find a good balance between exploring your character during moments of anticipation and giving the floor to other players. Those moments of anticipation are a perfect opportunity to learn more about others’ characters and to develop your character’s relationship to them further. You can also use the things you learn from such moments about others’ characters later in the game to create intense personal scenes.  

    Now, let’s briefly take the designer’s perspective.

    If your larp is a complete sandbox, you probably don’t have much influence over moments of anticipation. However, if you have at least some rough cornerstone events planned for your larp, then you should definitely add enough occasions and time for your players to savor the anticipation.

    Of course, sudden surprises and unexpected turns of events have their own magical charm but don’t forget to add opportunities of anticipation. Let your players wait before a big event is finally happening and give them hints about what they can expect to spark the flame of their imagination. You can drop allusions with the help of supporting characters or in-game materials such as a newspaper. Or you can simply use transparent design where your players know off-game where the story arc is going.

    The imagination of your players is a powerful tool! Just think of a horror movie as an example – usually, we are far more frightened when we haven’t seen the monster. When we know that there is something lurking, some eerie imminence, our imagination fills in the gaps and often our imagination does it far more effectively than any creature designer. 

    Give your players time to envision the worst or the best before you actually let it happen. If you want, you can even guide their imagination by using sound effects, music, lighting, and so on. Just read up on how to use those things when designing larps to get some inspiration. A good starting point is the article “The Fundamentals of Sound Design in Larp” by Anni Tolvanen and Irrette Melakoski (2019) published in the book Larp Design.

    No matter if you look at anticipation from a player’s perspective or from a designer’s – relishing moments of anticipation can definitely create intense scenes. Let’s all be more aware of the magic that lies within anticipation and let’s use it more consciously!

    References

    Tolvanen, Anni, and Irrette Melakoski. 2019. “The Fundamentals of Sound Design for Larp.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.


    Cover photo: Illustration by Nina Mutik.

    This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Fischer, Olivia. 2022. “Wielding the Magic of Anticipation.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 105-107. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

  • Play on Lies

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    We’ve all been there – “Is this character lying, or is the player just not being very believable?”

    The Problem

    Early on in my larping career, I was very interested in playing on lies. Back then, I really enjoyed fiction focussing on intrigues and scheming, like renaissance politics and Game of Thrones. I quickly learned that there were problems when it came to lying in larps: since larp means collectively pretending, collaborating in telling the same “lie”, it is much more difficult to decide if a character is lying or not, and knowing what is actually true in the reality of the larp.

    In everyday life, we have a lot of different tools at our disposal to decide if someone is being truthful or lying:

    The Unlikely Statement. If the suspected liar makes a statement that seems highly unlikely, it feels very probable that they are lying. However, in a larp context we can never be certain that our co-players have read all of the material explaining the fiction of the larp, that they remember it correctly or that they understood it in the same way we did. There are also a lot of aspects of the fiction that are not detailed in the fiction documents, where we as players need to fill in the blanks. We can never be certain that we have a joint view of what is probable and believable. As good co-players, we usually opt to “yes, and…” the improvisations of others.

    Verifying the Truth. When someone makes a statement, it is usually possible to verify it – for example by investigating directly. In larps, this is difficult, as we often need to play on a lot of things that are not in fact there, and are not verifiable.

    Conflicting Statements. If you were to talk to different characters about something that they have a joint knowledge of, you might get a lot of conflicting statements. In reality, this would be a pretty sure sign that some or all of them are lying. In larp, however, it might just be a sign that they are all trying to improvise, and have not had a chance to decide off-game what the truth is.

    Signs of Uncertainty. When someone is lying, especially if they are not very good at it or are in a very difficult situation, they usually show signs of uncertainty. They might wring their hands, bite their lips, glance off to the sides, stutter or even change what they are saying during the conversation. However, things like this are also signs of nervousness, and often occur when we are finding it difficult to improvise something believable.

    It is possible to broadcast that we are lying to our co-players. The surest way to do this is by overdoing the signs of uncertainty, and not needing much pressure to give away the lie. This is useful when playing a bad liar – smooth, polished lies are more difficult (but of course not impossible) to signal. This usually requires a high-resolution play-style, in which you are able to communicate much with very subtle gestures and variations, and having co-players who are able to read these hints.

    The Poker Face

    At the recently played larp The Future is Straight (2021) I found myself wanting to play a capable liar, while still being able to signal to my co-players what was true and what was a lie, and at times invite them to challenge the lies and call me out as a liar. Inspired by this need, after the larp I came up with the Poker Face meta-technique.

    The Poker Face is used to signal if something is true, if it is a convincing lie, or if it is an obvious lie. This is done through the positioning of one’s hands when making a statement.

    The technique is best suited for dialogue between two people sitting down, with their hands free and visible to each other. It can be used in situations with more people involved, and it is possible to use while standing up. It can be used by all players present in a scene, or just by the one currently in focus (for example, in an interview or interrogation). To make the technique more easily recognizable, both hands should be used.

    The technique uses three hand positions:

    Palms facing upwards: This statement is true. The character is being honest.

    Seated person with open hands resting on legs
    Photo by Patrik Åkervinda.

    Palms facing downwards, hand is open: This statement is a lie, but it is told smoothly and convincingly. It should only be called out if there is a good reason for it.

    Image of a seated person with open hands resting on their legs
    Photo by Patrik Åkervinda.

    Hands closed into fists: This statement is a lie, and it is not told very convincingly. The player welcomes the co-players to call out the lie.

    Image of seated person with closed fists resting on their legs
    Photo by Patrik Åkervinda.

    This is the technique in its most basic form. In addition to this, I have two suggestions that you may or may not want to use, depending on the design of your larp:

    Palms together, directed at interviewee: If the Poker Face technique is available as a tool at the larp, players may nevertheless forget to use it. If a player would like to know whether a recent statement is true or false, they can put their palms together and point them at the person they’re talking to, and ask “Really?”, “Is that so? Tell me more!” or something along these lines. The co-player is reminded to use the technique, and can give the requested meta-information while continuing to talk about the same subject.

    Image of seated person with open hands pressed together in front of them
    Photo by Patrik Åkervinda.

    Hand half-closed, palm facing downwards: You may come to decide that the difference between the smooth lie (palms down) and the obvious lie (fist) is too stark, and that you would like to have a middle-ground. This is one more gesture for your players to remember, but the scale from open hand to closed fist is intuitive if workshopped.

    The design of the hand-signs is connected to our views of how lying looks in our natural body language. Open, visible palms are understood to signal openness and honesty, while hidden palms are not. The reason fists signal a bad lie is because a bad liar is likely to look tense and uncomfortable. Someone who lies well is more likely to have a relaxed, natural posture, hence the relaxed hands with palms facing downwards.


    Cover image: Photo by Patrik Åkervinda. Photo has been cropped.

    This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Greip, Julia. 2022. “Play on Lies.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 142-144. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

  • Wyrding the Self

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    You’re weird.

    This common childhood insult comes in many languages and forms. The gist being that if you are not like the other children, and you do not fit in, then there must be something wrong with you. To be weird, is to be outside of what was expected of you. This may be something you are familiar with. The outsider is something we, as a collective part of humanity, have always tried to deal with. The notion that we are weird, and therefore somehow outside of society, and unwanted, is strong. If you do not fit in, then you must be fixed. This can be especially strong in collectivist cultures, where being outside the norm may even be considered selfish.

    However, what if the concept of weird, was not bad at all? What if the act of being weird, was actually a powerful and radical act of controlling one’s destiny? In this article, we will learn how to wyrd the self, that is, we will learn how to use basic tools to decolonize((Colonization is when a dominant group or system takes over culture and society from other groups. This may involve taking land, physical and mental violence, systemic injustice, and forcing people to only follow the colonizer’s way of life. When one decolonizes something, they are trying to undo the long lasting harm colonization has done. In this article, we are attempting to decolonize ourselves by rejecting a mythical norm. In this meaning decolonize means that we will learn how to press the proverbial restart button. What if we could be the being we truly want to be without the confines of society’s rigid interpretation of who we must be?)) the body and search for liberation from internalized oppression using navigational play. In simple terms, by learning to steer for liberation, and to engage in deep reflection after a larp, we may end up finding a version of ourselves who we want to be, rather than who society tells us we must be. This article is a condensed and rewritten take on my Master’s Degree thesis, Playing to Create Ourselves: Exploring Larp and Visual Autoethnographic Practice as a Tool of Self Liberation for Marginalized Identities (Kemper 2018).

    What is Wyrding?

    The word weird has its root in the Anglo Saxon word, wyrd, which roughly boils down to the action of controlling one’s fate. To be weird, is to control one’s fate, rather than let society determine your place and fate. To be weird, is to be outside the normal aspects of society, yes, but to also collectively decide who you would like to be, not based on societal pressure. It is my belief that larp affords us the actual ability to wyrd ourselves, that is to shape ourselves and our conceptions of self through play. In her book, The Functions of Role-Playing Games (2010), scholar Sarah Lynne Bowman speaks about role-playing’s ability to allow players to alter parts of their identity by trying on different acts of self hood:

    Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the process of role-playing lies in the ability to shift personality characteristics within the parameters of the game environment. Games and scenarios allow participants the opportunity to ”try on different hats” of selfhood, experimenting with the adoption of personality characteristics that either amplify or contradict aspects of their primary identities.

