The Larpwright

Dark Empathy

efatland — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:29:26 +0000

One of the traditional claims about (live) role-playing is that it increases empathy, our ability to feel what others feel, to effortlessly experience the world through other peoples eyes.

This claim is supported by plenty of anecdotal evidence, and no real evidence. It makes sense, though.

For one: if we assume that players make an effort to experience the inner world of the character, such effort should be empathy-training, giving insight into the inner worlds of people who are like the character. I doubt that all players do this, but there are certainly those who do.

But more importantly: live role-playing is built on a foundation of empathy, on players listening to each other, attentively, moving their improvisation in the same direction. Those who join larp as loner geeks rarely remain so for long.

But is this only a good thing?

Empathizing with each other at larps, we also suspend the self. We adjust our behaviour to that of others, and vice-versa, establishing together the genre, etiquette, way of playing. The better we are at moving, feeling, thinking as a group, the more powerful are the experiences we unlock.

There are plenty of words that describe moving, feeling, thinking as a group: team spirit, groupthink, the madness of crowds, mass hysteria, lynch mobs, totalitarianism.

Empathy is a dark god.

Does your larp have a zombie?

efatland — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:10:03 +0000

Imagine two larps: the first one is about angsty teenagers figuring out the meaning of life in a remote mountain cabin. The second one is exactly the same, except those teenagers are being atacked by zombies. Which larp do you think will attract more players?

In “Talk Larp”, one of the three downloadable anthologies published at the 2011 Knudepunkt conference, Juhana Pettersson’s contribution “The Necessary Zombie” contains two very useful observations:

a) that players rarely have a problem with weird and experimental larp forms – it’s the lack of relatable content that often scares them off from arthaus stuff.
And:
b) that a succesful larp needs some clear relatable content – some hook that explains to the player how the game is played. Pettersson calls this “the Necessary Zombie”. You can add existential angst and arthaus experimentation on top of that. Just make sure you have the zombie.

Having worked with marketing the laivfabrikken larps, and developed a sense of what will attract a bunch of eager ready-to-play players and what won’t, Petterssons observations ring very true to me. In my community in Oslo we’ve already begun saying things like “we need a necessary zombie for this game!” and “where’s the zombie?”

Zombies come in many forms, not all of them tied to genre fiction. For Marcellos Kjeller, it was the music of Kaizers Orchestra, and the sex-appeal of the mafiaesque resistance fighters evoked by their lyrics. Never mind that the larp took the form of a musical, with cut-scenes and weird meta-techniques: it was filled twice, and could probably be filled more times. For Café René it was the familiarity of the “Allo’ Allo’” TV-series we grew up watching. The laivfabrikken game “Falne Stjerner” (fallen stars), about discarded items hoping to get a new life at the flea market, drew blank stares until you pointed out that you could play the character of Mao’s Little Red Book, bitterly rambling about your former owners fall from communism. Relatable content. And what is more relatable than a zombie? They’re scary, they’re dead, and they eat brains. Everyone and their grandmother knows how to play one.

Pettersson also has a good point about why relatability is much more important in larp than in litterature and cinema: if the player struggles with understanding the content, she is also struggling to create it. Lars von Triers newest movie will continue running whether you “get it” or not. The larp, however, will stop.

I covered some of the same ground, with less precision and more detail, in my paper on “interaction codes” (published in Role, Play, Art). However, that one has the title “Understanding and Establishing Patterns in Player Improvisation”. I’d rather talk about zombies.

2011 Knutebooks on-line

efatland — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 11:13:40 +0000

The 2011 Knudepunkt Books are now dribbling onto the web. At the time of writing, two of the three books can be downloaded as PDFs:

The three books are devoted to respectively academic research (“Think Larp”), organizer write-ups (“Do Larp”) and rants & opinions (“Talk Larp”). The last volume, rumours have it, is bound to cause some controversy.

