Playing a dominant character comes with its own set of challenges. Dominant characters come in different forms: authority figures (benevolent or not), antagonists, or outright villains. However, each of these figures presents the same challenges: establishing and displaying dominance in a credible manner, managing interactions with dominated characters, and balancing character domination with respect for player agency.
Roleplaying dominance can discomfit some players who feel they don’t belong in these roles, whether for physical or personality reasons or simply a lack of experience. Another perceived obstacle is that playing with status requires buy-in from fellow players. These factors have led to a widespread belief that playing dominant characters is overwhelming and difficult.
Contrary to this, we believe playing dominant is essentially performative and achievable through a series of techniques. We’ll provide you with practical tips to this end, on three topics:
Understanding your character’s function; and how you can calibrate for the part and structure your personal narrative
How to play on physical dominance when you can’t rely on an imposing physique to do the work for you
Tips and challenges for dominant play
The Function of the Dominant Character
Dominant characters have a variety of roles and functions that determine how they fit into a larp, and you should start by looking at your character in that light. The character can be a leader, an antagonist, or an oppressor, and they might be bringing the group together or providing dramatic conflict. Understanding where your character fits and what they need to do can support both pre-game calibration with other participants and character adjustments you might need to play. Ask the following questions and try to understand where your role fits on these scales:
Active ↔ Disengaged
Leadership: Is the character supposed to exercise authority, distribute tasks, take decisions, and make plans, or do they just occupy a privileged position where they are not expected to take an active role in decision-making? Are they part of enforcing the system or do they just benefit from it?
Brilliant ↔ Inefficient
Efficiency: Is the character good at using their power to achieve their goals, or have they ended up with power they don’t use well, like an officer placed in a position of command due to rank or family connections?
Benevolent ↔ Sadistic
Oppression: How does the character exercise their power in a dominant position? Do they only exercise power when confronted or pushed, will they try to intimidate or command others, or will they abuse their power for personal gain or just out of cruelty?
Legitimate ↔ Usurper
Legitimacy: For obvious dramatic reasons, a dominant character may face a challenge in some form or another. This question is important to examine closely, as it may determine the arc of your larp. A character who faces too much opposition might end up alienated from the rest of society.
Status quo ↔ Downfall
Trajectory: A character’s relationship with their own authority defines a lot about them. Are they trying to hold on to power? Are they trying to gain more power? Are they heading towards downfall? Do they suffer from power fatigue? This aspect of course is fluid, and prone to evolving over the course of the game in response to other players. However, considering potential narrative arcs in advance helps to calibrate and steer the game in the desired direction.
Once you understand these elements, you can figure out where you need to calibrate with other players:
How much will you need them to “play up” your character’s status?
How much delegation of tasks or power will the players of subordinate or submissive characters expect from you?
How much gamemastering does the dominant position entail and how can you make sure your needs for this function are met (ask the organizers)?
Is the character at risk of being isolated or alienated in ways that you don’t want to play out, and if so, which characters could work as a safety net for them?
Is there any aspect of the character that feels hard to play and that needs extra support or adjustment?
How will you display the emotions of your character? Do they have a public facade that they only abandon in more private settings? Will they try to keep face at all times? What could make them break?
There are several things you should track when looking at the function of your role and during calibration. First, you will want to avoid situations where other players do not seem willing to “play up” the character’s status, and if you don’t feel like you’ll be well-enough supported, you should request more “play to lift” to support your character, both from organizers and other participants. Second, dominant characters in leadership positions in particular run a risk of needing to perform runtime gamemaster functions. Try to anticipate these requirements and ask for support from the actual gamemasters as needed. Third, you need to understand how the dominant position will impact your character’s relationships with others, so you can steer toward interactions that will work. Finally, you should try to anticipate where the character’s narrative arc may go and specific challenges they may face, as you’ll need to direct your play more than in a less-dominant role.
The Physicality of Dominance
Dominant characters have power. Power, socially, almost always shows in the body. Self-assured people who feel power over those they’re in a social situation with take up more space. Physicality in larp is a useful tool. It conveys information non-verbally about who your character is, it signals how you would like to be played up, and it’s the basis for all emotionally-nuanced play. If you are playing on dominance, you are relying on other players to confer status on you or on your ability to wring respect out of them.
One of the main challenges in dominant play is tailoring it to bodies not commonly perceived as powerful. Younger, non-male, or smaller players may find it more difficult to convey something that will be read as the physical gravitas of a dominant figure. Even in larps where participants are not supposed to play to your real-life body, it can be difficult for players to eliminate the impact of unconscious bias on how they react. A useful tactic to work around this can be modeling your presentation on an example of a fictional character in a position of dominance analogous to what you will play, and also explicitly telling your co-players about what you’re doing to get the picture in their heads too. Good examples, depending on genre, might include Lyanna Mormont (from Game of Thrones) and Susan Calvin (from Asimov’s short stories).
Some suggestions on how to convey dominance in your character’s physicality:
Dress to impress. Make sure your costume stands out with visible accessories. Think crowns, tiaras, capes or billowing cloaks — elements that set you apart from everyone else or make you feel powerful.
Physical demeanor. Stand straight, shoulders back, head high. If you can’t look people straight in the eye, look at the point between their eyebrows. Do not smile just because of social conventions or out of politeness.
Placement. Place yourself in the center of the room, on the best seat. Surround yourself with your entourage. Do not make way for others. Keep others at a distance if you want to emphasize your superiority, or get right up in their personal space if you want to emphasize your ability to affect them.
Voice and language. Use a loud, projecting voice when you speak in public. Alternatively, speak quietly and force people to lean toward you, or have an underling speak in your place. Make pronouncements and do not waver in public.
Touch. The way we touch each other conveys a huge amount of status information and will affect both you and your co-players emotionally. Be careful about calibration and consent, and then look at how you can physically demonstrate dominance by how you touch your co-players.
Reaction. If you think your character is likely to be challenged during the game, plan your emotional reactions in advance to give the impression of unquestioning authority, regardless of what you’re feeling as a player.
Practice. If these tips do not come naturally to your body, practice in front of your mirror or with friends. Decide on a few gestures or expressions that you can base your performance on. This is significant if your body type is not conventionally read as dominant or you are not routinely rewarded.
Rules of Interaction
As a dominant character, some of the action in the larp will revolve around your character’s power and how they use it. This can include delegating tasks, social hosting duties, conflict management, bullying or hazing, and enforcement of rules, whether they’re pre-existing or just your whims. Looking at the rules that will structure your interaction with others can also be a good way to establish your character.
Here are a few things to think about around how you engage with others as an authority figure:
Start things. Don’t hesitate to generate conflict when it’s useful for you, or simply to initiate play — you have all the cards.
If you’re acting as a leader, delegate as much as you can, but remember to make the tasks playable.
Take breaks and rest; being dominant can be exhausting (especially since players in dominant roles need to devote more mental space to emotional safety and care in handling conflicts, emotionally charged or violent scenes).
Wear a watch — you’re more likely to need to set the pacing of play in a dominant role.
Again, prepare in advance. For example, if you know you need to deliver a certain scene, it may help to have brainstormed some ideas for it.
There are some unique challenges for dominant characters:
Managing adrenaline levels and “villain fatigue”. Playing an outright villain, or even an antagonist can be draining. If you have a lot of victim players to interact with who are all be interested in similar abuse stories, it can also be quite repetitive. It can often be lonely at the top — social exclusion and conflict play can take a lot out of you, emotionally. Self-care and rest is important when playing dominant. Consider making sure you have a positive ally playing close to you for emotional support. If possible, also have someone you share power with so you can tag each other in and share responsibility.
Work with your victims to share the burden of arranging scenes.((See Playing an Engaging Victim by Katrine Wind and Karijn van der Heij in What Do We Do When We Play?)) Inside the fiction, the dominant character may be initiating a scene, but (especially on a meta-level) it doesn’t have to work this way. In particular, you don’t always need to be the one who comes up with the ideas. Encourage players of lower status characters to talk about how they want their characters to be ordered around, dominated, or abused — this will make your job easier and make their games better.
Think about what happens when you’re
“off the clock” in character if you’re playing someone with formal authority. You probably don’t suddenly start treating other characters as your peers, even if you’re playing a kind leadership figure. There can be a lot of interesting play in the subtle friction here, especially if your character’s status conflicts with their own needs or desires.
Conclusion
Not everyone enjoys playing dominant, but it can be accessible for anyone. Playing dominant means using a specific palette of social dynamics when you engage with other characters and shapes which kinds of narratives and challenges you will play out, but with a good foundation, you’ll both have a lot of room to improvise and the confidence to do so . Having a good grasp of how to perform dominance will make your play both more credible and more interesting. Thanks to Simon Rogers for some of the ideas in this piece and early discussions about it.
Non-player characters, even when inhabited by players, are less than human. They are props and toys for the player characters to do with as they please.
Keynote: Nordic Larp, NPCs, and the Future, Jaakko Stenros, Oslo, 2017
The Non-Player Character is an interesting legacy of table-top roleplaying games where the gamemaster would play all of those characters not under the direct control of the players. For larps they have proven useful as plot devices, as functionaries of the game used to make a specific event happen at a specific time or in a predetermined way; or as short term characters who may only be present for a part of the larp. They exist at the service of the larp, and their existence and agency are secondary to those of the player characters. For the purposes of this chapter we will use the term “supporting character”.
For example the Krampus in Midwinter (2020) are supporting characters whose function is to torture, terrify, and re-educate Santa’s elves when they are naughty. The design suggests that all players must visit the Krampus at least once during the larp, and thus the people taking on the role will find that their (functional) play will be intense and unrelenting, but that they will have little time to simply play the character. From a design point of view the Krampus should not have full agency to affect the outcome of the larp, because they have too much power and too high a status.
Similarly guards in a prison larp may spend much of their time moving inmates from one place to another, or teachers in a magic school may have little time to explore personal plots. Antagonists often find themselves falling into a purely functional role, even if they are not supposed to be supporting characters, for much the same reason. However, a larper who takes on a supporting character is role-playing, embodying and experiencing a character with their whole body; so the experience can be just as powerful, or traumatic, or bleed-inducing as playing a full player-character. This short piece asks what we can learn from the NPC, and whether there are any techniques and methods that we can adopt for normal play.
Making Game for Other Participants
Some supporting characters are net producers of alibi, designed to create opportunities for play, to offer that invitation to the players, and to give them explicit permission to engage. A supporting character would not normally directly affect the story of the larp,unless specifically designed to do so. A supporting assassin who murders the queen is less interesting than one who tries to blackmail a player character to carry out that murder, as this second approach creates play for other participants. For example, in Countdown (2019) the host of a live TV show knows that one of the contestants is pregnant; a fact that she is unaware of. Whilst it would be a dramatic reveal to announce this to the world, doing so would reduce the agency of her player. Instead, the host whispers in her ear and leaves it up to her whether or not to let the secret out. Her character arc is her own, and her play — and moments of dramatic revelation — are more important than his. For players this is a generosity of spirit, an acknowledgement that the shared experience of larping is significant and that sometimes our own experience is not paramount.
Providing Alibis for Interaction
In addition, this idea of producing alibi is a useful tool for all larpers; we may create opportunities and invitations for interaction every time we speak to another player, but some larpers may need a more explicit invitation to engage.
“Would you like to dance?” Samuel asks William. This is a literal invitation to play, but William’s player is nervous. He wants to engage, but has not yet made the step from audience to participant. It is very easy for William to say “no,” to look away, to stutter an excuse.
“Can you dance?” is a more interesting opening. If William says “yes” Samuel can follow it up with “Well I can’t! Can you show me how?” and if William says “no” Samuel can either offer to show him, or can admit he is also gifted with two left feet and they can learn together. In every instance the supporting character is offering the player a reason to say yes. A nuanced version of this can be used for oppression play; the antagonist offers a reason to escalate in their line of questioning,
“There are people who you care for?”
“Yes”
“Well if you don’t answer my questions, we will come for them next”
or
“No”
“Then why resist?”
offering the victim both something to fight for and a reason to capitulate.
The supporting character creates new stories and activities, but when these opportunities arise, they pass them over to players and step away. The supporting character creates opportunity for play (makes game), cedes opportunity for play (gives game), and encourages play from all parties (produces alibi). But we can all do this, it simply involves a little extra work: steering for generosity.
Avoiding “Blue-on-Blue” Action
One of the pitfalls of having supporting characters is that they can end up playing scenes amongst themselves. This is particularly common with high status characters. It makes sense to the story for the king and the wizard to argue in the throne room, but their high status tends to force everyone else to become an audience.
High status characters take the spotlight simply by existing. Players want to talk to them. They have access to information and contacts, and they are responsible for taking decisions. Sometimes a co-dependency emerges. Players bring information to the supporting characters rather than sharing it with their co-players, although the supporting characters often have insufficient capacity to assimilate and disseminate the information; so the information gets lost. This bottlenecking comes from poor management or poor design.
Finally there is a high-status tendency to perform; to deliver a speech that takes ten minutes when it could probably have been done in thirty seconds, and when a high status character is talking it is difficult for a lower status character to interrupt. Instead they can facilitate conversation to ensure that everyone who wants to be heard has an opportunity to be heard.
There are lessons here for players, as every criticism aimed at high status supporting characters applies to any high status character. High status players need to be aware of their privilege and use it to create opportunities for everyone to engage.
A larp is a compressed fiction; it offers a finite amount of playable dramatic space which is shared by all participants. An experienced player should be aware of the space they take up and look for ways to share or cede that space.
Hug Your Antagonist
Antagonists are often written as supporting characters because they perform a one dimensional, one directional, or disposable function. An oppressor may do terrible things to generate game for their victims, but it is hard for the victims to willingly engage with their oppressors outside of this context. Indeed characters who are dangerous and powerful can end up isolated. Their energy is directed at their victims, but beyond that interaction there is little opportunity for them to engage with the story. It is a lonely experience to play the sociopath bully.
I was playing an oppressor, and I honestly felt like a ‘Service Top,’ I never really got to play the character at all.
Aleph Behaviour Player, Conscience (2019)
It is easier for a supporting character to interact with an antagonistic player character. Perhaps the alibi of being in a supporting role and thus not having to find a good diegetic reason to interact with the antagonists helps. Because supporting characters are not fully in play, they are in a position to notice when a player character is isolated or disconnected from play and can engage with them and bring them back into the fold.
Recognising the narrative labour carried out by antagonistic co-players is important. Players can engineer interactions with characters who are awful, without expecting awfulness or oppression in return. If we fail to do this, we are treating our antagonist as a supporting character, not a co-player.
Serial Focus
Some players are willing to interrupt what they consider to be a non-dramatic scene in order to inject their own drama, or to further their own play. Supporting characters sometimes adopt the “nothing is more important than the player I am talking to right now” technique; this is a strictly serial order of interaction — essentially a queue — which means that they will always finish the scene or conversation they are having before moving on. The news that another character is bringing might be important to your larp, but it is not as important as the play you are having right now.
Creating an Accessible Character
A well designed supporting character heuristic is to always engage, to always make play, to always have a conversation. Supporting characters tend to accept invitations to play more easily than some player characters (or some players.) This is the most important lesson we can learn from supporting characters: to always find a reason to engage, to initiate play, and to offer other players alibi to engage with you.
We do not want to emancipate Non-Player Characters, we want Non-Player Characters to have the agency to emancipate themselves.
When larping, players don’t always wear costumes, and even when costumed, a character ought to be more than a funny hat. Here, we offer practical ways to flesh out how a character moves and speaks, in the hope of making it easier for you to do so.
Analyzing your Character
However much or little information you receive on the character you will be playing in a larp, you will probably form a mental image and decide where you want to take them. The aspects which define a character are numerous, so a list of identifying traits is a good start, if you know how to translate them into your play.
Walking the Walk
Once you have an idea of how the character should appear to other players, there are different aspects to consider when defining those characteristics. This section will focus on bearing, posture, gait, and breathing(An interesting tool to consider when designing motion aspects is Laban Movement Analysis (sometimes: Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis). For larp purposes, LMA has been written about by Erin Marsh in the Nordiclarp.org blog (see bibliography).). When making these choices, it’s good to consider the difference between internal and external perception. Does the way I move or hold myself convey the meaning I want it to, or is it just in my head?
Bearing, Posture, and Gait
Inner perception or posture can affect your outer bearing in a useful way. Putting yourself in the right frame of mind translates well into the way you stand, sit, or walk. Practice in front of a full-length mirror or film a video: seeing the effect helps you calibrate it.
If you struggle with finding your own, copy signature mannerisms from actors. E.g., for arrogance in servitude, look no further than Stowell, Alun Armstrong’s role as a butler in season 5 of Downton Abbey((https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3962976/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast, 21. October 2019)). Films and TV offer many such examples for a variety of traits.
Gait, the way you walk, contributes a lot to a character’s general appearance. Walking on the balls and toes of your feet, keeping the heel off the ground will make you appear slightly taller, more willowy, and lighter on your feet, while stomping heel first can seem more decisive. Experiment!
As a practical example, take the run of the Shakespearean larp Forsooth, where, for the major role of a count (we’ll disregard for the purpose of this paper that a funny hat was worn), arms and hands were held a certain way: shoulders down, upper arms closer to the body, lower arms outward, palms turned more or less upwards, which might have been sustainable for a longer time. In contrast to that, a butler/servant character was portrayed as bent over forwards and partly sideways, with a rounded back, hunched shoulders and the head thrown back, so as to always seeming to look up at his ‘betters’ – this works for a limited amount of time, but remaining in that role over several hours on end, let alone days, might well have ended painfully.
Be aware that while a more or less obvious limp is a sure way of changing the look of your gait, it really shouldn’t be done for comedic effect, but rather have a medical or possibly psychological reason in the character’s background. “It looks different” is not a reason, it’s lazy characterization.
Breathing
You can also use breath for character building. Slower, more pronounced breaths can suggest frailty, which can underline old age or some ailment or other; this is something Holger used in
Bunker 101 (Chaos League), playing a character who had aged beyond the societal limit for being supplied with anti-radiation drugs, by pausing to “catch his breath” or coughing every now and then.
Talking the Talk
Your speech pattern is an easily recognisable characteristic, and changing it up will affect both how others perceive your character and how you perceive them in relation to yourself. Speaking differently will increase the difference between you and your character.
There are many elements to speech — tone, volume, register, speech pattern, etc. Your tone is connected to the way your voice travels through your body as you make a sound: a tone can be nasal, if you speak a lot through your nose, or raspy if the sound travels up your throat in a certain way. Volume is, as indicated by its name, the volume with which you speak; you can whisper or shout. Your register is the part of the total human vocal range your voice moves within; someone with a deep voice has a lower register than someone with a high voice. The amplitude of the register varies from person to person — trained singers have usually developed a broader register than someone who mostly uses their voice for everyday chats. The speech pattern is all other little quirks that mix into the way you speak; your accent, potential stutters, a lisp, using certain words more than others (e.g. “like” or humming a lot) and so on.
All of these vocal elements can be changed, though some (such as broadening your register) require more practice than others. The easiest are tone, volume, and minor speech pattern alterations. Although changing the way you use your register when you speak is effective, it can be hard to avoid slipping back into your “vocal comfort zone” as the larp goes on without constantly having to focus on the way you speak.
Tone
Changing your tone of voice is simple, and does a lot for your character portrayal. This allows using people’s unconscious biases (e.g. “soft people have soft voices”) as quick shorthand to enforce your portrayal. A snooty character might have a nasal voice, a scarred warrior a raspy one, a caretaker a soft one, etc. Be aware, though — raspy tones can damage your vocal chords and result in a sore throat if done incorrectly, so avoid those unless you know how to use them safely. Remember you will have to sustain this tone for hours or maybe days. The further away from your natural tone you go, the more challenging this is going to be.
