It is a series of works, a cascade, each work inspiring the next.

There is the concept as it lives in the minds, conversations, whiteboards, and notepads of the larpwrights. The idea of the larp-to-be. But it is not the larp.

There might be a larpscript, neatly written to enable anyone to run the larp. A particular expression of the idea of the larp-to-be. But this, also, is not the larp.

There is the concept as it is communicated to players, through rules and workshops and background information and the website and so on. This too is an autunomous work of art – intended to express the concept or execute the larpscript, but not identical to either. Nor is it identical to the larp.

There is the larp as it is played. So much could be, and has been, said about this. Is it one work, or is it a multitude, a river delta of creative works that come into being as each and every player creates the larp from their own vantage point? Or is each single moment of play a work in its own right, a swarm of interacting and intersecting works?

Yes. All of these.

The visible and invisible interaction or non-interaction of players, as they play. This is what we most often mean when we say “the larp” and are forced to narrow it down. And it is an object that cannot be studied. Emergent and ephemeral. We’ve already lost it. But that was always the point.

After it’s gone, new works are created in order to make sense of what we lost. Player stories, reviews, photographs (carefully shot, selected, edited), analysis articles. The Movie of the Larp. The Presentation About The Larp. Each one an attempt to capture The Larp. There have been poems derived from larps, plays and novels derived from larps, books published about larps. The larpscript that did not exist before the larp might be written after it, to enable new larps to be played, similar to the one that was lost. The larpwrights might write articles about the concept, the idea of the larp-to-be, contrasting it with the larp that actually was (& was lost).

Each one of these is an autonomous work of art. You can analyse and appreciate and critique the Movie About The Larp even if it had very little to do with The Larp. The photos are forever, but they are photos. They are not the larp. The Larp was messy, dirty, sweaty, with weird pauses and times you did not look your best. There were probably players there who happened to never walk in front of the camera. The pretty pictures with all the players present were staged post-larp.

We each carry our memory of the larp. We try to share them, compare notes, thereby changing our memories of the larp. We create reputation, legacy, and the more we try to agree on the Truth about The Larp the more we erode of the actual memories.

We started loosing the larp as we played it, as each moment of improvisation collapsed many potential events into a single actual one. And when we finished playing it, it was gone. Because we never played it for the camera, or the story, or the article. We did not play it to be viewed, analysed, critiqued. We did not try to carve into stone any truths about the world and our place in it. We allowed ourselves to live, for some minutes or hours or days, entirely free of all that.

And that’s the point.

And so after the larp we yearn for “documentation”, trying to bring that wondrous feeling with us into the future, to brag about it, trying to fit all the pieces together as if the larp was a puzzle and the pieces could actually be put together. And we’ll never succeed, of course, but we’ll make many new things along the way.

And that, also, is the point.

Ritual improv at Knutpunkt 2010. Photo: Li Xin

Level 0:
The sign for !opt-out.
The permission to leave.

Level 1-5: The baseline
The River:
1. We make sound.
2. Listening is important.
3. Eyes shut.

Level 5-10: The Flock
1. The beginning of this exercise is identical to the “Flocking” exercise of improvised dance.
2. But also use the River.
3. No leaders!
4. No circles!
5. Flocks meet.

Level 10-20: Signs
!Ending the Sequence.
!Lowering the Volume.
!Remember
!Repeat
!remember and !repeat -> call and response, subdividing, instructing voice vs. physical movement
Moving in circles
Walking against the circle.
!Giving leadership
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Level 20-25: Ritual Drama
!Posession/Giving roles
!Subdividing/Living scenography
The Storyteller

Beyond 25: Ethics of the herd.

Participant reflections between each block.

Context

I’ve run this version of the ritual workshop / ritual improv course at Spillerom, GNiales, and twice as an extracurricular at the larpwriter summer school. It’s based on the ritual improvisation system for KoiKoi, which is in turn based on a number of previous ritual workshops going way back to the Oslo scene of the mid 90s. The Knutepunkt ritual workshops held by Matthijs Holter, Erlend Eidsem and myself were important precursors. While these techniques have many authors, this particular configuration of them is my own.

The ostensible purpose of ritual improv is to train participants to be able to improvise “rituals” on the fly in the midst of a larp – to make it look like their characters know exactly what they’re doing, even as the players are making it all up. By “ritual” I mean synchronized, meaning-ladden, group movements and sound: anything from a religious ceremony to a formalized introduction at a state dinner or a recreation of Ancient greek dionysian revelries. The techniques themselves are not culture- or time-specific.

A storyteller / ritual leader using a hand-sign at KoiKoi (2014). Photo: Li Xin

Method

The ritual improv workshop aims to enhance bodily awareness and the ability to listen (the river and the flock), training participants into finding joint motions and sounds without leaders, and then re-introducing leadership through a system of hand-signs without removing participant agency and co-creation.

