Sometimes in larps – and I suspect this happens to most of us – I get bored and disconnected. When this happens, I’ve noticed what I need is usually not more to do, but to get better in touch with what I feel about the game. Before I start looking for something to happen – I need to start by looking for something to care about.
This has led me to the idea of the emotional core. I think of it as something that makes me as a player care, which helps to emotionally connect my character to the story. With a clear emotional core in place, my character has something that matters to them. It can provide a sense of purpose or a feeling of connectedness with the game – both for my character and for myself as a player.
In rhetorics, the presence of an emotional core would be part of the art of pathos – appealing to the audience’s emotions. Of course, there are many ways to do this. Some people tend to go there with a more-is-more approach and find it through heavy themes and big drama – dragons, disasters, damsels in distress. Some go for a less-is-more approach, where intense emotions are built around mundane themes, like conflicts in your friend group or intensely hoping your crush likes you back. Either approach can create deeply meaningful stories, because they matter to the players and the characters present.
Without an emotional core, though, it is easy as a player to simply not care, but to feel bored and disconnected. Then, an intense pressure-cooker story turns into boring “dry-larping”, and a truly epic story ends up feeling like telenovela-style melodrama.
Emotional core – the who, what and where
Compared to other designable surfaces of a game, what I find interesting about the emotional core is that it is internal to the players, and thus something the designers have limited control over. This is one thing that separates it from the theme, setting and plot of a game. As emotions are inside our heads, emotional core content is usually found in the internal conflicts of a larp, while a plot more often focuses on external conflicts.
When I write a speech and consider how to use pathos to appeal to the audience’s emotions, I can make assumptions about what will make these specific listeners care about what I’m saying (loud or silent, overdramatic or understated), as well as decide what emotions I want to invoke in my audience (guilt, fear, hope, trust, anger etc). In the same way, larp designers can give conditions for an emotional core to appear in a number of ways – by themes, plot, conflicts, the characters and their relationship to each other, and by making sure every character has something meaningful to do that connects them to the story of the larp. But just like I as a speaker can’t control which emotions (if any) my audience feel while listening to me, larp designers can’t fully control what emotionally connects each player to the story of their larp.
The emotional core doesn’t necessarily have to be the same for all players of the same larp.
Sometimes, this varies between players in the same game, and that is fine. It can however also be an area where players get very out of sync with each other in frustrating or unintentionally comical ways – like someone dying from an overdose while their friends have a serious argument about the benefits of different kitchen appliances.
This is where the emotional content grid comes in. The idea of it is to provide a tool for understanding the emotional core in a game. In this article, I use it to analyse how different larp designs can provide different kinds of emotional core content. It might also be used by designers to communicate what kind of larp you’re making, or by players to figure out your preferred playstyle and find others with similar preferences.
The content axis – what is going on?
The content axis is about how light or heavy the emotional core content of the larp is. Will the internal conflicts of this larp centre around things like “does my crush like me back?” or “how do we deal with slavery and torture?”.
The emotional core content is not the same as the setting, theme or external conflict of a larp. Different larps can have the same theme (eg. a search for love) and external conflicts (eg. who will end up with who?), but different positions on the emotional core content axis will decide if these are played out as a dark dystopian fight for survival, a social realist critique of the patriarchy or a lighthearted romantic comedy where everyone gets a happy ending.
Contrasting the emotional core content with the setting or theme can also be a really interesting design choice, like in Our Last Year where I spent the last hour on earth mending my character’s sore relationship with her teenage daughter. Here, lighter emotional core content (human connections and search for meaning) became more powerful when combined with the heavy setting (waiting for the pending apocalypse).
Different positions on this axis will likely appeal to different players, just as different rhetorical strategies appeal to different audiences. As a designer it is, however, good to communicate to your players where your larp is placed on this scale.
The emotional realism axis – how does it feel?
This axis is about what level of realism the emotional themes are handled with. Is the violence frightening and realistic like in a Nordic noir tv drama, or symbolic and theatrical like in an action movie? A position on this axis can be created through communicating an intended degree of realism – like if “my whole family were killed by orcs” will be treated as a character alibi for being alone and carrying a sword, or a source of deep trauma.
Emotional realism can be approached using both a high degree of realism, and wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get) aesthetics, or by using meta-techniques and mechanics. This is not about how a larp looks, but about how it feels to play it. And while some players might find these to be connected (like having an easier time to immerse in a character if they’re in a 360 environment), they are not the same thing.
