Year: 2023

  • Listen 2 Your Heart Season 8: An Unexpectedly Bleedy Experiment

    Listen 2 Your Heart Season 8: An Unexpectedly Bleedy Experiment

    This article is first in a series on Larping Intimacy and Relationships.

    From October 28-29, 2023, I participated in Listen 2 Your Heart Season 8 (L2YH), an online larp (or LAOG, Reininghaus 2019) based on the Netflix show Love is Blind (2020-). The game was organized by JD Lade and took place on Discord between Saturday evening and Sunday evening, with enforced off-game sleep hours. We played 8 characters, plus the robot-voiced “Production” who gave us instructions at each stage of the larp. 

    The following article describes the reality show genre within which this adaptation was placed, addressing its fascinating but also problematic nature, as well as its similarities and differences with larp. I then discuss the potency of playing romantic relationships as vulnerable and potentially transformative experiences, as well as the pitfalls that can arise. I briefly discuss Oliver Nøglebæk’s (2016, 2023) “4 Cs of Larping Love”: context, consent, communication, and chemistry. Finally, I explore how a larp’s design can impact player experiences of romance, situating Listen to Your Heart’s game design and my play experience as a case study. I discuss the surprise twist of this particular run and consider it with regard to safety and consent.

    Is Love Really Blind?

    As a binge-watcher of many shows related to intimacy, relationships and marriage, Love is Blind is one of my favorite concepts. Single people are invited to take part in an experiment to see if love truly is blind. An equal number of cis-het men and women who all ostensibly are ready to get married are grouped in living quarters according to gender. Then, they take turns dating each person from the other group with a twist: they cannot see each other and can only communicate through a thin partition between them. They spend hours on end in these rooms called “pods” and they can choose to share or not share aspects of their physicality to the person on the other end. However, most avoid such talk, as the premise of the show is to date people without judging them immediately based on looks alone. Of course, some of the cast are there to get on TV and get famous, but some earnestly want to find a life partner through the show. 

    If one of the cast proposes to another — always heterosexual pairings, with usually the cis man proposing in the traditional fashion — and the woman accepts, they prepare for The Reveal. The two are placed on opposite sides of a room with the partitions slowly rising. The anticipation is intense — will they be attracted to this person who they only knew by voice, and vice versa? After they propose, they rush to the center of the room, where they embrace, and if he still wants to propose, the man drops to a knee and asks again. 

    They are then thrown into a honeymoon with the other newly engaged couples, which can be intensely romantic or disastrous depending on the couple’s compatibility and each partner’s ability to handle insecurities or shallow habits, such as focusing overmuch on physical traits that are not their usual “type.” If they make it past the honeymoon, they have three weeks to live together back in the “real world,” then have a wedding with their friends and family watching. At the altar, they find out if the other person will actually marry them, which makes for high-stakes and intense television. A year later, they come back to the show for the reunion, sharing how life has unfolded for them since they made this big decision. 

    Emotional Extreme Sports and Consent

    I have seen many seasons of the show, as well as its spiritual predecessor, Married at First Sight (2014-), which is made by the same production company. In Married at First Sight, the cast members are matchmade by experts (a sexologist, a pastor, and a sociologist) and are subject to extensive questionnaires and interviews before, during, and after meeting their spouse at the altar. The experiment in this show is to see if love can grow over time. At times, these experts intervene in times of conflict, which is viewed as inevitable, and guide the couples through marriage counseling. The experiment is predicated on research developed at the Gottman Institute (2023), where psychologists have studied the formula for long-lasting relationships. The show emphasizes how love can grow through moments of intimacy and connection, even if attraction is not present, as attraction can fade, while intimacy needs tending over time. In this way, Married at First Sight is educational, and my view is these counselors deeply want these couples to be happy and have healthy marriages.

     The Love is Blind experience has little to none of that concern. No one intervenes on camera, although occasionally the fourth wall breaks and you can see a producer or camera person trying to persuade the person to stay in the relationship. Cast members have recently revealed shocking filming conditions, including being abandoned with no food, sleep-deprived, and forced to stay on set for 20 hours straight at a time (Hogg 2022). As a larper, this makes total sense to me: of course you would deprive people of their basic needs in order to push for intense emotional reactions (Leonard and Thurman 2018) — and many larpers willingly push these limits regardless of the game’s design, and some larps consider such deprivation a feature, not a bug. Larpers who enjoy this type of intense experience or even edge play (Poremba 2007; Montola 2010) often refer to their play activities as emotional extreme sports. Furthermore, such extreme experiences, especially when paired with romantic play, often do lead to romantic feelings between players, as they experience the catalytic container of the liminal space of the larp and the altered, paradoxical state of being themselves-yet-a-character. 

    However, although these cast members signed a contract and receive the benefits of being on the show, such as instant fame, they clearly are not privy to the kind of consent and safety mechanics we encourage in the international larp community. That contract also states that they must stay legally married for one year and can only get divorced after the reunion is filmed, which is a surefire way to ensure psychological damage if the relationship is dysfunctional. They risk the humiliation of being turned down at the altar not only in front of their friends and family, but the world. It’s exploitative, problematic, hetero-, mono-normative, although not necessarily more so than other Hollywood products sadly.

    Nonetheless, I can’t help watching and being fascinated by the human struggle to relate to one another playing out in all these different dynamics. What is remarkable about these shows is the way in which cast members open their relationships to be inspected and consumed by millions of people. Relationships are the places in which our deepest insecurities can be revealed, including any prior wounds or attachment trauma, such as a tendency to fear abandonment (anxious attachment) or engulfment (avoidant attachment) (Levine and Heller 2011). As the show airs, fans around the world watch every (edited) moment of their relationships at their ecstatic best and excruciating worst. Furthermore, the edits they receive tell a narrative that is more of what the producers want to portray, which may not accurately reflect the actual dynamics and happenings between the participants. Many have difficulties dating non semi-famous people after the show airs, instead dating other people from the show or from other reality TV shows, especially if fame was indeed their objective. However, it’s clear that being on the show changes their lives forever; one cast member recently claimed he has been turned down for jobs in his profession due to his participation on Love is Blind, although other cast members have found these claims dubious (Brathwaite 2023).

    I think what fascinates me most about this show in particular is the idea of only knowing someone by voice and spending many hours with them, learning all about them, without the distraction of examining their physicality or the anxiety of them examining yours. When I think about concepts that would be appealing to larp, a Love is Blind-themed game was on the top of my list. Could “the experiment” be replicated in a serious way in larp form, or would it devolve into the familiar (and safe) realm of satire, as in The Upgrade (2004) a jeepform larp by Tobias Wrigstad, Thorbiörn Fritzon, and Olle Jonsson about couples deciding whether or not to “trade up” for a different partner? Would players experience emotional bleed (Montola 2010; Bowman 2015) or relationship bleed (Harder 2018) they find triggering or exposing? Or perhaps have a breakthrough as a result of playing out a trial relationship under these circumstances? As a result of this fascination, when JD Lade posted in Larpers BFF that late spots were open to Listen 2 Your Heart Season 8, I jumped right into playing that evening.

    Photo by Efe Kurnaz on Unsplash.

    Romantic Play and Personal Development

    One of the things that interests me most about romantic play is the way it can open opportunities for players to explore relationship dynamics that are unfamiliar, but might reveal parts of themselves, their desires, and their patterns that were less clear to them before. They can experience hypercolor moments of relationship intensity that they may never have felt safe, worthy, or brave enough to try to achieve before. They can play characters that are more sexually or romantically confident and experience what that feels like; alternatively, they can play deeply insecure people who employ manipulative tactics in order to gain power over one another. They can watch in horror as their character takes their own attachment trauma into dysfunctional extremes, or practice playing out a more healthy relationship dynamic. They can experience what true love is — for their characters, at least. What happens to the relationship between the players and any lingering feelings afterward, i.e. the larp crush (Harder 2018), is an often taboo, but necessary topic to openly discuss within larp circles and between players. Ultimately, such experiences can be spaces for healing, learning, personal, and interpersonal growth if handled with care (Baird, Bowman, and Hugaas 2022).

    Aware of the vulnerable space that romantic play can open, I am always curious how larps will handle issues of attraction, consent negotiations, storylines, and relationship dynamics. A tendency in role-playing game design in general and romantic games specifically is to design for conflict and tension — the more explosive, the better, especially in communities like Nordic larp that emphasize playing to lose or playing for drama. I am often dubious and even bored of such dynamics — beginning play at the height of conflict means next to nothing if there was no relationship developed between the characters beforehand, no embodied sense of what being “in love” with that person might feel like. For that reason, I have often favored preparatory scenes (Holkar 2021), also called backstory play, in which the basic dynamics of the relationship, including the excitement, the tenderness, and the passion can be experienced, therefore making any drama that unfolds meaningful. 

    Furthermore, the idea of trying to play out functional relationship dynamics can be equally fascinating, as conflict often arises in human interaction whether we pre-plan it or not. Being asked by the larp’s design or by organizers to overperform drama in order to keep things exciting for other players has often annoyed me, as sometimes the best play in my view is in the quiet, gentle moments of subtle intimacy. I am also careful about bleed, as I am aware that angry or shaming words said in-character when in such a vulnerable state can often reach us as players, especially if the dynamics we are exploring are relatable to our own lives.

    The Four C’s: Context, Consent, Communication, and Chemistry

    Of particular sensitivity are matters of chemistry and attraction. According to Oliver Nøglebæk (2016; 2023), “four Cs” are important to consider when larping romance (and, arguably, when engaging in relationships in general):

    1. Context: Considering the context of the larp as a whole, its themes, and the experiences of other players when approaching romantic play;
    2. Consent: Making sure all players enthusiastically consent to play within stated boundaries;
    3. Communication: Directly, openly, and regularly communicating what types of experiences each player would like to have;
    4. Chemistry: The inexplicable spark of connection that can be instantaneous or cultivated over time.

    Regarding this last point of chemistry, many larpers will understandably lean more into in-game relationships with people to whom they are emotionally, intellectually, physically, or spiritually attracted; that sort of bleed can be experienced as pleasurable and may even lead to relationships with the other player in daily life (Bowman 2013). Chemistry from this perspective need not be rooted in sexual desire. On the other hand, if one only plays for chemistry, one might end up rejecting play from others, which can emotionally impact other players, especially if they consider themselves outside the bounds of conventional attractiveness, or as Karijn van der Heij (2021) calls it, appearance-based prejudice. Rejecting such connections can also negatively impact the larp, e.g., in larps with a strongly narrativist structure like Fortune & Felicity (Harder 2017; Kemper 2017), where a specific arc is meant to be played out over time with one’s assigned co-players. However, when considering the importance of consent, we arrive at a conundrum: should we force players to engage with one another in romantic play at all if they are not enthusiastically consenting? When considering the ethics of larp, this sort of peer pressure to perform romance can be a bit murky. In such cases, trying to find mutually satisfying ways to adjust the narrative through larp hacking might be kinder for everyone involved. Larp hacking involves subverting the game’s parameters such that it is more playable or enjoyable for participants but does not “break the game” completely (Svanevik and Brind 2020).

