Odysseus: In Search of a Clockwork Larp

Odysseus (Finland 2019) was an ambitious attempt to create a fully functioning spaceship in the spirit of the TV series Battlestar Galactica. The dream was to create a sense of a perfectly working spaceship, where every aspect of the ship would have a part to play in the collective success and failure of the crew. The Odysseus had 104 characters onboard, running the ship in shifts for 48 hours. The larp aimed for a high-fidelity illusion of being on a spaceship, full with interactivity, scenography, sound and light to create a plausible feel of being inside an episode of a space opera.

Played in the Torpparinmäki school in Helsinki, Odysseus was about making every aspect of a space opera into playable content: bridge crew fighting space battles, landing parties exploring planets, fighter pilots engaging enemies in combat, med bay patching up injured soldiers, science lab solving mysteries, and engineering crew keeping the bird in the air.

Odysseus pursued the dream of a clockwork larp. Clockwork larp is a larp where characters work on diverse and sequential interdependent tasks that feed into each other, forming loops that progress the story and the dynamics of the larp.

The beauty of a clockwork is in the immersive sensation that comes from dozens of players working together to overcome a challenge. Your job might be tedious in itself, but as your performance impacts everyone, it becomes imbued with meaning and significance. When an injured soldier comes to the medical station, she arrives with actual historical details on where, how, and why she got hit, and all those details are shared by all her comrades. As a medic, you are just patching up a soldier, but if you do your work badly, it might lead to dramatic repercussions further down the line.

A properly interdependent clockwork is a fragile device. For every task to matter, every task needs to matter. Every wheel and spring must be doing its job or the gears grind to a halt. The characters must be reasonably successful in their tasks. The players must be reasonably timely. The larp technology must work smoothly. The marines must be on board when the cruiser jumps. If something goes wrong, the entire larp might be in danger of falling apart.

While naval vessels and space stations are the obvious themes, any larp requiring coordinated success of diverse character groups can approach the aesthetics and face the challenges of a clockwork. To understand whether you should think about a larp as a clockwork is all about interdependence and fragility. If there are multiple player groups performing multiple tasks that could completely ruin the larp, it might be valuable to think about the larp in terms of clockwork design. In this paper I seek to describe how Odysseus approached the central clockwork-related design problems. This is not a review of Odysseus as a whole, but an attempt to distill the essential elements of its successful execution of the clockwork aesthetics.

The Odysseus Engine

The ESS Odysseus is a starship escaping a devastating attack on her home planet. As in the Battlestar Galactica TV-series that inspired the larp, the only hope is to find a safe haven by following an ancient path through the stars. In order to succeed, the crew must fend off relentless enemy attacks, deploy landing parties to collect long-lost artefacts, and decipher clues to discover the way to safety.

The Odysseus clockwork loop (Figure 1) starts with the ship escaping combat with a hyperspace jump, and landing in the relative safety of a new star system. After the jump, the medics and the engineers have to take care of injured crew members and damaged machinery. At the same time, the scientists and the bridge crew use scanners to figure out which planet to visit next.

Figure 1: The clockwork loop of Odysseus. Ground missions were only done during every other loop, giving scientists more time to figure out the artefacts while traveling. Each revolution took about 2 hours and 47 minutes to complete. Jump drive cooldown requirements prevented players from rushing the loop, and the pursuing enemies prevented players from slowing it down. The clockwork loop was sequential, not simultaneous, so there were always some character groups off-duty and others hard at work: the scientists, for instance, had no clockwork duties during the marine ground missions.

Then, the marines are deployed to the planet, with a mission to obtain ancient artefacts for the scientists. During the ground mission, they encounter enemies and other dangers (see Figure 2), and thus need to have their injuries treated by the medics. While this happens, the pursuing enemy fleet unerringly catches up with the Odysseus, prompting a space battle between the ship, its fighter craft, and the enemy fleet.

Figure 2: Marines and pilots often ended up in combat situations on their planetary missions. When they returned, the stories of their heroic deeds fueled play onboard. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

The fight lasts until the scientists researching the artefacts figure out the next star system to visit, at which point the engineers prepare the jump engine and the bridge officers perform another hyperspace jump to safety. As the Odysseus escapes to a new star system, the loop starts over, and it is time to take care of injured crew members and damaged machinery.

