Recently an article was republished from this year’s Solmukohta book, “Debauchery: Meh” (Anonymous 2024), that caused quite a stir in the community, on the subject of “erotic larps”, that is larps with sex as a central theme. Plenty of people within our community have made their own assessments over this week, but I’d like to take the time to offer up some thoughts. And naturally, the shorter the original comment, the more I have to say about it.
So, why do we larp?
A simple question to be sure, and perhaps a bit pretentious for the start of an essay talking mostly about filthy sex, though as anyone who has played a larp can say, the answers are broad and complex. No shortage of ink has been shed across this very outlet on the topic, and yet my anonymous friend in the original comment has surmised that in the case of “erotic larps” that the principal, and perhaps even sole, driver for people attending is sexual gratification.
Whilst it is no surprise that many people had some quite robust criticisms of this idea, I think it’s worth exploring not just why this is wrong, but the range and diversity of why these larps may appeal to people.
A Confession
Here is the point though where I need to make a confession: I haven’t actually ever been to an “erotic larp”. I have played sexually-charged characters and stories in other larps, such as being the paramour of a doomed warrior and part of her polyamorous entourage, to playing the latest “acquisition” to a sexy vampire cult, amongst others; but I have never been to a larp where sexual or kink themes were central to the design.
So I should probably stop writing now then, eh? I don’t know the genre in question intimately (heh), I haven’t experienced the plotlines, the events, the hype; I don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, perhaps, and if that is your opinion then I bid you a good day. But I feel whilst I haven’t had much to do with “erotic larp”, I am both (in my own humble opinion) a fairly experienced larper across a range of genres, and would like to share some credentials in a vain attempt to restore some credibility.
Hi there, my name is Abbie, and I have been at various times in my adult life: a sex worker, both escort and porn, a volunteer at a sexual health service, a trans and disability sexual liberation activist, an organizer and host of a series of sex parties, and a sex & kink communicator, including getting to be on radio to talk about the Sex Without Shame campaign we ran some years ago. I’ve also happily had no shortage of romantic and sexual experiences in my life, so when it comes to that topic, I think I am broadly qualified.
Exploring Ourselves
But it’s my time with the Sex Without Shame campaign that I’d like to talk about most here. This was, as the name suggests, a campaign set up to encourage people, mostly queer and LGBTQ+ people, to explore their sexuality freely, and hopefully feel more comfortable and confident in experiencing sex and kink. My part of it (aside from doing a sexy photoshoot with a lovely Leather-Daddy named Frank, where we both admitted that it was to us the most heterosexual thing either had done in a long time) was mostly presenting seminars and workshops as part of the women’s programme. These workshops covered all sorts of topics, from sexual health and contraception to exploring sexual attraction and alternative relationships, but one important one was the ‘Wall of Kinks.’
In this exercise, everyone would anonymously write a kink, fetish, sexual fantasy, or anything similar onto a post-it note, and place them into a bag at the start of the session. I would then empty out the notes, and put them up on the wall, and we’d discuss them. Part of the exercise was to break the taboo a bit, both personally and as a group, to show that these are the things the people in this room are into, and how that’s okay, natural, and can be explored and experienced safely and confidently. It was often a highlight of the series for me, as it was often the most transformative bit for participants.
So this is a bit of a long personal ramble before I get to how-to-make the lasagne, but I think it’s important. Because the biggest point I wanted to make before getting to the other topics is this: if you use larp as a place to explore your own sexuality, in whatever form that takes, then that’s absolutely fine. If you communicate and are open about what you’re looking for, then you go right ahead. Because I know from the experience of running those workshops, that there aren’t a whole heap of places to safely explore parts of who you are, and sexuality is absolutely a core part of ourselves. So if you’re communicating, seeking consent, and being honest, then you’re doing larp right, and I don’t want anyone telling you otherwise.
And I don’t really think my anonymous friend would disagree, but I really wanted to make that part clear.
Exploring Others
Okay, so that’s one reason people might play “erotic larps”, to explore themselves and their own feelings in a safe environment. So what are the others? Well, they’re as myriad as the reasons people play any other sort of larp. And for that I’d like to share about why I don’t, or more accurately haven’t, been to any “erotic larps”. Because from reading my little CV up there you might well say “these larps look like they’re right up your street, Abbie,” and in some ways you’d be right. But that’s sort of the point isn’t it.
