In 2018, I brought a friend to A Nice Evening with the Family (Sweden 2018). I was concerned, because he had very little experience with role-playing games, let alone with a very emotionally intense game. Despite my efforts to discourage him, he insisted that he wanted to join. The morning after the larp finished, he was a crying mess and it took him quite some effort to convince me that he would be fine and that I should not regret having brought him over. The next time we spoke, he told me that several friends had confronted him about this new hobby that left him shaken for several days.
It was his first larp. Since then, he has chosen to become a crying mess several times. It does not look like he will stop any time soon. What might look reckless from the outside is actually a well planned process: he knows his limits, but when he ventures to cross them, he is aware of the scars he may bring back, and prepares as well as he can to alleviate the consequences. This is the same process he goes through when he goes rock-climbing, an activity arguably more dangerous, which does not raise such concerns.
As larp has evolved, pushing for new limits of intense play, we have developed a wealth of expertise to larp more safely. However, this is not limited to larp: as humankind’s ability to cause catastrophes has increased, so has our ability to avoid causing them. Pharmaceutical companies, nuclear power plants, financial institutions, airplane manufacturers all have had to change their ways of working (enforced by legislation, obviously) not to bring about tragedy. The most critical part of it is the object of this article: how to come to terms with the fact that risks cannot be eliminated, and how to manage them instead.
In practice, there is nothing revolutionary about risk management. It is just a systematization of common sense. This article will hardly reveal anything new. However, I will hopefully provide a new perspective that will help to view larp safety in a new way, and shine light on how powerful the tools are that we already have at our disposal.
Risk
Attempting to find a definition of “safe” that everyone will agree on is futile. Any communication relying on the word “safe” will be misleadingly dangerous. Any financial adviser, surgeon, engineer, or martial arts or scuba diving instructor worth their salt will never claim that something is safe. Instead, they will try to clearly explain what the negative consequences might be, and let their client make an informed decision. Similarly, a larp organizer that promises that their larp is safe, implying that no harm will happen to any participant, is promising something that they have no control over.
Risk, on the other hand, is a word most people can agree on. There may be disagreement if a certain risk is worth worrying over or not, but if somebody says “This rusty nail is a risk” or “There is a risk that we will run out of money”, everybody understands it the same way: something bad may happen.
Risk means that harm, more or less severe, has a certain likelihood of happening.
Harm
Harm is something that we do not wish to happen. Harm is the ultimate negative consequence of a series of events. Falling off a cliff is not harm, but getting injured as a consequence of a fall is. Being yelled at is not harm, but becoming emotionally distressed is. Hazards are the direct sources of harm: fire, physical impact, toxic chemicals, and verbal abuse are examples of hazards.
In larp, there are many things that we do not wish to happen: trauma (physical or mental) and property damage are the first that come to mind, but other things can be also regarded as harm: damage to reputation, loss of friendship, or even boredom. From a risk-management perspective, they are all the same, and you must decide what to focus on.
In Nordic larp, the focus has been centred on psychological harm. Psychological harm is a slippery concept, and to my knowledge there is no conclusive source to refer to. Because of that, most of the examples I will use throughout this article will be about physical harm, which is much easier to agree on. Hopefully, it will become clear that the same techniques that can be used to manage one can be applied to manage the other.
Severity
Harm presents itself in varying degrees of severity. We think of a bruise as less serious than a broken rib, which is itself less serious than the loss of a limb. Often though things are not so clear-cut, and determining the severity of harm is context-dependent, subjective, and hence challenging.
Generally speaking, severity should correlate to how longer-term prospects are negatively impacted. For example, in a medical context, severity is assigned depending on the consequences to patients, from a minor nuisance to permanent disability or death; broken bones are usually considered minor injuries, since the prognosis for total recovery is often excellent. Financial risk could be quantified not just in terms of how much money might be lost, but how likely it is to be able to recover from such loss; structural risks could be related to the ease of repairing a building; environmental risk measured by how likely it is that the previous situation can be recovered, etc.
As many have experienced, larp can cause serious emotional harm. However, let us admit that larp is, by definition, a simulation, and hence the severity of emotional harm is going to be always lower that being exposed to the real situation: a larp about prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, as harrowing as it may be, will hardly ever be an experience as horrifying as being imprisoned at the actual camp. In a way, larp is an exercise in risk management, eliminating most sources of harm when mimicking extreme real-life situations.
Likelihood
Severity is not the only thing that matters about harm. A meteorite crashing on your larp location would certainly be catastrophic, but it is so unlikely that it is not worth considering. On the other hand, a mosquito is normally considered a minor source of harm, but it becomes a concern if it happens constantly: having a bunch of larpers going back home covered in bites after spending a weekend by an infested swamp is something that everyone would want to avoid.
The likelihood of harm can be understood either in terms of how probable it is or how frequently it will happen. Such probabilities are difficult to estimate accurately. In any case, knowing that the probability of falling off the staircase at your larp is 1.3% is not very useful compared to “I would be surprised if no one trips here over the weekend”. As with severity, organizations normally simply assign terms in a scale, corresponding to qualitative likelihoods. One common example is to have five levels of likelihood: improbable (not expected to ever happen), remote (it would be very exceptional if it happens, but it is not impossible), occasional (rare, but given enough time, it will happen), probable (nobody will be surprised if it happens), and frequent (it would be surprising if it did not happen).
A quick introduction to risk management
Risk management, as daunting as it may sound, is a fairly straightforward process which consists of three steps: analysing the risks, deciding whether to accept the risks or not, and mitigating the risks.
Analysing risk
The starting point to manage risks is to analyse them: finding as many things as possible that can go wrong and figuring out how severe and likely they are.
Risk analysis requires honesty to be useful. It is hard to admit that we are putting people in danger, but dismissing a risk without careful consideration is a recipe for disaster. Airplanes rarely crash because of saboteurs, and drug dealers are not planning to hurt their customers when they cut their product with rat poison: behind all these cases, there is somebody who believes everything will be fine. Crooks are a piece of cake to catch and stop in time compared to reckless optimists who take everyone down with them.
In any case, identifying risks is never easy. Reality always finds ways to surprise us, no matter how thorough our analysis was. So, how much effort should you spend analysing risks? The unsatisfactory answer is “as much as reasonably possible”. One way to evaluate your analysis is to think about how you would view it in the future if something goes wrong. Was it reasonable not to reach out for an expert? Was it reasonable that you did not check out your larp location in advance? Was it reasonable to conclude that no serious mental distress could be expected? All of this is context dependent. If you have doubts, maybe you can try to run your analysis by somebody else.
Analysing the risks that lie beyond the limits may seem impossible, but it is not: we may not know how things may go wrong, but at least we know what wrong means. In other words, we know the severity, but not the likelihood. The safest approach is to assume that the likelihood is higher than you expect.
Accepting risk (or not)
After identifying and determining the severity and likelihood of a risk, a natural question arises: can we live with it? Some risks are obviously intolerable, and some are so trivial that it is even hard to consider them as risks. But quite often this is not clear at all.
Deciding when we can accept a risk is a tricky question. Even after bad things have already happened, people often disagree on whether the risk was worth taking. Even the same person might have doubts about it. So, how to decide about something that may not even happen?
The methods used in risk management (risk matrices being the primary example) help us very little here: they have been designed to leave a paper trail which can be used as evidence. They are too bureaucratic to use in larps, but most importantly they are not much of a moral reference we can adhere to. Sadly, nobody can give you any easy answers here.
