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.

Fishermen at '1942 - Noen å stole på'. Photo copyright (c) 2000-2010 Britta Bergersen

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?

Scene from "Love in the Age of Debasement". Copyright 2009 Li Xin. Used with permission. Click for more.

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.

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”.

How are we to design larps, to teach and talk about larp design, if we are unable to talk about how larp works, what goes on when people role-play? A lot of larps are designed and played almost unconsciously. Yes, we know how to play, we also, for the most part,  know how to design. But when people ask “how?” we resort to simplistic metaphor and simile – “like cowboys and indians with adults!”, “like theatre, but without an audience!”, “like the plot at last years summer larp, but with dark elves instead of orcs”…

This works fine for a group of friends who play and organize together. It can even work well for whole communities. Trouble arrives when people with different backgrounds sit down to design a larp together, or when you try to pass on knowledge and experience to others.

Then, it’s not enough to say what larp is like. We need to be able to talk about what larp is.

Thankfully, that conversation started a decade ago. The Dogma 99 manifesto presented the first definition of live role-playing, as “a meeting between players who, through their characters, relate to each other in a fictive reality”. (though I co-wrote the Dogma 99 manifesto, all credit for that definition belongs to Lars Wingård).

Several definitions have followed, and the interconnected discussions about what larps are, how larps are played, and how they are designed have evolved into eight knutepunkt books and a gazillion online messages, eventually even infiltrating and inspiring academic research into (live) role-playing. There was theory before the Knutepunkt books, of course, and there’s also theory outside them. Not all of the knutebooks are theory (there are also reviews, history, opinion…), and there is Knutebookish theory outside of them. But at present the Knutepunkt books form the largest interconnected corpus of ideas about larp.

In this first series of blog-posts, “Understanding larp”, I’ll recap some key points from those discussions, and emphasize the ones I find most useful for dramaturgy.  Read it as a “larp theory 101″, if you will, but keep in mind that I’m writing with the biased eyes of a larp designer. If I don’t find a chunk of theory relevant to larp design, I’m going to ignore it. If I find something relevant that’s mentioned only in an obscure footnote in an obscure paper, I’ll give it disproportional space.

I have been known, on occasion, to be wrong.

Kaizers Orchestra in Munich - photo by Johanna Bocher, CC 2.0 by-nc-nd

“Good idea – great universe!” This is one of the most common responses I get when pitching Marcello’s Kjeller, the larp I’m currently working on together with Anders Ohlson, Arvid Falch and the Larp Factory. The larp has been announced as inspired by the music of Kaizers Orchestra – a Norwegian band with a vaguely Tom Waits-like sound and lyrics that evoke film noir, Godfatheresque mafia, a rural ambience and WW2 resistance fighters. In Kaizers’ lyrics people play Russian roulette, perform the Polka in “the traditional way”, confess their sins to the Chauffeur, wear gas masks, and dance the ompa until their death in grand gypsy finales. It is a cool universe.

But will it make a good larp?At the moment, the question is difficult to answer. All those things evoked by Kaizer’s lyrics are precisely evocative – they bring up images, not facts. Finite stories, not potential play. Names, not whole characters. When Tony confesses to the chauffeur that he has fired his revolver in the cathedral of his father, I have no idea how that might be brought to happen at a larp, let alone how to evoke the melancholy and despair inherent in the song. Ahead of us is the job of fleshing out the characters, detailing out other potential events for them, and figuring out what Miss Conradas, Tony and Mister Kaizer might do for a whole evening at Marcello’s basement. We need to define how one dances Polka the traditional way, what kind of “Ompa” can be danced until death and how, precisely, gas masks fit into it all. The Kaizers universe begs to be explored, but exploration is not straight-forward. In theoryspeak, Kaizers lyrics do not translate to an interaction code (more on those later, or in my 2006 Knutbook article).

Squeezing big worlds into small larps

Yes, but must it be in middle-earth? (photo quoted from "The Fellowship of the Ring", 2001)

Plenty of larps have been based on the idea of world exploration. On the face of it, it is easier to adapt universes than it is to adapt stories – larping the “Lord of The Rings” is almost inconceivable, but a larp set in a pub on the Shire sounds highly playable.

