Nordic Larp

Tag: Steering

  • Steering for Survival

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    Steering for Survival

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    We need bread, yes, but roses too.

    Helen Todd

    All humans have experienced being shy or uncomfortable, and we generally fear being unwelcome — in larps as elsewhere. For some participants, though, the stakes are higher. What they are worried about is not a lonely moment or a frustrating experience, but being singled out, experiencing social violence like out of character humiliation or racism, or even for a stranger to become physically violent towards them.

    When such worries come true, the result for them is not just a bad larp, but pain, anger and heartbreak. It is bad enough to have to face prejudice in daily life. To not be allowed to escape it, even in other lives in fictional worlds, can feel like being robbed of an especially important freedom. Such experiences have led players to disengage from larp entirely, which is a loss for our communities and a failure for us as collectives of players.

    Many of your co-players at different larps will have real-life experiences of violence, harassment, and social rejection based on racism, homophobia, transphobia, or other kinds of cultural bias. Some will have experiences of fearing for their lives because of acting or being “wrong” relative to social norms in the real world. You may or may not know; they might even come across as strong and unbothered. Either way, the calculations they make as they larp are necessarily different from someone whose expectation of the world generally is to be seen and respected. This article will try to illustrate how our differences in experiences and expectations can affect how we larp.

    When we play, we automatically use our cultural knowledge to make assumptions about the goals, intentions, identities, and personalities of the people who play with us. However, inserting our social bias into play also has counterproductive results. We often miss cues or opportunities from our fellow players, and may unintentionally associate them with their ingame role — to the point where it’s quite common for the player of the villain to introduce themselves to people after the larp by saying that no, they’re not actually that horrible character.

    You might assume that the player of a character you read as socially confident or sexually aggressive is equally comfortable being socially confident or sexually aggressive when the larp is over, or that someone whose attempts to play a powerful character fell flat is a bad leader in real life. In most cases, we know not to trust our assumptions about who the player is after a larp is over. But with everything going on in a larp, we’re not as good at not assuming things about people during play. Most assumptions are harmless, and often our co-players won’t even notice. But when those assumptions reflect internalized bias, they can cause harm.

    When we engage in play during a larp, we are always betting that our suggestions — our social bids (Edman 2019) — will be picked up on by others and create interesting interactions.

    When you burst into the room with an urgent message for the Queen, you are betting that other players will respond to you, will give you space to interact, and will mirror the role you are performing back to you — treating you as, say, a royal messenger, not as the court jester or ignoring you entirely. Internalized bias affects how co-players react to the bids we make as we larp.

    Ignoring a character as “not serious” or dismissing them as somehow “obviously not important” is one example of internalised bias. Another one would be automatically assuming that a player from an oppressed minority is interested in bringing that oppression into the larp and seeing their character go through it as well. Cultural bias can make it difficult for us to imagine more than a narrow set of stories that would “fit” certain player bodies.

    It is not your fault that such prejudiced norms exist in society and inside your mind, but it is everyone’s responsibility to be aware how they limit us, and to work actively to change them. Unwittingly playing on your own internalized bias can entirely derail your co-player’s experience in ways you didn’t intend (Kemper, 2018). You can set the tone of their larp in ways they didn’t want, and in some cases, ruin it entirely.

    Most of the time for most players, the outcome of play invitations are safe and predictable. For some players though, certain play situations can be wildly unpredictable, even if they spend more time than their co-players reading the social dynamics of the room and managing risk. This risk management work takes them away from play, weakening the fabric of the larp and hurting everyone’s experience.

    Let’s look at some (fictional) examples:

    • A middle-aged woman, cast as a beautiful libertine, finds herself continually rebuffed by players who say, “It would be like playing with my mom.” She wonders how to get her co-players to play her up without making them uncomfortable and without herself being made to feel undesirable or wrong.
    • A tall, heavily built man is playing a brooding, emotionally volatile character. He repeatedly asks himself in each scene how much anger he can express to be seen as accurately portraying the character without scaring or hurting his co-players, or removing their agency.
    • A person who is an amputee is cast as a warrior. Despite meta-techniques that make it clear they are just as capable, they worry players will find excuses to keep them from fighting. “What can I do to make my co-players want me on the battlefield instead of guarding the camp?”
    • A racialized((I.e., read by others as “not white”)) person playing a historical game notices many players singling them out for play on racism, despite it not being a theme of the larp. They ask, “What can I do to stop my co-players from performing racism they think is historically accurate? What can I do to put myself on the same level of agency as my white co-players?”
    • A trans player in a larp that engages with physical desire finds herself nervously reading each player, trying to guess who will be willing to engage and where their limits are. Despite a play contract that emphasizes slow escalation and opt out, she isn’t certain that other players will engage at all if she initiates a scene, and is afraid they may react violently.

    While most participants in a larp will be steering for a fun or interesting experience, others will be steering around cultural bias or — especially players from marginalised groups — even steering for survival.

    Steering is “the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons” (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015). Steering for survival is the experience a marginalized player has in a larp when they’re trying to get through the game without being hurt more than they can afford, while hopefully getting some of the positive or healing things they’d hoped to find.

    The ability to read social situations is a learned skill; so is learning to read a larp. As we learn to larp, we all learn to pick up on things like the play bids of others and to read the arc that our character is on so we can evaluate if it’s one we want. Many players find as they larp that they only need to read the fictional situation, and can forget for long stretches of time that the players are actually from our societies and our time. This is a kind of privilege. Their lives and/or their experiences with the particular players have not given them reason to trust that the pain and bias of the real world will not follow them into imaginary places.

    In just the same way that learning to read the emotions your co-players are performing makes you a better player, so does learning to read the choices and decisions they may be forced by their experiences of the world to make in their interactions with you. The following is a list of questions your co-players from marginalized identities may be asking themselves during runtime.

    • Will it be physically possible for me to be where the most play is happening?
    • How do I need to modulate this (real or portrayed) emotion for my (or my character’s) behavior to not be read as socially unacceptable?
    • Will other players react negatively to my body in game-breaking ways if I take this action?
    • What stereotypes are being projected onto me that I cannot modulate via actions?
    • What kind of play will I not be permitted to engage in that other players are permitted?
    • How will people misread my emotions or my actions?
    • How will I be (uniquely) socially penalized for my (perceived, normal) actions?
    • If I do this, will I be physically or emotionally able to do other things I need/want to do?
    • What don’t I know, where my ignorance will shock other players or will be held against me?
    • Will I be able to understand others and/or will I be able to get others to understand me?
    • Does my role in this larp push me to perform a negative stereotype others may have of someone like me? Can I avoid playing into it, and if so, how?
    • Are there other players like me also attending? Will their presence be enough to change what I’m able to do or experience, or the consequences it has?
    • If I do this (normal) thing, will other players react/treat it as real in the fiction/pay attention?

    This list isn’t exhaustive, and we’re trying to generalize here — some of these questions will matter more in some play cultures than others. Almost everyone will have to ask some of these questions sometimes; you probably have. Now imagine how exhausting it must be to constantly perform social risk management and navigation as you move through the world. How it might drive you to fear violence or rejection from your environment, and the ways it might make you wary of trusting strangers.

    Larp is at its best as a medium when we can push boundaries together, as one ensemble. Pushing together means each of us realizing that our narrative can’t come at the expense of other players. To create space for deep exploration, we first need to build deep and mutual trust within the ensemble. One of the places trust comes from is first understanding the challenges faced by others, and then showing by our actions that we care enough to help them overcome those challenges in whatever way that they want us to, even if it’s inconvenient.

    If you are aware of questions your fellow players may need to ask, you’re going to be more able to play together on difficult themes without accidentally hurting anyone or making light of serious issues. If you know your co-players may be steering for survival, you’re less likely to be the reason they need to. Being attentive to how other people’s agency may differ from yours will make you a better co-player for everyone, not just marginalised groups, and contribute to a play culture where all participants will feel more confident engaging in brave play.

    While playing and pursuing games with difficult subject matter may be liberatory, there is no point in making games about hard subjects if they drive us apart. If we refuse to acknowledge both our own internal bias, and the need for many of our co-players to adapt around bias, we will not be able to play as deeply as we might hope.

    Larp as a medium can tell serious and nuanced stories, but doing so requires us to be brave together. In Nordic larp, we like to tell stories about things that matter deeply in the real world. Many of the subjects we want to explore, like sexism, racism, sexual violence, or the experiences of migration or class oppression, come much closer to the lives of some players than others. To be forced without warning to recreate or re-experience oppression from your everyday life inside a larp can cause emotional or social harm, whether serious or subtle. On the other hand, in some other larp, the same scene can be genuinely liberating — if you have actively chosen to engage, and have the agency you need around the experience and its framing.

    Bibliography

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

    Karin Edman (2019): “Social bid”-method of playing on oppression in larp. WonderKarin. https://wonderkarin.se/2019/11/15/social-bid-method-of-playing-oppression-in-larp/, ref February 5th, 2020.

    Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta (2015): The Art of Steering. Knudepunkt. The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book.

  • Maps, Loops and Larp

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    Maps, Loops and Larp

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    Should I reveal the secret now, or wait? Should I say something, or stay silent? Should I go somewhere, or stay where I am?

    Questions like these are running through the heads and guts of players all the time when larping. Often, players don’t even think of them actively as questions, but are subconsciously making choices nevertheless. The actions of a player during runtime are consequences of a series of decisions. In this article, we will outline a framework for analyzing how the players decide on their actions moment to moment, as well as on longer time scales throughout the larp. To help understand how these choices are arrived at and structured, we will introduce the concepts map and loop.

    The map is the structure in the players’ minds of the current status of the fictional reality and their place inside it((While we are speaking about something larp-specific, humans use these types of structures all the time; for more information, look up cognitive maps or mental maps (Cognitive Map, Wikipedia, 2020).)). The map’s content can be spatial information, character relationships, the characters’ understanding of past events, and the kinds of actions the player sees as possible in the larp. The map also stores projections of event outcomes, and the schedule of acts, known predetermined events, and the end of play.

    Players often start to sketch their map before playing begins, for example gathering information in a pre-larp workshop or reading written materials. At the start of play, players are focused on coloring in((The initial printing of this essay used “warming up” as the metaphor here; on reflection, “coloring in” was clearly the better terminology choice.)) their maps and filling in enough detail that play flows easily and actions become self-sustaining.

    The other concept we will work with in this piece is the action loop. During a larp, participants are running at least one action loop — often a few, at different time scales. An action loop moves the participant through four steps: observing and understanding the situation, planning and assessing the possible actions they could take, deciding on a course of action, and performance. We call the process of repeatedly cycling through this set of steps as you make decisions and take actions “running a loop.” The loop is a metaphor for the player’s decision process((Loops are a common conceptual and practical tool in systems thinking and computer science. Credit for the decision loop metaphor goes originally to Col. John Boyd’s “OODA” loop (OODA Loop, Wikipedia, 2020)).