    Bowman 2010, 127

    What this essentially means is that when we role-play, we can completely shift who we are to fit the game. Each game allows us as players to explore the selves we could never be, or that we might have been, depending on how close to home we are playing. Larp then becomes a dressing room where we experiment with different selves that we can try on or take off as it suits us, and it is within this space we might find some of the characteristics we have always wanted to exhibit, but we have been closed off or discouraged from being. A large man may be allowed to be seen as soft and tearful, a woman of color may be able to be seen as smart without someone believing it is unbelievable, and someone who feels outside of the realm of attractiveness may be seen as a sex symbol. When you begin to alter yourself through this type of investigation and play it is taking fate into your own hands.

    When one does wyrd the self, they seek out emancipatory bleed, steer for liberation, and investigate themselves through the lens of play. What follows below, is a practical tool for using larp as an investigation tool, integrating those discoveries into your life, and a suggestion for the ethics of doing so.

    The Mythical Norm, Internalized Oppression, and Internalized Bias

    Before we go further, it is important to understand the concept of marginalized is larger than we have come to believe, and that these tools and theories are here to liberate all peoples, regardless of their station in life. While the word ‘marginalized’ may be commonly used to describe those populations who are often at the risk of the most oppression, it is important to understand that most people are both the oppressed and the oppressor. It is an uncomfortable thought to sit with, as it makes you aware that no matter how oppressed you may be, you still have the power to oppress others. Even people who face an extreme set of marginalizations (people of color/racialized populations and gender and sexual minorities) can still have the ability to oppress others.

    This can be best summed up by Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Friere, who explained what he believed the true goal of liberation in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Frieire writes:

    This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.

    Freire 1968/2014, 541

    Freire is saying that even though oppressors may do things that oppress others, they themselves are stuck in the same destructive cycles, and the only way to break them is to notice that we are all stuck inside of them. For example: A person who belongs in an ethnic minority may still have English as a first language, and can then take space of those who do not speak the language fluently. At home, this player is routinely oppressed by their government and culture. However, they are a native English speaker, and never have to worry about conveying what they want to say in a larp. The player realizes this, and attempts to remember this while playing, which leads them to being far more egalitarian in play. They must notice their behavior, and seek to change themselves.

    By freeing yourself, you free your oppressor and encourage them to break their social binding roles. Wyrding the self, is grounded in an intersectional theory of self, and so must sit with our messy definitions and recognitions of oppression. This tool is just as easy to use and accessible to a white, European, cis-gendered, hetreosexual man. Why? It is because it is my belief that society oppresses all individuals in ways that may be unseen, and if we want liberation, then we must also liberate those who oppress us because they are oppressed just like us, through the mythical norm.

    The concept of the mythical norm comes from intersectional theorist and poet, Audre Lorde, who defines it in her essay, “Age, Race, Class and Sex” when she states:

    Somewhere on the edge of consciousness, there is something I call the mythical norm. Which each one of in our hearts knows, “that is not me”. In America this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is within this norm that the trappings of power reside in this society.

    Lorde 2015, 116

    Identities like Western European, English speaking, cisgender, able bodied, and neurotypical are all things commonly seen as the mythical norm. In each of our societies, the norm goes even further, oppressing more and more people, and setting up those people to oppress others.

    Our primary identity is constructed and shaped by our culture and the mythic norm. When one lies outside that norm, they find that their primary identity is complex and intersectional. Sometimes you do not even need an outside oppressor to harm you, as your own thoughts and feelings can hold you back. You believe you cannot do something because you are not “the type” to do it. This is called internalized oppression. For example, if you do not go in for the sexy Goddess role because you believe you are too fat, and no one can believe a fat goddess, this is internalized oppression. Similarly, if you do not go for a leadership role because you think your English is not as good as others, and you’re worried no one will listen to you.

    With internalized oppression, we only see ourselves as not normal, as the other outside of the mythic norm, and we uphold that unconsciously. By continuing to stay in these roles, we uplift the very oppression that can pull us down.

    In addition to internalized oppression, we have internalized biases that stop us from playing as fully, and impacts our co-players as we are engaging in their oppression. Here are some examples: A woman who is playing a leader is never listened to by her war council, despite being cast as the most knowledgeable warrior who they are supposed to listen to. Someone in their 60s is considered too unattractive to be seductive, despite the fact that their character is seductive.

    If we hold ourselves captive to these internalized myths of who we can never be, how then do we break it? We can do this through consciously telling our own stories and creating our own selves. With larp, you have the power to live your own stories and put them to action in your body. In larp, we find yet another realization that stories have the power to liberate.

    Emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2016) is the feeling of liberation that comes from being able to fight back against or succeed against a systematic oppression, or allows you to notice those things that have held you back. For example, when a male player who was routinely bullied as a child for being emotional, plays a character who has the ability to freely share that emotion without being bullied for it. Or when a player notices that they are no longer afraid of speaking their mind at the office, or taking up space in public, after playing a person in charge at a larp.

    Capturing Story, Narrative, and Plot

    How can we capture what has happened during a larp? According to larp theorist Johanna Koljonen (2008), when a larp is over, it ceases to exist, and it is hard to pin down the narrative. In order to understand the importance of stories and narratives in relation to wyrding the self, we will be using the definition of story, plot, and narrative as defined by designer and scholar Simon Brind (2016). His definition of stories and narratives allows you to see how the fluidity and temporality of larp as well as how you may progress through it. Plot is the larpwrights plan for what is going to happen in the larp, Story is what is actually happening during runtime, and narrative is the events that have taken place and described after the fact.

    A larp follows an overall plot conceit (i.e. we are all in a forest in a magical land, we are all at wizard school, we are all at the dinner table) and then the players take the designer’s plot and structure, and turn it into a co-created story, which is ephemeral in nature, and becomes the narrative when it is all done.

    Since the narrative of the larp is only decided after the larp has taken place, it is fairly personal to each player. Therefore, each instance of play is a fleeting moment in time which can never be recreated exactly. The narrative of the larp lies in the mind of each player, and that narrative becomes their embodied experience. The story you create with your co-players evolves moment to moment with player interactions and choices, each person bringing themselves and the fiction to life. While the larpwrights may have ideas about how a larp ends, it is generally up to you as a player to get there, even if the larp ends in a specific conceit.

    How can we contextualize our own experiences if they are hard to document and the narrative is not created until after everything has happened? You will need a set of reflexive tools to help you remember and contextualize your experience, and since the co-creation of the story ends up in many individual narratives, I believe that larp experience can be best suited to be investigated from the personal, which is why we use autoethnographic techniques.

    We know that the narrative of a larp is not the plot of the larp, nor is it the story. The story is what happens during the larp, and the narrative we can investigate is not apparent until the end. This means you must create a record of your stages of play and actions as a character. This is something you may already do after many games. You may write up what happened to you during the game, or give your character’s story an epilogue. This is often bundled into a narrative write up, which can then serve as an autoethnographic set of data we can investigate. A visual ethnography is a study of a people done in media, namely photographs, ephemera, and videos, and autoethnography is a self-study of a group you may be in. These two combined approaches may help you to explore your experiences.

    A visual autoethnography allows you to capture as much of your experience as possible, like ephemera and narrative epilogues or write ups, and then use those to reflect on who you played. You may already be taking pictures and documenting your ephemera, and you may even practice reflexive writing every time you share narratives of your game.

    When we write reflexively, we do not just look inside the magic circle with this approach, we look inside ourselves, inside the character, and inside the greater world. This reflexivity is what gives us the ability to see into ourselves. Social scientists, Tony Adams, Stacey Jones, and Carolyn Ellis (2014, 103) define reflexivity in Autoethnography Understanding Qualitative Research, “Reflexivity includes both acknowledging and critiquing our place and privilege in society and using the stories we tell to break long-held silences on power, relationships, cultural taboos, and forgotten and/or suppressed experiences.” By allowing ourselves to pin down the narrative and then look at it and compare it to our lives, we can potentially see where our fantasies lie within our realities.

    Navigational Play

    When we choose to wyrd the self, what we are actually doing is engaging in something I have termed, navigational play (Kemper 2018). The main purpose of navigational play is to try and see yourself outside the bounds of the mythic norm. Instead of constantly inhabiting your own oppressive world, you can use a self-exploratory, liberatory play style, that allows you to feel free of or investigate a particular marginalization. Navigational play is the act of steering yourself during the full process of a larp, to seek emancipatory bleed and consists of two components, steering for liberation and reflective writing.

    When you steer, you are making in-character decisions based on out of game reasons (Montola, Stenros, & Saitta 2015), and thus steering for liberation is the act of seeking liberatory experiences through steering. Reflective writing is the act of looking at and writing about how your experiences relate to fictional situations, in our case, our larp experiences. In order for us to reflect on our narrative, we have to remember what our larp experience was. Using ephemera, pre larp writing activities, and creating a narrative write up, will create an artifact that we can then explore reflexively.

    In order to steer for liberation and create an artifact we can then look at reflexively, we have to investigate what we want and need from the larp. By investigating your character and self, at various points of the larp stages you can identify similar oppressions and desires between the character and self. In the next section, we will explore ways to invoke pre-bleed, create ephemera, involve others such as co-players and organizers, as well as touch upon how to take field notes during a larp so you may write reflexively. Chart 1 roughly explains how each step may be achieved during various stages of a larp.