Also: if you, dear reader, have lived under a rock the last couple of months, you might have missed the monumental publication of the monumental book “Nordic Larp”, which documents 30 historically significant larps in text and pictures. It’s not on-line, and it anyway shouldn’t be read on a screen – this is a beautiful “art book”, which sits nicely on your coffee table or in the library of your neighbourhood art istitution. Buy it here or read the editors blog. I have contributed text on the larp “1942 – noen å stole på”.

The Other Us : a larp for a small group of close friends

efatland — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 09:21:54 +0000

1. One player is the host, who invites the others. As host, you should invite people you know really well – and preferably who know each other really well. Apart from this, no GM is needed.

2. The larp begins with a timer or alarm clock set for four hours. It ends when the timer rings.

3. Before role-playing begins, each player should carefully examine their own life, looking back to the single biggest decision that has led them to where they are today. The player should imagine what would have happened had that decision been taken differently (for good or for bad), and if so: who would the player be today? That person is the character.

4. In-game, none of the characters know each other. They meet for the first time.

5. The host decides where and why the characters meet.

6. Plan at least two hours for debrief.

Tips & Traps

efatland — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 09:14:07 +0000

I came across this excellent gathering of advice in Swedish on Gabriel Widings blog, and impulsively translated it into English. Gabriel is one of the authors of the book-slash-provocation deltagarkultur (“participatory culture”) and has spent as much time working with ARGs, collaborative writing and other kinds of participatory culture as he has with larp. So the list below includes but is not limited to the design of live-roleplaying events.

I think it pinpoints precisely how to avoid the mistakes that are usually comitted by people in the Established Arts (theatre, cinema, performance etc.) who try to engage their “audiences” in interactivity or participation, and it also offers up some eternal larpwriting truths. As with most holy text, there is space here for both interpretation and heresy.

The author, Gabriel Widing, in front of the whiteboard busily making culture

Tips and traps when making participatory culture

By Gabriel Widing

Tips:

Communicate the agreement clearly and explicitly. Only when the participant knows the rules of play, that is: how communication and participation are meant to be done, is she confident enough to act.
Consider banning passive spectators and documentation. The external, critical, view is not always productive. It may in some cases prevent participatory action. People do not behave the same way in front of a camera as they do in front of confidantes. Documentation usually fails at capturing the qualities of a participatory work, but easily pushes participants from dialogic action to simple performance.

Use an aesthetic or story as basis. In this way, a framework is easily made for the action. With total creative freedom, it is easy for the participants to drift off into darkness without knowing what to do. Stories help us find meaningful actions.
Use the body and its senses. Whether participation is verbal or physical, the various senses can be employed. Sharing smells, sound, rhythm, music and food together can intensify the meeting.

Traps

Over-confidence in the Will to participate. We are schooled in the spectator paradigm, and many fear participation.
Interactivity instead of participation. Rather than creating a space for action, one creates only a limited set of options to choose between. This is common amongst producers with a need for control.
Too high threshold. The skill of participation must be learned. It works differently in different contexts and cultures. Consider how to avoid making the rules governing interaction too difficult and complicated.
Narrow space of action / little possibility for impact. The participant’s must have the possibility to act in a way that has a genuine influence on the experience and actions of other participants. Putting a piece of paper in a box, or hanging it on the wall at the end of an exhibition – these are not participatory.
Work / alienation. Mandatory participation with a results focus is pervasive in our society, e.g. in schools. Grading individual contributions to a group work is an excellent way to destroy the participatory process.
Provocation. Trying to cross the barrier between producer and consumer using provocation rather than formulating new agreements.

Self-Realization! Conspiracies! The Last Man On Earth!

efatland — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 06:43:22 +0000

Do you like larp documentation? I do, and so far 2010 is making me very happy.

First up: “Mad About The Boy” (website), the Nordic arthaus larp about a world where all men are dead and a group of women are competing for the privilege of artificial insemination until * suddenly * the last man alive appears. Li Xin took some excellent photos: Mad About The Boy, First Run.