The world exploration mode works well for tabletop role-playing, where the players can push forward into uncharted territory and the GM can consult sourcebooks or make things up as they move along. It does not work that well in larp, where the play universe is finite, set by the timing and location of the larp. Is the pub on the Shire really that more playable than any other pub set in any other universe, including our own? It will certainly lack the tragedy of Frodo, the White City, the sacrifice of Gandalf and the other elements that make “The Lord of the Rings” a good read. As for Kaizers, we can’t explore the whole world of their lyrics, only the potential interactions and non-interactions of an evening in Marcello’s basement.

A universe does not, by itself, make a larp. At their worst, they may serve to inspire unplayable larps. At their best, they form an interaction code and an interesting framework around a larp situation. At their very best but also most challenging, they might be the frame of a larp that is both playable and that evokes the same emotions as its source material, yet with more detail. I hope this will be the case with Marcello’s Kjeller – on November 14th, we’ll find out.

Photo quoted from SonsbeekLive.org

Plenty of interesting things to learn from the documentation: Condon’s tower, of course, is truly inspirational and shows a potential third path for fantasy-larp scenography, an alternative to both crappy-looking symbolism (rope = city wall) and work-intensive authenticity (100 volunteers and 5000 stones = city wall).

Even though the Sonsbeek festivals plastic bubbles and Christoesque towers do not in any way look medieval, they look magical. This kind of expressive scenography is the norm in theatre, but very rare in larps. The only comparable larps I can think of are Hamlet Innifrån (Riksteatern 2000), which was played inside a white inflatable bubbly “castle”, and Luminesence (Pettersson & Pohjola 2004) played in a room full of flour.

Also notice how SonsbeekLive solved the problem of integrating a non-playing audience: to player characters, the audience were invading spirits that ought to be chased away with mirrors and chanting. While players and audience did not co-exist in the same reality, this notion allowed the larpers to be interpreted as performers by the audience and the audience to have a diegetic significance to the larpers. Judging by the documentation video, it seemed to work well for the audience. I’m curious how this worked for the players.

Rumour has it that Condon & Pedersen are taking their collaboration to the US for 2010. I hope that next time, Bjarke will do us the favour of spreading the rumor in advance, as opposed to casually dropping the url to his facebook account – only on request – a year later… there is such a thing as too much humility. The people Demand to Know about cool larps being held!

So there’s this group in Elverum in Norway, called “De Krakilske Papegøyer” (DKP), which no-one in the Oslo scene had heard about until they’d already organised five larps. And to the sixth one, Marthe, a larper from Oslo went and returned reporting (no) what she had experienced. Turns out they were using a novel incentive they called “sekundærrolle”, meaning secondary character description: little envelopes that you opened at particular times during the larp.

So an envelope, to borrow DKPs example, might have the text “open if you meet your wife”, given to a character whose wife disappeared years ago. And when at the larp the wife actually appears, the envelope reveals that “you really can’t stand her – she’s ugly and annoying. How can you get rid of her?” This, in turn, might set off further events in the wife’s story.

A similar kind of incentive was used by Mike Youngs classic comedy larp Snugglebunny Ringwraiths, about the Dark Lord Sauron being expelled to the land of the Snugglebunnies, a parody of childrens TV shows populated by near-identical cute, cuddly things who hug rather than fight. When reaching a sufficient threshold of unwanted snugglebunny hugs, the player of Sauron opens envelopes, each one instructing him to mellow out a bit, until the final envelope instructs him that he is no longer a Dark Lord but rather the Sauron Snugglebunny.

The technique, especially as used by DKP, is highly reminiscent of fate-play, so I’ll call it the Fate Envelope. In dramaturgical terms, it consists of an instruction where the condition is printed on the outside of an envelope and the effector is contained on the inside. (more on triggers, effectors and the like in a future blog post and this old article). DKP’s technique could even be expanded into a more fateweb-like structure, by hiding envelopes inside envelopes, or letting the player start with several fate envelopes to be opened at different times.

As with most permutations of the fate system (and there are many) I would guess that the tricky part is to get them to work together, so that all players involved in a fate-point (e.g. the husband and wife) get it to work, and so that the chain of events set off by the first instruction actually behaves like a chain of events rather than isolated incidents or orders impossible to carry out. If you manage that, the results can be astounding.