    Pre-Larp During Larp Post Larp
    Explore Character If characters are pre-written, and not created by you, attempt to find and ask for casting in relations to the themes of the larp you would like to explore. Look at alibi. What will the larp allow you to do that you otherwise cannot in the real world?Explore relationships the character has to others. What are the similarities and differences?

    How does this character connect to you? Think about their name and history, what can you add to it to make it personal? How are they different? Which of the larp’s themes feel most important to play on? Are there parts of yourself that you would like to think about and bring into play? Are there themes you would like to play on that the larp and the character explores?

    Investigate the character. Which proverbs, virtues and values, rituals, mentors, and artifacts mean the most to you? To them? What if anything is in common or dissimilar to your lived experience? To your latent or obvious fantasies? Visualize the self.

    What feels interesting to the character in the play space? Who would they be drawn to throughout their story? What rituals, social mores etc. are they seeking to break, embrace, or understand? What in the end were the similarities and differences to you and the character?Using your narrative write up, or field notes re-investigate the character and their narrative. Compare and contrast which proverbs, virtues and values, rituals, mentors, and artifacts mean the most to you after play.

    What means the most to the character?

    What if anything is in common or dissimilar to your lived experience?

    To your latent or obvious fantasies? Visualize the narrative self and the personal.

    Identify Themes and Exploration Identify similar themes and oppressions between the character and yourself if they are prewritten. If the character is self-written identify themes you may want to explore now that you have alibi.If the character is pre-written and feels unplayable ask for a new casting or write changes and ask for them to be implanted within reason.

    Asking that your character bring in their ethnic heritage in a larp about going to a barbecue is reasonable, asking your character to be changed to a Martian in a game about the Crusades is not. To break the fiction premise radically when that will harm others’ games can throw off other players who are seeking to explore their own oppression or simply play. This would be a critical breach of ingroup social mores and unethical.

    Steer for optimal play experience of the themes chosen. Notice any behaviors you are replicating for better or worse. Notice who you gravitate towards. Steer for relationships and situations you have the alibi for. Look for situations that uphold narrative cohesion and satisfy your steering goals. Attempt fearlessness. Attempt exploration. Remember Alibi.If you are engaging in oppression play, be aware of intersecting identities and that oppression does not occur in a vacuum. Respect safety mechanisms. Go through your write up and look for replicated behaviors that tie into your personal life. Evaluate your steering in comparison to what you looked for. What stopped you? What encouraged you?What relationships did you gravitate towards? What roles did you enact that either broke or upheld the oppressive behaviors you sought to dismiss? What roles or people did you gravitate towards in order to feel liberation?

    Were there mentors?

    Did anything unusual happen that you weren’t prepared for? Did you stop yourself from doing something you wanted, or engaged in behavior that you don’t enjoy?

    Writing/Recording Flesh out Character through fiction or poetry writing. If this is not possible, ask yourself questions about your character. Where are they from, what do they like? Seek to make them as whole as possible.If possible, explore co-writing with established relationships in the larp.

    Take pictures of your costume choices, create a Pinterest board, or organize thoughts and feelings with music or art.

    Take notes during the larp or shortly thereafter. Diegetic notes and diaries are preferable. Write or draw ephemera as much as you can. Save notes.If allowed, take photos of spaces and people that mean things to your character.

    Gain informed consent from the larp runners and other participants.

    Create a narrative write up that focuses and centers your player experience in character. When you are ready to investigate the larp from your personal non-character point of view, attempt to find common themes in how you played. Look for moments that felt particularly poignant. Instead of trying to capture the entire larp, seek to capture what was most important to the character in the moment.Write the narrative write up in any creative format that makes you feel the most comfortable. Use annotations and footnotes to add in self reflections.
    Ephemera Using the character concept, design and think about the costuming, props, notes, and other things that may be important to your character. If the larp is short and you cannot create props consider creating in-game ephemera. If you are playing close to home, explore using personal objects to immerse yourself. Pictures of family and friends, your own wardrobe, etc. Take photos, write letters, create props, collect important objects that are useful for your character and provoke a sense of missing. Ephemera created during the story period often has significant meanings. Take photos of all of the ephemera collected. Sort through character portraits and other in game ephemera. What ephemeral artifacts can you explore?Save official game documents given to you by the organizer. How did the structure of the larp help? Hinder? What does the ephemera mean to the character? Are there similarities between the ephemera you collected at the player and you collected as the character?

    Identifying Oppressions and Desires

    The first part of liberatory steering, is to think of what you want to accomplish or explore within the magic circle of the larp’s plot. Not every larp is useful for exploring yourself in this way, and you can save yourself a lot of trouble by looking at playstyle, length of time, tone, and overall larp culture. A larp that allows you to play a role that can challenge your perceptions of yourself and the world, is a good candidate, as is one where the larp culture allows you to make more choices about what happens to your character. You should avoid forcing yourself to play on themes that deeply distress you, are not in the spirit or theme of the larp, and would affect the play of your co-players to the detriment of the game.

    For example: A player has two options of larps. One is a larp about an unequal society that murders lower class people, and the coming revolution. The other is a larp about wealthy nobles and their servants in 1918. The player who is from a lower class background, would like to experience what it would be like to successfully rebel against the upper class, so they choose the first larp as it would provide more opportunity to rebel and succeed than the larp in which most of their play is in subservience to others.

    If the characters are prewritten, you can try to select a character that may allow you to achieve your desires by applying for characters, groups, or requesting certain themes be written heavily into the character. If the characters are created by yourself or tailored to you, then you may ask to play around certain themes and desires in a casting questionnaire. In the former example, you may ask specifically to play a rebel because you want to explore that dynamic. Then if you are cast as such, you can seek to explore how or why you are doing so. After you identify your desires and things that may hold you back, you should then look at the relations your characters have and talk to your fellow co-players.

    Talking to Co-Players and Playing to Lift

    After casting, but before playing the larp, reaching out to co-players and actually expressing your needs and wants for the game is a challenging but necessary step. You can divulge what themes you are thinking of playing on more heavily, and ask your co-player if there are any themes they might want to play on. Asking questions of your co-players, even quickly, can help you both steer for the type of game you both would like to achieve. When you seek to share responsibility like this, you are also engaging in what designer and theorist Susanne Vejdemo (2018) calls, playing to lift. Vejdemo defines this as by saying, “Play to Lift means that the responsibility for your drama and your character also rests on all your co-players. You have to lift each other.” By talking to your co-players you can work to create a game that allows you to steer towards your desires together, and seek to help them in creating drama and interesting play that will lift them as well as yourself.

    Depending on the length of the larp, you can also go on to create connections with your co-players that can be as easy as choosing to be siblings who support each other to many pages of back stories with intricate details. This is done in larps that have or allow pre-play, which is the act of writing or engaging with players in character before the larp. This type of relationship building can lead to something called pre-bleed (Svanevik and Brind 2016), which is very useful for getting into character. Pre-bleed is usually conceived of as an activity between two or more players, but it does not necessarily require a co-player.

    Larps may set up chat groups where in character dialogue may happen, players may write stories between their connected characters that happen before the larp, and various other methods which deepen character connection.

    Here are some ways to invoke pre-bleed:

    • Writing a series of short fiction pieces with another player or a group of players that flesh out the world of the larp before the larp happens.
    • Writing a short story for yourself about your character’s relation to a key theme of the larp.
    • Creating a piece of ephemera that you will use heavily during the larp, such as a personalized handkerchief or other item.
    • Exploring the topic of the larp through research.
    • Creating a playlist of songs to listen to that reminds you of your character.
    • Creating a mood board that captures the character’s home, wants, and desires.

    Actions You Can Take Inside of the Larp

    By carefully choosing your larp based on what experiences, tone, and theme you will embody, you can set yourself up for better results. Look out for opportunities to experience things you may never get to do so in your daily life. If, for example, you never got the experience of finishing your studies, you could choose to play a high achieving and successful student in a school larp. Even if you did not overcome what stopped you from finishing in your actual courses, you may feel as if you overcame them within the larp.

    Here are some examples of actions to take during play:

    • If an action is prohibited for someone of your social rank, do it.
    • If an activity is something you wouldn’t be expected to do, do it.
    • If a style is something you have been prohibited from wearing because people like you are not allowed, wear it.
    • If your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation usually prohibits you from owning something, buy it.

    Creating Ephemera and Reflexive Writing

    When a larp ends, what do you have left as a participant? Perhaps some photos, your costume, a vague narrative you remember, lots of ephemera and…not much else. It is hard to be reflexive about your experience if you do not have a memory of what happened. How then, as a player can you investigate your experience after it is over? One way is by creating and writing about ephemera, things that are primarily used for a larp and typically discarded or recycled.

    Larps may produce a surprising amount of ephemera. Ephemera are generally objects that have limited use, like concert tickets, or a show program. However, within larp’s ephemeral nature, ephemera becomes a unique way to bond player to character.

    Within an autoethnography of larp participation, a player who carefully chooses, creates, documents, and uses reflection in regard to their ephemera may be able to immerse themselves deeper into their character, use ephemera in liberational steering, and document an otherwise transitory medium.

    Here are a few examples of ephemera you can keep and later investigate:

    • A letter sent to your character from another character that is important to you both.
    • A prop that your character always carried or used frequently during the larp.
    • A homework assignment, poem, or plan drawn up by your character or others.
    • Costume pieces like identifying badges, sweaters, and any other piece that firmly reminds you of an experience.
    • Photos taken in character by an in character photographer.