Volume
Volume speaks volumes — we alter our body language depending on how much space we are comfortable claiming for ourselves, and the same happens to the volume with which we speak. A self-assured character will not have a problem being loud, while a confused or shy character will speak quieter, maybe even whisper or mumble at times.
Speech Pattern
The most cost-effective speech pattern changes are small. What are your character’s favourite words for expressing joy, anger, awe, etc? Do they often lose their trail of thought mid-sentence? Perhaps they interject themselves with constant uhm’s and eh’s, or click their tongue a lot? Think of a few quirks and try combining them. Decide what to keep and what to scratch — less is more, especially before you get used to playing with your voice. Play around until you find a voice you feel suits your character, while still being comfortable to maintain. If it feels uncomfortable, change it. A sore throat, cough, or loss of voice never made anyone’s larp experience any more fun.
Avoid fake accents: they are difficult to do well, and even more difficult to do without engaging a lot of unintentional, misguided, or outright offensive cultural stereotypes((The same goes for stereotypical speech impediments, such as stuttering. A disability is not a costume.)). Perhaps you are willing to put in the required effort, but let’s be realistic — we always leave larp prep to the last minute, and no one is going to believe that Scottish accent practiced overnight. Instead, focus on original, smaller changes!
Sustainability and Safety
If the physical and vocal tools you’re employing need to be sustained for the duration of a larp, consider both the safety and health of the player. The length of the larp and your physical fitness may reduce the viability of some choices. For example, certain changes to tone and register require a lot of work and risk damaging your voice if practiced without professional guidance — especially over a longer period. However, if you are a trained vocalist, you may already know how to safely experiment with these. For every technique we present here, players should ask themselves whether it’s sustainable for the purpose of the particular larp and/or role they want to use it for.
Conclusion
Now that you have assembled the bodily and vocal identifiers for the character, remember that practice makes perfect. You may not have the chance to do that for a mini larp, but before going to a bigger event, try combining the different aspects you chose, putting yourself through the expected emotional states of the character, imagining situations they might need to react to; and see how your design holds up to all of these. Practice your character voice and movement around friends to see how you’re able to sustain them during intense social interaction. Be honest about them, don’t be afraid to discard those not up to your expectations, be creative, be safe, and remember to have fun!
Playing a super-rich character in a larp probably sounds fun and easy. It is neither, at least not at all times. Centrally, it requires a fine line of balancing, in order to not take the role over the top, but sufficiently close, in order to provide the most optimal playable content to other participants. We believe, based on our experiences at for instance, Tuhannen viillon kuolema, (Pettersson, Hannula et al, 2018), that this is best done in groups or ensembles. That way, an individual character’s affluenza((The unhealthy and unwelcome psychological and social effects of affluence regarded especially as a widespread societal problem, such as A: feelings of guilt, lack of motivation, and social isolation experienced by wealthy people. B: extreme materialism and consumerism associated with the pursuit of wealth and success and resulting in a life of chronic dissatisfaction, debt, overwork, stress, and impaired relationships (Merriam-Webster) )) becomes part of a greater whole rather than a corny stereotype.
Creating a believable super-rich character is difficult. How to combine a real, playable personality, with a sense of affluenza? Role-playing usually requires a sense of connection and interaction, so the player has to be able to convey playable realism and a sense of unreality at the same time. Avoiding satire, comedy or outrageous in-game spending is usually recommended, unless the larp organizers specifically want a two-dimensional non-player character. Like simplified villains, they can of course fit some larps, but here we want to look at a more realistic approach.
In our experience, the first element for successfully constructing a super-rich character is the origin of their money. This has a significant effect on character personality. For example, it is possible to play someone who has inherited their money as either ruthless and efficient or as complacent, but if the money has been earned somehow through one’s own actions, the character will probably default to the former — even if they are now resting on their proverbial laurels. Remember to interact with other characters: a character who has ennui, or just hides in an enclave, is not useful as more than story decoration. However, by approaching the ennui and talking about it, or planning the enclave (as in Tuhannen viillon kuolema), creates playable content for others.
The second recommended step is to find at least two types of affluenza. The character should optimally be able to deviate from typical middle-class behaviour in at least one way, and be outrageous to poor characters in at least one as well. If these are different things, all the better. They should also be playable, so that they come out during play often enough. Maybe it is an off-hand art purchase that is expensive, but not immensely so, or the firing of several people during a phone call that others can hear. A classic solution is to emphasize in play how “everyone could be rich, if they just worked as hard as I did”. Unless the character is supposed to be a ruthless tycoon or something similar, however, it is far better to come up with more interesting ways to express the increasing removal from understanding the realities of those who earn or own less. One of the best ways we have found for emphasizing this, is to select some things (e.g., optimizing travel without caring about prices) that are not at all easy to the poor or even the middle class, but which the super-rich character takes for granted.
The third suggested step is to find at least two types of mental relations outside of the social class of the character. These are ways in which the character believes that they relate to other people. It is very typical for even the very rich, at least in the Nordic countries, to think that they are “not that different, just wealthier” from hard-working people with less money. Therefore, playability and interaction increase, if the rich character has situations where they can sincerely say “I’m just like you in this regard.” For some topics — like both characters going to the gym, even if one of them has a group of personal trainers and the other a student discount – it can create believable temporary empathy. In many others, this can be used to emphasize the affluenza, because the rich character’s statements will sound dissonant to the other, who will not likely see the presumed “similarity”.
The fourth step is linked to the third one. The artificial affluenza gets more realistic, if there is not just one or two contacts outside one’s economic core group, but rather a large number of characters from the middle class and “poor people”. Power is not taken, it is given, in this case by the other characters’ reactions. Playing the rich among others of similar standing provides little content to others, and can quickly become boring. Doing so in an environment of economic differences that are not just transactional creates fruitful play — and emotions — for all concerned. While playing aristocrats and their servants has its own charms, playing a rich character in a more open setting offers more possibilities.
Finally, playing rich is best done in a group of rich characters, each of a different type. Tuhannen viillon kuolema really emphasized this point for us, in its contrast with many other larps with similar themes. One super-rich character can easily get satirical, even if played well and with good care. A few of them together, with different types of estrangement, become a surprisingly realistic group of people. This also enables some of them to take the play to the level of occasional satire, especially if such satire still reflects something seen in real life (think “pharma bro” or “trophy-hunting heiress”).
Where do we find beauty in larp? Can we make sense of the moments in larp where we, as players, have an aesthetic appreciation of the larp? Can we account for moments that are striking, that leave us breathless, that stay with us for the rest of our lives, that propel tears or joyous rapture? Can we develop theory to render at least some of the logic of those moments visible?
Larp is a specific form of expression that has similarities to performance, theatre, tabletop role-playing, sports, installation art, and to games, yet it is clearly distinct from all of these (Stenros 2010; Simkins 2015). Working out the aims, conventions, and methods of the form implies an aesthetic theory. In this article, we unpack what makes larp play beautiful. We wish to explicate the aesthetics of larp in a way that is recognizable for practitioners (i.e., players and designers) while also being potentially useful for people coming from different fields.
Aesthetics is a broad, even terrifying, term. It covers the subjective, emotional sensations we experience when encountering an object or environment, from pop music to a sunset viewed from the top of a forest ridge. It also pertains to a set of principles that may govern the production of aesthetic objects; an aesthetics of jazz, for instance, gives a general outline of what makes jazz jazz, and also what makes jazz beautiful. It is also a term for a field in philosophy relating to the nature of art, and so on. Indeed, Leonard Koren (2010) has identified ten different ways to understand the term, explaining why the ‘aesthetics’ is sometimes hard to grasp. In this article, we develop an aesthetic theory of larp that describes the ways in which we find larp beautiful, as well as the principles of design and play that make larp an object of aesthetic appreciation.
The beauty of larp has been discussed surprisingly little previously. Obviously the form of larp has received quite a bit of attention, particularly in the Knutepunkt community (e.g. Koljonen et al. 2019). However, while descriptions of design and play abound and there is a rich tradition of implicit standards of beauty couched in declarative accounts of how larps should be (i.e., manifestos), accounts of beauty and the aesthetics of larp are scarce (cf. Zagal & Deterding 2018, see also MacDonald 2012; Stenros 2013).
Two key limitations need to be noted here. This article approaches the beauty of larp from the point of view of the player. Beauty in larp is probably different if it were to be pivoted around the designer or an external audience. Second, although this article talks of beauty in larp in general terms, it is important to realize that it emerges in the context of Nordic and international larp, in a very specific artistic tradition, and is meant to make sense of that tradition.
Setting the Stage
Larp is embodied participatory drama. It unfolds in real-time, in physical surroundings, through the actions of participants bodily portraying characters. Larp can incorporate other forms of expression, and when it does include other art forms, they can be analysed with aesthetic tools developed for those specific expressions. For example, tools borrowed from theatre, music, visual arts, cinema, and the emerging field of aesthetics of games (e.g. De Koven 1978; Myers 2010; Kirkpatrick 2011) can fruitfully be leveraged to make sense of larps((There is no question, for instance, that a musical performance inside a larp will be evaluated and enjoyed by players on the basis of how we usually enjoy music. However, while it may be important that the music is good, the song might also be beautiful for reasons germane to the larp: perhaps the character is expressing a major change in their life; perhaps the song choice refers to things that are known to the players but not to the characters; or even, a “bad” performance of the song can create larp beauty if it is meaningful in a way that the players appreciate.)). However, while we will draw from these other fields, the focus is on understanding what is beautiful in larp specifically.
To understand the form of larp one needs to consider how larp is created and appreciated — and how these two processes are tied together. The participant in a larp is present in two ways. They are both a character within the fiction, and a player participating in a larp. The participant has a sort of dual consciousness, seeing everything both as real (within the fiction) and as not-real (as in playing). The participant is both a character and a player, able to flip between the two modes, and able to see things in double. We can call this bisociation (Koestler 1964, 35).
The participant is both a player and a character, which creates interesting frictions because there is only one body to inhabit, and one set of experiences to encounter (Sandberg 2004). The participant experiences the events as a character who has agency within the fiction, but they can also appreciate the larp from a wider perspective as a player with meta-awareness, and can shape this structure as a player.
Obviously the division of the participant into two roles is not real in the sense that these two personas would be somehow fully distinct and separate (Järvelä 2019). Instead, the role-play agreement — that the player and the character are to be treated as separate entities — is a social contract, one that gives alibi to act in ways that conflict with the participant’s story of self (Sihvonen 1997). This social contract obviously has limits; there are acts one cannot get away with as a player, even if done in character.
The main audience in larp is the player/character participant. However, the participant is also the main performer in a larp — for that audience. The performer and the spectator are also brought together in one body, and thus in larp we talk of the first-person audience (Sandberg 2004). In order to see and witness these works, one must participate. A significant part of the work is internal. The thoughts and feelings of a character, from doubts and schemes to joy and surprise, are only accessible from the first-person point of view (Montola 2012). The private landscapes conjured by a participant’s imagination are very much part of the experience, even if never shared.
Furthermore, first person is not just a metaphor for personal experience, but a concrete description. The participant will, very literally, only see what their character sees, experience only those scenes where they are present, in body. The participant is the lens through which the work unfolds.
This first person audience differs from, say, theatre, art, and music, where the division between the artist/performer and the audience/appreciator has traditionally been clear. Here we cannot make such a separation. Even someone at a larp who is watching a scene is not an “audience”. They are actively listening; their physical and social presence is meaningful to the other players, and at any moment their watching may turn into doing.
In considering beauty in larp, we find it useful to separate the question into two categories: first, the beautiful things that others have done and can be appreciated and, second, the beautiful things that we do (or participate in doing) ourselves that we ourselves can appreciate.
Beautiful to See
American artist Brody Condon has formulated a way of appreciating larp from the outside. He has noted that larp is a “generative engine” that creates an interesting visual surface (Condon 2010). While Condon works with this visual surface in a sophisticated way, we can see more straightforward examples in larp photographs and videos that try to capture the visual beauty of the scene. While it is possible to look at a larp as one looks at a painting, as a surface, while playing, this is not something that players commonly report, even though players can spend dozens of painstaking hours preparing costumes and props to contribute to this visual surface. It seems that this surface becomes most visible to people who do not participate in the play of the larp. Anyone can access it when it is mediated with a camera (see Torner 2011).
It is perhaps worth noting that the visual surface is part of what has sometimes made larp an object of derision or ridicule. From the outside, the props may look less authentic than what we have come to expect from films, just as the dialogue may sound stiff compared to what we expect from plays, and the narrative may appear completely disorganised when compared with what we expect from novels. It is important to acknowledge that larp is not trying to imitate these forms — the failure of larp to be like a play is not an aesthetic failure.
In expressive forms where there is a clear division between the artist and the audience, we often marvel at performative excellence. The artist has spent thousands of hours becoming excellent at something, and now this skill is on display. We find this in larp as well.
We can talk about performative excellence in larp, when someone portrays their character perfectly with exquisite body language and pitch perfect accent, or when someone has the perfect costume and carries it in the most fitting fashion, or when the scenography of the larp location is a perfect fit with fully functioning props. “Perfect” here means some kind of a combination of “appropriate”, “pleasing”, “fulfils all the requirements of the imagination” and “supports play”. We can appreciate the skill that goes into such performances and creations, and we can gaze on in appreciation when faced with such displays. Sometimes performative excellence is created in the moment; sometimes we see a truly beautiful artefact or encounter another kind of residue of a creation that took place before the larp.
The third source of external beauty in larp is rooted in their structure. Larps are rule-bound. Like games, they are constituted through the enacting of the rules the designers have created and curated (Suits 1978). Shared rules provide the necessary foundation for playing together. They also provide a framework for moments of delight to emerge, just as the rules of football provide the framework for astonishing feats of athleticism that were never specifically called for; yet they are made possible by the framework.
Nordic larps tend to have bespoke rules, meaning that the rules are written (curated, combined, created) specifically for that work (Koljonen 2019). By contrast, in other larp traditions there are tendencies to create general rules that can always be used, or to attempt to take into consideration any and all possibilities. In the Nordic tradition, the rules tend to be light; a minimal amount of rules is preferred in order to create the foundation for a shared experience with a specific topic, theme or situation, with enough of a safety net. Simplicity of rules is regarded as elegant((To avoid the notion that simple rules are superior rules, it is worth pointing out that the lighter the explicit rules, the greater reliance there is on unspoken rules, herd competence, and shared values. Extremely light rules may simply mean that players are only playing with people who are very familiar to them.)).
This is the part of the beauty of games that can be attributed to the designer — or in the case of larps, the larpwrights. They create the rules and the structure of larps. Rules here include the actual dos and don’ts (that usually are inherited from tradition), but more importantly the replacement techniques and metatechniques, as well as the interaction codes that are used in play, and the overall structure of the larp. There are different ways to create the structure, from character and character network design to timed events and thematic acts. The minutiae of the design that larpwrights do is not the focus here; the important thing is that this larp design can be beautiful in and of itself. It is possible to appreciate elegant design when reading the rules, while playing, or when hearing someone talk about a larp. Indeed, a great deal of larp talk revolves around design, and it produces the same kinds of appreciative “oohs” and “aahs” one would expect to hear from rocket scientists working to get a new model off the ground. “Did you hear how they solved the hierarchy issue in the last iteration? It’s genius.”
Of course, since this is an area of design, there are competing design ideals that value things differently. For example, some find high resolution interaction (Nordgren 2008) to be beautiful, enabling nuanced play indecipherable to an observer, while others may favour a 360° illusion and a WYSIWYG aesthetic (Koljonen 2007). Naturally, fashion is also a component here.
The rules must be explicit to the participants. Everyone needs to know them in order to participate in constituting the fictional world into being. (The structure of the larp can also be transparent, although it is more common that it is only revealed to the players as the larp unfolds.) As participants interpret written rules in different ways, it is common to have a shared workshop amongst the participants before the runtime of a larp begins to test out rules and interaction codes. This helps get participants on the same page before play starts, and minimizes play-style conflicts.
Sometimes designers, especially when they are coming from outside larp, want to hide the rules. Artists more accustomed to, say, theatre or film can regard explicit rules as ugly and inelegant, preferring to communicate the rules within the fiction. This is usually a mistake (MacDonald 2019). In comparison to larp, film and theatre have intuitive seamless interfaces. This means that we know how to read them, mostly because we are encultured to understand them. Even experimental pieces tend to contain keys to unlock their meaning. You are supposed to be able to understand a film or a play just by watching it. The director of a film usually does not appear before the screening to explain what a film is about, or how the colour red symbolizes desire in this particular piece. Despite, obviously, a whole paratextual industry of marketing, reviews, and behind-the-scenes featurettes, mainstream films, plays, and books are supposed to stand on their own. In culturally established forms of expression where there is a division between the audience and the work, there is a strong hesitancy to give explicit guidelines or rules.
However, when the work is created through doing things together, the rules of conduct must be haggled out in advance, settling the language of the work. When everyone knows the rules going in, it is possible to engage in subtle play knowing that all participants understand, even if it would be completely incomprehensible for an external audience. This very structure is what separates larp from free play. Anything communicated within the fiction is subject to interpretation. To take an example from another co-created form with rules, if a jazz band is playing Ain’t Misbehavin’ and the tenor sax solo starts to riff on Mary Had a Little Lamb, the band interprets the nursery rhyme within the musical frame of Ain’t Misbehavin’. Nobody in the band thinks that everyone is supposed to switch songs, or even genres.
If we were to approach larp as a designed object or a procedural artefact, we could conclude our analysis here. However, as we are interested in larp as played, performed, and co-created, we need to go further. Most often, when larpers speak of beautiful larp moments, they are not talking about the design or the setting. Instead, they say that something beautiful happened to them and to their character, or that someone did something beautiful.
Beautiful to Do
There are three different ‘larps’ we can talk about: the larp as designed, the larp as played, and the larp as remembered (Stenros 2013). The first is the larp as created by the designers. This includes the rules, the characters, pre-scripted events, spatial design, sound design, time design, possible metalarp rules, and other such design information. This ‘larp as designed’ can be published as a larp script. Also, if the ‘same’ larp is staged a number of times, this is (more or less) what remains the same. The larp as designed is largely covered in the previous section.
The larp as played is what happened during the runtime of a larp. This is where the players bring the design to life through improvisation guided by the rules and characters. Larp as played is, of course, ephemeral. The moment a larp is complete, it ceases to exist (Koljonen 2008). It cannot be revisited or replayed, and each participant can only ever experience from their own point of view.
The third larp, larp as remembered, emerges after the larp. As participants talk about the larp afterwards, find out about what happened to other participants and hear their interpretations, a reading of the larp starts to emerge. Usually some kind of hegemonic view of the larp emerges, though that can never be too specific. Still, enough people might agree on what the larp “was about”. This larp as remembered is shaped by analysis, documentation, reflection, photographs, and even interpretation by people who did not play the larp. Participants with more social capital may have a stronger influence of how a larp is remembered. Even so, dissenting voices on how a larp is remembered are common, and are equally part of the larp as remembered.
Considering larps as beautiful to do, from the point of view of the participants, we concentrate on the larp as played. The rules, the designed structure, and the material reality provide a shared ground for the participants stepping into the fiction of the larp. However, it is the emergent play of the participants (including the larp organizers) that constitute the larp as played.