A common reason for why we larp is to get to experience the lives of others. I will never forget, to my dying breath, the fear and loneliness of being a WW1 nurse, or the righteous fury of being a maniacal paladin, or the crushing loss of being a cursed raider doomed to be hunted for eternity through the forests. These experiences, these emotions, these deep and resonant lives of people I’ve lived, even for a short while, will stay with me forever, just as I know they do in the minds of fellow larpers. I will probably never in my life get to really experience the anxiety and love of shepherding a gaggle of nurses across Siberia, or the confidence and bravery of charging into a battle I know will kill me. That’s a big part of larping: to experience things from lives we will never see ourselves.
Now this is also a big part of why I don’t often play disabled characters at larps. I live that, every day of my life. Whilst playing a disabled person in a very different context to my own is neat, and I’ve done that on occasion, on the whole, playing what I experience (and usually a bad experience) in life isn’t all that fun. Just for the same reason I don’t often play trans or non-binary characters at larp, a sentiment I have heard echoed by other larpers from those demographics. However, I do pretty much always play gay or bisexual characters, because that part of my life is pretty damn great, and so getting to be that in different contexts and in new and exciting ways is brilliant.
But sexual liberation falls somewhere between the two. It’s certainly not a bad experience whatsoever for me, far from it, but it’s also not really much of a departure from who I already am. There wouldn’t be tremendous appeal to me in playing a character that was about being sexually confident, liberated, and getting to experience those feelings. But to someone for whom that isn’t a part of their everyday, I can see how that would be an especially enticing premise, just as getting to live any other life beyond our own is in larp. Experiencing the deep empathy of living another person’s life is one of the most amazing things about this medium, and I’m sure this can be a real draw to people to play “erotic larps”.
Experiencing the life and perspective of others with a vastly different outlook from us, perhaps an outlook we admire, or one we are glad we don’t share, allows us to reframe how we see the world and the people in it. And whether that is seeing social interactions, positive and negative, through the mind of someone with a different outlook on sex and sexuality, can be a hugely moving adventure.
So people might want to explore their own lives through “erotic larp”, they might want to explore lives of others… what else? Well you’ll notice that I didn’t actually give a proper answer in that section as to why I haven’t been to any “erotic larps”, and you might surmise that it was that they don’t differ from my own life enough to be appealing. But you may also recall me saying earlier that I have played sexual and romantic characters and stories in larps, so there must be something there that interests me?
Well that’s because the honest answer is that I haven’t been to any “erotic larps” because of the very usual reasons: expense and travel. Most of the ones have been overseas, and my budget for international larp is limited, and none of them have ever broken the threshold of interest to make me want to commit my precious time and money to them when other priorities existed. Except one.
Exploring Power
I did in fact, some years ago, try to go to an “erotic larp”. This being Nocturne (2022) by Atropos Studios, a historical larp set in a brothel during the American Revolutionary War. In the end I didn’t get a place as numbers were quite tight, but I’d like to talk about what appealed to me in this larp over others. Firstly, for anyone who knows me, I am an absolute slut for a historical larp. They’re the main genre I play, write, and work on, and as a historian by background it’s fairly obvious why. So that alone already moved it up above the threshold of interest, but it wasn’t all of it.
And I think this is where I make my biggest departure from the thoughts of my anonymous friend, because now we’re getting into the territory of “what does sex mean?” And that is a very interesting question that I think larp is an exceptional medium to explore. In the two cases I outlined at the start where I played a sexual story at a larp (there are others naturally, but these two I think best exemplify my point) the meanings they each had were quite different.
For the romance with the doomed warrior, myself and the other members of their entourage were engaged in the traditional hedonistic lifestyle. The warrior knew she was bound to die soon, as did most of us around her, and so the sex there was about attraction, living for today, and the platonic ideal of hedonism. In the other, the being an “acquisition” to the vampires, that was much more about power, dominance, the symbolic expression of sex in possession and control. And my interest in Nocturne, skewed towards the latter.