Whatever you consider as your criteria, they should fulfil two conditions. First, a criterion has to be systematic: if you find yourself adding exceptions one after the other, it is probably not a very good criterion. Secondly, it must be easy for anybody to understand the criteria and agree that they are reasonable.
One criterion that you could use is the following: a risk is acceptable if, even when harm happens, we expect nobody to regret having been part of the larp.
This implies that the organization did everything within reason to analyse and mitigate the risks, all participants understood and accepted those risks, and whatever harm happened was either predicted and handled as well as possible, and nobody can be blamed for having been reckless. In reality, this goal is not achievable: but since it is clear, and the absolute best one can hope for, it is a good target to aim at.
If we decide that a given risk is acceptable, we can move on to the next one. But if we conclude that it is not, then it must be mitigated.
Mitigating risk
Mitigating a risk means reducing its likelihood, its severity, or both. Risk mitigation (also referred to as risk control) must be continued until we decide that the risk is acceptable. Let us review several strategies.
If you encounter a risk which you have tried mitigating by all means possible, but it is still unacceptable, there is one way to completely remove the risk: just do not do what you were planning. If it looks like in your larp something horrible might happen which you have no control over, and you have no idea on how to fix the problem without it becoming a different larp, the best idea is to cancel the larp.
The second approach is to change the design, that is, adding, removing, or modifying elements of your original plan. Moving to a different location, locking doors, removing game content, forcing off-game breaks, adding non-diegetic safety elements (such as mattresses), or changing your player selection process can all be used to mitigate risks. If you are lucky, your larp may be unaffected – possibly even improved! However, it is more likely that the changes will impact your larp, possibly even to the point that you feel it is not worth organizing.
If there is nothing you can change, the next thing you can attempt is to affect how people will behave. You can instruct them not to enter an area under any circumstance, or remind them to stay hydrated under the scorching Tunisian sun. Since this relies on participants’ efforts and attention, you may want to go through these procedures during a workshop. Do not hesitate to make participation compulsory, if absence would lead to risks that you cannot accept. Of these behavioural mitigations (called administrative controls), the weakest form is what we can call, in general, labelling, which is any kind of passive, static visual information, such as signs, warning messages in manuals, pop-up windows, safety brochures, and actual labels found in packages, control panels, etc. If the only thing between a player and disaster is a paragraph somewhere on your website, or a danger sign that looks perfectly diegetic, get ready for disaster.
The final option is protective equipment. Unfortunately, as effective as they may be for other purposes, helmets and hazmat suits will do very little to protect your participants from emotional harm.
The Nordic larper’s risk management toolkit
By now, you hopefully have a good idea about what risk management is. In this section, we will zone in into the peculiarities of emotionally intense larp.
In emotionally intense larp, like in combat sports, enjoyment is inextricably linked to the potentially harmful things that players do to each other. Somewhat counterintuitively, risk management in both cases revolves around the same key concepts: the restrictions to what participants can do, the measures to ensure that participants will follow such restrictions, and the contingency plans to be used if something goes wrong. In other words, rules, trust, and care.
Rules
If you run or design larps, you should appreciate that you have a huge control over players: if you can convince them that they are capable of throwing fireballs by extending both index fingers, you can surely convince them that they cannot touch each other at all, thereby creating a world where the risk of hurting other people is non-existent. This is what rules are for.
By “rules” I refer to all the constraints on the things that can possibly happen during a larp. From a risk management perspective, rules are control measures which either reduce the likelihood of risks – or remove the risks altogether – or replace hazards with different ones. Rules define what may or may not happen in- and off-game. Sometimes larp rules are introduced for other purposes than risk mitigation, and in some cases, rules may control risks at the same time as they contribute to a more interesting game experience.
Perhaps the most representative rules of larp are those used to represent violence: I have never heard of any larp with WYSIWYG violence, that is where violence between characters is not governed by restrictions of some kind. Requiring padded weapons, using rules systems similar to table-top role-playing games, theatrical representation – where the outcomes are either pre-planned or improvised during play using some signalling mechanic, or even removing violence altogether from the game, are all different ways of reducing the severity or likelihood of harm, or even eliminating it altogether.
Sex seems to be the other major perceived source of risk. In this case, the hazards are not so clear-cut as getting a broken nose, but it is generally accepted that sex requires a state of vulnerability which opens the gates for extremely severe psychological harm. Again, the forms in which sex appears in a game are restricted, from total avoidance to “dry-humping”, including more abstract mechanics, such as the Phallus technique used in Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway 2011), or Ars Amandi which, after its introduction in Mellan himmel och hav (Sweden 2003, Eng. Between Heaven and Sea), has been used in numerous larps of many different genres.
In the daring type of play of many Nordic larps, characters are often exposed to many other sources of emotional harm, which are often a central part of the game: family abuse, workplace harassment, discrimination, slavery, imprisonment, political repression, torture, manipulation, etc. Harm happens when these emotions exceed the level the player is willing to experience. This may lead to emotional distress, and even trauma. These, in their turn, may be worsened because of triggering past traumatic experiences.
Interestingly, it is rare to find rules to handle emotional risks arising from something other than physical violence or sex in a specific manner: and these other elements are usually supposed to be represented realistically. For example, players playing prison guards are expected to shout at other players’ faces, and to represent mental torture scenes as they would think would happen in reality.
Instead, emotional risks are managed generically by check-in, de-escalation, and game interruption mechanics. These mechanics are forms of inter-player communication to avoid harmful situations. Check-in mechanics are used to verify, during or after a risky scene, that players are doing fine. A popular one is using the OK hand sign to silently ask a co-player if they are OK when it is difficult to tell if a negative display of emotions (grief, anger) is a sign of an emotional distress that the player cannot handle. De-escalation and interruption techniques function in the opposite way, providing signals (like safe words or taps) to ask co-players to not escalate further or to lower the intensity of the scene, or to stop the game altogether.
These techniques have become standard. If you decide not to include any of them in your larp, it is a good idea to explain your alternative risk management plan before players sign up.
It is important that safety rules are, in the first place, clear. But it is equally important that you, as an organizer, as well as every other participant, get a clear picture that everyone has understood them.. I strongly recommended practising them explicitly in a workshop before runtime, particularly in case of subtle diegetic mechanics, which may be easily missed. The number of safety mechanics should be kept to a minimum to prevent confusion. Well-meaning players may spontaneously suggest adding their favourite mechanics to your game: it is preferable to firmly – but kindly – not allow this. An overabundance of mechanics may have the same effect as too many warning signs: none of them are meaningful in the end.
Trust
Trust is the degree of the certainty we have in our predictions that no harm will happen to us. Trust is critical in daring larp, because participants will compensate for lack of trust by acting as if risks were worse (either more probable or more harmful) than in reality, refraining from fully engaging with the content.
When we trust someone, we know that they will not hurt us, neither by directly causing us harm, nor by neglecting doing their part in keeping us safe. When we do not trust someone, it is because we suspect they may fail at the moment of truth, or because they actively seek to hurt us. Trust has two components: a cognitive one and a primal one. Having enough information to make predictions is critical, but so is having the “gut feeling” that we are right. These two aspects need to be considered all the time.
The first step is building trust. In other words, convincing every participant that nobody will hurt them. Easier said than done.
