When players of older characters at a Jane Austen inspired larp realise they are little more than NPCs for the younger characters, they go off piste and engineer their own romance plot. Through extremes of in-character behaviour, they force the younger characters to take on the roles of antagonists for them, thus inverting the power dynamics of the piece. This is done in a way that does not adversely affect the play of others.
Larp hacking is when players subvert or change the design of a larp while the larp is running. At its most gentle, hacking a larp is when players find ways to push the limits of the design, or use the design of the larp in ways that the original designers did not expect. At the far end of the scale it is a revolt by players to rescue a larp from abject failure. When done for constructive reasons, subverting the design of the larp can be a useful way to improve or save an experience. Hacking a larp involves changing the overall play experience rather than simply tweaking a character. It is the output of calibration rather than gentle steering.((Steering is a conscious decision to change the character within the auspices of the design of the larp, whereas larp hacking plays with the structure. See Stenros, Jaakko. Playfulness, play, and games: A constructionist ludology approach. (2015).)) Larp hacking is called hacking because it involves changing a part of the design or structure of a larp without the designers’ involvement or consent, pushing the limits of the design, or using the design of the larp in ways that the original designers did not expect.
How to hack a larp
There is no single way to hack a larp, but it is useful to think about larp hacking as a three step process with little opportunity for testing and iterating.
Step 1 – Analysis
The approaches you take to hack will differ depending on why you’re doing it. It is more or less impossible to hack a larp successfully if you don’t understand what is not working, and why. This calls for some reflection.
Here are some of the reasons you might need to hack:
The larp is not working for me
The larp is not working for a small group of (identified) players
The larp is not working for anyone
The larp is working, but I want to push the limits
Imagine that a player has identified that the bulk of the larp seems to be taking place in the secure laboratory building, but as a mere janitor they are not allowed inside. The larp design imagined that there would be enough people outside of the laboratory for play to exist there as well, but for whatever reason, one player with a broom is now left sweeping up in the dark. Our imagined player is not a Turkuist,((Someone who follows the tenets of the Turku Manifesto.)) so they are not entirely happy with the situation.
Just saying “the larp is not working for me” or “I am not enjoying myself” is not enough. “I am not enjoying this larp because I am unable to complete this particular function that the larp is supposed to offer, but does not” is better. Most constructive would be an analysis with an implicit solution: “If my character had access to the laboratory and the players there, this larp would be fun.”
As a part of the analysis it is really useful to check in with other players. It is significantly easier to change a larp with a group. Often we’ll assume that we are the only player who is struggling, only to discover after the larp is over that we were one of many silently wishing there was someone to talk to.
Step 2 – Design
Larp hacking is arguably a form of larp design, except it is done by players, typically during the run-time of the larp. It uses many of the same skills and approaches as larp design. Once you understand what problem you are trying to fix, it is possible to come up with solutions. It might be possible to change part of the offgame structures of the larp. Our janitor player may, for example, create a security clearance badge to allow them passage into the lab. It may also be possible to hack from within the diegesis, e.g. by sneaking into the lab without the clearance and (when asked) state that janitors have always had access.
Suggested approaches:
Creatively use or subvert the limits of the playing space. For example, climb through the air vents instead of facing the guards.
Introduce another element consistent with the setting, which hasn’t been used in the design. For example introducing feminism to a historical larp, which does not already have it.
Creatively use / subvert the rules set by the designers. For example by breaking ingame rules in ways you do not think were intended to happen.
Create new sub-groups or interactions between sets of players on the fly, or invent reasons for groups that are meant to compete to collaborate, if competition is blocking play. For example by creating an excuse for members of two warring factions to be trapped alone together without their weapons and work out how to escape.
Take the story of the larp in a direction that the designers had not considered. For example by crafting a new plotline for yourself and other players interested in getting involved.
Insert background material that was not in the larp from the start. For example by introducing new objects and giving them traditional or magical importance, or creating a new religion.
Step 3 – Analysis (again)
Your proposed hack is constrained by time, by impact, and by agency. It is like tuning the engine of a bus driving down the main road carrying 150 passengers. Stop the bus. Sit down. Think. Consider your solution carefully.
Time
Hacking a larp is done against the clock. The earlier in the game you are, the more likely you are to succeed. As a running experience the larp is fluid and your opportunity to implement a change tends to come with a narrow time window. Much like the fictional cyberspace cowboy trying to crack through black ICE,((Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE) is a term used in cyberpunk literature to refer to security programs which protect computerised data from being accessed by hackers. Black ICE refers to ICE that are capable of killing the intruder.)) if you leave it too long, the chance will be lost.
Agency and Opportunity
Your agency in-game is limited to what you can either do as your character, or what you can negotiate with players you can get hold of and get enthusiastic about your idea. You might have a great plan but if you lack the in-game agency to execute it, you need the off-game support from other players to make it happen.
Impact
Larp hacking is a creative use of space, but it is a shared space. Before you subvert it, consider your co-players. If the impact of your hack is significant and widespread,((See Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Larp Domino Effect)) it runs the risk of adversely affecting the experience of others. It could ruin their immersion, spoil their fun, or break their larp. Consider: Will your hack shut down play for others? Will it derail the plot? Will it break parts of the design that are working? We owe it to our fellow players to ask these questions before implementing a hack.
Step 4 – Implementation
You have a hack, you have thought it through, and now it is time to put it into action. Usually the method of implementation is baked into the design of the hack. In most cases it is a case of JFDI (“Just Do it.”), although sometimes the pace and timing is important. An elegant hack can be a beautiful piece of design, made all the more clever because it is done from within the larp itself.
Conclusion
Sometimes a larp does not work, either for us as individual players or for a number of participants. When a larp goes off-rail, it is not necessarily anybody’s fault, not the designers and not any particular players – it just happens because larps are prone to emergent chaos. For various reasons we may not want to rely on organisers to resolve these issues. Perhaps they are unable or unwilling to compromise their design. Perhaps we don’t want to discuss it with them, either through a lack of trust, or more likely because we see them as fellow larpers under an inordinate amount of pressure and choose not to burden them with our faux-world problems.
There are plenty of strategies available for larpers when things are not working but most of these approaches are techniques that work within the structures of the larp. Sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes in order to play the game, you need to change the rules.
Feeling tired, though you have slept well, stayed hydrated and eaten? Having a hard time concentrating, but you do not want to take a rest?
Though mindfulness is a bit of a trendy word to use right now, I find that we should learn to use mindfulness as a way to steer our own play and to be more aware of here and now. Because here and now is really more what it is about. Some of us have easier to keep our minds focused on one thing at a time, while others might feel their thoughts wander away, and then maybe not always going the positive way. Using exercises to keep one’s mind on track is a way I personally have tried at larps ever since a friend (non-larper) once asked “Isn’t larp like mindfulness all the time?”. That one curious question has followed me since then, which is also why I wanted to share this with you as a reader.
There are many different exercises out there, and many working very different from person to person. You will probably find a difference in learning exercises in your native language compared to for example English, which is why I will encourage you to search around the web for something that will work for yourself.
The examples of exercises I will provide here are some I have tried at larps myself. The breathing stair I personally find to be easy to use even when being among a lot of other people, and I don’t necessarily need to be still or to have to close my eyes. It’s more about being aware of your breathing than to actually have to go through with the whole exercise. Depending on the larp genre, the focus exercise is easy to put in many different situations, since you don’t actually have to go through all of your senses if you don’t want to. For example, If there’s a ritual with chanting/singing/music I find perfect to just close my eyes for a while and listen.
Maybe reloading should be a better word than mindfulness? I have found myself feeling both more into my immersion and focused at whatever I’m doing after a quick exercise. And if I have felt that I am not in control of my own experience, I have also felt that taking that short break and allowing myself to be here and now, have helped me create a better larp for myself.
The Breathing Stair
If possible and if you want to, close your eyes. Imagine that you are supposed to (slowly) walk up a stair with ten steps, but you have to count your breaths while doing so. You count in “in one” and “out one”, focusing on the breathing and the counting.
In, one
Out, one
In, two
Out, two…
When coming to the top of the stairs at ten, you can, if you want to, stop there for a while and just mentally stand on that top platform. And when you are ready, you turn and walk down, doing the same thing, but going from ten down to one.