Every other loop was a ground mission loop, where a landing party was deployed to recover artefacts, and every other loop was a more relaxed waypoint en route towards the next ground mission. While Odysseus was traveling, the scientists studied the artefacts further and determined where to land in the next star system to find more artefacts.

Odysseus was played, in shifts, for 48 hours straight. More than half of the players were awake at any time to run the ship (see below). During the larp, the Odysseus went through 16 clockwork loops, which included 6 larger and 3 smaller operations for the marines.

All the while the clockwork was relentlessly grinding onwards, the Odysseus runtime gamemaster team was throwing spanners in the works: Enemy boarding parties attacking the Odysseus, marines getting mysterious parasite infections on planetside missions, critical resources running out, and so on and so on. As the escaping Odysseus was accompanied by a flotilla of civilian vessels, the politician players had to figure out political issues and conflicts relating to the entire fleet.

As the journey of the Odysseus progressed through the clockwork loops, the various plotlines of the larp advanced as well. Characters and groups brought an endless amount of plot twists to the mix, from small personal plots to grand revelations. Often it felt like none of the clockwork revolutions were played out cleanly, as there were always some twists to accompany them. Sometimes you picked up a group of refugee players, sometimes you hosted a group of NPC visitors from the civilian fleet for a political summit. Sometimes there were massive space battles, and sometimes the crew had to take various precautions to prevent disease from spreading onboard.

Small Cogs in the Large Machine

It is not a simple task to ensure that all players understand what is happening in a larp. However, in a clockwork design it is almost mandatory: when your ship gets shot, or performs a hyperspace jump, or receives visitors from another vessel, this needs to be obvious to everyone on board. This is not an easy task, even when a substantial amount of computers, lights, and loudspeakers can be used to do the job.

Some earlier larps going for clockwork aesthetics discovered magnificent pre-existing larp locations: The Monitor Celestra (Sweden, 2013; see Karlsson 2013) was played in the crammed steel corridors of the HMS Småland, and Lotka-Volterra (Sweden, 2018) took place in a large underground bomb shelter near Uppsala. These gorgeous locations came with fundamental downsides: they were labyrinthine, they were difficult for rigging all the cables and gear, they were impossible for wireless connectivity, and they heavily limited the time the organizing teams could spend on-site before and after the larp.

Odysseus rented a convenient modern building in Helsinki for six weeks. Before the first run, the team spent three weeks on site, transforming a school into a spaceship with sets, lights, audio, ICT systems and more. They laid down six kilometres of cable, installed 34 loudspeakers, and rigged dozens and dozens of lights. This was a very expensive solution in terms of workload, but it provided the team a controlled, dry, warm, safe environment where they could spend a lot of time before the larp to set things up. This was possible because Odysseus had a huge organiser team, with some 160 people credited on the game’s website.

All the main systems of the ship were connected to semi-automated light and sound systems, creating a powerful illusion of being actually on a spaceship. Klaxons screamed, jump engines boomed, fuses blew, screens blinked, all coordinated with sound, light, and smoke. The technological infrastructure created not only a convincing illusion, but also a critical communication medium that ensured that everyone understood the state of the Odysseus, and allowed the game masters to direct the larp. One clever design choice was that whenever the Odysseus performed a jump, all her computer systems went momentarily offline, with all monitors everywhere only displaying static. Together with all the other audiovisual cues, this ensured that even deeply engaged players had to take a pause and register that a new clockwork loop had begun.

Figure 3: The big main hall was the central communication medium of the larp. All essential crew functions had an easy visual access to the lobby, and as it also served as a bar and a restaurant, civilians spent a lot of time there. Consequently, as all visual and auditory information was clear in the lobby, it was clear everywhere in the larp. In this picture, an enemy boarding party has just penetrated the Odysseus and an indoors firefight is about to start – in the central lobby. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

In a clear contrast to the maze-like corridors of the Celestra, the Odysseus team intentionally designed all the spaces to be inclusive, open, and accessible (Makkonen 2019). Almost all the facilities were placed around a large, open main lobby, which served as the primary channel of audio and light information: Even if your work area did not have lights or loudspeakers for a red alert, you could not miss it when it took over the main areas. Most rooms had windows to the main lobby, so everyone could see what was happening (see Figure 3). Areas like the bridge and the med bay were separated with a glass wall, allowing anyone to see all the action (see Figure 4). The brig was adjacent to the security room, and designed to allow prisoners to “incidentally” see the entire play area through surveillance cameras.