    A player might be running one loop as their character talks to another, interpreting the other character’s responses, seeing the conversational openings, and steering their responses toward the direction they find interesting for the scene. In another, higher-level loop they might be looking at how the scene is evolving, seeing the possibilities it opens up for future scenes, evaluating them with respect to their goals, and then changing the steering input in the shorter-term loop. The player might also have a much longer-term loop, where they reflect upon the arc of their experience thus far, and set strategic goals for how to shape that arc going forward. Especially on this level, they might also be thinking about their own life and how it is mirrored in the themes of the larp, and using that as input for their loop. This is called metareflection, and as you can read more about it in Hilda Levin’s chapter Metareflection elsewhere in this book, we will not go into it in depth here.

    As a player runs their loops, they refer to their mental map to interpret and understand what is happening in the larp. The players continuously update their maps, connecting new observations to existing information. Those connections are where players find possibilities for action, and provide the field for player creativity.

    Agency Regulation and Motivation

    To understand player decisions, we need to look at the concepts of player and character agency, and player motivations. Agency measures how much or little a person can affect a specific situation, how they can act, and whether they can change outcomes.

    The player’s agency is separate from the character’s agency. It is restricted by aspects such as what information the larp has given the players, which skills you have, legal restrictions, and play culture. Furthermore, agency is subject to social factors, such as body shape, performance skills, or status among your co-players. Aspects of the world that regulate player actions are constraints. To be specific, the constraint is not the aspect of the world itself — rather, the constraint is the relationship of the group of players with that aspect.

    Hard constraints cannot be changed by participants and are shared by all of them. For example, even if you play a character that can fly, humans cannot fly, so you are not able to represent the action directly. Hard constraints can be set by laws and common sense (not killing your co-players in combat), or by choices made by the designer and expressed through rules (“this is a non-verbal larp”). In the latter case the constraint is hard if the consequence of breaking the rule is that others will not view the action as part of the fiction (for example, talking when the fiction says you cannot talk).

    Soft constraints are different from player to player — for example, if your character wants to take off their clothes, but you hold back because you are afraid of others’ reactions or because you will feel ashamed. A constraint like this can limit your agency just as powerfully as a hard constraint. It can, however, be addressed in different ways both through the design of the event (for instance, of the player culture or the rules of the fiction), through adjustments during play (like changing the lighting in the space) or internally by the player (for instance, if your fears diminish as the co-players earn your trust).

    The constraints limit the affordances of the situation — what you as a player can do. However, within the constraints there are usually many options. While different players may see the same options as possible, there will not necessarily be the same cost or risk involved for all players. Agency-regulating constraints determine the perceived cost or risk of taking an action.

    Player motivations are the goals that direct player actions and shape which of the available options the player will view as most interesting.

    Motivations can be individual or communal, and have to do with either the larp experience itself or with factors outside the larp. Examples of individual motivations can be experiencing powerful emotions, wanting to win, or temporarily escaping into another world. Motivations outside of the play situation could be increasing one’s social status, understanding something better, or making new friends. Communal goals could be making experiences better for others, helping to build a community with certain values, or exploring and developing a genre or fiction together. Characters will also have goals for their actions, but player and character goals will not always coincide. It can, however, be a player goal to stay loyal to their character.

    The constraints regulate the agency of the player and the character. The actions that exist inside the constraints are — for you — the possible actions. Actions that are constrained are impossible, either literally, or because the player currently perceives them as such.

    The player’s decision of which action to pick among those that seem to be available is based on a cost/benefit analysis, taking into consideration motivation and constraints. We will examine this analysis below, as we explore different stages of the loop.

    Stages of the Loop

    Keeping the affordances determined by agency and motivations in mind, it is now time to describe the steps of the loop in more detail. The processes described are mostly automatic, which is to say you might be only vaguely aware of them as you larp (just as you are almost never aware of similar processes occurring continuously as you move through your daily life). Even at your first larp, you will perform the steps of the loop successfully, and as you larp more, you will become more skilled at different aspects of the process, such as identifying play opportunities or reading the emotional states of other players.

    Let’s go over the four stages of the loop in more detail.

    Observation and Understanding

    Your loop starts by observing yourself and the world around you (using all of your senses, not just vision), attempting to understand what you’re seeing in view of your map, and comparing what you see to the information in your map of the larp — and then possibly updating your map.

    In this phase, you’ll note things like your own emotional and physical state, where players are and what actions their characters are taking, the reactions of other players and characters to what you did in the previous loop, the emotional state of other players and/or the emotional state their characters are projecting, etc. You’ll evaluate these observations for offered play opportunities, power structures, the emotional reaction they bring up in you, their significance in the fiction, their resonance with the larp’s themes, the metatechnical meaning of actions (if metatechniques are used in the larp), etc. Drawing understanding out of what you observe in a larp is what we call literacy — things like your ability to recognize play offers from others, or check in with yourself to understand your own emotional state separate from the state you’re portraying with your character.

    Planning and Assessment

    Planning and assessing actions is a process where the player has to take into account what kind of agency they have, what motivation they have, how the rest of the larp will react, how much time is available, what restrictions are placed on the player by their own physical and mental state, and what the likely outcomes of the actions will be. The player will evaluate what actions are possible, desired, acceptable, and achievable.

    Possible actions: In theory, the list of possible actions is more or less endless. In practice, the player does not think about most of these — only a small number of possible actions will come to mind. The list of actions is composed based on the situation the player is already in. Often, a player will navigate the larp in order to get into a situation where more actions are possible. For example, if you are alone and want to interact with others, you first need to take actions to get together with other people.

    Because players aren’t just recording raw data about the world, but are actively reading the environment, the planning and assessment process in practice often occurs at least in part contemporaneously with observation and understanding. In particular, players will often not even consider actions they know aren’t possible, like flying down from a building. This is efficient, as considering those options would be a waste of time.

    Social rules can be internalised to a degree that the player might also not consider actions that are literally possible — these are what we refer to as soft constraints. Most players will, for example, rule out actually injuring another player as an action that is not possible; this is a soft constraint that is helpful. Unfortunately, social rules can also make a player see an action as impossible even when it is something that the larp offers, or even encourages. For example, if they have learned in the outside world that the kind of person they are perceived as, or perceive themselves as, will be socially or physically punished for some actions, the player may view those actions as impossible — for more on this, see Kemper, Saitta, and Koljonen’s Steering for Survival elsewhere in this book.

    In short, an action is possible if the player is conscious of it and feels able to pursue it.

    Desired actions: From the list of possible actions that the player is conscious of, they will identify which ones are desirable. In the previous step, we only took into account the agency regulating constraints. In this step, as well as the subsequent ones, the constraints still matter, but we also take motivation into account. Whether the action is desirable is dependent on player motivation as well as on soft constraints. Based on the player’s motivation, they will filter out actions that they deem will not support their goals. For example, a player wanting to be loyal to their character will not act in a way that goes against the character motivation — unless other player goals overshadow the desire to be loyal to the character. This leaves the player with a selection of actions that are both possible and desirable.

    Acceptable actions: The other players (and the organizers) of the larp will expect actions that maintain the coherence of the fiction and support content, events, and actions that are in line with what they want to experience or create. Usually, co-players will expect everybody to avoid actions that ruin the play for others, and to play their character as intended by the designers. In many play cultures it is also considered poor form to choose actions that significantly limit the agency of other players. Which kinds of actions have that effect varies between different kinds of larps and play cultures, making this a common cause of friction at international events.

    While players differ in how much they care about the acceptance of their co-players, all players take these norms of acceptable play into account. The play culture’s influence on which actions are acceptable shapes how a player’s agency is regulated by constraints, as does the player’s knowledge and understanding of this culture. The player’s motivation will affect the degree to which a player cares about how their choices are received by others. A player who is indifferent to how others view them will have a wider range of options at the planning and assessment stage, although social consequences are then likely to limit their possible actions later, for example if they become isolated in play.

    At this stage, the character’s agency becomes part of the decision even if the player isn’t motivated by being loyal to their character. If you are supposed to play an old and weak character, it doesn’t make sense to lift a heavy table above your head, even if you as a player are strong enough to do so and doing so could help take your larp where you want to go. The choice could be ruled out by your personal adherence to the coherence of the overall fiction, or by an understanding that breaking it is not socially acceptable.

    Achievable actions: Most actions will cost the player time and energy. As these are limited resources, it’s necessary to take them into account. Some actions (for example resting) may give you more energy for later play. When deciding between a couple of actions that are all possible, desirable, and acceptable, a player will take time and energy into account. Doing something always means you are not doing something else. For example, staging a big scene in front of everybody might drain your energy, and joining a group that will go away for a few hours means you will miss a lot of other play while being away. Sometimes you have to select an action which by itself is not the most desirable, in order to save time and energy, or because you do not have the capacity to carry out another behaviour right now.

    Outcome evaluation: Once you’ve got a set of possible, desirable, acceptable actions that you have the bandwidth to perform, you need to project forward to understand their likely outcomes. An action that may be desirable in the moment may not look desirable when you consider how it may shape player actions over time, or you may realize that it doesn’t make sense in the context of your goals in an action loop running on a longer timescale — for instance that it would make a great scene, but not support a good character arc.

    In practice, the planning and assessment phase will be compressed, and it’s rare that you’ll do all of these steps explicitly or even consciously. However, we believe that all of these factors are evaluated at some level in this phase, unless a heuristic — a mental rule — is used to skip over assessment and planning entirely. For more on this, see Magnar Grønvik Müller’s Introduction to Heuristics elsewhere in this book.

    Decision Point

    Once you have one or more viable plans, you need to decide between them, or commit to the one you have. At this point, you’ve likely already thought through the possible outcomes and their likelihoods for the plans, especially if you have more than one. The decision point is often subconscious or very fast, particularly if you’ve identified one obvious plan. In the case of multiple plans with significant consequences for your experience, you may spend some time in deliberation.

    Some players use heuristics to skip from observation to decision. They will have learned from experience that some situations lead to play they do or don’t want, and have established an internal rule that they will always take a specific type of action in a certain type of situation.

    The choices might have high stakes, or there may be too many viable options without a way to decide between them — or seem to be no options at all — or you may realize that you’re uncomfortable with what looks like the obvious choice on the basis of how it feels when it comes time to commit to it. In these situations, you might experience choice paralysis, and decide instead to to go back and replan, to take some time out of character to figure out what decision to make, or just make up your mind to passively follow some random external impulse (like listening to another character’s suggested course of action).

    Performance

    This is the phase where you act out whatever plan you’ve decided on. Some of your actions can be fully internal and visible only to yourself, but generally as you perform your actions, you will be observed by others. The other players will read you based on their maps, and update them. As you play out your plan, you’ll be noting their reactions and observing your own performance and evaluating whether your actions have interesting or meaningful consequences. This will lead you into the next iteration of the loop.

    A single loop is fairly straightforward. However, players run several loops simultaneously, which makes the concept a bit more complex.

    Multiple Loops: Working Across Timescales

    In any given larp, you will be running simultaneous action loops at different timescales.

    At the finest time scale, you run a loop that lets you manage your performance inside a scene; this is the performative loop. Here, you are for instance deciding what you’ll say next, or how long you should drag out these death groans, or how much of your character’s feelings you will allow your facial expressions and body language to reflect.

    If it’s useful, you can think of every scene as being composed of a series of phrases for each character, with each phrase corresponding to one iteration — repetition — of the loop, whether they’re verbal phrases, physical movements, etc. This is the loop where you evaluate situations and emotional reactions in the highest detail, and is generally what will take up most of your focus in a larp. If you are a player who prioritises character immersion, the mental state where you (pretend to) feel, act, and be as your character, this is the level where you will perform the emotion-following part of immersion.