If you lose count anytime during the exercise, it’s fine. Instead of stopping and starting over, compliment yourself for noticing that you lost your count or focus, and just go on from the step that you think that you were on before.
Focus
This is about very consciously choosing what you wish to focus on with your senses. If possible, close your eyes and pause what you are doing. Try not to value any of the impressions you get. You don’t necessarily have to focus on all of the senses, and you can stop any time you want, it’s not an exercise where you have to wait or do something special to stop with it.
Start with listening.
What are you hearing when listening to your left? What are you hearing when listening to your right? What do you hear when listening to sounds coming from behind you? Are any sounds louder? Do you hear sounds from very nearby or from far away? Is there sounds suddenly appearing?
Then shift your focus to what you see. The things around you. Look at one thing at a time. Are there any special colours? Reflections in the light? Any shifts in the texture of things? Then move on to focus on what you feel. Let your koncentration go through your body. How does your clothes feel against your skin? If you are sitting down, how does what you sit on feel? Can you feel the air against the skin on the top of your hands?
And finally try to notice if there’s any special smell around where you are. How does that smell? From what? Do you recognise any of the smells?
Bibliography
Bernd Hesslinger, Alexandra Philipsen and Harald Richter (2016). Psykoterapi för vuxna med ADHD: En arbetsbok. Hogrefe Psykologiförlaget.
Stepping outside your comfort zone to try out something new at a larp can be scary. Whether that new thing is performing, being a leader, or playing a very touchy-feely character, it is easy to fear failure and have the whole larp ruined as a consequence.
But playing with the same safe characters and themes can get boring. And at its best, venturing outside your comfort zone can not only be empowering and fun, it can be outright transformative (Bowman & Hugaas 2019).
These tips aim to help you feel more secure and in control when trying out new things. They work best for where players have some control over the content of their characters and at least a few weeks to prepare before the game.
1. Limit the amount of scary new things to one or two per larp
Larping is often exhausting. There are so many things to remember, from character backgrounds to safety rules, that some anxiety is only to be expected — even without the addition of scary new things. If on top of this mental load you add too much at once, you run the risk of feeling completely overwhelmed even before the larp has started. Inversely, knowing you only have one or two new things to tackle helps you feel more in control.
For example, when playing a fighter for the very first time, try to have the fighting be the only completely new thing you need to do. Don’t take on a character who also needs to hold a war council, make a public speech, and be evil, if all of these things are new to you as well.
2. Have a safety net of familiar things to fall back on
Doing new things at larps means having to learn how to do them, and learning happens best in the zone that just borders our comfort zone (Algayres 2019). Your comfort zone in larps is in familiar things: the characters you find easy to play and the skills you excel at. Use these as your safety net. This way you won’t have to be out of your comfort zone all the time. You can try out that scary new thing, and when you start to feel overwhelmed, you can fall back on your safety net. Even if, at the end of the larp, the scary new thing still feels scary and new, you can gain a sense of accomplishment from the things you are good at.
For example, if being touchy-feely is outside your comfort zone, but engaging in witty banter feels very comfortable, combine the two traits in your character. That way you can fall back on being witty when touching others feels hard, and you can still feel you are playing your character well.
3. Rehearse the scary new things before the larp
Our characters are often experts at something we are not. Very few people are immediately good at something they have never done before and, as a consequence, doing that thing for the very first time at the larp can feel very intimidating
— the opposite of what the character should be feeling. Rehearsing the new things beforehand can help make them feel a little more familiar. Some things can be rehearsed for real — e.g. public speaking or holding a weapon —
but even when that is not possible, many things can be rehearsed mentally. Imagining your character doing their thing helps trick your brain into believing it is not the first time when you finally do that thing for real in the larp.
For example, public speaking is something that is easy to rehearse before the larp, for real or through your imagination. Enlist a few friends to be your supportive and enthusiastic audience, or give a speech in-character to an imaginary audience, immersing yourself in their confidence.
4. Ask others to support you
We all have different things we are good at, things we find scary, and things we are trying out for the first time. Much of the competence of our characters comes from the support and lift we as players give each other. Asking for that support can feel as scary as doing the scary new thing itself because it exposes our lack of expertise. But it also takes away the pressure to be instantly perfect. Telling other people — the gamemasters, people playing your closest contacts, or friends coming to the same larp — that you are trying something new and scary makes it possible for them to support you.
For example, when playing a character who is in charge and has to make important decisions, letting the gamemasters and other players support you takes away the pressure of having to succeed everything on your own. Find ways for the others to help you make those decisions in a way that does not undermine your character’s authority or your own sense of competence.
There is no way around it — doing scary new things at larps is scary. The trick to doing them anyway is finding ways to maintain a sense of security and control when taking the plunge.
A heuristic technique, or a heuristic for short, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect or rational, but which is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal. Wikipedia, 2019
Larps are complex. Once runtime starts, each individual player is expected to improvise actions that are, in an ideal world, in line with the thematic vision of the writers and designers, that further the story or plot of the larp, that are true to their character’s nature and motivations, and that don’t block play for others. At the same time, once a larp has begun, no one — including the organizers, knows everything that is going on. Needless to say, things can get messy and players get stuck. A bad larp experience can often originate from the first moment when a player doesn’t know what to do.
Sometimes at the afterparty, when I tell a co-player about moments where I got stuck during a larp, their response is “oh, when that happens to me, I always do this…” This happens particularly often whenever I talk to players with more experience than I have — experience meaning general larp experience, experience with the genre or style, or experience with larps run by the organizing crew in question. On hearing their response, my mind goes, “why didn’t I think of that?” The answer is that strategies like these usually are employed as a substitute for thinking.
Heuristic techniques help us reduce the load of decision making. They’re especially useful when it’s not possible (or just not worth the time it would take) to find an optimal solution. They are mental shortcuts that are generally good enough. Examples of heuristic techniques include rules of thumb, educated guesses, intuitive judgments, stereotyping, profiling, and common sense (Wikipedia, 2019). And we use them all the time, every day, not just in larp. Typically, they look something like this: “If X happens, do Y”, “If option X is available, always choose option X”, “When making a choice, always lean towards X”, or “If you don’t know what to do, try X first”. Heuristics sometimes don’t give us the result we wanted, but they often work as a starting point for getting us there. As you gain experience in a field, you typically build and refine a wide repertoire of heuristics.
Let’s say you’re in a traditional Vampire larp and you’re feeling stuck. Heuristics that might help you get unstuck could include “if you don’t have anything to do, find someone and ask if they are in need of a favor” or “if nothing is happening, use obfuscate to spy on someone”. However, larp heuristics can be used for more than getting yourself unstuck. They can be about preferences, helping you generate scenes you typically find fulfilling, or to steer you away from play you find undesirable. A heuristic I employ in almost all larps I play is “if a council is about to be formed, look for the nearest exit” — I find that larp councils tend to generate play that rarely leads anywhere, so I avoid them when I can, and this way I don’t have to think about whether this time the council will be a good idea. To me, it’s worth sometimes missing out on a bit of interesting play to avoid what will most likely be an experience I don’t enjoy. Another great area for heuristics is during the awkward few hours at the beginning of a game, when players are all still mapping the larp and no one really knows what to do yet. An example could be “If you have no idea what is happening, find a character in a uniform and start demanding answers”.
Heuristics are practical. They’re directly applicable to situations — they aren’t abstract concepts or theoretical knowledge. This means that they don’t tell you why something is the way it is, or why an action is a good idea in a situation, just that it generally works. They’re often also personal — they might not work for everyone. A heuristic is also not a general approach or philosophy for an activity (for example, “play to lose”
is not a heuristic).
In a situation where I’m trying to learn, I find heuristics useful because they provide a point to start practicing. Practice then leads to experiences that can be talked about, thought about, and analyzed, which allows one to see new perspectives that can be generalized and learned from.
Across the wider larp community, players likely have thousands of heuristics they rely on. Gathering them so they can be categorized and compared to each other is one interesting place to start if we want to systematically explore what we do when we play.