    After the larp is over, you can begin to look at each ephemera and write down your reactions to them and what they mean to you as the character and/or the player. This connects the character to the self. Interrogate and reflect on how the character and the self connect:

    • Why is this object important to the character or myself?
    • What do I feel when I touch it?
    • Why did I keep it?
    • Have I ever owned anything like it? Why or why not?
    • Have I continued to use it out of character?
    • Have I used it for multiple characters?
    • Where does it live when I’m not this character?

    By answering these questions you may begin to see the connections between yourself and the character. For example, perhaps you choose to explore a series of notes passed in class by your player, and realize that you were too nervous to pass notes when you were in school yourself. Passing notes made you feel daring, and you particularly enjoyed it in the larp, because you never got the opportunity to do so before.

    When you write this down, you may develop a sense of why you play the way you do, or whether you actually explored the desires and oppressions you wanted to. However, this reflexive insight must still be put in context of the narrative.

    Taking Field Notes at Larps

    For our purposes, field notes within larp are observations by players about their larp experience as it is happening and is collected into a field journal. There is no one way to write a narrative field journal, but having one if a larp allows it, can provide a valuable tool in searching for the transformation of self through immersion and examining bleed. A diegetic journal is also an ephemeral artifact that allows the player to connect to the character’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. You can use this journal to write a summation of your narrative write up, which you can then look at reflexively. Those who write them often turn their larp experience into pleasurable reading and a document of play.

    Here are some tips for taking practical field notes during larps:

    • Focus not on other’s experience, but your own. Avoid writing what you wish happened, and stay truthful to your own experience and your co-players actions.
    • Just as a character might take a diary, and note what happened, try and write what happened during the day.
    • Note who your most important relationships are, what is occurring around you, and how your character is reacting to it.
    • If you are in a short larp or are not able to write much, consider writing up your character’s feelings in a letter to yourself while the larp is still fresh.
    • Do not spend too much time trying to remember everything that has happened, but the key experiences, beliefs, issues, and rituals the character engaged in.
    • Do not stop other’s play in order to record a conversation. Feel free to go out of play to a separate space to record important moments immediately, if you fear forgetting.
    • Do not write more than you play.

    When you are done writing, you can then begin to be reflexive. Give yourself time and space before looking at what you wrote. When you are ready, use the following questions as a sample guide to begin investigating your experience while rereading:

    • Are there memories that remind you of your actual self?
    • Did you associate with characters or players that you you, yourself would or that you wished you could interact with?
    • Did you avoid people your character wouldn’t have? Why do you think so?
    • Is there something you overcame?
    • Was there something you felt stopping you from playing as you would have liked? Was it yourself? Design? Your co-players?
    • Did you notice moments of internalized bias towards yourself or others? If you did, what did you do about it?
    • Do you recognize habits that you do as yourself that you did in character?
    • Do you recognize any habits you always wished you had? Did you end up taking home any of these habits? Have you retained them?
    • Do you have any regrets about what you did or didn’t do? Why?

    Retyping your narrative in a word processor and then placing your reflective writing answers as footnotes can be particularly helpful to seeing the separation between self and character. You may begin to see clear threads about your own desires and oppressions, and notice patterns in your play style over time. This can help you choose which larps you may enjoy, and which larps you can steer away from, as well as what you may take away. For example like this:

    Field Note:
    After the battle meeting, I realized that the power I channeled during a previous ritual had been inside me all along.

    Footnote to the Field Note:
    After the larp I realized that I was more assertive at work than I normally am. I’ve been speaking up at a lot more meetings now then I used to, and I think it comes from this moment. I should really pick more larps where I have a leading role.

    Ethics

    While you should absolutely be using larp and a navigational play style in order to seek emancipatory bleed and investigate our own relationships to trauma and internalized oppressions, we cannot do this in a vacuum. Larp is a co-created medium, and while we may want to use it for our own liberation, our liberation cannot come at the cost of others. While our narratives in a larp are individual, our stories are not so easily cut off. Much like our actual lives, your co-players do play a role. Anthropologist Heewon Chang (2008) in her book Autoethnography as Method reminds us that we must be aware of the role of others in our research and outlines some practices I believe are also important when thinking of a larp autoethnography:

    Strangers can be connected to self through group membership or common experiences, if not through personal contacts. In autoethnography, self and others may be positioned in different ways. You can consider three possibilities. First, you can investigate yourself as a main character and others as supporting actors in your life story. Second, you can include others as co-participants or co-informants in your study. Third, you can study others as the primary focus, yet also as an entry to your world.

    Chang 2008, 65

    It is preferred to position yourself as the main character and your co-players as supporting characters in your own personal narrative. You must be aware though, that your narrative in no way is the only narrative of the larp, and even your closest co-player may have had a radically different experience. We must consider how we involve our co-players in the practice of our write ups and our play. We must take care to not misrepresent them, even though it may make for better fiction. The goal is liberation for yourself, not at the expense of others. In the cases of autoethnographies that are published for ingroup pleasure as well ones published for player-researcher means, I argue the following two approaches based on Chang’s above suggestions:

    First, focus only about your character’s experience of the world, making sure to keep all of your co-players anonymous as possible. In this way, you center your own experience over others’ in the write up, but not in play. In play, you should strive to be as generous as you would if you were not steering for emancipatory bleed. Your liberation should not come at the expense of others’ play.

    2. Involve your co-players in the writing and steering process. Making a collaborative larp autoethnography would be an excellent way to involve all of your players and help each other to dissect facets of the character you might have missed. Imagine if an entire faction took turns writing mission reports that served as a diary for that group during game.

    We must never put our liberation over co-player’s experience, and that means we must not steer ourselves in the play space to disrupt a larp when it would negatively impact others who may play. We must take into context the ethics of consequence (Etherington 2007) and the benefit of self. If you are writing something solely for your own discovery, this is less cumbersome as no one else outside of the group will see or read it. If, however, you chose to use it in your own research, then you must practice process consent (Ellis 2007) namely, you must check in with those who you have played and who appear in the work to see if they are still willing to take part. If the answer is no, then you must keep your narrative to the ingroup community or to yourself.

    An autoethnography that is kept purely for the discovery of self and never shared is still as valuable as anything that may be published. It is the act of reflection, not the publishing where liberation lies. Here are some things you can do with a finished autoethnographic larp write up:

    • You can share it with your co-players.
    • You can look over it with a trained mental health professional.
    • You can keep it for yourself, and reread it comparing it to other write ups and finding clear patterns in how and why you play the way you do.

    Conclusion

    Wyrding the self is the sustained effort to decolonize your body from the mythical norm, and begin the process of identity alteration. This alteration can be a direct result of experiencing emancipatory bleed that you may be able to achieve through navigational play which involves the acts of reflexive writing and steering for liberation.

    The ability to wyrd the self lies in a player’s desire to do the reflective work that is necessary for decolonization. It is not easy, and requires pre-planning and commitment to co-create narratives collectively with your co-players while seeking liberation. While this tool has been created with those who face systematic marginalization in mind, the ability to investigate how you played the larp, and it’s relation to your own life has been immensely helpful to larpers who are interested in playing for transformative purposes. Recording your actions during a larp, transcribing it, and then investigating your play by comparing it to some of the questions you may ask yourself, can allow you to see internalized biases or oppressions that can hold you back in your day to day life. As long as you do not push your narrative and experience to be more important than your co-players, I believe this too can be used to see and cultivate a community of transformative larp practice. When you seek to wyrd the self, you create a more resilient self by seeing yourself as truly want to be, not what you have been molded to be by a mythical norm.

    Bibliography

    Simon Brind (2017): Response to Ian Andrews. Knutpunkt. Once Upon a Nordic Larp: Twenty Years of Playing Stories, edited by Martine Svanevik et al.

    Sarah Lynne Bowman (2010): The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. Jefferson: McFarland.

    Heewon Chang (2016): Autoethnography as Method. Routledge.

    Paulo Freire (1968/2014): Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Bloomsbury Publishing.

    Jonaya Kemper (2017): The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity, Nordic Larp, 21 June 2017.

    Jonaya Kemper (2018): Playing to Create Ourselves: Exploring Larp and Visual Autoethnographic Practice as a Tool of Self Liberation for Marginalized Identities (Unpublished Master’s Thesis). New York University, Gallatin Graduate School.

    Johanna Koljonen (2008): The Dragon Was the Least of It: Dragonbane and LARP as Ephemera and Ruin. Ropecon ry. Montola & Stenros (eds): Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games.

    Linn, Holman Jones Stacy, et al. (2016): Handbook of Autoethnography. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

    Audre Lorde (2015): Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press

    Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, & Eleanor Saitta (2015): The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together. Rollespilsakademiet. The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Claus Raasted and Charles Bo Nielsen.

    Martine Svanevik, and Simon Brind (2016): Pre-Bleed Is Totally a Thing. Ropecon Ry. Larp Realia – Analysis, Design, and Discussions of Nordic Larp.

    Susanne Vejdemo (2018): Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose Nordic Larp, 21 Feb. 2018

  • Sceneing and Storying

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    Sceneing and Storying

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    This chapter might have been titled ‘How I Larp’ or, more accurately, ‘How I Conceive of My Larping.’ It arises from my own experiences playing a broad range of larps. Therefore, though it is presented as a general theory of larping, and is intended to help conceptualise playing in larp in a way that is constructive for others, it comes with the proviso that the particular play preferences discussed are personal to me, and may not be helpful to everyone. I hope, however, that others may gain benefit from it.