Mad About The Boy - photo by Li Xin

These pictures were taken in-character, and some of them ended up as plot devices on the larp. But there’s more! Here’s Anna-Karin‘s video documentation from the same event:

Also, if you want a look at video documentation with huge production values, there’s a set of excellent videos from the pervasive larp “Conspiracy for Good”, a Tim Kring + Company P + Nokia production, with prominent Nordic larpers prominently featured on both sides of the camera. (via Pervasive Games blog)

And last but freshest, Brody Condon (previously mentioned in connection to SonsbeekLive), is at it again, this time with an art-context-larp about self-actualization courses:

Level 5 Documentation from Brody Condon on Vimeo.

Tobias Wrigstad shares his impressions of the first run on his blog: Level Five. Also of note: BongBoings writeup, scroll down for the bonus hilarity of the comments.

Looking for “it”

efatland — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:33:46 +0000

So, some years back, I held a concept-development workshop for larpers. Groups of 2-5 larpers would collaboratively develop a few keywords into a fully-fledged larp concept in half an hour or so. It worked well, yielding some 3-4 fully functional larps with the framework of a decent dramaturgy. None of those larps were ever held. Instead, every year, we see a bunch of larps with weak concepts and dramaturgies attracting players and producing strong experiences amidst complaints of their weaknesses. Why?

When purity is your only goal, it’s easy to achieve. But, as one of the workshop participants explained, it’s not enough to have a holistic concept – you must really love that concept, to motivate you into doing all the work required for it to become a larp. It doesn’t even need to be a strong concept, but the idea must have “it” – some kind of magic factor that makes you passionate about realizing the larp. This translates to participation as well. Not that many people bother to attend larps that don’t have “it”, especially not if those larps require plenty of preparation. Needless to say, “it” is different things to different people. Otherwise, we’d all be going to the same larps. But what is “it”? And how do you recognize it when you’ve found it?

Here’s a sample of ideas I’ve seen triggering passionate responses in myself or other larpers:

tribal society with plenty of rituals and primal screams.
totalitarian society, based on Orwell’s “1984″.
19th century costume drama
mafia families in contemporary Oslo

In my experience, the “it” factor isn’t contained in these one-liners, but in the associations they evoke. For example, it was not the idea of putting 100 players into a police-state that drove myself and Jan-Erik Dyve to organise Kybergenesis. Jan-Erik pointed out, much later, that the two of us shared a fascination for really pompous music, like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” or “The Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Orchestra”. In addition, I had seen the 1984 filmatization of “1984″, and was captivated by the interrogation scenes – not so much their cruelty, but for their tragedy, and the way the interrogation setting allowed for powerful dialogue.

A lot of “it” seems to come from past cultural experiences, and by the tangle of emotion associated with them. For Harry Potter fans, then, “it” might be a larp set at Hogwarths. For a lot of us, “it” is Tolkien, and hence any Tolkienish fantasy. For fans of old-school tabletop RPGs, it might come from dungeons or sanity points, and the classic sessions they evoke. Even for eclectic Nordic arthaus larps, similar resonances are at work with concepts like Hamlet Innifrån (Shakespeare), 1942 (any WW2 movie, or family history), Carolus Rex (steampunk), System Danmark (cyberpunk), etc. Most of the exceptions I can think of are larps that resonate not with fiction but with personal experience – Kjærlighet i Fornedringens Tid (all your failed relationships), 13 at the table (any embarrassing family dinner you’ve attended).

Is there an analytical way of predicting “it”? Not that I know of.

But here’s what I do when I try to figure out if an idea I have has that mystical quality: I talk about it, ceaselessly, and note the reactions of people I talk to. If the idea makes them come up with ideas of their own that fit with mine, such as a character or a potential location, the concept might have “it”. If someone else is so enthusiastic about the concept they want to make it happen, not only does the larp idea have “it” – we also have sown the seeds of a production team.