Figure 4: The Odysseus bridge and Empty Epsilon -driven command screens portrayed through a glass wall from an adjacent corridor. All important areas were positioned behind glass walls from the main hall, allowing the crew to focus on their tasks while still being easy to observe from the outside. At times crowds would gather outside the bridge during a space combat, or outside the medlab during a dangerous surgery. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

The ship was not a backdrop in Odysseus: it was a relentless force controlling your play at all times. Depending on whether you were on shift or not, a red alert could be a startling backdrop to an intimate moment, or a rough shake-up pulling you back to combat. If you chose to sleep in the in-game berthing area, you probably noticed every single jump and red alert.

Running on Rails

Odysseus was a larp about a military vessel in a crisis situation. The majority of characters were members of a military hierarchy, and as the crisis was acute for the full duration of the larp, civilian characters did not have much say on the big picture. Thus, the larp’s themes would be better characterised by discipline than by agency, and the Odysseus team took a very negative stance on individual players choosing their own styles of play. This tight design was adopted as a perceived necessity for a clockwork larp: since the aesthetic was portraying interdependent characters working in unison, there was limited room for anyone getting out of line.

The larp is designed to be a tunnel not a sandbox, so although you have many decisions you can do completely independently there are [a] few elements we hope that you follow as it gives you most to play with. We have tried to also give your characters ingame reasons to do this. So if you get a distress signal, go and save those in need! … The game relies rather heavily on solving the puzzles and completing the following land mission in timely manner, so this should be supported from the top as well. … This is not a game to be hacked, won or overachieved (Odysseus play instructions, 2019).

It was important that every clockwork character did their part with a reasonable amount of success and in a timely manner. This was non-negotiable, as the organisers had scheduled the full larp with a 15-minute timetable.

The primary strategy for this was to make sure that all the key characters were suitable for keeping the train on the rails. As in many Finnish larps, character descriptions were long and detailed, containing the most important relationships, personality, agendas, personal history et cetera, and these character writeouts were written to create the everyday heroes the larp needed. I played the chief scientist, who was intentionally established to be a fair but demanding leader – precisely what was necessary to run the lab in a way that would get the artefact puzzles solved in time. According to the organisers, this micro-level design was used in other leader characters as well, in order to minimise the chances of, for example, the captain going rogue and rebelling against the fleet command.

As an additional strategy, players were given explicit responsibilities. For instance, the organisers provided the marine officers with specific instructions on which characters to send on particular ground missions. This allowed organisers to distribute planetary missions evenly, and ensured that particular characters would be on missions related to their personal plots.

The organisers actively sought to avoid player boredom, as bored players frequently make their own fun in ways that could be disastrous to the overall working of the clockwork. According to the main organiser Laura Kröger, one reason why the larp had tons of action, secrets, revelations and plotlines was to keep players busy, specifically in order to avoid emergence of disruptive plots such as unplanned mutinies or unwanted larp democracy.

The last line of defence was brutal old-school railroading. If the scientists failed to solve a puzzle in time, one of them would get a whisper in the ear from a game master. If a bridge officer plotted incorrect coordinates into the jump engine, the ship AI would double-check and reject them. If the ship was about to explode, the onboard AI would suggest heroic last-second shenanigans to engineers who could miraculously save the ship, often at the cost of ending up in the med bay. Railroading was necessary, because Odysseus had no contingency plans for players ending up exploring incorrect planets.