    The chapter is concerned with an apparent paradox about larping. The experiences and stories which we make in larping are collective. Not only does larping normally happen in groups, but it usually requires the input and action of others in the production of the experience and stories. However, it is perhaps equally obvious that no two players can share exactly the same experience, even if they are playing in the same scene together, and that the stories which we make are individual to our own experiences and the characters we play.

    So, larping is both collective and individual at the same time. That is to say, larping has both a collective dimension and an individual dimension. The individual dimension is related to Jonaya Kemper’s (2019) notion of larp anarchy. Larp anarchy is the freedom of players to take charge of and create their own experiences and stories while larping. So if, during a larp, a player is not having a good experience they have the freedom to forge new relations, and develop their character and plots in ways that are more enjoyable for them (see, e.g., Simon Brind’s chapter in this volume, Larp Hacking). Anarchy here refers to the rejection of political hierarchy and freedom from the rule of a leader: you as a player are free to do what you want with your character. It is not intended to denote a state of disorder, which the term connotes due to the spurious idea that a leaderless society would break down into chaos. Nor does it denote the political movement of anarchism, though, as we shall see, there are distinct similarities between cooperative anarchism and my conceptualisation of the individual and collective dimensions in larping. It is important to note here that larp anarchy and the individual dimension do not imply absolute individualism. Larping requires structure and balance in order to function well, and if every player’s individual whim were admitted into play it would almost certainly result in disorder, and possibly that breed of power-playing/powergaming in which one player creates the character or plot they want at the expense of other players’ enjoyment (see, e.g. Algayres 2019; Huw2k8 2011). Also, as Evan Torner (2018) points out, the emergent play and story that come from players anarchically taking control occurs always in relation to the larp’s design, which defines the set of parameters all participants have subscribed to. Towards the end of this chapter I will look more closely at the responsibilities we have towards each other in larping.

    The collective dimension is related to the fact that larping is an ‘ecological’ process, as expressed by Marjukka Lampo (2016). That is, larping is always relational — it is the relationships between things which bring about the creativity of experiences and stories: ‘larping can be seen as an ecological, reciprocal relationship between the participants and the environment of the event, i.e. the players and the game.’ (Lampo 2016, 35) Without the ‘environment’ of the other players, the setting, the design and backstory, etc. there can be no lived experience from which to produce our stories. It is fundamental to larping that we are acting as((In the sense of doing the actions of, rather than representing as in a play or film.)) the character, and not simply imagining, narrating or writing their actions((Though characters of course do all these things during a larp. The important distinction is that these are what the character is doing (I as my character am relating a story to other characters) and not the means of playing (I as a player am telling other players what my character is doing).)). While Lampo, in her article, focuses on the individual in the environment, what I suggest here is that this idea of larping as ecology highlights both the individual dimension and the collective dimension — it is about both the relationships between individuals and participation in a larger process. This participation is not taking part in an activity as an individual, but rather becoming part of a collective action which is not reducible to individual participants. In other words, in contrast to the individual dimension, the collective dimension in larping must be understood holistically, not as interacting singularities but as a plural whole.

    It is important here that we are discussing ‘larping’ rather than ‘larps’. A larp is a thing, either a design, or a particular instance of a design put into practice. Larping, on the other hand, is a process. As a process, larping is always in the flow of becoming rather than a state of being. That is to say, when we are larping things are not completely fixed, outcomes are not completely defined, and there are always many potentials((This notion of “becoming” rather than “being” as fundamental to existence and change is derived from process theory, such as that of Alfred North Whitehead (1978 [1929]) and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (1987 [1980]).)). I will break the process of larping down into two distinct but related processes. One process relates to the collective aspect of larping and the other to the individual aspect. The collective process I will refer to as sceneing, since it correlates with the collaborative generation of scenes. The individual process I will refer to as storying, since it correlates with each player’s production of a personal narrative. I will also demonstrate how these two processes are related and are necessary for each other.

    Storying

    Here I propose storying as the process of creating a narrative for your character. This narrativizing is done individually by each player. It is a private process, experienced by each individual separately and uniquely, compared with the collective and public process of sceneing. Storying is the process of experiencing and making sense of what has been given by the collective into the process of sceneing.

    If sceneing involves the dissolution of the players into the collective, storying is their reconstitution, through the integration and interpretation into their personal narratives of the process of sceneing in which they are participating. It is, to continue the analogy, the consumption of the ‘soup’ which is made in the process of sceneing. This ‘consumption’ is a process of experiencing, in which the elements making up the instance of sceneing (words, actions, expressions, gestures, both our own and those of others) are brought together in the individual experience of each player, made sense of, and turned into a narrative moment, which is also integrated into the continuous narrative produced by successive instances of storying.

    The process of storying does not ‘use’ the elements of sceneing as such; the process cannot be separated from its constituents, nor does it exist prior to the coming together of those constituents in the player’s experience. The ‘soup’ of sceneing becomes the organs of each player’s story. Just as an organic body is made from the nutrients it consumes, so storying is made from the ‘soup’ of sceneing. It is the lived experience of our participation which goes into building the narratives we make for our characters. Therefore, the potential for storying is limited by what is given to the player, the words, actions, gestures, and expressions of others, in the process of sceneing. The narratives in larping are made from our experiences.

    While storying is necessarily constituted by experiences of sceneing, that does not mean that every element of sceneing is prominent or even present in every player’s individual narrative. Rather, storying is individually self-determined from the data of our lived experience. Not everything in the process of sceneing will be relevant to every player. It is important that storying filters out in order to make a comprehensible narrative. Much of what is happening in the process of sceneing may be lost. Things which will be relevant to other characters and players may simply be noise. The conversation between two lovers which is overheard by chance might have no relevance to the narrative of your character, so even though it is registered it may be discounted. In a large larp with many different locations, much of the action and activity of other players won’t even be registered since they are not directly experienced, even though you might be aware that they are happening, or come to you indirectly through the ripples they cause.

    Importantly, storying is, or at least has the potential to be, anarchic. Our individual processes of storying are our own. There is no authority that can tell us to experience things in a particular way, nor how to construct the stories of our characters. We are free to interpret our private narratives for ourselves. There are qualifying factors to this, of course: the filter of the character, which may have been partially constructed by a designer; our assumptions about the expectations of organisers or other players; and internalised biases and prejudices which form constructs within us about the ‘correct’ ways to play, experience, and make stories. These can be constraints by which we do not allow ourselves the freedom of anarchy, which is why I say that storying is only potentially anarchic. As I will discuss below, some of these constraints might be seen as positive and produce responsible play. It is worth recognising, though, that these constraints are to a large extent self imposed.

    Whatever constraints we apply to our own processes of storying, what is certain is that no two players’ narratives will be identical. Even if they play in all the same processes of sceneing together, their experiences will be different. It is these different experiences and players’ interpretations of them which give rise to the intentions which will be given back to the process of sceneing through the ‘ingredients’ of actions, words, gestures, etc.

    Reciprocity

    The processes of sceneing and storying I have described above are reciprocal —each requires the other in order to become. This is because elements of sceneing constitute each player’s process of storying, and reciprocally, any process of sceneing is constituted by actions deriving from the multitude of interpretations from players’ storying. Lampo’s perceptual ecology shows how we can move from the individual to the collective and back again. The process of creativity in sceneing and storying is largely congruent to Lampo’s. That is, the individual player makes sense of the events they are participating in (or subject to) and then acts according to their interpretation. What Lampo refers to as ‘affordances’, and the embodied choices enacted by the player are both identical to the ‘ingredients’ given to the ‘soup’ of sceneing, while the gathering and making of choices is similar to what I propose with storying.

    Lampo captures the spirit of the reciprocal process between the individual and thecollective, though the process she proposes requires, for me, an excess of conscious analysis. The most intense and beautiful larping experiences for me have been when I have acted as the character without thinking, in a kind of flow state (Csikszentmihályi 1990, passim; and see e.g. Bowman 2018, 380). Therefore, the reciprocal processes I propose are rooted much more in feeling than in conscious analysis. While Lampo admits that ‘the choice-making process of the players in a larp ecology is affected by the emotions and feelings of the players as well as the somatic responses they experience,’ (Lampo 2016, 42) I suggest here that these factors are primary in the process of storying. In storying the other players and environment are first experienced physically and emotionally, and it is possible to react physically and emotionally, giving words, gestures, or actions back into the process of sceneing without the intervention of a conscious decision at all. Moreover, the reaction is already embodied in the physical and emotional effect of the experience. Meaning-making and action are more often generated preconsciously((In a Whiteheadian sense of before consciousness comes to bear on the storying process, rather than a Freudian sense.)) than consciously. The beauty of larping lies more in how it feels than how it appears.

    Of course, this does not preclude conscious decision making in appropriate circumstances, only that conscious, ‘rational’ cognition is not necessary to the process. For this kind of flow state I propose, you need to ‘be in it’, to participate fully in the process of sceneing. This is perhaps where we find the limit of the ‘soup’ analogy. Where I have said above that we give the ingredients for sceneing in the form of words, gestures, actions, etc., these elements cannot be separated from our physical, emotional, and psychological selves. So in fact it is ourselves we must give into the process of sceneing — we are the ingredients, becoming part of the ‘soup’, to some extent losing ourselves in play. We are both part of the ‘soup’, and at the same time the consumers of the ‘soup’.