1942 & The Three Affiliations Model

efatland — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 08:16:42 +0000

So it’s been a hiatus. My main excuse is that my larp writing energy has gone into a) a larp (Marcellos Kjeller, pics , to be blogged) and b) an article about the larp “1942 – noen å stole på” (FLH, 2000) for the forthcoming Nordic Larp book project. A fiendishly difficult writing project, as the article was to be less than 2000 words. Brevity is not my strong side.

While researching “1942″, a canonical 5-day 130-player larp held on Norway’s west coast back in 2000, I was reminded of the “Three Affiliations” model the 1942 organizers used to provide activities and relationships for their characters. The model was successful enough that it has later been reused for similar Norwegian larps – larps that focus on the living of daily life in smallish communities.

the Three Affiliations Model

As with all good larp design models, this one is really simple: Each character is defined through three group affiliations – usually Work, Family and Social circle. The work dimension provides the character with something to do during the daytime, and a set of colleagues or professional relationships with whom to interact. The Family dimension provides him with a place to stay, and a set of relatives. The social circle provides a third set of relationships, and can help to define the characters personality. Let’s take an example:

A: Male (40). Works as a fisherman. Married to character B. Member of the illegal late-night poker game.
B: Female (38). Volunteers at the orphanage. Married to Character A. Member of the Church Comittee Against Gambling.

Voila – two playable characters, and a nice little intrigue for them to role-play. From this point, the larpwright can go on to elaborating personal histories, relationships to colleagues etc. Or leave those details to the players – the Meat is already there.

Toiling for the Larp

Foreign readers might be surprised about one of the assumptions above: that players do their character’s work, in-game. This is far from universal in Nordic larping – but it does happen, and the larps that have used this model have all had a fair amount of in-character work. The focus of these larps is usually on achieving a believable experience, most often of a historical epoch, so work becomes a natural part of daily life. And skeptics should note that the work-place, whether a fishing boat, a cantina or a brothel, can be the site of all kinds of interesting drama.

But for other kinds of larp, each of the three affiliations can be replaced by something more appropriate. For example “gang membership” might replace “work” in a cyberpunk larp. Three remains a magic number, though, securing the play experience if one of the affiliations becomes dysfunctional, providing a sufficient variety of possible interactions.

Three Affiliations vs. Three Levels

In building dramatics, Susanne Gräslund also mentions a trifold approach – going from the largest level (conflict between nations) to the small (conflict between individuals). The three affiliations model is more character-centric, thereby ensuring consistency for different players, but there is nothing to indicate they can’t be combined.

That article was published in 2001, the year after “1942″ and the same year as the first Knutepunkt Book. I find it paradoxical that almost nothing has been written about this issue since. The question of “how do we design characters, and turn these into a cohesive community?” is after all the first question most larpwrights ask. The Three Affiliations Model offers one functional answer to that question.

Do you know of any other such approaches?

The pre-emptive character – Love in the Age of Debasement

efatland — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:15:25 +0000

Six couples. A cafè. 3 hours. No orcs, goblins, mystical orders, spies, asassins, or any kind of extraordinary characters. No magic, combat, violence, mystique, politics, or any kind of extraordinary drama. Just regular people, struggling to save or sever their relationships.

It was, of course, a larp – more precisely: Erlend Eidsems “Love in the Age of Debasement”. And the most interesting part of the larp was the innovative way it used written characters to construct the drama.

Most larps that have pre-written characters use some kind of life-story narration to define who the character was, and any past events that might motivate the character to act in certain ways during the larp. For example, Zorro might have killed your father three years ago, giving you a motivation to comitt revenge during the larp.

Half of the characters at “Love in the Age of Debasement”, the ones written by co-author Geir Tore Brenne, were done in this style. It’s a functional style of character writing – players usually “get it”, understand what the larpwright wants with the character. And if the writer manages to restrain himself from excessive decoration and unfocused narration – which Geir Tore certainly did – they can be eminently role-playable.