Although a lot of larpers shun this kind of railroading, this probably did not harm most players’ experiences of the larp. In terms of agency, the enforced hierarchy of a naval setting concentrates all decision-making power to very few characters in any case. For a player of a junior engineer it matters little whether the route of the Odysseus was planned by the admiral or by the game organisers, as the setting forces most characters to follow orders anyway. The organisers also worked hard to ensure that the players had reasonable in-character reasons to follow along their plots. Similarly, offering a miraculous feat to an engineer or a critical tip to a scientist might detract from one player’s experience, but at the same time allow the clockwork to keep on ticking for the hundred other players.

Ideally, of course, this kind of a larp would weave a story of natural successes and failures, incorporating important decisions made by the players. However, the workload of creating even a single path through the larp was massive, so it seems unfeasible to create all the redundant content that would be required for a branching narrative – let alone one where players could freely explore the galaxy.

In comparison, The Monitor Celestra team also realised the fragility of a clockwork machine when faced with diverse playstyles. Just like Odysseus, the Celestra organisers explicitly gave the players of key characters various responsibilities to keep the game running. While the Odysseus key playstyle message was play along – check the distress signals, solve the puzzles – the Celestra key message was play to lose against other players, play to win against outside enemies.

The Celestra still allowed a lot more freedom to players. The main thing that was explicitly forbidden was covert sabotage: clockwork play is challenging even on a good day, and it is practically impossible to keep an eye on everyone working in various duties. I remember trying to command a space battle while the engine room was staging a strike, preventing us from maneuvering or shooting. Although such a scenario might work perfectly on the silver screen, no larp space battle is long enough to accommodate negotiations over working conditions. The Celestra was also hijacked by a lone gunman at some point, creating an experience where all agency was transferred from everyone onboard to one player for a moment, until the crisis was resolved.

This genre of larp is not resilient against larphacking, sabotage, popular uprisings, or larp democracy. All clockwork larps have to make their peace with some amounts of railroading. They have to clearly specify supported styles of play, and to figure out how to restrain player agency in order to keep flying. I believe there is no other way.

Turning the Gears

Clockwork design depends on in-game work, and designing a labour-intense larp has its own challenges (see Jones, Koulu & Torner 2016). The work needs to be interesting, there needs to be enough of it, and there must not be too much work. Finally, the labour should support character play, instead of taking attention away from it.

The Odysseus clockwork was designed to be sequential, rather than simultaneous. None of the clockwork functions required more than half-a-dozen players contributing simultaneously, which made it easier to get the crew in stations and to focus on the tasks. The characters were split into two main shifts, with a third shift consisting of reserve characters that could relieve characters that were on shift, or jump into action if crew members were missing. As the larp lasted for 48 intense hours, exhaustion became a part of the play: some jobs needed to be done, regardless of whether the players fancied doing them at the moment. Although working in character was a central pleasure of the larp, there were definitely some occasions where tired players genuinely wanted to avoid their shifts. Personally, for me it is hard to stay in character when exhausted, so there is always a danger of robotically doing my job without really larping while doing so.

Designing diegetic work is a difficult multidisciplinary design task that connects larp design, digital game design, scenography, engineering and other hard skills. If you want to create a handheld HANSCA scanner (see Figure 5) that relays information between engineers, medics, scientists and game masters, you have to interface with the tech systems to get it working, with plot design to add content, with props to make sure they can be properly scanned, and so forth. As this kind of task requires many people to accomplish, it becomes complex and time-consuming.

Figure 5: HANSCA handheld scanners combined off-the-shelf Android phones with custom software. In the initial plans, they would have been used a lot by scientists, engineers, and medics to read RFID tags and provide information for the game mastering systems. In the actual runs they were primarily used by engineers. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

Bridge officers, fighter pilots, engineers and marines had close-to-indexical^[1]See e.g. Stenros & al. (2024) in this volume for more on symbols, icons and indices. jobs, meaning that the player tasks were very closely aligned with the character tasks. For example the bridge officers and pilots were actually fighting the enemies with Empty Epsilon combat simulator, the engineers were mechanically changing fuses (see Figure 6) and fiddling with the jump drives, and the marines were physically shooting aliens with nerf guns.

Figure 6: Engineer changing a fuse. The game masters could blow fuses around the ship to represent damage to the Odysseus. Blown fuses could have further physical consequences, such as screens going black until they were fixed. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

The medical staff sometimes reverted to iconic work, where you pretend to do something in a way that looks and sounds right, but you are not actually doing the work itself. For instance, they acted out performing surgeries. Often the injuries and ailments were well-propped to improve the experience of medical treatment.