The flock and the river are the base techniques : add rythm (a drummer, or clapping), and you will have a group of people who move and sing in synchronicity for an indefinite period of time. This will bring on a kind of trance. Motions and sounds will gradually metamorphose. Enormous amounts of time will pass. It usually ends in a final peak of exhaustion amongst the last ritualizers still standing. It’s an interesting and powerful experience, an “accoustic rave”, but a time-consuming one, free of dramaturgy. Not really a ritual in the cultural sense.

To constrain rituals and diversify their content, we need leaders. There are hand-signs for taking, delegating and passing on leadership in the midst of a ritual. There are hand-signs for assigning participants particular roles or characters in the ritual (possession) and there are hand-signs for giving chanting or movement instructions (imitation and call-and-response). Instructions can be given to individuals, to groups (men, women, you over there) and to the whole crowd.

Finally, gestures can be used to increase or reduce the volume, and to end a sequence. Reducing volume and ending sequences are necessary, as the inner logic of an improvising group tends to be a movement towards a constantly higher and louder peak.

While I think the hand-signs can be refined even more (e.g. separating imitiation – “do what I do” from call-and-response – “wait for my signal and then do what I am doing now”) the current incarnation IMHO makes for a powerful toolbox, and a step up from the late-90s ritual culture, though one which requires training and experience to fully utilize.

It’s also my experience that ritual improv and ritual leadership can only be taught and learnt through practice, with a sufficiently large group of participants. Most of it is non-verbal. People keep asking for written guides or filmed tutorials and I keep having to disappoint them. For the time being, at least, I prefer ritual improv to spread by oral transmission and have a chance to evolve before it is formalized. I believe ritual improv may have the potential to grow from “methods for cool larp rituals” into an autonomous form of culture.

(edited to expand on context and method, and incorporate information already shared online).

And that’s OK. Because you know what’s the alternative to making mistakes? Shutting up. Standing still. Not improvising. Not roleplaying.

In fact: it’s not just OK, it’s excellent. We ignore the mistakes of others. We forgive them. We forget them. When we think back on the larp, it’s not the mistakes we remember. And some mistakes are hidden gifts, that take roleplay to new and interesting places.

Roleplaying, improvising, requires us to make mistakes. A barrage of mistakes. That’s how we learn. That’s when things happen. That’s how we become so comfortable as our characters that things just flow, and the magic begins seeping in. By daring to make mistakes you give your character a chance to speak through you. Clumsily at first. Fluently later.

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Let us make many mistakes together, so that we may have a great larp!

—

(This is a version of a talk I gave before KoiKoi (2014), written from memory, and rewritten to be more generic. It was re-used by the organizers of the 2015 run of Just A Little Loving. Feel free to quote, steal, paraphrase, or do whatever you want with the text. No attribution needed.)

The frame is general to all participants. It includes the game rules, the procedures for signing up and co-creating or interpreting the content, the spatial design of the larp, the format – duration and it’s segmentation or lack of segmentation into distinct units such as acts, chapters. It includes the manner of beginning and ending the larp. And it includes the world their characters inhabit – the fiction, or diegesis – with all its hidden suggestions (Interaction Codes – see article in Role, Play, Art ) about play style and possible stories and appropriate things to do and experience.

The canvas contains the individually specific aspects of the larp design. Character texts or personal costume, the conflicts or relationships or goals and motivations of individuals and groups.

The canvas is never fully painted. It’s larp – improvised, co-created. Players take the starting points provided by the larpwright and continue painting. Only in retrospect, as players talk and recall and describe and compare notes, does the metaphor of a larp as a painting begin to make sense.

*

Some larp traditions design larps mostly inside very similar, or identical frames. Quite a lot of fantasy boffer traditions work this way: three randomly selected larps will have the same game rules, the same general playing field, the same duration and segmentation of time, the same way of beginning, and of ending, and of creating characters. They vary mostly in the spread of characters and the activities they engage in.

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*

As a larpwright, you face the choice of whether to design the frame, or the canvas, or both. I don’t think there is any “right choice”. Systemic design allows for scalability and rerunnability. But there are certain design spaces that become unavailable, especially the spaces of individual psychology, morals and perceptions that are often explored by theatre and literature. Systemic design excels on exploring the actions of groups – the mechanics of societies, or conflicts.

Canvas-dominant designs (should we call them “tailored”?), on the other hand, are less suitable for exploring group action but open up a design space of strong and distinct individuals, private interactions. They scale poorly, but can re-run easily.

My goal in proposing this (unpolished, unfinished) model is not to be prescriptive, but descriptive. At the very least, I find it helps me understand differences in larp and roleplaying traditions.

And I find it a useful question to ponder at the early stages of a design process: do we want to achieve this by working with the frame, the canvas, or both?

(video courtesy of Nordic Larp Talks)

Full text and images:

My name is Eirik Fatland. I hold a Norwegian passport, a Masters degree in new media design, and a job in financial services. I am 37 years old. For 20 of those 37 years, I have spent large chunks of my spare time, and some chunks of time that really should have been devoted to studies or work, on playing games of make-believe together with friends and strangers.

I am a larper.

Yes, I have hit my friends, repeatedly, with rubber swords.