The interesting thing, however, are the characters written by Erlend Eidsem. Here’s a sample:

Not everything at once.
Bit by bit. Maybe
Have to pinch in.
Not so easy to hold it back.
Not anymore.
Everything changing.
All the time.
Leakages. In the panties.
Hourglass dripping. Sand hitting the bottom.
Time is running out. Bottom gets big and bigger.
The Blood! All this blood. Where does it come from?
The color? Brown?
Why always so brown?
Never thought of that. Ending. Beginnings. All ends are new beginnings.
What am I going to do?
Will it ever come? It always does..
Might go to examine it.
Just not alone.

What’s going on here? This is poetic form, reflecting not what the character did, but how she feels, what she is thinking, in the disjointed style of actual thought. But there’s more.

Something growing innside of me. THAT feeling. I never have felt it before.
Body is melting, floating. Life. Magic. Universe. Who could have known?
Me and HIM..
..and one more! I do know that this is not really the time.
Do I dare? Do I have the will?
Can I ever do anything?
”Meltdown towards another life?”

Bye, bye party
Bye bye Me.
From now on : We.

The stage is set: An unexpectedly pregnant woman, sitting in front of her boyfriend, wondering what to do about the pregnancy, what to tell him. Except this is not something that happened pre-larp. This, per the organisers instructions, are things she will think during the larp. It is a an attempt at filling the players mind with the same thoughts and images that are meant to be in the characters mind. They just happen to be written down beforehand.

Do I have the courage to remove it? Shit, fuck, forever – rest of my life? And longer?
Do I have to courgage to keep it?
Am I mature enough – is it actually mature to keep it?

Babycarriages. Eternal rows of baby carriages. Lines. Mothers. Standstill.
You are in that queue. Right now, but you thought you were free of the whole system.
Your age. My education. My opportunities.Will this splinter the thin threads woven in between us.
This is not Circus Merano. This is life.
The masquerade is over. Cannot find the right mask. Finding no mask.
Tonight it is only children. Rubbernipples. Curtains of Winnie the Pooh.

After the mask there is the wound. Aching. Reality bites.
Am I really ready to take that much sunlight.
I am an angel of the night. I hate Maria Magdalena. I hate virgin Mary.
GOD! – go back were you came from.

Christening, Baptising?

Meandering thoughts – one moment detesting the pregnancy, the next moment taking it for granted. These are not clear, indisputable instructions to the player. They follow the path of the characters thought, and allow the player to determine whether and how to express those thoughts in words and actions.

Which decision will she take? One ending is suggested by the final paragraph:

Cries. Tears that drip. Leakage in the panties. Blood. Small drops of blood. Everywhere
.Will it hurt? Oh, stay with me! Someone.. Anyone.. I need everybody. More than ever.
I need him. You have become WE. I am WE. US three.

Another ending, and a completely different narrative, is suggested by the character of her partner:

Looking her straight into the eyes.
Total penetration. Taking off.Riding the highway.
She is so horny. She is so hot.You and her. The forever party.
Forever dancing. Forever young.
Knocking off – HARD. Harder than ever before.

(…)

It’s the rule of the game: No relationship, no commitment, maximum passion. Until it dies..
Bye, bye honey… and hello, again.

(No happy families here – this was a larp about love going wrong)

How did these characters work in play? The players who received them generally loved them. Since the setting was highly structured (you’re a couple in difficulties, at the cafè, reach the climax of argument when the DJ plays your song) the texts were easily interpreted and easy to draw inspiration from.

Character style as influencing player style

Since the larp both contained Erlends “pre-emptive” poetic flow-of-consciousness characters and Geir Tores ordinary retrospective characters, it serves as an interesting test bed of writing styles.