For starters, participants must be on the same page about the possible risks. Make sure that you provide enough information during the sign-up process so that everyone has an understanding of risks as similar to yours as possible.
Another important aspect is the player selection process. A player may wish not to play with another player, for a variety of reasons. It is reasonable to publish a list of players and offer a channel for players to give feedback. Flagging, which consists of assigning a colour to other players to indicate the level of trust (from “will not share scenes” to “will not attend same larp”), is a popular approach. It may put you in the difficult position of leaving people out. In such a case, remember that your goal is to ensure a less risky game, and not to act as a moral judge. If you believe that your larp may present such risks that it requires that you completely trust all the players – trust that they can care for themselves and others – then you may need to do something more drastic, such as hand-pick your players or have an invite-only run.
Once your players have arrived at the larp location, the most effective way to create trust is pre-game workshops. On the cognitive side, you should cover all your rules and mechanics thoroughly, and rehearse them as necessary, until players are convinced that everybody can play their part. Safety-critical workshops should be compulsory, not just opt-in. A bit like how beginners are required to show that they can do an 8-figure knot before they are allowed to start top-rope climbing. Finally, do not rush through safety workshops: besides failing to communicate critical information, players may get the impression that you do not care enough about safety, and that you included the safety workshop as a nuisance that must be there.
On the primal side, you need to tickle the brains of participants to convince them that they are of the same tribe. Things like physical contact, or locking eyes and smiling, may help. Baphomet (Denmark 2017) used a simple and powerful technique where participants hug each other randomly in silence for a very long time. This had a profound effect in creating a trusting atmosphere. These exercises are not a replacement for the safety rehearsals discussed above, and can be counterproductive if they create a sense of false security.
When someone causes us harm, either directly or indirectly, we immediately lose trust, to a larger or smaller degree: our predictions that they would not hurt us failed, which means that they may hurt us again. Our brain will then activate the alarm and deploy its defences. Suddenly we will dislike, fear, or lose respect for those people. This defence mechanism is quite clever: even if our feelings for those people are unfair (for example, they tried to protect us and failed), our brain will override our reasoning, tricking us into being convinced we are absolutely right, pushing us to avoid that person.
Restoring trust is not easy. At a cognitive level, we need to know that the other person is sensitive to our pain – that’s the purpose of a (real) apology —, and that we can accept that something bad happened exceptionally, that is, that either the other person didn’t know something important or simply made a mistake, or that there was actually a very good reason we did not know about. The primal level also needs to be readjusted to lift the defences after they are not needed. For example, a hug or a smile can have a magical effect after a fight. However, be careful when using this approach: I can tell from my own experience that a forced hug from a perceived aggressor has the opposite effect, and can cause even more harm. In case of doubt, do not push it and simply try to figure out a way for the larp to continue with everyone feeling safe. This, in extreme cases, may require removing players from the game.
Care
Care is a particularly versatile tool, because it can reduce the severity of harm which we had not even predicted could happen. In our quest for pushing the limits of daring larp, it is very valuable to deploy a solid care infrastructure, in the same way that a campaign hospital will help dealing with all kinds of physical harm, without needing to predict its exact nature. Making participants part of a care infrastructure is similar to demanding that everybody must take first-aid training before joining an expedition.
Similar to trust, it is possible to enforce care using rules. Off-game rooms and dedicated staff to support players are very common; although it may not look like such, giving players the option to walk out of the game into guaranteed support is just a larp rule. In many larps, each character has a connection with whom they have a positive relationship. This connection can be used to seek in-game support, which translates into support for the player. This could be further exploited by means of explicit rules, for example adding a hand sign directed at the support connection which forces them to go play a blackbox scene reminiscing of happier times. A larp designed around one-on-one abusive scenes could impose that after every such scene the players must go off-game together to provide mandatory after-care.
Care rules could take many forms: the key is that larp designers should not be afraid to impose such seemingly awkward game elements, because the fact is that this can be much more effective than leaving care to the skill and initiative of the participants.
Conclusion
Nobody – including, first of all, me – expects that larp organizations will start conducting formal risk review meetings, performing external audits, filling risk matrices, and writing down risk mitigation plans.
Let’s be daring! But daring does not mean reckless. Let’s learn from the lessons of the past and, for those disasters yet to come, let them be the kind that, despite the pain they cause, leave us with the feeling that it was worth trying.
Take home messages:
Be brave! At least as much as you want to.
Be honest. Do not fool participants, but most of all do not fool yourself.
Be open. Your level of risk is not the same as most people’s. You do not want to drag anyone into something they will regret.
Be kind. If other people fail, and they honestly tried their very best to avoid disaster, be thankful that they discovered for all of us where the hard limits are.
Be creative. Pushing the limits will demand of you to come up with new techniques to go where no larper has gone before, and come back in one piece. Hopefully, you know now that you have more tools at your disposal than you thought before.
Bibliography
Anneli Friedner. 2019. “The Brave Space: Some Thoughts on Safety in Larps“. https://nordiclarp.org/2019/10/07/the-brave-space-some-thoughts-on-safety-in-larps/ , ref. Dec 12th, 2023.
Ludography
Anna Westerling & Anders Hultman. 2018. A Nice Evening With the Family. Sweden. (Originally En stilla middag med familjen (2007): Sweden. Anna Westerling, Anders Hultman & al.)
Eliot Wieslander & Katarina Björk. 2003. Mellan himmel och hav. Sweden.
Linda Udby & Bjarke Pedersen. 2016. Baphomet. Denmark.
Tor Kjetil Edland & Hanne Grasmo. 2011. Just a Little Lovin’. Norway.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Losilla, Sergio. 2024. “Rules, Trust, and Care: the Nordic Larper’s Risk Management Toolkit.” 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 Eamon up North on Pexels.com. Photo has been cropped.
Immersive experience designers have been inspired by Ida Benedetto’s 2017 design reference work Patterns of Transformation (Benedetto 2017). The multi-part essay is the result of Benedetto’s personal involvement creating transgressive events such as The Night Heron (Sextant Works, 2013) coupled with her research on sex parties, wilderness survival treks, and unconventional funerals. She discovered similarities within all of these endeavors, and suggests these patterns catalyze personal transformation. She states in her introduction:
In previous eras, social gatherings and ritual experiences were the domain of religious institutions, cultural organizations, or the state. Now, they increasingly fall within the realm of design as it expands to address challenges of human emotion and connection. Experience design offers a possible solution to our very human craving for connection and meaning in the face of increased isolation and diminishing social cooperation.
Benedetto, 2017
Undergoing a risky experience can be personally rewarding on a fundamental level far beyond an amusing narrative or fostering a friendship. For experience designers, there may be no higher calling than the possibility of healing humanity through one self-improved person at a time. Oftentimes government and business interests regulate our interactions with the world and other people. It may befall the artists and craftspeople who, through unpredictable experiences such as larp, break the artificial restrictions continuously plastered over us and allow our spirit to breathe again. But transformative experiences are both delicate and wild, easy to ruin and inherently uncontrollable. Like fire that can devastate a city or fuel a moonshot, risk is a powerful instrument that should not be bound and buried in the creative tool box. We hope this essay will cultivate a respect for risk and reveal the possibilities for healthy individual growth through intentionally risky adventures.
What is Risk?
All of life is risk. Living without taking risks is not really living. That would be half-living, under a spiritual anesthesia. This high-security society that is developing sees in risk a declared enemy, but in doing so, allows a sort of gangrene to develop. The idea that we can achieve zero risk is not only collectively harmful, but also toxic for individuals.