I have performed strange rituals in dark forests.

I have been dumped by women who were never my girlfriend …

… and hooked up with guys despite neither of us being gay.

I have been a character in an Ibsen play and a character in a Monty Python comedy. I have lived for a week in the year 1942, another week in the year 40 AD. Altogether, I have participated in a few hundred larps. Some requiring only an hour of my time, some lasting a week and demanding months of preparation.

As if playing larps does not take enough time I have been – and continue to be – a larp designer. One who sets the stage for others to play.

I have invited players to be grungy resistance fighters at a musical larp …

… to be traumatized refugees at an asylum reception center …

… and ordinary people waking up as prisoners forced to face impossible moral choices by a disembodied voice.

At the tender age of 21, I was in charge of locking 120 people around my own age into a shut-down mental asylum where they lived for five days in a totalitarian society resembling George Orwells 1984.

Now. Society has – on multiple occasions – told me that this isn’t really acceptable. Friends, relatives, co-workers and teachers keep implying that if I had worked harder towards being able to buy a BMW and a larger house, or feed a growing family, or volunteer to help the poor and the destitute, or sell my talents as a writer or an artist, or kick a ball around on a grassy field – that would all be good. But that the passions I direct towards roleplaying, though tolerated (we live in a tolerant society), are just weird and irrelevant.

So, while it has been getting better in recent years, I obviously have felt a need to ask the question myself: Does larp matter?

And in truth – I am ambivalent.

On sunny days I see in role-playing the potential for a transformation of the role-player into a more fully realised human being, and of art towards more democratic forms capable of depicting the human condition with a degree of intimacy and realism unthinkable in the spectator arts. On rainy days, however, it all seems like a gratuitous, incestuous and self-indulgent waste of time.

But I am convinced that *larp design* matters, more than larping itself, and to more people than to the people who design and play larps. And I’m here to talk about Why I think this is the case.

Let’s look at what larp designers do.

This is PanoptiCorp. A larp about an advertising agency. The entire written material consists of a dictionary of 30 words, the office jargon of this agency. Terms like “NexSec” which means “next second” or cool, “mundy” which is a derogatry term for anything that is not NexSec, and “HotNot” which is a vote held daily to determine your “CorpCred”, which in turn determines whether you have a job tomorrow. By adopting these 30 words, players learn enough of the mindset and work routines to be able to simulate a dark, cynical advertising agency with an alarming degree of immersion.

(more: PanoptiCorp Mini Documentary)

The Danish larp Totem invented a series of drama techniques that turned a group of young Scandinavians into two rigidly hierarchical and highly complex tribal societies.

A Norwegian larp called AmerikA worked with a group of ordinary young Norwegians over three weekends, and placed them in the midst of a mountain of garbage in the centre of the town. As a result of their training, they were not just able to bring to life a society of the crazy and destitute, but to draw in a hundred more players and an audience of thousands.

(more: Excavating AmerikA)

Acting As If

We larp designers do our thing by inviting players to act As If. As If they are knights. As If there is a dragon. Or As If they are migrants celebrating easter.

Larp, of course, is not unique in asking us to pretend As If. Children do it all the time. Adults do it too. If I tell a story quoting someone else saying “Fuck off”, then you understand I am not actually telling you to fuck off, but that I’m speaking as if I was that person. You, in turn, act As If I didn’t just say “fuck off”. This is not just a matter of games or stories. As Markus Montola explores in his PhD thesis on larp and pervasive games, a great deal of human society is built on people acting As If.

As If the bread consumed at eucharist is the body of Christ. As if the policeman is the embodiment of the state.
As If a sound – “stone” – is related to an object.
As If this piece of paper [a 100-kr. bill] is the equivalent of a cow.

When we design larps, we play with the building blocks of culture.

But asking people to act As If is not enough to make a larp.
As larpers we need to act As If together.
Because if I act As If I am a merchant from the city of Libidibi … And I greet you like this:

[weird gesture resembling bowing]

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To enable roleplaying, I need to identify the rules and symbols that actually matter. I need to reduce these to their minimal components – not a whole language. The 30 words that matter. Not a whole society – but the body language and the rituals that create the behavior that is most different from our own.

And I need to communicate those requirements to the players, so that they share the same language, the same norms, enabling them to act as if they were very different people in a very different society. And I cannot micro-manage the players – I need to ensure that the tools I give them fit together and work together and allow them to improvise something that fits together and becomes interesting or beautiful or humorous or profound.

The bottom line

is this: that what we do, as larp designers, is to describe and communicate the minimum requirements needed to direct human creativity towards a shared purpose.

And directing human creativity towards shared purpose is not a small thing. It is the primary challenge of any project, any community, of small businesses and corporations, families and clans and dynasties, cities, nation-states, civilizations. The resolutions to all of the big questions of our time – whether it is dealing with dog poo on the streets or solving the problem of climate change – depend on our ability to direct human creativity towards a shared purpose.

It is not a small thing. But it is a very challenging thing.