Example Heuristics
If the arc of my character is driving towards something — killing a prince — and GMs stop me offgame — they need him alive — I have to resolve the tension in my character. Instead of dropping it, I’ll betray my character — I try, but fail — so I do the thing, but without the outcome. Monica Hjort Traxl
Cold play makes me as a player very anxious. When there is a lot of it, I make it my character’s problem. I bleed-in the emotions I am feeling, and invent diegetic reasons why it’s happening. It’s like putting my play in a microwave. Moyra Turkington
When I feel bored, I ask myself: What is my character lying to herself about? Then I find reasons to be with characters who complicate those feelings uncomfortably. Exposing character self-vulnerabilities boosts excitement and emotions in play, and diversifies who I’m playing with. Moyra Turkington
Share your character’s beliefs and skills with others precisely when your character doubts them — hold your values to the flames. During a crisis of faith, I recruit other characters who aren’t doing much and give them lessons, letting the doubt show. Evan Torner
Whenever a crowd gathers to sing songs by the fire I find something else to do. I find it hard to play there — the fire makes people tired and they’re singing, so it’s hard to talk to them, and bringing a big scene in disrupts things and is rarely welcome. Karin Edman
During the first few hours of a larp when everything is awkward, if you have no idea what is happening, find a character in a uniform and start demanding answers. You’re unlikely to get answers, but you’ll find some play. Magnar Grønvik Müller
Find your character pre-game by devising three unique things —emotional, physical, or behavioral— to portray them. For example, “never smile,” “seek affirmation,” or “slouch.” They can be changed or abandoned mid-game if you forget them or they don’t work. Elina Gouliou and Simon Rogers
Never forget the Max Weber dictum that the three ways to get humans to do things are bureaucracy or tradition, charismatic authority, and fear. Also: using any of the three can make your character seem like an asshole. Good. Let them think that. Evan Torner
Try shouting or screaming your character’s name loudly. If it can’t be shouted, your character will need a nickname that can be — or you need to — pick a different name. Elin Dalstål
When I find myself not having fun in a larp, I choose another player and Play For Them. I become an NPC serving their story. Reframing the game transforms it with new goals and measures of fun, turns frustrated play fruitful, and makes someone else’s game shine at the same time. Moyra Turkington
When I feel disconnected in large games, I pick another character that my character is secretly in love with and a reason I can never confess it. It gives me charged connections and instant opinions on them and everyone they know and interact with in character. Moyra Turkington
If I want an exit from a larp where it’s appropriate, I plan a dramatic death scene. Go out in a blaze of glory so my nemesis sees me become a hero and my best friend can mourn, or make a smaller moment and slowly expire in the arms of a loved one. Jeffrey Mann
If a council is about to be formed, look for the nearest exit. I find that larp councils tend to generate play that rarely leads anywhere, so I avoid them when I can. Magnar Grønvik Müller
If I’m going to plan a secret meeting or conversation, I always leave the doors open or at least ajar so other players can listen in. If the secret affair or money laundering-plot never gets out during the larp then what’s the point of having it? Elvira Andemore
When playing with a competitive opponent in a larp with secrets, I always arrange to talk offgame options like transparency or fate play and to make sure we are on the same team: people who want to have a good time together. Michael Freudenthal
If no one seems to notice that my character is ill or drunk, I go for a big loud gesture. Knock over a table while stumbling. Start a fight with a marine surrounded by all her buddies. Collapse on a table where a bunch of people are sitting (if it looks like they aren’t doing something intense). Drop a metal tray that will clang satisfyingly. Jeffrey Mann
What Do We Do When We Play? contained a number of short articles giving personal perspectives on play situations. These are gathered here.
Ask Questions Later
Kathaleen Amende
I was raised on parlor larps where non-diegetic calibration is frowned upon. And despite running freeform games for years, I occasionally still find myself fighting the (unhelpful and sometimes harmful) instinct to always “do what your character would do.” Such happened recently at a two-day international larp.
During the first night of the event, through reasons that were no one’s fault, I found myself feeling isolated from the game and my fellow players. I knew I had to make a drastic change in my story. I wanted the change to be true to me and good for the game, so I asked myself two important questions: 1) what kind of play at this larp looked the most fun to me? and 2) what could make a positive impact on the game? In this case, I’d been enjoying watching the blackmailers and criminals conduct business, and there was a clear and growing demand for a drug dealer who could access what drugs remained.
I approached both the organizers and the person whose character controlled the drugs, and told them about my concerns with my game. They not only supplied me with access to the drugs, they worked with me to create a story for this change. My character, as written, believed completely in the rule of law, but by ignoring that fact, I was able to vastly improve my experience.
What I discovered was that sometimes, the change has to come first, and then the narrative reason for the change. So now, when players at our own events find themselves disconnected or isolated, we ask them the two questions I asked myself that day, and we help them find the answers. So far, it’s worked every time.
Battling Perfectionism
Julie Artula
“Wait, I’m not ready!“
“This doesn’t look right.“
“Oh no, it’s not working…“
I often catch myself wanting to get it ’just right’: just a little more of this, just a bit less of that. The risk: hyperfocusing on details rather than granting things the freedom to develop as they will.
Playing Raine — a rebel character who didn’t give a fuck — helped me be more relaxed about this. Instead of checking on and chasing after all the things that could be happening, it allowed me to simply lie down on a lawn outside. If plot comes my way: great! If not: great, I can also just enjoy being present in character!
Let’s face it: that cool plot waiting around the corner doesn’t depend on anything but YOU being there to take part in it. Nobody but yourself judges, expects or maybe even knows what you had in mind for whatever you’re worrying about! Mostly it will neither impact your ability to larp, nor what makes this larp memorable for yourself and others.
Consider turning it into an advantage. I wore a fake tattoo carrying a lot of meaning for my character and was frustrated when it wore off faster than expected. But I realized that this could provide a great opportunity for play: why not let Raine’s fading tattoo symbolize her receding ability to remember her most joyful memory? Suddenly she had a new goal and more play-to-struggle material: admitting her drug addiction to herself and others, and finding a way to quit.
Larp is all about giving ourselves permission to play. Let’s re-discover and celebrate the liberty of not having to fear bad consequences of something not working out as planned!
Don’t let your perfectionism tell you otherwise — sometimes it’s refreshing not to give a fuck.
Claiming Space
Kaisa Vitikainen
Two years ago I crossplayed for the first time. I had never larped a man before, and I was nervous about it. For three days straight, I would put on a binder and sideburns and pretend to be Samuel Skala, Prefect of House Durentius. Would anyone take me seriously?
I needn’t have worried. The larp went amazingly well as far as crossplaying was concerned. It didn’t matter if the binder couldn’t quite hide my breasts, or if I was too short or too feminine. I was treated as a male, and the experience blew my mind. I didn’t have to claim space; I was given it. People listened to me. I was taken more seriously than I had been as the Headmistress at previous runs of the same larp.
When I gushed about this experience to male friends afterwards, they seemed bemused, and at times amused as well. I suppose they couldn’t quite understand what a big deal it was, and my excitement about it might have seemed overblown. They couldn’t relate.
But it was a big deal. At first I thought: I need to do this again! I need to do this a lot! But as the initial excitement faded, I decided not to let the satisfaction of being treated as a male be my only takeaway from the experience, as fantastic as it had been.
I haven’t crossplayed since. I’ve learned to claim space in new and different ways, and in moments of uncertainty during larps I have sometimes asked myself, “What would Sam Skala do?” Surprisingly often, it works. It’s not the same, of course, and it’s much harder when not playing a male character, but using what I learned crossplaying to be given space as a non-male character can be just as satisfying.
Cold Equations
Elisa Tognari
I played Bunker 101 twice. Some context: halfway through the game, a character does something that (while in good faith, done to save his seriously ill companion) puts the entire community at risk. The Bunker is too small and resources are too scarce for a prison. The only way to protect the community from criminals is exile; effectively a death sentence.
The first time I played, I felt the duty to protect the community: the fragile balance that separated us from extinction depended on the isolation of potential dangers and the person responsible had to be thrown out.
The second time, I was this man’s colleague and friend: I knew his desperation and anguish. He had to be protected and understood, not punished! Was life in a society without mercy or compassion worth it? If that was the cost of survival, I preferred extinction.
The problem was that I wasn’t playing games. Both times I was sincerely, painfully convinced of my arguments. Both times I cried, frustrated and hurt, and struggled to make my voice heard, defending opposite positions.
Thinking back, I still cannot decide which position was valid.