    Nøglebæk’s (2016, 2023) view on chemistry is “You can’t force it. But you can grow it, if both of you are willing to open up – it takes a little work and communication to build up mutual trust and connection.” This philosophy is quite similar to the stance taken by the Gottman Institute and, by extension, Married at First Sight and Love is Blind. Laura Wood (2022) has given a Nordic Larp Talk on the topic, advising much the same, discussing the way larpers can cultivate chemistry through “emotional bids,” as Gottman describes. It is certainly possible to foster such connection in a startlingly short amount of time in larp through workshop activities such as eye gazing; ars amandi, a technique developed by Eliot Wieslander for playing out sexuality through touching arms (Nordic Larp Wiki); or asking each other 36 Questions intended to help you fall in love (Aron et al. 1997).

    Listen 2 Your Heart: Salem Edition

    The run I experienced of Listen 2 Your Heart was called Season 8 diegetically and was the eighth iteration of the larp non-diegetically. The title of the larp refers to the Roxette song by the same name; the Glee (2009-2015) version of the song (2015) was played at the beginning of the larp, ostensibly as the theme song for the show. The setting was realistic in principle: all characters were given their own apartment and were communicating through chat rooms, audio, and video conferencing. This practice made it easier to immerse through the interface, which can be challenging in online larps. Furthermore, the online format took any anxieties around physical touch or intimacy off the table, which was a nice change of pace from physically embodied larp.

    By this point in the larp’s evolution, certain rules were in place in order to try to avoid the pitfalls of larp romance described above, which was a pleasant surprise. I am particularly sensitive to issues of chemistry; people’s feelings can get hurt if romantic gestures are not reciprocated or they can feel violated if forced to play out relationship dynamics without the option of opting out. Such issues can lead to larp ghosting, in which players drop their pre-arranged relations to seek out more fulfilling play. 

    Listen 2 Your Heart dealt with this conundrum in several ways. Most importantly, it broke with the cis hetero-normative formula endemic to many of these mainstream shows. The setting document states, “All characters are some flavor of bisexual / pansexual. They may have preferences, but none of the characters are to be played as straight or homosexual with only one gender preference” (“L2YH Schedule and Rules”). This rule tries to solve issues that can emerge in larps, such as queer players being forced to play straight romances (Paisley 2015; Stenros and Sihvonen 2019; Wood and D 2021), players steering away from players that their off-game self would not normally consider “their type,” etc. However, the rules also explicitly state that this world is mono-normative and that the dilemmas inherent to dating in groups cannot be solved through polyamory or dating outside of the pods. Such solutions break the premise of the game. In addition, the setting document states that all characters want to be on television and consented to the possibility of marrying someone. 

    I played Melaina, a young adult Fantasy author who believed she could do magic. The last part was a tweak I added to the original pre-written character concept when I started noticing the twist (see below). The in-game experience toggled between playing in the pods in a series of dates with members of the other group (audio only), in my case, Group B, then communicating with one’s group about what unfolded (audio and video), in my case, Group A. Though the larp was fairly long for the online format at approximately 13-14 hours of play over a 28 hour period, the pacing was such that while we were asked to interact with co-players through these “pod dates” played out in a series of Discord channels with camera off, we were not interacting with any one person for more than 20-30 minutes at a time. This kept the pace going and the format allowed for players to make any choice with regard to their character’s romantic storyline, although they were not allowed to unalive themselves, as that kind of choice can negatively hijack the narrative for everyone. 

    Group meetings featured different stimuli in addition to talking, such as prompts for us to go to the “confessional camera,” prompts to vote on characters in specific ways, e.g., “Most Likely to Receive the ‘Hero Edit’,” “Least Favorite Date.” This input was gathered in practice in Google Forms, then the larp adjusted in some way. For example, characters could request all the confessional quotes from a particular character, or were given anonymous confessional quotes to decipher. Votes were tabulated and winners (even in “losing” categories), were sometimes invited to choose the next series of dates, including to benefit themselves and either thwart or assist others. This practice kept us always on our toes and the game flowing nicely. Consistently shifting between interactions ensured that even if the setting was mono-normative, the play was more a collective negotiation.

    Many larps these days have rules against larping rejection of someone based on personal appearance for the reasons van der Heij (2021) described. L2YH had a particularly interesting approach to this rule, stating: “Don’t play negatively on someone’s OFF-GAME looks / age / etc. Everybody is hot, that’s the fun of the show, right? Somebody might not be your character’s type, but they are still objectively hot (“L2YH Schedule and Rules”). In practice, this was quite lovely after Reveal scenes, in which each of us were sent on dates where the camera suddenly came on, like the barrier lifting in Love is Blind. Cast members on Love is Blind often comment on how jarring it is to finally connect this new face with the voice they fell in love with and the physicality they imagined, which I found to be true as well, but still a pleasant surprise. In fact, these scenes were even more potent for me perhaps than the several of the other players, who seemed to play the larp together often I presume as new characters each time; I only know one of the players previously so I had an authentic experience of curiosity and surprise.

    When Group A would reconvene to gossip after these Reveals, we would play to lift (Vejdemo 2018) the other players, talking about how hot they were and how confusing it made everything, which we would then also sometimes reveal to characters in Group B. This practice can potentially lead to positive experiences of bleed that might counteract feelings of insecurity present in the player.

    The game encouraged players to amp up the interpersonal drama, which I sometimes struggle with being forced to do considering my preferred playstyle of keeping intensity growing at a slow boil  rather than exploding for the sake of narrative drama. However, off-game calibration with other players in terms of boundaries and the direction of storylines was strongly encouraged. In practice, this worked quite well, especially when communicating with experienced larpers who are conscientious of other player’s experience. 

    However, from my perspective, a major issue with such calibration occurred due to in-game secrets embedded in this particular run of the larp. While most runs focus on the traditional relationship trajectory storyline, this run of L2YH had a twist due to its proximity to Halloween: all the characters in Group B were actually vampires. Furthermore, it was revealed through play that if anyone in Group A does not choose to get married, they will be hunted and killed on the vampire television network on which the show now airs. Furthermore, they would then be forced to become a vampire themselves or die, thus becoming the monster themselves, now implying an additional meaning to the word “bleed.” This plot was hinted at in our briefing, in which the facilitator alluded to spooky things being afoot due to the game running close to Halloween and placed in Salem, Massachusetts, the location of the famous witch trials in colonial America that were unfortunately all too common in Europe.

    In terms of a plot, it was intriguing and my character figured out some of what was going on fairly early, but the secrecy of the game led to some cognitive dissonance around genre. On Love is Blind, you might end up with someone with narcissistic or abusive tendencies, but on this show, you would most certainly end up with a serial murderer, which is a steep escalation. Players in Group B were instructed to try not to reveal the secret until the Reveal, ostensibly to stir up the aforementioned drama. However, as it leaked early, I had to make a choice as a player: I could lean into the premise as horror or as the aforementioned satire/mockumentary style of play, similar to What We Do in the Shadows (2014, 2019-). I ended up doing what my characters often try to do when playing romance in larp: attempting to redeem or save the “troubled, misguided” abuser. My storyline started off fairly seriously, as I wanted my character to be earnestly looking for her life partner, as befits the genre of the show, but ended up in a dysfunctional love triangle between murderous psychopaths in order to amp up the drama for the finale. Furthermore, as Vampire fiction is often considered a metaphor for sexual violence, this twist did not entirely line up with the rule, “Do not play upon child- / sexual abuse / non consensual sexual encounters” (“L2YH Schedule and Rules”).

    I decided to lean into the absurdity and still had a good experience. However, this example illustrates the problems with secrecy in larps in terms of player consent (Torner 2013), as I may have declined playing upon such themes or negotiated a less severe storyline through calibration if I had known ahead of time. My understanding is that the next runs of this larp will revert to the typical Love is Blind format and will therefore likely not have such issues.

    A further hiccup revolved around the opt-out mechanic, a semi in-game phrase, “I’d rather not…”  We were instructed to say or chat the phrase and use the X-arms to the camera if we wanted to take the scene in a different direction. “I’d rather not…” could also be used to indicate a desire to change the topic of conversation, similar to an X-card (Stavropoulos n.d.), meaning that topic was off-limits. In practice, remembering such phrases during play can be quite difficult, as can remembering to signal, or remembering to check the chat to see if someone had sent an off-game message. These issues are ongoing with regard to safety. Cues can be missed whether in-person or virtual play, and in-game phrases meant to be immersive can sometimes be missed. In future runs, I would recommend workshopping such techniques to make sure all players had some embodied experience with them before play rather than only receiving them in the rules document and having them explained at a briefing.  

    A Successful Experiment

    Despite this narrative twist at the end, overall Listen to Your Heart Season 8 provided an authentic-feeling experience that strikes me as similar to what it might feel like to be in the pods of Love is Blind. I very much enjoyed being able to focus only on the voice as a means of communicating, whether the topics were flirtatious or deeply metaphysical, which is where my play tends to go. The experience of listening to the character’s voice on headphones strikes me as particularly intimate, as well as the pressure of attuning to every nuance the person was communicating explicitly or implicitly in order to ascertain in a short amount of time whether or not the relationship would work. Overall, I think the designer made smart choices in terms of the parameters of the larp. 

    References

    Aron, et al. 1997. “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23, no. 4: 363-377.

    Baird, Josephine, Sarah Lynne Bowman, and Kjell Hedgard Hugaas. 2022. “Liminal Intimacy: Role-playing Games as Catalysts for Interpersonal Growth and Relating.” In The Magic of Games, edited by Nikolaus Koenig, Natalie Denk, Alexander Pfeiffer, and Thomas Wernbacher, 169-171. Edition Donau-Universität Krems.

    Brathwaite, Lester Fabian. 2023. “Love Is Blind star Nick Thompson says he’s applied for 400 jobs, is Two Months Away from Losing Home.” Entertainment Weekly, August 2.

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2013. “Social Conflict in Role-playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study.” International Journal of Role-Playing 4: 17-18. https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi4.183

    Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2015. “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character.” Nordiclarp.org, March 2.

    Gottman Institute, The. “The Gottman Institute: A Research-Based Approach to Relationships.” Gottman.com.

    Harder, Sanne. 2017. “Fortune & Felicity: When Larp Grows Up.” Nordiclarp.org, June 13.

    Harder, Sanne. 2018. “Larp Crush: The What, When and How.” Nordiclarp.org, March 28.

    Hogg, Ryan. 2022. “‘Love is Blind’ Contestant Sues Netflix After Being Forced to Work ‘Inhumane’ 20-hour Days without Enough Food or Sleep.” Business Insider, July 17.

    Holkar, Mo. 2021. “Larping Before the Larp: The Magic of Preparatory Scenes.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.

    Kemper, Jonaya. 2017. “The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity.” Nordiclarp.org, June 21.

    Lade, JD. 2023. “Schedule and Rules. Listen 2 Your Heart, Google Docs.

    Leonard, Diana J., and Tessa Thurman. 2018. “Bleed-out on the Brain: The Neuroscience of Character-to-Player. International Journal of Role-Playing 9: 9-15.

    Levine, Amir, and Rachel Heller. 2011. Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — and Keep — Love. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2011.

    Montola, Markus. 2010. “The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-playing.” In Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players. Stockholm, Sweden, August 16.

    Nøglebæk, Oliver. 2016. “The 4 Cs of Larping Love.” Olivers tegninger om rollespil, August 18.

    Nøglebæk, Oliver. 2023. “The 4 Cs of Larping Love.” Nordiclarp.org, November 14.

    Nordic Larp Wiki. 2013. “Ars Amandi.” July 11.

    Nordic Larp Wiki. 2014. “Jeepform.” May 29.

    Paisley, Erik Winther, 2015. “Play the Gay Away: Confessions of a Queer Larper.” In Larp Politics: Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi, 170-177. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta 2016, Ropecon ry.