Anne Dufourmantelle interview in Le Monde
According to Benedetto, “risk is any threat to one’s current state that offers the potential to destabilize the way things are. Higher order risks can include financial, political, and legal risks. Primal risks threaten our emotional, social, or physical well-being.” (Benedetto, 2017). We will concentrate on the primal risks.
An emotional risk jeopardizes one’s sense of self, a deeply-held belief, motivation, confidence, or one’s composure. Harm to your emotional state can lead to depression, anger, or compulsive thinking. It can leave psychological scars that can impact a person’s quality of life. The concept of bleed is a strong indicator of emotional changes, but change is not inherently negative. Benedetto suggests that facing risks can strengthen “one’s emotional range and resilience.” (Benedetto, 2017). Like physical exercise, we can use designed experiences to toughen our “ego muscles” through stressful exertion.
Benedetto’s explanation of a social risk is “a threat to one’s standing with a group. A social risk could damage one’s image, sever one’s connections with others, or bruise one’s sense of self-worth. Confronting social risks can give someone new tools for creating and maintaining connections with others.” (Benedetto, 2017).
A social risk can for example mean being judged and found guilty of something by peers. In larp, this can come from role-playing a character close to your real self. You can potentially reveal truths about yourself to others who may not accept them, resulting in ostracization and, thanks to social media and whisper networks, banishment from other events. Playing a villainous character may also be a social risk, even if that character was pre-generated. People might mistake the player for the character, and be negatively biased against the player. This risk increases if you play the same character or type of character repeatedly. You may also be judged for the actions your character takes, as others may ascribe “poor” choices to the player. Social risk often appears in larp communities that create and enforce a code of conduct. The energy and impetus that causes the community to form is also the energy that creates a social risk of exile from the group. When someone causes harm to another—intentionally or not—they may be banned from the community. Benedetto researched a sex party curated by The Dirty Gentleman (TDG), or Mr. Gentleman, containing high social risk. This excerpt may sound familiar to campaign larpers:
When it comes to sexually permissive events, the risk is not only in being hurt but in doing the hurting. Enacting harmful behavior creates the social risk of shame and ostracization. “There is a term for deciding certain people are good or bad which is ‘Voting People off the Island’,” says Mr. Gentleman. “The idea is that you can be in this world until you do something wrong, and then you are dangerous and bad and need to go away.” The severity of a ‘Voting People Off the Island’ model is exactly what The Dirty Gentleman is designed to counter. The gathering focuses on social etiquette so that behaviors, rather than the individual participants, are the focus of potential improvement.
Benedetto, 2017
A physical risk is harm to one’s body. In the most extreme case, this results in death. Taking physical risks is common in mainstream activities such as skydiving, bungee-jumping, and most sports. Boffer larps feature physical risk and utilize many rules to mitigate it, e.g., no head or groin shots, maximum bow draw weight, weapon checks, etc. Benedetto writes “Confronting physical risk can reframe one’s sense of vulnerability in day-to-day life and change our relationship to the constructed environments we inhabit every day.” (Benedetto, 2017)
It must be acknowledged that Benedetto stresses that any risk should be roughly equal between the participants, especially social risk. Reacting to a recent Vanity Fair article about Silicon Valley sex parties that enable stereotypical heterosexual male fantasies, she opines “If all participants do not need to risk rejection equally, and those least empowered to leverage their personal boundaries are those most likely to suffer consequences outside the party, you have a recipe for coercion and abuse.” (Benedetto, 2018). Further inquiry into the effects of imbalanced risk among participants is needed. For our purposes, we assume that any risk is generally the same for all involved, possibly including the designers and organizers.
Each of these three types of risk can be actual or imagined, and this is not a duality but a spectrum. Our subjective perception can deceive participants into thinking risk
exists when it does not or is minimal, e.g., afraid of embarrassing oneself with “poor” role-playing among a group of supportive larpers.
is greater than it actually is, e.g., touching another person on the shoulder without their consent.
is less than it actually is, e.g., shooting an old padded arrow from a bow with 30-pound weight at 28” draw at a person when they aren’t looking (LARP Haven Facebook group query, based on over 60 responses, 2018).
does not exist when it does, e.g., getting food poisoning from a novice food preparer, or being unaware of the presence of bees and whether or not you are allergic to their sting.
Unknown actual risks are the most perilous, and discovering the risk after the fact can be exhilarating or traumatic; the danger was unnoticed, survived by someone unprepared for the challenge.
It is critical that experience designers understand the difference between actual and imagined or mis-perceived risk. This difference is particular to each participant as well—someone with an acute nut allergy has a greater actual risk in eating unidentified foods compared to someone who does not. Following a recommended transparency of expectation (Torner, 2013) the designers have a moral and possibly even legal obligation to inform the participants about the experience before undertaking it, whether it involves illegal trespassing, like Benedetto’s The Night Heron, or violence, like the Blackout Experience (Josh Randall and Kristjan Thor, 2009). Both events were up front in their marketing; The Night Heron was an intimate experience in a building’s empty water tower (without authorization to be there), and Blackout involves a single participant going through a series of scenes where they are grabbed, shoved, and choked by the actors (NPCs). Keeping actual risk hidden from participants means the designers are taking on their own undue risk, which may not be the purpose of the activity.
There is considerable opportunity, however, in playing off the perceptions or misperceptions of the participants. Benedetto describes risk perception as “Relying on our unconscious to steer us away from risks makes life manageable, as long as we can trust our unconscious to properly identify the risks. Occasionally waking up from our unconscious steering can put us back in touch with something enriching and transformative.” (Benedetto, 2017). Competition, for example, is an easy method of suggesting risk—the characters might lose the battle and die—while controlling the actual amount of danger faced by adjusting the power level of the opponents. In a controlled, specific manner, duplicity can be quite effective in setting up the conditions for a transformation. More about deception is in the tips section.
What is Transformation?
Risk is a kairos, in the Greek sense of the decisive moment. And what it determines is not only the future, but also the past, behind our horizon of waiting, in which it reveals an unsuspected reserve of freedom.
Éloge du risque, Anne Dufourmantelle
Benedetto defines transformation as:
A transformation is a fundamental change. The change can be big or small, but what makes it transformational is how close the change is to what makes someone who they are. Not all transformations are equal, and not all transformations come about in the same way. Transformation is hard if not impossible to measure because most measurements track the effects of the transformation, not the transformation itself. Sometimes whatever is worth measuring about the transformation isn’t evident until the transformation is well under way.
Benedetto, 2017
The main criteria for transformation is that it is personal. It is an interior redecorating of your psyche. Although any immersive, interactive experience can change your social circle, hobbies, discretionary income or vacation destination, those are not part of personal transformation. A personal transformation converts the human being through the process of the human doing. It can shatter parts of the previous self, and reconstruction takes time. Benedetto reminds us:
If the experience is successful in delivering transformative potential, the participant cannot fully wrap their mind around what has happened; they cannot satisfactorily tame the splendor of the experience with serious judgment about what happened to them. Leaving an experience in a state of disoriented awe allows for the participant to reorder their world view and sense of self in order to make meaning out of what they went through. Transformation is an unraveling, followed by a slow and sometimes prolonged stitching back together.
Benedetto, 2017
Benedetto describes three ways that we can be transformed via a designed experience: acute, repetitive, and dramatic.