The emotional realism axis connects to what Andie Nordgren describes as high/low resolution larping, which is defined by the detail level of the interactions. In a high resolution playstyle, we can use subtle gestures like looks, pauses and small shifts in tone to enact a conflict in an emotionally realistic manner. A low resolution playstyle requires conflicts to be acted out with bigger brushstrokes and more theatrical gestures, like obviously snide remarks or a full blown bar fight, in order to be recognised as a conflict by the co-players. It subsequently requires less realistic simulation mechanics, so that the bar fight can be enacted without anyone getting hurt.
This is, once again, an area where different design choices will be suitable for different games, and where players have different preferences. In this article, Mo Holkar and Monica Hjort Traxl discuss the “sexiness-level” of different sex mechanics, and their consequences when it comes to different aspects (feelings, looks, accessibility) of the larp. A game with high emotional realism is more likely to contain some degree of unsimulated physicality and simulation mechanics chosen to feel real. On the other hand, a game with low emotional realism might have simulation mechanics chosen based on whether they look good, or which are completely symbolic.
To me, this also seems to be a somewhat common source of conflict between players, like when more realism-oriented players accuse theatrical-oriented co-players of “over-acting” or treating emotional scenes as slapstick, while more theatrical-oriented players might find it uncomfortable to immerse in realistic feelings like sadness, anger, affection or arousal.
Many ways to make it work
Sometimes, the axes of the grid are directly connected to each other – the heavier and darker the content, the more immersive and realistic the violence. But they certainly don’t have to be, and it seems possible to make intensely emotional games in all the different quadrants. Let me give some examples:
A classic genre of larping – the boffer fest larp – is one good example of heavy content, theatrical playstyle. These battle larps are usually centered around wars and battles, but the main appeal of them is that it is fun to play war with your friends. This works because they generally treat heavy content like wars in a low-realism way, where battles are played out as joyful boffer fights with lots of abstraction mechanics involved.
Larp campaigns like Krigshjärta or Granlandskampanjen have tried to bring more Nordic-style elements like higher realism, heavier content and more grimdark oppression into this genre – but to get the players onboard they still have to compromise with the idea that while war is awful, it should also be entertaining to play. My friends’ war stories from these games are usually adrenaline-filled anecdotes from fights, or happy retellings like “I cried in mud a lot and had an epic death scene” – the emotional core is usually about getting to be an action hero, or antihero.
Hurt soldier getting help away from the battlefield at Krigshjärta 9. Photo by Johan Nylin.
Another category of larps that would fall into this category are the high-abstraction ones. At Beasts We Fight Against, we played hospitalised children, who had learnt to talk about their cancer as a beast within themselves. While the narrative of this larp was about children battling cancer – what we did in practice was to switch between the beasts doing abstract representational dancing, and the children painting with crayons and exchanging small talk. In this way, we could find the emotional core in a story about a heavy theme, without it turning realistic or melodramatic.
Many Nordic-style larps seem to fall in the category of heavy content, high emotional realism. These might be games like Nocturne, The Circle or Snapphaneland, combining heavy themes like sexual violence, manipulative cults, oppression and racism with high-realism mechanics. Players of this kind of larps often seem to talk about “type two fun”, and the emotional core often seems to be around the catharsis of feeling strong negative emotions within a safe framework.
I am personally very fond of light content games, and had an eye-opening experience at Klassefesten when it ran at Prolog in 2012. The game is about teenagers forming cliques, having popularity contests and making out. I ended the larp comforting the crying birthday girl, feeling lonely and left out as all my friends were hooking up on the dance floor. This opened my eyes to the power of light content larps, and not having to turn the heavy content level up to max to get an emotionally fulfilling experience.
The scenario format lends itself well to meta-techniques and mechanics which could make the game more abstract and symbolic, but simultaneously create alibi which helps the players immerse more in their characters’ feelings and thus get a stronger emotional realism. For example To the Bitter End, which follows a couple through their cycle of meeting, falling in love and breaking up, does this by giving the players action-cards (like “give your partner a pet name” or “make unreasonable demands”) to play out. I’ve played it a few times with results ranging over a spectrum from low-realism romantic comedy to heart-wrenching realistic drama.