    Poremba, Cindy. 2007. “Critical Potential on the Brink of the Magic Circle.” In DiGRA ’07 – Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play Volume 4. Tokyo: The University of Tokyo.

    Reininghaus, Gerrit. 2019. “A Manifesto for LAOGs – Live Action Online Games.” Nordiclarp.org, June 14.

    Roxette. 2015. “Listen to Your Heart.” Perf. Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff. Glee.

    Sedillo, Joaquin, dir. 2015. “S6.E11. We Built This Glee Club.” Glee, May 13.

    Stavropoulos, John. N.d. “X-Card: Safety Tools for Simulations and Role-Playing Games by John Stavropoulos.” Google Docs, accessed January 13, 2019. http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg

    Stenros, Jaakko, and Tanja Sihvonen. 2019. “Queer While Larping: Community, Identity, and Affective Labor in Nordic Live Action Role-Playing.” Analog Game Studies: 2019 Role-Playing Game Summit (December 23).

    Svanevik, Martine, and Simon Brind. 2020. “Larp Hacking.” Nordiclarp.org, February 2.

    Torner, Evan. 2013. “Transparency and Safety in Role-playing Games.” In The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, 14-17. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2013.

    van der Heij, Karijn. 2021. “We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps.” Nordiclarp.org, June 14.

    Vejdemo, Susanne. 2018. “Play to Lift, not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143-146. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.

    Wood, Laura. 2022. “Larp Chemistry – Laura Wood.” Nordiclarp.org, September 11.

    Wood, Laura, and Quinn D. 2021. “Sex, Romance and Attraction: Applying the Split Attraction Model to Larps.” Nordiclarp.org, February 22.

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    Photo by Efe Kurnaz on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.

  • The 4 Cs of Larping Love

    The 4 Cs of Larping Love

    This article was originally published on Olivers tegninger om rollespil blog on August 18, 2016.

    So Karin Edman published a wishlist from the ladies of the Swedish Larp Women Unite (LWU), who wished more men would be interested in playing romantic relationships with them, which has spawned a lot of interesting discussion in the larposphere on Facebook.

    I’ve had a lot of fun out of romantic storylines in a lot of different larps, it’s a really powerful area to explore. There’s so many possibilities for intense emotions and meaningful stories:

    I’ve played Romeo and Juliet in a prison camp, a can’t-live-with-you-can’t-live-without-you story in utopia, been set up in an arranged marriage doomed to tragedy and been magically drawn back to life by my true love.

    I’d like to share my observations on what I think makes for good romantic play (or any intense interpersonal drama, really).

    Just to be catchy and bloggy, I’m basing it on four pillars: Context, Consent, Communication and Chemistry.

    Context

    No man is an island; neither does two make an archipelago. So if you are making the romance from scratch, explore the context of the whole larp to see what relationships are possible and encouraged. Find an angle that supports the intended experience of the larp; don’t just go for fulfilling your personal fantasies.

    Also make sure the play has room in between the other stuff you’re doing, I’ve seen so many romances neglected by players too busy to focus on them and an equal amount of players stuck with only the romance to play on and no one at the other end.

    Find someone to play with who has a genuine desire to be the other half, who has the possibility to prioritize the play with you, so you don’t end up disappointed.
    Oftentimes your character comes with a romantic story attached and you just have to make the best of it. Here the best approach is to try and see what function the plot has in the larp and where you get to decide yourself in the relationship.

    The players around you are also an important part of the relationship. Find ways for your relationship play to contribute to their experience as well, and see that they have meaningful positions in regards to the relationship. Romeo and Juliet are boring without the Capulets and Montagues.

    Consent

    I have this thing where I cannot engage with play if the other person is not actually into it – call it neurotic. If I sense they are not enjoying themselves, my body has ways of shutting it all down.
    Seriously though, consent is a basic requirement for me. If I don’t feel that the other person is excited about playing romantically with me, I steer clear of that play. I don’t just want a lukewarm “okay, that sounds fine.” I need enthusiastic consent and shared ownership if I am to play it at all.
    I’m also aware of giving my own enthusiastic consent early and often; I’d rather be overbearing than not get the conversation started. You should at least have a vague idea about your personal lines. Saying “I’m not sure exactly where my lines are with physical play” is a good start; “I don’t have any lines” shows that you are an idiot.

    Personally I have used the last many larps to develop an elevator pitch about my personal limits, to get started:

    I really enjoy bringing physicality and touching into play, so I’m good with most normal stuff as long as you stay away from groping the swimsuit area. You can give me a slap or light physical molestation if that becomes relevant. I have a weak immune system, so anything with mucus membranes and bodily fluids is out, that means actual kissing, spitting, fingers in the mouth and such. But Ars Amandi works wonderfully for me, so I suggest that for intimacy, but if you prefer something else, I’m sure we can make that work too.

    I also need to have consent reaffirmed during play. Especially when thing get heavier. If I can’t tell that you are enjoying play, I’m not going to take it further. This means we go off-game and check in, and preferably also talk about where we want play to go. Blackbox scenes are a good excuse.

    If you fail to build the relationship on mutual off-game consent, you’re bound to end up in territory where you or someone else feels violated or unsafe. The stuff we play with in romantic scenes is the natural habitat of trauma, so we need the extra care not to trigger old scars or create new injuries. Sometimes we do so by accident, in which case it is going to be a lot less horrible to work out, if you have already shown that you care about consent.

    Communication

    Talk. With. Each. Other. A lot. You can’t really consent if you don’t know what is going on. Also there’s a lot of layers and meanings we might miss when it comes to intense relations, so it’s good to know what the other side is focusing on and what is making them excited. Talk about the type of scenes you’d be into. Talk about the kinds of stories you love. Talk about the kinds of affection that work for you. Talk about your characters. Talk about what you want to go wrong. Talk about which songs you could have as theme song for the relationship. Make up pointless bits of backstory.

    And once play starts, you keep the lines open. You take time to listen to each other and sense what works for the other. You go off-game and check in. You tell how you feel as a player.

    I’ve enjoyed using meta room or blackbox play to calibrate with my partner, we’ve done abstract scenes with stuff like inner monologues and free association to communicate our thoughts and feelings in ways that open up for new and more nuanced play afterwards.

    I nearly always follow the basic model of mutual escalation in order to keep it feeling safe all the way through. Make a move, wait for the other to respond and reciprocate before moving on. If you get positive feedback, move up the intensity, if not you step back to a safe place and try something else.
    If you want to be discreet, you can do things in-game and then check if the other player plays into the move or around and get useful info. If someone isn’t actively playing reactions to your play, you’re better off going for something else. You can tell a lot from the level of engagement.

    Chemistry

    This is actually the most important bit: You need personal chemistry to play love. Without chemistry, play becomes a sucky chore. You need at least a spark of connection. And it better be mutual. Also, it has infinitely less to do with what makes your pants tingle, than it does with subconscious trust and genuine interest in the other person.

    You can’t force it. But you can grow it, if both of you are willing to open up – it takes a little work and communication to build up mutual trust and connection.

    Chemistry is also awfully fragile. So many things can ruin it, so you have to put in the work, to be someone people can connect with. A lot of the points in the list from LWU is personal deal breakers that ruin the chemistry. You can’t guarantee that it works, but you can start it up.

    Also, chemistry is impossible to detect without meeting in person. You might have great fun on skype before play, but once you meet a wrong pheromone can break the spell. Likewise, sometimes you build up an incredibly meaningful thing out of 15 minutes at a workshop. It’s a bit of a lottery really, so you just go to try an up your odds and hope for the best.

    If you’re stuck larping a romance without any chemistry, you’re gonna want to minimize the damage. A good place to start is to acknowledge the awkward with your partner and talk about what to do about it. If possible, simply play the relationship to a breaking point and end it. Go your separate ways. Otherwise see if you can transform the relationship into something you’re both comfortable with. Going through the motions should be a last resort.

    How to Get Started

    You ask. Ask out aloud in the Facebook group of the larp, if anyone is up for a romance. Suggest it to someone personally. Be prepared for rejection, so don’t just aim for one perfect relationship – that is a losing strategy. Be open to whatever comes up and be prepared to shape it yourself.

    The big problem is that for a lot of us, asking someone to play out romantic stuff is pretty much the same terrifying prospect as asking someone on a date in real life. The rejection is very much the same punch in the gut. There’s no big trick here, but to make it start out as low stakes for everyone involved. I’d suggest starting out talking about play in general, move onto your characters relationship potential in general, before asking about adding a romantic layer. Worse case scenario is you might get a rejection, but still an interesting potential for play.

    Be honest about what you want. Don’t just go along with what you get offered, take ownership of your half of the play. It’s a lot more attractive when it comes to building the intense stuff we all want. Romance is really not that different from most other play, at the end of the day.

    And my pet peeve:

    Don’t you dare hook up with the other player. You’re failing to larp if you do. You’re putting your own base needs ahead of community safety.

    I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to give up on opening romantic play, because the other person assumed I was only into if to get into their pants. I usually make a point of mentioning my off-game partner during introductory talks, to discreetly position myself.

    The reason I’ve managed to get to some insanely intense levels of intimacy in larp, is the simple fact that off-game there is nothing but friendship awaiting us. Even if we feel like we connect on soul-level or hormones rage during Ars Amandi. Off-game we’re not going to pursue this further. That’s part of the contract and the magic circle.

    At least keep your pants on through play and the after party, if you can’t wait that long, you are not grown up enough to larp.


    Cover photo by Filipe Almeida on Unsplash.

  • Jaakko Stenros: Retrospective: Documentation, Community, and Research

    Jaakko Stenros: Retrospective: Documentation, Community, and Research

    In the Knutepunkt scene there is a history of larp designers and producers giving retrospectives, where they discuss all of their work. In this talk, here presented in two parts, Dr Stenros takes that format and expands it to other aspects of the community. He gives an overview of the work he has done around larp relating to documentation, community, and research during the past 25 years.

    Part 1:

    Part 2:

    Cover Photo: screenshot from the video. Photo by KP SK on YouTube.

  • Elements of Larp Design

    Elements of Larp Design

    What is it larp designers actually design? How do players actually respond to design decisions? Are there any truths that apply to all the different kinds of larp design? Eirik Fatland presents his unpublished yet influential mid-level theory of what the big picture in larp design looks like. An updated re-run of a classic KP presentation.

    Cover Photo: screenshot from the video. Photo by KP SK on YouTube.

  • Bringing Larp to the Larpers

    Bringing Larp to the Larpers

    Katrine Wind has worked with local producers to re-run her larp Daemon in different countries. The reasons to do so are many! Sustainability, accessibility, and co-creation. In this presentation she shares her experiences from the US, UK, Denmark, and Belgium together with some of the collaborators: Sandy Bailly who is the producer of the Belgian run and Mo Holkar who is the safety person. Mo has also brought larps abroad from his local scene, and provides insights from those experiences. The aim is to hopefully inspire people to bring larps to other communities. It is easier than you think, and we should re-run more larps!

    Cover Photo: screenshot from the video. Photo by KP SK on YouTube.

  • A Trip Beyond the House of Craving

    A Trip Beyond the House of Craving

    (Originally written July 10, 2019).

    PLUS ONE, n. (+) The drug is quite certainly active. The chronology can be determined with some accuracy, but the nature of the drug’s effects are not yet apparent.((Shulgin and Shulgin 1990.))