    The next timescale is the inter-scene scale, where you think about the scene that you want to play next and how the scenes will stitch together. This is the tactical loop. In a very short larp, like some blackbox larps, this will be the highest timescale, since you can plan for the whole duration of the larp on this level. This is often the level where steering choices are made.

    Iterations of this loop are scenes. Depending on your play style, you may engage this loop more or less consciously. The evaluation process can be just as fast as in the mostly subconscious performative loop, but this level is more likely to slow down to a reflection you can become aware of. In the tactical loop, you will often focus on your intention as a player and your intention as a character for a given scene; these become the goals that you evaluate actions against in the faster performative loop.

    The largest timescale is the whole-larp, or strategic loop timescale; iterations of this loop are acts. Here, you evaluate your goals as a player for the entire larp (or the series of larps, if you’re playing a campaign), the dramatic arc of your character, etc. Having decided on the direction you want your arc to take, you are likely to stay on that course, but you might be sensitive to new input that would trigger reevaluation of that direction — like a better opportunity or a sign your chosen path might not work. While you may think about your arc frequently, consciously changing course is a less common occurrence.

    Different players have different strategies for playing larps, which may shape how they use their strategic loop. Some players will optimize for emotional intensity, some for narrative coherence, or some (in competitive play cultures) for winning the larp. If you are an immersionist player, this is the level where you make strategic choices to enable immersive play.

    If the larp you are playing is split up into acts by the designer, you will run at least one iteration of this loop per act, although if acts are long, you might step out of play mid-act (either internally or physically) to re-evaluate. Like the other loops, the strategic loop runs throughout the larp. But as this loop is more symbolic and goal-centric, and requires zooming out of the immediate situation, it can be useful to reserve dedicated time in the design of the larp itself for out-of-character strategic reflection.

    Bandwidth

    In this model, bandwidth is the term for how many things a player can think about, decide on, remember, and do at the same time — their capacity to process information and make decisions, or in other words, to work with their map and loops.((Simon Brind, in his piece Blue Valkyrie Needs Food, Badly! elsewhere in this book, talks about the various kinds of energy we use in play. Bandwidth here corresponds roughly to the categories of “social energy” he describes. As we’re primarily concerned with information processing here, we use a metaphor from that space, in part because we believe it makes clear the ways different activities can trade of a shared resource.)) When you are feeling overwhelmed during play, that is often the experience of being low on bandwidth.

    As players become more experienced, they build more efficient cognitive skills for managing information in their maps, and more efficient ways of processing their loops, including heuristics. They will also develop more fluency at jumping between the diegetic, real-world, and metareflective frames, and between different time-scales in the larp, meaning they spend less time on context switches. All this increasing efficiency adds up to more bandwidth to process nuanced information. Consciously developing your map or assessing your decision loops early in a larp may take up a bit of your bandwidth, but can be an investment that pays back in terms of more bandwidth later.

    Bandwidth is a resource that players can spend in different ways, and different actions are more or less costly for different players. Bandwidth also affects things like recall of less-salient parts of a player’s map, or cross-referencing between pieces of information, noticing available play opportunities, portraying emotional nuance when playing close to another character, maintaining an accent or physical habits, or language or physical skills. Better larp literacy skills also improve bandwidth, as relevant information will jump out at the player without time-consuming introspection or analysis.

    While experience can grant additional bandwidth, any number of things can reduce it. Players who are stressed or otherwise in vulnerable emotional states, cold, hungry, tired, handling social oppression, or dealing with disabilities often experience reduced bandwidth. Players who are not playing in their first language or their own play culture often become more fluent as play progresses, but still tire faster as they keep having to spend extra bandwidth on the effort of translation.

    Bandwidth limitations can have different effects: passive and reactive play, disconnecting from the fiction or the social dynamics of play for a while, or even needing to step out of or leave play entirely. Design choices can require more or less bandwidth, and cost or provide different amounts of energy. Designers should consider how their decisions will impact the available energy and bandwidth of different players through the larp. A design that inflicts player fatigue, for example through lack of sleep or food, might leave players more open to emotional impact — but it will also reduce their bandwidth. On the other hand, offering physical comfort even though the fiction is stressful, for example by providing an offgame space with coffee and sweets, may help players regenerate their energy and free up bandwidth.

    Your available bandwidth affects the choices you make during play. You might abstain from a desired action to save energy for complex play later, or rule out actions as impossible due to lack of bandwidth.

    Steering and Collective Decision-Making

    In The Art of Steering (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015), steering is defined as “the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons”. In the context of action loops, steering can be viewed as a process of deciding which goals to bring into play — evaluating possible actions on the basis of which ones are desirable with respect to your personal goals.

    Steering is defined as something players do alone, on the basis of their own goals. Steering is both the act of identifying a goal (often on the whole-larp or inter-scene level) and the successive loops that the player performs to attempt to satisfy those goals (often on the scene level). It is possible for two players to agree that they both have goals that align, and for the two players to then steer their play in a coordinated fashion. However, the communication and collective decision-making whereby the players discover they have aligned goals and decide to act on them are just that — collaboration in their action loops, not steering.

    Players rarely execute their action loops alone. While solipsistically we may all be alone in our heads, each thinking in isolation, in practical terms larp is defined by collaboration at an extradiegetic((Communication that’s within the collective set of social norms that exists during runtime, but which is outside the diegesis, or shared fiction.)) level — the players are always collaborating, at minimum to maintain the fiction, regardless of what happens inside it. Explicit collaboration between the players may be done via some combination of body language and speech intended to carry meaning at both the diegetic and metadiegetic levels; via specific metatechniques; or even stepping out of play to negotiate or plan together. These collaborations often shape each player’s action loops at the strategic level, as they verbally negotiate the broad arcs they’re interested in playing out and loosely coordinate some of their goals.

    Often, the players informally calibrate how their desired paths of action are compatible at the tactical or inter-scene level to shape those loops. In some play cultures, this goes even further, with explicit extradiegetic planning overriding player and character improvisation down to the scene level. For instance, two players might decide not just that their characters will both vie for the favour of the prince, but that one character will call the other’s mother a hamster, leading to a duel that they will lose. As this playing style transfers creativity from the play situation to out-of-character coordination between players, it allows the players to shortcut decision loops on what to do, and significantly reduce the need for a map. It leaves the player to only make runtime decisions on details regarding how to enact the scene. This approach saves the player a lot of bandwidth, and may allow players to play many more dramatic scenes than without pre-planning. However, critics of this playing style would argue that one also risks undermining the emotional connection between player and character, and that it makes the player unreceptive to alternative play bids, which from another co-player’s point of view may be experienced as blocking play.

    Character Immersion as a Tactic Versus a Strategy

    This new model for looking at what kinds of decisions are made at what kinds of timescales in play can help provide a more nuanced understanding of immersion.

    When players talk about preferring to be immersed, they’re often talking about an experience that happens at the scene level, of emotional flow and an absence of thoughts readily identifiable as coming from the player. Intentionally achieving this state requires either luck or, often, conscious acts at the strategic level to set themselves up for immersive play. For some players, these choices will happen as a set of heuristics that they’ve learned over time. While a heuristic may allow them to shortcut the strategic loop evaluation, the loop does still occur.

    Even though immersion at the tactical level — within each scene — is desirable for many players, an overemphasis on it can cause problems. In the steering paper (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015), it was raised that playing a larp often requires a certain amount of steering work from each player as they bring the experience into a coherent whole with a collectively desired arc. A player who only steers for immersion requires other players to do the work of steering for the good of the overall larp. That is, the player makes choices in their strategic loop to enable immersion, and then acts in their inter-scene and tactical loops to maintain flow above all else.

    Loop Failure Modes

    Thinking about how a player’s execution of steps in the loop can lead to unexpected or undesirable experiences helps us understand some of those experiences more clearly.

    The first set of failure modes in the loop is in the observation and understanding phase. There are any number of reading errors that can occur. The risk of reading errors depends on the player’s larp literacy. Issues here can include failures to recognize play opportunities being given to you, misreading the emotions of others, etc. Observation or literacy failures around misunderstanding are often sorted out in play, (or at least after the larp), but the failure to realize there was something to see at all is more likely to just lead to missed play opportunities. Players misreading the larp can lead to equifinality((Often, players have different understandings of parts of the diegesis. Two perspectives (or here, maps) are said to be equifinal if the consequences of players acting on them are indistinguishable enough that material conflicts in their interpretations do not derail play. (Montola, 2012))) problems (more on this below), and in some cases conflict between players.

    A number of failures come up during the planning and assessment phase of the loop, commonly either cost or risk estimation failures, where a player embarks on play that will either be too expensive (in terms of e.g. their available bandwidth or emotional energy) for them to follow through with, or that may fall flat with other players, not be seen as acceptable play (e.g. they have failed at assessing acceptable options), or not lead to the experience they were hoping for, or that they projected would evolve from their action. Risk estimation failures can go both ways, of course, as players can also avoid actions they would have been able to accomplish, or not do things from fear of social censure or out of a misreading of the social contract of the larp.

    Another failure mode, at the decision point of the loop, is choice paralysis, where a player has either too many possibilities to choose from or a small number of high-stakes options with uncertain outcomes and insufficient information to decide with.

    Most of the remaining failure modes are performance failures, which encompass most of what we traditionally think of as failures in play.

    The Map

    Maps have a life-cycle that mirrors that of the larp, from sketching before the larp begins to coloring in the map as the game starts, through flow during the bulk of play, and then narrativization after the larp ends.

    Sketching

    Sketching your map might mean reading background material from the organizers, getting a sense of the world you’ll be playing in and of the logic of that world — of how to think of and within the fiction. It might mean doing non-diegetic research, like watching documentaries about the history of AIDS before playing Just a Little Lovin’, or engaging with source documents, like reading a novel or playing a computer game before playing Witcher School. Such preparation can give you emotional touchstones to shape how you read events during play, or to fill in gaps in your understanding of relevant history that you can draw on in play.

    Genre and references to existing works are a fast way to sketch in the rough outlines of a map. “This game is Donna Tartt plus Dead Poets’ Society plus Cruel Intentions” provides a huge amount of information to a player who understands the references. So does “This is a satirical post-apocalyptic larp with 70’s leather gay aesthetics”. Being familiar with the design tradition the larp builds on can also provide such outlines, for example if you have played larps by the same designers before. This information provides starting points for the map, but is less likely to be relevant during play — and indeed, players who hold too tightly to their interpretation of genre and source material may find their maps in conflict with the larp as actually played.

    For many players, the process of sketching starts for real when you get (or create, depending on the design) your character. If you talk to your co-players before the larp, you may start layering in some initial information about your chemistry with that player and their play style, and also start collaborative decision-making around your intent for how to play your character relationship.

    During pre-larp workshops, the players are mapping the larp under the facilitation of the organizers. Often, this is when the possibilities for play become clear. Particularly if the larp content hasn’t been well-communicated beforehand, seeing what’s talked about in workshops, which mechanics are practiced, and what safety lines are drawn helps you evaluate what actions will be possible and desirable in play.