Now I want to reiterate, I didn’t end up playing the game, and beyond signing up and reading the provisional material for the first run I have no knowledge of the design or the actual content of the game, so I don’t really have anything to say on the game itself. But I do want to talk about what it was that appealed to me in the premise.
It was specifically one character, the sister of one of the soldiers. So in the outline, the players are split into two cohorts, the brothel workers, being women, and the soldiers, being men. But there was one woman amongst the soldiers, being the sister of one of them who I presumed would be something of an assistant to the soldiers, what we would call a “camp-follower”. And reading that made me go “Oooh, that’s interesting”.
I am sure I would’ve had a plenty good time playing amongst the women of the brothel, as there’s a whole range of personalities and stories you could explore in that setting. You’ll perhaps notice that the two cases I’ve mentioned had me playing in a more submissive role, which to someone who is more often on the dominant side of the dichotomy has its own appeal, that would be present here. But that one character, the woman who would be split in loyalty between fellow women and the soldiers to whom she was bound, that would make for one compelling plotline.
And of course there’s many ways one could play such a character and I didn’t get any more information on how she was written or eventually played by anyone. But for me, my intention was (if I was successful in getting a ticket and then in getting that character, neither of which came true) was to take the character in quite a dark direction, to be a willing, perhaps even slightly sadistic participant in the oppressive play that would no doubt have been central to the content of the game. And that exploration of themes, in a historical setting was very enticing to me. Everything after all, to get my obligatory pretentious quote in for the article, is about sex; except sex. Sex is about power.
And maybe my anonymous friend agrees, maybe they feel that the “erotic larps” should be about so much more, that they could explore themes of dominance, power-structures, the leveraging of sex as a means of social control both in limiting and embracing it. Larps could give players a window into what sex means, exploring the deeper questions of morality and power, and let them live the lives of both those elevated and those crushed by sex. Whether they do or not alas lies out of my experience to say.
Sex Sells
Yet they still seem to feel that despite these important and meaningful topics to explore, “erotic larps” remain an “overrated” genre.
Whilst I must admit, in my own circles I haven’t experienced much of this rating, as I don’t find “erotic larps” to be held with the sanctity they appear to be in other circles, there certainly is a perception from parts of the community that this is so. Where the prestige and prominence these types of larps seem to hold comes from is an important topic, but perhaps best explored by someone from those corners.
Though I might offer a simple thought at least on the point of popularity, rather than prestige, and it is the evergreen notion that sex sells. From working in marketing on a few occasions, I can say from personal anecdote, that depictions or even mere implications of sex sell products, whether that be films like I was selling, or larps as here.
I think it would be arrogant for me to claim that larpers are somehow not susceptible to those same hooks in our monkey-brains as everybody else. And whilst I absolutely do not believe that any larp producer is using sex as a marketing hook to sell tickets, it’s hardly outside the realm of possibility that in a sea of available larps, for some of us, those that light up the horny neuron in our brain might subconsciously seem a little more appealing. And in the current environment, where budgets are tight, and so many larps are struggling to make ends meet, it may only take a little bit of a marketing bump to take a larp from the edge of feasibility into safe territory, where other larps struggle to get exposure.
So between this appearance of popularity, real or imagined, and the prestige they carry in certain circles, I can at least begin to understand why my anonymous friend might feel upset at these productions, even whilst I profoundly disagree with their assessments. Times are hard, and we all want to elevate the sort of experiences we enjoy and cherish, and it is demoralizing seeing projects you care for fall by the wayside to productions you’re not enthused by.
Though, it seems there are at least a fair few reasons besides sexual gratification that someone might want to play a larp with sex as a central theme, and no shortage of stories, meanings, and levels of emotion to explore through them. So I hope if it is your thing, or think it might be, that you’ll give them a go, and I have no doubt that those producing them will continue to improve their craft, as we all do.
And to my anonymous friend: I hope you find forms of larp, and people to experience them with, that speak to you, and get to enjoy your favourite flavours with joy and abandon. I could wish nothing more for any of us.
References
Anonymous. 2024. “Debauchery: Meh.” Nordiclarp.org, August 7.
Cover photo: Photo by Emojibater and Rosie Simmons on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.