But what does that mean in practice? Players talk about being part of the fictional world, about immersing into the world, the character, and the situation; of creating a satisfactory story, and of sublime moments of bliss. These memorable moments rise out of the design of the larpwrights, but also from other players, the environment, or even the weather; and might exist in juxtaposition to whatever else is going on in their lives outside the larp. These are moments of synchronicity and perfect happenstance. We might try to label these moments apophenia (Dansey 2008) or pronoia (McGonigal 2006), but players often talk about “larp magic”. Let us try to pick apart a little bit more what emergent co-creation includes and how it can lead to larp magic.
Consider an example of two characters in a multiple-day larp, who do not have any pre-written relationships or interests. The players never speak to each other in the workshops. On the first day of the larp, their characters happen to both be queueing at the bar; one tells a joke and the other laughs. They introduce themselves to each other and think nothing more of it. On the second day, they find each other at the bar again, and this time end up having an unexpectedly candid conversation. On the third day, they react to a crisis together, side-by-side, and realise that they were always meant to be friends and allies. The offhand joke told on the first day becomes one of the most meaningful moments for them both. Their stories are now inseparable.
Larp is socio-dramatic play (see Burghardt 2005), in which everyone pretends to be their character. Sometimes people attempt to not only act and look like their character, but to actually think and feel as the character. This ideal we call immersion, immersing into a character. Other players have a more instrumental attitude towards their character — even if the character is, basically, their body. However, it is not enough to pretend that you are your character. You need to pretend that everyone else is their character as well. This gives rise to inter-immersion (Pohjola 2004), the collective experience that ideally arises from pretending together. You do not play just your characters, but everyone’s. We cannot have prisoners without jailors; no kings without subjects.
Larping is fundamentally a social endeavour, done together with others. Doing things together is hardwired in humans. It is fundamentally different to do things together than to do things side-by-side. Social play is different from parallel play (there are a lot of terms for this in game studies, see Stenros 2015 for a discussion). Furthermore, liveness is an important part of doing things together. In this kind of mutual creation, each participant has agency. An ensemble is revelling in togetherness. Participants see each other and are seen by others. The validation of one’s performance, identity, and actions is important.
If we take the example of the allies who met at the bar, we can tease out an important point: both players are open to larp magic, and the experience deepens when both players know the experience was magical for the other((We call this the friendship is magic principle. This is when the to and fro of inter-immersion leads to beauty, where one knows that the other is also experiencing the magical moment in a way that feels like synchronicity and telepathy.)). There is a template for high-pitched, breathless postlarp conversations recounting these moments that goes roughly: “And then your character did this… and my character had no idea, but then I did this… and then you did that… and then we both did this…”, etc. It’s interesting that we capture, confirm, and re-live the moments that were important to us with the people who were also there.
The creation of an aesthetic object out of the act of doing things together is not just from game studies; it’s also performance art. Those unfamiliar with performance art (now sometimes called Live Art) often find it confusing that “anything can be performance art” and that it often does not look good, like art traditionally is expected to. But performance art very frequently uses the same elements for its canvas that larp does: behaviours, bodies, rituals, social norms, interactions, or time-based processes. It sometimes creates a trace or residue, but this is distinct from the ephemeral performance itself. It is making art out of what we do as humans; when we encounter it, we reflect on how things are done, by whom, and why. Performance art shares with larp an inseparable connection to the social world, but also to the process of reflecting on how we create this world socially((See Nicolas Bourriaud’s (1998) Relational Aesthetics as a basis for situating art in relationships rather than in artistic objects.)).
Inter-immersion is what transports us to the fictional world. It is not just that one steps into a carefully constructed fantastic setting, but that one is seen as part of it and recognized as having agency. This is how a new social reality is created. It does not matter if a larp is full-on escapist fantasy or a critical exploration of sociological alternatives, the alternate reality is still constructed in the same way. Of course, this inter-immersion and new social reality is also supported by the physical location, props, and scenography, but mostly it is about the new world being played into being.
This is why larp is so often about community. As a form, larp lends itself particularly well to the study of networked interpersonal relationships. While larp is pretence, the relationships and interactions feel real, for they are real — even if they are fictional.
Consider an example of a character who undergoes a coming-of-age ceremony within a larp. The ceremony contains ritualistic elements that are made up for the larp, and the whole concept of becoming an adult is different in this society. One comes of age, say, at 50. The player has only been in this “society” for 30 hours, but when the ritual comes, it is devastatingly emotional for both character and player. He is touched by the care his society takes in him, feels apprehension at his new social role, and feels personal ownership of the ritual objects and texts. He reflects on these social processes in his real life and what they have meant to him.
In larp we are transported to another meaning, but we are there in our bodies. Larp is embodied. The play is in the body, and the body is, fully, in play. This is not just a linguistic point, but a concrete and physical thing. Larp design consciously addresses the body: sleep deprivation, discomfort or luxury, dance as communication, sensual and sexual play. Often, this means using sensations, exertion, or discomforts that cannot be ignored: the body is in the foreground when players need to march 25 kilometers in the wintry countryside as soldiers. But even a larp with players seated around a dinner table is equally embodied.
Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) describes the body as “our general medium for having a world.” His writings in phenomenology (the field of philosophy investigating things as we experience them) have been invaluable to analysis of contemporary dance, particularly as dance spilled over from conventional stages and created choreography from natural movement of human crowds, everyday movements, and social interactions. He describes the social world as not an object or sum of objects, but “as a permanent field or dimension of existence.” In larp we create experiences that are emergent, inter-immersive, and embodied; it would be remiss to leave phenomenology out of an aesthetics of larp when we essentially use “being-in-the-world” as a designable surface.
The things that happen to our characters also happen to us. Yes, simulation does take place, but our bodies are moving and being moved, touching and being touched. This is, of course, also connected to the liveness. The experience is immediate. Even if larp is heightened and artificial, our bodies often do not distinguish between the artificially-induced and ‘the real’ — it’s all real. Larp pushes our buttons with bodily experiences: surprise, arousal, freshness, exploration, and neophilia. There is also the physical exhaustion of repetition, and embodied learning. Doing things for real, even when ‘the real’ is fictional, is a powerful aesthetic. When larpers speak of having had a beautiful larp, often they are talking about having had a meaningful sense of physical and mental engagement, presence, and authenticity.
Furthermore, larp is most beautiful when we are present not just in body, but in mind. Larpers talk about authenticity, generosity, and being present in the moment as being beautiful. These are all affirmations of existence — they say “I am here right now.” We can call that presence((Theatre director Herbert Blau (1982) has written eloquently about presence. His words resonate with the larp experience: “With mortality as a base, Presence is fragile, subject to change (and chance), yet persisting through that. Breath blood nerves brains, the metabolism of perception.”)). Being sensitive to the emotions around you, understanding the exact situation, creating the right character response, feeling the emotion.
Sometimes we see this as overcoming personal boundaries, being able to do something in larp one would not do outside it. Being vulnerable and open reduces the distance between the participant and the character they embody.
The idea of fully being in the present with all sense modalities is certainly part of doing something beautiful. However, even the term ‘beautiful to do’ is not without its problems — it is not necessary to do anything. Larpers talk about beautiful boredom. Those are moments when one is just chilling in the fictional world; present, and in character, but not doing anything. One is simply present and content, hanging out in the moment. Here it is important to note that beautiful boredom requires agency. If there is nothing to do, or if the agency of a participant is strictly limited, then the boredom is not pleasurable, meaningful, or beautiful.
However, being present in the moment is a bit more complicated than first might look, since the participant is present both as a player and a character. Everything is simultaneously real and not real, fictional and not fictional, authentic and representational. Playing larp is always reflexive, building on dual consciousness and bisociation. This is what enables larp to move beyond game-like goals such as winning, and significantly opens up the design space and aesthetic realm available for exploration. The player can win even if the character loses. This is not failure, but tragedy. This is a key difference between traditional games and role-playing games. Larpers call this friction between the character failing while the player has a meaningful experience positive negative experience (Hopeametsä 2008). Sometimes this is also called, tongue in cheek, Type 2 Fun. When players use terms like Type 2 Fun, it usually signifies that something has not been pleasurable, but it has been beautiful.
However, reflexivity also means that while the participant chooses to treat the fiction as real, they are also alienated from it, since they know that it is not real. Back in the mid-1990s, the ideal was to stay fully within the fiction from start to finish. While this kind of continuous illusion is still important, over the years the Nordic design ideals have drifted and now bisociation is recognized as an important part of the larp form as something to be played with (e.g. Pettersson 2006; Westerling & Hultman 2019)((Today, there is a valorization of the continuity of the experience, even if the in character continuity is disrupted.)). Nordic larp is Brechtian in the sense that the estrangement effect is built in due to this space for reflection between fiction and non-fiction (see also Levin 2020). This has created the space for metatechniques to design in the space between the player and the character. We also talk about playing close to home: creating a character that is very similar to the player to make the events in the larp feel more immediate. The term bleed is used to discuss how the emotions of the character travel (or bleed) into the player, or vice versa. Notice that bleed is not necessarily a negative experience, but something participants crave. They play in order to feel something (and then to reflect on those feelings, once they have some distance). It is also possible to consciously use larps as reflective tools, and play towards emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2020).
There is one further duality in larp: the participant is both the performer, and the director/ writer. The participant is living in the moment, being and performing, but also able to plan and steer playing in a way that makes sense in a larger context. This is another source of beauty in larp: narrative or structural excellence produced by meta-awareness. This means that the playing creates a satisfactory story (the term ‘story’ is used loosely here). We might see narrative forms like seeding and call back, closure, and fugue structure. This requires being in and out of the larp at the same time, experiencing it first hand, but also looking at it from a distance as a thing that will be a whole.
We can appreciate and get pleasure from moments of larp magic, from playing a world into being together, playing out interesting social dynamics, from physical pleasure of embodied play, from a sense of being present, generous towards, and vulnerable with others, and from the meta-awareness that we are creating something satisfying, either for our character’s arc, or the fictional world as a whole. We can also find pleasure in our ability to steer in a larp by acknowledging our dual consciousness and playing with it. Of course, the question we have not answered is why we find these things beautiful. Those answers may take us deep into psychology, physiology, and anthropology, and they are likely to remain as slippery as similar enquiries about dancing and architecture. But to develop an aesthetic theory of larp, we must first be descriptive, not causal. We can say ”larpers say they find this beautiful” without knowing why.
On Dualism and Failure
In this article, we have divided the beauty in larp into the seeing and doing. This division is practical when we consider whether “this is beautiful” or “that is beautiful”. Are we looking for beauty that exists without our participation beyond witnessing it, or beauty that exists only when we are integrated into it?
If we take the binary to its extremes, we can still find beauty. For example, when considering performative excellence, we see sometimes the appreciation of a performance or other pre-created piece takes us out of the work. If a participant is performing their character perfectly, but it feels like acting and not larping, it puts us in a different position. It moves us from co-creator to viewer. The player-participants, at least temporarily, are not part of the thing they are appreciating. This is just beautiful to see, this is ‘that’.
On the other hand, when we are very deeply engrossed in the larp, we may find ourselves in a state where we are only lightly conscious of the fact that this activity is framed as fictional; our emotions and thoughts feel like there is no distinction between the self and character. In such moments, we do not reflect and have no meta-awareness of other players’ experiences. This, and it is ‘this’, is just beautiful to do.
However, this dualism is purely an analytical distinction. It is a model we have constructed to understand larp; it is not the reality of larping. None of the analytical dichotomies we have used are ‘real’, but attempts at mapping the terrain of actual larp experience. A speech by a queen in a larp might be performed beautifully, but is also touching, meaningful, and so rooted in the social moment, that it is beautiful as something we are doing together. After all, the queen is a queen, because we are playing that she is — we are playing a world into being. And we are aware, in the moment, that there is a beauty to playing this world into being together with others, right now. This comes close to what Levin (2020) discussed as metareflection, and it is the space where most beauty occurs in larp.
Finally, one way to look for beauty is to consider its opposite. When is there an absence of beauty? When are larps ugly? It is not beautiful when we are aware that we have no agency. It is not beautiful when we do not connect with our co-players. It is not beautiful when the physical setting does not support play. It is awful to be cold and hungry unless we are meant to be cold and hungry. It is not beautiful when we are lonely in a larp. It is ugly when we feel disconnected from our own character, and that speaking and acting is “work” all the time. It is not beautiful when we are emotionally disengaged. There is no beauty when we physically cannot take part. It is not beautiful when the world played into being is disjointed, disappointing, or never shows up at all. It is not beautiful if we have a good time but our co-players do not.
These are our failure modes, our ugly spots. But they are also sites to invite beauty to appear. Risk is important as it implies commitment; vulnerability is beautiful because it contains the possibility of rejection; presence is beautiful because it defies absence, refusal, and death.
Coda
Larp is both beautiful to see and beautiful to do. Participants can appreciate the performative excellence of individual performances and other skilful exhibitions, there is a visual surface that can be enthralling regardless of the context, and certainly there is the intricate work in crafting the rule-bound bespoke design. These elements we can appreciate from afar, as an audience, whether we are also participants, or even just someone going through larp documentation, be it design documents (larp-as-designed), photographs, video, written reflections, or costumes (larp-as-remembered).
The larp as played, for the participants, has three additional ways to encounter beauty. In larp, the participants mutually play a world into being by improvising within the rules and structures given by the design, partaking in emergent co-creation through play and inter-immersion. Furthermore, participants engage in vulnerable and generous play while being mindful, embodied, and present. Yet they also remain reflexive about the conceit of larp and strive for structural and narrative excellence.
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Johanna Koljonen (2019): An Introduction to Bespoke Larp Design. In Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen (Eds.): Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen (Eds.) (2019): Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Leonard Koren (2010): Which ”Aesthetics” Do You Mean? Ten Definitions. Imperfect Publishing.
James Lórien MacDonald (2019): Collaborating with Theatre and Other Arts. In Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen (Eds.): Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Jane McGonigal (2006). The puppet master problem: Design for real-world, mission based gaming. Games and Storytelling lecture series, Jan 24th, 2006, University of Art and Design Helsinki
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945): Phenomenology of Perception. Translation Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.
Markus Montola (2012): On the Edge of the Magic Circle. Understanding Role-Playing and Pervasive Games. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Tampere.
David Myers (2010): Play Redux. The Form of Computer Games. University of Michigan Press.
Andie Nordgren (2008): High Resolution Larping: Enabling Sublety at Totem and Beyond. In Markus Montola & Jaakko Stenros (eds.): Playground Worlds. Ropecon.
Mike Pohjola (2004): Autonomous Identities. Immersion as a Tool for Exploring, Empowering and Emancipating Identities, in Montola, Markus & Stenros, Jaakko (eds.): Beyond Role and Play. Ropecon.
Christopher Sandberg (2004): Genesi. Larp Art, Basic Theories. In Montola, Markus & Stenros, Jaakko (eds): Beyond Role and Play. Ropecon.
David Simkins (2015): The Arts of Larp: Design, Literacy, Learning and Community in Live-Action Role Play. McFarland.
Toni Sihvonen (1997): Pieni johdatus live-roolipelaamisen psykologiaan. In Niklas Vainio (ed.): Larppaajan käsikirja. Suomen live-roolipelaajat ry.
Jaakko Stenros (2010): Nordic Larp: Theatre, Art and Game. In Stenros, Jaakko & Montola, Markus (eds.): Nordic Larp. Fëa Livia.
Jaakko Stenros (2015): Playfulness, Play, and Games: A Constructionist Ludology Approach. Doctoral dissertation. University of Tampere
Bernard Suits (1978): The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. University of Toronto Press.
Evan Torner (2011): The Theory and Practice of Larp in Non-Fiction Film. In Thomas Duus Henriksen, et al. (eds.): Think Larp. Rollespilsakademiet.
Anna Westerling and Anders Hultman (2019): Metatechniques. In Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen (Eds.) (2019): Larp Design. Landsforeningen Bifrost.
José P. Zagal & Sebastian Deterding (Eds.) (2018): Role-playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Routledge.
Have you gone to a larp that somehow required more work than your day job? Have you done work in a larp and been compensated with fictional resources in the larp rather than money or in-kind, real resources such as shelter and food? Have you had video of your larp experience used in a commercial setting outside of the play context? While larp is in no need of a Marxian revolution, the community is in need of a reckoning with regards to players’ play being also valuable as labor.
Let me explain.
Modern societies operate based on a division between human activity considered “productive” — i.e., that delivers value to someone — and “non-productive,” that seems to deliver value to no one. Value is a central part of labor, and also part of play. Despite recent public discourse on the topic (Bogost 2019), few players care about the distinction between play and labor. We all understand that the line between work and play is murky in late capitalism, as evidenced by so-called “modding” culture, streaming, eSports and other “playbour” movements (Kücklich 2005). But, as Aleena Chia (2019) asserts, players do care about who is gaining what benefit at the expense of others, and whether or not they are burning themselves out in the process:
Vocational passion energizes social, cultural, and organizational practices that create economic value for companies, yet drains workers and aspirants through class-based expectations to compromise employment security in ‘doing what you love.’
Few play more intensely and passionately than larpers.
This chapter continues research begun four years ago with our piece Playing At Work: Labor, Identity and Emotion in Larp (Jones, Koulu, Torner 2016), where we asserted that core larp activities — playing roles as supporting characters, pretending to dig ditches, putting up with off-putting players — involve labor during the game’s runtime. Larpers’ passion for play means a lot of work before, during, and after the game. We also introduced a three-fold taxonomy of labor during a larp: first-order labor (that which keeps players alive, beyond any system of value), second-order labor (non-survival-critical work that would otherwise be financially compensated in other contexts), and third-order labor (entirely fictional work performed with entirely fictional rewards.)
Such research continues to accompany discussions as they evolve around a wide range of labor-related topics: the art of larp volunteering (Mutsaers 2018), in-game larp counseling and post-game debrief (Atwater 2016) as well as the range of skills that larp requires as an assemblage of practices (Kamm 2019). Our work focused on in-game labor, as pre-game and post-game labor has a different set of issues associated with them.
It appears that structured live-action role-play with preparation, rules, and unspoken play cultures is indistinguishable from labor. When players enter the “magic circle” of play, supposedly they have entered a space in which different rules apply from social reality. Yet from the start of the game, players perform intensive work to keep the game itself afloat as well as support their own play experience. Moreover, such “playbour” may create surplus value for the players themselves or, more frequently, others. This work is inseparable from the bodies and emotions of the participants, just as play is (Keogh 2018). Using the conceptual framework of the human body, a model used in a notable film theory textbook (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010), I discuss below the varied ways in which play and work intermingle, and how players actively evolve skills not only to do this labor well, but also to effortlessly elide it from their consciousness as “play.” Relying on several examples from Nordic larp and freeform, I explore the complex relationship between play, work, the body, mind and, above all, capital.
Hands and Feet
Let’s begin with the hands and feet as metaphors for physical labor play, the most obvious form of playbour. Building, crafting, cleaning, cooking — there is so much to be done in a larp, and much of it can be done in-character. Olle Nyman’s post-apocalyptic larp Skymningsland (Dusk Land 2010), for example, incorporated chopping wood, making coal, pumping water and other labor-intensive jobs into the design, so as to let the refugee and marginalised characters in the game feel their lower stations in life in their very bodies. Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo’s five-day larp experience Just a Little Lovin’ (2011-) has a whole kitchen staff, the cooks of Pepper’s Diner, that is also in-character; they spend most of the game preparing food for the other characters, but are also able to get involved with fictional plotlines and take part in the party. The Czech game Legion: Siberian Story (2016) involves long, physical treks on foot through January snow in order to move from one location to another.
This form of in-game, physical labor has wildly variable value, since its value as play may not be as high as its first-order contribution to the basic survival of the larpers (i.e., food preparation, custodial work, transport), but such physical activity can certainly contribute to the deepening of one’s investment into one’s character and the core themes of the larp itself (i.e., survival, hardship, labor inequality, etc.)