    Much map data is sensory — recognizing a person, knowing how characters move, knowing the layout of the play space, or building associations between colors and factions — and it’s hard to put this data into your map until you’re on site.

    Coloring In

    When play begins, your map is alive; now things can actually happen. This is the map proper — reactive terrain, not a static store of information and instead something you can use. During the coloring period, several things are happening — usually subconsciously. First, you’re getting comfortable with the rhythm of play and finding your character. Second, you’re figuring out which of the information you sketched into your map matters, what is irrelevant, and what is now incorrect for the larp-as-played. Third, you’re starting to try out play offers and see what is actually possible, what gets a response from your co-players, and what is interesting to you. Some things introduced in the pre-larp workshop or reading material before the larp may stand out as important, while others prove less viable. Fourth, you’re looking for, evaluating, responding to, and building up a library of social bids, or play offers from other players. As the map is colored in, you also start running one or more loops, making decisions and updating the map based on the new information you gather.

    Much of the awkwardness many players feel at the beginning of a larp comes from everyone coloring in their maps at the same time. Every action taken by each participant is a test: is this a reasonable action in this situation, culture, world? If it is, which players around me might be interested in the directions I’m suggesting, and for which characters would the actions be relevant? After playing a while, you will increasingly both offer and receive social bids that you can actually act on (see Edman 2019; Westborg and Nordblom 2017 for more on this). When you have enough character-specific possibilities that are established as playable for play to flow smoothly, your map is functional. With a functional map, it’s easier to play, and should you need to step out of character for a bit, it’s then easier to get back in compared to when you had to color in the map initially.

    Flow and Communication

    During play, players are constantly sharing parts of their maps with each other. This can be explicit, such as when characters tell each other things that they’ve seen happen, describe where to find things or people, or talk about things they might do together. This is only a small part of the sharing that goes on. While there are many other layers to the interaction, every time you see a character react to something you’ve done, that player is also (intentionally or not) sharing data about their map. When you do work to shape the emotional reaction you want to present to others, especially when you’re regulating player emotions to be able to portray character emotions, this is also intentional sharing of information.

    Conflicts between players driven by different understandings of the shared world (i.e. equifinality conflicts) are map conflicts. Two maps of a larp are equifinal if the players working from those maps can agree on the shape of the world where it matters to their choices. During map conflicts, player communication about their maps is likely to become more competitive, as each player tries to push the version of diegetic reality that they prefer. Charismatic players sometimes do this accidentally, shaping the diegetic world around them. This isn’t always bad, but can cause problems if they haven’t thought about how their map may affect the experiences of other players. Serious map conflicts can be hard for players to resolve at runtime. Stepping out of play to negotiate is sometimes the answer, but especially if players are low on bandwidth and the play style allows for less narrative coherency the players might also just split into groups, each with their own understanding.

    Narrativization

    When the runtime ends, the map changes again. A lot of what was being kept in the map — the emotional state of your and other characters, predictions about things that might happen, an understanding of the options for what you can do — becomes irrelevant, as you are no longer making choices about what to do. For some players, this shift in information processing can be disorienting. It can also happen simultaneously with an emotional reaction (often grief) to no longer having access to the social world where their performances as their characters are reflected back to them, and to the other characters they cared about. Depending on the larp and the player, all of this can be overshadowed by post-game celebrations and collective congratulations among the ensemble, but some players will still feel both grief and disorientation intensely.

    Once the map is no longer living, you can’t act upon it, but the meaning of what happened can still change. The process of turning a live map where stories exist as collections of events and action-possibilities into chronologies that have a specific meaning and interpretation is narrativization.

    Narrativization is a collective process. For a player’s narrative to have social meaning, it needs to be shared and reflected back to them by the other players who are part of it; this too is a kind of negotiation. In this stage, players are still sharing information from their maps, sometimes with the goal of persuading each other that their version of the map is the most correct; often to provide more high-resolution nuance for each other. Some players prefer to reflect on the meaning and experience of their larps in private, and some types of larps, like very abstract or poetic ones, generate maps that differ so significantly from each other that a collective narrativization process has no relevance for the experience of the piece (although comparing experiences might still be interesting).

    Epilogues, or short stories that some players write about what happened to their characters after the game ended, occupy an interesting place in narrativization. This contested practice((There are both larp cultures and individuals that consider epilogue-writing a forced imposition of one set of outcomes and meanings upon one’s co-players; the epilogue writers would argue no one is forced to read them.)) provides players with one last chance to exercise agency within the game world, often as a way to find emotional closure for where the game ended, or to resolve emotional complexity that springs from the way narrativization shifted the meaning of their individual story. Epilogues are sometimes shared as an explicit part of the collective process by players who engage in this practice; some of their co-players will engage with their epilogues, while others will not.

    Things to Put in Your Map

    Every player will focus on different things in their maps, but some things are likely to be in the maps of most players. The categories are a rough guide, as many larps will sequence things differently.

    Before a larp, you might think about the following:

    • Pre-larp motivations: Why am I at this larp, what kind of play experiences am I looking for?
    • Information about players: What are their names? How do they play, if you’ve played with them before? Do you like them, want to get to know them better, or want to avoid them?
    • Information about characters: What are their names, their group allegiances (if relevant) or general dispositions? How can you recognize this character if you don’t know their player already? What is your characters’ relationship, and is it likely to be important?
    • Diegetic information: What’s the historical era and specific fiction of the larp? What fictional information looks like it will be core to your ability to understand the actions of others? What do you know about the setting?
    • Metadiegetic information: Themes of the larp, what genre you’re expecting to play in, and your understanding of the culture of the larp and its players. Experiences from other works by the same designers.
    • Planned play progression: Acts, schedule, expected play flow, etc.
    • Practical concerns: Food, bathrooms, temperature/weather, first-aid, access to power or communications, coffee, sleeping, hazards, and your own planning around these.
    • Costuming: What am I planning on bringing? What are the affordances of these objects and clothes? How do they relate to the fiction?
    • Skills: Are there particular skills needed to play this (e.g. a particular dance, fencing or a reading a rune alphabet)? If there are, do you have these skills?
    • Out of character concerns: Are there things you already know about that will require you to plan around during play, like times you will need to step out of character, etc.

    Once you’re on site, you’re likely to change and re-evaluate many of your answers to the previous section, and also start adding some new things:

    • More information about the players: What faces belong to what names? What groups or cliques do you see among the players? What kind of chemistry do you have with people you’ll be playing with? What kind of emotional space do they seem to be in? Are there players who you think may need extra support whom you might be able to help?
    • The space: Recognizing places. How long it takes to get around, what’s expected in different spaces in and out of game, what’s visible from where, what spaces afford which actions, who is likely to be in which spaces, where you are comfortable.
    • Costuming: What did you end up taking with you? How does your costume look compared to others? What does that tell you about players and characters? Will your costume constrain your actions in the space? Is there anything you should change before the larp starts?
    • Rules: What are they? How do they work? What are your options if they don’t?
    • Calibration: What tools does this larp offer to calibrate interactions with others? How does what you’re hearing in the workshops or before the larp starts change your understanding of what you expect to happen in play? What does it look like the play style will be? Which intentions are expressed by players you’re calibrating with?
    • Movement: Once you’re in costume, how does your character move? How do other characters move?
    • Agency regulating constraints: What actions feel like they’ll be acceptable here? Especially if you’re a gender or sexual minority, how might other players identify? Does the room feel like it’s likely to be racist or sexist, etc., or to tolerate those actions?
    • Self-knowledge: What is your motivation right now? Your goals, and your physical and emotional state?

    When play starts, the map kicks into high gear, first during coloring, and then in flow. You’ll re-evaluate things above again, or confirm your judgements, and start adding things like:

    • Actions: What has happened so far, and what does it mean?
    • Character state: What mood is your character in, what are their goals right now, and what are they thinking about? Does this feel right, or do you need to adjust it?
    • Story: What arc is your character on and where are you trying to steer it?
    • Engagement and energy levels: To what degree do others seem to be immersed in play? What’s the mood in the room? Which way is it going?
    • Projections: How are players and characters likely to react to your potential actions? How would an action change the arc of your character, affect your group of characters, or the larp as a whole? Are players likely to accept your social bid, and what if anything will it cost you, socially or emotionally? Are there problems this action may cause or help resolve?
    • Knowledge level: What do you know you don’t know? What might you be wrong about? Where are places where you think your map may differ from that of other players, and will this cause problems?

    Conclusion

    How players manage information and how they make decisions during runtime was becoming an increasingly prominent blindspot in larp theory. The two questions are inseparable. The two questions are inseparable. The decision process of the loops must be informed by mapped information about the world, and the lifecycle of that information is shaped both by the experience of that world in play and by the decision process itself. The idea of maps and loops provides a sketch of a cognitive model with the affordances we need to talk about and reflect on the way we think in play.

    There are a number of secondary concepts and explorations in this piece — player bandwidth, extradiegetic collaboration as the collective partner to steering, understanding how immersion works at the tactical versus strategic level, and the rhythmic split of a larp into phrases, scenes, and acts as something native to the medium, not just a design structure present in some larps. These are subjects we have been in need of more conceptual tools to tackle.

    Larp literacy in particular, touched on in passing here, is ripe for more work, as are agency-regulating frames. Both of those ideas, along with maps and loops, came from the Player Skills Retreat held in Helsinki in May 2019; credit for them is owed to everyone in that room.

    Bibliography

    Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta (2015): The Art of Steering. Knudepunkt. The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book.

    Markus Montola (2012): On the Edge of the Magic Circle. Understanding Role-Playing and Pervasive Games. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Tampere.

    Hilda Levin (2020): Metareflection. Solmukohta. What Do We Do When We Play?

    Karin Edman (2019): “Social bid”-method of playing on oppression in larp. WonderKarin, ref February 5th, 2020.

    Josefin Westborg and Carl Nordblom (2017): Do You Want to Play Ball? Knutepunkt. Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories.

    Jonaya Kemper, Eleanor Saitta, and Johanna Koljonen (2020): Steering for Survival. Solmukohta. What Do We Do When We Play?

    Simon Brind (2020): Blue Valkyrie Needs Food, Badly! Solmukohta. What Do We Do When We Play?

    Wikipedia (2020): Cognitive map. Wikipedia, ref. Jan 1st, 2020.

    Wikipedia (2020): OODA loop. Wikipedia, ref. Jan 1st, 2020.

  • You’re in Charge of You

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    You’re in Charge of You

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    Moira (play, by Karin Tidbeck).Let me tell you about how you can game master yourself in a larp.

    In a tabletop role-playing game it’s easy for the actual game master to work on pacing and theme and mood and so on, because she sees the whole group pretty much all the time, knows what’s happening where, and controls the entire environment.

    In a larp that’s much more difficult. You might have run-time game masters, but they probably won’t be able to focus on all the players at the same time. They have to take care of the big picture, the main plot lines, the secret NPCs arriving in time.

    So who’s there to take care of your pacing and theme and mood in a larp? That’s right. No one, but you.

    Before I tell you about how you can game master yourself, let me tell you about my character.

    Moira (play, by Karin Tidbeck).I was playing in Sweden, and decided to play only in Finnish. None of the Swedes would understand me, and I would rely on my limited Swedish skills to get what they’re saying. There were a few other Finns in the game, and I could communicate with them, and they could communicate with the others in English or Swedish if they wanted to. But to make things interesting for myself and others, I’d decided to speak only Finnish.