Acute transformation is produced by a change that is imposed on someone without warning, against their will, or otherwise beyond their control. In this case, the purpose of the experience is to help the participants adjust to the change that has happened in their world and get past the shock of the change. Not transforming would mean being stuck as the world leaves them behind, often to their detriment.
Benedetto, 2017
Avant-garde funeral directors specialize in acute transformation because they design a ceremony unique to the aggrieved. Acute transformational larps are a minority of larps—possibly, too, of designed experiences in general. This is because of the time and care necessary to create something meaningful for a specific audience who already encountered something overpowering. Other people, especially strangers, may not understand or want to participate in something so personal to one or a few. Nevertheless, experiences have been designed as a reaction to an unexpected event, and it may be the creator who seeks transformation themselves. Siobahn O’Loughlin’s Broken Bone Bathtub (2015) is “an immersive theatre project taking place inside a bathtub, in an actual home. After a serious bike accident [the acute catalyst], a young woman musters up the courage to ask for help, and shares her story, exploring themes of trauma, suffering, human generosity, vulnerability, and connection. The audience takes on the role of Siobhan’s close friends; not only in listening but sharing in their experiences, and assisting the cast-clad artist in the actual ritual of taking a bath.” In this 2018 Knutpunkt Companion, larpwright Shoshanna Kessock describes her larp scenario, Keeping the Candles Lit, which became tied to an acute experience, the loss of her mother. Even as the creator, this fabricated experience (scenario) provided Kessock with a lifeboat to weather an unexpected tragedy. (Kessock, 2018)
Repetitive transformation happens through repeat exposure to something over a series of experiences. The shift in the participant may be gradual or sudden but it comes about through habituating an experience that incrementally moves the transformation forward.
Benedetto, 2017
Benedetto refers to The Dirty Gentleman’s quarterly escapades as an example of repetitive transformation. For larps, clearly, these are our episodic events. There are many examples of people who have changed, often for the better, through recurring larp campaigns; enough that we assume this is prima facie.
Benedetto defines the third type of transformation:
Dramatic transformation happens at the end of a dramatic arc that has built the participants up to a change. A dramatic transformation happens as a result of an intense and concentrated experience. While dramatic arcs are often associated with fiction, they can happen in experiences of a profound confrontation with reality, too.
Benedetto, 2017
The likeliest larp candidate for this type of change is a weekend-long, one-shot event. Yet designed experiences can reach profound intensity within hours or even minutes, depending on the design and the participants. For example, Tobias Wrigstad’s formidable and transgressive larp Gang Rape (2008), which uses the fiat system wherein consenting participants (the rapists) verbally describe the physical act of rape to the victim, who verbally describes the emotions the rapist is feeling, lasts 45-90 minutes. By putting players in a highly-relevant, high-stakes, high-risk and pre-defined arc, it reduces the opportunity to escape from the serious subject matter of sexual assault, creating opportunity for dramatic transformation.
Following the analogy of an ego gymnasium, acute transformation is like physical therapy after an injury, repetitive transformation would be daily jogging, and dramatic transformation would be a short but intense training regimen before a race or triathlon. Akin to what physical exercise can do for your body, so designed experiences can do for your soul.
Experience
Risk Type
Risk Veracity
Structure
Transformation
Just a Little Lovin’
Emotional
Actual, depending on history with subject
Exploratory
Acute
Vampire: The Masquerade (campaign)
Social
variable
variable
Repetitive
Legion: A Siberian Story
Physical
Actual
Progressive
Dramatic
Examples of different larps and their risk/transformative categories.
Why Design a Risky Experience?
In an interview with Kathryn Yu for the No Proscenium podcast #130, Benedetto states that “transformation requires risk. And real risk. And that it’s only in having the supportive structure of an experience, especially if it involves other people that you can go through it with, that you can even approach [a] risk that is too chaotic and too threatening to deal with outside the context of that experience. But by confronting that risk, some part of you reconfigures itself or becomes more alive.” (Nelson-Yu, 2017)
This may be overstating the case. Transformation, at least an intentional transformation, i.e., change consciously desired by the individual, is possible without risk, real or imagined. Overcoming alcohol or nicotine addiction, for example, carries less risk, in most cases, than maintaining your dependence. However, Patterns of Transformation presents a strong case for using risk to make personal transformation easier. Her quote suggests that it is a shared experience that an intentional personal transformation requires, not necessarily a risky one—though that helps.
The power of designed experiences, and larps especially, is their ability to create a space for the mind, body, and emotional self to work out in a controlled manner. Experience designers are like weight trainers and spotters for our spirit. They are there to help us better our ability to operate in a tumultuous era, and, consequently, better the world for everyone. This is a noble endeavor. Benedetto calls this “human enrichment.” (Benedetto, 2017)
It is also probable that the designer will benefit from creating these experiences for others, either physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially. They, too, take a risk in the act of creation.
Why Play a potentially Transformative Experience?
Benedetto says “A lot of the transformation I looked at, where the transformation’s desirable in some way, is because we have been estranged from something, somehow […] I think the transformation gets you back in touch with something that you’ve been estranged [from], and that changes your relationship to the world in your everyday life. That can be super enriching.” (Nelson-Yu, 2017)
An intense designed experience can create the psychological state known as “flow,” coined in 1975 by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. It refers to a mental point in which a person undertakes a challenge that they understand and lies within their skill competency. When someone reaches this state, they become fully immersed and focused on the experience, losing their sense of space and time. It is innately enjoyable and yields long-lasting and positive after effects. He writes “the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990)
Designed experiences just outside one’s comfort or skill level, too, are the basis for Lev Vygotsky’s (1896-1934) zone of proximal development and scaffolding pedagogy. By presenting a risk that seems insurmountable, yet including the tools or people in the experience that helps the individual complete the task fosters deep cognitive and emotional learning.
According to one of the first attendees of the Blackout Experience, Allison F., “it was almost like they were tailoring every scene towards some type of issue to trigger somebody.” (personal interview, 2018) Going through Blackout by yourself, a participant can expect to experience abuse, torture, and sexual assault—depending on your perspective.
Yet Russell E., also a repeat attendee, explains how repetitive visits affected him:
Since Blackout is a show that adapts to each audience members’ emotional response, the shows became more intense each time I went. In my opinion, the creators and cast were able to recognize patrons who were “getting it” and sometimes altered a scene’s pacing or content to personalize the event and make it even more affecting… I often found myself contemplating my own emotional responses in real life to scenarios explored within Blackout scenes. It seemed to me I was discovering more compassion and more strength within myself than I had previously realized. By exploring heavy, troubling scenarios within an intense theatrical presentation, I found myself approaching everyday turmoil from a stronger foundation…I became [a] stronger person as a result of this exploration.
Personal interview, 2018
Allison shares the same sentiment: “…it’s extremely empowering for me to know that I still have that survival instinct or, for lack of better terms, I have it in me to survive…” (personal interview, 2018)
It is important to note that transformative experiences are not for everyone, and not at every point in their lives. Benedetto says “Constantly being in transformation [makes] you lose sense of who you are, and it’s hard to establish things or gain momentum.” (Nelson-Yu, 2017) Although there should be a larp or designed experience for everyone, not every larp is for everyone, nor should they be. Not everyone always wants or needs to undergo a risky interactive or immersive experience. It is also true that not everyone always wants or needs to participate in a safety-stuffed event.