My own scenario As Long as We Don’t Tell Anyone is even more mechanics-heavy and abstract, with the GM giving the players new and limiting instructions every few minutes. The content of the game is light and mundane – two people with a complicated relationship that they can’t really talk honestly about. The abstract mechanics however seem to help the players focus on the emotional core of the game by exploring a lot of different aspects of this relationship (casual flirting, deep talks, restrained longing, rejection, dreams and fears), which often creates vulnerable and intense stories.
I recently played Fragment of a Novel, which deliberately placed itself high up in the far left corner of the grid, as a light content, high realism game. It centered around a group of young people celebrating a school break together, and was designed as a very wysiwyg game with close-to-zero simulation or off-game calibration techniques. It was so lifelike that it was an almost meditative experience, which built immersion and a strong connection to the characters slowly over multiple days. This provided me with a mundane, yet intense, emotional core in moments like the satisfaction of finishing a drawing, the love felt while peeling potatoes together, or the adrenaline rush of a first slow dance.
Fragment of a Novel, polaroid photo taken in-game by Carl Nordblom.
Melodrama and hyperbole – when it doesn’t really work
Sometimes, being out of sync with co-players or the design in regards to this grid, seems to create negative experiences. I’ve for example at multiple occasions heard players complain about others taking serious or heavy content (rape, war, drug addiction etc.) too lightly, creating an understated effect. This can on the one hand become hyperbolic and silly, like the sandbox fantasy games of my early teenage years which were full of orphans threatened with being married off to old men, demon cultists performing ritual sacrifices, murderous orcs, happy hookers and sexy slaves. On the other hand,it might also become hurtful and offensive, as when some players’ real life trauma becomes entertainment or misery-tourism for others.
I’ve – unfortunately on a few different occasions – had other characters subjecting my character to sexual violence by quickly initiating it without checking for consent first. This seems like something that happens much easier in games with a theatrical playstyle or low degree of emotional realism – as it is easier to introduce a scene like this if your emotions don’t step on the brakes. I definitely suspect that if violence felt more like violence and sex felt more like sex, my co-players would have gotten the feeling that “wait, stop, this is really icky” and been better at slow escalation and checking for consent.
I’ve also experienced pretty bad cognitive dissonance at larps where player groups have different ideas on where to place themselves on the theatrical-realistic scale, or on how heavy and gritty the violence should be. Like a disturbing public execution scene right before the troops are about to leave for boffer o’clock – Are we still the heroes? Or the villains? Are we supposed to react negatively to this or cheer? Or similarly, a few co-players barging in, throwing someone on the table and shouting for medical help in the middle of some simmering low-key emotional drama.
Conclusion
I believe that the emotional core of a game is an important designable surface, and something to consider for both players and designers. Just like when building pathos in general, there are many ways to achieve it, and the “best practice” will depend a lot on the larp and the target audience. Hopefully, the grid could help provide a bit of an explanation to why some will find a scene deeply meaningful, while it will look bleak and boring to co-players, or why one player’s satisfying emotional drama feels hyperbolic and over-dramatic to others. At least, I’ve discovered that finding my own personal preferences on the grid is helpful to find which larps and co-players I will easily vibe with, and which ones I won’t.
References
Holkar, Mo and Monica Hjort Traxl. 2017. “What does it mean when sex is sexy?“ Nordiclarp.org 2017-02-03.
Nordgren, Andie. 2008. “High Resolution Larping – Enabling subtlety at Totem and beyond“. In Stenros and Montola (red) Playground Worlds, Solmukohta 2008.
Ludography
Angelico, Adrian, Anne Marie Stamnestrø (2019), Emilia Korhonen, Petra Katarina (2022). Nocturne.
Fragment of a Novel. Atropos. 2024.
Friedner, Anneli. As Long as We Don’t Tell Anyone. 2021.
Granlandskampanjen (campaign, 2008 – 2018)
Grasmo, Tyra, Frida Sofie Jansen, Trine Lise Lindahl. Klassefesten. 2012.
Göthberg, Rosalind, Mimmi Lundqvist, Alma Elofsson-Edgar. Snapphaneland. 2022.
Karachun, Masja, Zhenja Karachun, Olga Rudak, Nastassia Sinitsyna. Beasts we fight against. 2017.
Krigshjärta (campaign, 2006 – present)
Our Last Year (Reflections larp studio, 2019)
Skriver Lægteskov, Louise, Stefan Skriver Lægteskov, Jofrid Regitzesdatter and Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo. The Circle. 2024.
Stark, Lizzie and Bjarke Pedersen. To the Bitter End. 2019.
Cover image: Image by Pexels from Pixabay.