    The game was Moira, a modern-day fairy tale with different sorts of gnomes, trolls and elves from Scandinavian mythology. Faerie courts, Aesir and Vanir, the weavers of fate, changelings, humans no longer believing in the supernatural and so on and so on. There were five mundane modern-day humans in the game, who had been captured in the land of the fairy folk, and their disbelief soon turned to awe and later maybe into fear.

    I was one of the vittra, who were sort of the nobility of Nordic critters. There were about a dozen vittra in the game, all mad as hatters, and we had frequent meetings and discussions and debates. Everyone else spoke Swedish, I spoke Finnish, and everyone nodded as if they understood what I was saying. Occasionally Johanna Koljonen, the only vittra who could understand me, repeated some of my comments in Swedish, if she felt it would serve her interests.

    MoiraMartin Ericsson was playing one of the humans, a surfer dude clad in bicycle attire, and I started tormenting him for my own pleasure. He didn’t believe in faeries, and wanted me to show him around. I explained things to him, in Finnish. He didn’t understand a word, but I kept explaining. He challenged me and confronted me and attacked me, but I would remain mysterious and inexplicable.

    The game went on, and eventually Martin’s character saw too many strange and wonderful things to remain skeptical. He started losing his mind, and I tormented him to make things worse. At one point I stole his bicycle helmet, and that seemed to be the tipping point. He went over the border, and realized everything he’d believed in was false.

    Martin’s character started searching for answers, and I kept talking to him in Finnish. If nothing else, he at least wanted his helmet back. He was desperate. Towards the very end of the three-day game, he begged of me to tell him what was going on, to help him, to protect him, to give him back his helmet. He would do anything. Anything! Anything? I asked in Finnish. Anything, he swore in Swedish.

    Moira (play, by Karin Tidbeck).That’s when I spoke my only line in Swedish. I smiled, and looked deep into his eyes. “Dyrka mig”, I said. Worship me.

    He fell on his knees and bowed his head. My character had gone from zero worshipers to one, and his from a skeptic to a believer. An hour or two after this transformation the game was over.

    Years later sitting in a bus in the suburbs of Stockholm, I talked with Martin about larp. I claimed I never thought about the dramaturgy or any external factors like that when playing in a larp. I was in character, and only did what the character would do.

    “In that case you must be really, really lucky,” Martin said. For him such great scenes as our final one in Moira, only come through focusing on the drama of the events.

    We discussed our views, and I admitted I probably created quite dramatic characters so that I could focus on the drama while staying true to the character.

    Of course, the character wouldn’t know when the game is about to end, and when is the perfect moment for final farewells or the romantic first kiss. That’s all me.

    MoiraWe came to the realization that one must be one’s own game master in a larp. When the game is running, the game master won’t have time to guide us into playing the themes or the moods or the plots or the drama we want. We have to do it ourselves.

    Whenever we see interesting developments that will enhance our story, our experience and our character immersion, we have to jump at the chance to engage with them. Otherwise we’re not doing anyone any favors.

    In a larp you should be your own game master and help your own character immersion by building a better game for yourself.

    This article was originally published in the Knudepunkt 2011 companion book Talk Larp – Provocative Writings from KP2011. All photos from Moira and provided by the author. Center of cover photo as well as photo 1, 2 & 4 are by Karin Tidbeck. If you are the copyright owner of the other photos, please contact us.

  • The Art of Steering – Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together

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    The Art of Steering – Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together

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    The rhetorics of Nordic larp often imply that role-players play in an intuitive fashion guided by the character, rarely or never contemplating their actions during the game. In reality, however, we are often keenly aware of what we are doing as our characters and why. This paper explores the practice of making in-character decisions based on off-game reasons – also known as steering.

    In discussions about role-playing, there is a tendency to treat the character as an entity separate from the player. While we need some kind of separation to understand the contextual difference of killing an orc and adjusting a name-tag, this separation also obscures some important processes of roleplaying. As the participants in a larp enact their characters, the choices they make as characters are not always driven by diegetic (in-game) motivation. The rhetorics of immersion, character and coherence would have us believe that characters in role-playing games, at least when played by “good” role-players, do not let extra-diegetic motivation invade the game world.

    In the actual practice of roleplaying however, player motivations seep into the game constantly. The player of a tyrant might choose to play in a more benevolent style when interacting with beginners, or a vampire character might leave an interesting scene because the player needs to find the restroom. These are basic examples of steering, of doing things in a game due to the player’s reasons – rather than the character’s.

    While the idea of steering complicates some ideals of what players ‘should’ do, we consider it a critical player skill in most larps. We hope that by naming it, we can provide players with a useful tool to discuss their craft.

    We define steering as follows:

    Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.

    In other words, while the player’s character is an entity within a game world, the behavior of a steering player is motivated by reasons outside the game world. To manage this contradiction, steering players almost always attempt to maintain the semblance of coherence in their character’s behavior.

    Specifically, players attempt to ensure that characters maintain the outward appearance of coherence for the character’s actions, from the perspective of other characters first and other players second. In other words, a player who is steering strives to maintain the illusion that the actions of her character make sense as a whole.

    Whenever possible, players also attempt to maintain the internal coherence of their understanding of the character. In the above example of the vampire player looking for a restroom, the player undoubtedly fails to preserve internal coherence, but she still seeks to maintain the outward appearance of coherence for other players.

    Steering is often subtle and nuanced. As an example, the player of a prison guard might be considering whether her character should pursue a love interest or fulfil her character’s guard duties. In deciding that pursuing the love interest will make for a better game, she subtly decides to heed the pull of the romantic interest more strongly, maintaining her internal coherence while actually influencing her play based on a non-diegetic decision on how to generate better play.

    By definition, steering is always intentional. Thus, you can never steer by accident, and it requires conscious choice and effort. The behavior in the above example would not have counted as steering if the player was just deeply focused in the romantic affair and would have never considered the effect on the larger game before deserting her post. Instead, she consciously evaluated the impact of her actions, and then acted towards deepening the romance. This can happen quickly and semi-consciously so that the player can stay in the emotional flow that inspired the choice – but it is still a marked moment the player can identify afterwards. Of course, we do steering decisions so often and so quickly that we often forget about them before the larp is over.

    Steering can be used to create good or bad play. Usually such definitions depend on the play culture and the overall dynamics of the game: In a gamist aesthetic, playing to win can be seen as acceptable, while in games focusing on a play to lose aesthetic, the players are expected to steer towards failure. Steering can even be immoral or unethical, for example if a player uses her character as a pretence for stalking another player.

    Not all character actions result from steering – only those actions intended to guide the character to a specific effect for reasons that exist outside of the character’s conception of the world. At a minimum, we consider the reflexes and unconscious reactions of the player as external to steering. An example of the difficulty of establishing a line between steering and not-steering is player attraction toward other players: If a character’s choice to pursue a romance is influenced by the desire of the player it could be seen as steering – but only if the player is aware of this.

    It is also important to note that steering is something one does to one’s own character. There is by definition no such thing as ‘steering others’. However, through steering her own character, the player can also change the way others are playing and influence the direction of the larp as a whole. Indeed, that is often the goal.

    Dual Consciousness

    We believe that knowing how to steer properly is one of the most important player skills.

    Since steering breaks down the division between the player and the character and exposes the moment-to-moment reality of play, it is a useful tool in taking a brutally honest look at what happens in the practice of larp.

    Most of the time during larp runtime, players have the dual consciousness of looking at the event both as diegetic, and as non-diegetic, as play and as non-play. This dual consciousness, or bisociation, informs most of their actions. It is an important part of playing and games; standing with one foot within the border of play and another outside it can not only be powerful, but also instructive.

    Viewing something both as play and as non-play not only teaches the viewer about the thing she is looking at, but about the overall structure. This helps in understanding the socially constructed nature of reality as a whole, but specifically it helps in understanding how a game functions. This competence at reading situations on multiple levels is a skill that can be developed in play and applied when steering.

    Steering Examples

    Practical

    Physical needs. Food, sleep, warmth, etc.
    Looking for someone. Searching for another player to play a scene or to get the car keys.
    Documentation. Posing for or avoiding a camera. Filming in characer.
    Logistics. Entering hostile territory because that is where the toilet is.
    Physical safety. Not running in the pitch-black forest even when your pursuers do.

    Smooth Play

    Coherence. Preserving the external coherence, even at the expense of your internal coherence.
    Legibility. Overplaying emotions to make sure they are conveyed to other players.
    Game mastering and fateplay. Pushing the game towards some direction as required by larp design.
    Retrospective rationalization. Smoothing over the plot holes of earlier bad steering.
    Post-hoc player vetting. Mitigating the perceived damage to the game caused by a ‘bad’ player.
    Theme. Accepting that vampires are real in two minutes.

    Aesthetic Ideals

    Narrativism and dramatism. Making a better story for yourself or others.
    Gamism. Winning conflicts, gathering power.
    Immersionism. Avoiding heavy game mechanics that might detract from character immersion.
    Bleed. Seeking maximally intense emotional impact.
    360° illusion. Avoiding the sight of the parking lot in fantasy games.
    Play to lose. Sharing secrets loudly for eavesdroppers to hear them.

    Personal Experience

    Boredom. Looking for stuff to do. Picking up fights.
    Staying in game. Not leaving the haunted mansion even when two people are dead.
    Relevance. Getting closer to the perceived core of the game, or seeking more agency.
    Overcoming disabling design. Deciding that your character wants to become a revolutionary only after you realize that most characters only talk to revolutionaries.
    Avoiding the same-old. Not rebelling against the tyrant in two games in a row.
    Attraction. Getting to play with skilled or cool players.
    Player status. Doing things likely to increase one’s status as a player.
    Shame. Not wanting to do or to be seen doing certain things, even as a character.

    Ethical and Unethical

    Consent. Observing a slow-down safeword such as “yellow” or “brems”.
    Trust. Creating a safe situation in which to play demanding scenes.
    Inclusiveness. Including characters that have nothing to do at that moment.
    Harassment. Using the larp to stalk another player.
    Revenge. Killing your character because you killed mine in an earlier game.

    There is nothing mysterious about this process. It simply means that a player is able to see at the same time both the cheerful friend who gave her a lift to the larp wearing old army surplus clothes, and the frightful commander of the space station her character could never approach. Both of these things are true at the same time. Recognizing the difference between the diegetic and the non-diegetic is the difference roleplaying is built upon. However, that separation is not actual, but rather one made in interpretation.

    The idea that one realm, the non-diegetic, is allowed to influence the other realm, the diegetic, may seem wrong, even immoral. Indeed, the idea of steering may seem like anathema to roleplaying. Is not the key tenet of roleplaying the idea of portraying a fictional being in a fictional setting – without the petty motivations a player may have outside roleplaying? Yet steering is not a bad or an undesirable thing to do. In fact, many players steer almost all the time when they are playing. The diegetic world of fantasy never maps completely on the physical world, nor does the body of the player completely become that of the character. The draw of larp is that it is not-real and that it feels real.