It is beneficial, every once in a while, to reconnect with our estranged passions, to transform through a risky, designed experience.
Guidelines for Designing Risky and Transformative Experiences
Here are some tips on managing risk in a designed experience to create favorable conditions for personal transformation. Ida Benedetto outlined the first seven design steps in Patterns of Transformation. Due to space considerations, they are not reprinted here in full. It is strongly recommended you read these in detail on the Patterns website. We have included some examples from larping that we felt matched Benedetto’s terms and ideas. Following are our additional thoughts and ideas on the topic.
For our purposes, a “designed experience” is any kind of planned real-world experience involving participant interactivity and engagement—things like alternate reality games (ARGs), immersive theater, escape rooms, extreme haunts and, of course, larps. Note that all three of the experiences Benedetto researched do not have a fictional component, i.e., at the sex party, funeral, or survival adventure you are YOU, really doing that real action in the real world. Yet the patterns Benedetto identified can also be applied to experiences that rely on fiction and role-playing.
Before the experience (planning):
Identify the Risk – “Drill deep and get as specific as possible about the risk facing the people you are designing for.”(Benedetto, 2017)
Distill what is worthwhile in the Risk – “Be mindful of cultural mores, life stages, and personal agendas (yours and theirs) when taking this step.” (Benedetto, 2017)
Commit to an Experience Structure (see below, with larp equivalent terms)
Exploratory – freeform, sandbox, undefined goals
Progressive – linear, railroad, pre-defined goals
Cyclical – repetitive scenes, rituals, or actions, like boffer combat in battle larps (Benedetto, 2017)
During the experience (runtime):
Construct the Magic Circle (two types) – The “Magic Circle” is a concept inspired by Johan Huizinga’s (1872-1945) book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938) and popularized by Katie Salen and Ryan Zimmerman in Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (2003). A magic circle is a shared space and time mutually created by participants where things and people bounded by that time and space are not necessarily what they really are; it a sacred liminal space where play, and change, can happen. Benedetto describes two types:
Conditioned – this type of Magic Circle includes the majority of larps where we learn rules, character backgrounds, etc. The Magic Circle comes into being due to our willing imposition of belief, e.g., a birdseed-filled packet is really a lightning bolt. (Benedetto, 2017)
Embraced – “A Magic Circle is embraced when it is drawn around an existing reality that is too overwhelming to engage without the supportive structure of a designed experience. The magic circle helps participants embrace a reality they otherwise avoid or are estranged from.” (Benedetto, 2017). This type of Magic Circle, although rare, appears in response larps that address a difficult concept such as GR (2008), Active Shooter (Tim Hutchings, 2014), or A Mother’s Heart (Christina Christensen & Eirik Fatland, 2010). Here, a slight fiction (the larp, the Magic Circle) is imposed over a troubling reality. Embraced magic circles can also occasionally appear in immersive theater, flash mobs, 1960s Happenings, and Benedetto’s primary example, bespoke funeral ceremonies. Dublin2 (JP Kaljonen, Johanna Raekallio & Haidi Montola, 2011), a pervasive larp reaction to EU’s asylum seekers policy, was held in one of Helsinki’s main plazas where real people sometimes interacted with the participants. Interestingly, an embraced Magic Circle coupled with an acute transformation is largely unexplored territory for experience designers, or at least larp designers. Imagine designing a bespoke larp for someone who was recently laid off that directly addresses that issue using few fictional elements.
Hold the space for transformation – Organizers need to respectfully maintain the liminal space to allow the time for transformation, recognize when more time is needed, when it is time to close, and when something is going wrong and it needs to close.
Close the Magic Circle – There are many examples of rituals and symbolic actions from larps that represent the closing of the Magic Circle. In some respects, a debrief after a larp can be considered part of this closing. Running debriefs the same day as the end of the larp should accept, though, that if it was a transformational experience, participants might be confused and shaken, their sense of self, tattered. They might not have the words or ability to join or participate in the meeting.
After the experience:
Check in – This should happen days or even weeks after the event, and this is where the effects of the transformation can be identified, after the individual has had time to process the experience.
From a larp design perspective, we propose the following additions to Benedetto’s seven design steps. We believe these techniques, some for designers, some for participants, heighten the transformative potential of an experience.
Identify the type of transformation desired “The first step with figuring out your strategy for care is to identify what the nature of the transformation is. How are you going to about it? That helps you construct the Magic Circle, that helps you figure out what the experience structure is.” (Nelson-Yu, 2017). Besides identifying the risk, decide if the conditions for transformation should be acute, dramatic or repetitive. A typical dramatic larp is a one-shot, and repetitive usually indicates an ongoing event. Consider flipping those so a campaign leads to one final intense conclusion, and a one-shot repeats the same action or scene in its limited time.
Once the risk is identified (tip #1) and the worthwhile part of risk determined (tip #2), minimize or eliminate all other risks. If you design towards a dramatic transformation through emotional risk, ensure that participants are shielded from social and physical risks. These other elements can detract from the power of transformational risk.
Promote ideal conditions and encourage participants to transform themselves (tip #5), but do not force players into a transformational state, nor dictate to them what their new “self” should be. The more emphasis a designer imposes on participants to become or behave a certain way, the more the experience resembles a cult. The movie and book Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk, novel, 1996, David Fincher, director, movie, 1999) is a fictive example of how physical risk presented as a transformative experience is deliberately used as a vehicle for creating an anarchist army. Organizers should only extrinsically set the conditions for transformation to occur; the actual act of transformation must be intrinsically activated.
When marketing the experience, do not claim that it is or will be transformational. Let others do that for you with testimonials. It is hubris to think that your daring design will work every time for everyone. If you label it transformational in your marketing, someone may go in demanding that, and become upset if the experience fails to deliver. But do let people know about the risk (see point below on deception).
Establish trust. “Trust is a prerequisite for enabling transformation.” (Benedetto, 2017). Constructing trust between participants, designers and facilitators is rightfully difficult. Once you have it and a community surrounds the experience, the bonds are often hard to break (Douglas, 2016). Additionally, greater trust facilitates the use of greater risk in the experience—though not necessarily greater transformative potential. To achieve the trust of participants before an experience has run, use different levels of transparency. For example, if participants sign waivers, have a “spoiler” and a “no spoiler” version for them to choose to read and sign. The spoiler waiver would include detailed descriptions of the risk, such as “you will unexpectedly have a cloth hood thrown over your head.” The no spoiler version would only mention physical contact, darkness, helplessness.
If you have designed previous experiences, mention those. Be honest about the use of risk in the experience, but not necessarily exactly what the risk is, for some people are attracted to chancy, mysterious events. If there is some kind of independent group that can vouch for your experience (Southern California has a nascent organization called LEIA: League of Experiential & Immersive Artists that may do just this), contact them and let them know about your production; perhaps applying a seal of approval. This may be unwise if it’s a government entity; would The Night Heron have been as profound an experience if everyone had permission to be in the water tower? Benedetto suggests it would not. Conversely, funeral directors, even avant-garde ones, cannot legally operate without license. This is where your previous decisions about the worthwhile risk and transformative type are relevant—is it worth being an underground, unlawful experience, or would the imprimatur of officiality allow attendees easy access into and a lengthy stay within the Magic Circle?