Now let me first tell you something that is not challenging, and it is to direct humans towards a shared purpose. Not their creativity, just their bodies and the essential facilities of their ability to control them.

We know very well how to do this. If we need to direct people towards a shared purpose …

.. we hurt and threaten them until they loose their rough edges and do what we tell them to do. Sometimes we medicate them, as well, or tell grand lies for them to believe in. And we have become very sophisticated with the hurting and threatening so it barely looks like hurting and threatening, and it barely sounds like trying to assert control but instead uses the language of “protection” or “safety” or “necessity” or “for your own good”. And it becomes internalized, rationalized. No longer the teacher or sergeant or boss threatinening you – but you yourself, the voice in your head.

But directing human creativity is much harder. Creativity describes our ability to generate and execute ideas. Creativity is complex problem-solving. And:

Creativity Does Not Thrive On Fear.

All authorities on creativity agree on this: that it requires fearlessness, thrives on playfulness.

Nor does creativity thrive on solitude. Neither Einstein nor Picasso would have been worth much without the communities and institutions that taught them a common language, challenged them, supported them. Creativity requires on a perfect blend of individual differences and common frames of expressing them.

And this is where we find larp and larp design.

Obviously, we are not alone in this. There are many others working on improving the ways we direct creativity towards a shared purpose.

There are art directors and theatre instructors, service designers and game designers, process planners and information architects, politicians and activists, teachers and urban planners and many different kinds of managers.

And on the research side of things there are sociologists, social psychologists, game design scholars, scholars of learning, of anthropology, of religion, of design, of economics.

But we, larp designers, have two unique advantages:

1. We prototype rapidly.

In the Nordic larp tradition we have simulated the institutional structures of slave-holding societes, of advertising companies and IT companies, of real and fictitious militaries. We have lived im societies with four genders and no genders. We have recreated daily life in the years 1349 and in 1942 and 10 000 BC. We have experienced the inner dynamics of hundreds of socieites, thousands of families. Our art might be based in games of make-believe, but by enacting those beliefs with our whole bodies, we make temporary realities.

Nobody else does this. No other branch of knowledge or practice can build a religion, test out for five days how it feels to be a believer, how belief affects action, and then use that experience to build another religion next year. The speed by which we can put imaginary social and creative constructs to the test enables us to learn more quickly than any other discipline.

2. We are multi-disciplinary

I am speaking, now, on the evening before the 17th Knutpunkt festival, an international celebration and discussion forum of live role-playing. In this network, that has met once a year since 1997, we have kept a conversation going on larp design. On experimental larps, on larp theory, on whatever we can use to improve the practice of larp design and enhance the toolbox of larp designers.

And you know what?

All of these strands of knowledge and practice are represented here, now, in this room:

art directors, theatre instructors, service designers and game designers, process planners, information archietcts, politicians, activists, teachers, urban planners, managers …

… sociologists, social psychologists, game design scholars, scholars of learning, anthropologists, compartive religionists, design researchers, economists …

We may be multidisciplinary as a result of our passions for larp. That when we need to make a living – we are drawn to adjoining fields. But in the kind of professions that actually pay you in real pieces of paper.

But we are also multidisciplinary because we have to be, because larp can depict the totality of human life and so must draw on the totality of human knowledge

Does larp design matter?

The toolbox of larp design contains ideas and symbols and rules and practices. These tools, in turn, allow us to build groups and companies and cultures and institutions.

The tools come from any and all branches of art and science. The tools keep getting tested and refined. Some tools – we have thrown away. Many others, we have made sharper. And we still discover new tools.

And so the toolbox keeps evolving. And we are getting better at understanding the tools, and at teaching them to others.

We are not there yet.

It is only two years ago that we started figuring out how to teach larp design, and so started realizing how much we still need to figure out.

But we’re getting there.

And as our toolbox evolves, I believe we will find – that we are already finding – that we can put the same tools to use to design “real” symbols and rules and roles and practices, and hence new kinds of culture, organisations and movements.

As such, larp design represents a new kind of leadership.

Not the leadership of hierarchy and intimidation.
Not a kind of leadership that is easily transplanted into our schools or companies.
But a leadership that works by inspiration, and by invitation. Building better playgrounds rather than pushing children around.

A kind of leadership that will found instituions, instigate movements.
And that may come to empower us with the rules and roles and symbols we can use to bring forth the best in ourselves, and to work towards realising our highest aspirations.

And this, I think, is why larp design matters.

Thank you.

And the slides, that don’t make that much sense without the video:

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Writing it down

Jaakko S: “Attempt to write about it. Fail. Lie awake at night thinking about it. Repeat until able to write.”

Susanne G: “I either hang out with people who were also there and talk talk talk. Or I write the story of my character, usually with an in-perspective. Sometimes both.”

Karete M : “I usually write stuff. It can be a mixture of my own, personal thoughts, the in-game story of my character and things other players have said that I want to bring with me. Also, if available, I watch tons of documentaries/movies etc that revolves around the themes I feel have touched me. I also like to curl into a foetus position and lie down on the floor for a couple of hours, contemplating what I’ve been through :)”

Malik H : “Work creatively – (personally I write lyrics for songs) and keep physically active.”