Transparency vs. surprise
There’s a big and never-ending debate between proponents of larpwright secrecy (surprising players) and the proponents of transparency (preparing players). I’ll limit myself to discussing it here as it relates to fate and fate-like techniques such as the fate envelopes.

In its original incarnation, fates were meant to produce a mix of preparation and surprise: you might know your part of the fate-web, but carrying out the fate would trigger the unexpected response. Already in our early experimentation (with Moirais Vev and Afasias Barn), we abandoned the insistence on surprise – and let players decide whether they wanted to see the whole fate-web or not. Most felt that seeing the whole web helped them enjoy the larp better, and improvise more appropriate arcs for their characters.

The advantages of transparency were amply demonstrated by Swedish theatrical larp “En Stilla Middag Med Familien”, where theatre scripts were read by the players pre-larp and then dissected into fate-like structures. At that larp, players had collective advance knowledge of the story-arcs in full detail, including things like dialogue and character motivation that in traditional fate-play are left to player improvisation. Even though most of the dialogue and many of the core events of the actual larp were improvised, the transparency of script gave us a solid basis for improvisation. If you know what will happen to your character, you can prepare for it.

It depends on the genre
What is gained, then, by secrecy – by hiding the instruction in an envelope? Certainly a little more surprise, on the part of the player. This works well for Snugglebunny Ring-wraiths, where Sauron’s transformation to a Snugglebunny becomes funnier when it is unexpected. Comedy relies largely on the unexpected. For the other snugglebunnies, of course, it doesn’t really matter whether Sauron’s player has advance knowledge of his characters fate or not, but the envelopes allow him to be an equal victim of the joke.

Another use of secrecy might be the thriller or horror larp. As Lovecraft put it, “Of all emotions, fear is the most ancient, and fear of the unknown the most profound.” A larpwright might plan a thriller larp driven by players fear of sounds in the dark rather than actual monsters. But isn’t it more effective if players do not know whether there are monsters in the dark or not? The fate envelope can be used similarly to build suspense, or trigger sudden horror.

This suggests a guideline for when to use secrecy as part of dramaturgy: when the revelation of the secret is likely to produce a sought-after emotion in the player. And it also suggests an appropriate ethical boundary: that the emotion is, in fact, sought after. It’s still a bad idea to let brain-eating zombies run loose at the larp you announced as “a strict reenactment of everyday life in the 1820’s”.

—

(plush ninja by plushplex, on flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The model simply states that during a larp, there are two kinds of personal journeys undertaken: the journey of the player, and the journey of the character. Both might have their high points, their turnarounds, their narrative structure. They might intersect to a great degree – the most important moment of the characters life might also be – to the player – the most important moment of the larp. But then again, it might not.

fig. 1 : the player's journey and the character's journey

The character’s journey, being the path of a fictive person, consists entirely of events – things that happen, are said, are done, are described. The player’s journey, the path of the real human, is one of experience – of saying, doing, feeling, thinking, imagining.  The two are obviously not independent of each other. The player’s journey is influenced by what happens to the character, and the player – in turn – decides what the character does.

fig. 2 : the player enacts the character, and the character's journey influences the player's journey

In additon, the player experiences the actions of other characters, the progress of the larp itself. These may be interpreted differently from how the character interprets them. I might recognize great role-playing in the player of my characters mortal enemy. But my character, his journey, is the key to unlocking that experience.

The interesting implications of the model begin when you look beyond the larp itself. When does the player’s journey start? That is: when does the player begin forming an experience of the larp? It’s certainly before the larp begins, as players begin building a mental image of what the larp will be like. We might place the beginning of the player’s journey as early as the first time the player hears about the larp, when she first begins imagining what might happen at the larp and who she might play. Or it might be even before that, when the player comes across a costume or a character idea, thinking: at what kind of larp can I play this?

fig. 3 : the player's journey begins by thinking about the larp

And when does the players journey end? That is, when does the player’s interpretation of the larp stop evolving? Dare I suggest: never? I still have situations where I re-evaluate larp experiences from 10 years ago in light of life, or re-evaluate life in light of larps played a decade ago. In a sense, this is the mark of truly great larps: they maintain a constant presence in your life.

fig. 4 : interpretation continues post-larp

You might notice I’m speaking here about “interpretation” rather than “action”. Obviously, the player and character’s journeys are only enacted when they intersect: at the larp itself. But that activity is constantly informed by the players interpretations – of the character, the play world, the larp’s style and purpose, the co-players and characters and the events that have already occured.