    Steering and Immersionism

    The concept of steering – and the criticism of motivations originating with the player – emerge from a tradition that values character immersion as an ideal. Immersion is perhaps most frequently defined as moments when player forgets herself – when the dual consciousness of simultaneously being a player and a character fades away and player only focuses on being her character. This experience has been characterized, for example, as the player pretending to believe that she is her character (Pohjola 2004) and as bracketing the everyday self (Fine 1983).

    It has been compared to ideas such as flow (Hopeametsä 2008) and wilful suspension of disbelief (Pohjola 2004).

    In the Manifesto of the Turku School, Mike Pohjola (2000) argued that character immersion should be seen as the ideal aesthetic of the larp. But with an ideology that forbids dual consciousness comes some baggage – it prohibits steering:

    Sometimes it might be fun to do something that is not in strict accordance with the character, but – unless the GM has specifically asked you to do so – THAT IS FORBIDDEN.

    Mike Pohjola, Manifesto of the Turku School

    The psychological idealism focused on immersion has faded since the turn of the millennium. It is now commonly acknowledged in the Nordic larp discourse that even when player’s focus is on her character she still does not become the character. The idea that someone could use character immersion as a moral justification for punching another player in the face would universally be found ridiculous.

    But even as full character immersion has been found impossible, this rhetoric of playing true to the character has persisted. The dogma of character fidelity can be seen whenever players discuss whether it is realistic that the king fell in love with the peasant girl, or whether it was credible that mortal enemies joined forces in order to win the war against orcs.

    However, as the player cannot psychologically transform into her character, the problem of Pohjola’s statement is that it is impossible to determine which actions are in “strict accordance with the character”. Even as a player, one can determine several credible courses of action for almost any situation the character can be in.

    This uncertainty and ambiguity about what would be fitting for a character is what makes steering possible. If there was always one right choice for a character to make, steering would be meaningless. It is this very uncertainty that is the site for steering – the minute choices a character makes. Steering is rarely about making major life choices and often about pushing a discussion gently in a new direction.

    Indeed, the skill in question is not entirely dissimilar to the skills one needs when steering conversation away from difficult topics in an everyday social situation like a polite chat with colleagues over coffee. When you understand that you have a potentially inappropriate joke that is perfect for the situation, you still decide whether or not to tell it. Sometimes that decision may be done very quickly, subtly, or half-unconsciously.

    The strict reading of immersionism presented above appears to be incompatible with the idea of steering. However, contemporary immersionists do not argue that character immersion is an overwhelming and persistent state. Rather, it is seen as an aesthetic ideal and a goal to strive for when playing.

    From this perspective, we actually argue that some amount of steering is even a requirement for immersionist play. The immersionist player seeks to ignore and forget the fact she is larping while doing so. This wilful suspension of disbelief requires the player to maintain internal coherence of her character: It might be hard to forget yourself and become a medieval queen if you are standing on the balcony with the clear view to the parking lot. Getting a powerful immersionist experience of committing a tragic suicide is more likely if you consciously choose to commit one.

    Or, as Pohjola wrote himself years later:

    Whenever we see interesting developments that will enhance our story, our experience and our character immersion, we have to jump at the chance to engage with them. Otherwise we’re not doing anyone any favors. In a larp you should be your own game master and help your own character immersion by building a better game for yourself.

    Mike Pohjola, You’re in Charge of You

    The reason why the idea of steering is sometimes seen to be at odds with The Manifesto of the Turku School is probably historical. It was written at a time when player motivations were seen to be influencing Finnish roleplaying too much.

    Although it was a response to Dogma 99 (Fatland & Wingård 1999), it was actually directed against gamism (steering to win), dramatism (steering to create interesting scenes and stories), and bad roleplaying (for example, steering on the expense of coherence).

    The idea of steering shows how rare moments of real immersion and flow are. By lifting the dogmatic ways of talking about the play experience tinted with the idea of immersion, it helps account for many of the actions a player takes during runtime. By shifting emphasis from the ideals of playing to the actual practice it illuminates what we really do while roleplaying.

    Designing for Steering

    The idea that larps contain characters that are there to direct the play is as old as larping itself. This is what the non-player characters and other game master controlled actors have been doing since the beginning of larping (cf. Stenros 2013). However, player characters have done this since the beginning as well – even if it was not always directly discussed.

    Explicit steering instructions have been a part of the tradition of Nordic larps at least since the emergence of fateplay (see Fatland 2005), a style of making larps where players are given some instructions on how to behave in certain situations – the character Claudius, for example, was fated to die in the larp Hamlet (2002).

    More recently, larps such as The Monitor Celestra (2013) have introduced the idea of having large amounts of characters with pervasive and persistent steering duties. In the Celestra, which featured strict naval and military hierarchies, higher-ranking officers were expected to generate play for their subordinates. For example, the commanding officer of the Colonial Navy was instructed as follows:

    As the Major in charge, your foremost duty is to act as a game master for bridge and CIC personnel, generating interesting play and putting flavor into the tasks of running the ship […] Always keep in mind that your job isn’t to be an effective Major, but to be a good player/game master, and enable interesting action for others.

    Character material, The Monitor Celestra

    While all players had similar duties, the higher the character was in a hierarchy, the stronger the expectation of steering was. This was of course a practical solution: By having the Major to steer hard the game masters could alter the course of the entire larp, as she could use her diegetic authority to impact the game for all her subordinates, shielding them from the need to steer.

    This mechanic worked rather well for members of those hierarchies, especially compared to older and more selfish play styles (see Fatland & Montola in this book for a detailed discussion).

    Although the top brass was expected to steer the most, Celestra explicitly encouraged following the philosophy of play to lose, which basically expects everyone to steer in the larp. The following play instruction was given under the heading “Rules” in the briefing materials:

    You are expected to play to lose, prettily. In a game where experiencing the journey is the whole point, winning is moronic. Losing, on the other hand, is dramatic and cool since it puts a spin on the story and contributes to emotional impact.

    The Monitor Celestra Briefing

    These games have established a new steering norm along the ones such as gamism, dramatism, immersionism and bleed: In these games, players are expected to steer in order to play to lose. This anti-gamist stance can arguably contribute to many other play aesthetics, as it “puts a spin on the story” for dramatists and “contributes to emotional impact” for immersionists and bleedhunters.

    Obligatory and Heavy Steering

    Sometimes it is every larper’s obligation to steer. Barring some unusual arrangement, role-players share an almost universal implicit obligation to steer for coherence. Different game styles have different conceptions of what coherence is, yet internal logic of some kind is valued in all larp cultures.

    In some roleplaying games, especially larger larps with less-tightly organized plots, what would be seen as a significant coherence conflict in another game may be glossed over by all players concerned as they acknowledge tacitly that a conflict has occurred by choosing not to fix it, as it would require too much work on the part of disparate groups of players.

    In other games, often smaller or more tightly plotted, it would be seen as a serious problem for such a breach of coherence to occur to start with, requiring either heavy steering by all parties to fix immediately or possibly (in some play cultures) a break of play so the ‘truth’ of the situation can be decided directly by the players off-game. Usually, when coherence cannot be achieved by steering, the next solution is to ignore the problem; to steer play away from the mess.

    Two examples can help clarify this. In long-running campaigns the character arcs can become increasingly improbable. Like in soap operas and superhero comics, certain ancient acts may be de-emphasized by those character’s players.

    In larps this works particularly well, as no one can go back in time three years to check and nitpick what actually and specifically happened. In larps that use them, mechanics like experience points can also shift balances between masters and apprentices or parents and children, if players put in different amounts of play time.

    Another example comes from the second run of The Monitor Celestra, where at one point the key to the hyperdrive was stolen, and a dozen characters got involved in recovering it from the characters who used it as leverage in a negotiation. Problems arose because the game organizers held that no such key existed, as some player had improvised it up. As the characters raced to solve the issue the gamemasters ignored it; as far as they were concerned, this plot did not exist.

    The game masters could still not solve the problem simply by issuing a decree, because too many characters were involved with the key.

    In the end the issue was solved twice in the game – once very rapidly due to game master pressure and again by some characters not being aware of the first time – and only then were all the characters able to move on. No equifinal understanding on what actually happened can be produced.

    When characters are forced to steer hard, it causes wider ripples in the play. Specifically, one player steering hard may leave another player confused about the steerer’s character’s identity, her relationship with the second player’s character, or the events of the larp. This is sometimes unavoidable, especially when a player is forced to steer in a character-breaking way. This is a specific kind of game incoherence associated with steering that many players, especially heavily immersionist players, may consider unacceptable.

    Steering can be characterized as character-breaking steering when the player cannot maintain her internal sense of coherence. For example, if the player is executing a game master directive that is important for the larger plot of a game but finds their character has moved away from the gamemasters’ expectations of who they would be when the instructions were originally specified, they will need to steer their character to ensure they fulfill their obligations to the game, but will do so knowing that this action does not make sense for the character.

    Likewise, a player may realize part-way through a game that they have played themselves into a corner, and if they wish to continue playing or return to the main plot of the game, they will have to simply reinvent part of their character. While to be character-breaking, this shift need only be incoherent to the player, when done poorly (or under extreme circumstances) it will often result in the character also appearing incoherent to other players.

    In order to repair the disruption created by heavy steering, players sometimes engage in retroactive rationalization, wherein they decide on the thus far unvoiced rationale for choices they have already made to maintain the appearance of coherence. For instance, a player who forgot their character’s sidearm may later steer, deciding that their character was feeling especially secure that morning, and thought they would not need it.

    If the player discovers that this will cause a coherence problem with other players expectations, they may engage in retroactive rationalization retconning – if they have not already told the other players, they can changing their prior retroactive rationalization. In this example, the player might decide that instead of being supremely confident, their sidearm was actually stolen, allowing them to integrate with a game mood of suspicion and paranoia.

    The roleplay agreement (Sihvonen 1997), the social contract that participants treat the player and the character as separate entities and refrain from making judgement about one based on the other, is a cornerstone of roleplaying. Without it establishing trust amongst players to also engage in anti-social behaviors, like playing a villain, can be hard. The concept of steering does not obliterate the role-play agreement. However, it needs to be modified; the separation need not be between player and character, but diegesis and non-play. Indeed, it is the character that acts as an alibi for steering. The player can choose what she wants to do or what best fits the larp, and as long as it somehow makes sense in relation to the facts of the character thus far established, it is acceptable.

    Conclusion

    Sensitivity to other players – knowing when and how to steer – is a key player skill. A considerate player can create play for others, pace drama, include others players, support beginners, and avoid hogging plots and secrets. A good larper steers in a nuanced way that is invisible to other players and does not damage the coherence of play. Steering is not a bad thing to do in a game, and most of us steer much of the time while we are playing.

    Just like good steering contributes to the game, refusal to steer can detract from it. If one player does not steer, her fellow players may be forced to steer even harder to sustain the game. It is not rare to encounter a selfish player in a larp with a preference to avoid steering who expects other players to accommodate her play style. The other players may end up steering hard to maintain play and allow her to preserve the immersive flow instead of caring about the overall game.

    Steering is a skill and not all players are good at it. Steering coherently and reliably requires thinking and performing simultaneously on two, three, or more levels while maintaining an accurate model of both the perceptions of both other characters and their players.

    Players holding on to an ideal of playing entirely without dual consciousness may even argue that the expectation of steering ruins their game. Steering is perceived by some players as distancing them from their character. In part, the degree of distance perceived may relate to how quickly players are able to slip between different levels of play.