    The narrative you create in the process of storying uses the relevant ingredients from the collective process of sceneing. Likewise, the individual process of storying feeds back into the collective process through the interpretation of events which gives rise to new decisions, intentions, and actions — the ingredients for the cauldron. Each process is necessary for the other, since each provides the constituents for the other. In other words, sceneing is made from storying and storying is made from sceneing. The holistic, collective process of sceneing feeds the multiple storyings experienced by the individual players, while those storyings in turn feed the collective sceneing through the expression of individual interpretation.

    While each process of storying becomes determined in the individual player to whom it belongs, the multiplicity of the storyings feeding the process of sceneing means that sceneings can never become completely determined. In other words, the larp can never be defined by a single player’s actions, nor a single player’s interpretation. The multiplicity of narratives arising in the oscillation from storying to sceneing and back again means that the meaning of the larp is always open: undecided and indeterminate. However, this does not mean that an individual interpretation is not valid; indeed, every player’s interpretation is valid, and moreover, each is equally as valid as all others. To take up the soup analogy again, each of us eats a portion of the soup to which we have all contributed, and makes up our own mind about it. This will necessarily be coloured by personal preference and prior experience.

    Responsibility

    This way of thinking about larping, as both a collective process and an organ for anarchic storymaking, necessitates a particular way of playing together responsibly. My notion of responsibility here is threefold. Firstly, it points to the fact that players are, in part, responsible for each other’s experiences in larping. Secondly, this responsibility for each other’s experiences makes us responsible to other players for creating enriching play experiences. And thirdly, it captures the idea of playing in response to others, as part of a collective. The first of these aspects of responsibility is a theory, the second and third are practices.

    We are responsible for each other’s experiences in that each player gives themselves into the process of sceneing, which is experienced by all the players in their storying. Therefore, the things we do and say become part of other players’ narratives. It should be obvious that this state of affairs is ripe for abuse, and it is where anarchy can become problematic. Each of us must make an ethical choice. You can choose to act only with regard for your own interests and experiences, or you can choose to with a sense of responsibility towards your fellow players. However, with the theory of sceneing and storying, one of these ethical modes becomes preferable. Since other players are to a great extent responsible for the experiences you will have, it is in your interest to work with them collaboratively, to give into sceneing words, actions, and gestures that will enrich everyone’s experience. The alternative may be that you find other players will avoid you, or will refuse to go along with the ingredients you give into the ‘soup’. Thus, your storying becomes malnourished; the experiences you have are less rich, less vibrant. It is better, then, to play with regard for others’ experiences, as well as in response to what others are giving to the process of sceneing. Do not disregard what others offer. Both give and receive generously.

    Sometimes, something feels right for my character. An event, an action, a speech. However, if that something involves other players’ characters and limiting or changing their potentials for play, I have a responsibility to ensure that they too want this kind of play. If my character dies, that will affect those with whom the character has relations. If my character euthanizes a patient with a terminal condition, that will affect not only the patient but the characters with whom they have relations too. I and my actions are in part responsible for their experiences. These examples are big, obvious cases, but it is true of the smallest actions too.

    It is in this principle of responsibility we see most clearly parallels between this model of playing and cooperative anarchism. Freedom (from authority and to pursue one’s own interests and desires) is the basic principle of all anarchism. What marks cooperative anarchism as different from more individualist forms like libertarianism is that it recognizes that individuals thrive together and that collaboration enriches the individuals involved as well as the relations between them. Likewise, in larping, we can create richer experiences through cooperation.

    With the idea of responsibility, I don’t want to say, ‘you are responsible for everyone’s experience, so you’d better do it right.’ On the contrary, everyone gives ingredients into the process, so it doesn’t matter if you do something ‘badly’. However an action or utterance is executed, it can be interpreted and integrated in any number of ways. This theory of sceneing and storying very much encourages ‘playing to lift’, since the production of, for instance, the relative status of characters is the responsibility of everyone who is participating in a process of sceneing. And on the other hand, the theory asserts that the things you do matter. Your actions will be felt, even if they are only relevant to a limited number of other players. In sceneing and storying, everyone is responsible, and we are all in it together!

    NOTE: This model of larping is inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s process theory, or ‘philosophy of organism’. For more on this subject, refer to Whitehead’s Process and Reality: Corrected Edition (1978) and Ivor Leclerc’s Whitehead’s Metaphysics (1958).

    Bibliography

    Muriel Algayres (2019): The Impact of Social Capital on Larp Safety. Nordic Larp. Ref. 20th Jan, 2020.

    Sarah Lynne Bowman (2018): Immersion and Shared Imagination in Role-playing Games. Role-playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach.

    Mihály Csikszentmihályi (1990): Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.

    Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987 [1980]): A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press.

    Huw2k8 (2011): Powergaming Meaning, Friendly Players Roleplay Wiki, Fandom. Ref. 20th Jan, 2020.

    Jonaya Kemper (2019): No Plot. No (Game) Masters: The Case for Larp Anarchy. The Smoke: London’s International Larp Festival, ref. 5th Jan, 2019.

    Marjukka Lampo (2016): Ecological Approach to the Performance of Larping, International Journal of Role-playing.

    Evan Torner (2018): Emergence, Iteration and Reincorporation in Larp, Knutpunkt. Ref. 20th Jan, 2020.

    Alfred North Whitehead (1978 [1929]): Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology: Gifford Lectures, Corrected Edition. The Free Press.

  • Ensemble Play

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    Ensemble play has been part of Nordic larp discourse since 2003, but the community is yet to define its exact role in larp design. In this chapter we draw insights from different ensemble-driven art forms, and demonstrate how ensemble skills facilitate better play. We also discuss the most common challenges preventing ensemble play, and offer suggestions and tools for overcoming them.

    Ensemble play is most noticeable when a piece of art (music, story, dance, larp) is not defined in advance, but emerges in real time. A symphony orchestra or a Shakespeare troupe can, of course, be described as an ensemble even when their content is pre-defined on sheet music or a script. For the purposes of larp, however, we find it more relevant to look at ensembles that discover and create their piece in the moment.

    Musical jam sessions, devised theatre, and other co-creative art forms share a specific characteristic with larp: they all rely on the players’ ability to constantly calibrate their play, and collaboratively negotiate and renegotiate what belongs into the piece, and what is left out.

    In a collaborative ensemble performers actively give and take opportunities to shine, and derive enjoyment from their own contribution as well as from the contributions of others. They balance the attention they give to themselves, the group, and the piece, and focus on creating something together as well as on their individual performance. This, we find, is an accurate description of rewarding ensemble play in larp, too.

    How do we know when play is ensemble play? A good sign is spontaneous and mutual delight and surprise: what is happening right now is rewarding, meaningful, and unpredicted. Most importantly, we can see from the eyes of our co-creators that they are experiencing the same joy — even if outwardly our characters are screaming in rage. We have become partners in crime, sharing a unique moment in a unique reality, all facets of which are not necessarily visible to others.

    Larp Magic — or Ensemble Play in Action?

    Most larpers are familiar with the concept of larp magic: a scene, storyline, or chain of events that unravels in the most rewarding way possible, without anyone planning for that outcome in advance. Some larp magic certainly happens due to luck or coincidence — serendipitous occurrences like weather and random encounters can heavily impact our play — but preconditions for surprising and auspicious play can also be consciously created by a skillful ensemble.

    To a performer’s eye, larp magic does not look entirely incidental. Most professional performers learn through their practice that a well timed buildup towards a satisfactory resolution is a matter of applying specific skills, such as:

    • listening to co-creators;
    • anticipating opportunities;
    • picking up cues and impulses;
    • paying attention to content other than your own;
    • building for delayed gratification;
    • deciding when to act, when to take space, and when to step back.

    All of these skills are regularly employed at larps in order to create more rewarding and fluent play. Some of them are inherently codified in play instructions like play to lose and play to lift.((Play to lose/lift is an interaction guideline in Nordic larp, that instructs players to drive scenes towards the most interesting story, rather than success for their character. (Wilson 2019))) The notion of playing in ensembles is not new in the Nordic larp tradition, either. Johanna Koljonen refers to ensemble play when describing a particular playstyle in late 1990s Sweden:

    The ensemble player employs aspects of his role to support the initiatives of his co-players with the express purpose of creating satisfying dramatic situations for the group experience. The ensemble is collectively responsible for the dramatic arc in the whole game as well as each scene, and may choose to do something implausible or illogical to achieve the most moving narrative.

    Koljonen 2007

    The first Nordic larp to methodologically design for ensemble play was Mellan himmel och hav (Between Heaven and Sea, 2003). Played over three days in Riksteatern (The National Theater Company) in Stockholm, Sweden, the larp was preceded by three weekend-long workshops, during which the participants learned how to play as an ensemble: How to listen and react to each other’s feelings and impulses, and how to collectively mediate the larp’s artistic vision (Gerge 2004).

    In Mellan himmel och hav, ensemble workshops were not only a means to an end. The ensemble creation itself was an inherent part of the larp’s experience design. Ensemble members became fellow creators, contributing to every aspect of the larp, from character creation to narrative design and meta-techniques. The goal of this extensive process was to create an atmosphere of trust, and empower players to explore the intimate interpersonal themes of the larp. (Wieslander 2004)

    The co-creative ensemble play in Mellan himmel och hav facilitated unprecedentedly deep exploration of diegetic social roles, and formed a powerful connection between the players in the ensemble (Stenros 2010). Similar ensemble workshops were further explored and developed in several other designs, such as System Danmarc (2005), Totem (2007), and Delirium (2010) (see Stenros & Montola 2010). Today, a subset of ensemble methods are commonplace at larp workshops. Some typical practices include:

    • having structured discussions about needs, wishes, and feelings of co-players,
    • calibrating physical contact and body language,
    • co-designing character relations and social dynamics,
    • and making collective decisions about play styles and themes.