What then of the characters journey? Does it fit neatly inside the boundaries of the larp? Perhaps not. Its highest density is when it is played, inside the larp-frame, when most of the player’s conscious moments are devoted to exploring the character’s journey. But few characters start out as empty slates – the player, or larpwright, define key points in the characters back-story. And so we can visualize it as a path extending backwards in time from the larp.

But wait! At the onset of the larp, we do not know all there is to know about the character’s past life. Much is added through improvisation. As a player, I might invent a childhood anecdote to tell. Or simply refine my idea of who the character is and was in the past.

fig. 5 : the characters story begins before the character is played

And furthermore, unless the character dies at the larp, we can imagine its story – its journey – stretching forward into an unknown future.

I remember a player who complained about the dramatic ending of the larp Kybergenesis, a nitty-gritty dystopia where most of the characters died towards the end. The player insisted his experience would have been stronger if he had left the larp knowing that his character’s life would have continued unchanged – in other words, if he had felt certain that he knew the characters journey would continue, and had an idea of how it would continue. This became the effect I designed for in Europa and PanoptiCorp, by trying to give players a clear idea of the characters’ daily life and ending the larps at a point where it seemed the daily life would continue. Alternately, of course, one can try to reach the climactic conclusion to the character’s journey at the larp, which was the effect we designed for at Moirais Vev and Mytteriet.

fig. 6 : provided the character survives the larp, her story continues into the unknown future

What is the value of this model? Partially, I find it a useful reminder of what a larp looks like to the player – and of how a larpwrights work will ultimately be evaluated. Not by the elegance of plot charts, or the literary value of written texts, nor by the beauty of the scenography. But by the story that can be told of the character’s journey, by the evolving interpretations and reinterpretations in the player’s mind. I have been to larps that seemed like failures, but that grew and grew as players continued reflected on their experiences. Conversely, I have been to larps that received extatic reviews immediately after their conclusion, but that were forgotten not long after.

Were we to compare ourselves to painters, our canvas would be the player’s journey. Our brush is the character’s journey. Plot, character, scenography, drama – these are simply daubs of paint.

Classic net.art myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru Pretty and poetic, but dramaturgically its just 2-3 branches leading to the same destination.

Most “cybertexts”, to borrow Aarseths catch-all term for things like hypertext fiction and narrative games, use structures similar to the most basic and rudimentary larp dramaturgies. Interactive television and interactive installations are more primitive even than that, usually allowing for only one of two kinds of participation: either the same kind of pick-one-of-two-paths interactivity as in “choose your own adventure” books, or some kind of indirect influence – opaque to the participants – for example by having a computer select scenes to show based on the movements of the viewers.

There are some non-digital interactive dramas, from Grotowskis “beehives” to “Tony and Tinas wedding”, that approach larp in their level of dramaturgical sophistication. But again, larpers (at least of the Nordic kind) have come further in a) establishing stable, reproducible, forms of dramatic interaction and b) writing about it so that others might learn.

Now, I might be wrong about this. I haven’t read everything ever written about interactive narratives, nor participated in every one ever made. If you know of any counter-examples, please do let me know!

Leisure Suit Larry, sophisticated interactive narrative.

But assuming I’m right in this negative assessment: Why is it so? There are several plausible explanations: the cycles of larp production have enabled rapid, iterative development of the form. The volunteer spirit of larp communities has made experiments cheap to produce and test, while the communities themselves have provided the continuity of a stable form. Personally, i tend to blame the high-brow arts on one hand for being too concerned about the meaning of individual works, and not enough about reproducing the structures of successful ones, while the low-brow stuff on the other hand, such as the computer games industry or television, has been too risk-averse.

But the main advantage of larp when approaching “interactivity” and “participation” is that it is inherently both interactive and participatory. Rather than beginning with something that is passive and linear, like television or the Novel, and trying to open it up for participation, live role-playing begins with the a group of equal participants who ask “What can we build together?”.

From that staring point, anything is possible.