It is interesting to note that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed his concept of flow (1975), or the pleasurable mental states produced by a steady, voluntarily chosen set of achievable tasks and competence at those tasks, against the backdrop of Italian fascism. His family was in Italy during the chaos of war, and he was able to nevertheless maintain a stable mental state by playing chess. How do certain physical and mental activities secure our minds against fear and despair? How could both play and work be actually two sides of the same coin? Csikszentmihalyi’s schema Flow is created through concentration and effort, a revolving state of being mildly challenged and rising to meet the challenge.
Losing track of time in the “playbour” state of larp can be a positive thing: it means the player is thoroughly engaged in activity, whatever it may be. In the larp context, Sarah Lynne Bowman (2018) calls this “immersion into activity,” or when the physical and cognitive tasks of a game become rewarding in themselves and, in turn, a player’s activity as a character becomes spatial-motor and tactile. Neither play nor labor induces flow by necessity, however. There can be play that is not remotely fun (Stenros 2015, Sharp and Thomas 2019), and there is plenty of work that serves no purpose in society other than to subjugate us with mind-numbing tedium (Graeber 2018). Players must voluntarily enter into the activities of a larp, but they’re better when conscientiously designed and implemented.
Larp as a medium often exhibits its best side when these structured physical tasks are introduced by way of conscious design. Rather than simply standing around as if at an awkward party, players have something concrete to do that may require additional in-character problem-solving, player physical effort, and time. Larp designs that revolve around professionals performing small talk while taking care of volumes of tasks, either fictional or not, preoccupy the players with various stakes in their characters’ stories as well as brute reality. If dinner at the historical larp Fairweather Manor (2015- 2018) isn’t served by in-character servants, for example, then players do not get to eat.
As we have argued earlier (Jones, Koulu, Torner 2016), first-order and second-order labor in larp can also cause jarring context collapse: the vital tasks that would ordinarily be compensated with money are both (A) variably or not remunerated outside the larp and (B) now mixed in with ingame drama that may interfere with the tasks themselves, forcing players to make a choice between dropping character and doing the task well or doing the task poorly (or not at all) and risking both ingame and out-of-game consequences.
Larp play can itself produce objects of value and transaction in the open market. For example, Martin Tegelj’s game Polka Pillow Production (2018) simulates a Slovenian workers’ co-op that stuffs pillows, all while interrupting work on occasion for music and dance. The four stages of production — spinning yarn, looming the cloth, embroidering the cloth, and constructing and stuffing pillows — can be play-acted, but there is at least one group who has played the game and constructed actual pillows. Who owns these pillows? These are clearly artifacts of play, having emerged from a fictional context, and one with starkly different regimes of value (i.e., Slovenia under communist rule) at that.
Larps that produce actual goods, even those just meant as keepsakes for their participants, have added “commodity creation” as one of the design outcomes, meaning that the play that produced them now has monetary value, scant as it may be.
Obvious physical labor in larp thus straddles a wide range of value to the players and organizers. Ingame cooking, cleaning, and security may be vital to the larp, or entirely marginal. Tasks that players must perform in-character may create flow states, allowing the player to lose themselves and induce a positive mental state in the player or they may be distractions and liabilities that sideline play away from the larp’s core focus.
In turn, larps may create objects with exchange value or services with use value, in which case an organizer team has an ethical obligation to their players in being transparent about who profits from those goods or services. Larps have the power to engage their participants in vigorous, meaningful physical activity, but design and play must mediate against distraction, drudgery, and economic exploitation.
Eyes, Mouth, Ears, and Brain
Turning next to the eyes, mouth, ears, and brain in our metaphor, we conceive of our ideal larper as someone actively investing their cognitive energy and sensory capacities in making the larp work: they are noticing details, making sense of them, and communicating about them in a certain way. Players work and create value in the larp as a whole when they pay attention to others, in particular to in-play cues. They then perform additional labor by sorting the cues and acting upon them with their full cognitive and emotional capacities.
Almost any play advice worth mentioning will encourage players to, at bare minimum, listen to each other. Players in larps are typically not “lost” in character, but rather are constantly shifting their attention between various in-character goals, extant player needs, and just “being” in the game. This requires active awareness, or the devotion of one’s full attention to the comprehension of one’s environment and fellow players. For example, in blockbuster games such as the magic school larp College of Wizardry (2014-), whether or not someone is aware of a group of students headed off to follow a serpent spirit or is in an area cordoned off for an impromptu magic ritual can make or break multiple players’ larp experiences.
The core skill being exercised in many games is reflective listening, or the basic repetition of material one has perceived to ensure one understands. Players do this every time they noticeably state a fellow player’s character name aloud instead of their real name: “Hi Miguel!” They are confirming “I understand you are playing a fictional entity by the name of Miguel and acknowledge you as this entity.” Reflective listening in larps also manifests with respect to all the meme-like nuggets of plot information normally circulated: “The king has a traitor in his court!” “Susanne has an illegitimate child.” “I am not actually a horse.” Larps are usually robust enough to deal with the social realities of tacit misinformation — think of how a message transforms over time during a child’s game of “telephone” — but accurately passing on the message “Stefan is not actually a horse” can have profound effects on subsequent play, due to the host of fictional triggers and social opportunities at hand in a larp.
It turns out that paying attention and good communication are some of the most basic and valuable work skills there are. German rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff already outlined in Psychologia empirica (1732) and Psychologia rationalis (1734) the formal bases of our perception, apperception, and attention, with the goal of controlling one’s own conscious thought for as long as possible. Centuries of inquiry have been devoted to how to increase one’s self-control over one’s attention, and it is an overt commodity in the digital age (Dean 2012). 21st Century capitalist societies both require extensive intellectual work in programming, engineering, teaching, and management to survive, and also relentlessly exhaust those capacities through advertising, email, and the daily distractions of digital life. John Tierney (2001) argues that this relentless struggle over our attentive decision-making capacities is more taxing than one would think:
No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired-but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts…
When we larp well, we are not just good players. We are also good co-workers and employees of the larp (Saitta 2012) — we not only submit to its rules system and genre expectations, but we also watch out for fellow players and listen to the various subtleties in their expression and demeanor. Taking it all in and making in-character decisions is both the object of most games and also, as described above, substantively exhausting.
Listening empathically to both player and character, performing emotional labor where needed (see Koulu 2020, also in this volume) — a responsibility that often falls to the already marginalized — can be part of play for certain, but also constitutes labor in the informal sense. Participatory art is thorny in this way. Cognitive and emotional load take center stage in larp design (Li and Morningstar 2016), and players self-manage their labor on this front, regardless of whether organizers do.
One scenario I have witnessed on occasion is the labor performed by close social acquaintances of high-maintenance players. If said player regularly does not have a good time at games without playing with their acquaintances, they will likely steer their play toward these acquaintances, who suddenly have the labor of providing a decent larp experience for this player. I mention this after encountering multiple players weighing their in-game emotional labor before a large event: “If Janaki is in the larp, then that will mean they will eventually wind up playing with me, and I do not know if I can handle it this time when they suffer their typical emotional breakdown after Act II.”
Another scenario includes players actively steering away from portions of the larp that make them uncomfortable, especially when they know someone in power might nevertheless choose not to keep them safe (Algayres 2019). Much of this labor goes unseen, but is absolutely vital for maintaining seemingly “effortless” play.
Skin
We turn to the metaphor of skin specifically to validate costume and beauty work as an immense portion of both pre-game and in-game player efforts, as well as the physical preparations to embody a character. Such efforts are often feminized and de-valued, something I consider every time I watch a woman apply make-up on a man’s face when he exhibits no capacity to put it on himself.
For events that last hours, one wants a topnotch look that acceptably portrays one’s character for the evening. For events that last days, one wants a durable set of costumes that can be easily donned or taken off at the end of a larp day. And in our current era, we also need to look good for the cameras: larp photographers dart amidst us, taking hundreds of photos for perusal afterward. Sharing good photos shores up self esteem and confers social capital.
Preparing one’s body for the portrayal of a character can prove intensive. Characterization changes one’s posture, voice, facial expressions, hand gestures, and dozens of other details that, often, only the player knows about. Characters that require cultural sensitivity to play also mean that players must balance between their own desires for the character and what is respectful and acceptable in a cosmopolitan, multicultural society; embodying the character without using harmful accents or mocking bodily movements. Costuming and make-up simply add another layer of labor on top of this. Larp costuming and make-up straddle four primary focal areas: character portrayal, comfort, durability, and overall polish, and few of these come without a financial or labor cost.To portray a character, it can take anywhere from 5 minutes to upwards of an hour to get ready for a game prior to a larp’s start time. This is not to mention all of the planning, measuring, shopping, sewing, experimentation, and touch ups required before one even sets foot on the larp site. Some larps such as the period game De la Bête (2016-) provide costumes themselves in order to achieve desired “looks” for the game; others such as Inside Hamlet (2015-) rely on players to supply their own costumes, but one needs to fit the 1930s style for an “epic party and heartbreaking tragedy.” Players scour online photo boards, consider historical fashion textbooks, and do video make-up tutorials in order to get the proper look.
The comfort of costumes or make-up cannot be underrated as part of a player’s labor. Discomfort impacts all aspects of play, including the sheer amount of energy required to simply “be” that character. One makes oneself comfortable through a variety of means: padding, extra zippers, breathable fabrics, and lightweight materials. A heavy make-up mask that looks stunning for staged larp photos can be substituted for a lighter make-up mask for actual play. Those who have theatrical or dress-up skills that allow for such shortcuts are able to help the players who have chosen onerous costume and make-up arrangements. The same goes for costume and make-up durability: regardless of one’s monetary investment in a particular look, a player must be mindful of wearing out the elements of that look before the end of the larp. That level of care and attention to one’s materials is also labor.
A player with an appearance that nails the character and period, looks sharp for others and the camera, and is easy to take on and take off is what Karl Marx would call “congealed labor,” in which the commodity’s effortless appearance belies how much labor went into its creation, and that it is not correspondingly valued either. And yet we also deny social capital to those nerds who just throw on a cape over street clothes and show up for a larp: they have not shown proper deference to the play of the larp through their labor, and will pay a subsequent social cost. This can vary, from exclusion from recognition in the larp itself — and thus, play — to visual absence in the post-game documentation.
Smartphone
Finally, I have included the smartphone as a body part, as it represents an object that is both an extension of our being and also something fully external to us. Modern smartphones represent outside forces endlessly pushing in on our lives, as well as our externalized memory and communication with the world. In our metaphorical universe of larp labor, the smartphone represents the permeability of the magic circle and the pressures of non-larp forces on our larp play. Larp as a medium demands much of its participants but generates little to no profit, as one can see from the collapse of many for-profit larp companies over the years and the struggle of even Disney’s 2019 Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge immersive entertainment resort. Nevertheless, there are many stakeholders lurking at the edge of our play. Larp-adjacent activities such as military or search & rescue simulations are designed to teach real, testable skills and responses. Political messages can be advocated in a larp (Rantanen 2016), and larps funded through government grants may be obligated to take a particular position on a topic or on the outcome of the larp itself. Larp organizers and players are not necessarily the owners of the overall larp business which pays for the event itself, and thus labor on behalf of for-profit entities.
It is odd to think the actual play of a larp could be financially exploited, but the 21st Century has seen to it that neoliberal financialization will creep into every activity we do. In particular, content creators on social media and video-sharing platforms, many of whom seek clicks and advertisers for revenue, now use larp as a rich trove of imagery and stories with which to provide content for a wider audience.
Gone are the earlier days of stilted larp documentary (Torner 2011), replaced by “influencers” and media professionals making high-quality webisodes for Larp House or The Nerdist. Influencers can increase the Internet attention paid to a particular larp, and there are occasions in which their publicity labor is exchanged for perquisites such as free admission, lodging, and more. Yet the players’ playbour becomes contested terrain once the influencers’ cameras start rolling. Players are suddenly “performing” for an unknown, broadly conceived global Internet audience, and their playbour is likely to go uncompensated, despite the congealed result of their physical, mental, emotional, and cosmetic efforts. Even if organizers clearly state in the photography and video policy that their images will be circulated in such a fashion, the value being derived from the players’ play is highly suspect. Players are in theory exchanging money for not only the larp but also high-quality imagery of them in-costume and in-character, and yet in practice are providing surplus value to be extracted by others in the digital economy.
Organizers must be mindful of the external stakeholders in the images generated by a larp, and streamers must be particularly mindful of the wishes of the players for the circulation of their larp character images online. It is hegemonic to simply ask players to be happy that they are getting high-quality images taken of them. Moreover, the labor of creating quality streaming material means, in practice, that the influencers become a separate larp within the larp with different stakes and stipulations. Players are forced to take on more labor to collaborate with or avoid such entities.
The Whole Body
It is not of much intellectual or social benefit to distinguish between play and work — the modern age has produced a surreal sliding scale of play that also makes its participants millions of dollars and worthless work that serves only to occupy the time of those who do it. It is, however, of great importance to recognize the value of one’s playbour as a player. Physical and/or remuneration-worthy work in a larp can be of great surplus value to the players and organizers, or not. Players who pay active attention to each other, communicate, and respond in consensual, socially acceptable ways are absolutely crucial for most larps, and are thus producing value internal to the whole operation. When we travel long distances or do uncompensated emotional counseling of fellow players, we are putting work into making the play experience better. But when we make ourselves beautiful, presentable for the camera and the outside world — beyond our own gratification and the game itself — the value of our playbour becomes increasingly clear.
When our larp play becomes consumed vicariously — through photos, videos, or a live, ticketpaying audience — then our playbour is producing surplus value for outside stakeholders. When we actively employ it to teach a lesson or transmit a political message for some institution, our playbour now has investors seeking a particular outcome or effect, possibly resulting in the conferral or denial of future resources.
Good play and good make-up/costuming among the players does indeed increase the larp’s value to others. Our communities can be financialized and, in doing so, our playbour alienated. One begins to think of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s long-rolling DAU project: players staying in costume and on a set for 24 hours a day, but still being filmed for some future moving-image project.
Above all, our players should attend to these principles:
Your play is also labor.
Your play has value.
Keep track of what others do with the products and recordings of play.
Sarah Lynne Bowman (2018): Immersion and Shared Imagination in Role-Playing Games. In José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding (eds.), Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. New York: Routledge, 379-394.
Aleena Chia (2019): The Moral Calculus of Vocational Passion in Digital Gaming. Television & New Media, Vol. 20(8), 767-777.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1975): Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener (2010): Film Theory: An Introduction Through The Senses. New York: Routledge.
David Graeber (2018): Bullshit Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Katherine Castiello Jones, Sanna Koulu, and Evan Torner (2016): Playing at Work: Labor, Identity and Emotion in Larp.In Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi (eds.), Larp Politics – Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action. Helsinki: Solmukohta. 122-132.
Björn-Ole Kamm (2019): Adapting Live-Action Role-Play in Japan: How “German” Roots Do Not Destine “Japanese” Routes. Re-Playing Japan 1, 64-78.
Brendan Keogh (2018): A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Teemu Rantanen (2016): Larp as a Form of Political Action: Some Insights from the Theories of Political Science Political Larps: Two Audiences. In Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi (eds.), Larp Politics – Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action. Helsinki: Ropecon ry, 111-118.
John Sharp and David Thomas (2019): Fun, Taste, & Games: An Aesthetics of the Idle, Unproductive, and Otherwise Playful. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jaakko Stenros (2015): Playfulness, Play, and Games: A Constructionist Ludology Approach. Dissertation. Tampere: Tampere University.
John Tierney (2001): Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue? New York Times Magazine.
Evan Torner (2011): The Theory and Practice of Larp in Non-Fiction Film. In Thomas Duus Henriksen, et al. (eds.), Think Larp. Denmark: Bymose Hegn, 104-123.
One of the most important tenets of the communities built around Nordic larp these past few years has been inclusivity. “Inclusiveness” was defined by Lars Nerback in a 2013 Nordic Larp Talk as the feeling of being culturally and socially accepted, welcome, and equally treated (Nerback 2013).
From a larpmaker’s perspective, it designates the effort to design spaces in which people who experience discrimination in their ordinary lives are actively supported and encouraged. Over the years, people involved with Nordic larp have consequently developed practical and educational tools to support their claim of being inclusive. For example, papers have been written about how to perform cultural calibration so that players have the same vision and understanding of the culture depicted ingame (Nielsen 2014) or of the actual culture and everyday experiences of the people whose lives are being used as a direct inspiration for the larp (Kangas 2017). Others have written to address discrimination experienced in larp contexts, for example due to race (Kemper 2018) or body type (Kessock 2019).
Those tools, although primarily designed to be used in larp contexts, contribute to shaping the behaviors and practices expected on a community level. Indeed, if larps are the ground from which most social relationships among larpers grow, sociability doesn’t end at larps. For most people, it continues, through Facebook, chat, public meetings, events, etc. That’s why, in this chapter, I will address larp primarily as a community — a social group sharing common interests, supported by a feeling of belonging.
In addition, many (larp and non-larp) communities, seeking inspiration from Nordic larp or following the spirit of the times, also strive towards inclusivity. Those communities may encounter similar problems: inclusivity questions our collective ability to remain actively open while taking part in a group of interests. It is, at its essence, a matter of community skills.
The partial success of the effort towards inclusivity is especially apparent in the increasing visibility of queer people, for example at Solmukohta — from Drag me to KP to “queer at KP” badges to the prominence of rainbowcolored pieces of clothing. However, the larp world remains strikingly homogenous, revealing limits to how inclusivity is currently practiced. Even though it is not true of all larp cultures, most Nordic larpers are white, able-bodied, and come from moderately wealthy, educated backgrounds: people of color, people of reduced mobility, and people with low income or education, are scarce.
Intersectionality, a notion created by African American academic Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), helps us understand how different discrimination (for example, race, ability, and class) combine in ways that make it necessary to address all its aspects in order to understand how a person is being limited or suppressed based on their identity. We must also take that into account in designing for inclusivity.
The aspects we need to consider to make a community effectively inclusive are many: gender, class, race, ability, but also education, and even social skills. Nordic larp was born out of an endeavor to get several emerging larping traditions to share practices and ideas, and it worked tremendously well. However, this creative proliferation has, over the years, built to increase the distance between insiders and outsiders. From the outside, the threshold to participate in the Nordic larping community now seems ridiculously high.
I joined the Nordic scene two years ago at age 23 during Knutpunkt 2018 after a pretty short larping career in France, in the pursuit of a degree in Social Anthropology. I was fortunate enough to have a motive to join (research), a feminist background, and a compulsive learning attitude forged by years of university training. Yet, even today, after spending some time in the Nordics countries, reading as much larp theory as I could stomach, and writing a thesis I’m pretty happy with, it still feels I can never, ever catch up with what was produced during the last twenty years.
As a result, I feel dangerously ignorant of the cultural and social ways of the community, and constantly in danger of making a misstep. I think it is safe to say I’m far from being the only one. Many other larpers I had the chance to talk to shared similar feelings. The cost of access, i.e. the amount of specialized knowledge required to participate in the Nordic larp community is very high.
Some of the cost of access that impedes inclusivity is, in fact, due to the efforts to support it. There’s two sides to every coin: to be inclusive to certain people, a space has to be exclusive of others — and it is not always clear who.
This is the paradox of inclusivity.
In this chapter, I would like to address how “being inclusive” and “feeling safe” come into contradiction, notably in the way that we design community spaces. Then, I will try to question the phenomenon of community violence and how it relies on our in-group conceptions of difference and ways to confront it. These thoughts will help build a clearer vision of what inclusivity does, and can, mean. Finally, I will try to offer practical advice to help us build more inclusive communities, encourage collective reflexivity, and conceive of larpers’ spaces as a piece of a more global society, which needs to become more inclusive as well.