Coldly, out of character, I evaluate the two points of view to find a definitive answer, but I see the reasons and the shortcomings of both, and cannot choose. Both times I perceived my opponents as misguided and foolish — once because they were blinded by sentimentality, once because they were cold and cruel.
Through empathy people can be driven to dangerous actions, which elicit instinctive and irrational responses. However, cold calculations that do not recognize human suffering are just as dangerous, leading to cruelty that justifies itself with higher values, careless of what is left behind.
I still cannot find a balance between these two positions, but I will always be grateful to this larp for putting me on this road paved with doubts, which leads me every day to be more aware of the choices I make.
Larping the Language Barrier
Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen
In Ennen vedenpaisumusta (“Before the Flood”, 2019) my character Viktoria was a recent Russian immigrant to Finland. I’m a native Finnish speaker but wanted to somehow demonstrate that Viktoria wasn’t. We discussed language issues within our small character group of Russian immigrants. We definitely did not want to be offensive, so we decided to avoid fake accents and concentrate on what kind of mistakes or hypercorrect forms a non-native speaker with a Slavic language as their mother tongue would make in Finnish. I tried to think about non-native Finnish speakers that I know, and a co-player consulted their linguist friends and shared some tips with us. At the beginning of the game we asked other players to play up our character’s lack of fluency.
This all combined made it possible to find Viktoria’s language. Playing with others that also spoke this way reinforced the patterns. Our characters were highly educated, so it was also natural to sometimes use English or other foreign words instead of common Finnish ones. Just occasionally stopping to think about a word had a great effect and gave other characters the chance to fill in missing words or to correct my character.
Language was an effective tool in in-character relationships. Friendly characters were helping out and encouraging my character to speak. When Viktoria encountered Finnish officials, the language barrier made me feel the same helplessness and desire for validation that my character was feeling — after all, she was not stupid even if she didn’t speak perfectly. I also often dropped the broken Finnish when speaking to Russian contacts to point out that it was easier to talk to them, although we didn’t explicitly agree on simulating Russian this way.
Overcoming Larp Shyness
Mátyás Hartyándi
My initial return to boffer larps was a boring and frustrating experience. I did not know anyone, felt that I had been left out of the main plot and was constantly worried about ruining play for others.
I value larps as secure spaces for bold behavior experimentation where consequences are interesting but not real. I am an impulsive player who likes to jump into tense situations and escalate quickly, but I also care a lot about others and do not want to dominate scenes. I felt utterly powerless as I did not know how to use my improv skills and consent techniques in this setting.
I did not give up. I asked for suggestions from veteran players and started planning. I wanted attention regularly but not exclusively. I was defining goals and searching for types of interaction which are exciting but not limiting to others, etc. I wanted to hack the traditional experience.
Thus a decadent poet character was born. This way I could easily get my quick attention fix by reciting witty or naughty verses I had memorized. By playing a drunkard I could be uninhibited, unpredictable but harmless. Ah, those mood swings! I was sobbing in the corner after dancing on a table. I was pitiful, overly honest, mushy, funny, childish or wise at times.
Heavy in-game drinking enabled me to escape situations by collapsing, and letting others help or exploit me (both are great!). I was dragged up and down, robbed and saved, fooled out of money, etc. Enacted blackouts also allowed me to start any conversation over and over again (a soft, diegetic repeat technique!).
This well-prepared role was a useful excuse to be over the top but not dominating. A memorable experience for every participant!
Show, Don’t Tell
Ruska Kevätkoski
You have crawled into the skin of your character and become my sister, officer Hali Okuma. I am reporter Oriel Cook. We are onboard ESS Odysseus and the world has ended. Throughout the larp we try and ultimately fail to find shelter in each other.
Our characters have been out of touch for several years, ever since they fell out over differences of opinion. In their every interaction there is bitterness and doubt mixed with love and implicit trust. We let ourselves be drawn together and then push each other away, again and again, with increasingly small gestures.
There is an easy familiarity in the way you talk to me, interlaced with uncertainty. We share secrets; we invite each other to understand and misunderstand. We create play out of half-finished sentences, hesitant pauses and interruptions. Shared laughter turns sour with a single wrong word. The downturned corners of your mouth tell me your character disapproves, so does a huff, the way you cross your arms and look away. But simply by coming to sit by my bed you communicate there is still love. When I improvise a “remember when…”, you say you do, and just like that shared history is born and becomes meaningful. Later a single glance tells me Okuma is worried for her little brother. Later still a memento tossed at me says: this is the end.
I have known this before, but you have shown me again how powerful and beautiful it can be to communicate not with full explanations and grand gestures but with things so small and fleeting they can be easily missed.
You don’t tell me who Hali Okuma is. You show me and trust me to understand.
Talking to Strangers
Suus Mutsaers
I usually try to avoid joining ongoing campaigns. I’ve often felt that it’s harder to get involved in ongoing stories when joining halfway. Last year, contrary to my usual modus operandi, I joined a campaign retelling The Three Musketeers in steampunk.
I had the pleasure to play Agnes, a young beggar who was called a saint by the people of Paris. When I received the character sheet she had several connections, most of whom were upper class characters with full agendas, which showed at the game. Although all her connections acknowledged Agnes’s presence, there was little to actually play on besides the formal introductions. Very soon, I started to feel bored. I felt my character was lacking plot hooks that would properly draw me into the story.
Agnes had a few dominant characteristics. Carefulness and standoffishness were the major ones, the result of a childhood on the streets of Paris. But she also cared deeply about the people around her. I decided to amplify that aspect and started approaching characters who were alone and in distress. I decided to disregard some of the distance she was written with in favour of my own fun.
Observing the other player groups, picking up on discussions and fights and then approaching the to me unknown characters afterwards when they were alone brought me just what I needed. In vulnerable moments most of them actually wanted to talk to the innocent-looking stranger who was offering a shoulder and a smile. Many of them entrusted Agnes with their secrets, giving me plenty of plot hooks to continue with.
Disregarding the characteristic that got in my way while playing brought me a story that I’ll gladly return to. After all, I definitely want to figure out if she actually makes it to become an official church-acknowledged saint.
The Larp I Won and the Larp I Lost
Berber Wierda
Once upon a time, I won a larp. I played a cooperative game without a win state, yet I came home claiming I won, and even the larpwright agreed with me. Why? Because my character, against all my expectations, achieved all she could have possibly hoped for. A closer bond with her one surviving relative, an explanation of her past, two friends where first she had none, and even two suitors to round things off. It was awesome. This larp is among my favourite games ever.
Once upon a time, I lost a larp. I wasn’t playing to lose, per se. The game was a beautiful symbiosis of characters enhancing each other’s stories. Still, at the afterparty, I was quite adamant I lost the larp, and the organisers seemed to agree. Why? Because my character lost everything he thought he had. His certainties, his hopes and dreams, his family bonds, and the love of his life, all gone in an instant because of his own actions but despite his every intention. It was awful. This larp is among my favourite games ever.
Both of these games were two-day one-shots, a format I had found difficult because it offers less time than longer-running series to achieve the immersion that I want and need from a larp; the experience of becoming someone else and seeing the world from another perspective. Winning and losing, in all their intensity, were a shortcut to immersion, showing in clear, exhilarated or desperate outlines what a character wanted or needed, how they were wired. Large emotions and life-changing events, I found, are a story hack. They’re a form of shorthand, a window to a character’s essence.
And that essence is my ultimate participation trophy.
The Mum, the Boss, and the Nymph
Hanne Grasmo
My youngest son was taken away by the almighty Grey Ones, to live forever as one of them in their castle in the sky. My tears, they wet my cheeks, my blouse, my skirt, the floor. I did not care about the comfort of my seven other children. This was the one I could never lose.
Vintereventyr
I have always used larps as a way to learn about myself, to explore possibilities for who I can be. 25 years of larping has made me who I am today, I think. In 1996 I decided to maxi-mize three of my personal features and build three different characters around them: With the Mother, from the example above, I wanted to be the kindest, most caring version of Hanne. I asked for a character who was a mother in the Nordic fairytale larp Vintereventyr (The Fairytale of Winter), and they gave me a pre-scripted one with eight kids! The youngest was my own real-life son, eight years old. So of course the bleed was enormous when HE was the chosen one. He even wanted to leave with them. I am sure I cried two buckets full during the larp, for all the things that happened to my kids!