And, at the run I attended, the difference was visible in role-playing: the retrospective characters tended to end up more rational, more verbal, more argumentative than the pre-emptive ones. The players of the pre-emptive characters, by contrast, were more likely to express emotion, more likely to use body language, more physically present than those of pre-emptive characters. Their characters were simply less rational than the retrospectively written characters.

Obviously, 12 players at a cafe are not enough data to draw this kind of conclusion with anything close to certainty. But since Erlend and Geir Tore plan to re-run the larp in the future, and perhaps publish it on-line, we’ll probably be able to test and re-test this hypothesis several times in the future.

Love in the age of debasement

Concept by Erlend Eidsem. Originally done as a Dogma larp at Sydcon, 2001.
Second edition by Erlend Eidsem and Geir-Tore Brenne. Held in the Laivfabrikken (“larp factory”) network, autumn 2009, Sagene Lunchbar, Oslo.
2.5 hours of play. 12-14 players, 2 organisers, one photographer.

[book review] Pervasive Games – theory and design

efatland — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:06:37 +0000

(this is the English text of a review published in Finnish translation in issue #23 of Roolipelaaja magazine)

Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, Annika Waern:
Pervasive Games – Theory and Design

This book is important. For years, people have been playing different kinds of games that occur in public spaces, that mix play with reality and players with unwitting civilians, that can invade your life at any time and any place. Some of these should be familiar to role-players: games such as “Killer”, where you murder your friends with bananas, or the “city larp”, played on the streets, in the cafes, amongst non-larpers. Others, such as “Alternate Reality Games” (ARGs) or location-aware mobile games, have their origins in business and marketing. Yet others, such as zombie walks or flash mobs, seem to have exploded out of the creative stew of the Internet.

In the past, the interested reader would have to trawl though plenty of blog posts, web articles, and research journals to even begin getting an idea of how such things were played, let alone designed. “Pervasive Games” brings it all together, separates fact from hype, and sorts out the similarities as well as differences between these – at times – strikingly different games. The book reads as a semi-anthology, with most of the longer chapters written by the authors, but with essays and game descriptions from 13 other contributors. Pretty much every aspect of the activity is covered – from history, to design, to ethics, to how pervasive games fit into contemporary culture. So yes – it is an important book.

Does that mean you should read it? That depends on who you are, and what part of the book you are talking about. Anyone involved in game design, whether as a role-playing GM making your own adventures or as a designer of massive online games, will find inspiration in the 13 “case studies”, describing the successes and failures of pervasive games from “Killer” to “The Beast” – often from the point of view of the designer. The remainder of the book caters to specialists – researchers, professional designers, Nordic larp theorists and the like, but with different sections presumably of interest to different people.

The book’s main strength is, as such, also its main weakness: the encyclopedic covering of everything pervasive game-related, from lonelygirl15 to Swedish arthaus larp, from Borat to semiotics and postmodernism. With a mere 300 pages for all this material the result is a densely-packed tome – foot-noted and referenced to boot – which is on occasion difficult to digest even for someone who has followed the authors’ writing on pervasive games over several years. This is dietary fiber for the mind: it’s healthy, important, but not always tasty. Still, as an encyclopedia – to be browsed and consulted at need or for inspiration, rather than something that must be read from cover to cover – “Pervasive Games” remains eminently readable.

Of particular interest to larpers is the chapter that discusses the ethics of (role-)playing with people who do not know that you are role-playing. This has been an ethical and practical quagmire for decades – I had my first encounter with the Oslo police at a Vampire larp in 1995, following a mock drive-by shooting that looked real enough for a neighbor to phone it in. While the authors do not provide an Ultimate Solution to such problems (who could?), they go a long way in clarifying and exemplifying the list of things that could go wrong, or seem ethically dubious, and the available strategies for dealing with them.

That chapter alone is reason enough to buy this book. And for those who would claim to design or research pervasive games, it’s mandatory reading. From this point on, you simply cannot speak with any credibility about such games without having read “Pervasive Games – theory and design”.