    While the word ‘ensemble’ is rarely used in Nordic larp discourse, the importance of ensemble play is still implicitly recognized in our design paradigm: If players do not know how to collaborate and collectively coordinate their play, our larps simply stop functioning. The designer vision of the larp is ultimately brought to life by players’ individual and collective actions and interpretations. The more collaborative and compatible those actions are, the more elaborate and nuanced play we can build on them.

    Successful ensemble play creates high resolution larping: subtle and nuanced character interaction of high quality and high detail (Nordgren 2008). Practicing ensemble skills makes us more open to different social cues, signals, subtexts, body language, and invitations to play – and the more details we notice, the deeper and more vivid our interpretation of the play becomes. Mutually observant high resolution play helps us see each other better and feel more seen ourselves. Consequently, playing in ensembles cultivates a culture of trust and inclusive co-creation.

    In summary, ensemble play in larp is a method that relies on active inclusivity and reflexivity. Any collaborating group of participants that recognizes the importance of each participant’s experience and takes collective responsibility of the scene and the larp, counts as an ensemble.

    An ensemble player is reflexive about their surroundings in order to support the initiatives of their co-players, and employs aspects of their character to facilitate both individually and collectively satisfying play.

    Ensemble Pedagogy in Art

    Many workshop methods used in Nordic larp, including the ensemble creation benchmarked in Mellan himmel och hav, are based on practices developed for and within pedagogical and artistic contexts. Ensemble exercises and methodologies have been explored and formalized by countless teachers, artists, authors, and gurus, and are used everywhere from art schools and universities to artist think-tanks, improv groups, drama therapies, team building retreats, creative communities, and even literal cults.

    While the exercises themselves have many inherent similarities from one context to another, there is a crucial difference to their use in larp: Larp does not have the established institutions, nor the gurus((Larp gurus, self-proclaimed or otherwise, are designers, organisers, and academics – not teachers of player skills.)). An art student and a larper may both engage with similar ensemble methodology, but only the former has their performance evaluated by a mentor or a teacher.

    A teacher has a mandate to observe students and suggest where their weaknesses and strengths lie. In larps we play with our peers, and evaluative feedback on someone’s performance is rare, and often socially complicated((Positive commendations for good play, such as Facebook threads after a larp, of course count as feedback. However, whilst reading about enjoyable and praiseworthy play can be empowering and inspire us to explore more of that kind of play, praise tells us nothing about our individual and collective weaknesses. At their worst, public commendations can give players with high social capital more of that capital, without addressing the problems associated with it.)). In certain ways this is a missed opportunity: Many of us appreciate advice on how to become better at something we love. Without external feedback, our means of learning new skills are limited to things we individually notice through self-reflection, or stumble upon by trial and error.

    The authors of this article have had the privilege of learning ensemble skills in professional contexts, both inside formal institutions and outside of them. During our years studying music and theatre we have come across multiple methods and exercises for practicing ensemble play. One of these methodologies, The Viewpoints (Bogart & Landau 2004), introduces a paradigm for co-creative ensemble work we find highly relevant to Nordic larp.

    Originally a composition method for theatre, The Viewpoints teaches real-time artistic collaboration through movement, space, sound, and gesture. The method has influenced performer training widely outside its formal contexts, and offers a framework for exploring ensemble play as its own skill set.

    The Viewpoints focuses on a spectrum of aesthetic principles: How to think about movement and sound in space and time. The simple act of walking across a room can be analysed in the vocabulary offered by The Viewpoints, eg. Tempo, Duration, or Spatial Relationship. This helps performers communicate what they see and hear, and also gives them tools to improve their skills by concentrating on one or more Viewpoints at a time.

    Training in the style of The Viewpoints often involves open improvisation sessions using specific limitations or instructions, such as:

    • Only five people on stage at any given time.
    • Everyone sits down at the same time. Nobody decides when, and nobody gives the signal.
    • Exactly three people have to be singing at all times.
    • When the facilitator gives a signal, the music must switch to a new key. Nobody signals the key in advance. The music must continue uninterrupted.

    The purpose of these exercises is to develop the performers’ ability to pay attention to the ensemble and the space, whilst at the same time making individual choices about actions and aesthetics within the piece. The reflexive analysis and the creative decision making required in the improv are very similar to the mental processing most larpers engage with during runtime in larps.

    Through improv, artists are taught to receive and react to external impulses — cues that initiate action. For example, if someone claps their hands, another person may use that as a trigger for their own unplanned reaction, eg. jumping, falling down, or yelling. While this is a very simple example, it forms the basis for more complicated co-creation. Being able to interrupt what one was previously doing in order to react spontaneously to new information is a useful ensemble skill. In larps, noticing and reacting to cues (both diegetic and non-diegetic) guides our interaction with other characters, and connects us to the play around us.

    The Viewpoints sessions and exercises are often done with a portion of the group observing as audience. This serves an important pedagogical purpose: Noticing interaction patterns that are hard to spot when we are in the middle of the action. In the action, we are often wrapped up in our own feelings of pleasure, anxiety, or wanting to make a good impression. We may feel like we are listening and reacting to others, but the observers can clearly see whether this is actually the case, and whether we succeed at collaborating with others. Feedback on our ensemble skills helps us become more observant of and reflexive about our co-creators.

    Observers also help performers think about their aesthetic choices within the piece. If everyone bunches up together in the center of the space, or all play the lead melody, observers may point out that the edges of the space, or specific harmonic layers, are left unused. Through this feedback performers can evaluate their contributions in a wider context. Next time, before introducing their initial idea, they may look for the gaps in the piece, and contribute to those instead.

    Observing the improv is also an active learning experience. From the audience we see the anxiety in the performer who is out of ideas — and their gratitude when others collaborate to support them. We see the beauty of a spontaneous flock of people moving as a group, with no apparent leader. We see the performer who consistently tries to control the way the exercise unfolds, and the one who breaks the flow by refusing to put themselves in the limelight. We see the collective frustration when something is fundamentally not clicking.

    In larp, we do not have formal structures for observing each other’s play — but that does not mean we cannot learn from it. Through methods suggested later in this essay (eg. switching between solo and accompaniment, embracing stillness and boredom) we can become more conscious of the multitude of cues and interactions around us, observe what kind of play they create, and adjust our own play based on what we learn.

    Forming Larp Ensembles

    Like any other aspect of larp, ensembles are a designable surface. As designers, we can explore methods that facilitate collaborative play and ensemble formation in our larp((A comprehensive selection of useful methods can be found from Larp Design (Koljonen et al. 2019), esp. “Designing the Mechanics You Need” (Wilson 2019).)). As players, we can think about our interaction with other players within the ensemble framework, and make conscious decisions about negotiating and calibrating ensemble play both before and during runtime. A good starting point for designers and players alike is to acknowledge that an ensemble is not simply created when players get along together naturally — it is formed and maintained through conscious efforts and skillful play.

    Most pre-negotiated larp ensembles are formed through character relations. Whether pre-written by designers or co-created between players, a diegetic friend circle, military squad, or secret society creates a natural premise for an ensemble. While the characters may have known each other for a lifetime, the players, however, often have not. They need to bridge that gap by employing ensemble skills: being reflexive about each other’s suggestions and cues, and collectively embodying the essence of the character group.

    Ensembles are also organically formed in individual scenes. During runtime, any combination of characters interacting with each other positions players into momentary ensembles. This is often where our individual ensemble skills become most visible: Even if we have no idea who these characters are and what they are up to, are we still able to join the scene, collaborate with other players, and allow something interesting to happen?

    Players failing to collaborate as an ensemble can easily wreck even the most carefully designed storyline or character group. Conversely, a successful ensemble can create amazing play even in the shoddiest of larps. For this reason it is understandable that some players prefer custom ensembles (i.e. playing with people they already know) and even custom scene content to those randomly created through casting and organic gameplay. While there is nothing wrong with a moderate amount of pre-planning and custom casting, overly opportunistic ensemble optimization can lead to unwanted exclusivity — or what Anni Tolvanen calls the dance card school of larping.

    Popularised in 19th century Vienna, a dance card was a system for booking partners in a ball: A lady would pre-plan her evening by accepting dance invitations from particular gentlemen, who would book specific dances from her dance card. In larps, players pre-negotiating content with pre-casted ensembles are metaphorically filling out their dance cards — and the fuller the card, the less availability there is for new, unexpected dance partners.

    Dance card larping produces ambivalent outcomes. If our attention is focused on exclusive plans with pre-casted ensembles, we are not open to impromptu invitations and reflexive serendipity. Furthermore, players who are not part of pre-negotiated cliques may feel excluded and rejected, especially if some of their plots or relations get pushed aside for more appealing dance card items.

    The core difference between dance card larping and successful ensemble play is inclusiveness. While both may contribute to amazing and powerful scenes and story arcs, only the latter creates open and equal opportunities for co-creation. Organic ensemble play — accepting and embracing the unpredictability of ensemble compositions — leads to mutually cooperative exploration and discovery, where everyone’s presence is acknowledged, and everyone has the possibility to join play they find interesting and meaningful.