The next one I wanted to play was the myth “Hanne Grasmo” — I already wrote for an erotic magazine then — and as purely sexual as possible. The designers of the philosophical fantasy larp Løgnens Rike (The Kingdom of Lies) had a long inter-creative process together with each and every player, and together we made the nymphtroll Ediiitha. I even had sexual magic to seduce the humans together with my two nymph-friends. All through the larp’s seven days I only whispered or climaxed. The most fierce and explorative one was maybe in full day-light, outside the village inn, when I orgasmed three times riding my staff. The villagers thought some weird magic was going on!
I also wanted to play strong and bad. In my career and organisational life I have often been in a manager position. So I chose the dystopian sci fi-larp Kybergenesis for this. I just stated I wanted to play one of the administrators, and I made my pre-scripted character come to life with the strongest and worst sides of my role as “leader”. Just once I went out of character to check if I had treated someone too bad: I cut a scene where a young worker had spent two hours in a stand-up cell, and was then interrogated, to ask if he was okay. After all, he was shivering all over. It was my fault: I forced him to have sex with me and placed a condom in his pocket. Since sex was forbidden for the worker class, I tipped the Police Force and they caught him hard. Then the young man met me, The Ultimate Leader, as the Judge in court.
So who was she, Hanne Grasmo, after this self-explorative year of larp? I found all the characters spoke truth to me. The Mother, the Nymph-troll, and the Boss are aspects of me I both fear and cherish. I learned I could be even more shamelessly heartful, horny, and bossy. I think I still have self-confidence to be more of me because of those three characters. On the other hand, the interactivity and embodiment of larping taught me how my powers can affect others very negatively, and make them avoid or even hate me.
The most important lesson, which I have striven for since, is to play as close to home as I can. Then may larp characters have transformative powers.
Uplifting Antagonism
Jasmin Lade
For On Location (2019), I was cast as The Diva. By establishing her status through pre-game calibration, I made sure the threshold for others’ emotions towards her was somewhere between “respectful pity” and “scared shitless”. However, it was very important to me not let the character become a caricature and slip into antagonist NPC territory.
I didn’t make her lose her cool over every little thing. She had a temper, yes, but more like a ticking time bomb with a hidden countdown than an active landmine. For example, when another actress showed up wearing the matching skirt to my top, the diva didn’t have any reason to be angry about such a petty thing. My character remained calm and we had fun with it, which had a surprising element to it because it played with the established expectations towards my character. Because I didn’t push the other character away, we had several lovely interactions throughout the day and created play for others around the fact that we wore matching clothes.
In general, gracefully walking the established baseline will make every deviation from it all the more impactful. The Diva’s extreme was explored at a point in the larp where all characters were on edge after having been in this house for several weeks. She was annoyed at another character and ultimately had him cowering in a corner after slapping him. This short scene helped cement a fearful respect and it gave many others a topic to discuss.
When playing an antagonist, you don’t have to play at extremes the whole time. Often it can be enough to just establish that the extremes within a character and their status exist, and let the tensions simmer.
You Make Me Brave
Ruska Kevätkoski
On the other side of the curtain, a nightmare world awaits.
My heart is pounding, but not out of fear. I feel eager, excited, exhilarated. I glance at my watch, tighten my grip on the prayer beads. I look at my teammates with a reassuring smile and step through the curtain. I am admiral Radford Luke, the Master of the School of the Endless Journey. I am a Dreamwalker and as I step into the dream, I am not afraid.
Which is a little unfortunate. This is a horror larp, and as a player I expected to be frightened. I wanted to feel fear in a safe and supportive environment. I wanted to experience that adrenaline rush, and after the larp ends, I find myself a little disappointed that I have not.
Strong immersion into a character’s mindset, I have just confirmed, can override my own deep-seated inclinations. A fearless character can make me brave for the duration of the larp. A calm character can soothe my often hyper-active mind. A character with a healthy appetite can help me eat. The same is also true in reverse. In the next part of the campaign I experimented by inflicting Radford with some neurological problems. By the end of the larp I was genuinely stuttering and feeling weak.
I can make this “immersion override” work for me. I can take on challenging characters and trust that I will be able to handle whatever my character can, or I can give my characters traits that will make the larp a little easier for myself.
And the next time I immerse myself into Radford’s mind, I can rectify my previous disappointment. I will give him a fear, and then we can both be frightened together.
All humans have experienced being shy or uncomfortable, and we generally fear being unwelcome — in larps as elsewhere. For some participants, though, the stakes are higher. What they are worried about is not a lonely moment or a frustrating experience, but being singled out, experiencing social violence like out of character humiliation or racism, or even for a stranger to become physically violent towards them.
When such worries come true, the result for them is not just a bad larp, but pain, anger and heartbreak. It is bad enough to have to face prejudice in daily life. To not be allowed to escape it, even in other lives in fictional worlds, can feel like being robbed of an especially important freedom. Such experiences have led players to disengage from larp entirely, which is a loss for our communities and a failure for us as collectives of players.
Many of your co-players at different larps will have real-life experiences of violence, harassment, and social rejection based on racism, homophobia, transphobia, or other kinds of cultural bias. Some will have experiences of fearing for their lives because of acting or being “wrong” relative to social norms in the real world. You may or may not know; they might even come across as strong and unbothered. Either way, the calculations they make as they larp are necessarily different from someone whose expectation of the world generally is to be seen and respected. This article will try to illustrate how our differences in experiences and expectations can affect how we larp.
When we play, we automatically use our cultural knowledge to make assumptions about the goals, intentions, identities, and personalities of the people who play with us. However, inserting our social bias into play also has counterproductive results. We often miss cues or opportunities from our fellow players, and may unintentionally associate them with their ingame role — to the point where it’s quite common for the player of the villain to introduce themselves to people after the larp by saying that no, they’re not actually that horrible character.
You might assume that the player of a character you read as socially confident or sexually aggressive is equally comfortable being socially confident or sexually aggressive when the larp is over, or that someone whose attempts to play a powerful character fell flat is a bad leader in real life. In most cases, we know not to trust our assumptions about who the player is after a larp is over. But with everything going on in a larp, we’re not as good at not assuming things about people during play. Most assumptions are harmless, and often our co-players won’t even notice. But when those assumptions reflect internalized bias, they can cause harm.
When we engage in play during a larp, we are always betting that our suggestions — our social bids (Edman 2019) — will be picked up on by others and create interesting interactions.
When you burst into the room with an urgent message for the Queen, you are betting that other players will respond to you, will give you space to interact, and will mirror the role you are performing back to you — treating you as, say, a royal messenger, not as the court jester or ignoring you entirely. Internalized bias affects how co-players react to the bids we make as we larp.
Ignoring a character as “not serious” or dismissing them as somehow “obviously not important” is one example of internalised bias. Another one would be automatically assuming that a player from an oppressed minority is interested in bringing that oppression into the larp and seeing their character go through it as well. Cultural bias can make it difficult for us to imagine more than a narrow set of stories that would “fit” certain player bodies.
It is not your fault that such prejudiced norms exist in society and inside your mind, but it is everyone’s responsibility to be aware how they limit us, and to work actively to change them. Unwittingly playing on your own internalized bias can entirely derail your co-player’s experience in ways you didn’t intend (Kemper, 2018). You can set the tone of their larp in ways they didn’t want, and in some cases, ruin it entirely.
Most of the time for most players, the outcome of play invitations are safe and predictable. For some players though, certain play situations can be wildly unpredictable, even if they spend more time than their co-players reading the social dynamics of the room and managing risk. This risk management work takes them away from play, weakening the fabric of the larp and hurting everyone’s experience.
Let’s look at some (fictional) examples:
A middle-aged woman, cast as a beautiful libertine, finds herself continually rebuffed by players who say, “It would be like playing with my mom.” She wonders how to get her co-players to play her up without making them uncomfortable and without herself being made to feel undesirable or wrong.
A tall, heavily built man is playing a brooding, emotionally volatile character. He repeatedly asks himself in each scene how much anger he can express to be seen as accurately portraying the character without scaring or hurting his co-players, or removing their agency.