Inclusivity vs. Safe Space: Bringing In or Keeping Out
When trying to achieve inclusivity in practice, the first obstacle encountered is the exclusiveness of general society. Just because a space seems public, or open, doesn’t mean that it is: homeless people are constantly pushed away, people of color are at risk of police violence, openly gay couples often have to fear assault, sex workers are criminalized and stigmatized, etc. Therefore, all attempts to build an inclusive community must deal with the matter of the space in which events, gatherings, or larps take place.
In short, we need to make the participants feel safe. According to Johanna Koljonen, this involves the following:
Participants need to feel seen and secure, they need to know they’re in the right place, and have a reasonably good idea of what kinds of experiences and activities they are about to engage in. This makes them not have to worry, which allows them to be present in the moment and explore the actual instance of the experience in a playful, mindful and proactive manner.
Koljonen 2016
The careful framing of such spaces, the rules and limitations we actively give them, differ from how we experience our everyday lives. There are no safety mechanics in real life, no word that magically stops your boss from yelling at you, no graceful opt-out that’ll let you walk free of a street harasser.
What we try to achieve through all the rules, the caring, the long discussions about consent, is commonly called a safe space. And, as society itself is certainly not a safe space, we need to build a space that is separated from it and tries to counter it, to cancel the prejudices, power relations, and inequalities that we encounter in our ordinary lives.
We try to build an inclusive environment by removing it from society, and by making sure unwanted elements of society don’t follow inside. We try to bring (people) in by keeping (the problems which individuals are a part of) out.
In short: safe spaces, which are instrumental in allowing for inclusivity, are exclusive. Then again, what choice do we have? The world in general remains a dangerous place for many of us. In the absence of other options, we must ponder what we call safe and what (or who) we deem unsafe.
First, it is important to acknowledge that safety is a collective concern requiring all members of the community to actively contribute to the social design that organizers — primarily — come up with. As Maury Brown puts it:
For a community to be safe, all of its members must: uphold the agreed-upon social contract of respectful behavior; be intolerant of harassment, abuse, and assault within the group; share the duty of monitoring behavior and educating new members; support the decisions of organizers to enforce safety norms; and respect and offer support to those who make reports of safety violations.
Brown 2017
These are no small tasks: the exact meaning of words like harassment, abuse, and assault, is far from evident. Safety requirements are specialized knowledge, and contribute to raising the cost of access to communities such as the Nordic larp scene. Fortunately, in larps, cultural calibration tools and workshops provide support, and have shown remarkable efciency in including, for example, autistic people (Fein 2015).
Blockbuster larps and performance or art games marketed to the general public have an ability to attract new faces, thus building an entry point to the community. However, becoming part of the community, being a valid, full member of the group, able to participate in Facebook conversations, is not easy.
In fact, during my first Solmukohta, I felt so distressed and alone (I knew barely a handful of people among the 500, and none of them well) that I spent a whole afternoon in my room writing about “extrovert privilege”. The first time I wrote the Nordic larping community was not actually inclusive was the first time I came into contact with it. Being told this community was “a big family”, it was hard to realize that it was as difficult to take part in for an introvert as anywhere else.
The amount of community skills required to support a safe space is high, and at odds with the concern for inclusivity. To address it we can, at least partly, rely on “herd competence” — hoping the people bold enough to enter our spaces learn by doing in contact with others. However, by relying on the rather elusive notion of safety, we court confusion.
Safety is a many-sided issue: we need to be safe to play, express our identities, meet our needs, voice our opinions, etc. (what Friedner 2019 calls the brave space), but also safe from. There’s a positive safety, rooted in empowerment, and a negative safety, emerging from the perceived need of protection and defense.
Although enforced in more or less tangible ways, safety is a feeling, not a state of affairs. As such, it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with reality: we may feel unsafe while running no risk at all, or engage in risky behavior because we feel safe.
In an interview for the Knutpunkt 2018 Companion Book, Johanna Koljonen says that larp safety “is about feeling safe to play rather than being safe from harm” (Svanevik and Brind 2018, my emphasis). However, this principle of safety offers very little ground for facts. It relies largely on subjectivity.
It is difficult to decide what constitutes a threat, and even more so to distinguish between an actual threat and one we project based on our own past experiences.
What (supposedly) makes the larping community safe or inclusive is primarily the language we use to qualify it: it is safe because we’ve said so. It is inclusive because we’ve written about it. This is what is commonly called, following linguist John Austin (1962), a performative use of language: uttering a certain speech, in appropriate circumstances, may produce effects in reality. When we collectively declare “larp is safe”, we make safety happen, because all of a sudden we become mindful of others, their vulnerability, the precariousness of any social situation, etc. But when we have no clear definition of what “safe” means and the word “inclusivity” is little more than gibberish to many community members, the performative function of language is in jeopardy.
That’s when crises happen.
What We Do to Each Other: Community, Care, and the Making of Forgiveness
We often perceive safety as a human right. As far as I’m concerned, this is true. However, the chasm between “the right not to be shot on the way home” and “the right to not feel uncomfortable” is wide. As Sarah Schulman, author of an essay called Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016), warns:
Feeling “safe” of course is already a problematic endeavor since there is little guarantee of safety in our world, and the promise of it is a false one, as the effort to enforce this is often at the expense of other people.
Schulman 2016:130
There is no way to ensure 100% safety, and by trying to increase our chances, we might put other people at risk. If safety is a feeling, so is the impression of threat, unsafety, or intentional harm.
According to Sarah Schulman, projecting fears and insecurities onto others (the people who are “not us”, not part of the safe group) is common with two attitudes that we usually do not think to associate with each other: supremacy and trauma. Supremacy is the belief that the reference group is superior to other groups (by way of race, nationality, gender, ability, etc.), and therefore their own needs must be prioritized. This can lead to hate crimes, but more mundanely manifests in the feeling that the members of the supremacy group are put at risk of harm by non-members, and it’s therefore legitimate to use whatever means of “protection” against the (imaginary) threat they deem necessary.
In Europe, supremacist ideology directly translates to anti-immigrant laws, horrendous detention camps, and thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean each year.
Schulman describes supremacist attitudes in terms of the irrational feeling that one’s group must be protected against and separated from others, who are deemed dangerous, unworthy, or inferior. She draws a disturbing parallel with the attitude of traumatized people, whose feeling of being unsafe can be based not on actual risks in the present tense, but “a projection in the present based on dangers that occurred in the past” (ibid.). Because both supremacy and trauma are rooted in an analogous feeling that the group is being at risk of harm from non-members, the traumatized can become the supremacist. The Israeli occupation of Palestine constitutes a major institutional example of that escalation.
It is natural to seek to be, and feel, safe. However, when it leads to expecting others to comply with our own (not necessarily clear, visible from the outside, or reasonable) needs, conflict becomes inevitable. Moreover, conflict is often simplified until one can clearly distinguish a victim and an abuser.
The following pattern is common especially in communities using a lot of social media: A person commits, often without realizing it, an act that makes some members of the community feel hurt. These people share their pain, unease or dismay with other members. As more and more people become aware of the situation, the initial feelings flare up and reach a level where the status quo can’t hold, inducing a crisis.
At this point, it seems like nothing can be done: sides are taken, the community becomes polarized, and a stable state is only reached through splitting the community or shunning the wrongdoer. When this process targets public figures, it can take the form of “canceling,” an attempt from an active minority to deplatform a creator by publicly denouncing, slandering, and threatening them and their supporters.
Issues concerning the building of a safe space are involved in such crises. Designating a space as safe leads to the passive exclusion of people who do not know, or feel they know, enough, and the active exclusion of people thought to threaten the safety of the group. By creating a space that is viewed as separate, different from “the rest of the world,” and validating it through a feeling — safety —, those attitudes may lead to creating a critical differentiation between “us” and “them,” and to posit otherness (difference, disagreement, strangeness, etc.) as a threat. As a consequence, it becomes difficult to treat others with the same care as we expect to be treated as rightful members of our community. A Finnish larper who had been part of a recent community crisis as one of the wrongdoers told me: “You heard about the Week of Stories? We didn’t even have five minutes.”
The “Week of Stories” is a short period of time after an event (generally a larp) in which the participants withhold their criticism to give the organizers an opportunity to recover — and let the steam cool down.
As the actions of the organizers of this particular event were deemed outrageous, many attendants reacted by expressing their shock and indignation immediately. These feelings were, of course, legitimate: all feelings, in fact, should be acknowledged — although not always acted upon. In that case, though, the immediate outburst caused the organizers to feel hurt and disregarded in turn.
The rules and norms of care and attention in larps are largely there not to be used: they are there in case of need, but their primary purpose is to support a feeling of “safe enough” to participate — much like a lifejacket or a seatbelt. But when those rules, like the Week of Stories, could come in handy to address a particularly difficult situation, we are not always able to resist the initial flare of emotion.
Unfortunately, social media encourage us to react immediately to stimuli, and facilitates emotional outbursts at the expense of caution and reflection. As the authors of the Living Games’ Crisis Management Workshop put it:
While many communities and events are working hard to make their spaces safer, it’s not enough to have a Code of Conduct. You need to practice it.
Stavropoulos and Steele 2016
Speaking about safety is not enough. Imagining safety measures is not enough. We need to practice understanding why we made those rules.
Violence happens. Conflict happens. But violent reactions, even verbal, even righteous, even targeted at the people who wronged us, are unlikely to lead to positive outcomes in a community. There are other ways than exclusion to support a safe and inclusive space, and resorting to it too often may weaken the space we try to preserve.
We frequently use the metaphor of the missing stair to describe an individual that we know to be “problematic” in a community, yet carefully avoid instead of confronting (putting at risk those who are unaware a stair is missing). It could have provided a nice basis for understanding how to address detrimental elements in a community, but this metaphor was built on a logical error: we don’t fix a stair by removing it, but by safely replacing faulty parts, adding safeguards, and making sure the stair doesn’t put people at risk anymore.
If shunning can be a temporary solution to address a potential danger in the short term, it is not likely to support understanding of the harmful behavior, for the perpetrator or the community.
Being denied the right to speak, the perpetrator can experience a strong feeling of unfairness and rejection. This won’t help them listen and understand the consequences of their actions. As for the community, it cannot reach an adequate comprehension of the sociological causes of the harm done without facing the perpetrator and hearing them too. As a consequence, the community renders itself incapable of preventing similar behaviors in the future. Furthermore, enforcing safety rules using the fear of shunning encourages perpetrators to hide and deny their actions instead of acknowledging them and trust the community to resort to transformative justice.
Transformative justice is a comprehensive and non-legal approach to problem solving and peacemaking that doesn’t seek to punish the perpetrator, but to collectively reach a new state of balance through educating, supporting, and encouraging dialogue. It doesn’t mean that we are responsible for fixing people: in some cases, that would simply be impossible. However, “sacrificing” members of the community who are known to misbehave may be beside the point. In fact, punishment for the sake of righteousness is often beside the point. I believe that it is our individual and collective duty to try to understand the etiology of a crisis. Otherwise an appropriate response remains impossible.
Reaching Past the Choir
By keeping us from reaching more people, building our communities as safe spaces fails to allow us to fully benefit from the educational and transformative powers of larp (e.g. Bowman and Hugaas 2019). To change that, we need to be inclusive towards other kinds of people, to be able to extend the safe space in ways that allow anyone to step in and benefit from the kind of awareness we’ve had.
The para-larp environment is awfully technical, albeit for good reasons: in general society, something as widespread as e.g. sharing one’s pronouns is mostly unheard of. Being for once in a space where people won’t misgender you is priceless — that’s also why I’m not rejecting inclusivity as we usually conceive of it, simply pointing at some of its dark spots.
Most people quickly become allies when they are placed in an environment that is appropriately forgiving with their missteps, yet encourages their efforts in learning and being included. On the contrary, hurtful reactions to honest mistakes can create more anger, confusion, and a feeling of rejection that fosters resistance and hatred. Getting angry happens, of course: but offering the other person an explanation for our reaction can help bridge the difference, and slowly bring them to our side.
Shunning hurts us. When addressing community issues, violence is almost always detrimental. If inclusivity is synonymous with purity, we are not protecting ourselves from harm, but ensuring it happens.
As it stands, the community requires specialized knowledge and legitimacy to talk about many sensitive topics. As a consequence, it is more difficult for newer and low-status members to achieve social recognition, while older and high-status members benefit from a kind of indulgence that might result in unhealthy power relations (especially in the event of a crisis). Muriel Algayres’s article about social capital in larp offers a detailed account of the effects of status differences on play opportunities and social dynamics (Algayres 2019).
The Nordic larp community is inclusive, but not all the time, and not to everyone. In fact, inclusive is, in my opinion, not the right term to use for the larp community: instead, it is queerfriendly, with (white) feminist values, and an education to difference. Not bad, but with a few fixes, we can do better. By understanding that the need for safety may come into contradiction with the ideal of inclusivity we can move to an increased awareness of how to address and support differences in our community. Here are a few steps:
Acknowledging feelings, while at the same time recognizing that feeling alone cannot be the baseline for acting upon a conflict situation.
Ensuring the persons who felt hurt receive appropriate care, but remaining careful in assuming the intentions of the wrongdoers or initiating punishment.
Keeping in mind that being inclusive means making space for different people and opinions to coexist.
Holding the space to hear all parties involved in a crisis, and offering or asking a neutral community member or entity for mediation.
Refraining from immediate social media exposure.
Instead of projecting our expectations based on a unilateral understanding of a given situation, we need to assume the best of others (at least provisionally) and create the space for reasonable dialogue to occur.
A lot of good can arise from constructing a safe space around positive tenets meant to cancel, or compensate, behaviors at play in general society. However, we need to be wary of the risk of seclusion and insularity. Indeed, such a state of affairs would give way to distorted thinking about the state of the world and the intentions of the people who don’t belong. In wanting to defend the group from harm, insular communities may thoughtlessly replicate harmful behaviors such as bullying, shunning, and rejecting difference. In doing so, community spaces become less resilient to change and dissent and thus more precarious.
Inclusivity has to meet a double logic. First, the creation of a safe space allows, from the outside to the inside, to take in people whose identities do not meet the dominant social norms. Second, from the inside to the outside, larp and larp communities can create opportunities for educating people to difference and provide alternative social models that contribute to the struggle against all oppression — a purpose the seminary The State of the Larp in Oslo in December 2018 explicitly pursued.
However, neither the one nor the other should be taken for granted or implied: what makes a space safe is far from obvious, and the power of larp is only as great as the people it reaches. In the design of our larps and communities, we must explicitly ask ourselves: what do we think we are doing, and what do we want to do in practice? To put it provocatively: to make a better place in the world for ourselves, or to make the world a better place.
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989): Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum.
Elizabeth Fein (2015): Making Meaningful Worlds: Role-playing Subcultures and the Autism Spectrum. Cult Med Psychiatry, 39(2), pp. 299-321.
Kat Jones, Mo Holkar and Jonaya Kemper (2019): Designing for Intersectional Identities. in Johanna Koljonen (ed.), Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Landsforeningen Bifrost, 2019.
This common childhood insult comes in many languages and forms. The gist being that if you are not like the other children, and you do not fit in, then there must be something wrong with you. To be weird, is to be outside of what was expected of you. This may be something you are familiar with. The outsider is something we, as a collective part of humanity, have always tried to deal with. The notion that we are weird, and therefore somehow outside of society, and unwanted, is strong. If you do not fit in, then you must be fixed. This can be especially strong in collectivist cultures, where being outside the norm may even be considered selfish.
However, what if the concept of weird, was not bad at all? What if the act of being weird, was actually a powerful and radical act of controlling one’s destiny? In this article, we will learn how to wyrd the self, that is, we will learn how to use basic tools to decolonize((Colonization is when a dominant group or system takes over culture and society from other groups. This may involve taking land, physical and mental violence, systemic injustice, and forcing people to only follow the colonizer’s way of life. When one decolonizes something, they are trying to undo the long lasting harm colonization has done. In this article, we are attempting to decolonize ourselves by rejecting a mythical norm. In this meaning decolonize means that we will learn how to press the proverbial restart button. What if we could be the being we truly want to be without the confines of society’s rigid interpretation of who we must be?)) the body and search for liberation from internalized oppression using navigational play. In simple terms, by learning to steer for liberation, and to engage in deep reflection after a larp, we may end up finding a version of ourselves who we want to be, rather than who society tells us we must be. This article is a condensed and rewritten take on my Master’s Degree thesis, Playing to Create Ourselves: Exploring Larp and Visual Autoethnographic Practice as a Tool of Self Liberation for Marginalized Identities (Kemper 2018).
What is Wyrding?
The word weird has its root in the Anglo Saxon word, wyrd, which roughly boils down to the action of controlling one’s fate. To be weird, is to control one’s fate, rather than let society determine your place and fate. To be weird, is to be outside the normal aspects of society, yes, but to also collectively decide who you would like to be, not based on societal pressure. It is my belief that larp affords us the actual ability to wyrd ourselves, that is to shape ourselves and our conceptions of self through play. In her book, The Functions of Role-Playing Games (2010), scholar Sarah Lynne Bowman speaks about role-playing’s ability to allow players to alter parts of their identity by trying on different acts of self hood:
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the process of role-playing lies in the ability to shift personality characteristics within the parameters of the game environment. Games and scenarios allow participants the opportunity to ”try on different hats” of selfhood, experimenting with the adoption of personality characteristics that either amplify or contradict aspects of their primary identities.
Bowman 2010, 127
What this essentially means is that when we role-play, we can completely shift who we are to fit the game. Each game allows us as players to explore the selves we could never be, or that we might have been, depending on how close to home we are playing. Larp then becomes a dressing room where we experiment with different selves that we can try on or take off as it suits us, and it is within this space we might find some of the characteristics we have always wanted to exhibit, but we have been closed off or discouraged from being. A large man may be allowed to be seen as soft and tearful, a woman of color may be able to be seen as smart without someone believing it is unbelievable, and someone who feels outside of the realm of attractiveness may be seen as a sex symbol. When you begin to alter yourself through this type of investigation and play it is taking fate into your own hands.
When one does wyrd the self, they seek out emancipatory bleed, steer for liberation, and investigate themselves through the lens of play. What follows below, is a practical tool for using larp as an investigation tool, integrating those discoveries into your life, and a suggestion for the ethics of doing so.
The Mythical Norm, Internalized Oppression, and Internalized Bias
Before we go further, it is important to understand the concept of marginalized is larger than we have come to believe, and that these tools and theories are here to liberate all peoples, regardless of their station in life. While the word ‘marginalized’ may be commonly used to describe those populations who are often at the risk of the most oppression, it is important to understand that most people are both the oppressed and the oppressor. It is an uncomfortable thought to sit with, as it makes you aware that no matter how oppressed you may be, you still have the power to oppress others. Even people who face an extreme set of marginalizations (people of color/racialized populations and gender and sexual minorities) can still have the ability to oppress others.
This can be best summed up by Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Friere, who explained what he believed the true goal of liberation in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Frieire writes:
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.
Freire 1968/2014, 541
Freire is saying that even though oppressors may do things that oppress others, they themselves are stuck in the same destructive cycles, and the only way to break them is to notice that we are all stuck inside of them. For example: A person who belongs in an ethnic minority may still have English as a first language, and can then take space of those who do not speak the language fluently. At home, this player is routinely oppressed by their government and culture. However, they are a native English speaker, and never have to worry about conveying what they want to say in a larp. The player realizes this, and attempts to remember this while playing, which leads them to being far more egalitarian in play. They must notice their behavior, and seek to change themselves.