    It is not necessarily the case that more intense emotional experiences require less movement between levels of player consideration, but this appears to be true for some players. Some players and some game contracts may consider steering to be cheating, as in those contexts, only diegetic concerns are considered to be acceptable as motivations for player choices. We believe that such contracts are often self-deceptive, and that acknowledgement of the role of steering in play is critical to designing for character immersion in the context of a coherent, functional game.

    Acknowledgements

    We would especially want to thank Juhana Pettersson as well as other organizers and participants of Larpwriters’ Winter Retreat 2014.

    Ludography

    • Hamlet (2002): Martin Ericsson, Christopher Sandberg, Anna Eriksson, Martin Brodén, with a large team. Interaktiva Uppsättningar and riksteatern JAM. Stockholm, Sweden.
    • The Monitor Celestra (2013): Alternaliv AB, with Bardo AB and Berättelsefrämjandet, with a team of 85 people. Gothenburg, Sweden. www.celestra-larp.com

    References

    Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.

    This article was initially published in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Theory jam at the Larpwriter Winter Retreat 2014, by Johannes Axner, is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

  • Steering for Immersion in Five Nordic Larps – A New Understanding of Eläytyminen

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    Steering for Immersion in Five Nordic Larps – A New Understanding of Eläytyminen

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    The concept of character immersion has been a cornerstone of Nordic larp discussion for fifteen years. I was surprised by how much the concept of steering introduced last year brought to my understanding of character immersion (“eläytyminen”). In this essay I look at five specific experiences with steering towards immersion, some successful, some not.

    More specifically, I have usually tried to steer towards immersing in cathartic emotional experiences experiences through my character. Most often this has come through experiencing Saturnine melancholy.

    The character immersion definition I work with here is this one:

    Immersion is the player assuming the identity of the character by pretending to believe their identity only consists of the diegetic roles.

    Pohjola, 2004

    In The Art of Steering (2015, Montola, Saitta, Stenros), which is in this volume, steering is defined like like this:

    Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons.

    That is, out-of-character motivations guide the character in some direction. In my case, the out-of-character motivation is that of delving deeper in the character, and guiding the character towards experiencing strong emotions.

    Saturnine Melancholy

    When watching movies, I’m most typically moved to tears when the scene deals with generations passing, time moving on, sons becoming fathers, mothers becoming grandmothers, hints of new babies eventually becoming unrecognized names on graves.

    I’ve heard this feeling is called “Saturnine melancholy”, as in melancholy related to time; from the Roman time god Saturn who eats his own son.

    Scenes like the one in The Thirteenth Warrior, where the vikings going to battle recite: Lo there do I see the line of my people, back to the beginning. Lo, they do call me, they bid me take my place among them.

    Or the wedding scene in Fiddler on the Roof, where they sing Sunrise, Sunset: Is this the little girl I carried? / Is this the little boy at play? / I don’t remember growing older. / When did they?

    Why I am particularly prone to Saturnine melancholy is perhaps a topic for another essay. But I have experienced it enough times to know to steer for it.

    Käpälämäki X – Kesäyö

    The Käpälämäki series is a Harry Potter larp series set at the uncanonical Finnish magic school Käpälämäki. I attended the tenth episode.

    My character was Severi Saraste, a bureaucrat from a well known family of dark magic users. He wanted nothing to do with his family, but knew his job and connections depended on them.

    Severi’s job in the larp was to be part of a Ministry envoy overseeing the Käpälämäki school and to make sure the Pureblood kids in the school had everything they needed.

    During the course of the larp, Severi and some students were imprisoned by Aurors (magic police) because of their ties to a secret cabal of pureblood extremists.

    After a few hours the students were released. Neither Saraste nor the conspirator students had said anything. The immersion was mostly to the situation of being in a damp cellar, being interrogated, trying not to be found out. Exciting, but not exactly cathartic.

    Saraste was moved to the attic and left alone to ponder upon his actions.

    After a while of sitting alone in the attic, I noticed my thoughts started to drift away from the larp, into matters of real-life work, family, art, food, and so on. I was running out of inner monologue for my character! I had to steer my larp ship out of these low shoals into the high seas of immersion! But I had no chart.

    I pulled out my Finnish-style lengthy character description detailing Severi’s childhood, contacts, plots, background, dilemmas, tasks, everything. I figured I would have hours to sit alone, so I read it with care.

    Severi only has two choices, neither of which are appealing: he can leave the pureblood extremists and gain freedom but lose everything else, or continue as before, and remain a prisoner of his community.

    But wait… Was he actually offered a third choice now? Come clean to the Aurors, and rat out his whole family? They would go to prison and have no power over Severi Saraste or his career anymore. But did Severi have it in him?

    This was just the sort of emotional hook I was hoping to find by re-reading the character description. It provided the lengthy alone time with the perfect inner monologue. Severi stared out the window, thinking about what to do. On the one hand, this, on the other hand, that…

    And then the in-game radio started playing a sad wizarding jazz song downstairs. Severi could just hear the melodramatic tone, and then the tears came. After I had enough of crying, Severi demanded to see the Aurors again.

    “I wish to change my statement.”
    “In what way?”
    “I want to confess.”

    After that the game took a whole new direction for myself and for many other players, including the Aurors and the other conspirators.

    I had not planned for this in any way, and neither had the character writer Lissu Ervasti. But by chance, steering, and character immersion, I received the full Aristotelian experience. First, an insoluble dilemma (act one), getting into trouble because of it (act two), then a recognition of some inner truth (anagnorisis), and a complete turn of direction (peripeteia), resulting in an outcome that at first would ha ve seemed impossible (act three). (See also Pohjola, 2003)

    The immersive experience would have been just as strong without the turning point, but in this case it happened to serve as fuel for more game content.

    Monitor Celestra

    Monitor Celestra was a big Swedish larp set in the world of the reimagined TV series Battlestar Galactica. The larp was set in the time of the pilot episode, where almost all mankind has just been destroyed by the Cylon machines. Only a handful of spaceships survived and formed a fleet, which included both the military museum ship Galactica, political ship Colonial One, and the research vessel Celestra.

    I played the surgeon on board the Celestra, Dr. P. Albert. (The larp was played three times, and all characters were non-gendered. I named myself Pavel.)

    The written character mostly consisted of group briefs, like Cultural Affiliation: Tauron, Group: Celestra Crew, Subgroup: Medical Staff, and Other Affiliations: Cylon Sympathizers.

    Before the group briefs I had a small chapter summarizing my character as a Cylon loving doctor. Then at the bottom of the description this Cylon loving doctor idea was extrapolated and imbued with playing directions, and out-of-character duties (such as determining the severity of wounds and illnesses).

    The Cylon loving doctor might seem like a fun character to play, but in the actual larp, the understandable lack of cylons and limited space for medical practice made this almost irrelevant. So I was left with very little of the pre-made material being useful.

    We were told to flesh out the characters ourselves, as is quite often the case in Swedish and Danish larps. In Finnish larps the larp design is communicated mostly through the characters, so the “make your own character” style seems strange even for me after a decade and a half of larping abroad.

    In this case we were given a forum, and told to develop inter-character relations there. Fine.

    I fleshed out my character by giving him a wife and family on one of the planets that was destroyed. I made Dr. Pavel Albert a long-haired hippie with a California drawl in his speech to very clearly mark him a civilian and thus contrast him further with the military personnel I knew would be manning the Celestra at some point.

    I decided P. Albert had worked on the Celestra to pay his med school loans, but was now almost done with it, and would get to return to Tauron next week. And I developed some low-key relationships with other players, but unfortunately nothing that would become truly essential in the larp. And, assuming this was a sandbox type larp, I decided the character would try to take over the ship from the eventual military occupation, if push came to shove.

    Like the Cylon loving doctor description, all of these, too, became void in the course of the larp. I ended up having to do a lot of impromptu steering in order to get something out of the larp.

    The aftermath of humanity being destroyed would have been perfect material for character immersion, and even Saturnine melancholy: I am the last member of my family. My wife has just died. My parents had died. 99.99+ % of humanity has died. But during the course of the game (as of the TV pilot), we would be given new hope of a secret thirteenth colony of mankind: Earth.

    Unfortunately most of this emotional potential was made void by the heavy emphasis on action plots, and the breaks in the game.

    The plot model Brute Force Larp Design is discussed in the article The Blockbuster Formula (2015, Fatland & Montola).

    The game was divided into four acts, with a break between each. Sometimes the break was short, at other times we would leave the location for the hostel. There was always a time leap for the characters. Fine. But the dramatic structure that works for television, does not always work for larps: the big information with the potential emotional impact (“Earth exists!”) was always delivered at the very end of the act. Meaning that we never got to play characters reacting to them.

    Similar problems prevented focus on the “everyone you knew is dead” aspect of the setting.

    There were plots elements in the larp, too. Is the ship controlled by the original civilian crew or the military visitors? What side is the Presidential representative on? Does Celestra contact the Cylon ship or the refugee ship? Do we have Cylons onboard?

    I do not know how well these “main plots” worked in other runs of the larp, but in the second one that I attended, the whole system was unfortunately broken (see also The Blockbuster Formula). A bunch of players who had contributed to the larp via crowdfunding and made the whole thing possible were promised a “special plot,” which turned out to be that they were all members of a secret spy organization.

    Their characters were then divided into various groups in high positions, meaning they essentially controlled most of the main plots. During the course of the larp I realized it was not built like the sandbox I expected, and the main plots seemed strangely impenetrable.

    What was left was more like an amusement park, and I started steering in that direction to get some enjoyment out of it.

    It worked like this: Dr. Pavel Albert went to a location, event or person (such as the AI lab, the bridge, the mutiny, the murder, the Presidential Aide, or the Cylon prisoner), and interacted with everyone as much as possible.

    When the situation had exhausted its dramatic potential, he went to a new location. This was most apparent when interacting with GM-played supporting characters, such as the Cylon prisoner. Eventually dialogue with the prisoner started to repeat itself, like talking to non-player characters in a video game.

    These emergency steering maneuvers eventually lead to meaningful, emotional content, too, as Dr. Albert, the Presidential Aide (played in a wonderfully enabling manner by Christopher Sandberg), and a few others started hatching a plan to steal a shuttle and flee from Celestra together.

    Halat Hisar

    Halat hisar was set in an alternate reality where the Palestinian situation had happened in Finland. The fictional Ugric people had been given parts of Finland, and had conquered even more. Many Finns lived under occupation in “South Coast” (corresponding to West Bank) or the Åland Islands (corresponding to Gaza Strip). It was played in Parkano in November 15–17, 2013, and organized by a Palestinian-Finnish team.

    The larp was set at the Finnish University of Helsinki, in divided Helsinki. My character Tuomas Kallo, described as “The Conflicted Realist,” was running for the head of the student council as one of the Social Democratic Liberation Party (“Fatah”) candidates. Other parties were the Party of Christ (“Hamas”), Pan-Nordic Liberation Front, and the Socialist Resistance Front.

    My dramatic function was explained in the character description: “You represent the establishment, and through you, maybe the radical roots of today’s ruling party can be seen.” In this reading I was essentially a younger, Finnish version of Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority.