A person who is an amputee is cast as a warrior. Despite meta-techniques that make it clear they are just as capable, they worry players will find excuses to keep them from fighting. “What can I do to make my co-players want me on the battlefield instead of guarding the camp?”
A racialized((I.e., read by others as “not white”)) person playing a historical game notices many players singling them out for play on racism, despite it not being a theme of the larp. They ask, “What can I do to stop my co-players from performing racism they think is historically accurate? What can I do to put myself on the same level of agency as my white co-players?”
A trans player in a larp that engages with physical desire finds herself nervously reading each player, trying to guess who will be willing to engage and where their limits are. Despite a play contract that emphasizes slow escalation and opt out, she isn’t certain that other players will engage at all if she initiates a scene, and is afraid they may react violently.
While most participants in a larp will be steering for a fun or interesting experience, others will be steering around cultural bias or — especially players from marginalised groups — even steering for survival.
Steering is “the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons” (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015). Steering for survival is the experience a marginalized player has in a larp when they’re trying to get through the game without being hurt more than they can afford, while hopefully getting some of the positive or healing things they’d hoped to find.
The ability to read social situations is a learned skill; so is learning to read a larp. As we learn to larp, we all learn to pick up on things like the play bids of others and to read the arc that our character is on so we can evaluate if it’s one we want. Many players find as they larp that they only need to read the fictional situation, and can forget for long stretches of time that the players are actually from our societies and our time. This is a kind of privilege. Their lives and/or their experiences with the particular players have not given them reason to trust that the pain and bias of the real world will not follow them into imaginary places.
In just the same way that learning to read the emotions your co-players are performing makes you a better player, so does learning to read the choices and decisions they may be forced by their experiences of the world to make in their interactions with you. The following is a list of questions your co-players from marginalized identities may be asking themselves during runtime.
Will it be physically possible for me to be where the most play is happening?
How do I need to modulate this (real or portrayed) emotion for my (or my character’s) behavior to not be read as socially unacceptable?
Will other players react negatively to my body in game-breaking ways if I take this action?
What stereotypes are being projected onto me that I cannot modulate via actions?
What kind of play will I not be permitted to engage in that other players are permitted?
How will people misread my emotions or my actions?
How will I be (uniquely) socially penalized for my (perceived, normal) actions?
If I do this, will I be physically or emotionally able to do other things I need/want to do?
What don’t I know, where my ignorance will shock other players or will be held against me?
Will I be able to understand others and/or will I be able to get others to understand me?
Does my role in this larp push me to perform a negative stereotype others may have of someone like me? Can I avoid playing into it, and if so, how?
Are there other players like me also attending? Will their presence be enough to change what I’m able to do or experience, or the consequences it has?
If I do this (normal) thing, will other players react/treat it as real in the fiction/pay attention?
This list isn’t exhaustive, and we’re trying to generalize here — some of these questions will matter more in some play cultures than others. Almost everyone will have to ask some of these questions sometimes; you probably have. Now imagine how exhausting it must be to constantly perform social risk management and navigation as you move through the world. How it might drive you to fear violence or rejection from your environment, and the ways it might make you wary of trusting strangers.
Larp is at its best as a medium when we can push boundaries together, as one ensemble. Pushing together means each of us realizing that our narrative can’t come at the expense of other players. To create space for deep exploration, we first need to build deep and mutual trust within the ensemble. One of the places trust comes from is first understanding the challenges faced by others, and then showing by our actions that we care enough to help them overcome those challenges in whatever way that they want us to, even if it’s inconvenient.
If you are aware of questions your fellow players may need to ask, you’re going to be more able to play together on difficult themes without accidentally hurting anyone or making light of serious issues. If you know your co-players may be steering for survival, you’re less likely to be the reason they need to. Being attentive to how other people’s agency may differ from yours will make you a better co-player for everyone, not just marginalised groups, and contribute to a play culture where all participants will feel more confident engaging in brave play.
While playing and pursuing games with difficult subject matter may be liberatory, there is no point in making games about hard subjects if they drive us apart. If we refuse to acknowledge both our own internal bias, and the need for many of our co-players to adapt around bias, we will not be able to play as deeply as we might hope.
Larp as a medium can tell serious and nuanced stories, but doing so requires us to be brave together. In Nordic larp, we like to tell stories about things that matter deeply in the real world. Many of the subjects we want to explore, like sexism, racism, sexual violence, or the experiences of migration or class oppression, come much closer to the lives of some players than others. To be forced without warning to recreate or re-experience oppression from your everyday life inside a larp can cause emotional or social harm, whether serious or subtle. On the other hand, in some other larp, the same scene can be genuinely liberating — if you have actively chosen to engage, and have the agency you need around the experience and its framing.
Bibliography
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.
This is a tool to give yourself a place to rest but do so in character rather than leave the game. You can use this tool if you are going to a game where your character will take you out of your comfort zone or you will portray a heavy theme. This tool works for both prewritten and self-written characters.
A fail-safe in the context of larp can be anything from a state of mind to a physical placement to a method where you can balance the intensity of your game. It’s a means to allow you to stay ingame at times when you are stressed and otherwise might need to go off game. To boil it down, it is about creating room for you while you explore the embodiment of your character.
Questions to ask yourself:
What do you need to relax?
What helps you become centered?
What does your physical and mental safe space look like?
Is it introspective or extrospective?
Is it shared or alone?
What do you need in situations where you are under pressure?
Solitude or company?
Guidance or to lead or control?
Structure or freedom?
Identifying Your Fail-Safes
Here you find the five core personality types known as OCEAN, which is an abbreviation of the five core traits openness, conscientious, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We are seldom purely one of these types, but we can still use OCEAN to build an understanding of what kinds of spaces and fail safes we can design our game experience around.
Personality type
Type of space
Possible fail-safes
Open
You are very creative and open to trying new things. You focus on tackling new challenges and are happy to think about abstract concepts.
Social
Gravitate towards close relationships where one can share experiences, be it with one carefully selected character/player or in a wider context e.g. where gossip is shared. If you cope well with a distraction (this requires knowledge about what you want/need to avoid) this is an option too.
Conscientious
You spend time preparing and are good at finishing important tasks first. You pay attention to detail and enjoy having a set schedule.
Controlled
Go into relations or scenes that have been negotiated. Focus on making sure you have agency in your relations, i.e. avoid relations where you are dependent on the other players to initiate play. You can also gravitate towards a location when you need to “touch base” with yourself or your group.
Extravert
You enjoy meeting new people and feel energized when you are around people. You may talk before you think. You enjoy being the center of attention, to start conversations and include others.
Public
Thriving in very social and public spaces, you might have a need to go all in and take center stage, be it a literal stage or in dramatic scenes. Being extravert you might also have a need for the opposite: solitude or extra calm places/mindsets. A close (intense)
— not necessarily romantic — relation can be a good place to rest.
Agreeable
You have a great deal of interest in other people and care about others. You strongly feel concern and empathy. You enjoy helping, contributing and assisting others.
Contemplative
As you might tend to be a people-pleaser, make sure you create fail-safes that give you time to reflect on whether or not it’s your needs that are met or your need to accommodate others. You might find enjoyment in having characters that support others — this can be a safe space too.
Neurotic
You worry about many things and you find yourself getting stressed quicker than others. You can experience dramatic shifts in moods. It can take you a while to bounce back from a stressful event.
Familiar
Make sure you have players around you who know you. They can help you stay grounded. Ahead of the game, you should start deciding on physical places you can gravitate towards. If you relax well in contemplation, create fail-safes where you write letters, draw, or read. If contemplation makes you anxious, close relations with whom you can share your (ingame) feelings can help you relax.
The chart offers an overview of the five personality types, what type of space they tend to gravitate towards, and ideas for fail-safes. Use the questions above to start the process of figuring out what safety is for you. Here are a couple of examples.
Example 1 — offgame personality
A player who wants to push their boundaries and play an extraverted character when they are far from one themselves. To accommodate their offgame personality and allow for them to stay in the game the character is designed around several different ways to be at center stage without being in the spotlight. This could be by: always introducing and including new people into conversations (open chair policy). Often seek out new conversation partners and get them to talk by showing deep interest in them. Rarely talk about themselves. And when needed, they could re-treat into a broody and closed mental space alone amidst it all. All these are ways of being deflective: Being in focus but not with attention on them.