By freeing yourself, you free your oppressor and encourage them to break their social binding roles. Wyrding the self, is grounded in an intersectional theory of self, and so must sit with our messy definitions and recognitions of oppression. This tool is just as easy to use and accessible to a white, European, cis-gendered, hetreosexual man. Why? It is because it is my belief that society oppresses all individuals in ways that may be unseen, and if we want liberation, then we must also liberate those who oppress us because they are oppressed just like us, through the mythical norm.
The concept of the mythical norm comes from intersectional theorist and poet, Audre Lorde, who defines it in her essay, “Age, Race, Class and Sex” when she states:
Somewhere on the edge of consciousness, there is something I call the mythical norm. Which each one of in our hearts knows, “that is not me”. In America this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is within this norm that the trappings of power reside in this society.
Lorde 2015, 116
Identities like Western European, English speaking, cisgender, able bodied, and neurotypical are all things commonly seen as the mythical norm. In each of our societies, the norm goes even further, oppressing more and more people, and setting up those people to oppress others.
Our primary identity is constructed and shaped by our culture and the mythic norm. When one lies outside that norm, they find that their primary identity is complex and intersectional. Sometimes you do not even need an outside oppressor to harm you, as your own thoughts and feelings can hold you back. You believe you cannot do something because you are not “the type” to do it. This is called internalized oppression. For example, if you do not go in for the sexy Goddess role because you believe you are too fat, and no one can believe a fat goddess, this is internalized oppression. Similarly, if you do not go for a leadership role because you think your English is not as good as others, and you’re worried no one will listen to you.
With internalized oppression, we only see ourselves as not normal, as the other outside of the mythic norm, and we uphold that unconsciously. By continuing to stay in these roles, we uplift the very oppression that can pull us down.
In addition to internalized oppression, we have internalized biases that stop us from playing as fully, and impacts our co-players as we are engaging in their oppression. Here are some examples: A woman who is playing a leader is never listened to by her war council, despite being cast as the most knowledgeable warrior who they are supposed to listen to. Someone in their 60s is considered too unattractive to be seductive, despite the fact that their character is seductive.
If we hold ourselves captive to these internalized myths of who we can never be, how then do we break it? We can do this through consciously telling our own stories and creating our own selves. With larp, you have the power to live your own stories and put them to action in your body. In larp, we find yet another realization that stories have the power to liberate.
Emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2016) is the feeling of liberation that comes from being able to fight back against or succeed against a systematic oppression, or allows you to notice those things that have held you back. For example, when a male player who was routinely bullied as a child for being emotional, plays a character who has the ability to freely share that emotion without being bullied for it. Or when a player notices that they are no longer afraid of speaking their mind at the office, or taking up space in public, after playing a person in charge at a larp.
Capturing Story, Narrative, and Plot
How can we capture what has happened during a larp? According to larp theorist Johanna Koljonen (2008), when a larp is over, it ceases to exist, and it is hard to pin down the narrative. In order to understand the importance of stories and narratives in relation to wyrding the self, we will be using the definition of story, plot, and narrative as defined by designer and scholar Simon Brind (2016). His definition of stories and narratives allows you to see how the fluidity and temporality of larp as well as how you may progress through it. Plot is the larpwrights plan for what is going to happen in the larp, Story is what is actually happening during runtime, and narrative is the events that have taken place and described after the fact.
A larp follows an overall plot conceit (i.e. we are all in a forest in a magical land, we are all at wizard school, we are all at the dinner table) and then the players take the designer’s plot and structure, and turn it into a co-created story, which is ephemeral in nature, and becomes the narrative when it is all done.
Since the narrative of the larp is only decided after the larp has taken place, it is fairly personal to each player. Therefore, each instance of play is a fleeting moment in time which can never be recreated exactly. The narrative of the larp lies in the mind of each player, and that narrative becomes their embodied experience. The story you create with your co-players evolves moment to moment with player interactions and choices, each person bringing themselves and the fiction to life. While the larpwrights may have ideas about how a larp ends, it is generally up to you as a player to get there, even if the larp ends in a specific conceit.
How can we contextualize our own experiences if they are hard to document and the narrative is not created until after everything has happened? You will need a set of reflexive tools to help you remember and contextualize your experience, and since the co-creation of the story ends up in many individual narratives, I believe that larp experience can be best suited to be investigated from the personal, which is why we use autoethnographic techniques.
We know that the narrative of a larp is not the plot of the larp, nor is it the story. The story is what happens during the larp, and the narrative we can investigate is not apparent until the end. This means you must create a record of your stages of play and actions as a character. This is something you may already do after many games. You may write up what happened to you during the game, or give your character’s story an epilogue. This is often bundled into a narrative write up, which can then serve as an autoethnographic set of data we can investigate. A visual ethnography is a study of a people done in media, namely photographs, ephemera, and videos, and autoethnography is a self-study of a group you may be in. These two combined approaches may help you to explore your experiences.
A visual autoethnography allows you to capture as much of your experience as possible, like ephemera and narrative epilogues or write ups, and then use those to reflect on who you played. You may already be taking pictures and documenting your ephemera, and you may even practice reflexive writing every time you share narratives of your game.
When we write reflexively, we do not just look inside the magic circle with this approach, we look inside ourselves, inside the character, and inside the greater world. This reflexivity is what gives us the ability to see into ourselves. Social scientists, Tony Adams, Stacey Jones, and Carolyn Ellis (2014, 103) define reflexivity in Autoethnography Understanding Qualitative Research, “Reflexivity includes both acknowledging and critiquing our place and privilege in society and using the stories we tell to break long-held silences on power, relationships, cultural taboos, and forgotten and/or suppressed experiences.” By allowing ourselves to pin down the narrative and then look at it and compare it to our lives, we can potentially see where our fantasies lie within our realities.
Navigational Play
When we choose to wyrd the self, what we are actually doing is engaging in something I have termed, navigational play (Kemper 2018). The main purpose of navigational play is to try and see yourself outside the bounds of the mythic norm. Instead of constantly inhabiting your own oppressive world, you can use a self-exploratory, liberatory play style, that allows you to feel free of or investigate a particular marginalization. Navigational play is the act of steering yourself during the full process of a larp, to seek emancipatory bleed and consists of two components, steering for liberation and reflective writing.
When you steer, you are making in-character decisions based on out of game reasons (Montola, Stenros, & Saitta 2015), and thus steering for liberation is the act of seeking liberatory experiences through steering. Reflective writing is the act of looking at and writing about how your experiences relate to fictional situations, in our case, our larp experiences. In order for us to reflect on our narrative, we have to remember what our larp experience was. Using ephemera, pre larp writing activities, and creating a narrative write up, will create an artifact that we can then explore reflexively.
In order to steer for liberation and create an artifact we can then look at reflexively, we have to investigate what we want and need from the larp. By investigating your character and self, at various points of the larp stages you can identify similar oppressions and desires between the character and self. In the next section, we will explore ways to invoke pre-bleed, create ephemera, involve others such as co-players and organizers, as well as touch upon how to take field notes during a larp so you may write reflexively. Chart 1 roughly explains how each step may be achieved during various stages of a larp.
Pre-Larp
During Larp
Post Larp
Explore Character
If characters are pre-written, and not created by you, attempt to find and ask for casting in relations to the themes of the larp you would like to explore. Look at alibi. What will the larp allow you to do that you otherwise cannot in the real world?Explore relationships the character has to others. What are the similarities and differences?
How does this character connect to you? Think about their name and history, what can you add to it to make it personal? How are they different? Which of the larp’s themes feel most important to play on? Are there parts of yourself that you would like to think about and bring into play? Are there themes you would like to play on that the larp and the character explores?
Investigate the character. Which proverbs, virtues and values, rituals, mentors, and artifacts mean the most to you? To them? What if anything is in common or dissimilar to your lived experience? To your latent or obvious fantasies? Visualize the self.
What feels interesting to the character in the play space? Who would they be drawn to throughout their story? What rituals, social mores etc. are they seeking to break, embrace, or understand?
What in the end were the similarities and differences to you and the character?Using your narrative write up, or field notes re-investigate the character and their narrative. Compare and contrast which proverbs, virtues and values, rituals, mentors, and artifacts mean the most to you after play.
What means the most to the character?
What if anything is in common or dissimilar to your lived experience?
To your latent or obvious fantasies? Visualize the narrative self and the personal.
Identify Themes and Exploration
Identify similar themes and oppressions between the character and yourself if they are prewritten. If the character is self-written identify themes you may want to explore now that you have alibi.If the character is pre-written and feels unplayable ask for a new casting or write changes and ask for them to be implanted within reason.
Asking that your character bring in their ethnic heritage in a larp about going to a barbecue is reasonable, asking your character to be changed to a Martian in a game about the Crusades is not. To break the fiction premise radically when that will harm others’ games can throw off other players who are seeking to explore their own oppression or simply play. This would be a critical breach of ingroup social mores and unethical.
Steer for optimal play experience of the themes chosen. Notice any behaviors you are replicating for better or worse. Notice who you gravitate towards. Steer for relationships and situations you have the alibi for. Look for situations that uphold narrative cohesion and satisfy your steering goals. Attempt fearlessness. Attempt exploration. Remember Alibi.If you are engaging in oppression play, be aware of intersecting identities and that oppression does not occur in a vacuum. Respect safety mechanisms.
Go through your write up and look for replicated behaviors that tie into your personal life. Evaluate your steering in comparison to what you looked for. What stopped you? What encouraged you?What relationships did you gravitate towards? What roles did you enact that either broke or upheld the oppressive behaviors you sought to dismiss? What roles or people did you gravitate towards in order to feel liberation?
Were there mentors?
Did anything unusual happen that you weren’t prepared for? Did you stop yourself from doing something you wanted, or engaged in behavior that you don’t enjoy?
Writing/Recording
Flesh out Character through fiction or poetry writing. If this is not possible, ask yourself questions about your character. Where are they from, what do they like? Seek to make them as whole as possible.If possible, explore co-writing with established relationships in the larp.
Take pictures of your costume choices, create a Pinterest board, or organize thoughts and feelings with music or art.
Take notes during the larp or shortly thereafter. Diegetic notes and diaries are preferable. Write or draw ephemera as much as you can. Save notes.If allowed, take photos of spaces and people that mean things to your character.
Gain informed consent from the larp runners and other participants.
Create a narrative write up that focuses and centers your player experience in character. When you are ready to investigate the larp from your personal non-character point of view, attempt to find common themes in how you played. Look for moments that felt particularly poignant. Instead of trying to capture the entire larp, seek to capture what was most important to the character in the moment.Write the narrative write up in any creative format that makes you feel the most comfortable. Use annotations and footnotes to add in self reflections.
Ephemera
Using the character concept, design and think about the costuming, props, notes, and other things that may be important to your character. If the larp is short and you cannot create props consider creating in-game ephemera. If you are playing close to home, explore using personal objects to immerse yourself. Pictures of family and friends, your own wardrobe, etc.
Take photos, write letters, create props, collect important objects that are useful for your character and provoke a sense of missing. Ephemera created during the story period often has significant meanings.
Take photos of all of the ephemera collected. Sort through character portraits and other in game ephemera. What ephemeral artifacts can you explore?Save official game documents given to you by the organizer. How did the structure of the larp help? Hinder? What does the ephemera mean to the character? Are there similarities between the ephemera you collected at the player and you collected as the character?
Identifying Oppressions and Desires
The first part of liberatory steering, is to think of what you want to accomplish or explore within the magic circle of the larp’s plot. Not every larp is useful for exploring yourself in this way, and you can save yourself a lot of trouble by looking at playstyle, length of time, tone, and overall larp culture. A larp that allows you to play a role that can challenge your perceptions of yourself and the world, is a good candidate, as is one where the larp culture allows you to make more choices about what happens to your character. You should avoid forcing yourself to play on themes that deeply distress you, are not in the spirit or theme of the larp, and would affect the play of your co-players to the detriment of the game.
For example: A player has two options of larps. One is a larp about an unequal society that murders lower class people, and the coming revolution. The other is a larp about wealthy nobles and their servants in 1918. The player who is from a lower class background, would like to experience what it would be like to successfully rebel against the upper class, so they choose the first larp as it would provide more opportunity to rebel and succeed than the larp in which most of their play is in subservience to others.
If the characters are prewritten, you can try to select a character that may allow you to achieve your desires by applying for characters, groups, or requesting certain themes be written heavily into the character. If the characters are created by yourself or tailored to you, then you may ask to play around certain themes and desires in a casting questionnaire. In the former example, you may ask specifically to play a rebel because you want to explore that dynamic. Then if you are cast as such, you can seek to explore how or why you are doing so. After you identify your desires and things that may hold you back, you should then look at the relations your characters have and talk to your fellow co-players.
Talking to Co-Players and Playing to Lift
After casting, but before playing the larp, reaching out to co-players and actually expressing your needs and wants for the game is a challenging but necessary step. You can divulge what themes you are thinking of playing on more heavily, and ask your co-player if there are any themes they might want to play on. Asking questions of your co-players, even quickly, can help you both steer for the type of game you both would like to achieve. When you seek to share responsibility like this, you are also engaging in what designer and theorist Susanne Vejdemo (2018) calls, playing to lift. Vejdemo defines this as by saying, “Play to Lift means that the responsibility for your drama and your character also rests on all your co-players. You have to lift each other.” By talking to your co-players you can work to create a game that allows you to steer towards your desires together, and seek to help them in creating drama and interesting play that will lift them as well as yourself.
Depending on the length of the larp, you can also go on to create connections with your co-players that can be as easy as choosing to be siblings who support each other to many pages of back stories with intricate details. This is done in larps that have or allow pre-play, which is the act of writing or engaging with players in character before the larp. This type of relationship building can lead to something called pre-bleed (Svanevik and Brind 2016), which is very useful for getting into character. Pre-bleed is usually conceived of as an activity between two or more players, but it does not necessarily require a co-player.
Larps may set up chat groups where in character dialogue may happen, players may write stories between their connected characters that happen before the larp, and various other methods which deepen character connection.
Here are some ways to invoke pre-bleed:
Writing a series of short fiction pieces with another player or a group of players that flesh out the world of the larp before the larp happens.
Writing a short story for yourself about your character’s relation to a key theme of the larp.
Creating a piece of ephemera that you will use heavily during the larp, such as a personalized handkerchief or other item.
Exploring the topic of the larp through research.
Creating a playlist of songs to listen to that reminds you of your character.
Creating a mood board that captures the character’s home, wants, and desires.
Actions You Can Take Inside of the Larp
By carefully choosing your larp based on what experiences, tone, and theme you will embody, you can set yourself up for better results. Look out for opportunities to experience things you may never get to do so in your daily life. If, for example, you never got the experience of finishing your studies, you could choose to play a high achieving and successful student in a school larp. Even if you did not overcome what stopped you from finishing in your actual courses, you may feel as if you overcame them within the larp.
Here are some examples of actions to take during play:
If an action is prohibited for someone of your social rank, do it.
If an activity is something you wouldn’t be expected to do, do it.
If a style is something you have been prohibited from wearing because people like you are not allowed, wear it.
If your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation usually prohibits you from owning something, buy it.
Creating Ephemera and Reflexive Writing
When a larp ends, what do you have left as a participant? Perhaps some photos, your costume, a vague narrative you remember, lots of ephemera and…not much else. It is hard to be reflexive about your experience if you do not have a memory of what happened. How then, as a player can you investigate your experience after it is over? One way is by creating and writing about ephemera, things that are primarily used for a larp and typically discarded or recycled.
Larps may produce a surprising amount of ephemera. Ephemera are generally objects that have limited use, like concert tickets, or a show program. However, within larp’s ephemeral nature, ephemera becomes a unique way to bond player to character.
Within an autoethnography of larp participation, a player who carefully chooses, creates, documents, and uses reflection in regard to their ephemera may be able to immerse themselves deeper into their character, use ephemera in liberational steering, and document an otherwise transitory medium.
Here are a few examples of ephemera you can keep and later investigate:
A letter sent to your character from another character that is important to you both.
A prop that your character always carried or used frequently during the larp.
A homework assignment, poem, or plan drawn up by your character or others.
Costume pieces like identifying badges, sweaters, and any other piece that firmly reminds you of an experience.
Photos taken in character by an in character photographer.
After the larp is over, you can begin to look at each ephemera and write down your reactions to them and what they mean to you as the character and/or the player. This connects the character to the self. Interrogate and reflect on how the character and the self connect:
Why is this object important to the character or myself?
What do I feel when I touch it?
Why did I keep it?
Have I ever owned anything like it? Why or why not?
Have I continued to use it out of character?
Have I used it for multiple characters?
Where does it live when I’m not this character?
By answering these questions you may begin to see the connections between yourself and the character. For example, perhaps you choose to explore a series of notes passed in class by your player, and realize that you were too nervous to pass notes when you were in school yourself. Passing notes made you feel daring, and you particularly enjoyed it in the larp, because you never got the opportunity to do so before.
When you write this down, you may develop a sense of why you play the way you do, or whether you actually explored the desires and oppressions you wanted to. However, this reflexive insight must still be put in context of the narrative.
Taking Field Notes at Larps
For our purposes, field notes within larp are observations by players about their larp experience as it is happening and is collected into a field journal. There is no one way to write a narrative field journal, but having one if a larp allows it, can provide a valuable tool in searching for the transformation of self through immersion and examining bleed. A diegetic journal is also an ephemeral artifact that allows the player to connect to the character’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. You can use this journal to write a summation of your narrative write up, which you can then look at reflexively. Those who write them often turn their larp experience into pleasurable reading and a document of play.
Here are some tips for taking practical field notes during larps:
Focus not on other’s experience, but your own. Avoid writing what you wish happened, and stay truthful to your own experience and your co-players actions.
Just as a character might take a diary, and note what happened, try and write what happened during the day.
Note who your most important relationships are, what is occurring around you, and how your character is reacting to it.
If you are in a short larp or are not able to write much, consider writing up your character’s feelings in a letter to yourself while the larp is still fresh.
Do not spend too much time trying to remember everything that has happened, but the key experiences, beliefs, issues, and rituals the character engaged in.
Do not stop other’s play in order to record a conversation. Feel free to go out of play to a separate space to record important moments immediately, if you fear forgetting.
Do not write more than you play.
When you are done writing, you can then begin to be reflexive. Give yourself time and space before looking at what you wrote. When you are ready, use the following questions as a sample guide to begin investigating your experience while rereading:
Are there memories that remind you of your actual self?
Did you associate with characters or players that you you, yourself would or that you wished you could interact with?
Did you avoid people your character wouldn’t have? Why do you think so?
Is there something you overcame?
Was there something you felt stopping you from playing as you would have liked? Was it yourself? Design? Your co-players?
Did you notice moments of internalized bias towards yourself or others? If you did, what did you do about it?
Do you recognize habits that you do as yourself that you did in character?
Do you recognize any habits you always wished you had? Did you end up taking home any of these habits? Have you retained them?
Do you have any regrets about what you did or didn’t do? Why?
Retyping your narrative in a word processor and then placing your reflective writing answers as footnotes can be particularly helpful to seeing the separation between self and character. You may begin to see clear threads about your own desires and oppressions, and notice patterns in your play style over time. This can help you choose which larps you may enjoy, and which larps you can steer away from, as well as what you may take away. For example like this:
Field Note: After the battle meeting, I realized that the power I channeled during a previous ritual had been inside me all along.
Footnote to the Field Note:
After the larp I realized that I was more assertive at work than I normally am. I’ve been speaking up at a lot more meetings now then I used to, and I think it comes from this moment. I should really pick more larps where I have a leading role.