    For some larps it is easy to write about the experience in a way that will make sense to those who were not there. I can describe the events of the larp as a narrative, perhaps focussing on some of the significant set piece moments of the experience, and this will enable others to get a sense of what happened because of a shared context and shared experiences. Even for non-larpers we can explain some of the things that happened in a way that will persuade them to say, ‘That sounds amazing!’ Of course the experience is subjective. Of the various people I know who have played the various runs of Odysseus (2019) over the last week, for example, despite playing ostensibly the same larp, with some overlap, their narratives will be similar, but their reactions to it will be personal. Just as it is with people who have played College of Wizardry, or Inside Hamlet, or any larp that has been re-run. For my UK friends who are unfamiliar with this concept, it is when you run the same larp – usually with the same characters (but different players) – multiple times. It is not a campaign, but literally the same game being repeated. You can play the same larp multiple times, but with very different outcomes.

    But I played House of Craving and it was different, and yet I am struggling to articulate how it was different and why. And so this is neither a review, nor a critical summary, but rather a gonzoid attempt to make sense of what the fuck just happened. 

    A recently widowed man discovers that his wife owned the house where she grew up and that she has left it to him in her will. He decides to spend the summer there – with his extended family and friends – in order to try to come to terms with her death. The characters are all broken in different ways: Some of them aren’t terribly pleasant, others are self-absorbed, others still are so damaged that they would be better suited to be anywhere but in close proximity to these others. Of course this terrible potential for conflict is what powers the engine of larp. But the house is beautiful, the cooking staff are geniuses, and there is a pool, and plenty of champagne, so what could possibly go wrong?

    Over time it becomes apparent that these twelve people are not alone. The ghosts of the house object to this family’s presence and, as the day progresses they will influence, manipulate, and then finally control the living family to play out a cycle of tragedy and abuse. Eventually the family will be absorbed by the house, and as the old ghosts move on – into the darkness – they replace their ghosts to become the ghosts for the next family to arrive. And then the cycle will repeat itself. Again and again.

    PLUS TWO, n. (++) Both the chronology and the nature of the action of a drug are unmistakably apparent. But you still have some choice as to whether you will accept the adventure, or rather just continue with your ordinary day’s plans (if you are an experienced researcher, that is). The effects can be allowed a predominant role, or they may be repressible and made secondary to other chosen activities.

    The stories of this larp – and those who played it – are interlinked and overlapping. A story written in an earlier run may persist as an artifact to be discovered by those who came after. A drawing or a photograph of Jacob may affect a different Jacob when he comes across it in a future run. A short story written by Monica in run 3 could be read aloud by Monica in run 5, but she has no memory of having written it.((Metalepsis, again.)) There are other echoes too, like a twisted game of Chinese Whispers, some stories are retold as remembered or as experienced by the players. Those of us playing run 5 do not know what happened in run 1, but some of that narrative surely became plot to drive our own story. Who are the authors of our fates? Those who played as ghosts in run 1? The others? Ourselves? I cannot say. 

    This larp is a horror story, it unravels as a descent into madness and death. From the player’s perspective, we think we will have an (un)easy revenge on the next set of family players; but we do not, because the true horror, and the fear is yet to come, as we discover what happens to our ghosts and the approaching darkness that will devour them. And worse still the human’s play back at you. After all this is larp not some Punchdrunk loop. Their agency is real.

    House of Craving is an immensely physical larp. You play it with your whole body in a way that I find terrifying; there is little abstraction, and more touch in this larp than I have experienced before; largely because of the proximity and influence of the ghosts. But as ever you retain autonomy, the option to tap out or to invite escalation exists.((I tap out once during the larp. I have one quiet regret for not tapping out a second time. I attempted to escalate but the mechanic – lightly scratching a co-player – does not work for those who bite their fingernails!)) Despite the ability of ghosts to eventually control humans, as players we remain responsible and accountable for ourselves and our own experience. We are instructed to steer for our own play, rather than to focus on the experiences of others. It is a bold undertaking, and a risky one if the players are not all on the same page. But for our run, we are all on the same page! We had an evening together before the larp: our players met for dinner in Odense and then had some self-guided workshops (with wine) at the venue. Here is the point I knew it would work. So much of what we do as larpers is subliminal. If you know your fellow players already it helps, but sometimes a group or an individual just does not gel. Our core-group of four players whose plots and backstory were intertwined clicked. Understanding that this group were all looking for similarly intense experiences really helped; we know even before the larp starts that we’ll be able to cooperatively play ourselves deep into the madness that is to follow. The word often used is chemistry, but perhaps it is more reasonably alchemy.((Or possibly pharmacology.))

    The first morning consists of a series of workshops; these are designed to teach you how to play the larp. This is not simply an explanation of meta-techniques and an info dump of rules, but rather a set of subroutines that reprogramme the players to conform to the new social norms of the story world. We, the new players, are slightly nervous and slightly hungover, watching the players who had been the family the previous day. It is interesting. They smile, they hold eye contact for longer, they are unafraid, have no concept of personal space, and carry with them a nervous joy that permeates the black and white checked ballroom, empty but for a candelabra and a few chairs. I want to opt out of at least one of the proffered workshops, but force myself to take part; I am so far beyond my comfort zone that it becomes Brechtian. The sessions are physical; I am strong, used to fighting back; part of the exercise here is to give up control. The ghosts always win. Pushed to the floor with ghosts whispering in my ear I take a deep breath and relax, becoming one with the checked tiles beneath my cheek and I am not afraid anymore.

    The larp starts with a nap. The characters have fallen asleep before lunch and all awake in different parts of the house. They amuse themselves for an hour before lunch – Jacob and Wilhelm do “masculine things” in the garden, the homoeroticism of wrapping someone’s hands before putting on boxing gloves is lost in front of an audience sipping champagne – and then at lunchtime, things start to get weird. At six thirty the humans are utterly under the control of the ghosts, and by midnight they are destroyed and devoured by the house. The whole experience is ten to twelve hours of intense play but the following day the cycle repeats except the human players of the previous day are now their own ghosts and a new set of humans come in – as the same characters – to repeat the day. All except for the first run, where the ghosts are NPCs, and the last run, where the family players do not get to play ghosts. I played the penultimate run. 

    PLUS THREE, n. (+++) Not only are the chronology and the nature of a drug’s action quite clear, but ignoring its action is no longer an option. The subject is totally engaged in the experience, for better or worse.

    But when it comes down to it, I can’t begin to describe what happened. Individual events and scenes taken out of context may sound challenging, confusing, or simply make no sense, and the contexts are subjective. Instead I am going to have to resort to the obvious analogy. Larp is sometimes thought of as a consensual hallucination, and this one was more hallucinogenic than most. 

    The Shulgin scale – quoted throughout this piece – looks at the experience of a chemical over time, and describes the physical and mental effects of the experience on a positive scale of plus one to four (Shulgin and Shulgin 1990). As I am typing this, another player on a backchannel chat is describing the mental state of the players, four days after the larp, as like a comedown after 48 hours of MDMA. Their description is valid. Except there is no crushing bleakness for me. I am still on a high. I am mainly frightened that it will wear off and what it will feel like when it does. Other players have described this process already. Perhaps this is a part of the horror of this game, having to look in the mirror and realise that the larp is over and the magic circle is no more?

    House of Craving was a solid plus three for me. It is important to note that this is not a rating scale. A high number is not objectively the goal of larp, or the best thing. One cannot argue that any larp that fails to achieve it is a failure – because most larps don’t, indeed hardly any larps do, nor do they intend to. House of Craving was a horror larp, but there were no moments of blind terror or jump scares and it did not feel dangerous. The fear was the slow realisation of creeping entropy juxtaposed with beauty, and this juxtaposition made the fear feel much worse. My run produced two of the most beautiful larp moments of the 34 years I have been larping, including one which was so eye-wateringly incredible that it makes me gasp to think about it. I am not going to tell you what they were. It would be like describing the effects of 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine((DOC, a hallucinogenic amphetamine first synthesised in Canada in 1972 (Shulgin and Shulgin 1990).)) to someone who had not taken it. I can’t offer you details, only impressions.

    I played towards not some sort of death, but towards oblivion. My character’s ending was a ceding of control to the unknown by a character who was willfully in control of himself and his environment up to that point. He did not allow himself to feel physical fear or pain, he kept it inside, until – at the end – only fear remained. The only thing that scared him was the loss of his wife. His litany “without you, I am nothing” became the poem that ended the larp, as he slipped away from her and the lights went out. (Here I literally move away from my fellow players and end the larp alone in the darkness, I feel their hands reach out to find me, but I am gone.) “Without you I am nothing. Without you I am nothing. I am nothing. Nothing. (nothing).”

    The patterns and the layers of the piece is what made it work; the ultimate form of intertextuality, stories tied into intricate and beautiful knots, held tight against willing skin. As a piece of ontological design which constructs a narrative and performative space – a larp if you like – House of Craving is a masterpiece of the form. It is a dramatically and personally profound piece of capital A-Art. Given the right players, a little bit of larp magic, and a prevailing wind, it can be life changing. It is certainly life affirming, sexy as hell, and really rather scary. 

    PLUS FOUR, n. (++++) A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a “peak experience,” a “religious experience,” “divine transformation,” a “state of Samadhi” and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug’s intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug.

    There is a point on the Shulgin Scale above plus three. Plus four, however, is a state of being which is profound by definition and by effect, but it can also be terrifying and dangerous. The experience of playing House of Craving was a powerful one yet it remained safe. But the fall out is even more fascinating. I feel fantastic; as though the loved-up effect of MDMA has persisted long after the chemical has worn off. My body image issues, whilst probably not gone for good, are certainly in abeyance; I went into the larp as someone who would describe himself as “old” “fat” “bald” “ugly” ”haggard”; I have come out of it with a healthy dose of “fuck that.” Do you know that we are all beautiful – all of us – and that is the truth, everything that tells you different is merely advertising? I have no religious conviction that this state of affairs will persist, but the larp has produced a profound effect on how I perceive who I am, and this is plus four, and it is wonderful.

    If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end, of the human experiment.

    — Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (pp. 963–965).

    References

    Shulgin, Alexander “Sasha,” and Ann Shulgen. 1990. “#64 DOC.PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Transform Books. Available at Erowid.org: https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal064.shtml

    —. 1990. PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Transform Books. Available at Erowid.org: https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal064.shtml


    Cover Photo: Promotional photo from House of Craving. Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.

  • The Immortal Legacy

    The Immortal Legacy

    In high school, I had a phase where I was really into the Romantic poets. I read about Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular and was struck by his “The Masque of Anarchy,” a rabble-rousing political poem:

    And many more Destructions played

    In this ghastly masquerade,

    All disguised, even to the eyes,

    Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the most famous poets of the Romantic period. I found the world of the Romantics fascinating. In the biography Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes I read about his personal life, which even as a high schooler I understood to be a truly amazing trainwreck.

    Gothic is a 2023 larp by Avalon Larp Studios inspired by the Ken Russell movie of the same name, featuring the Romantic poets in a story of gothic horror. I signed up and got lucky, playing first Percy Bysshe Shelley and then the servant William Fletcher.

    This was because Gothic was based on an unusual production model pioneered by another intimate horror larp, House of Craving. There are five overlapping runs of the event. Played in a mansion in the Danish countryside, the larp runs continuously as a repeating one-day instance which each player experiences twice, first as a poet and then as a servant.

    When I was playing Percy, the person who had played Percy yesterday was now my manservant. The next day, I was the servant and a new player was portraying Percy.

    Image of a red and white candle and a white mask between them
    Photo by Simon Brind.