The scientist work often felt symbolic. Deciphering the ancient artefacts to figure out the path of the Odysseus was done through puzzles which resembled escape room puzzles. Although they were fairly well designed, it was at times hard to explain why some ancient folks used a geometry puzzle to encrypt stellar coordinates.

Designing the difficulty level of diegetic teamwork is not easy. You might end up with players who have no idea of what they should be doing on a spaceship bridge, or – like I did in one run of Celestra – you may end up with a professional naval officer who can both run the show and teach others at the same time. In Odysseus, at least some bridge crews mitigated the risk of incompetence by practicing space combat with Empty Epsilon before the larp. This is of course possible only if you can play the simulator online in advance.

The gold standard of labour in clockwork larp is work that consists of tasks that uphold the 360° illusion (see Koljonen 2007) perfectly, while having a difficulty level easy enough to allow players to role-play while barely succeeding. Ideally, the tasks should enable narrative granularity: binary success/failure tasks do not produce the most interesting narrative inputs down the line in the clockwork. Similarly, symbolic tasks can be hard to turn into social content – if Odysseus would have literally expected scientists to solve sudokus, it would have been very hard to narrativise success and failure in that task to create social play.

As Celestra before, Odysseus included a lot of characters without clockwork tasks, such as refugees, civilian administration, religious leaders, and politicians. The risk is that regardless of the quality of the game content created for those characters, they may feel left out from an experience centered around the clockwork. This risk is connected to player expectations, for instance if players sign up to experience a clockwork, but end up cast as civilians.

Odysseus sought to alleviate this by creating tons of important plot content for civilian characters. Based on the quantitative evaluation in a post-larp player survey, this was a mixed success. In general, the players of civilian characters did state that they had a great larp, but the players of military characters were still quite a bit happier with their experiences.

The Invisible Machine

Behind the scenes, another fragile and interdependent machine was ticking away: The organiser team was busy at work. They were setting up space battles with Empty Epsilon, answering characters’ messages to the civilian fleet, prepping antagonists for the land missions, deploying artefacts in the woods to be soon retrieved by the marines, shuttling marine players from the main location to the planetside play areas, answering endless queries from medics, scientists and engineers on behalf of the ship’s AI… and much more. At any time there were a couple of dozen organisers at work.

The runtime game mastering was based on a pre-planned schedule, where everything was broken down to 15 minute slots. This allowed the game masters to adapt their plans based on the status of the larp. For instance, if the Odysseus was planned to suffer an unexpected glitch during a jump that would damage the ship, but the ship was already heavily damaged by the enemy fire, the event could be skipped or postponed. Or if the Odysseus had enjoyed smooth sailing for a while, the game masters could trigger a larger and more dangerous space battle. According to Laura Kröger, the team had many backup plans for various scenarios in which the larp would have been derailed.

Although much of the technology was automated, the light, audio and code had to be manually operated whenever the Odysseus performed a jump – every 2 hours 47 minutes, around the clock. As the organiser team had no capacity to train substitute game masters to run the larp, there was very little redundancy available. For example, Kröger herself had to be woken up to orchestrate every jump, and she was also the person directing all runtime game mastering, meaning that team members had to consult her on details constantly.

There were numerous indispensable organisers who would have been very hard to replace on a quick schedule. While the in-game machine only had to run for 48 hours, the organiser side also had to operate smoothly through all the phases leading into the larp and taking place after it.

Where possible, the Odysseus team mitigated technology risk by using off-the-shelf hardware and software. Lights and audio are relatively easy to operate frictionlessly if organisers are professionals who can use the same tools they use in their daily work, and Empty Epsilon is a reasonably stable piece of space combat software. With the more ambitious custom tools, like the HANSCA hand scanners, custom-programmed Android phones that were intended to relay scan data to game masters, minor glitches and problems were frequent – but they were still more robust than any custom wireless hardware I have ever seen in larp. Half a dozen professional programmers spent more than six months on building and integrating the various systems used in the larp. The larp had some 20 different IT systems running, including a custom backend, engineer repair system, the datahub used for ingame emails, the warp engines, airlock doors, surveillance cameras, info screens, and so on (see Hautala 2020 and Santala & Juustila 2019 for details).