Ethics
While you should absolutely be using larp and a navigational play style in order to seek emancipatory bleed and investigate our own relationships to trauma and internalized oppressions, we cannot do this in a vacuum. Larp is a co-created medium, and while we may want to use it for our own liberation, our liberation cannot come at the cost of others. While our narratives in a larp are individual, our stories are not so easily cut off. Much like our actual lives, your co-players do play a role. Anthropologist Heewon Chang (2008) in her book Autoethnography as Method reminds us that we must be aware of the role of others in our research and outlines some practices I believe are also important when thinking of a larp autoethnography:
Strangers can be connected to self through group membership or common experiences, if not through personal contacts. In autoethnography, self and others may be positioned in different ways. You can consider three possibilities. First, you can investigate yourself as a main character and others as supporting actors in your life story. Second, you can include others as co-participants or co-informants in your study. Third, you can study others as the primary focus, yet also as an entry to your world.
Chang 2008, 65
It is preferred to position yourself as the main character and your co-players as supporting characters in your own personal narrative. You must be aware though, that your narrative in no way is the only narrative of the larp, and even your closest co-player may have had a radically different experience. We must consider how we involve our co-players in the practice of our write ups and our play. We must take care to not misrepresent them, even though it may make for better fiction. The goal is liberation for yourself, not at the expense of others. In the cases of autoethnographies that are published for ingroup pleasure as well ones published for player-researcher means, I argue the following two approaches based on Chang’s above suggestions:
First, focus only about your character’s experience of the world, making sure to keep all of your co-players anonymous as possible. In this way, you center your own experience over others’ in the write up, but not in play. In play, you should strive to be as generous as you would if you were not steering for emancipatory bleed. Your liberation should not come at the expense of others’ play.
2. Involve your co-players in the writing and steering process. Making a collaborative larp autoethnography would be an excellent way to involve all of your players and help each other to dissect facets of the character you might have missed. Imagine if an entire faction took turns writing mission reports that served as a diary for that group during game.
We must never put our liberation over co-player’s experience, and that means we must not steer ourselves in the play space to disrupt a larp when it would negatively impact others who may play. We must take into context the ethics of consequence (Etherington 2007) and the benefit of self. If you are writing something solely for your own discovery, this is less cumbersome as no one else outside of the group will see or read it. If, however, you chose to use it in your own research, then you must practice process consent (Ellis 2007) namely, you must check in with those who you have played and who appear in the work to see if they are still willing to take part. If the answer is no, then you must keep your narrative to the ingroup community or to yourself.
An autoethnography that is kept purely for the discovery of self and never shared is still as valuable as anything that may be published. It is the act of reflection, not the publishing where liberation lies. Here are some things you can do with a finished autoethnographic larp write up:
You can share it with your co-players.
You can look over it with a trained mental health professional.
You can keep it for yourself, and reread it comparing it to other write ups and finding clear patterns in how and why you play the way you do.
Conclusion
Wyrding the self is the sustained effort to decolonize your body from the mythical norm, and begin the process of identity alteration. This alteration can be a direct result of experiencing emancipatory bleed that you may be able to achieve through navigational play which involves the acts of reflexive writing and steering for liberation.
The ability to wyrd the self lies in a player’s desire to do the reflective work that is necessary for decolonization. It is not easy, and requires pre-planning and commitment to co-create narratives collectively with your co-players while seeking liberation. While this tool has been created with those who face systematic marginalization in mind, the ability to investigate how you played the larp, and it’s relation to your own life has been immensely helpful to larpers who are interested in playing for transformative purposes. Recording your actions during a larp, transcribing it, and then investigating your play by comparing it to some of the questions you may ask yourself, can allow you to see internalized biases or oppressions that can hold you back in your day to day life. As long as you do not push your narrative and experience to be more important than your co-players, I believe this too can be used to see and cultivate a community of transformative larp practice. When you seek to wyrd the self, you create a more resilient self by seeing yourself as truly want to be, not what you have been molded to be by a mythical norm.
Sarah Lynne Bowman (2010): The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. Jefferson: McFarland.
Heewon Chang (2016): Autoethnography as Method. Routledge.
Paulo Freire (1968/2014): Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Jonaya Kemper (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 chapter might have been titled ‘How I Larp’ or, more accurately, ‘How I Conceive of My Larping.’ It arises from my own experiences playing a broad range of larps. Therefore, though it is presented as a general theory of larping, and is intended to help conceptualise playing in larp in a way that is constructive for others, it comes with the proviso that the particular play preferences discussed are personal to me, and may not be helpful to everyone. I hope, however, that others may gain benefit from it.
The chapter is concerned with an apparent paradox about larping. The experiences and stories which we make in larping are collective. Not only does larping normally happen in groups, but it usually requires the input and action of others in the production of the experience and stories. However, it is perhaps equally obvious that no two players can share exactly the same experience, even if they are playing in the same scene together, and that the stories which we make are individual to our own experiences and the characters we play.
So, larping is both collective and individual at the same time. That is to say, larping has both a collective dimension and an individual dimension. The individual dimension is related to Jonaya Kemper’s (2019) notion of larp anarchy. Larp anarchy is the freedom of players to take charge of and create their own experiences and stories while larping. So if, during a larp, a player is not having a good experience they have the freedom to forge new relations, and develop their character and plots in ways that are more enjoyable for them (see, e.g., Simon Brind’s chapter in this volume, Larp Hacking). Anarchy here refers to the rejection of political hierarchy and freedom from the rule of a leader: you as a player are free to do what you want with your character. It is not intended to denote a state of disorder, which the term connotes due to the spurious idea that a leaderless society would break down into chaos. Nor does it denote the political movement of anarchism, though, as we shall see, there are distinct similarities between cooperative anarchism and my conceptualisation of the individual and collective dimensions in larping. It is important to note here that larp anarchy and the individual dimension do not imply absolute individualism. Larping requires structure and balance in order to function well, and if every player’s individual whim were admitted into play it would almost certainly result in disorder, and possibly that breed of power-playing/powergaming in which one player creates the character or plot they want at the expense of other players’ enjoyment (see, e.g. Algayres 2019; Huw2k8 2011). Also, as Evan Torner (2018) points out, the emergent play and story that come from players anarchically taking control occurs always in relation to the larp’s design, which defines the set of parameters all participants have subscribed to. Towards the end of this chapter I will look more closely at the responsibilities we have towards each other in larping.
The collective dimension is related to the fact that larping is an ‘ecological’ process, as expressed by Marjukka Lampo (2016). That is, larping is always relational — it is the relationships between things which bring about the creativity of experiences and stories: ‘larping can be seen as an ecological, reciprocal relationship between the participants and the environment of the event, i.e. the players and the game.’ (Lampo 2016, 35) Without the ‘environment’ of the other players, the setting, the design and backstory, etc. there can be no lived experience from which to produce our stories. It is fundamental to larping that we are acting as((In the sense of doing the actions of, rather than representing as in a play or film.)) the character, and not simply imagining, narrating or writing their actions((Though characters of course do all these things during a larp. The important distinction is that these are what the character is doing (I as my character am relating a story to other characters) and not the means of playing (I as a player am telling other players what my character is doing).)). While Lampo, in her article, focuses on the individual in the environment, what I suggest here is that this idea of larping as ecology highlights both the individual dimension and the collective dimension — it is about both the relationships between individuals and participation in a larger process. This participation is not taking part in an activity as an individual, but rather becoming part of a collective action which is not reducible to individual participants. In other words, in contrast to the individual dimension, the collective dimension in larping must be understood holistically, not as interacting singularities but as a plural whole.
It is important here that we are discussing ‘larping’ rather than ‘larps’. A larp is a thing, either a design, or a particular instance of a design put into practice. Larping, on the other hand, is a process. As a process, larping is always in the flow of becoming rather than a state of being. That is to say, when we are larping things are not completely fixed, outcomes are not completely defined, and there are always many potentials((This notion of “becoming” rather than “being” as fundamental to existence and change is derived from process theory, such as that of Alfred North Whitehead (1978 [1929]) and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (1987 [1980]).)). I will break the process of larping down into two distinct but related processes. One process relates to the collective aspect of larping and the other to the individual aspect. The collective process I will refer to as sceneing, since it correlates with the collaborative generation of scenes. The individual process I will refer to as storying, since it correlates with each player’s production of a personal narrative. I will also demonstrate how these two processes are related and are necessary for each other.
Storying
Here I propose storying as the process of creating a narrative for your character. This narrativizing is done individually by each player. It is a private process, experienced by each individual separately and uniquely, compared with the collective and public process of sceneing. Storying is the process of experiencing and making sense of what has been given by the collective into the process of sceneing.
If sceneing involves the dissolution of the players into the collective, storying is their reconstitution, through the integration and interpretation into their personal narratives of the process of sceneing in which they are participating. It is, to continue the analogy, the consumption of the ‘soup’ which is made in the process of sceneing. This ‘consumption’ is a process of experiencing, in which the elements making up the instance of sceneing (words, actions, expressions, gestures, both our own and those of others) are brought together in the individual experience of each player, made sense of, and turned into a narrative moment, which is also integrated into the continuous narrative produced by successive instances of storying.
The process of storying does not ‘use’ the elements of sceneing as such; the process cannot be separated from its constituents, nor does it exist prior to the coming together of those constituents in the player’s experience. The ‘soup’ of sceneing becomes the organs of each player’s story. Just as an organic body is made from the nutrients it consumes, so storying is made from the ‘soup’ of sceneing. It is the lived experience of our participation which goes into building the narratives we make for our characters. Therefore, the potential for storying is limited by what is given to the player, the words, actions, gestures, and expressions of others, in the process of sceneing. The narratives in larping are made from our experiences.
While storying is necessarily constituted by experiences of sceneing, that does not mean that every element of sceneing is prominent or even present in every player’s individual narrative. Rather, storying is individually self-determined from the data of our lived experience. Not everything in the process of sceneing will be relevant to every player. It is important that storying filters out in order to make a comprehensible narrative. Much of what is happening in the process of sceneing may be lost. Things which will be relevant to other characters and players may simply be noise. The conversation between two lovers which is overheard by chance might have no relevance to the narrative of your character, so even though it is registered it may be discounted. In a large larp with many different locations, much of the action and activity of other players won’t even be registered since they are not directly experienced, even though you might be aware that they are happening, or come to you indirectly through the ripples they cause.
Importantly, storying is, or at least has the potential to be, anarchic. Our individual processes of storying are our own. There is no authority that can tell us to experience things in a particular way, nor how to construct the stories of our characters. We are free to interpret our private narratives for ourselves. There are qualifying factors to this, of course: the filter of the character, which may have been partially constructed by a designer; our assumptions about the expectations of organisers or other players; and internalised biases and prejudices which form constructs within us about the ‘correct’ ways to play, experience, and make stories. These can be constraints by which we do not allow ourselves the freedom of anarchy, which is why I say that storying is only potentially anarchic. As I will discuss below, some of these constraints might be seen as positive and produce responsible play. It is worth recognising, though, that these constraints are to a large extent self imposed.
Whatever constraints we apply to our own processes of storying, what is certain is that no two players’ narratives will be identical. Even if they play in all the same processes of sceneing together, their experiences will be different. It is these different experiences and players’ interpretations of them which give rise to the intentions which will be given back to the process of sceneing through the ‘ingredients’ of actions, words, gestures, etc.
Reciprocity
The processes of sceneing and storying I have described above are reciprocal —each requires the other in order to become. This is because elements of sceneing constitute each player’s process of storying, and reciprocally, any process of sceneing is constituted by actions deriving from the multitude of interpretations from players’ storying. Lampo’s perceptual ecology shows how we can move from the individual to the collective and back again. The process of creativity in sceneing and storying is largely congruent to Lampo’s. That is, the individual player makes sense of the events they are participating in (or subject to) and then acts according to their interpretation. What Lampo refers to as ‘affordances’, and the embodied choices enacted by the player are both identical to the ‘ingredients’ given to the ‘soup’ of sceneing, while the gathering and making of choices is similar to what I propose with storying.
Lampo captures the spirit of the reciprocal process between the individual and thecollective, though the process she proposes requires, for me, an excess of conscious analysis. The most intense and beautiful larping experiences for me have been when I have acted as the character without thinking, in a kind of flow state (Csikszentmihályi 1990, passim; and see e.g. Bowman 2018, 380). Therefore, the reciprocal processes I propose are rooted much more in feeling than in conscious analysis. While Lampo admits that ‘the choice-making process of the players in a larp ecology is affected by the emotions and feelings of the players as well as the somatic responses they experience,’ (Lampo 2016, 42) I suggest here that these factors are primary in the process of storying. In storying the other players and environment are first experienced physically and emotionally, and it is possible to react physically and emotionally, giving words, gestures, or actions back into the process of sceneing without the intervention of a conscious decision at all. Moreover, the reaction is already embodied in the physical and emotional effect of the experience. Meaning-making and action are more often generated preconsciously((In a Whiteheadian sense of before consciousness comes to bear on the storying process, rather than a Freudian sense.)) than consciously. The beauty of larping lies more in how it feels than how it appears.
Of course, this does not preclude conscious decision making in appropriate circumstances, only that conscious, ‘rational’ cognition is not necessary to the process. For this kind of flow state I propose, you need to ‘be in it’, to participate fully in the process of sceneing. This is perhaps where we find the limit of the ‘soup’ analogy. Where I have said above that we give the ingredients for sceneing in the form of words, gestures, actions, etc., these elements cannot be separated from our physical, emotional, and psychological selves. So in fact it is ourselves we must give into the process of sceneing — we are the ingredients, becoming part of the ‘soup’, to some extent losing ourselves in play. We are both part of the ‘soup’, and at the same time the consumers of the ‘soup’.
The narrative you create in the process of storying uses the relevant ingredients from the collective process of sceneing. Likewise, the individual process of storying feeds back into the collective process through the interpretation of events which gives rise to new decisions, intentions, and actions — the ingredients for the cauldron. Each process is necessary for the other, since each provides the constituents for the other. In other words, sceneing is made from storying and storying is made from sceneing. The holistic, collective process of sceneing feeds the multiple storyings experienced by the individual players, while those storyings in turn feed the collective sceneing through the expression of individual interpretation.
While each process of storying becomes determined in the individual player to whom it belongs, the multiplicity of the storyings feeding the process of sceneing means that sceneings can never become completely determined. In other words, the larp can never be defined by a single player’s actions, nor a single player’s interpretation. The multiplicity of narratives arising in the oscillation from storying to sceneing and back again means that the meaning of the larp is always open: undecided and indeterminate. However, this does not mean that an individual interpretation is not valid; indeed, every player’s interpretation is valid, and moreover, each is equally as valid as all others. To take up the soup analogy again, each of us eats a portion of the soup to which we have all contributed, and makes up our own mind about it. This will necessarily be coloured by personal preference and prior experience.
Responsibility
This way of thinking about larping, as both a collective process and an organ for anarchic storymaking, necessitates a particular way of playing together responsibly. My notion of responsibility here is threefold. Firstly, it points to the fact that players are, in part, responsible for each other’s experiences in larping. Secondly, this responsibility for each other’s experiences makes us responsible to other players for creating enriching play experiences. And thirdly, it captures the idea of playing in response to others, as part of a collective. The first of these aspects of responsibility is a theory, the second and third are practices.
We are responsible for each other’s experiences in that each player gives themselves into the process of sceneing, which is experienced by all the players in their storying. Therefore, the things we do and say become part of other players’ narratives. It should be obvious that this state of affairs is ripe for abuse, and it is where anarchy can become problematic. Each of us must make an ethical choice. You can choose to act only with regard for your own interests and experiences, or you can choose to with a sense of responsibility towards your fellow players. However, with the theory of sceneing and storying, one of these ethical modes becomes preferable. Since other players are to a great extent responsible for the experiences you will have, it is in your interest to work with them collaboratively, to give into sceneing words, actions, and gestures that will enrich everyone’s experience. The alternative may be that you find other players will avoid you, or will refuse to go along with the ingredients you give into the ‘soup’. Thus, your storying becomes malnourished; the experiences you have are less rich, less vibrant. It is better, then, to play with regard for others’ experiences, as well as in response to what others are giving to the process of sceneing. Do not disregard what others offer. Both give and receive generously.
Sometimes, something feels right for my character. An event, an action, a speech. However, if that something involves other players’ characters and limiting or changing their potentials for play, I have a responsibility to ensure that they too want this kind of play. If my character dies, that will affect those with whom the character has relations. If my character euthanizes a patient with a terminal condition, that will affect not only the patient but the characters with whom they have relations too. I and my actions are in part responsible for their experiences. These examples are big, obvious cases, but it is true of the smallest actions too.
It is in this principle of responsibility we see most clearly parallels between this model of playing and cooperative anarchism. Freedom (from authority and to pursue one’s own interests and desires) is the basic principle of all anarchism. What marks cooperative anarchism as different from more individualist forms like libertarianism is that it recognizes that individuals thrive together and that collaboration enriches the individuals involved as well as the relations between them. Likewise, in larping, we can create richer experiences through cooperation.
With the idea of responsibility, I don’t want to say, ‘you are responsible for everyone’s experience, so you’d better do it right.’ On the contrary, everyone gives ingredients into the process, so it doesn’t matter if you do something ‘badly’. However an action or utterance is executed, it can be interpreted and integrated in any number of ways. This theory of sceneing and storying very much encourages ‘playing to lift’, since the production of, for instance, the relative status of characters is the responsibility of everyone who is participating in a process of sceneing. And on the other hand, the theory asserts that the things you do matter. Your actions will be felt, even if they are only relevant to a limited number of other players. In sceneing and storying, everyone is responsible, and we are all in it together!
NOTE: This model of larping is inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s process theory, or ‘philosophy of organism’. For more on this subject, refer to Whitehead’s Process and Reality: Corrected Edition (1978) and Ivor Leclerc’s Whitehead’s Metaphysics (1958).
Ensemble play has been part of Nordic larp discourse since 2003, but the community is yet to define its exact role in larp design. In this chapter we draw insights from different ensemble-driven art forms, and demonstrate how ensemble skills facilitate better play. We also discuss the most common challenges preventing ensemble play, and offer suggestions and tools for overcoming them.
Ensemble play is most noticeable when a piece of art (music, story, dance, larp) is not defined in advance, but emerges in real time. A symphony orchestra or a Shakespeare troupe can, of course, be described as an ensemble even when their content is pre-defined on sheet music or a script. For the purposes of larp, however, we find it more relevant to look at ensembles that discover and create their piece in the moment.
Musical jam sessions, devised theatre, and other co-creative art forms share a specific characteristic with larp: they all rely on the players’ ability to constantly calibrate their play, and collaboratively negotiate and renegotiate what belongs into the piece, and what is left out.
In a collaborative ensemble performers actively give and take opportunities to shine, and derive enjoyment from their own contribution as well as from the contributions of others. They balance the attention they give to themselves, the group, and the piece, and focus on creating something together as well as on their individual performance. This, we find, is an accurate description of rewarding ensemble play in larp, too.
How do we know when play is ensemble play? A good sign is spontaneous and mutual delight and surprise: what is happening right now is rewarding, meaningful, and unpredicted. Most importantly, we can see from the eyes of our co-creators that they are experiencing the same joy — even if outwardly our characters are screaming in rage. We have become partners in crime, sharing a unique moment in a unique reality, all facets of which are not necessarily visible to others.
Larp Magic — or Ensemble Play in Action?
Most larpers are familiar with the concept of larp magic: a scene, storyline, or chain of events that unravels in the most rewarding way possible, without anyone planning for that outcome in advance. Some larp magic certainly happens due to luck or coincidence — serendipitous occurrences like weather and random encounters can heavily impact our play — but preconditions for surprising and auspicious play can also be consciously created by a skillful ensemble.