Example 2 — offgame energy management
A character at a historic larp has two major themes 1) war trauma, violent, public outbursts of PTSD and 2) homosexuality in an era where this is punishable by death. Both themes have the potential to be extraordinarily heavy and the player is afraid they will end up spending more energy on this portrayal than they have or want to. To balance this out the player put the two themes on each end of a scale, where at each end the intensity are a volatile trauma and overt gayness.
War trauma
Volatile
↔
Homosexuality
Gayness
This allows the player to balance one heavy theme by playing on the other and vice versa, creating room for both in their game experience. Ingame this scale functions as a coping method with two very different life circumstances.
Humans — all of us — are often bad at being constructive when we’ve hurt others. Luckily, there are skills here we can train and improve. Everyone makes mistakes, but how we handle ourselves afterwards is what matters. This piece focuses on effective apologizing and personal growth, as opposed to ‘just saying sorry’. It examines what you can do in situations where you have been the transgressor and how to achieve a complete apology, including acceptance, knowledge and understanding.
We’ll assume in this article that you don’t mean to cross anyone’s boundaries. If you do, though, your initial reaction may be to withdraw and exclude yourself from larp to keep yourself and those around you safe. You may also recognise a loss of trust, and feel shame accompanying it. What you need,, though, is to recover, heal, and move forward with confidence and trust in yourself. First we’ll look at rebuilding trust in yourself, and then at what it will take from you for co-players to rebuild trust in you.
Where to Start
Accountability and Responsibility
It’s a personal call where a boundary is and when it has been pushed or crossed. Regardless of whether you share that boundary, it’s not your place to decide which boundaries should be respected. This type of accountability can feel like an attack, but it isn’t. Accountability is acknowledging that a line was crossed, and accepting how your behavior has harmed others. To start rebuilding trust you need to first process what has happened and then demonstrate responsibility with changed behavior.
Taking responsibility as an adult doesn’t mean blurting out that you’re sorry immediately when you’ve caused serious harm. This isn’t how a real apology works and is likely more about you seeking relief from shame — and it can also put pressure on the person you’ve harmed, making things worse (especially if it’s a big public production of an apology) Instead, direct the focus away from yourself and onto the situation at hand. Show remorse by making it clear you understand that something has happened and that you take responsibility for doing something in response. Accountability will come as you process what happened and demonstrate that you have changed in ways that will help it not happen again. This may take time and work.
Knowing as a Prerequisite for Change
If you don’t know what you did, you won’t be able to change your behavior. If you know what you did (either because you were told or from your own processing) but don’t understand it yet, you have something you can work on. Intangible knowledge like “you made someone feel unsafe” isn’t enough to work with. You can reach out to the event organizers or the safety team and ask them to help you get the knowledge you need. This isn’t about getting them to solve the situation for you, but rather helping you get the knowledge you need to resolve things yourself. Remember to say this out loud — you know this is your goal but they might not.
A Plan for Change
You need a plan for how to change. Change lets you build trust in yourself. This is where isolation might feel right. Only do this with specific intent, after real consideration, and don’t isolate yourself from people who can help you. Use isolation as a meditative space where you can process what has happened. if you’re doing the work, you will either come to understand what happened, or conclude that you can’t yet, on your own — and this is where you should break your isolation, even though shame will tell you to keep handling it alone. You need feedback and help from others. Reach out to a friend, a safety person, a professional therapist, or all three. For larger or more serious transgressions, you’re likely to need more resources and more time.
How to Apologize
It is hard not to focus on ourselves when we apologize. We mean well, but it comes across as dismissive or explanatory and doesn’t rebuild trust. Here are two tools to help you apologize: the elements of a sincere apology, and the types of apology different recipients may need.
Permission: Ask permission to apologise. Respect it if they are not in a place to receive your apology.
Remorse: Show that you understand you hurt them. Directly say that you are sorry for what you did. We try to say this in many ways but often we are not good at saying it directly.
Understanding: Show that you understand the impact of your transgression. This is about empathy, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. This may be hard and it’s okay to say you don’t fully understand it yet.
Change: Show what you have done and are doing to change. This is the promise you make on how to avoid this in the future.
Forgiveness: Ask for forgiveness. It is not up to you if you are forgiven or not. Know that it might take time — you may not get it at this point.
We have different temperaments, but Chapman and Thomas (2006) theorised we can be put into five categories when it comes to our preferred apologies. Considering what type or combination of types you would need yourself can help you understand what other people need. If you can understand what the person you’ve hurt needs from you, you’ll be better able to communicate a sincere apology.
The Five Languages of Apology
Expressing regret
Is best done by verbalising your “sorry”. Those who fall into this category want to hear that you understand how you hurt them and that you regret what you have done. This is about acknowledging how you’ve affected them emotionally.
Accepting responsibility
Drop the excuses. Those who fall into this category don’t want to know why you did what you did, they want you to own up to the impact of it. Your intention doesn’t matter at this point. Explaining will not do you any good.
Making restitution
People in this category want to know how you plan to change your behavior so it doesn’t happen again. This is about being action-oriented and committed to the change. Words don’t mean much unless there’s a plan and action behind them.
Genuinely repenting
Why did you do it and do you still care? These people want to understand what happened, and whether you’re willing to do what they need to show that you repent.
Requesting forgiveness
This isn’t you being entitled to forgiveness but about you asking for it respecting their agency and the time it takes for them to grant it or not. Ask, give room, and pull away until they are ready to answer.
Bibliography
Gary Chapman & Jennifer Thomas (2006): The Five Languages of Apology. Gale Thompson.
Routines and rituals define much of our lives. A routine, or an everyday ritual, is a reiterated, habitual or mechanical way of behaving. Regardless of whether you’re going to a larp with an everyday or an extraordinary storyline, they can be used as a tool to get a feel of your character before the game and to get or stay in tune with them during the game. Routines can serve several purposes:
Structuring an (ingame) day
Structuring the entirety of the larp
Strengthening the feeling of everyday, or alternatively,
Strengthening the feeling of an abnormal day when broken
When you follow or break your rituals you can steer your experience towards the vision of the game or the game you want. If you have shared your routines with your co-players ahead of the game, they will know what you’re doing and be able to play into it too.
To start forming routines, here are some questions:
Situations
Questions
Waking up
When and how does the character get out of bed?
Morning routine
What do they do before they start their day?
Mealtimes
How do they eat their meals? Are they different from each other – in what ways?
Personal grooming
What do they do before going to bed?
Bedtime routine
How do they get into bed?
Ways around co-workers/formal relations
What does a normal work/activity day consist of?
Leisure time activities
What do breaks from everyday activity look like? What would disrupt/ruin their routine?
Ways around friends
Ways around family / Alone time
How do they prefer to spend time with close relations/
family? Do they like doing this at all?
Example 1: Laura the Maid-of-all-work at Fairweather Manor
In a game designed around work-related activities, the routines of everyday work may come to mind first, but your character will still have their own personal routines. The maid-of-all-work wakes up all other servants, but she gets up even earlier to savour the moment when she has the manor to herself. She spends that time sitting on the big staircase reading. She skips down the hallways knocking on doors — because no one is up to tell her not to do so. Then she goes down to the servants hall to first turn on the coffee and tea pots and she starts the cleaning of the servants quarters. She hums when she works. Her short and sporadic breaks are spent walking outside dreaming of dancing at a ball, and if she has the time she will write a letter home to the family on the farm.
Example 2: Badger of the Machine Dogs at Blodsband Reloaded
Badger wakes up and puts on the clothes and makeup that are specific to the Machine Dogs, a band of engine worshipping road warriors in a post apocalyptic world. She grabs coffee and finds a quiet spot in the sun, angrily staring at everyone before the coffee soothes her mood. Badger needs her coffee and the rest of the group knows to stay away. The rest of the meals are different, eaten while lounging on top of the cars. Whenever Badger has downtime or a quiet spot, she returns to the cars, half asleep on the hood she can feel connected to the engine — and her player can reconnect to the character´s core. Badger doesn’t have a need for personal space, so whenever she sits with other dogs, she’s always touching or sitting close to them.