Reading up

Anders H : “I usually spend a lot of time listening to and reading about other participants stories, emotions and experiences from the game. It helps me remember and “file away” parts of my own memories and feelings.”

Thomas B : “Spending hours looking for/at pics of the game, reading people’s feedback and writing about it on my blog. Which I have not been able to do this year due to too many larps and it pisses me off to no end, because that “digesting” part is part of larping too.”

Talking it through

Johanna M : “Talking to a friend who was there. Several times. Posting a few braindumps in a private FB thread or over chat.”

“Also talking about it a week / month / year later has proved for me to be useful, and brings into focus how I felt in the larp – gives some perspective.”

Elin N : “This is how I’m coping with the larp Just a Little Lovin’ at the moment: Just being with the people I played with a lot, preferably several days in a row, broken up by dedicated alone-time where I prefer passive entertainment. I make sure I feel safe with the people I choose to socialize with, and I express my needs in the moment, whether that is a hug, some space, some confirmation. I like processing the game through discussions over time. Time and having people who understand is what heals my postlarpweirdness.”

Veronika F : “I find it fascinating how some of the people need to dive deeper into the experience while the others get away as far as possible and get in touch with reality.

For me, with the most intense emotions that trouble me, it’s somewhere in-between I guess – talking to someone who either didn’t play the game or if they did, they can listen to me and look at it from some other perspective, which rarely happens if they were deep in their own role.”

Symbolic actions

Jeanita H : “Writing a letter for my character really helped for my after Just a Little Lovin´ Also saying goodbye to the character or even killing him/her has helped me before.”

Shoshana K : “I usually use items to help me bring myself out of game. So I don’t carry my phone at most games, and it has my connections to the rest of the world. I grab it after game, plug in headphones, and listen to music that first I consider associated with my character (if it’s a long running campaign) or with the game itself or with LARPing. Then I listen to stuff that is just mine. It helps me get back into things. And then I go onto social media or answer some work emails and such? Brings me back into the real world.”

Lars W : “I was once stuck in feelings from one larp. So I wrote it down on a piece of paper, put the paper in a bottle, filled it with stones and threw it to the ocean. Worked for me.”

Kjersti L : “ [ … ] try to identify one thing about yourself that you’d like to leave behind with the character; one thing about the character that you’d like to bring with you into real life; and one thing about the character that you’re happy that you don’t have to deal with in real life.

Apart from that, writing and talking to other players, including having one or more debug-buddies, work really well for me, both during and after the game.”

Kjersti mentions the source of this technique: Johanna Koljonens excellent 2012 talk on larp safety.

Petter K : “While they often end up in the debrief on location, I still love the two questions:
1) What did me and my character have in common and I want to leave behind
2) What did my character have, that I don’t, that I want to keep with me.”

Dancing and music

Morgain H : “For me blues dancing works. It melts everything inside me and let it flow away.”

Josefin W : “Hanging out with the people I bleed with. This weekend i discovered that sometimes it works to dance the worst of the bleed away with that person. Otherwise I just need to hang out a lot with the person in question. I need to feel important and seen. I get kind of needy.”

Anna-Karin L : “If there is theme music to the larp I listen to that a lot.”

Anne Marie S : “Music! Listening to, and singing, songs that are connected to the larp and the emotions. It really helps me to sing (it’s physical and honest and helps me to connect with my own voice and body again). Listening to songs that were used at the larp (or songs that relate to the emotions brought on by the larp) lets me re-experience those feelings in a different setting and helps me to process them. And then moving on to songs that have nothing to do with the larp, but that mean something to me personally (like old favorites,the songs and hymns of my religion that reminds me what I believe and who I am, etc.)

And writing. Because I know this feeling will pass, and I don’t always want to forget all the thoughts I’m having right now.

Of course, most of the time, all of this isn’t needed. And mostly it works to just hang out with the right people and hug a lot.”

Rasmus T : “Music. Doing music that fits your mood :D”

Introspection

Sanna K: “One thing I would like to add is that for me, one of the functions of processing a larp is to hone and polish my memory of the game — so as to determine what I want to carry out of the game and to intensify that. For me, it works to dwell on a scene or memory that really highlights the feelings and themes of the game, and to listen (possibly on repeat) a song that somehow encapsulates that feeling. I don’t want to land fast, I want to land carefully and deliberately ;)”

Dagmar W: “Unlike most people here, I need to be alone. I go for a run or a walk while talking to myself, trying to analyze my feelings and put them into words, searching for what I’ve learned…and then I can talk about it with others. And yes, concentrating the “normal” stuff helps a lot as well.

So if you ever meet me in the middle of a deep forest, engaged in a conversation with an imaginary friend, no, I’m not a psycho.”