    Horror Stories

    At any given time, Gothic only has five poet characters and five servant characters. The ensemble is small and tight. The division between the social positions of the characters meant that the focus of play is on the five players who arrive together each day. When I was Percy Bysshe Shelley, my primary focus was on my co-players who played Mary Shelley and the others, and when I was Fletcher, I interacted most with my fellow servants.

    This allowed for nuanced, interesting social and internal play. The schedule keeps things moving with events such as afternoon tea, a séance and dinner but there is space to explore ideas and build scenes together.

    The fact that they share a design structure made me initially compare Gothic to House to Craving, a larp known for its extravagant, depraved madness. During play, I realized that Gothic was quite a different experience, more focused on the depth of the themes, characters and the setting than the visceral, bodily experience of House of Craving. The Romantic poets allowed for an unusually thorough examination of the various ideas connected to the larp because the characters themselves were quite capable of both discussing and implementing them.

    The poets were intellectually ambitious, and that meant we as players could explore things like the difference between an ideal and reality, or conversely the problems caused by strict, heedless application of ideals to reality.

    In the fiction, the larp was set in Villa Diodati where Lord Byron famously stayed in the summer of 1816, spending three days together with Dr. John Polidori, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Claire Claremont. The time spent by the poets at Villa Diodati is famous for Lord Byron’s challenge that each should come up with a horror story. It is this prompt that gave Mary Shelley the push to come up with her idea for Frankenstein, a landmark work of horror literature.

    Our group of poets approached this task diligently, each of us coming up with a story. This meant that not only was gothic horror the genre of the larp, we as characters were also telling each other horror stories in the dimly lit, creaking mansion in the middle of the night. There were layers upon layers of horror, building to an escalating level of unreality as the night progressed.

    The themes of artistic legacy and creative immortality influenced my play strongly. There was an unusual space for playing on the complex real-life legacy of the characters because the design facilitated it, key details brought into focus in the excellent character writing. To prepare for the larp, I’d read Miranda Seymour’s excellent biography Mary Shelley and was surprised how directly applicable it was, especially in the surreal late night scenes where talking about the future was as sensible as talking about the past. I’d done extracurricular reading beyond what was suggested by the organizers because I enjoy it, but it paid off.

    There was an interesting creative tension between the themes of poetic and creative immortality for the characters, a group of legendary artists, and larp as an artform. Larp is ephemeral by its very nature. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein lives on although she and even the society she came from have disappeared.

    A larp lives on in the memories of its players, and shadows persist in documentation such as photos and this essay. Otherwise, it’s lost the moment it ends. Yet what larp loses in the pursuit of immortality it gains in the immediacy of the experience.

    Image of old photographs, books, and opera gloves on a desk
    Photo by Simon Brind.

    Noises in the Dark

    When you go to international larps, you end up staying at a lot of mansions available for rent in different countries across Europe. They’ve been built to the specifications of a certain culture of servants and masters. The living quarters of the family in residence are separate from the discreet, narrow staircases and attic rooms of the servants needed to keep the household functioning.

    Playing Gothic was the first time I experienced an old mansion through the social context it was actually made for. Since the larp had a number of partially overlapping runs, the players of each run had to arrive discreetly so as not to disturb ongoing play. Thus, a taxi left me and several other players outside the grounds of the Danish country manor where the larp took place and an organizer came to fetch us, guiding us discreetly to a servant’s entrance. This way, we’d be as invisible as possible to the players who were at that moment gazing forlornly out the windows as the poets.

    We spent the evening doing workshops and then retired for the night, all on the basement floor of the expansive building. The next day, we had more workshops before we’d start play at 14:00 as the poets.

    Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were both aristocrats. As the poets, we’d be sleeping in the magnificent first floor bedrooms so before play started, we bundled up our linens and carried them up the stairs to where we’d sleep the second night, in grand style. We moved from the servant side to the public facing side.

    Our third day onsite, our second day of play, it was our turn to play the servants. Thus, we bundled up the linens from our beds again. Most of the servant’s rooms were in the attic. We shifted back to the servant side both inside the fiction and physically inside the mansion.

    At night, the mansion was extremely atmospheric. Waking up to go to the bathroom, I was walking the corridors alone, listening to the strange sounds of the building, pitch black doorways and creaking windows looming over me.

    It’s a common human experience that when you wake up, your brain misconstrues something you see in the dark. The shape of a coat hanging from a doorframe looks like the silhouette of a human. For one reason or another, I’m very prone to this. It happens all the time and I don’t really get an emotional reaction from it anymore. Seeing something looming in the dark just after waking up, I know it’s just my brain being stupid again. The vision goes away when I turn on the lights.

    I was sleeping in my room the third night, on my side cradling a pillow with my left arm, my hand resting against my face.

    As I woke up, I saw a hand holding my hand.

    Turns out, I wasn’t quite as blasé as I’d thought. It took a while to fall asleep again after I’d frantically grabbed for my cellphone light.

    Who Is Remembered

    One of the key moments of the larp is a séance involving prophetic statements about the futures of the poets. The themes of who gets remembered and who’ll have a legacy are brought into the open.

    As players we knew the statements were true and we knew which applied to which character. This meant that the unfairness of how these people’s lives proceeded was integral to the experience, both in terms of character history and future fate.

    The Romantic poets are long dead and the versions we play are fictional, calibrated to the questions we are interested in exploring. From the biographies I knew the larp’s take on history was surprisingly faithful. Perhaps the poets had led such dramatic lives that it was easier to adapt them to the purposes of the larp’s design. Still, I also knew the versions we played were romanticized and exaggerated to make the larp function.

    A sitting room in a mansion bathed in red light
    Photo by Simon Brind.

    The question of who is remembered and how was explored both explicitly and implicitly. It was an ongoing topic of conversation for our characters who operated on what they knew at that moment: Lord Byron was famous, while the others were unknowns, although Percy Bysshe Shelley had written poems that could go somewhere. Other works, like Frankenstein, were still in the future.

    Our characters didn’t know that in terms of popular impact, Mary Shelley would in time be the most enduring of the writers present. Although Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley both continue to be read, it’s no exaggeration to say that Frankenstein is in a completely different category. As players we knew this and were able to play on it, even as it remained outside the frame of the fiction.

    From her biography, I knew that Mary Shelley’s relationship with success was complicated. Her creative career was overshadowed by the difficult fact that her biggest hit was her first book. She wrote many others but never managed to capture lightning again.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley was never particularly popular during his lifetime. His poems became iconic only after his death, and one person who put a lot of work into making that happen was Mary Shelley. You could almost say that the idea of Percy Bysshe Shelley as the archetypal ethereal elf-poet was created by Mary as she curated and contextualized his work.

    A play based on Mary’s Frankenstein made her novel a pop culture phenomenon already during her lifetime and accelerated sales of the book. After Percy’s death, she exercised significant control over how his legacy should be remembered. In all this, although she suffered many indignities and setbacks made worse by 19th century gender discrimination and the travails of being a professional writer, she also exercised power of her own. She was an active participant in the shaping of literary memory.

    Of the poet characters in Gothic, I find the most tragic to be Claire Clairmont and Dr. Polidori. The latter was the only one alongside Mary who actually completed the story he came up with during those fateful days at Villa Diodati, called The Vampyre, a progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. Although not as famous as Frankenstein, it too has remained in the canon of horror literature.

    Dr. Polidori based the vampire of his story on Lord Byron and when he got it published, the publisher decided to attribute it to Byron instead of its true author. Although Byron himself demanded that his name be removed, this and other setbacks eventually depressed Polidori so much that he took his own life at the age of 25.

    picture of the author in costume as the servant Fletcher taken in a bathroom mirror
    The author as the servant Flecher. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.

    Working people barely get remembered at all. The servant characters were also based on real people at least to some degree, but the problem is that records about their lives are limited. The servant I played, William Fletcher, was probably the one of whom the most complete picture is available from historical sources because he stayed with Byron for such a long time and enjoyed a very close relationship with him.

    As each day of play ended, we received letters informing us of the future fates of our characters. Percy’s letter didn’t have a significant effect on me because I already knew his fate. Reading Fletcher’s letter was a much more emotional experience. Although he might have felt an inkling of power and control amidst the terror-infused chaos of midnight at Villa Diodati, in the end he was just a poor man living in an age that wasn’t very kind to those without money, title and connections.

    In the end, all the famous people around him failed to take care of him.

    This was the fate of Claire Clairmont too, a lover of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley who ended up betrayed by both and having to make her own way in a cold, uncaring world. Still, some of her perspective remains. Even before the larp, I’d already become familiar with her voice because her writings were used extensively as source material in the Mary Shelley biography.

    Living Words

    Playing a famous poet is intimidating for those of us not capable of writing great poetry on demand and Gothic had a clever solution for this problem: The off-game room had a stack of poems and you could grab one and just decide that it was something your poet had just created.

    As a player, you had what you needed to make a scene work.

    That was my experience of the larp in general. The production model of overlapping small runs used in Gothic is difficult to pull off and requires that everything runs smoothly. This was the case and if there were any hiccups backstage, you didn’t really see them.

    Similarly, I was blessed with a cohesive group of co-players who shared similar priorities for what we wanted to do. You could sign up for the larp either as an individual or a group. The run I played in was the only one composed of individual sign ups while the other runs were groups who had signed up together. Due to luck or good casting, I felt our group shared a similar level of interest in exploring the mythology of the Romantic poets and their legacies.

    Emotionally, the heaviest scenes were all when I was playing Percy Bysshe Shelley. I got confronted with my failures as a man, a poet, a husband, a lover and a radical, but all that is much easier to deal with when you’ve spent the day as a poet of immortal genius.

    The most meaningful scene I played was at the culmination of a game of hide and seek instigated fairly late at night. I ran after Mary, thinking that we could hide together, but the hiding place she chose in the servant’s quarters was for one person only. Realizing I needed a place of my own, I used the same hiding place that had worked for me the last time I’d played hide and seek, probably thirty years ago: Behind the door.

    Lord Byron’s hired companion Tita rushed into the room with a baying crowd and noticed Mary. Someone even banged on the door I was hiding behind, but they didn’t notice me and eventually left the servant’s quarters altogether, leaving behind Mary and her maid.

    I revealed myself and Mary, supported by the maid Elise, let me have it, all the poison in our relationship, everything that was wrong, pouring out in one powerful, eloquent torrent. I was staggered by it and needed a moment to take it all in. At that point, Elise left, leaving me and Mary alone. I sat on the bed and the conversation continued, slowly shifting gears until it’d moved from the emotional fireworks of gothic horror into a more realistic emotional register.

    My key to playing a Romantic poet was that they were very young, precocious teenagers given agency by status and wealth. Lord Byron came across as an elder statesman and he was just four years older than Percy Bysshe Shelley. How come the poets were so irresponsible, so extra? Well, they were barely adults!

    When I had my Percy Bysshe Shelley phase, I was at an arts high school where you had a lot of peer support if you wanted to be dramatic. The first time I got drunk in my life, it was with absinthe smuggled from Portugal by my grandmother. (It was illegal in Finland at that time.) We did the whole ceremony with a friend and I got so wasted, I couldn’t take the bus home in the morning without puking on the sidewalk.

    Who knows, if I’d had the wealth and fortune of a Percy Bysshe Shelley or a Lord Byron, what heights of folly I would have managed at that age?

    Image of stairs in a mansion
    Photo by Simon Brind.

    Gothic

    Gothic was produced by the Avalon Larp Studio collective.