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS), an informal collective that created a number of legendary larps, made a point to let all participants know that nothing the organizers asked the players to do the designers had not done themselves. In his Master’s thesis, J. Michael Bestul describes The Mistress of Nyarlathotep (The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, Andrew Leman, 1991), a larp run by the HPLHS where players had to jump off a roof through a fabricated temporal gate not knowing what, if anything, would catch them on the other side.
Only when a keeper can earn the trust of players are events like this possible. Under normal, everyday circumstances, a person would not jump off a roof into a prop time portal. They would most likely consider it an insane proposition. But, in a game setting, where the keepers have earned the players’ trust, that insane option is now a likely choice. The investigators, properly motivated, would jump in; the players, knowing the keeper would never ask them to do something exceedingly dangerous, can jump in.
Bestul, 2006
As an experience creator, too, you have to trust your players that they will engage to the best of their abilities. In larps, organizers entrust their players to carry out a plot and to role-play their characters as best they can. If you are designing for transformation, you also have to trust that the players will make themselves open and vulnerable.
Paying the designers/organizers money can alter the risk and transformative power. One of the keys to The Night Heron was its exclusivity and price point: “The Night Heron was very much inspired by a design principle that we had hit on in doing our previous events, which was this notion of generosity. We looked at what we were doing as a gift to the guests or the participants. We never charged for tickets because we were doing this all illegally […] as soon as we had a ticket relationship with the guests, it felt like we were going to be in nebulous legal territory. The positive byproduct of doing that is that people were even more over the moon that this was this weird thing they got invited to and was spectacular. Because it had such a profound emotional effect, it ended up informing how people got to The Night Heron […] you could only come as a gift of somebody who had already been.” (Nelson-Yu, 2017)
Similarly, the HPLHS usually did not charge their players money to play in their larps. “On the whole the Cthulhu Lives games [larps] we produced were never staged as for-profit enterprises and the Keeper would generally bear the cost of producing his/her own event. It’s possible that there may have been a couple of games where a Keeper asked players to chip in a few bucks to help defray expenses, but that usually wasn’t the case. Most of our Keepers would design their LARPs so they could be executed within the resources available to the Keeper.” (personal correspondence with Sean Branney of the HPLHS, 2018)
Asking for money alters the relationship between organizer and participant. It does not eliminate the risk or transformative nature, but gaining the trust of others might be easier if the organizers also take a financial risk. Conversely, paying a higher fee could also prime people towards personal transformation; they are already taking a financial risk. The immersive play YOU by Hall & Mirrors costs $5000 for one night of bespoke performance and interaction. The high cost can influence our reaction (“Britt”, 2008). The monetary cost of a transformative experience should not be treated lightly. Benedetto says one of the core questions to consider is “What’s the risk, and what’s the gift?” (Nelson-Yu, 2017)
Deceiving the participants: How much information do participants really need to know? Can you obfuscate parts of the adventure? In most experiences, certainly larps, there is a chaos factor that even the best-prepared organizers cannot expect. Since participants are by nature unpredictable, and more so in a risky, potentially transformative state, all variables cannot be accounted for and stated up front. But organizers owe it to their participants to inform them of at least the generalities expected in the experience. Do not forget that for first iterations or first-time participants, no precedent has been set, no foreknowledge provided, and that itself indicates a risk. Use this to your design advantage. An example from an immersive theater experience playing with transparency comes from Annie Lesser’s A(partment 8) (2016), the first chapter of The ABC Project. Although the waiver mentions nudity, physical contact, and darkness it did not put those together to say (spoiler alert) “participants with shut eyes will be kissed by a naked woman.” You can lose trust if you deceive too much, but if you have trust from the participants, there is a level of mendacity that you can use to a transformative advantage. Even with deception, any opt-out rules such as safe words should be apparent and honest; although this dictum has already been challenged by Frederik Berg Østergaard’s Fat Man Down (2009), which has a fake safe word and a real safe word. Where and when the safe words are usable should be carefully considered. How many positive personal transformations were ruined because someone took an early exit instead of breaking through to the other side? And of course, in some experiences it might be too late, e.g., using a safe word after you jumped out of the airplane.
Give up control. As an organizer, you need to loosen the bonds of any agenda or plan that you have made. But be ready to intervene if a crisis occurs. Being prepared to interrupt might be enough, too. Some participants, knowing safety rules are in place, may be more willing to push themselves further than if they do not know where the line lies between reckless endangerment and regulated hazard. Others may not push themselves far enough.
As a participant, you may need to relinquish control over your social, emotional, or physical safety to either the organizers, your own subconscious, or random chance. The latter two might be the most frightening of all. Be vulnerable.
Lack of epiphany does not mean failure. It may come to pass that after everything a participant has gone through, they have not been altered in any demonstrable fashion. That is OK. Maybe they were not fully committed to the event. Maybe they were not the right person for this particular experience. Maybe the Magic Circle could not wait for one last person. It could be a design flaw. Hopefully the participant still had a satisfactory or enjoyable experience. Keep the discussion channels between designers and participants open, be honest, and compare the reflections of all attendees. If you followed the tip about marketing, you never promised a metamorphosis.
For participants, avoid major decisions for approximately a month. Assuming the experience was transformative, you are different. The way things were in your former life will probably seem strange when viewed with a new perspective—and you might not like the way they look. While you put your pieces back together, refrain from making other major changes or decisions. You could lose a connection you may, years later, have wanted to keep. This sound advice is given at the end of Legion: A Siberian Story (Rolling, 2016), a Czech larp based on the historical past of Czechoslovakia’s army trapped in the Russian Revolution.
Limitations on Safety and Consent
The most stunning commonality among these experiences is that the risk posed to the participant also poses a chaotic and uncontrollable element to the guide that, if fully tamed, destroys the transformative potential of the experience.
Safety and risk are obviously related. Risk can be increased simply by decreasing safety, but without corresponding conscious decisions regarding the risk, participants can be unintentionally hurt. Even if safety is elevated, serious risk can still lurk in an experience. In this section we explore some of the limits of safety and some conditions where safety inhibits the experience and its potential. For more information on safety techniques and calibration, read this manifesto, this article, these four posts, or thesetwo entries from the 2018 Knutpunkt Companion. All qualities of larp safety techniques should be considered when deciding which mechanisms to adopt or eschew.
Consent-Based Play Reshuffling
While the word “consent” suggests that anything else is “non-consensual”, it is instead one of many social contracts that can be adopted by a group of people. Consent-based play moves the cognitive overhead of coordinating playstyle from the design and planning stage by the organizers to the players during run-time. This removes the possibility of errors in calibration, but it requires more work to be done during the larp itself.
This is an approach many people enjoy and find freeing, but it is not a universal response. Communication and coordination take effort. We do not often think of emotional effort the way we count walking far or carrying heavy items, but it is work. In low-coordination, high-calibration larps where the rules of engagement and interaction are pre-set, this work is not undertaken, and playing takes less emotional effort. For example, larps that have established no-touch policies remove player deliberation during the larp on whether or not a particular instance of touch is comfortable: the pre-larp external calibration replaces run-time player coordination.
Alliance, a New England sports larp organization, encourages players to be invested in their characters and play the same persona in many different games, with little to no preparation or specific connections. It is possible to travel across America to another chapter and drop in to play on a whim. This is supported because all Alliance events share a common rules system and constraints on the level of risk and reward, topics that are out-of-bounds, and elements of world design. Players who choose to play are opting in to a set of understood external requirements, and so dozens of strangers can play without so much as an introduction. Run-time calibration between players and a lengthy pre-larp workshop is not required.
