Psychodrama

Psychodramtic scenarios are a form of scenario, connected to jeepform, fastaval scenarios and black box games.

History

Psychodramatic scenarios were developed by Nathan Hook after being influenced by jeepform ideas, particularly a presentation in the Knutpunkt pre-week in 2009 in Norway. He combined these ideas with his psychology backgrond and immersionist leanings to develop psychodrama scenarios.

Psychodrama is used here in the literary sense, meaning 'fiction concerned with psychological forces,' rather than the therapy sense.

The first scenario in this tradition was Passion fruit, launched at Fastaval 2010. Currently there are a total of 9 scenario in this tradition, 8 by Nathan Hook and one by Taisia Kann. These are published in the Green Book series (3 books to date), available on lulu.com.

Nathan Hook does regard these scenarios as larps, in the broad sense, but others may consider them 'freeforms' or 'semi-live.'

Features

Psychodrama scenarios (the term 'game' is rejected as inaccurate) generally have the following features:

- generally designed for around 3-6 players

- short, generally played in 1–3 hours

- playable in one room

- Most do not require an organiser to play (but can be run with one to present the material)

- Play with strong emotional content

- often draw inspiration in design either for psychological models (e.g. the five stages of grief) or more general paradigms taught in psychology (e.g. social identity theory, social constructionism)

- are replayable, and thus do not depend on design secrecy.

- are scene based

Because replayability is a feature, this scenarios do not have preset characters. Character creation is included as a warm-up exercise, but scenarios also include example characters.

Psychodrama scenarios use a variety of meta-techniques appropriate to each scenario, such as pre-game guided mediation, card mechanics to control scene flow, and phantom players. More invasive meta-techniques, such as breaking a scene for a monologue are generally not used.

Nathan Hook discussed the second scenario Black Dog in the Nordic Larp Talks 2014 http://nordiclarptalks.org/post/87238078318/identity-crafting-keeping-the-black-dog-at-bay