    Main organizers: Simon Brind, Halfdan Keller Justesen, Laurie Penny, Martine Svanevik, and Sagalinn Tangen.

    Content writers: Aina S. Lakou and Charlie Ashby.

    Website feedback and proofreading: Alexis Moisand, Alma Elofsson Edgar, Esperanza Montero, Eva Wei, Andreas Markehed, and Siri Sandquist.

    Location Scouts: Julie Streit Pilegaard (main location), Ragnhild Hutchinson, Tidvis (playtest one) and Laurie Penny (playtest two).

    Food Design:  Anna Katrine Bønnelycke and Maria Østerby Elleby.

    Playtesters: Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde, Jørn Norum Slemdal, Frida Sofie, Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, Aina S. Lakou, Ingrid G. Storrø, Kerstin Örtberg, Halfdan Keller Justesen, Kol Ford, Emmer Felber, Rebel Rehbinder, James De Worde, Dominika Kovacova, Jorg Rødsjø, Martine Svanevik, and Charlie Ashby.

    Onsite Crew: Maria Kolseth Jensen, Sascha Stans, and Søren Werge.

    For additional acknowledgements see the larp website.


    Cover photo: The larp location. Photo by Simon Brind.

  • Slow Larp Manifesto

    Slow Larp Manifesto

    Opening Remarks

    There are larps that are not action-heavy, that don’t try to offer maximum amounts of drama or complicated plots. These larps are designed to encourage players to ponder. They tell different stories than the hero’s dramatic journey. These larps rely on quiet downtime, deep immersion, and the gradual, iterated unraveling of character relations — all those small things that often get lost in big drama.

    Lack of action or drama in a larp is often regarded as a design fault. We think Slow Larp should be recognized as a valid design choice that deserves more attention.

    This manifesto is intended to promote serious and respectful discussion. While it is written in a generalizing, even provocative manner, we recognize that its subject matter is nuanced and open to various conflicting interpretations. The authors all share a background in Finnish and Nordic larp traditions and acknowledge that this fundamentally shapes our understanding of the subject.

    What is Slow Larp?

    These are the main attributes of Slow Larp. The points raised here will be explored in more detail later.

    1. Less is more. Slow Larp is all about the negative space of larp: the quiet moments, the small gestures, the downtime.

    2. Immersion over action. Slow Larp aims for immersion into character that is strong enough to evoke real feelings. With strong immersion, the smallest elements can become meaningful. What is often called “downtime” becomes not just lack of action, but a time of reflection, of making memories, of longing, grieving, falling in love.

    3. Subtlety in play style, setting, and design. Slow Larp focuses on human-sized drama. By design, Slow Larp is more about small slices of life, status quo, and everyday stillness than about epic, life-changing drama. Slow Larp explores what it is like to simply exist as these particular characters in this particular setting. Characters are played in a naturalistic way and players trust each other to catch subtle hints about their emotions and intentions.

    4. Offering potential for emergent play instead of ready-made plots. The idea of Slow Larp is to explore and iterate rather than play a plotline ”from start to finish.” Instead of plots—”what must happen”—Slow Larp offers players ”potentials”—possibilities for play. Potentials are designed elements that have the ability (the potential) to induce play, a way of offering meaningful content without forcing a chronological, designer-driven narrative on the players.

    5. Slow Larp revolves around a limited set of thematic elements. These carefully chosen themes—such as “loyalty”, “environmental crisis”, or “what is a family?”—are woven into both the macro structure of the larp as well as in every character. When everyone plays on the same themes, everything happening in the larp has the potential to be meaningful for every character. Themes act as potentials and create playable content. They suggest topics to discuss and things to do, and they can create tension between characters who approach the same theme from different viewpoints.

    6. Slow Larp is built on iteration and layers. Players explore the themes of the larp, their own characters, and their characters’ relationships through repeated interactions. Conversations are started, halted, and picked up again. Conflicts are not resolved in one scene and then forgotten. Instead of solving a conflict to achieve a certain goal, the unresolved conflict itself can be the main content of play. Through iteration, new insights can emerge.

    7. Players create Slow Larp. Slow Larp requires time and effort from its players and is not for everyone. It is the player’s duty to navigate the game in a way that feels meaningful to them and to seek play that allows for and increases immersion. This often requires extensive preparation before the game, both to find personal relevance in the shared themes and to establish contacts and create enough trust between the players to make immersive play feel safe. Careful preparation also helps to ensure that immersion into character doesn’t lead into disruptively individualistic play.

    How to Design a Slow Larp

    Here are some suggestions based on our observations both as players and game designers on how to approach the creation of a Slow Larp. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list but a starting point for reflections about what the idea of slowness might look like in practice.

    8. Design your larp around a limited set of themes. These are the central ideas and questions your larp explores. Ideas like “found family” or questions like “What is courage?” or “What gives life meaning?” are good examples of thematic elements that create infinite possibilities for play and reflection while funneling action in a common direction.

    Everything in your larp should be designed to support the selected themes. The themes should be made visible in the macro structure of your larp—explicitly in the design document and implicitly in all diegetic materials—and integrated into every character. They are a major source of playable content and dictate the overall mood of the larp. Focusing your larp’s design on a few carefully chosen thematic elements and communicating these clearly helps in making sure the larp stays cohesive, without the need to force plot-like structures or excessive meta instructions on your players. Strong themes are also a way to bring focus to player-created content.

    Avoid giving your players direct answers to the thematic questions and instead encourage reflection, exploring and curiosity. Try not to limit the ways in which your players are allowed to explore the chosen themes, unless they threaten to derail the whole larp. Discussions and workshops beforehand are a good way of making sure the focus of your larp stays clear.

    Choose the themes to work together with the desired ambiance of your larp. Note that a slow design approach doesn’t have to limit the milieu of the larp to naturalistic, contemporary settings, but these often suit Slow Larp best.

    9. Favor mundane and robust settings. Slow Larp settings should emphasize continuity and familiar everyday life over exceptional situations in temporary places. The illusion that the fictional world will continue after the runtime is what allows players to immerse themselves in slow and iterative play. Tight-knit communities with familiar routines offer a natural setting for exploring complex character relationships in the continuum of everyday life.

    While a Slow Larp can be set in any time and place, keep in mind that the more background fiction and meta information your players have to memorize, the less mental energy they will have left for exploration and spontaneous play. The same applies to set design: suspension of disbelief always takes energy, as does being mindful of fragile props. A strong degree of realism helps with immersion and subtle roleplaying, as it allows players to reference our collective understanding of the world and convey meaning with even the smallest gestures. Aim for your location and props to offer a near 360° illusion and to be robust enough for your players to interact with without too many limitations.

    The setting should always support the play, not hijack the attention of the players by being too unrealistic for immersion. This doesn’t necessarily imply that speculative elements (e.g. futuristic technology, magic, fantastic creatures) have no place in Slow Larp, but care should be taken that the wondrous does not drown out the everyday.

    10. Offer your players potentials instead of plots. A “potential” is a designed element in the larp that has the ability (the potential) to induce play. Almost anything can function as a potential: thematically relevant world-building, an existing conflict between two characters, an NPC-character, a prop, a piece of news delivered during runtime, an ingame activity…

    What makes potentials different from plots and meta instructions is that a potential is something a player can choose to ignore if it doesn’t seem to offer them anything. The larp as a whole benefits from players interacting with the offered potentials, but it will not crumble if some of them are ignored. Plots that must happen—and rely on player actions to do so—are usually incompatible with a Slow Larp design that encourages character immersion, iterative exploration, and focusing on player-found meanings.

    While almost anything can function as a potential, they should always be closely linked with the larp’s chosen themes. Potentials should funnel and focus play towards these themes and towards shared experiences. Only very rarely should they stay secret or known by just a single character.

    11. Give it time. Time is at the center of Slow Larp. The slow passage of time allows players to revisit and re-examine thoughts and ideas, to witness and reflect upon gradual changes in themselves and their environment, to notice how their experiences progressively change the way their characters think and feel. The best way to allow this to happen is to have a long, often continuous runtime.

    Long runtime together with the illusion of continuity helps to eliminate the common feeling of “being in a hurry” during a larp. With a long runtime, players will have time to do almost anything they wish, and they can better choose the right moments to do those things, instead of being forced to act immediately for fear of losing the chance forever.

    When designing for a long runtime, it is important to give players some structure to help them organize their time, while being mindful of not restricting them too much. Structures that come in the form of daily routines familiar to the characters are often a good choice, especially in larps that center around an established community. The routines should fit the setting and themes of the larp and have some pre-designed activities for the characters to participate in. But they should also give the players some leeway to seek out personally meaningful play, and plenty of downtime in between activities to encourage emergent play and reflection.

    Designing larps with a long runtime and a lot of downtime or ”negative space” can feel intimidating. Preplanning content for every minute might seem like an easy way to make sure that everyone has something to do during the larp. But the aim of Slow Larp design is not to give players a lot of things to do; it is to facilitate immersion—experiencing what it feels like to be this other person in this other setting—and reflection—coming away from the larp with new insights.

    There is no true substitute for time when aiming for deep familiarity between characters, between the characters and their surroundings, and between a player and their own character. However, if for practical reasons actual runtime is limited, these connections can—to a certain extent—be simulated and supported with careful groundwork (with active participation from the players) beforehand, and/or with workshops at the location. To ensure that players get an equal and consistent experience, this preparatory work should be viewed as an essential part of the whole, not as optional.

    12. Support and trust your players. When players are expected to be in charge of their own experience, the larp designer must support that effort. Developing the experience together with players can require much more work than designing a pay-to-play larp with pre-written plots and fully-developed characters. It should never be confused with “sandbox” design, where players are often expected to navigate the larp and create play without much help from the organisers.

    Be open from the beginning about the design choices of your larp and what they demand from your players. Communicate the desired play style clearly on your website or through other channels, especially if your player base is international. Encourage questions, reflection, and being okay with incompleteness—this will help familiarize your players with the iterative style of play which is central to Slow Larp.

    Have your players participate in the creation of their own characters, their characters’ relationships, and the ingame world. Offer platforms and spaces for the players to discuss the larp with the designers and with each other. Do this weeks or preferably months before the larp. Meetings and workshops where the players get to know each other, develop their characters, and discuss the themes of the larp can help create the sense of familiarity that Slow Larp aims for. These meetings and discussions can transform the group of designers and players of a single larp into a temporary mini-community, which helps foster an atmosphere of safety and mutual accountability.

    All this demands time, effort, and engagement from your players—resources not all of them will have in equal amounts. Like expensive “pay-to-play” larps, Slow Larp as a genre is not equally accessible to all. Instead of money, players are expected to invest their time and effort in creating the best possible foundation for the larp. If a player is not pulling their weight, the whole design or community might suffer, especially in smaller larps. For this reason, player selection is often necessary. Emphasis should be put on choosing enough players who are capable of and enthusiastic in participating in extensive preparation and creating content for themselves and others.

    Since much of the emerging experience of a Slow Larp is up to the players—and to some extent chance—the quality of the design can be hard to test beforehand. This can be terrifying for a designer, but here also open communication helps to manage everyone’s expectations.  Trusting your players to do their part is essential. They need your guidance when navigating your larp, but in the end they are the ones creating the experience for themselves.

    How to Enjoy Slow Larp

    Designing for slowness is only half of creating a Slow Larp—the rest is up to the players. Here are some ideas on how to get the most out of Slow Larp as a player.