Daniel K: “I rarely experience that sort of afterglow, but when I do I tend to need some alone time: playing games, watching movies and listening to music that touches on the genre or emotional theme of the experience. I also have a strong need for contact with the couple of players I’ve had the most intense interaction with, usually by mailing or texting. The written word works best for me – meeting up and talking can actually be offputting, though at times I do that too (usually after a really profound journey).”

Martine S : “I play through the scenes over and over in my head, thinking, writing, talking to myself about them. I try to see how I could have reacted differently and play out alternative versions of the same events. All this is introspective, so I need to be alone.

Then, I need to find the people I had the most intense experiences with and talk through the scenes. Hugging, drinking, eating, talking. Over and over until it’s finely honed as memories.

Only after I’ve danced, sung, talked and written through the scenes do I approach my normal life. I have to be back in my own head, processed and ready, before I want to talk to people who weren’t there.”

Leo N : “I take long walks in urban areas at night.”

Kaia A : “For me: Long walk in the park/forest/nature or drawing pictures. Sometimes talking to someone who was not there, but still is interested enough to listen. And talking to one of the organizers if something happened that needs to be talked to one the organizers about.”

Joanna Ö: “I’m one of those who it takes ages for to process a larp and to put it into words that does the experience any justice. I try to avoid responding to smalltalk about the larp that would give away my experience as something less than it actually could be… as if trying to hang onto the utopia for a little bit longer, wary of losing the profound that could be put into words later on.”

Engaging in fiction

Bjarke P : “I usually consume a lot of other fictional worlds. Cinema, computer games, TV series, books, comics and such. It seems to be put in the same ‘fiction’ part in my memory as the larp.”

Reality Check

Annika W : “After debrief, I need a reality check. Meeting with friends who were not at the larp, choir practice, going to the gym, playing games with my kids, makes love to my S.O. Those kinds of everyday things.”

Troels S : “Sleep well. Eat healthy. Exercise. Fill out your time with something significant and fun that isn’t related to the game. Having kids is a great boon in times like that”.

Even T : “I tend to be less interested in talking about the game than I was before. I used to do that, hanging out with the people I had been playing with, clinging to the experience as long as possible. Now, I want to seek out the individuals I had a particularly intense play experience with and talk through things with them, but then just get away from all those people and do something else.”

Sonja E : “Earlier I felt the need to talk to the other players, now I don’t. Somehow I have found a way to distance myself just enough to get on with my real life, while at the same time carrying on the parts of the LARP I wanna keep with me without having such a difficult time to land anymore. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know, it just happened over the years. And believe me: I had often a hard time to land. The only thing I know: it is so much better for me to land this way.”

Landing as an organizer

Grethe S : “Here’s how I prefer to debrief myself when I’ve organized a larp. Be focused and listen to the players in the formal debrief. Cleaning up the area with a ritualistic approach in my mind, letting this temporary place of magic disappear. After a longer larp I prefer having an afterparty onsite, starting the transition to everyday life gradually. Lots of hugging and happy smiles with the other organizers. Music, looking up what people have shared online and sometimes taking part in interesting discussions a long time after the larp ended. I also really recommend having larp-discussions with a player during a midnight bath.“

Beverages

Ståle J: “Beer”

Katri L: “Just rant about your experience to any of your friends in a bar as long as you feel like regardless if they want to listen to you or not. When all of them leave, continue ranting alone with your beer and get wasted. Very old and working Finnish method.”

“Everybody else’s experience but your own sounds always so frustratingly boring… You just wait the moment when you can start with yours and then – when you’ve barely reached the prologue after half an hour – again that annoying guy next to you interrupts your experience and starts to share his! The beer or vodka doesn’t interrupt. It just shares its blessing and listens so quietly and sweetly…”

In conclusion

I was a bit uncertain about what to call this – we have a lot of words already, “Personal debriefing”, “De-immersion”, “De-rolling”, “Processing” – even “De-fucking”. But ended up on “landing” as the most neutral and self-explanatory term.

I am fascinated that such a simple question got so many responses, and so many different responses. Kristoffer T’s answer, from the end of the thread, is perhaps the one that combines most of them:

“Being honest with the people I have created fictional relations with. Telling them how I feel, so that we as players can talk about what we created together instead of ending up feeling ashamed of being in love og feeling anger towards someone.

• Battle myself between the two needs of being alone or disappearing in a big crowd and the need to connect with the people I have experienced the larp with.
• Anchor emotions with music.
• Telling the story of the game and my character to someone who was not at the larp, but who understands the medium. Get it out in arms reach and get some perspective. Turn it into something outside myself that I am connected to.”

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Together, I think these responses paint a picture of a our community as one characterized by caring, sharing, reflection and intense creativity. I am also struck by the diversity of experiences and responses. As they say in academia: “further research is needed”.

But for now: can I summarize these responses into some universal advice? Nope. You are probably better off figuring out what works for you. The list above should be a good place to start. A big thank you to all who contributed!