    Early on in the larp soldiers from the Ugric Defense Forces occupied the university and placed it under curfew. Students and faculty were arrested, interrogated and tortured. During the larp rumors started spreading that my character was somehow in league with the UDF, perhaps giving them information. It was impossible to refute such accusations, but they essentially cost Tuomas Kallo the election and some friendships.

    The big turning point, and cause of emotional turmoil for Tuomas Kallo was a student demonstration against the UDF soldiers. I took the megaphone and lead the group in singing nationalist songs. Some people yelled slogans, others threw stones.

    The other megaphone was held by a fellow candidate, the Socialist Marie Isola (played by Jamie MacDonald). She was the de facto leader of the demonstration, and got into a shouting match with one of the soldiers.

    Things got aggressive, and the UDF soldier shot Marie.

    Somebody called the ambulance, which drove towards the demonstration, but was held by the soldiers at the road block, and then forbidden to get close to the bleeding student. When the medical professionals eventually got to Marie, she was already dead. After the larp we found out this was all pre-written by the organizers.

    Marie’s death was such a blow that it effectively ended the demonstration. We went back to the university building, everyone full of emotions: sadness, shock, bitterness, anger, fear…

    I was ready to let the emotions wash over me. It was time to steer towards Saturnine melancholy!

    For that, I found the perfect Turku-style location for solitary immersion: a lookout tower with a very small room on the top, and in every direction windows to the blackness that is Finnish November. There was even one chair there. Just one, as if it was designed for being alone. Perhaps it was.

    I stared out the window into the dramatic darkness, seeing soldiers marching on the campus. How horrible…

    Had I chosen the right path? Would we avenge Marie? Would we hold a vigil for her? Should I be more radical? What would my father have done, had he not been killed by UDF soldiers? Perfect Saturnine melancholic material for emotional immersion.

    But then I, the player, remembered something! This larp used the Black Box technique, and I had decided to try that. I imagined the emotional potential triggered by Marie’s death would be prime material for Black Boxing, so I took the wheel, made a quick U turn, and walked the stairs down to the Black Box room.

    Unfortunately the Black Box was taken. Many players had scenes to play with Marie: flashback, dreams, “what could have beens”, and so on. Marie’s player would soon play something else, so all this had to be done now. Mohamad Rabah, the Game Master in charge of the Black Box, asked me to wait.

    This called for complex steering: I had to hold on to the emotional potential but not tap into it. To do this, I walked around the building trying to avoid any contact with others who might inflict me with dialogue or plots that would dilute the emotional potential.

    Eventually I made it to the Black Box and played a dream sequence where Mohamad played Tuomas Kallo’s father. After plenty of “What would you do, dad?” and “My son, you already know what you have to do” we concluded the scene. I found it difficult to fully utilize the emotional potential I had come in with, perhaps because I lacked mechanisms for steering Mohamad, or because Mohamad had some other aim with the Black Box scene.

    Some time after the Black Box scene we held a small memorial event for Marie. We raised the Finnish flag, sung some sad songs about how we join our ancestors in Heaven and one day, we, too, will fade from memory. That was what finally made Tuomas Kallo (and me) cry.

    KoiKoi

    KoiKoi was a larp about stone-age hunter-gatherers played in Norway on July 1 – 5, 2014. The larp was played in numerous Scandinavian languages, and us Finns played strangers from a neighboring tribe who had become humans, that is, members of this tribe. My character Duskregn was a loincloth-wearing warrior married into the Bear Family.

    The larp was only a little about any single character’s individual dilemmas and dramas, and quite a lot about the society going about its business. Children becoming men, women and nuk, young men and women traded to other families to bear new children, and the old dying and being remembered. It should have been a perfect opportunity for some Saturnine melancholy, but somehow I never got there.

    All the instances of transformation were ritualized, which made perfect sense for the larp and could easily have added to the atmosphere. So we had a ManRit for children becoming men, a KvinnRit for children becoming women, a NukRit for children becoming nuk, a DödsRit for old people dying, a MinnsRit for remembering those who had died after the previous KoiKoi meeting, and several family rites for leaving one family and joining another. Some families even had washing rites and such.

    Between all those rituals and the getting ready for them, the content of my larp was mostly about hanging with my family, sleeping with people from other families, and dancing and telling stories in the big tent-like house.

    In a modern-day larp I would have brought a book for my character to read during downtime. In this case, the storytelling took that part.

    I listened to stories, performed in stories, and told stories of my own. As a professional writer coming up with stories is something I enjoy doing, and I am quite experienced at it. Unfortunately I ended up steering too much into coming up with stories for others to hear, instead of steering for getting everything out of whatever situation I was in.

    Most of the time I didn’t realize this was a problem, until after the larp. But after the MinnsRit where we remembered the dead, and everybody told stories about their loved ones, I was disappointed to not have really felt it.

    All the elements were there: generations passing, everyone having lost their loved ones, us becoming aware of our mortality and of the fact that others will eventually take our place and tell stories of us. We even had a few ancestors (nuks with masks) watching us. It should have been a cry-fest for me, but it was not.

    During the MinnsRit I spent too much brain-power on trying to come up with a story to tell. I was a recent addition to the AnKoi, but maybe I’d killed one of them earlier when I was still a Stranger. That might be a powerful, emotional twist. But who, and how? And why did they only die now? Or are there actually too many stories, and it’s getting kind of boring, and it takes too long to get through the mandatory memories without me adding new ones?

    What I should have done is steer for experiencing this full on, seeing us in the millennial line of people coming there to hear memories, share memories, and become memories. It is possible that due to my character’s outsider and barely developed past, I lacked points in which to attach such emotions.

    At times during the larp I felt not as my character but only as myself as a hunter-gatherer. Then I tried to figure out a more complex personality or back-story for my character. Maybe I was a spy from the strange tribe who was examining this tribe for weaknesses to exploit.

    One of the designers of KoiKoi, Eirik Fatland, has spoken about how Aragorn in the Prancing Pony would be a horrible character, since he would have no connection to any of the other characters, or the plots amongst the other visitors. But he would have an inner monologue Fatland parodizes as

    I am Aragorn, I am so cool. I am Aragorn, I am so cool…

    Fatland, 2014

    An inner monologue of that kind would ha ve been preferable to having no inner monologue at all.

    For me KoiKoi was a very powerful experience and an excellent larp, but in this sense a failure in steering for emotional immersion.

    College of Wizardry

    College of Wizardry was a Danish-Polish larp played November 13 – 16, 2014, at Czocha Castle in Poland. The larp was set at a magic university in Harry Potter world, almost twenty years after the books.

    I played Bombastus Bane, Professor of Dark Arts. Defence Against the Dark Arts, I mean. Essentially the Snape of Czocha. The professor characters were more or less created by the players themselves, but the organizers were quick to react to our ideas about contacts and plots.

    Bane’s whole family (mother, father, wife) had been in the wizard prison Azkaban since the war portrayed in the books. Bane’s wife had been pregnant at the time of imprisonment, and had given birth to their son Vladimir in prison. Vladimir had grown up in Azkaban surrounded by Dementors and criminals.

    Friday at lunch Bane received a letter informing him that his wife had passed away at Azkaban. I realized this is prime material for heavy emotions washing over me, and immediately steered towards this. I left the dining room for the Dark Forest in order to wallow in these emotions alone. Very Turku School. While I was in the Dark Forest, I realized the playing style of this larp would actually benefit from me making this as public as possible, and decided to make a steering turnabout.

    I returned to the dining hall to attack the Auror Bane assumed to be responsible for killing his wife. The private emotion became a public spectacle. Essentially this meant that I suppressed the emotional potential in the death of Bane’s wife, and created a dramatic scene instead. A scene, which would later on bring more emotional potential to be explored.

    When the immediate conflict was resolved the Auror took Bane to a private location, and explained what had happened.

    “Professor Bane, your wife didn’t die naturally. She was killed.”
    “By whom?”
    “By your son Vladimir.”

    Horrible news for Bane, but great material for emotional immersion! He was very distraught, but didn’t cry his heart out, yet.

    What finally broke Bane’s heart (and mine) was the Sorting Ceremony on the evening of that day. Looking at all the new juniors walking to their houses, and being cheered, Bane suddenly realised Vladimir was nineteen, and this year he would have been a junior.

    My thoughts briefly touched on this idea while observing the Sorting. It immediately triggered a strong, sad emotion. The kind of emotion one normally steers away from in real life. But a larp is a safe space for experiencing them, so I steered right into it. One never knows what one finds when exploring these subconscious emotional triggers, but in this case, my larp ship crashed into an island of gold!

    I started thinking that if Vladimir hadn’t grown up in Azkaban he would have been sorted into House Faust, and Bane would have been so proud. Or sorted into some other house, and Bane would have had petty arguments with his son.

    And Vladimir would be so excited about all those student crushes and initiation rituals and all the ordinary life of the nineteen-year-old wizard. Which would never happen.

    And maybe his mother Miranda would have been there on the balcony with Bane watching him. Which would never happen.

    I cried in and off for an hour about this, first looking down at the ceremony, then afterwards when a student witch took Bane aside and he poured his heart out to her.

    Even though the larp College of Wizardry itself was far from tragic or sad, it provided the backdrop for a great experience of cathartic Saturnine melancholy.

    Conclusion

    Steering is a very useful way for a player to analyze their behavior after the larp. By understanding the idea behind steering, the player can also realize when they are doing it during the larp, and it can make it steering easier, and more fruitful.

    Steering does not need to happen in speech or actions, it can also happen inside the player, guiding for more interesting thoughts.

    I have given five examples of trying to steer towards emotional experiences within character immersion. Some of them were successful, some not: and in the case of Monitor Celestra, I had to abandon that goal mid-game, and steer for something else.

    Only the two last larps mentioned (KoiKoi and College of Wizardry) happened after the introduction of the concept of steering. The concept allowed me to better understand even the larps I had played before it: but in the case of College of Wizardry, I remember actively thinking about steering as I was doing it.

    Bibliography

    Eirik Fatland anmd Markus Montola (2015): The Blockbuster Formula, in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book.

    Markus Montola, Eleanor Saitta and Jaakko Stenros (2015): The Art of Steering, in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book.

    Mike Pohjola(2003): Give me Jesus or give me Death! Published in panclou #7, 2003.

    Mike Pohjola (2004): Autonomous Identities – Immersion as a Tool For Exploring, Empowering and Emancipating Identities, in Beyond Role and Play, 2004, ed. Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola.

    Ludography

    Helinä Nurmonen, et al (2012): Käpälämäki. Finland.

    Alternaliv AB, with Bardo AB and Berättelsefrämjandet, with a team of 85 people (2013): The Monitor Celestra. Gothenburg, Sweden. http://www.celestra-larp.com

    Fatima AbdulKarim, Kaisa Kangas, Riad Mustafa, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson and Mohamad Rabah (2013): Halat hisar. Palestine, Finland.

    Eirik Fatland, Tor Kjetil Edland, Margrete Raaum, et al (2014): KoiKoi. Norway.

    Charles Bo Nielsen, Dracan Dembinski, Claus Raasted, et al. (2014): College of Wizardry. Poland.

    Videography

    Eirik Fatland (2014): What is a Playable Character? Video, 07:30-09:40.