Calibration and Coordination Issues
Although some people enjoy or find it easier to participate in run-time coordination rather than playing larps with a risk of mis-calibration, expecting players to be skilled in this effort limits the potential pool of players. If a game is designed such that one can play with people one wouldn’t trust to communicate accurately and effectively in the game (IG), there are far more people you can play with. Casual low-trust events are especially useful for reaching audiences who otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to larp at all. Adding mechanics and categories of interactions raises the barrier of entry for participation, and few non-larpers or untrained improvisation actors are used to an ongoing negotiation of play.
Consent and safety mechanisms are sometimes presented as a matter of accessibility. Instead, they are a question of competing access needs: there is no design that will accommodate and enable everyone to play. Some people with mental health or physical concerns find that consent-based play enables them to safely participate. For other people who struggle with communication and coordination, consent-based play can require forms of interaction they find difficult or impossible, making the events inaccessible. Often consent mechanisms are built to serve those with the emotional intelligence to recognize when, for example, check-ins should happen, and who are able to easily swap from in-character (IC) and out-of-character (OOC) considerations.
Someone with a nonverbal learning disability may have trouble interpreting facial expressions and body language (Petti et al., 2003). The expectation that they are responsible for successfully negotiating playstyle on the fly can be anxiety-provoking. This can be especially true with mechanisms such as the OK check-in that are exclusively visual, rather than audio and visual combined. Since this is an invisible disability, it is possible that someone who flashed a missed signal might think that the other person was unsafe to play with, even though they could safely play in systems that rely on expectations or verbal game interrupts to negotiate playstyle.
Additionally, slipping in and out of a check-in is much easier for people with strong working memories and executive processing. People with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder can be easily distracted and find interruptions or context-switching more disruptive than neurotypical people (King et al., 2007). Requiring coordination or task switching can reduce the probability of flow and the general enjoyment of players with ADHD. According to Pattern Language for Larp Design by J Li and Jason Morningstar (2016), “A typical person can only keep track of 5-6 unrelated things at a time, with concentration. Without concentration, that number is closer to 3-4. When trying to keep track of a set of potentially complex dynamics, a typical person will get lost if the set has more than 4 elements.” Combining consent-based play, where interactions are negotiated outside the Magic Circle, plus a litany of safety mechanics such as OK check, look-down, tap-out, cut, brake/largo, and pronouns can be overwhelming even for neurotypical individuals. These memorizations are layered atop your character’s life, your IC relations, the world setting, and real world considerations such as who the GMs are and where the bathroom is.
This does not necessarily exclude neuroatypical players from playing emotionally risky larps where consent mechanisms mitigate risk, but such experiences may be less appealing or more challenging for such people. On the other hand, physically risky games that minimize the kind of work they find difficult may make transformative experiences more accessible to players with such difficulties. Remember to identify the worthwhile risk and eliminate or reduce the others. There is no single answer for “the most accessible” experience.
Safety Mechanics and Play Styles
Are we truly increasing safety by using risk-reducing mechanics? As described in Target Risk 3 by Gerald J.S. Wilde, humans tend to maintain “risk homeostasis”. He says
…in any activity, people accept a certain level of subjectively estimated risk to their health, safety, and other things they value, in exchange for the benefits they hope to receive from that activity […] In any ongoing activity, people continuously check the amount of risk they feel they are exposed to. They compare this with the amount of risk they are willing to accept, and try to reduce any difference between the two to zero. Thus, if the level of subjectively experienced risk is lower than is felt acceptable, people tend to engage in actions that increase their exposure to risk. If, however, the level of subjectively experienced risk is higher than is acceptable, they make an attempt to exercise greater caution.
This means that simply adding safety mechanisms does not inherently change the level of risk in a game. If a mechanic makes an experience safer, people are likely to adjust the level of risk they take to compensate.
Calling these “safety mechanics” can suggest that larps with them are safer than those without, but that is not necessarily true. If a larp is not designed for risky play that would be padded by safety mechanics, adding unnecessary safety mechanisms can push people to adopt more risky play than the game as a whole supports. The context in which safety mechanics are seen as universally appropriate and universally adopted is one in which the riskiest possible play is seen as a goal, and every experience is expected to support such play.
It can be disappointing for players if they are prepared to experience risky play that safety mechanisms inherently advertise and instead find themselves in low-risk play where the mechanisms were not needed. This could encourage players to circumvent or ignore safety mechanics, reducing their effectiveness when they would be useful.
Additionally, with a consent-based larp where no consequence befalls a participant unless they agree to it, there is reduced possibility for growth because there is no conflict, struggle, or resistance. Our muscles grow due to tissue rebuilding after experiencing micro-tears (Goussetis, 2015). Emotions, like muscles, may need to be damaged in order for personal growth.
Although designers usually desire a safe experience, safety mechanics and consent conflict resolution are not the only nor necessarily the best tools to use in all instances for all people. For example, using instead deception to suggest, or to actually include a risk higher than one participants feel comfortable with may make the experience safer—as participants adjust their role-playing to their acceptable risk tolerance—without an undue burden of excessive safety mechanics.
As the philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle says, “We want intensity without risk. That’s impossible. Intensity is jumping into the unknown, that which was previously unseen, which has not yet been written, yet which is however attainable within us.” (Dufourmantelle, 2011)
Caveats to Using Risk and Designing for Transformation
The element of risk we discussed relates to that which is specifically embedded into the design. Risk outside the experience, such as the potential for harm to or from an experience or negative contact betwixt players and organizers between episodes, was not addressed.
Designing an experience to be risky when the participants only expect entertainment can be extremely hazardous and should be avoided.
Risk does not guarantee a transformative experience. Great peril can be faced, yet the person walks away unfazed.
A risk-based transformation may not always end positively. It could cause trauma and lead to a stress disorder, anxiety, physical injury, even death.
Not all larps should be made for personal transformation. It is infeasible and impractical to plan every one of your designed experiences to rewire every participant. For players, it is a fool’s errand to expect every experience you participate in be created with the purpose of transformation.
Greater risk does not always correlate with greater transformation. Although the prospect certainly exists for “more risk means more change,” it is not a guaranteed formula.
Transformative experiences are no substitute for psychological therapy, and should not be used as such nor made with that intent. They can be palliative, cathartic, eye-opening, self-consciousness expanding and perception shifting, but they cannot replace a licensed therapist or medically-trained psychiatrist.
Objectively, risk-laden larps are no better nor no worse than risk-averse larps. The enjoyment, appreciation, or qualitative transformative benefit is purely subjective.
Conclusion
Risk scares people. It is a natural human response to perceived danger. But avoiding or blocking all risk in a designed experience, as in life, is like chasing rainbows, an uncatchable illusion. Designing to limit risk through safety mechanisms can exclude some people and overwhelm others. Reducing risk curbs the participants’ ability to attempt personal transformation in the experience. While risky endeavors and personal revelations are not and should not be the norm of designed experiences, it behooves all creators to not only look at safety mechanisms but also risk, and to use both in their creative vision. Ida Benedetto’s landmark work, Patterns of Transformation, provides an excellent guide for these bold, daring adventurers.
In the first essay of the landmark Nordic Larp book (2010), “The Paradox of Nordic Larp Culture,” Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola list four ways that larp can be used: to escape, to explore, to expose, to impose. Perhaps a fifth way should be added: to transform.
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