    13. Create a well-rounded character. “Becoming” and then “being” your character are crucial elements of Slow Larp. The preparation process for a Slow Larp emphasizes becoming familiar with the inner life of your character as well as with their connections to other characters. Ideally you will be able to co-create your character with the larp’s designers, but no matter if the character is mostly pre-written or self-created, becoming familiar with them takes time and care.

    Often it is easier to engage in subtle play and to find natural ways of reacting when the character in some key ways resembles yourself. Preparation is partly about choosing which different ways of being you want to explore in any given larp. Do you want to challenge yourself to be more active, physical, courageous or aggressive? Is your character filled with love or compassion? Are they naïve or ignorant? When you have these pillars of their personality down, communal preparation—and the larp itself—is about exploring how other characters react to these ways of being in different contexts.

    Try your best to reserve enough time and mental resources for the communal preparation phase. It is crucial for generating a sense of community and tight relationships. Often there is shared history to be planned together with other players. Try to come up with ways to foster a feeling of deep familiarity. For some players, long storylines with specific years and dates might be important, but often it is better to focus on creating a few emotionally laden details and memories.

    In a typical Slow Larp, there is little need for visually impressive costumes and character props. Often normal everyday wear chosen with the character’s personality in mind is enough. This frees you to focus more on finding an emotional repertoire for your character: their expressions, gestures and mimetics. A good way of doing this is thinking of memorable moments from your character’s past and playing them out in solo mode to generate emotive memories to use during runtime. How did the character breathe when they were surprised? What did it feel like when they made a fist and their nails pressed into their palm? These personal ways of reacting bring your character to life during the larp. Repetition helps make them more automatic for unexpected situations.

    14. Be prepared to create your own experience. Slow Larp is closer to “sandbox” than “amusement park” design in that while the designers provide you with a framework, it is ultimately up to you to find personally meaningful play inside that frame. Preparing well is part of this process, but your responsibility as an active participant does not end when the larp starts.

    A Slow Larp will usually have a certain amount of pre-planned content that will give structure to the larp and offer potentials for play. But what happens inside this framework is not decided beforehand. There are no character-related plots that must be advanced—like a secret that must come to light, or a betrayal that must happen. Most of what your character does during the runtime is freely improvised based on your preparations, the offered potentials, and what emerges organically from the characters interacting with their environment and each other. The ability to improvise fluently comes largely from being familiar with your character’s thoughts and reactions, but also from having listened to your co-players’ wishes beforehand. Incorporating these into your character encourages immersive play that lifts others. Aim at being so embedded inside the skin of your character that their reactions come to you naturally, without thinking.

    Don’t be afraid of ”downtime” or even occasional boredom. All players have downtime and it offers a chance to either start creating play together or letting it rise naturally from the moment. Don’t stress about ”being active” or ”achieving” or ”completing” stuff. Embrace simple chores like cooking or crafting, sitting and talking. Doing “nothing at all” can be very enjoyable. Slow Larp is more about being than doing. Immerse yourself in the setting and the character. Wait to see what happens, and just be that other self in their everyday life. React to the world and its other inhabitants as your character would—that is essential and enough.

    15. Be open to exploring emergent themes, ideas, and feelings. While the main themes to be explored in a well-designed Slow Larp are known to everyone in advance, what each individual player will end up focusing on might come as a surprise—even to that player. Be open to this emergent content. It might lead you to new and unexpectedly profound experiences.

    Pay attention to thoughts and sensations that arise during the game, be they large or small, and try to integrate them into your play. If you are feeling frustrated, maybe your character is, too. If your shoes chafe, make that a part of your character’s day. Strive to find meaning in character interactions that are not spelled out in your character sheet or other pre-larp materials. Be curious about the other characters and don’t be afraid of steering yourself towards those interactions that feel exciting and meaningful. Be influenced by other players’ choices and paths during the game, but also stop to take the time to ask yourself how your character feels about what is going on around them.

    In contrast with many other genres, a Slow Larp will not have a clear list of predefined objectives for your character to achieve, or a straightforward character arc to play out. Instead, you start with the knowledge of who your character is and what they want—or think they want—and a firm grasp on the inner workings of their emotional landscape. Your understanding of your character will deepen during the larp, but you will often have to feel your way gradually towards what constitutes the most essential content for you to play on. It might not always be what you expect.

    During the larp, completely new directions might emerge that will become relevant for you. Because there is nothing your character absolutely needs to do, you are free to explore these new directions without having to worry about neglecting an important plot line elsewhere.

    16. Play subtly. What exactly constitutes “subtle play” varies from culture to culture. For one player, subtle play might mean conveying your character’s emotions with small facial expressions. For another, a full-blown shouting match could still be subtle, as long as it feels authentic.

    Subtle play in Slow Larp means playing in a way that feels natural and genuine. Characters behave and talk in a way that would not be out-of-place in everyday situations outside the larp. Conversations are not built of theatrical one-liners, but remain meandering and ambiguous. Let your character’s reactions arise naturally from who they are and what they feel in that particular moment. Trust your co-players to understand subtle hints about your character’s thoughts and feelings. Instead of proclaiming, “You have betrayed me and I hate you!”, let this sentiment seep into your character’s every word and gesture: Will their words turn cold and poisonous? How will their body-language change? What actions could they take that will let the other character know how they feel?

    Instead of choosing an action with the most dramatic effect, in a Slow Larp it is usually best to steer towards the most meaningful effect. What this means in practice inevitably varies from situation to situation and character to character. With good character immersion, these choices become nearly automatic. If you do find yourself having to make a choice, think of what your character would most naturally do, or what action will lead to the most meaningful play for you.

    17. Be okay with incompleteness. Subtle play also usually means a less formalistic dramatic arc for your character. The concept of a story arc is deeply ingrained in us by our culture’s long history of dramatic fiction. It might take some practice to leave that concept behind. When you give up the idea of a rigidly-defined plot with a clear start and finish, you gain more room for exploration and sideways movement.

    In a Slow Larp, not every thread needs to be tied during runtime. If your character’s story is left open-ended at the close of the runtime, you can continue processing it and find even more relevance and meaning post-larp. In real life, events don’t always come together like pieces of a puzzle, nor is this necessary in a larp.

    It is natural to second-guess the choices you have made during the run of a larp. There are usually so many opportunities and possibilities that something is always left undone or unsaid. By choosing one activity you inevitably miss out on another. An important part of Slow Larp is being okay with this, of understanding that the things you end up doing make up the unique whole of your experience. You can ascribe your own meaning to the events, interactions, and feelings you experienced during the larp. Because there are fewer dramatic markers (no coup, no zombie invasion, no final battle), you have more freedom and also more responsibility to make up your own interpretation of what were the most essential experiences for you. Because there are no static plot lines, there are few if any things you absolutely have to accomplish for your larp experience to be complete.

    18. Know what you want and don’t want. Like any other genre, Slow Larp is not a good fit for everyone. Players who like to hold immersion for a long time and enjoy being profoundly immersed in their character benefit from Slow Larp design. Players who like philosophical pondering might enjoy a Slow Larp for its thematic content. Players who prefer a reactive playstyle over an active one may find the more relaxed pacing of a Slow Larp more comfortable for them.

    If, on the other hand, you are looking for an adrenaline-fuelled experience, where dramatic actions follow each other in quick succession, other genres may better suit your preferences. It is not useful to persist in trying to fit into a play style that does not come naturally to you, or that you have no interest in exploring. Looking for dramatic adventures where there are none to be found may, in the worst case, turn out to be detrimental to the experience of others.

    Still, many players are versatile and like variety, and so will sometimes choose a Slow Larp and other times a more plot-oriented or action-filled one. Be curious and find out what genres and styles of play work best for you.

    In Closing

    Much of the trouble in seeking out or running a Slow Larp successfully comes from our lack of shared vocabulary around them. How can you find out about or discuss something that doesn’t have a name?

    We want Slow Larp to become a well-defined genre in its own right. We want larp designers and players to be able to talk about this genre, about its defining elements, its strengths and its weaknesses. We want people participating in Slow Larps to know what to expect in regard to design elements and stylistic choices, the better to enjoy the rich layers and rainbow palettes of emotions Slow Larps can offer.

    With this manifesto, we want to give Slow Larp a name.


    This article was published in the Knutepunkt companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Kannasvuo, Sara, Ruska Kevätkoski, Elli Leppä. 2021. “Slow Larp Manifesto.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt.


    Photo by Samar Patil on Pexels.

  • Adding Larp to a Drama Teacher’s Curriculum – Year 1

    Adding Larp to a Drama Teacher’s Curriculum – Year 1

    Lindsay Wolgel is a professional actor and edu-larp enthusiast. She is currently the middle school drama teacher at a charter school in NYC. Learn about the ways she incorporated larp into her curriculum this past year, via in-class parties, a classroom podcast, creative writing prompts and more!

    Here’s a pdf of the slides: 1-Year-As-a-Drama-Teacher-Slideshow

  • The Spirit of Christmas

    The Spirit of Christmas

    My mother has always believed in having a big family Christmas. The director of a circus by profession, she brought that same organizational and creative energy into the way we celebrated the holidays. The way I remember Christmas from my childhood, it was really quite the perfect family occasion, thanks to significant collective effort.

    I come from a secular family of Finnish socialists and the Christian connotations of Christmas were foreign to me when I was growing up. In Finnish, Christmas is “joulu”, a word with no inherent religious meaning. When we decorated our Christmas tree, the pride of place at the top went to the red star of communism.

    Our Christmas consisted of a series of rituals. Going to the Christmas tree market with my stepfather and siblings and carrying the tree home. Bringing out the box of decorations and hanging them on the tree. The traditional Christmas breakfast, rice porridge. If you found the almond, you got to make a wish. One year my mother decided to cut down on sibling infighting by putting in enough almonds for all four of us.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. Photo has been cropped.

    In Finland, we open the presents on Christmas Eve. That’s also when the most significant family dinner takes place. Nobody in our family played the role of Santa. Instead, my Mom would pretend that she’d seen Santa fly across the sky with the reindeer from a window in the furthest room in our apartment.

    We ran over to look.

    As we did this, my parents quickly took the giant burlap sack of Christmas presents into the hallway outside our apartment and silently closed the door. As we returned, my Mom would knock on the underside of the dinner table and say: “Did you hear that? It must be Santa at the door!”

    We ran to the front door, opened it, and sure enough the presents were there!

    As I grew older, my mother remarried and our group of siblings grew. I switched teams, helping my stepdad carry the sack of presents outside while my youngest siblings rushed to see Santa from the window.

    The relationship I have with Christmas is positive and is not complicated at all, thanks to all the work my mother and the rest of the family put into it over the years.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    The Training Center

    In December of 2022, I played in the long-delayed Helsinki run of the larp Midwinter Revisited, with Anni Tolvanen as the project lead. The original Midwinter was created by Avalon Larp Studios and played in the U.K. in 2020, led by Martine Svanevik. Revisited was mainly created as a Finnish international production, expanded to twice the size of the original with new, redesigned and broadened content.

    Midwinter Revisited is set in Santa’s Workshop. The characters are elves and Christmas is just around the corner, with everyone making sure the last gifts are produced so children everywhere will be happy and full of joy. The elves love their work and throw themselves at their long shifts with jolliness in their hearts.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    Or put another way, the Workshop is a sweatshop where a workforce of elves is forced to endure long hours of tedious work while having to pretend they’re happy. Smiling is mandatory and those who are insufficiently jolly will be punished. Santa Claus isn’t really present in the daily lives of the elves and the Workshop is instead run by the Krampus.