Moar readings and lookings

Oliver Nøglebek has gathered all his de-immersion strategies in a blog post you should read.
Johanna Koljonens 2012 summer school talk on larp safety should be seen, at least twice, by everyone. (there’s also an even better 2013 talk, which should hopefully be on the intertubes soon)
I’ve blogged about the organizer side of things in “Debriefing Intense Larps 101”.

Aristotle (Greek philosopher) was the first to describe the structure underlying most dramatic storytelling. It goes like this:

First introduce a hero we can identify with – the protagonist. Then introduce a problem or conflict for our protagonist. In the middle of our story the problem grows worse and worse. The protagonist’s attempts to overcome it grow increasingly spectacular and interesting. We hold our breath as the tension reaches a peak, a resolution, which culminates in the problem disappearing. Maybe it disappeared because of the protagonist’s victory. Maybe it disappeared because the protagonist failed in an interesting way. At any rate: the conflict is gone. Tie up loose ends with an epilogue or two, and end the story.

When you draw this structure as a graph, it forms an arc:

Or maybe, as later thinkers have done, like an arc composed of smaller arcs (little problems are being resolved but the big problem keeps getting bigger):

You know the Artistotelian arc. It’s there, hiding, underneath pretty much every movie you have seen, every novel you have read. And * cough * many of the better acts of sexual intercourse you’ve enjoyed. The Aristotelian arc is not universal: there are narratives without the arc and with different kinds of arcs. But it’s so pervasive in Western storytelling that we tend to have difficulties with stories that fail to follow it.

In a larp the protagonist is you: the player. Or rather: the character that you play. Which means that if there are 50 characters, there are 50 protagonists.

And when you have 50 protagonists and 50 arcs, there will be a crescendo of conflict-resolution towards the end.

This is the Aristotelian Curse.

“A curse, you say? Why is it a curse?”

Let me give an example:

The peasant. The priest. The prince. The estranged lovers. These characters could all co-exist at the same larp.

The peasant’s noble sacrifice. The priest’s triumphant banishing of the demon. The new king’s coronation. The re-kindling of estranged love. These are all good resolutions to their respective stories.

But imagine them concluding simultaneously. The estranged lovers try to re-unite, but before they can admit their mutual love, they are called to the throne room to witness the coronation of a new king. But alas! The evil Royal Chamberlain had a different plan – the crown jewels, now in his hand, were the last missing component of his spell to summon the demon Shmoronzon and bring about the Æon of Fishy Darkness. So the coronation is interrupted by fire and brimstone, the booming voice of Shmoronzon demanding human sacrifice with a side of anchovis.

But wait! There is another voice in the room – the nervous Priest is chanting something, something that makes the demon afraid. For you see: A few hours back, he figured out the chamberlain’s demon-summoning plot, and managed to piece together an exorcism. The priest succeeds, the demon is banished, and ta-da! the larp is over.

Except the new king’s story, the estranged lovers story, and most of the stories of the other people are left open-ended. Unsatisfactory. And did I forget about the peasant’s noble self-sacrifice? So did you.

Why does this happen? People hunting for a good narrative can cause the curse. But it can also be described in economic terms: A dead character is worthless. But a victorious character is also worth little, having no driving force left, or reason to interact with others. So resolution is postponed. As the larp approaches the end, though, the cost of resolving the conflict lessens and the potential reward for resolving it increases. For all players. Simultaneously.

In other words: gamists and simulationists, you’re not off the hook.

Banishing Aritstotle

So how do larpwrights avoid the Artistotelian Curse?

Because they do avoid it. Some larps end in cacophony, but most don’t. While we didn’t even have a word to describe this phenomenon before this blog post, I don’t think that’s because the Aristotelian curse isn’t a problem. On the contrary, I think it’s because it’s such an obvious and common problem that it goes without saying.

But all wisdom, to quote Confucius (Chinese philosopher), begins by calling things by their right name. Finding names for larp design challenges allows us to have clearer discussions about them (“where’s the zombie?”), and pass this knowledge along to others.

So here are some strategies for dealing with the Aristotelian Curse:

• Design inclusive conflicts: Many or all characters have the same goal, and face the same opposition – e.g there are two armies, not two individuals, who are about to settle their differences. So all characters get their resolution simultaneously, but without cacophony.
• Isolate conflicts: Love in the age of debasement, for example, has 12 couples at the same cafe. Each couple reach the climax of their relationship crisis, but since the couples don’t know each other, it’s none of the others business.
• Distribute the climactic moments in time: Love in the age of debasement also assigns each couple a song. The players are off-game instructed to bring their conflict to a peak when “their song” plays. Those who resolve early can spend more time on epilogues.
• Distribute the climactic moments in space: the demon-summoning will not disrupt the coronation if it occurs in the monastery that is 800 meters away from the coronation.
• Have supporting parts: characters that can engage in low-level play of their own, but are expected to be the audience to the spectacular resolutions of others. For this to work, the supporting parts need to have a meaningful audience experience by following the arc of the protagonist-participants. A cultist who assists the cult leader in obtaining the clues and ingredients to summon the demon Shmoronzon can have an interesting experience.. But not peasant #15, who never heard of Shmoronzon before the climactic summoning.
• Low-key conflicts: Coronations and self-sacrifice and demon-summoning are examples of high-key resolution: they invite exaggeration, demand attention, overshadow other resolutions. But the resolution for the estranged lovers does not require an audience, does not stand in the way of anyone elses resolution. If all conflicts are similarly low-key, the Curse is avoided.
• Being upfront, e.g. by clarifying to the players there shall be no arc and no resolution: this was my strategy at Europa. In one sense it didn’t work – several narratives reached their climax towards the end of the larp. In another sense it did: the climaxes that did occur were few enough and subdued enough that the Curse was avoided.
• Design transitions rather than conflicts: We don’t actually need conflict to enjoy a narrative – we need change, transitions, even if what we change to is back to the original state. Transitions are verbs: Finding, loosing, leaving, coming, learning, unlearning, maintaining. Fighting is a very dramatic verb, one that sucks attention to itself. Ditch the conflict, and these other kinds of transition can be given the space to flower. Very few larpwrights actually do this.
• Design the larp around micro-arcs: have plenty of beginnings, middles and ends leading to the next beginning. For example, PanoptiCorp features an ad agency where the characters are constantly working towards their next pitch. The customer’s acceptance or rejection of the pitch concludes the arc, but there’s always a new project waiting. Just a little lovin’ is divided into three acts, each lasting roughly a day, and each ending with breakfast. So you can resolve your arc before going to bed, or at the breakfast table, or in the next act, or all of these.
• Make it a slice of life: encourage a highly realist playing style, where emphasis is on living the ordinary life of an ordinary character. 1942, for example, was not particularly cursed by Aristotle. Nor are the low-key fantasy larps built around ordinary life in a medievalish village.

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OR you can embrace the curse: Allow the larp to become a competition about who gets to dominate its ending. Accept the cacophony. Ignore the irreality of it. This is “low-resolution” roleplaying, to borrow Andie Nordgren’s term (source). And it is a natural consequence of “brute-force” larp design, the approach where you throw lots of exciting shit on the wall and see what sticks. Nothing wrong with that: lo-res larping can be fun, worthwhile, easily approachable. But what if you want wanted hi-res larping, the kind of role-play with nuance and subtlety, where everything that happens now is consistent with everything that happened before? In that case: don’t.

Any other strategies? Examples of good or bad ways of dealing with the Artistotelian Curse? Go ahead – the comment field is waiting for you:

The actual roleplaying begins with characters returning to their hideout after the heist has failed. The schematic is still there, on the table, helping us to remember the back story, and improvise coherently. But now it is also scenography : turning whatever room we are in into the secret meeting-place of gangsters.

*

Players prepare for In Fair Verona by participating in an intensive tango course.
Not only will their characters dance tango in the larp, but the characters establish and change their relationships by dancing. More than that: the choice of tango communicates the gender roles and prospects of romance in the fictive society. And it functions as a warm-up. When the larp begins, you’re already running.

*

Inside:outside begins and ends with a meditative session where you listen as a voice counts from 1 to 10 (beginning) or 10 to 1 (ending). The meditative session functions as a buffer between you and the character, in-game and off. It is an emotional safety technique. It is also there because the larp begins with the characters waking up, so it is appropriate to start it laying on the floor, eyes closed. The ending provides symmetry, the possibility of characters falling asleep again. And it is in harmony with the style of the larp – an introspective one, where the most important conflict is played between your mind and a disembodied voice.

*

In Marcello’s Kjeller, if you play Russian Roulette, you point the gun towards your temple but you don’t pull the trigger. Instead, Dirigenten (a character who may or may not be the devil) looks into your eyes, rolls a die, glances at the die (which you can’t see), and smiles.

The lights go off.

In the darkness, you may hear nothing. Or you may hear a gunshot. If you heard the gunshot: When the lights come back on again your character is dead.
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For this mechanic to work, Dirigenten needs to signal the sound-guy before the lights are switched off. She does so after reading the die, by raising her hand slowly and dramatically and extending either a thumbs up or a thumbs down, like a Cæsar judging a gladiator. In this way, players don’t actually risk death (live rounds) or deafening (blank shots). But also: the tension of Russian Roulette lasts far longer than it takes to pull a trigger. And the characters symbolically place their lives in the hands of the devil.

* * *

These design decisions are compound: they serve more than one function, have more than one reason to exist. By being compound they reduce the amount of information you need to give to the players, the amount of stuff they need to remember.

They are also holistic. The technique, or its execution, fits into the broader themes and aesthetics of the larp, the whole.

When repurposing the inside:outside meditative sessions for PanoptiCorp, a hyperactive larp about an ad agency, I had players sit or stand, not lie down. And the count-up was not from one to ten, but 1 – 2- 3 – action!

You can play In Fair Verona in a classroom or a ballroom, with 30’s costumes or without. But you can’t play it by dancing swing, or waltz. That would be another larp.

*

I believe most good larp design is characterized by the clever use of compound elements.

I believe all good larp design is holistic.