In this piece, we’ll show you how to cheat when making a costume. Specifically, we’ll look at how you can make an outfit seem historical by identifying a few important visuals elements and using them to communicate a historical period outfit, without needing to actually be historically accurate. Similarly, you can communicate your character’s personality or traits by adding certain items or clothing to their outfit. We will refer to these as communicators.
Our brains are lazy, and built to take short cuts — we fill in the blanks to save energy. If we have two or three dots, our brains will automatically connect them based on our collective and personal knowledge and fill in the rest. By adding known communicators for an archetype as a “dot”, our co-players will recognize it and add the traits of that archetype themselves. The shared cultural knowledge of the Nordic countries is biased towards Western cultural heritage, and this is also the focus of this piece. However, decomposing a look into archetypes works across cultures, and some archetypes are common in many cultures.
When you work through these methods, have in mind which cultures your character and co-players are from. Remember that your perception of color and other gendered communicators may also vary from era to era. When a person wears a golden crown, their (at least Western European) co-players know this person is royalty and treat them accordingly. They know this because the crown is, in Western culture, a clear communicator of ”royalty”. By adding communicators to your outfit, for instance accessories, props, garments, or colors, which visually communicate traits and characteristics, your costume will speak for you, saying things so you don’t have to. Most people already do this unconsciously when planning a larp outfit. We’d like to help you do this consciously.
The Five Bullet Method
The Five Bullet Method is a tool to help you identify the style of clothing you want to achieve. It requires you to have some visual material from the era you want to portray — for example a fashion drawing, a painting, or a photograph. Each bullet in the method is an element — a communicator —and when you combine them you make a style. As we’re talking about costumes (and not historic accuracy) you don’t need to represent every detail to create the impression of an era.
How to Use the Five Bullet Method
Some larps provide you with visual material for costume inspirations, but if the one you’re working toward didn’t, head for Google or Pinterest. We suggest you start by searching for a fashion plate, a drawing or painting of a fully clothed figure, as you will get a full body illustration, unlike many paintings. You might search for
“Fashion plate 1790”.((Other examples of search words you can add: Body: Petite, fat, tall, slim, short, hourglass, triangle, rectangle, inverted triangle. Regency, Biedermeier, Victorian, Edwardian. 1920s Paris, Roaring twenties, Tango. 1930s New York, Film Noir, Femme Fatale. 1940s London, Utility, WW2, post-war.))
Scroll through the results and get an initial impression of the style, look for any similarities in the fashion plates. When you’ve done this, choose an illustration that appeals to you. Now, go through the five bullets while looking at your chosen reference: What does the silhouette look like —where is the waist placed? How long or short are the different elements? Are there visible layers? What are the colors and patterns on the garment? Are there any accessories accompanying the garment? Keep in mind that some fashion plates can be really unusual — it is fashion after all. To get a better picture, repeat this process with a few more illustrations. Compare and combine and you’ll have a stronger foundation for the next step.
The Five Bullets
Lines: The silhouette and where it’s cut. Examples: long and lean, hourglass, waist placement, sleeve shapes, neckline.
Lengths: How long or short. Examples: hemline, sleeves, trousers, vests, differences between day and evening wear.
Layers: Both the invisible layers and how the visible layers show the era. Examples: undergarments, overdresses, sheerness, how the fabric falls, vests, jackets, coats.
Color and pattern: Color schemes favored in the era. Examples: Bright muted, saturated, pastels, contrasting, color blocking. Examples: Large or small motifs: floral, dots, stripes.
Accessories: All the things you wear that are part of the outfit but aren’t the clothes. Examples: hats, gloves, belts, bags, jewelry, canes, shawls, parasols, shoes. Of these items, lines and lengths are the two most important for understanding a look.
Refining the Style
Once you know what the palette of the era you’re working in looks like, you can start to figure out how to represent your character. A character has certain characteristics — age, gender, class, occupation, beliefs etc. They also have personality traits, which are, often points on a scale: — young to old, introvert to extrovert, etc. Which characteristics and traits are most important will depend on the character, game, and genre. When you’ve identified the characteristics you think are most important to communicate to other players visually, it’s time to think about what the communicators are for those characteristics and how to transfer them into costume.
Characteristics
What do we think about when we see a contemporary young adult in front of us? What colors are they wearing? A working class person or noble — what materials are their clothes made of, linen, wool or silk? What, if any, jewelry are they wearing? Clothing often directly communicates these characteristics. For example, in modern Western culture, we associate light pink dresses and lots of white lace with young women, and our brain will fill in all the other traits we associate with being young and female. When defining what your character should wear, start with the characteristics that will set the frame for who they are.
Personality traits
Once you have a frame, look at the details. The table below contains five categories of core personality traits,((The five traits are also known as OCEAN or five-factor model originally drafted by Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal in 1961.)) followed by examples of scalable traits, one at each end of the spectrum. Next to them, you will find suggestions for how to portray this trait with communicators. Remember which country your co-players are from and their cultural background, as these can influence how they interpret the traits and communicators.
Here’s an example. For a musician character, an obvious communicator is an instrument. This could translate into very different looks, depending on their personality traits. Looking at the extraversion scale, for instance — from energetic to reserved, this could be transferred into costume by the communicator color of the clothes. Bright colors will speak of a happy and energetic court jester, and dark colors will give the impression of a moody and reserved bard. Another example from the conscientiousness scale is the trait “organised”. One way of showing this could be the character’s ink-stained fingers and the paper and quill they bring with them wherever they go. Their garments could be controlled and restricted — high neck, all buttons closed, straight tight sleeves, pressed seams, neat, and in perfect condition.
Core Personality Trait
Example Traits
Communicator
Openness
Cautious
Clutching a shawl, cardigan or hat. Subdued colors.
Curious
Magnifying glass. Notebook. Untidy hair or clothes.
Conscientiousness
Organised
Restricticted. Neat. High neck. Buttons closed. Straight tight sleeves. Pressed seams. Subdued colors with controlled splashes of color.
Careless
Stained, mismatched clothes. Clutching a wine glass. Untidy hair or clothes.
Extraversion
Energetic
Loose. Flowy. Bright colors.
Reserved
Controlled clothing or directly opposite to push people away visually. Darker colors. Earthy tones.
Agreeableness
Friendly
A flower tucked behind an ear. Light colors.
Challenging
Shiny high boots. A weapon. A suit. Strict combined with in your face. Bold colors.
Neuroticism
Sensitive
Grasping a handkerchief. Smelling salt. Clothes that cover you. Shawls and scarves.
Secure
Statement jewelry. A suit or tight fitting clothes. Bold colors.
The Sourcing Timeline
When you have made your analysis, you need to source your costume. Luckily, over the past 100- 150 years, fashion has borrowed details from previous eras — so there are shortcuts you can use. Remember, when we’re aiming to make an impression and not a replica, we only need to connect the dots.
In the illustration, you can see a timeline of fashion history in northwestern Europe. On the left is a rough map of the different eras of fashion and what time interval they cover. On the right are the timeframes that different fiction genres have used as inspiration for their clothing, useful if you’re sourcing a genre costume.
To use the timeline, find the visual style or time in history you’re going for and look at the links between that period and more modern clothing. Now that you’ve got specific bullet points that you know need to hit for your era and a set of communicators to make sure others will see your character as you want them to be seen, you can head to a thrift store and look for modern clothes that rhyme with the era you’re trying to recreate and which will fit your character.
For example, if you need a costume relating to the 1910’s, you follow the dotted line to the 1980’s. 80s clothes can have a silhouette similar to the 10s. When you find 80’s pieces in the thrift store, some of them may be close to what you need. Don’t forget that a minor alteration, like where you place the belt, can often shift the silhouette of an outfit putting it in line with your bullet. Adding decorations to a garment can also sometimes help it blend with the era you need it to land in.
Instead of relying on assumed shared knowledge and being uncertain if what we intended to say with our costume will be read as intended by our co-players, we can now work consciously with style and communicators. This will help us find the character for ourselves and help others understand us, letting us be more confident in our costume choices and our play.
Once you have a frame, look at the details. The table below contains five categories of core personality traits,((The five traits are also known as OCEAN or five-factor model originally drafted by Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal in 1961.)) followed by examples of scalable traits, one at each end of the spectrum. Next to them, you will find suggestions for how to portray this trait with communicators. Remember which country your co-players are from and their cultural background, as these can influence how they interpret the traits and communicators.