To a performer’s eye, larp magic does not look entirely incidental. Most professional performers learn through their practice that a well timed buildup towards a satisfactory resolution is a matter of applying specific skills, such as:
listening to co-creators;
anticipating opportunities;
picking up cues and impulses;
paying attention to content other than your own;
building for delayed gratification;
deciding when to act, when to take space, and when to step back.
All of these skills are regularly employed at larps in order to create more rewarding and fluent play. Some of them are inherently codified in play instructions like play to lose and play to lift.((Play to lose/lift is an interaction guideline in Nordic larp, that instructs players to drive scenes towards the most interesting story, rather than success for their character. (Wilson 2019))) The notion of playing in ensembles is not new in the Nordic larp tradition, either. Johanna Koljonen refers to ensemble play when describing a particular playstyle in late 1990s Sweden:
The ensemble player employs aspects of his role to support the initiatives of his co-players with the express purpose of creating satisfying dramatic situations for the group experience. The ensemble is collectively responsible for the dramatic arc in the whole game as well as each scene, and may choose to do something implausible or illogical to achieve the most moving narrative.
Koljonen 2007
The first Nordic larp to methodologically design for ensemble play was Mellan himmel och hav (Between Heaven and Sea, 2003). Played over three days in Riksteatern (The National Theater Company) in Stockholm, Sweden, the larp was preceded by three weekend-long workshops, during which the participants learned how to play as an ensemble: How to listen and react to each other’s feelings and impulses, and how to collectively mediate the larp’s artistic vision (Gerge 2004).
In Mellan himmel och hav, ensemble workshops were not only a means to an end. The ensemble creation itself was an inherent part of the larp’s experience design. Ensemble members became fellow creators, contributing to every aspect of the larp, from character creation to narrative design and meta-techniques. The goal of this extensive process was to create an atmosphere of trust, and empower players to explore the intimate interpersonal themes of the larp. (Wieslander 2004)
The co-creative ensemble play in Mellan himmel och hav facilitated unprecedentedly deep exploration of diegetic social roles, and formed a powerful connection between the players in the ensemble (Stenros 2010). Similar ensemble workshops were further explored and developed in several other designs, such as System Danmarc (2005), Totem (2007), and Delirium (2010) (see Stenros & Montola 2010). Today, a subset of ensemble methods are commonplace at larp workshops. Some typical practices include:
having structured discussions about needs, wishes, and feelings of co-players,
calibrating physical contact and body language,
co-designing character relations and social dynamics,
and making collective decisions about play styles and themes.
While the word ‘ensemble’ is rarely used in Nordic larp discourse, the importance of ensemble play is still implicitly recognized in our design paradigm: If players do not know how to collaborate and collectively coordinate their play, our larps simply stop functioning. The designer vision of the larp is ultimately brought to life by players’ individual and collective actions and interpretations. The more collaborative and compatible those actions are, the more elaborate and nuanced play we can build on them.
Successful ensemble play creates high resolution larping: subtle and nuanced character interaction of high quality and high detail (Nordgren 2008). Practicing ensemble skills makes us more open to different social cues, signals, subtexts, body language, and invitations to play – and the more details we notice, the deeper and more vivid our interpretation of the play becomes. Mutually observant high resolution play helps us see each other better and feel more seen ourselves. Consequently, playing in ensembles cultivates a culture of trust and inclusive co-creation.
In summary, ensemble play in larp is a method that relies on active inclusivity and reflexivity. Any collaborating group of participants that recognizes the importance of each participant’s experience and takes collective responsibility of the scene and the larp, counts as an ensemble.
An ensemble player is reflexive about their surroundings in order to support the initiatives of their co-players, and employs aspects of their character to facilitate both individually and collectively satisfying play.
Ensemble Pedagogy in Art
Many workshop methods used in Nordic larp, including the ensemble creation benchmarked in Mellan himmel och hav, are based on practices developed for and within pedagogical and artistic contexts. Ensemble exercises and methodologies have been explored and formalized by countless teachers, artists, authors, and gurus, and are used everywhere from art schools and universities to artist think-tanks, improv groups, drama therapies, team building retreats, creative communities, and even literal cults.
While the exercises themselves have many inherent similarities from one context to another, there is a crucial difference to their use in larp: Larp does not have the established institutions, nor the gurus((Larp gurus, self-proclaimed or otherwise, are designers, organisers, and academics – not teachers of player skills.)). An art student and a larper may both engage with similar ensemble methodology, but only the former has their performance evaluated by a mentor or a teacher.
A teacher has a mandate to observe students and suggest where their weaknesses and strengths lie. In larps we play with our peers, and evaluative feedback on someone’s performance is rare, and often socially complicated((Positive commendations for good play, such as Facebook threads after a larp, of course count as feedback. However, whilst reading about enjoyable and praiseworthy play can be empowering and inspire us to explore more of that kind of play, praise tells us nothing about our individual and collective weaknesses. At their worst, public commendations can give players with high social capital more of that capital, without addressing the problems associated with it.)). In certain ways this is a missed opportunity: Many of us appreciate advice on how to become better at something we love. Without external feedback, our means of learning new skills are limited to things we individually notice through self-reflection, or stumble upon by trial and error.
The authors of this article have had the privilege of learning ensemble skills in professional contexts, both inside formal institutions and outside of them. During our years studying music and theatre we have come across multiple methods and exercises for practicing ensemble play. One of these methodologies, The Viewpoints (Bogart & Landau 2004), introduces a paradigm for co-creative ensemble work we find highly relevant to Nordic larp.
Originally a composition method for theatre, The Viewpoints teaches real-time artistic collaboration through movement, space, sound, and gesture. The method has influenced performer training widely outside its formal contexts, and offers a framework for exploring ensemble play as its own skill set.
The Viewpoints focuses on a spectrum of aesthetic principles: How to think about movement and sound in space and time. The simple act of walking across a room can be analysed in the vocabulary offered by The Viewpoints, eg. Tempo, Duration, or Spatial Relationship. This helps performers communicate what they see and hear, and also gives them tools to improve their skills by concentrating on one or more Viewpoints at a time.
Training in the style of The Viewpoints often involves open improvisation sessions using specific limitations or instructions, such as:
Only five people on stage at any given time.
Everyone sits down at the same time. Nobody decides when, and nobody gives the signal.
Exactly three people have to be singing at all times.
When the facilitator gives a signal, the music must switch to a new key. Nobody signals the key in advance. The music must continue uninterrupted.
The purpose of these exercises is to develop the performers’ ability to pay attention to the ensemble and the space, whilst at the same time making individual choices about actions and aesthetics within the piece. The reflexive analysis and the creative decision making required in the improv are very similar to the mental processing most larpers engage with during runtime in larps.
Through improv, artists are taught to receive and react to external impulses — cues that initiate action. For example, if someone claps their hands, another person may use that as a trigger for their own unplanned reaction, eg. jumping, falling down, or yelling. While this is a very simple example, it forms the basis for more complicated co-creation. Being able to interrupt what one was previously doing in order to react spontaneously to new information is a useful ensemble skill. In larps, noticing and reacting to cues (both diegetic and non-diegetic) guides our interaction with other characters, and connects us to the play around us.
The Viewpoints sessions and exercises are often done with a portion of the group observing as audience. This serves an important pedagogical purpose: Noticing interaction patterns that are hard to spot when we are in the middle of the action. In the action, we are often wrapped up in our own feelings of pleasure, anxiety, or wanting to make a good impression. We may feel like we are listening and reacting to others, but the observers can clearly see whether this is actually the case, and whether we succeed at collaborating with others. Feedback on our ensemble skills helps us become more observant of and reflexive about our co-creators.
Observers also help performers think about their aesthetic choices within the piece. If everyone bunches up together in the center of the space, or all play the lead melody, observers may point out that the edges of the space, or specific harmonic layers, are left unused. Through this feedback performers can evaluate their contributions in a wider context. Next time, before introducing their initial idea, they may look for the gaps in the piece, and contribute to those instead.
Observing the improv is also an active learning experience. From the audience we see the anxiety in the performer who is out of ideas — and their gratitude when others collaborate to support them. We see the beauty of a spontaneous flock of people moving as a group, with no apparent leader. We see the performer who consistently tries to control the way the exercise unfolds, and the one who breaks the flow by refusing to put themselves in the limelight. We see the collective frustration when something is fundamentally not clicking.
In larp, we do not have formal structures for observing each other’s play — but that does not mean we cannot learn from it. Through methods suggested later in this essay (eg. switching between solo and accompaniment, embracing stillness and boredom) we can become more conscious of the multitude of cues and interactions around us, observe what kind of play they create, and adjust our own play based on what we learn.
Forming Larp Ensembles
Like any other aspect of larp, ensembles are a designable surface. As designers, we can explore methods that facilitate collaborative play and ensemble formation in our larp((A comprehensive selection of useful methods can be found from Larp Design (Koljonen et al. 2019), esp. “Designing the Mechanics You Need” (Wilson 2019).)). As players, we can think about our interaction with other players within the ensemble framework, and make conscious decisions about negotiating and calibrating ensemble play both before and during runtime. A good starting point for designers and players alike is to acknowledge that an ensemble is not simply created when players get along together naturally — it is formed and maintained through conscious efforts and skillful play.
Most pre-negotiated larp ensembles are formed through character relations. Whether pre-written by designers or co-created between players, a diegetic friend circle, military squad, or secret society creates a natural premise for an ensemble. While the characters may have known each other for a lifetime, the players, however, often have not. They need to bridge that gap by employing ensemble skills: being reflexive about each other’s suggestions and cues, and collectively embodying the essence of the character group.
Ensembles are also organically formed in individual scenes. During runtime, any combination of characters interacting with each other positions players into momentary ensembles. This is often where our individual ensemble skills become most visible: Even if we have no idea who these characters are and what they are up to, are we still able to join the scene, collaborate with other players, and allow something interesting to happen?
Players failing to collaborate as an ensemble can easily wreck even the most carefully designed storyline or character group. Conversely, a successful ensemble can create amazing play even in the shoddiest of larps. For this reason it is understandable that some players prefer custom ensembles (i.e. playing with people they already know) and even custom scene content to those randomly created through casting and organic gameplay. While there is nothing wrong with a moderate amount of pre-planning and custom casting, overly opportunistic ensemble optimization can lead to unwanted exclusivity — or what Anni Tolvanen calls the dance card school of larping.
Popularised in 19th century Vienna, a dance card was a system for booking partners in a ball: A lady would pre-plan her evening by accepting dance invitations from particular gentlemen, who would book specific dances from her dance card. In larps, players pre-negotiating content with pre-casted ensembles are metaphorically filling out their dance cards — and the fuller the card, the less availability there is for new, unexpected dance partners.
Dance card larping produces ambivalent outcomes. If our attention is focused on exclusive plans with pre-casted ensembles, we are not open to impromptu invitations and reflexive serendipity. Furthermore, players who are not part of pre-negotiated cliques may feel excluded and rejected, especially if some of their plots or relations get pushed aside for more appealing dance card items.
The core difference between dance card larping and successful ensemble play is inclusiveness. While both may contribute to amazing and powerful scenes and story arcs, only the latter creates open and equal opportunities for co-creation. Organic ensemble play — accepting and embracing the unpredictability of ensemble compositions — leads to mutually cooperative exploration and discovery, where everyone’s presence is acknowledged, and everyone has the possibility to join play they find interesting and meaningful.
Understanding Solo and Accompaniment
Conceptually, all players in an ensemble have equal agency in any given scene. The same is not true for the characters, as the narrative or dramatic spotlight is often focused on particular characters (e.g. a murderer and the police officer who just caught them), while other characters remain in the background (bystanders witnessing the arrest). Some characters may have more diegetic agency to impact the scene than others (the officer can give commands to the murderer as well as the bystanders).
In order to be inclusive collaborators in an ensemble, we need to map((Mapping is the mental process by which a player tracks the overall structure of the larp and their character’s current position within the fiction. (Saitta, Koljonen & Nielsen 2020))) what is going on in the scene, and figure out whether we should contribute to it by solo or accompaniment.
In the context of larp, a solo is best described as the initiative to set the tone or the direction for a scene, a plot, or a narrative. A soloist positions their character into a central role in the scene, and/or strongly steers towards specific interaction or outcome. A solo gets its power from accompaniment: Other players reacting to it, supporting it, and building on it. Without accompaniment the scenes and narratives we build become incoherent and meaningless. If no one acknowledges the murder of the queen, did it even happen?((In Nordic larp discourse this dynamic is also referred to as inter-immersion: the existence of a character being dependent on all players collectively treating the character as a part of the storyworld.))
In an ensemble we have the privilege of expecting support for our solos, but also the duty to make sure everyone else’s solos are given the support they need. Essentially, the division between solo and accompaniment acts as a tool for self-reflection: Which role am I currently taking? Which role would best support the scene or my co-players? Which role would create more interesting play?
Dynamic play relies on players introducing solos and giving new directions to plots and scenes. Concurrently, it’s useful to remember that refraining from a solo does not mean stepping into sidelines or being less important to a scene. Accompanying others requires as much (or even more) skill and focus, and can be as rewarding and enjoyable. Taking turns between solo and accompaniment means we can both boldly suggest our own ideas, and gracefully give space to others without the fear of being ignored or forgotten.
Overcoming the Barriers to Ensemble Play
Most of the barriers to successful ensemble play relate to our needs, desires, ego, and fears. The barriers are not unambiguously negative player traits — most are useful in the right circumstances and in moderation. In this section we talk about how to recognize the impact of our barriers to our play, and how to turn barriers into constructive player skills.
The Desire for Perfectionism
Ironically, the desire to create something flawless is one of the easiest means to prevent anything amazing from happening. Aiming for perfection, we may plan, practice, and steer our play to the point where we are no longer larping, but performing a script. If we fixate on avoiding imperfections and hold on to past failures, we are not open to unexpected challenges and invitations to play.
So what can we do? Instead of dreading failures, embrace them. Some failures we can move past gracefully, while others will turn out to be gifts. If we are in sync with others, and engaged in mutually supportive play, even our unexpected fumbles can be collectively picked up and transformed into something beautiful.
The Hunger to Play Big
This barrier entices us to play our scenes with fierce commitment to our vision, without pausing to consider whether our play is in sync with others. Instead of looking for a way to collaborate with the ensemble, we focus solely on what works for our character.
Some very talented players fall into this trap, and their performances can indeed be impressive — but are they listening to or playing with others as equals? Few players enjoy spending their whole larp playing second fiddle to someone else’s neverending solo, no matter how believable and powerful that solo performance is.
The hunger to play big can be hard to solve on our own, because we are not always aware of how forceful our impact is on others. Luckily, there is an easy solution to test this in play: Instead of acting on every impulse and idea that pops up, try deliberately letting some slide by, and actively make room until others take initiative.
The Fear of Standing Out
Hiding inside an ensemble is another barrier to play, although an understandable one: We may fear appearing demanding, weird, or uncool, and rarely go for the play we truly want. We may feel easily rejected and would rather withdraw than ask to be included.
Being part of an ensemble does not mean that good things will come to us without us needing to put our necks out. We have all met or personally been the devastated player in an afterparty who did not get the play they wished for. Sometimes that player was indeed lacking the support they would deserved, but sometimes they also did not step forward when they should have done so.
The moment to claim our space rarely comes on a silver platter and with visible safety nets attached. It is simply on us to take the jump, and trust that our ensemble will catch us. To quote the beloved icon of audacity, Carrie Fisher: Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.
The Obsession with Larp Magic
The perfect can be a powerful foe of the good. If we chase the most magical scenes and the best exclusive plots, we often miss what is right in front of us. We may have a specific bar for satisfying play, and deem anything below it unworthy of our attention and effort. We can even become envious and frustrated if we think a better scene is happening elsewhere.
For an ensemble to function, we must play the scene we are actually in, not the scene we wish we were in. Players pining to be somewhere else, doing something else, suck all the energy out of an ensemble. Treating the present as a hindrance to our preferred play is not only unconstructive, but also disrespectful towards our co-players. Larp magic always begins with interaction in the here and now: concentrating on the present brings us closer to it.
The Terror of Silence
One barrier is the fear of being still. We may want to make sure we have something going on at all times, to have our dance cards full, and avoid boredom at all cost.
Silence, stillness, and empty space are essential ingredients in any work of art. Trying to fill every empty moment prevents us from noticing that something is already happening. A player who bursts in on a delicate scene with an outlandish agenda is often attempting to fix a problem that does not exist.
A good ensemble player discovers the scene, instead of forcing it to happen. If we challenge ourselves to indulge in moments of in-character stillness and spend some time just observing, we are likely to spot something interesting. Others may even join our stillness and start something that turns out to be unforgettable.
Disagreement Over Matters of Taste
Differences over taste need not be barriers to a working ensemble. However, if we feel like others do not understand our play style or we do not understand theirs, this can become a hindrance. We may conclude that no functional play can come out of this situation, and give up on co-creation entirely.
Taste differences will arise — but a generous ensemble player does their best to try out and support different kinds of play. Even in the rare situation where finding a functional compromise seems unlikely, it is good form to remain open to collaboration of some kind. Sometimes we just have to pick our battles, and that’s completely normal in creative work.
Social Bias
Most players put strong emphasis on player chemistry, attractiveness, verbal skills, or social status. This is human. However, remaining unaware of our biases creates barriers for play. If we do not challenge our prejudices and inhibitions towards people who do not fulfill our criteria, or who we think are unapproachable or “out of our league”, we needlessly limit the composition of our ensembles.
Larping is an intimate activity, and it would be irresponsible to say that everyone can play as an ensemble with everyone else. Yet, sometimes our reluctance to play with others is a question of lukewarm chemistry or petty prejudice, not insurmountable social conflicts.
A picky or suspicious attitude towards coplayers destroys the co-creative trust needed to form an ensemble. Unless there are serious real-life implications involved, we should never entirely ignore someone’s request for play. Being respectful and open-minded costs us very little — and may make a huge difference to someone else’s larp.
“Today’s Just Not the Day”
Finally, there are times when good ensemble players show up, are present and reflexive, contribute both solos and accompaniment, and have the desire to create and maintain the ensemble — and the magic still does not happen.
Accepting things as they come is an inherent part of ensemble play: we need to let go of the things that are not working out. In any given larp we interact with several overlapping ensembles. They will not all be equally functional, nor will they all be equally good matches to our personal preferences. The natural ebb and flow of co-creation always includes weak, embarrassing, dysfunctional, and disappointing moments, and a strong ensemble, as well as a strong ensemble player, faces those moments with grace and acceptance.
We Give and We Gain
We all join ensembles with our personal challenges, inhibitions, talents, and resources. The task in ensemble play is not to perform perfectly in all areas simultaneously, but to calibrate our own fears and desires, and contribute in the moment with what we have.
Ensemble play grants us moments of magic we cannot predict or design. It also makes us challenge our insecurities and inhibitions, and contributes not only to better player skills, but a better off-game community by creating play where players feel supported and able to take risks; fostering unexpected connections and rewards for cooperation; adding nuance to characters by giving them a wider array of interactions; providing the framework for a personal practice of social intelligence; and reducing the impact of off-game social hierarchies on who gets to play.
Bibliography
Anne Bogart & Tina Landau (2005): The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. Theatre Communications Group, Inc.
Tova Gerge (2004): Temporary Utopias: The Political Reality of Fiction in Beyond Role and Play. Ropecon.
Johanna Koljonen (2007): Eye-witness to the Illusion: An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing in Lifelike. Projektgruppen KP07.