It is a small miracle that everything worked out pretty well in all three runs, and it is trivial to imagine incidents that would have been extremely detrimental to the play experience: main organiser falling ill, or a key piece of technology breaking down, as simplest examples. It is far from certain that the larp could have recovered from such an incident at all.

Although the Odysseus team successfully pulled it off, anyone planning a clockwork larp should consider whether the dangerous and difficult aesthetic is truly worth the effort and the risk. Unless the point is to deliberately create the sensation of a fragile and interdependent system, there are easier ways to provide players with intense experiences of challenging labour. Succeeding and failing together does not require interdependence, and working in parallel can also be an equally great generator of social play.

A Fragile Contraption

The art of running a clockwork larp is largely an art of not failing. In principle, you only have to design meaningful interdependent jobs, build the architecture and the IT systems to allow proper communication, and fuel the system with events and plots to keep it running. But in practice the operation of the clockwork machine is fraught with existential risks: players can fail in their tasks, technology can break, bored larpers can start a mutiny, or someone can simply walk to the bridge with a gun and hijack the entire ship.

The Odysseus team successfully mitigated these risks. They established a railroading playstyle before the sign-up to eliminate larp democracy and to stop random rebels and saboteurs. They ensured that players succeeded in diegetic tasks by creating necessary fallbacks to sustain the clockwork. They spent a lot of time building the larp on-site, to ensure that all the IT systems running the game worked. They designed a space that facilitated communication, and augmented it with light and audio, to create a shared understanding of what was going on in the larp. They avoided dangerous player boredom by firehosing the characters with action and plots day and night. And they had a lot of luck in that none of the critical personnel or technology risks actualised.

Running a clockwork larp is a fool’s errand, because the very point of a clockwork is interdependence, and the very point of a larp is agency. The Odysseus team invested a massive amount of skilled labour to take this paradox head-on. While they had to accept some design tradeoffs to make it work, they ultimately prevailed, and crafted a beautiful 360° illusion of a spaceship ticking with clockwork magic.

Bibliography

Sanna Hautala (2020): Odysseus – A story about survival (using GIS). ref. December 26th 2023

Katherine Castiello Jones, Sanna Koulu and Evan Torner (2016): Playing at Work. In Larp Politics, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen and Jukka Särkijärvi. Solmukohta.

Petter Karlsson (2013): The Monitor Celestra – A Battlestar Galactica inspired frakkin’ spaceship larp. ref. December 26th 2023

Johanna Koljonen (2007): Eye-Witness to the Illusion. An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing. In Lifelike, edited by Jesper Donnis, Morten Gade and Line Thorup. Knudepunkt.

Mia Makkonen (2019): Spatial Design in Larps: Case Odysseus. Ropecon 2019.  ref. December 26th 2023

Essi Santala and Sampo Juustila (2019): Odysseus – Where Code Meets Light and Sound. Ropecon 2019.  ref. December 26th 2023

Jaakko Stenros, Eleanor Saitta and Markus Montola (2024): The General Problem of Indexicality in Larp Design. In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

Ludography

Lotka-Volterra (2018): Sweden. Olle Nyman, Simon Svensson, Andreas Amsvartner and Sebastian Utbult. Berättelsefrämjandet, Ariadnes Red Thread & Atropos. Full credits ref. December 26th 2023

The Monitor Celestra (2013): Sweden. Alternatliv, Bardo and Berättelsefrämjandet. Full credits ref. December 26th 2023

Odysseus (2019): Finland.

This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

Montola, Markus. 2024. “Odysseus: In Search of a Clockwork Larp.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

Cover photo:The hangar bay and the smaller ships were built with less fidelity for a 360° illusion, as the smaller vessels were built from fabrics. The 3 fighter craft, on left, were used in the space battles during the larp. The diplomat vessel ESS Starcaller, in the middle, could only be repaired in time to participate in the final mission. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)