    The character I played was a part of this somewhat anomalous group in the larp’s structure. The word Krampus denoted an individual character, the principal villain of the larp. It also meant the collective group of characters working under her, of which I was part of. Finally, it acquired an emergent meaning as the physical location where we took recalcitrant elves for retraining. Officially called The Training Center, it was often also called just The Krampus.

    The elves all dressed in Christmas gear: Lots of reds, browns and greens. The Krampus were dressed all in black, creating a striking visual contrast. Collectively, we were a cross between the wealthy family depicted in the TV show Succession and the staff of a torture facility.

    There were severe class distinctions between the different elf families in Midwinter Revisited. They were made concrete by the living arrangements, with the physical location of the family’s domicile showing how wealthy they were. Still, for me as a Krampus character these distinctions were less visible because the design placed us above all of it.

    The core themes of Midwinter Revisited were Christmas and capitalism. What is the meaning of Christmas? What does work mean under the demands of capitalist production? In the cosmology of the larp, the production of gifts created magical power which was hoarded by the Krampus and used to maintain control over the entire operation.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    Sincerity

    The simple genius of Midwinter Revisited lies in the way it treats Christmas with the utmost seriousness, while also leaving space to be playful. Christmas-themed movies and songs are often schmaltz or parody but this time, you as a player are really invited to consider what Christmas means for you. And not just from a political perspective, but in emotional and cultural terms as well.

    What does the spirit of Christmas mean for me?

    Sincerity is always difficult to pull off because it’s so close to cringe. Yet when it works, it’s very powerful. It was nice to be able to reflect on Christmas in a context that’s not saccharine, schmaltzy, or a parody, yet not without a critical edge either. What is this thing that permeates our society every year?

    The way schmaltz was incorporated into Midwinter Revisited was particularly ingenious. All the tackiness of Christmas was right there, in songs, physical props, costumes and even the language we used. However, the critique of capitalism inherent in the larp’s design positioned the schmaltz for critical appraisal while also allowing us to play with it. A rare case where you manage to have your cake and eat it too.

    Each of the characters belonged to a family, a work group, a club and a secret society, with the exception of the Krampus whose family was the same as the work group. This is classic larp design of course, making sure each character has a variety of social contexts.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    One of the groups was dedicated to spiritual exploration of the meaning of Christmas. Every time I walked past the group and their collective gatherings, I felt a deep sense of larp envy. It looked so warm and communal! I considered joining in but felt that their play might be damaged by one more Krampus character.

    The last hours of the larp were a chaotic, magical time. The revolt against the sweatshop capitalism of The Workshop Inc. had started but a new order was yet to form. Some were afraid, others freed by disorder. A crown of light seeming to represent the spirit of Christmas moved in the crowd creating a repeating scene of wonder and magic that felt surprisingly genuine. I had a moment with it too but I’d played a cynical Krampus character too long to be able to immediately shift gears convincingly. I felt sad afterwards because I wanted to explore that part of the larp’s emotional range more fully and didn’t entirely succeed.

    When the signal for the last work shift of the larp sounded, most of the workers were on strike. Managers had to go down to the workshop to make toys, creating one of the most eerie sights of the entire larp. They were too few, too shocked, stooped under the harsh lights trying to keep the workshop running when the power they represented had already failed.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    O Christmas Tree

    Christmas is celebrated in many different countries but these celebrations are not uniform in style. What’s normal in one country is strange in the next. Midwinter Revisited was an international larp, meaning that players came from many different cultures and brought their own assumptions with them.

    The variety of Christmas customs wasn’t to the detriment of the larp. Each of the three acts started with the song O Christmas Tree, the English version based on the German original, called O Tannenbaum. I felt the song worked wonderfully as an anthem for the whole larp despite the fact that it had never been part of my own Christmas tradition.

    The song shares the same tune as “The Red Flag,” the U.K.’s Labour Party’s anthem, which will become relevant later.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    The concept of jollity was central to a lot of the larp’s rhetoric. The elves were constantly exhorted to be jolly, to be happy and enjoy their work. This was a key part of the larp’s critique of modern capitalism. It wasn’t enough that you had to work. You had to enjoy it, and if someone didn’t seem to be jolly enough, that was reason to punish them. There was a department called Jollity Assurance tasked with ensuring requisite levels of jollity at all times.

    I can make the connection between jollity and Christmas in the context of Anglo-American Christmas culture but not really in my own. Finnish Christmas traditions have a somber quality, meaning that in the context of our Christmas you can be happy or sad.

    One of our most famous sad Christmas songs is called “Varpunen jouluaamuna,” which tells of a little bird flying, hungrily looking for food in the frozen snow fields of the Christmas morning. A little girl gives the bird a seed, only to discover that the bird is her dead brother.

    Adapting to the larp’s version of Christmas wasn’t as simple as adapting to the Anglo-American version of the holiday because it had more cultural depth and variety than that. It felt like we as players from different countries were looking for a Christmas shared across our particular cultural boundaries.

    The larp’s soundtrack came with an interesting twist. It wasn’t limited to English language Christmas songs but also included a Finnish song and other non-Anglo ones. When I first heard a Finnish Christmas song on the soundtrack, I experienced a moment of cultural confusion, like I was shifting from one Christmas paradigm to another.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    This wasn’t to the detriment of the larp at all. Rather, I experienced it as a moment of reflection on what the larp meant for me. What did it mean to navigate the different conventions of my own culture and that of Anglo-American cultural imperialism? What did that mean in the specific context of Christmas, with tram stops all over Helsinki decorated with ads celebrating Coca-Cola Christmas?

    The Torture Queue

    Oppression play has a long history in Nordic larp. Systems of oppression create action and emotion, making for powerful and dynamic larp. If you’ve ever organized a larp with a significant element of oppression you’ve probably found out that it’s hard work. People don’t oppress themselves! You have to put in the work to really make an oppressive system run.

    One facet of this is when you create a system where a police force (The Reindeer Guard in this larp) arrest people and drag them to a punishment center. This can be a torture chamber, a prison, an interrogation or what have you, depending on the larp.

    Running one of these centers in a larp is an art unto its own. There are many difficulties to consider. Experienced Nordic larpers often regard being interrogated or tortured as interesting larp content. Many steer their play purposefully towards it. In some larps, this has resulted in what is colloquially known as the “torture queue”. Because torture capacity is limited, characters and players have to wait before they can be tortured.

    This is just simple logistics. If there are two torturers and a single torture scene lasts for an hour, this means that the larp can only accommodate torture scenes for two players every hour. If the larp has 100 players, this creates a significant bottleneck. Some players will miss out on the torture.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    To resolve this issue, Midwinter Revisited’s design gave us in the Krampus our own space, the Training Center, a big classroom-like area with chairs and desks as well as a raised platform where we had our own luxurious Christmas tree, piles of presents and a table full of interesting knickknacks. The idea was that the Krampus characters were the only ones to be able to enjoy a luxurious family Christmas, and the elves being re-educated had to watch.

    The point of the classroom setting was to do big oppression scenes, where one Krampus player could handle as many as six or even ten characters simultaneously. This way, the torture queue would not happen because scenes could roll all continuously, for as many characters as needed.

    In practice, it didn’t really work out like this. For much of the larp, the Training Center wasn’t training anyone. We had the opposite problem from the torture queue: Often it was difficult to get people to come in at all.

    I figured there were a few different reasons why this was. There were a lot of first time players at the larp and maybe it wasn’t obvious to them that playing oppression scenes is fun. That’s more of an experienced Nordic larper thing. Some players and characters may have tried to avoid getting tortured, as amazing as that sounds.

    Some may have wanted an intimate one-on-one torture scene, and when that wasn’t in the cards, lost interest.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    It was very difficult for us in the Krampus to draw victims in. The process involved tasking the Reindeer Guard with arresting individual elves and bringing them to us. Because we wanted to make larger scenes of oppression, the arrest lists we drew up often had five or six names.

    The problems this situation created were many. Because the Krampus was somewhat separate from the rest of the larp, we often simply didn’t know what was happening. Because of this, it was often difficult to know who needed to be arrested.

    It was very difficult for the Reindeer Guard to arrest multiple characters quickly. I’ve seen this issue in other larps as well. Going around the larp with a list of names and trying to find the right people takes time and often fails entirely due to larp chaos. Thus, I ended up giving the Reindeer Guard tasks that were either very difficult or actually impossible for them to fulfill.

    The logistical problems of oppression play are absolutely not unique to Midwinter Revisited and many great scenes were played. The structural idea of scaling up the machinery of oppression was a good one.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    Red Christmas

    In the larp’s third and final act, it was clear the revolution was upon us. The question was which way would it go. Will the old status quo be restored, will a paternal figure like Santa Claus (or a maternal figure like the Krampus) emerge or will the revolution lead to a workers’ paradise?

    For my character, this was rather anxiety-inducing as I was part of the machinery of oppression. My character was a medical doctor of sorts and I spent much of the larp dispensing and withholding Jollity Pills, an all-purpose drug that could be amphetamines, antibiotics or a miracle cure. As a medical torturer, at first glance it didn’t look like I’d fare very well under the new worker-led regime.

    I had a scene with another Krampus character where we talked about our worries for the future and the line we held onto was this one: “No matter who ends up in power, they’ll always need people like us.” Of course, the fiction of the larp ends when the larp ends, so the future of our characters remains unknowable, as it should be.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    Midwinter Revisited had a mechanism where players could mark which Christmas ideology their character subscribed to at the end. White for a corporate option where Christmas is controlled by a company or a foundation run by the elves. Green for a religious or royalist wish to see a figure like Santa Claus or the Krampus returned to the top. Red for a Christmas not controlled by any one entity, but instead owned collectively.

    White would have been the obvious choice for me but I decided late in the larp that I needed a bit of character development to keep things interesting. I felt that my character was a born lackey so in a situation where the old order was crumbling, the green option was the most promising one. It still suggested that there would be power to serve.

    The way it would work was that the central visual motif of the larp, the grand Christmas tree, would be lit one of the three colors, depending on which way the larp went. The moment when the song O Christmas Tree played, only to suddenly switch to The Red Flag as the tree was bathed in red light was very powerful. The musical switch was rather elegant because the songs shared the same tune. And of course, the red Christmas was familiar to me from my childhood already.

    As a player, it was the ending I wished for, despite my character’s royalist hopes. A Christmas we can all believe in!

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.

    Credits

    Midwinter Revisited is a redesigned and extended edition of the larp Midwinter, originally run by by Avalon Larp Studio in Birmingham, UK, in January 2020. The original design was envisioned and directed by Martine Svanevik.

    Midwinter Revisited is an independent piece based on the original work.

    The Workshop, Inc. Helsinki Division

    Production and design lead, sound design: Anni Tolvanen

    Narrative and character design: Simon Brind

    Narrative and runtime design: Johana Koljonen

    Character design, production coordination: Irrette Melakoski

    Scenography: Katie Ballinger, Mikko Asunta, Tina Aspiala

    Lighting: Eleanor Saitta

    Kitchen: Paula Susitaival, Kristiina Prauda

    Player support: Juha Hurme

    Photography: Tuomas Puikkonen

    Writing and runtime facilitation: Kol Ford, William Hagstedt, Char Holdway, Torgrim Husvik, Jamie MacDonald, Maria Pettersson, Rebel Rehbinder, Jørn Slemdal, Kaya Toft Thejls


    Cover photo: Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. Photo has been cropped.