    Understanding Solo and Accompaniment

    Conceptually, all players in an ensemble have equal agency in any given scene. The same is not true for the characters, as the narrative or dramatic spotlight is often focused on particular characters (e.g. a murderer and the police officer who just caught them), while other characters remain in the background (bystanders witnessing the arrest). Some characters may have more diegetic agency to impact the scene than others (the officer can give commands to the murderer as well as the bystanders).

    In order to be inclusive collaborators in an ensemble, we need to map((Mapping is the mental process by which a player tracks the overall structure of the larp and their character’s current position within the fiction. (Saitta, Koljonen & Nielsen 2020))) what is going on in the scene, and figure out whether we should contribute to it by solo or accompaniment.

    In the context of larp, a solo is best described as the initiative to set the tone or the direction for a scene, a plot, or a narrative. A soloist positions their character into a central role in the scene, and/or strongly steers towards specific interaction or outcome. A solo gets its power from accompaniment: Other players reacting to it, supporting it, and building on it. Without accompaniment the scenes and narratives we build become incoherent and meaningless. If no one acknowledges the murder of the queen, did it even happen?((In Nordic larp discourse this dynamic is also referred to as inter-immersion: the existence of a character being dependent on all players collectively treating the character as a part of the storyworld.))

    In an ensemble we have the privilege of expecting support for our solos, but also the duty to make sure everyone else’s solos are given the support they need. Essentially, the division between solo and accompaniment acts as a tool for self-reflection: Which role am I currently taking? Which role would best support the scene or my co-players? Which role would create more interesting play?

    Dynamic play relies on players introducing solos and giving new directions to plots and scenes. Concurrently, it’s useful to remember that refraining from a solo does not mean stepping into sidelines or being less important to a scene. Accompanying others requires as much (or even more) skill and focus, and can be as rewarding and enjoyable. Taking turns between solo and accompaniment means we can both boldly suggest our own ideas, and gracefully give space to others without the fear of being ignored or forgotten.

    Overcoming the Barriers to Ensemble Play

    Most of the barriers to successful ensemble play relate to our needs, desires, ego, and fears. The barriers are not unambiguously negative player traits — most are useful in the right circumstances and in moderation. In this section we talk about how to recognize the impact of our barriers to our play, and how to turn barriers into constructive player skills.

    The Desire for Perfectionism

    Ironically, the desire to create something flawless is one of the easiest means to prevent anything amazing from happening. Aiming for perfection, we may plan, practice, and steer our play to the point where we are no longer larping, but performing a script. If we fixate on avoiding imperfections and hold on to past failures, we are not open to unexpected challenges and invitations to play.

    So what can we do? Instead of dreading failures, embrace them. Some failures we can move past gracefully, while others will turn out to be gifts. If we are in sync with others, and engaged in mutually supportive play, even our unexpected fumbles can be collectively picked up and transformed into something beautiful.

    The Hunger to Play Big

    This barrier entices us to play our scenes with fierce commitment to our vision, without pausing to consider whether our play is in sync with others. Instead of looking for a way to collaborate with the ensemble, we focus solely on what works for our character.

    Some very talented players fall into this trap, and their performances can indeed be impressive — but are they listening to or playing with others as equals? Few players enjoy spending their whole larp playing second fiddle to someone else’s neverending solo, no matter how believable and powerful that solo performance is.

    The hunger to play big can be hard to solve on our own, because we are not always aware of how forceful our impact is on others. Luckily, there is an easy solution to test this in play: Instead of acting on every impulse and idea that pops up, try deliberately letting some slide by, and actively make room until others take initiative.

    The Fear of Standing Out

    Hiding inside an ensemble is another barrier to play, although an understandable one: We may fear appearing demanding, weird, or uncool, and rarely go for the play we truly want. We may feel easily rejected and would rather withdraw than ask to be included.

    Being part of an ensemble does not mean that good things will come to us without us needing to put our necks out. We have all met or personally been the devastated player in an afterparty who did not get the play they wished for. Sometimes that player was indeed lacking the support they would deserved, but sometimes they also did not step forward when they should have done so.

    The moment to claim our space rarely comes on a silver platter and with visible safety nets attached. It is simply on us to take the jump, and trust that our ensemble will catch us. To quote the beloved icon of audacity, Carrie Fisher: Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.

    The Obsession with Larp Magic

    The perfect can be a powerful foe of the good. If we chase the most magical scenes and the best exclusive plots, we often miss what is right in front of us. We may have a specific bar for satisfying play, and deem anything below it unworthy of our attention and effort. We can even become envious and frustrated if we think a better scene is happening elsewhere.

    For an ensemble to function, we must play the scene we are actually in, not the scene we wish we were in. Players pining to be somewhere else, doing something else, suck all the energy out of an ensemble. Treating the present as a hindrance to our preferred play is not only unconstructive, but also disrespectful towards our co-players. Larp magic always begins with interaction in the here and now: concentrating on the present brings us closer to it.

    The Terror of Silence

    One barrier is the fear of being still. We may want to make sure we have something going on at all times, to have our dance cards full, and avoid boredom at all cost.

    Silence, stillness, and empty space are essential ingredients in any work of art. Trying to fill every empty moment prevents us from noticing that something is already happening. A player who bursts in on a delicate scene with an outlandish agenda is often attempting to fix a problem that does not exist.

    A good ensemble player discovers the scene, instead of forcing it to happen. If we challenge ourselves to indulge in moments of in-character stillness and spend some time just observing, we are likely to spot something interesting. Others may even join our stillness and start something that turns out to be unforgettable.

    Disagreement Over Matters of Taste

    Differences over taste need not be barriers to a working ensemble. However, if we feel like others do not understand our play style or we do not understand theirs, this can become a hindrance. We may conclude that no functional play can come out of this situation, and give up on co-creation entirely.

    Taste differences will arise — but a generous ensemble player does their best to try out and support different kinds of play. Even in the rare situation where finding a functional compromise seems unlikely, it is good form to remain open to collaboration of some kind. Sometimes we just have to pick our battles, and that’s completely normal in creative work.

    Social Bias

    Most players put strong emphasis on player chemistry, attractiveness, verbal skills, or social status. This is human. However, remaining unaware of our biases creates barriers for play. If we do not challenge our prejudices and inhibitions towards people who do not fulfill our criteria, or who we think are unapproachable or “out of our league”, we needlessly limit the composition of our ensembles.

    Larping is an intimate activity, and it would be irresponsible to say that everyone can play as an ensemble with everyone else. Yet, sometimes our reluctance to play with others is a question of lukewarm chemistry or petty prejudice, not insurmountable social conflicts.

    A picky or suspicious attitude towards coplayers destroys the co-creative trust needed to form an ensemble. Unless there are serious real-life implications involved, we should never entirely ignore someone’s request for play. Being respectful and open-minded costs us very little — and may make a huge difference to someone else’s larp.

    “Today’s Just Not the Day”

    Finally, there are times when good ensemble players show up, are present and reflexive, contribute both solos and accompaniment, and have the desire to create and maintain the ensemble — and the magic still does not happen.

    Accepting things as they come is an inherent part of ensemble play: we need to let go of the things that are not working out. In any given larp we interact with several overlapping ensembles. They will not all be equally functional, nor will they all be equally good matches to our personal preferences. The natural ebb and flow of co-creation always includes weak, embarrassing, dysfunctional, and disappointing moments, and a strong ensemble, as well as a strong ensemble player, faces those moments with grace and acceptance.

    We Give and We Gain

    We all join ensembles with our personal challenges, inhibitions, talents, and resources. The task in ensemble play is not to perform perfectly in all areas simultaneously, but to calibrate our own fears and desires, and contribute in the moment with what we have.

    Ensemble play grants us moments of magic we cannot predict or design. It also makes us challenge our insecurities and inhibitions, and contributes not only to better player skills, but a better off-game community by creating play where players feel supported and able to take risks; fostering unexpected connections and rewards for cooperation; adding nuance to characters by giving them a wider array of interactions; providing the framework for a personal practice of social intelligence; and reducing the impact of off-game social hierarchies on who gets to play.

    Bibliography

    Anne Bogart & Tina Landau (2005): The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. Theatre Communications Group, Inc.

    Tova Gerge (2004): Temporary Utopias: The Political Reality of Fiction in Beyond Role and Play. Ropecon.

    Johanna Koljonen (2007): Eye-witness to the Illusion: An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing in Lifelike. Projektgruppen KP07.

    Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell & Elin Nielsen (eds.) (2019): Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost.

    Andie Nordgren (2008): High Resolution Larping: Enabling Subtlety at Totem and Beyond in Playground Worlds. Ropecon.

    Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen & Martin Nielsen (2020): Maps, Loops, and Larps in What Do We Do When We Play? Solmukohta.

    Jaakko Stenros (2010): Mellan himmel och hav: Embodied Amorous Queer SciFi in Nordic Larp. Fëa Livia.

    Jaakko Stenros & Markus Montola (eds.) (2010): Nordic Larp. Fëa Livia.

    Emma Wieslander (2004): Positive Power Drama: A Theoretical and Practical Approach on Emotive Larping in Beyond Role and Play. Ropecon.

    Danny Wilson (2019): Designing the Mechanics You Need in Larp Design. Landsforeningen Bifrost.